[01] Elite: Wanted

E
LITE
: W
ANTED

A N
OVEL
B
Y
G
AVIN
S
MITH AND
S
TEPHEN
D
EAS

In memory of the three thousand and seventeen Cobras we crashed

‘Have you ever killed before?’ The voice was little more than a low rumble. Ravindra stopped short as the massive fellow con – barrel-chested, red-bearded – stepped in front of her. He stood a little under six foot eight inches in his stained, white prison uniform. He reached down to touch the side of her face, her soft light brown skin. His hand was large, and calloused.

Ravindra held his stare, looking up into hate-filled green eyes partially concealed under a heavy brow and thick red eyebrows. It was a stupid question. You didn’t get sentenced to hard labour in the high security section of Warren Prison Mine on Ross 128 unless you’d done something really bad.

His name was Red and he was the daddy in cell block 214. She was new. She was weary to the point of exhaustion from the first few days of mining. Her muscles were agony, she was still shaking from the cold that had seeped through her flesh and into her very bones, or so it seemed, and her hands, despite the gloves, were little more than a bloodied mess of burst blisters. Ravindra and Red were standing in a mile-long tunnel, one of the abandoned mine shafts originally cut by huge robot mining vehicles. The tunnel had been turned into a cell block.

She didn’t take her eyes off Red. She felt, rather than saw, people turn from her. Other prisoners. Some would be too frightened, others just deciding that it wasn’t their business. It was the guards turning away that bothered her the most, though she wasn’t all that surprised.

‘I think you have,’ Red rumbled.

Good call,
Ravindra thought but remained quiet, seemingly impassive. She didn’t want to give anything away.

‘But I think you did it the easy way.’ He gripped her face. The strength in his fingers suggested he could easily crush her skull if he wanted. ‘I think you killed them from far away. The lazy way. I think there’s no strength in you.’ He tightened his grasp and pulled her up onto her tiptoes. It wouldn’t have been difficult for him to lift her up but maybe he didn’t want to bruise her skin. ‘Do you want to do this the easy way as well? Or the hard?’

She let him see fear. It wasn’t all faked.

‘Easy,’ she pleaded. ‘Where?’

‘Here,’ he said letting her down onto the soles of her feet. ‘So everyone knows what you are. Who you belong to.’

She looked around, apparently terrified.

‘Please …’ she begged.

‘There is no—’

She palmed the flint-analogue-tipped shank and jammed it into his wrist, then she pushed it all the way up his arm to his arm pit. His eyes widened. He didn’t scream. It was at this point that Ravindra knew this prison-cooked-steroid hulk was less than human; he was a monster. He shifted his grip. Massive, thick fingers wrapped nearly all the way around her throat. He lifted her a full two feet off the ground. Her vision filled with stars whilst simultaneously going dark as he cut off the blood and oxygen to her brain. She saw the vein bulging on his neck from pain and fury. At least she had a target. She jammed the shank into the vein. He didn’t stop squeezing. Everything was going dark. She tore the shank out. The vein fountained red. The monster staggered back from her, clutching at the wound. Trying to stem the gush with his hand. Ravindra fell to the ground, nursing her near-crushed throat. She forced herself onto her feet despite her flickering vision, despite the light-headedness, despite a desperate wish to pass out. She tried to say something. It just came out a choking rattle. Red was still on his feet, staring at her as his life leaked through his fingers.

‘Listen!’ she finally managed. Red collapsed to the ground. Guards were sprinting towards them. ‘Decide how many of you have to die before I get left in peace!’ Then the guards reached her. They beat her so hard with stun batons that she soiled herself.

‘Mum!’

No! You can’t be here!
Ravindra thought. A moment of maternal panic as the confused boundaries between waking consciousness and dreaming memory merged. It was enough to make her sit bolt upright in her bed, drenched in sweat.

‘What?’ she asked blearily. She glanced out of the porthole. They called them portholes. They were actually just transparent parts of the hull. They were still small because they cost more than non-transparent parts of the hull. She'd paid through the nose for a cabin with a porthole. She could see the stratified blues and whites of Motherlode below them. From their position in the upper atmosphere she was looking at the planetary horizon. Reddot was living up to its name. The red dwarf star was little more than a small ball of red light far in the distance. It always made her feel cold, looking at it. Even high in the mountains, Quince had seemed warmer, more immediate.

Whit’s Station wasn’t a space station, though everyone treated it as such until they were faced with the maintenance bills for the strain that multiple atmospheric re-entry put on a hull. It was the control centre of an automated hydrogen mining operation. Robots built to withstand the incredible pressures in the lower atmospheres harvested the hydrogen and delivered it back to the station. The station itself was, in fact, a huge mushroom-shaped aerostat.

So far out on the Frontier and close, in relative terms, to a number of resource-rich systems, Whit’s Station would have been an easy target for pirates, claim jumpers and corporate raiders. So George Whit, entrepreneur and founder of the station, had turned it into a Freeport. He'd supplied hydrogen to the pirates, the claim jumpers and the corporate raiders. He'd provided port and fuel to legitimate ships as well: explorers, surveyors and prospectors.

On a number of occasions during its hundred and fifty year history, corporate interests had tried to take Whit’s Station over. Each time, there had been a loyal clientèle prepared to fight them off. On one occasion, ships loyal to Whit’s Station had even fought off a squadron of ships backed by the Empire. Ravindra had fought in that battle. It was during that fracas they had captured the
Song of Stone
. Yes, the Whit family had been clever. They’d ensured it was easier to work
with
them, than to try to take over
Whit’s Station
. And Ravindra had been given more reason than many to ensure that the Empire did not gain control.

The door to her cabin slid open and Ji looked down at his dishevelled mum. Ravindra had left the Warren Prison Mine pregnant. Everyone said that the seventeen-year-old Ji looked like a male version of her. There was nothing of his father in him. She had carried the stronger genes. Her owners and the gene clinics in Simpson Town on New America had made sure of that. He was tall, athletically slender, with dark hair that, at shoulder length, he kept much shorter than hers. They shared the same big brown eyes and high cheekbones that could make him appear either genuinely beautiful or very, very cruel, depending on the expression on his face. This morning the expression on his face was guarded. Seventeen years of maternal experience told Ravindra that this meant that Ji wanted something, something that she wasn’t going to like.

But he just nodded at the comms light. ‘Harlan’s trying to reach you.’

She cursed herself. She’d cut off the comms link so she wouldn’t be disturbed. She’d been up most of the night doing maintenance on the ship’s only military-grade laser. Without an Imperial naval shipyard, and the proper parts, it was a struggle to keep the powerful weapon functional.

‘All right,’ she acknowledged. Ji didn’t move. ‘I’m going to need to take this privately.’ Ji still didn’t move. He looked as if he was trying to find a way to say something. ‘You’re much more likely to get what you want when I haven’t just woken up with an important call waiting.’

He nodded and left the room.

‘Privacy check,’ she ordered. The cabin’s expert system assured her that the call was fully security screened. ‘Open call.’ Part of the wall became a screen. A blinking red light in the corner of the screen told her that the call had the highest privacy and security rating possible.

Harlan Whit, great-grandson of George Whit, appeared on the screen. He wore a spotless white linen suit and was sitting behind a large wooden desk that he’d paid a fortune to import from Earth itself. Behind the desk was a very large porthole looking down on Motherlode.

Whit was a plump, balding man in his early fifties. His appearance was deceptive. He looked the epitome of softness, particularly out here where he was surrounded by hard frontiersmen and women. There was intelligence in his blue eyes, however, and Ravindra knew that he was perfectly capable of looking after himself with his fists, with knives and with firearms, and that he could make utterly ruthless decisions.

The Whit family made sure that their children grew up hard. They also instilled in them the value of loyalty and fair play – if for no other reason than out in the Frontier you
had
to be able to trust who you were dealing with, to a certain extent. If you crossed a Whit, however, it would end badly for you.

‘You look like shit, young lady,’ Harlan told her, grinning.

‘Not so young anymore,’ she said, smiling back. She knew that her hair was a mess, her eyes were still full of sleep and her sleeveless Jjagged Bbanner t-shirt was soaked in sweat.

‘Bad night?’

She shrugged.

‘Newman’s in port.’

Ravindra cursed silently.

‘You sure you want to get in bed with these people?’

‘I’m sure I don’t …’

‘Look, I know I set this up, but you know who Newman works for. I can’t protect you from them.’

She nodded. She knew the risks involved. ‘Their reputation is for being harsh but fair.’

‘No, their reputation is for going to any lengths to do exactly what they said they’d do. That’s different.’

Ravindra sighed. She knew he was right. ‘It’s a big score, Harlan.’

‘Enough to stop being an outlaw?’ he asked smiling. It was what everyone talked about out here and nobody ever quite managed to do.

‘Living the dream,’ she said, smiling again. Then, more seriously, ‘It’s maybe enough for Ji …’

Harlan nodded. ‘There’s something else.’

‘Yeah?’ Ravindra asked wearily. She was pretty sure she wasn’t going to like what was coming.

‘Ji’s been hanging around the
Magician
.’

Ravindra absorbed that for a moment before responding. ‘Just so you know, I’m going to have a falling out with Captain Merkel,’ she said.

Harlan nodded. ‘Ain’t none of my concern, man’s a son-of-a-bitch as far as I’m concerned. I’ll speak to you when you get back, okay?’

Ravindra nodded. The screen went blank.

Shit
, she cursed.
They’re here today
, and she had an argument with Ji to look forward to as well.

Ravindra had sent orders for the crew to assemble. She hadn’t sent anything to Newman. She’d go and find him when she was ready. She’d showered, changed and put in her lenses.

Reddot was nominally in Alliance space – or rather, they had declared for the Alliance in a bid to avoid Imperial and Federation interference. The system wasn’t quite resource rich enough, and the locals were just a little more trouble than they were worth, for either of the two big powers to make anything more than a token effort to try to control it. Being in Alliance space meant that her news feed mainly came from Frontier News. She had searches up for certain items from the main Imperial and Federation news organisations but the news could be anything from two days to more than a week old.