[01] Elite: Wanted (10 page)

Yeah, right. Until the junker woke up and told them he’d been taken out by some crazy dwarf woman. No, that wasn’t going to fly.
Face it girl, you’re blown here.

She reached the holding cell and there still weren’t any alarms but, dammit, she hadn’t the first idea how to get out without being seen. Christ, the tension was killing her!

Well, there was always the straightforward way.

She carried on, out to the front doors of the enforcement offices. There were a dozen or so junkers between her and the exit and so she didn’t exactly leave quietly, but the shocker rod was just perfect for seeing they didn’t give her any trouble. It was a relief taking them down, burning off all that suppressed adrenaline. She left the last one on his feet and flipped him an identity tag. Who she
really
was this time. ‘The guy you had in the cells back there? Mistook him for someone with a price on his head. My bad. I’ll be leaving now. I might stop in a bar or two on the way out.

‘We can continue this argument if you like or you can just be glad to see the back of me. And yeah, I know, whichever Veil runs this place could evacuate a whole section of the station into space if he wanted to, but you might like to consider that I let you have me and I could easily have left bombs tied to my life-monitor in all sorts of places down in the hub before I came up. So there’s that.’ She looked about. ‘From the state of the place I should have left smaller ones.’

She walked out. Before they could put a lock on her, she tapped her ear and bounced a message to the
Dragon Queen
.

‘Get here. Now.’ That was all.

It was easy enough to find the pilot of the
Unkindness
. He was in a bar that some arsehole had called The Jameson, as if the real deal would ever have come to a shit-hole like this. A retro flat-screen took up a whole wall inside, running a loop of spectacular space accidents. Most of the ones here were of Cobra’s fucking up their roll-rate and crashing into the entry gate of one of the old-school rotating cuboctahedral Coriolis stations. There had been a whole spate of that when the Coriolis stations were first introduced. Was always a problem with the Cobras for some reason, fitting them through the letterbox opening and the pilots back then … well, these days no one got a licence without showing they could roll-match a station whether they were drunk, stoned or stone-cold sober.

Ziva threw a handful of camera drones into the air and gave them their thirty seconds. After the way she’d left the enforcement office, there didn’t seem much point in subtlety. Give them another five minutes and they’d have a whole posse of junkers hunting her; this time they’d be armed with a damn sight more than a shock-rod. She fired hers at the ceiling. That got the attention of every spacer in the bar quick enough. Once she had it she asked, ‘So which one of you fuckers flies the
Unkindness
?’ All it took was one glance and she knew who it was. She shocked him as she ran at him, vaulting tables, and he hadn’t even finished slumping to the floor by the time she reached him, picked him up and slung him over her shoulder.
Heavy fucker.
She was thankful the fake gravity of the Black Mausoleum was only about half Earth-standard. She stuffed a pair of anti-stun plugs in his ears and then let off one of the grenades from the junker she’d neck-chopped. That gave her about fifteen seconds while no one else in the bar would know their arse from their elbow, enough to drag the pilot into the gents – no one ever put a camera up in the men’s toilets, not ever – and barricade herself in. Next, she sent the camera drones off to create a moving blind spot through the station that would make it seem as though she was heading for the hub. Then she jabbed the Adder pilot with a half dose of Wakey-Wakey and enough Demon to put the shits up a horse. She slapped him; the moment his eyes opened, she pinned him down onto the tiled floor by his throat. The air stank of stale piss. A thousand years and some things just didn’t change.

‘I don’t know your name,’ she spat, ‘but I know you fly a Judas runner and I know you came in with an escape pod not long back. Who was in it?’

The pilot would have screamed if Ziva hadn’t stifled it with a balled-up sock in his mouth. That was the Demon. Put the living fear of Hell and Armageddon straight inside you. Instant bad trip.

Ziva hissed at him. ‘Tell me who it was or I’ll eat you alive.’ She pulled the sock out and leaned into him, pressing her arm across his throat, their faces inches apart. ‘Who?’

The pilot pissed himself. He mouthed the words more than spoke them. ‘I never knew his name.’

‘Was he tall? Short?’ Ziva slapped him again. As far as the Adder pilot was concerned, she’d look like some hideous nightmare creature from the worst corners of his own imagination. He wouldn’t have the first idea she was even human. Demon. Weird what people got off on these days. ‘Nod or shake your head. Was he tall?’ No. ‘Short?’ Not that either. Useless fucker. ‘Was he pale-skinned?’ Yes. ‘Dark hair?’ Yes. ‘Short hair?’ Yes. ‘Real short?’ Yes! Getting somewhere at last. ‘Accent? Maybe a touch Imperial? Ex-military? Pale watery eyes?’

Yes and yes and yes and yes. Newman. She asked a few more to be sure, but it was definitely him.

‘Why were you there?’

‘I was told to go and get him.’

‘He was in an escape pod’

Yes, in an escape pod. A stealthy one, powered right down and hiding against the dark side of an ice planetoid. No traces of any ship-to-ship in the last few minutes, no jump trails and Newman hadn’t talked. When she was done, Ziva jabbed the pilot with NightNight and left him there. She squatted a moment, wondering what to do – until someone started pushing on her barricade. They’d have recovered from that stun grenade by now and probably had station security on the way. She opened the door, smiled at the bemused man waiting outside and lobbed out a second grenade before slamming the door in his face. She put her hands over her ears a moment before the detonation shook the room. The Adder pilot screamed. Then he started to buzz. She thought it was his life-alarm at first, that she’d overdone the Demon and killed him; but it wasn’t that sort of shrill piercing wail, it was the loud incessant alarm that every spacer knew – the alarm of a ship preparing to leave without you. Apparently the
Unkindness
was trying to leave without its pilot.

Newman. He was on the station and he knew she was after him and he was running. She raced out of the bar, hurdling the handful of men and women reeling sprawled about the floor, and dashed outside. She didn’t know how much time she had but it wouldn’t be long. The camera drones might have bought her the few minutes she needed at the bar but the junkers would know that trick by now. They wouldn’t fall for it a second time.

‘Where are you?’ she shot the question to the
Dragon Queen
as she sprinted through the station.

‘Half a million kilometres away.’

‘When you get here I need an out. The way we did on Tau Ceti.’ She reached the closest of the spindle elevators that would take her towards the hub. A squad of junkers was milling about, presumably watching out for her. They were dumb enough to be clustered together and the shocker took out three of them at once before the last pair realised she was there. One of them swivelled, bringing a shotgun to bear. The other started talking urgently into his hand. Most places Ziva went, everyone started screaming and running at the first sight of a gun. On the Mausoleum people ran, right enough, but they didn’t run screaming. They ran with the grim, silent speed of people who’d seen this sort of thing too many times before.

The elevator doors were closing, the handful of passengers inside dashing out between them as the evacuation alarm sounded. Ziva raced the other way. She ducked behind a roving refreshment bot as the junker fired his shotgun, then she darted out and shocked the other one. He went down like a falling tree while she ran on, dodging and weaving. The junker with the gun got off another shot before she threw herself through the elevator doors. Ziva felt the sting of a pellet tear her shoulder, turned, fired the shocker one more time as the doors closed and then sat back. She heard the hiss of the vacuum seal close around the elevator and the bump as they started to move. She had it to herself. In some ways this was a good thing, in other ways … not so much. She released her drones to take out the cameras.

They couldn’t have gone more than a dozen metres towards the hub when the elevator lurched to a stop.

‘Ziva Eschel.’ Ziva didn’t recognise the voice but it was too smooth to be some junker. ‘This is how you stay alive: put the weapon down. Get on the floor and put your hands on your head and say very clearly the words “
I surrender.”
’

Ziva sought out the elevator cameras and pouted at the nearest. Hopefully, it was blind by now. Hopefully, whoever was doing the talking couldn’t see her. ‘But I don’t want to.’

‘How exactly do you think this is going to go, bounty hunter?’

‘To whom am I talking?’

‘I run the
Black Mausoleum
. That’s all you need to know.’

‘Ah. A Veil, then.’

‘You could be useful to me, Eschel. Give me a reason not to kill you.’

‘Actually, I was thinking something more along the lines of threatening to start executing hostages unless you let me descend to the hub, board my ship and leave.’ She smiled. ‘Or threatening not to blow up some bombs I left around the place. That sort of thing.’

‘You’re in a sealed elevator out on one of the spindles. How about you do what I say and I don’t evacuate you into space?’

‘Hey, maybe there’s a dozen other people here!’

‘Eschel, even if I cared, you don’t have any hostages and there aren’t any bombs. You might have blinded the cameras in there but really, how stupid do you think we are?’

‘Well, actually …’ She’d barely got the words out when a soft alarm went off behind her Fresnel eyes. Every spacer carried a pressure monitor.

‘And the bitch of it, Eschel, is that I’m not planning on killing you, just on dropping the oxygen level enough to make you pass out and then having a whole shitload of fun getting you to do my dirty work. I’m thinking a really exotic genetic disease to hold over you and your loved ones, but I’ll settle for a tiny sub-cranial anti-matter bomb if I have to. What do you think?’

‘I think that whoever you are, you’re a fucking arse.’
Ship! Where are you?

There was a sudden flicker as the elevator lights went out. Lines of ultraviolet scintillation scarred space outside, the tell-tale of military-grade x-ray beam lasers. Dim red emergency backups switched on at once. The elevator shuddered. The intercom went dead and then something deep within the metal spindle snapped as the lasers cut it apart. The fake gravity of the station’s rotation vanished and the elevator, floating free in space now, shot sideways straight at the station rim and then lurched as a sleek dark shape flickered past so close that Ziva flinched. The
Dragon Queen
. The ship had cut the elevator right out of the Black Mausoleum.

Gravity came back hard. Ziva slammed in a heap into the elevator wall, which had taken over as the floor, then toppled and tumbled as the
Dragon Queen
’s fuel scoop reeled her in like just any other cargo container. ‘Careful,’ she howled. ‘Remember I’m not in an escape pod or acceleration couch here!’ Unprotected as she was, the
Dragon Queen
could easily kill her with the scoop, with the sheer force of snatching her up.

Everywhere outside was full of bright light like fireworks now, the
Dragon Queen
dispensing cloud after cloud of countermeasures, aerosols and flares, while the station opened up with a handful of ancient pulse lasers. As soon as the ship had her inside, the
Dragon Queen
flooded the hold with air and burned open the elevator doors.

‘Tactical,’ snapped Ziva, launching herself for the cockpit, wincing at the sting in her shoulder. She’d have more bruises than she cared to count from this.

‘The Black Mausoleum is firing on us from increasing range and poses no threat. Several pursuit ships have launched but will not be able to draw sufficiently close to engage us as long as you are within an approved acceleration cocoon within the next thirty-seven seconds.’

‘Where’s the
Unkindness
?’

‘We’re following. What shall I do with our new cargo?’

‘Dump it.’ The weight would slow them – not much but it all counted.

She reached the Fer-de-Lance’s cockpit and strapped herself into the pilot’s cocoon. As soon as she did, the ship’s engines ignited and five gravities of acceleration slammed into the back of her. The cocoon was already jabbing her with its needles, dosing her up for the harder accelerations to come, flooding her with repair nanites.

A bounty notice flashed up. Someone from the Black Mausoleum had put two thousand credits on her head. There was an irony in that. She considered paying it off from what she’d get for bringing in Newman – thirty five thousand credits now, if he really was one of the pilots Darkwater were after. One the other hand, maybe the Judas Syndicate could just go fuck themselves. People like them didn’t raise bounties – they put a price on your head and paid the first assassin to claim it.

The
Unkindness
was micro-jumping now, racing off to the inner edge of the Kuiper belt. The
Dragon Queen
set after it, burning hydrogen as only a Fer-de-Lance could. She didn’t quite catch him before the Adder jumped.

‘Follow him!’ The Fer-de-Lance hit Newman’s departure point sixty seconds later; his hyperspace trail was still pristine fresh. Child’s play. Ziva felt the momentary tremor of the
Dragon Queen
’s jump-drive and then the stars stretched into lines.

The jump was a short one. As soon as she emerged back into real space, Ziva had alarms sounding all over the cockpit. Mines. The fucker had left mines for her and the
Dragon Queen
’s two point defence pulse lasers were already in overdrive, firing constantly. The nearest mines had already spotted her and fragmented into a storm of tiny darts. She took a moment – just that and nothing more – to see where she was. They’d emerged in the outer fringes of an unclaimed system with no name, just a designation, and the
Unkindness
was less than a hundred thousand kilometres ahead of her, streaking for a Neptunian gas giant with a vast and complex string of rings and moons. Ziva snapped a pair of missiles off after the Adder; then she flipped the
Dragon Queen
so she hit the minefield tail first and lit up the main engines for a few seconds as she did. A plume of fusion-heated plasma kilometres long scoured a path for her through the wave of dronelets. When she was done, she flipped the Fer-de-Lance back around and let the point defence lasers deal with the rest.