[04] Elite: Mostly Harmless (9 page)

Angel winced. She’d been floating in that torturous capsule with the alarm blaring for what seemed like days, but it had probably only been ninety minutes or so.

‘Too long.’

‘It’s just outside,’ Katherine nodded towards the salvage hatch. ‘We need to get you into the ship before I open the hatch up. Unless you fancy a spacewalk without your pod?’

Angel followed, pulling herself along the grab rail through the corridor linking the cargo bay with the rest of the ship. Up on the flight deck Katherine regarded Angel carefully as she instructed the salvage arm to bring the bot inside.

‘I’m Angel,’ Angel said, reaching her hand out in greeting.

‘Nice suit,’ Katherine said ignoring the hand. ‘Shame about your ship.’

Angel looked out at the remains of her Cobra and sighed.

‘Yeah, well that seems to be my luck right now. I had a hold full of gold too, which I’m sure my client will miss a lot more.’

Katherine’s ears perked up.

‘You were out here alone with a belly full of yellow?’

She tapped the scanner display to start sweeping again. A nice little load of gold bricks would go down a treat right about now.

‘Not alone, no, there was an Eagle with me.’

‘Ah, the other wreck on my long range sensor?’

‘My escort. We were ambushed by a heavily armed Fer-de-Lance. Take no prisoners kind of mentality; decal was broken red circles around a yellow disc with a section cut out - like a cheese. Did you see any other pods?’

Katherine shook her head. ‘Sounds like the Cypher Punks from the decal. I’m surprised they blasted you into so many pieces though. Not their style at all and they’ll be paying for it in rep levels. I suppose they got all your gold?’

 ‘I guess so. Hard to tell really when you’ve jettisoned yourself in a metal tube and your eardrums are being split open by an air raid siren.’

‘How about this bot?’

‘What about it?’

‘Worth much?’

 Angel sighed. ‘Oh yes, that’s right. I’m just a meal ticket to you?’Katherine shrugged. ‘It’s just business sweet cheeks. Don’t get all thermal. I could have left you floating through space to become fertiliser.’ ‘The bot is a surveillance unit. The client attached it to me to make sure his booty was safe.’

‘That worked out well then, didn’t it?’ Katherine said as she finished the pressurisation sequence in the salvage hold and made her way back down the ladder to check out the new cargo.

Angel followed.

‘I doubt it would fetch much in material salvage. Whether the data has any value will probably depend on how into pie-charts you are. But you’ll need to find a way of deactivating the proximity alarm before I let you take it any further than fifty metres from this wristband again.’

Angel’s face darkened slightly as a thought occurred to her. ‘Unless you’re planning to sell me with it?’

 ‘Tempting, but you can relax. I’m not a slaver – and there isn’t enough meat on your for livestock.’

Katherine laughed at the look on Angel’s face then twisted the airlock open and pulled herself through the hatch to check out the bot.

* * *

DORIS was floating in the middle of the cargo bay humming indignantly. When Katherine approached the bot ran a quick scan and started buzzing crossly. ‘Oh perfect. Not only have you lost all of our cargo but now we are in the clutches of a pirate. Well done, Commander Rose.’

Angel hung beside the dreadlocked pilot defiantly. ‘It’s not as if I had a choice you stupid robot. If you recall I was drifting through space in an escape pod with your proximity alarm perforating my eardrums. We’re lucky to be anywhere at all.’

 ‘If you had followed my instructions and stood down immediately instead of trying to be a hero we wouldn’t be in this mess, any of it.’

‘No offence
DORIS
, but I don’t take instructions from a glorified calculator, especially not when it is telling me to roll over and play puppy dog.’

‘Oh really? And yet here we are; captive of a pirate, no ship, no cargo and a dead escort. That’s pretty much playing puppy dog tied up in a sack ready to be tossed into the river. So congratulations on executing a terminally flawed plan.’

Angel bristled. ‘Listen you heap of over critical circuit boards, I didn’t want to take this job to start with. I told Kram not to get killed, but he took on that tank anyway. And besides, how do you know this woman … ‘ Angel realised she still didn’t know her name and turned expectantly. ‘Katherine …’

‘Thank you,’ she turned back to the bot. ‘You don’t know
Katherine
is a pirate.’

‘Oh purlease,’ the bot’s circuitry radiated sarcasm in a way no other type of electronics could. ‘Filthy, shabby flight suit; grubby face and hands; jewellery that looks like it could knock satellites out of orbit and a twelve inch blade strapped to her belt? Not to mention one of the smelliest-looking mess of rat’s tails on her head I’ve ever seen. Then there is the small matter of the skull and cross-cannons decal on this rust-bucket of an Asp that scooped us up. How many clues do you need? You can’t really be so naïve as to think anything else can you?’

Angel was fuming now. Katherine just looked dumbfounded at the verbal onslaught from the whirring box of electronics hovering in front of her.

‘Erm, I can hear how rude you’re being.’

DORIS turned its flashing sensors on Katherine.

‘And this should concern me for what reason?’

Now it was Katherine’s turn to bristle. ‘Well, I could chuck you back out into the vacuum of space for starters. So you be polite about me and my lovely Mischief’s Pearl,’ she stroked the metal panelled interior of the cargo bay affectionately, ‘and we might let you stay aboard.’

DORIS’s circuits hummed as they calculated the odds. ‘Unlikely,’ the bot stated plainly. ‘My sensors detect I’m about the most valuable thing on this floating garbage can, and the only chance you have of recouping your fuel costs is by returning myself and Commander Rose here safely to the Slough Orbital space station, which is owned by her father.’

Katherine’s eyed Angel even more appreciatively than before.

‘Oh great,’ Angel stormed, more annoyed by the association of status than the fact the bot had just handed over every card she was holding. She turned to glare at Katherine, arms crossed defensively.

‘Well?’

Katherine raised an eyebrow in reply.

‘
Are
you a pirate?’

Katherine tossed her hair back over her shoulders and stood tall and proud. ‘Arrrrr …’ she mocked in a theatrically piratical accent before finally holding out her hand in greeting. ‘Dread Katherine, at yerrr service ma’am.’

She hooted with laughter at the look on Angel’s face before twisting her body around and hauling herself back through the airlock towards the flight deck.

Chapter 9

‘I’m afraid the best I can offer you is a mag-harness on the tank rack, unless you want to slip into a stasis tube? I wasn’t exactly expecting passengers.’

Angel frowned. ‘And risk waking up on the
unpleasant
side of a pleasure clipper at Pog Hobdonia? I’d rather float thanks.’

DORIS bleeped gently as its processors processed. ‘According to my databank you’re at greater risk of being sold as medical supplies.’

Katherine snorted with laughter. ‘I don’t know about that,’ she said running an appreciative eye over Angel’s rump as it floated past. ‘I’d pay for a dance.’

Angel seized the grab rail and spun herself around to glare at Katherine, cheeks flaring red. ‘Do you mind? I might just be a piece of meat to you but I’d appreciate a little respect.’

 ‘Your bot has a sense of humour – the electronic one I mean,’ she smirked, eyes flicking back to Angel’s rear end as she struggled to keep her body under control in the gravity free environment. ‘That’s pretty unusual for a machine.’

Angel’s mood was getting darker by the minute. ‘Well, I’m glad you think it’s funny. I’ve only had to put up with this acidic heap of circuits and switches for twenty-four hours and I’ve already lost my sense of humour.’

 ‘Okay, well there’s clearly nothing left of your ship worth picking up so let’s go check out what’s left of your escort.’

Katherine tugged herself over to the command chair and strapped in, leaving her cabin guests to sort themselves out. She wasn’t going to be travelling very fast; there was too much flying debris around to risk running into anything that could punch a hole in the hull, but even at low speeds a passenger who wasn’t strapped in could get spun around in a very disorienting way.

The robot’s gyroscope would keep it steady relative to the surrounding environment with magnetic pulses, but Angel would have a much more nauseating ride if she didn’t attach herself to something solid. She pushed off the back of the command chair towards the rack of tanks over by the hatch, each one filled with enough compressed air to support an EVA suit for about ten hours. Grabbing hold of the rack with both hands she twisted her body around and pushed her back on to a tank, clipping her suit in and thumping the harness lock on her chest to secure it. Ordinarily she would now reach behind her left hip and pull the lever that popped the tank off the rack so she could exit the vessel with it on her back. But instead she remained bolted in place, feeling more like a piece of meat than ever before, hanging helplessly on a butchers hook awaiting her fate.

The hull rattled as Katherine tapped her foot on the forward thrusters at the same time as tilting the flight stick over to the right. The holographic display on the forward dash swung around in tandem with the ship’s movement and Angel could just about make out the blinking pieces of Kram’s ship scattered across the radar.

DORIS beeped softly as processors went to work reading and analysing the data streaming out of the dials and graphs. The bot moved a little closer to the dash and Katherine watched suspiciously out of the corner of one eye.

‘My calculations suggest there will be nothing worth salvaging from such a fragmented blast site. You are wasting your time and the risk of being discovered by additional criminal elements is growing exponentially with every moment we remain in this sector.’

Katherine sniffed, ignoring the bot as she straightened up the Asp’s tail and nudged the thrusters, sending it scudding through the twisted wreckage of Angel’s ship towards the obliterated Eagle. ‘The risk to reward ratio is off the scale – off the
bad
side of the scale – so you might as well just plot a course for Slough and open a jump from here.’ Katherine continued scanning the region. ‘I’m assuming of course that this heap of half-assed welding is equipped with hyperjump technology?’  ‘DORIS, shut up!’

It was Angel, fuming from over by the hatch.

‘You don’t know for sure about Kram. We at least owe it to him to scan for a pod.’

‘My datasets reveal this is a high traffic area for bandits and looters. Despite the
dread
pirate’s aggressive demeanour,’ the robot’s voice was dripping with sarcasm, ‘her ship is not as rapaciously equipped as she is. This area is hot for piracy and we’re sitting right on top of the only decent fuel source in sector G. It’s not even a probability it’s a matter of time.’

Katherine did look up this time, raising a sceptical eyebrow. ‘Rapaciously?’

The robot merely hummed.

‘Anyway, you both need to shut up. There is a jump point opening up and I don’t think it’s the bad guys we have to worry about – mainly on account of the fact that I am one of them. Or had you forgotten?’

Both Angel and DORIS turned to look out of the front window where the sweeping sensors on the dash were indicating a build-up of energy not far ahead of them; a build-up of energy that was the tell-tale sign of an incoming hyperspace arrival. Katherine flicked her foot over to the reverse side of the thruster and toed the ship to a standstill. She touched a few switches and activated the weapons array, just in case, then checked her own hyper-jump readout. It was still too hot to use again so whatever was coming through, they couldn’t run from it.  The atmosphere clenched its cosmic buttocks as they waited to see what would emerge.

A few seconds later the space in front of them split open with a blast of almost-blinding light and a crack you could feel rather than hear. The gash bulged and widened. It seemed to be screaming out of the velvety black space. Energy pulsed around the split, little bursts of plasma-like gas escaping as if the hole itself were panting with the agony of whatever was about to be pushed through it; pushed out of one dimension into another.

In twenty seconds the gash had become big enough to qualify as a rift and without further ado coughed a sleek, midnight blue Corvette into the space before them. It course corrected to intercept, as if it had known exactly what it would find when it jumped out of hyperspace at these coordinates. They watched as the ship approached, smooth and purposeful like a stalking panther, and then slipped silently past them so they could see the regimental decal emblazoned along its flank followed by the name
Retribution’s Fist
.

‘Damn it!’

Katherine was suddenly a blur of activity, slapping buttons and stamping on pedals, looking around frantically at the control panels spitting out a steady stream of information.

‘Navy!’

‘Navy.’

Angel and Katherine said this in unison, though their tones of voice couldn’t have been more different. For Katherine it was fearful anger, frustrated at being caught off guard by an enemy she had no hope of defeating.

Angel on the other hand just sounded depressed. She knew she would now have to deal with the insufferable smugness of Captain Riley having saved her from the clutches of an evil pirate. She glanced at Katherine, noting the deathly pallor of her fear.

‘Oh, don’t worry pirate. I know this ship – and you just saved yourself a trip to Slough. The captain is a bit of a creep but he’ll give you no trouble. Open a comms link and let me do the speaking.’

The Corvette oozed menace as it swung back around to face them, coming nose to nose with the Asp. Katherine could just make out a face through the windscreen of the cockpit. It was too far away for any detail but somehow she knew it wasn’t smiling. She looked uncertainly at Angel, who nodded towards the dash. ‘Open a link.’