[04] Elite: Mostly Harmless (4 page)

‘Anyway,’ she said after several more minutes of uneasy silence, ‘I might have the solution for you. Not that you’ll be grateful enough to acknowledge my help, but there is an investor who might be interested in backing you.’

Angel’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. Her mother’s ‘introductions’ typically concluded in an awkwardly declined proposal or an ill-advised attempt to cop a grope; which had once ended in a black eye and a narrowly avoided diplomatic incident.

‘Actually it is Captain Riley’s contact. He knows someone looking to finance a gold-run to LHS 3439 and when I told him about your financial predicament he said he could get you a place on the fleet. It’s a wonderful opportunity, isn’t it Michael?’ She nodded at the captain across the back of Angel’s chair, urging him to step in with more details.

Angel quivered with revulsion as she felt him rest his hand on the skin between her shoulder blades.

‘Yes, my Lady, of course. A
huge
opportunity. Three clear reputation levels in one shipment and enough credits to keep you for at least a year.’ He leant in close and Angel could feel his hot breath puffing against the back of her neck. ‘Since you do insist on keeping yourself rather than letting me keep you.’

Angel felt like she was being circled by Thargoid warships as her mother giggled coquettishly.

‘You know I don’t do high risk mother,’ Angel said, draining her glass again and scouting around for an escape route; desserts were being served now so it wouldn’t be long before she could make her excuses and leave.

‘Oh, this is hardly high risk,’ oozed the captain as Angel continued trying to squirm away from the touch of his hand on her back. ‘The plan is to fill three courier vessels with precious metal and send them off with a fleet of heavily armed Vipers. We are talking a
lot
of gold here and the investor is no idiot. He would hardly send you out across bandit controlled space with a belly full of his credits and no protection, would he?’

Angel’s mother and the captain laughed again, a little too loud she thought.

‘So, you’ll go and meet the investor in the morning Angel? Angel?’

‘I can’t go in the morning. I’m booked in for a spin.’

‘Oh Angel, do you have to? You know it will make your boobs sag, even more than they are already? All that horrid hyper-gravity pulling at your wobbly bits.’

Angel blushed furiously as Riley ogled her cleavage again and a young couple further along the table pretended not to hear.

‘Mother, with respect,’ she said through gritted teeth, ‘the one thing I do
not
need is for you to discuss the efficacy of my breasts in a public forum.’

Angel’s voice was tight and her mother sighed loudly again.

‘Well, it’s not good for a girl that’s all I’m saying. We’re made more delicately than that. I can already see it pulling at your jowls, even in this flattering gravity … At this rate you’ll never find a husband. Who wants to marry a saggy old hag? I’m sure even Captain Riley will be put off eventually, won’t you captain?’

‘Oh, I don’t know about that,’ Mike Riley oozed something close to confidence, only a lot slimier, and continued focussing on Angel’s cleavage. ‘Some things have a lasting appeal, even flawed.’

Chapter 4

‘Relax,’ Bowsen said. ‘Don't hold your breath. You know it will only make you sick if you fight it.’

Angel loosened her grip on the handles and tried to relax. She hated the centrifuge. It was like being stuck under a container load of slag pouring off the back of a construction freighter. But it was the fastest way to get back into shape after an extended period at space so she just had to grin and bear it - quite literally once the g-force started piling up. As the heavy pendulum gained momentum the chair she was strapped in tilted back to horizontal, keeping her spine aligned with the prevailing gravitational force.

She tried not to imagine what it must have felt like as a child, strapped into a similar device, the weight of reality crushing down on you before you were old enough to understand why. The Spinners of old – the original miners who'd carved the first chambers and caverns out of the planet’s interior – had started their hyper-gravity training as toddlers. Just three years old and they were subjected to forces of one-and-a-half-g; two-and-a-half-g; three-and-a-half-g and up; by the time they were teenagers spinning for sustained periods at a gut-mashing twelve-and-a-half-g. It made their bodies tough, thickening up their cytoskeletons so that their cells didn’t collapse and their bones crack under the pressure of working the mines down in Slough.

To Angel it seemed like a brutal thing to do to your child, but the financial rewards must have been persuasive. Only the strongest babies were selected; their parents handsomely paid. Many of the early settlers had started self-selecting into genetic pairings that gave them the best chance of birthing a candidate. Over the decades this practise saw the divide between Spinners and Orbitals grow wider, both physically as well as in status. Nerves of steel and an iron constitution were required to work in the planet below.
But,
Angel thought,
for a three-year-old strapped into a cradle at the end of a huge pendulum as it started to glide faster and faster around the circumference of a bleached out laboratory, it must be a frightening experience.

Forty-five seconds into the spin and she was at four-g. Her body now weighed around three hundred and twenty kilos. Her mother would have apoplexy, although luckily the weight wasn't going only on her hips. It was in her guts, on her chest; even her eyeballs felt like they had been replaced with lead ball-bearings.

She watched the red dots on the light-bar marching relentlessly inwards; clicking the thumb button each time they reached the centre of her vision. At four-and-a-half-g she released the lever in her left hand and the machinery clunked as the massive swinging pendulum locked in to a set pace.

‘Four-and-a-half? Well, that's pretty pathetic.’

Harry Bowsen's voice carried to her through the speakers in her headrest. Sound was weird at this speed. The words undulated and twanged, like someone was swinging them from the end of a bunch of guitar strings. Four-and-a-half-g was pretty pathetic. She would normally spin at around six but having spent the last three months at space her tolerance was low. Another night of heavy drinking hadn’t improved her motivation either. The last thing she needed was to go g-LOC and have to be stretchered out to a recovery bay unconscious. No. Four-and-a-half-g was plenty for today.

Angel concentrated on her breathing and settled in to the hypnotic march of the red dots as Bowsen locked down the centrifuge controls. Spin-speed set he'd be monitoring her vitals for the next thirty minutes – which meant he could catch up on Spacebook, maybe find something entertaining for them to do later? The technician leant back in his chair, propping his feet up on the softly beeping electrocardiogram machine as he flipped the medical readout screen over to the uniweb channel and fired up a browser.

* * *

‘Okay, commander, you’ve done your time.’

Angel blinked, propping herself up on unsteady elbows. The pendulum had ground to a halt but she still felt like she was moving.

‘Already? But I was having so much fun.’

Harry smiled as he tapped biometric readings into his tablet.

‘I can’t tempt you with a hot float?’

Angel shuddered, pushing herself all the way up to sitting.

‘You’re quite right, you can’t.’

She couldn’t think of anything worse than taking a float around a steam-filled chamber with a bunch of sweaty rich people. There was a whole stack of delights like this available in the spa centres on Observers I and II, where rings layered inside the central dome could be turned on and off to null or increase the ambient gravity, whatever the treatment required. From deep pore cleansing in hyper-gravity to a steamy float through zero-g. She stood shakily and the young technician stepped in front of her, shining a light into each of her eyes, observing her carefully. Angel looked straight ahead. They were both on autopilot now.

‘A drink then? My shift finishes in about an hour,’ Harry poked something medical into Angel’s mouth to hold her tongue down and peered inside as he spoke. ‘There’s rumour of a Jonty table over on Observer III later if you’re interested?’

‘Uhh-thay …’ she nodded, looking him directly in his sparkling blue eyes. They seemed to be smiling without any help from his mouth.

‘Good. Meet you at the Spinner’s Arms at two? Liquido burrito; you look like you could do with cheering up.’

Angel took a moment to consider whether a liquid lunch right before a meeting with Captain Riley’s investor was the best idea in the galaxy. She shook her head as if to rattle the thought right out of it through her ears. The trouble was, she mused, Harry Bowsen had eyes that you just couldn’t say no to.

Two hours later she was still trying to find the word ‘no’ in her vocabulary when Harry lifted up a fresh Glasgow Hullstripper and saluted the table, a big grin on his face. They’d picked up a couple of his old friends from med school - Iain Irvine and Gareth Coffey - and after a brief but convincing drinking session in the Spinner’s Arms had all jumped on a shuttle from Observer II to catch the card game. Now she was in for a dove she didn’t really have and extremely late for her meeting. Harry Bowsen, the annoying little shit with the irresistible eyes, had been winning rather convincingly all afternoon. The dealer glanced at his hand and decided to dive. He threw his cards face down on the table, folding his arms in disgust.

‘Jonty,’ said Harry, grinning at Angel like a fuel scooper.

Angel bit her bottom lip, feeding him false tells as her heart fluttered in her chest. She had a strong hand – there were only two possible hands that could beat her in fact – so she was feeling more than confident. But if she was going to sucker-punch this gloating git into giving her back the four credits he had already taken her for, she was going to have to play it cool. Draw him in.

‘Jonty-up,’ she said, doing her best to look shifty and uncertain as she pressed her thumb on the credit panel in front of her. Her sleeve vibrated as somewhere under her jacket the NFC chip flashed crossly with an ever-increasing red number. Red was not good, especially when related to your net economic worth. She had a limited overdraft but this game was eating through it faster than a corpse in an acid bath.

Two more hands at the table took a dive but two stayed in, both locals. They looked like grubbers; engineers who spent their days crawling the maintenance tunnels of the Observers, keeping these ancient generation ships ticking along. Their overalls were grease-stained and their hands calloused. If the tatty badges pinned to their chests were to be believed their names were Gavin McAfee and Lee Hamerstein. They glanced to one another and then across the table at Harry and Angel. She felt the mood in the room take a definite turn. Harry was annoying enough when he was drunk but he was an appalling winner too. These grubs looked like they were starting to take it personally.

The final card was turned by a sulky dealer and everyone who was still in studied their hands seriously. Except Harry, who broke into a broad grin and started whistling the theme tune to ‘i-Galaxy’. It was so obvious he had a great hand it just had to be a bluff. But maybe that’s what he wanted them to think? The double-bluff. Or was it? A double-double-bluff? Angel shook her head to banish the infinite circle of maybes. He might have a nice hand, but her hand was better. She was pretty sure of that.

‘Jonty,’ she said, clutching her cards to her chest and holding her breath.

Leading the last round she was in the perfect position to control the game. Her raise had just taken the bet to one hundred and if Harry or any of the others took the bait and raised to two hundred she could kick it one last Jonty to four hundred, which would be a tidy little pot for the winning hand.

McAfee eyed her, trying to get a read on her tells. Angel smirked inwardly whilst exuding what she hoped was foolish bravado.

‘Pledge,’ he said eventually, thumbing his own panel to match Angel’s bet.

‘Jonty-up,’ Hamerstein surprised everyone with this raise, pressing his thumb into the console a little too fiercely.

All eyes turned to Harry, who was busy eyeing up a leggy brunette leaning across the JabbleWok table next door.

‘Oh? My go?’ He flashed a boyish grin and planted his thumb on the glass panel in front of him. ‘Jonty-UP!’

Angel’s heart was now yammering inside her chest; ohmygosh-ohmygosh-ohmygosh it pumped. She hadn’t expected them both to raise. The bet was at four hundred with three hands in; did she really dare to raise it to eight hundred? She did a quick mental tot-up. It would completely clean her out; credits maxed out against the security of her ship with not a single other possession left to her name. She glanced again at her cards; four queens against her chest and a fifth on the table. It was the third strongest out of a possible five hundred or so combinations of hands, and with the cards now on display – a King, two Knaves, her Queen and a four – there was only one achievable hand that could beat her. She was laughing all the way to the chip scanner. Surely?

‘Jonty … Up,’ she said deliberately, this time keen for them to clock her confidence to avoid being priced out of the game - unlikely though as eight hundred creds was an insane amount for a game at this level.

McAfee growled menacingly. He was only in for one hundred so far and clearly decided it wasn’t worth seven hundred to see her so he threw his stack down on the table and said, ‘I dive.’

Hamerstein had more at stake and resentful eyes settled on her as he thumbed his bet in to the console.

‘Pledge.’

Angel’s chest tightened. If Harry went in too she would clear almost three K in one pot, putting her back on track with enough credits to get her shield fixed and fill the hold with a shipment of shale – not exactly the glamorous end of the market but there was good profit to be made short-running construction material. She checked her cards again; just to make sure those four beautiful Queens hadn’t run off with a passing Knave, and then noticed Harry looking at her mischievously.