[01] Elite: Wanted (16 page)

Ziva let the
Dragon Queen
jab her with a nerve booster then fired all four missiles. After that everything got interesting very quickly.

Ravindra was in the apartment, looking around. The place was a shithole, beanbags and thread-worn sofas covered in fast food cartoons, empty booze bottles and various bits of drug paraphernalia. The main room was lit in red, the smaller rooms in other colours. Blue was the kitchen, a worse mess than the lounge; green was the bathroom and Ravindra didn’t investigate that too thoroughly. She found Ji in the purple room. Alice’s bedroom. In her bed, smoking a bowl of some herbal narcotic.

‘Mum! What the fuck?’

Ravindra slapped the bowl out of his hand in an explosion of sparks and hot ashes. She tried not to look too closely at the filthy room. Outside she could hear Jonas and Harrelson speaking in low tones to Alice.

‘That’s the last time you speak to me like that!’ Ravindra snapped. ‘Get up, get dressed, you’re coming with me.’

‘Like hell,’ Ji said and glared at her defiantly. ‘Or what? Going to choke slam me again?’

Ravindra had to force herself to control her breathing. She also had to resist the urge to slap Ji, very, very hard. ‘I’m going to yank you out of that bed and march you through the station in whatever you’re wearing.’

‘Go ahead,’ Ji said and crossed his arms. ‘We could have talked about this yesterday. We could have talked about this on the phone earlier. If you wanted me to be reasonable, you had your chances then.’

Ravindra glared at him, took several deep breaths and forced herself to calm down.

‘Look, you want to hang out with scum, that’s up to you—’ Ravindra was trying not to raise her voice.

‘They’re my friends!’ Ji protested.

‘No, they’re—’

‘How’re you not the same kind of scum? How is you being friends with Orla and Jonty any different to me being friends with Merkel and Alice?’

‘I know it seems the same—’

‘Oh yes, everything’s okay when you’re doing it, but not when I’m—’

‘Shut up!’ Ravindra screamed at him.

‘Everything okay in there?’ Harrelson asked.

‘Mind your own business!’ Ravindra shouted, a little too shrilly for her own liking. She slammed Alice’s bedroom door and turned back to Ji. ‘Fine, I’m scum, my friends are scum, but I know they have my back …’

‘Merkel’s just the same …’

‘No, he’s not. I know this. I signed on with a captain like Merkel when I was just a little bit younger than you. They’re friends until it comes to the crunch. That’s how I ended up in prison. That’s when I learned how to read people a bit better.’

‘Oh right, so I’m too immature to work these things out for myself?’ Ji spat.

Yes, of course you are. We all are when we’re seventeen.
Ravindra decided not to voice her thoughts.

‘I don’t care who you hang out with,’ Ravindra lied. ‘I just don’t want you to do something that will get you arrested, hunted or killed,’ she said.
I want a better life for you. Why can’t you see that?

‘Mum, I know you want what’s best for me,’ he said rather coldly. ‘I really do. I know you want me to avoid making the same mistakes that you did but I have to make decisions for myself. There’s no age of majority on the station. I’m old enough to make those decisions. You have to loosen your grip.’

Then make better decisions!
‘Look, we can talk about this …’ Ravindra knew right away that it was the wrong thing to say. She watched his face harden, saw the anger back in his eyes.

‘When, mum, when? Even when you’re here, all you’re thinking about is the ship, the crew and the next score and you keep shutting me out.’

Is that why you want to be a pirate?
Thinking that made Ravindra reflect. She’d provided for Ji, but was that all she’d done? Was that enough? It seemed so ridiculous to her that her soft, sensitive boy wanted to take down scores in the spaceways. He hadn’t the slightest concept of what the life was like. What it took to do it successfully. What it took to not end up in the Warren, somewhere worse, or dead.

‘Okay, I’m sorry. I’m having a bad time at the moment and I need you to cut me some slack,’ she said, trying to appeal to him rather than hector. ‘I think you should leave it a few years. Maybe university and then decide …’

‘I don’t want to go to university – I know what I want to do! I have done since I was seven years old. I’ve grown up around it!’

No, Ji, you haven’t. You’ve no idea how much I’ve fought to keep this life from you.

‘All right, you want this life. Fine! I’ll tell you what this life means: I’ve pissed off some bad people. They may come looking for you. We are probably going to have to run. In the meantime, I need you safe so I can concentrate on fixing the mess that I’ve made, because if I have to worry about you, I’m likely to get myself and the others killed.
That’s
what this life means.’

‘I can look after myself.’

‘No, you can’t.
I
can’t look after myself against these people, and I’ve got seventeen years of experience on you, plus a hardcore crew and a warship behind me.’

‘I’ve got friends and I’m not leaving.’

Friends likely to sell you to the Judas Syndicate without a second thought.

Ravindra noticed the blinking comms icon in the corner of her lens. Harlan was trying to contact her. She cut the link without answering it.

‘This is what you wanted, did you? This is what it means. Only dealing with bad people, and law enforcement and bounty hunters after you. Always having to run. Or did you think it was going to be the glamorous fantasies that Merkel spins, or like it is in the holos? Because I have some bad news: that’s all bullshit. Now put your clothes on and let’s get going.’

‘No.’

‘Ji, I don’t have—’

‘I’ll take my chances.’

‘It’s not a fucking chance!’ Ravindra screamed. There was a knock on the door.

‘Everything okay in there?’ Harrelson demanded again, with a bit more menace in her voice this time.

‘I mean it,’ Ravindra told Ji.

‘Or what? More violence?’

‘I’m going to do whatever I need to, to make—’

‘Go on then,’ Ji said, crossing his arms. Ravindra considered going to get a shock rod and shocking her own son until he was a drooling mess on the filthy carpet. There was another knock on the door.

‘Fuck off!’ Ravindra screamed, almost losing it.

‘I’m sorry, Captain Khanguire,’ Harrelson said. ‘But Boss Whit wants to speak to you and I think you should take the link.’

‘It’ll be more important than me, anyway,’ Ji taunted.

‘It’ll be a bloody sight more important than arguing with you,’ Ravindra snapped and opened the link. Harlan’s avatar appeared in her vision.

‘I think you’ve got more trouble,’ the avatar told her.

What could be more trouble than the Judas Syndicate
? she wondered.

Ziva was almost impressed. The Asp didn’t pull the novice manoeuvre and turn away, and he didn’t start firing either; instead the pilot cut his main engine and started course adjusting with attitude thrusters, dumping heat from the ship’s skin into a scatter of inflatable canisters scattered behind him. The
Dragon Queen
’s infrared trackers lost his hull signature but picked up his thrusters, and the Fer-de-Lance continued trajectory predictions from estimates and basic Newtonian physics. It was an old trick and a simple one – if you could make yourself as cold as the vacuum of space then you made yourself invisible. Ziva had fitted a set of attitude thrusters to the
Dragon Queen
that vented liquid helium specifically to do what the Asp was trying to do, only better.

The Sidewinders did the opposite. They curved away from the Asp at full throttle. The
Dragon Queen
rotated a new salvo of missiles into position and set up estimated target tracks on all three ships. Ziva fired a drone, this time loaded with a cloud warhead, but held back on the rest of a second salvo. A pair at each Sidewinder would have set things going nicely but the Sidewinders didn’t have a bounty on them, not yet. Things like this had to be done right. That was the discipline. The line between pirate and hunter.

The Sidewinders changed course again, steering hard back across her bows. They’d dropped the range to five hundred clicks now. They passed right between the
Dragon Queen
and her estimate of where the Asp was hiding and Ziva was quite certain the Asp would have put out a short burst from its own thrusters while the Sidewinders’ fusion plumes were blinding her. The
Dragon Queen
’s track-error estimates grew steadily wider.

Fuck you
, Ziva thought, and allowed herself a smile.

Ravindra stood in Whit’s Station’s control centre. The footage from the high orbit surveillance satellite showed the Fer-de-Lance pilot kick the ship into a corkscrew and spray low-intensity laser fire all over where the Asp might be. The Fer-de-Lance didn’t have much chance of hitting; her pilot was trying to spook the Asp into giving himself away, that was all. So far it wasn’t working.

‘That Harris?’ she asked Harlan. He was stood next to her on the raised platform over the Command and Control workstations. The station boss nodded. ‘Harris is a good pilot,’ Ravindra conceded.

Ziva checked the missiles had all lost their locks on the Asp and then had them decelerate and position themselves along her best estimate of the Asp’s trajectory, lurking to pounce as soon as she had a solid lock on him again. The last missile she’d fired raced on.

Warnings flashed across the cockpit. Someone was lasing her. She cut the Fer-de-Lance’s fusion plume, dumped heat and twisted the
Dragon Queen
sideways, tumbling momentarily. In part the tumbling spread the laser damage over more of her shields, in part it helped her get a better fix on where it was coming from. Not that she much needed one. A Neo-Technik pulse laser, the standard factory armament of a Sidewinder.

When she was sideways on to her own trajectory she let out a hard burst from the main engines. It was the same trick as the
Nephilim
was trying only without bothering to hide it, and the trajectory shift from a main engine burn made for bigger prediction errors. While she was at it, she dropped the second salvo of missiles, one after the other. They kept their engines cold, drifting inert along a narrow spread towards the oncoming Asp. The drone with the cloud warhead was in the lead now, heading for the
Dragon Queen
’s estimate of the Asp’s position.

The Sidewinders both launched missiles at last. Ziva smiled, nodded her thanks to them for making themselves legitimate targets and threw out a snow cloud around the Fer-de-Lance, a fine spray of hydrogen and methane crystals close to absolute zero. It had the side effect of acting a little like a cloak but what it was really for was—

… The missile with the cloud warhead reached the
Dragon Queen
’s prediction spheroid for the
Nephilim
and ejected anti-hydrogen. The spent drone powered on. With a bit of luck whoever was in the Asp didn’t have the first idea what was about to happen. At the same time, the
Lemming’s Wrath
opened up with a pulse laser again …

—that. Lines of scintillation ripped through the ice around the
Dragon Queen
, giving Ziva a track-back on where the Sidewinder was coming from and confirming she wasn’t being lased by some other ship she hadn’t yet seen. The
Dragon Queen
projected lines of light directly into her heads-up displays, marking the laser strikes across Ziva’s view of space. It added the scintillations to its targeting solution and flipped over. In her acceleration cocoon, Ziva fired back with a sustained burst hard enough to make her cranked-up power circuits smoke. The
Dragon Queen’s
two coherent military-spec X-ray beams raked over the Sidewinder’s skin. The Sidewinder’s shields stopped them for a moment, and then they punched through and the port side of the
Lemming’s Wrath
broke apart. A flash of fusion product lit up space and momentarily blinded the
Dragon Queen
’s trackers. A beacon started flashing, the pilot’s escape pod, damaged but functional. That was Sidewinders for you. Small and fast and agile and armed to the teeth, but they broke if you as much as looked at them in a funny way.

The Asp drifted into Ziva’s cloud of anti-hydrogen. The particles of the cloud were too small and scattered to actually hurt it, but the nano-flashes of hard radiation that flared from its skin pinned it for the
Dragon Queen
’s fire control array. The Fer-de-Lance flipped again, end over end and let off another volley of laser fire while at the same time the four lurking missiles Ziva had launched in her first salvo, now only a few dozen clicks away, burst into life, bracketing the Asp’s position. Ziva’s shot scorched away some of the Asp's ablative shield. Its engine lit up, full torch now, but it was already too late and it knew it. The missiles silently went off around it, a perfect bracket, flinging anti-matter minelets everywhere. The pilot ejected a moment before the first one hit. A second later, the Asp vanished in a flash of hard radiation.

The
Jon Wood
turned tail and screamed away as fast as it could go. Ziva could have caught it if she’d wanted, but she let it be. Instead, she swept up the Asp’s escape pod and had the
Dragon Queen
’s drones put the pilot in restraints in the cabin with Newman. Then she picked up the pilot of the
Lemming’s Wrath
. ‘I’ll let you go when we get to Whit’s Station,’ she told him. No bounty. That made him lucky. The Asp pilot was another matter. Harris himself, was it?

When she was safely away, she sent out remote detonation orders to any minelets that had survived the Asp’s destruction and retrieved her second salvo of missiles. Finally she turned the
Dragon Queen
back to Whit’s Station and lit up the Fer-de-Lance’s fusion flare. Stealth had gone out of the window. Plan B, then. She sent out an avatar and paid Harlan Whit his protection money.

‘Well, Khanguire, were you there to watch the show?’

‘Well, they can fly, whoever they are,’ Ravindra conceded as she watched the death of the
Nephilim
. ‘What’s this got to do with me – or did you just want me to see the pretty lights?’