[01] Elite: Wanted (24 page)

Ziva shrugged. ‘You had a strange family, En. Pre-space dinosaurs. Nice enough, I suppose, as long as you didn’t challenge their twelfth-century values.’

Enaya laughed. ‘They were
not
helpful.’

‘My problem was more that I never had any boundaries. Still is …’ Ziva grinned. ‘Speaking of which, if you
really
want to have some fun then we could space-walk again, except this time in the Arcturus chromosphere.’

En looked appalled.

‘Sometimes I just want to go out there, En,’ Ziva said. ‘Did you know that starquakes can distort planetary magnetic fields from half a galaxy away? Fifty thousand light years. Thousands of jumps. Years of travel. To be so deep and so far and so alone …’

Enaya snorted. ‘And halfway there you run out of toilet paper.’

‘En!’

‘Yes. Well. You talk about vanishing into space for years at a time but you can do that on your own, thank you very much. It’s not safe out there. Wondrous, with treasures to sate desires both subtle and gross, but it’s not for the timid. And that’s what I am, Ziv. Timid. I don’t
want
to go exploring. I want to stay at home with you and Ay and curl up in bed and eat chocolate and watch k-cast series about serial killers and pornographic re-imaginings of fairy tales.’

Ziva laughed. ‘If that’s what you want, En.’

‘It is. But it’s not what
you
want.’

The
Dragon Queen
smashed into the clouds. ‘I’ve been thinking about what it would take to put back the old cabins and the lounge. Maybe I could get used to the idea of not being able to cross a hundred light years without refuelling. Then we could have both.’ She connected with her avatars again as the
Dragon Queen
punched out the other side of the cloud and matched its flight to the terrain, looking for a place to land.

Ay and Odar Something were sitting up in bed, half clothed, sharing a mildly illegal Lavinia pipe. Ziva patched that through to the cockpit’s screen so En could see too.

There was a flash and a bang. For a moment all the cameras went white. When they recovered, Ay and Odar weren’t sitting on the bed any more.

‘Ziv …’ Enaya was sitting beside her. She’d gone as stiff as a board. The screens showed the same room now, only Ziva couldn’t see Aisha. Odar was held, screaming, between two massive junkers. The camera stayed on Odar’s face for two seconds and then someone shot him. The bullet went in just under his nose, caving in his teeth. A spray of red exploded from the back of his head. As Odar slumped, the picture zoomed in. Three more shots: face, throat and heart; and then the picture shifted sideways back to the bed, where two more junkers held Aisha.

‘Ziv,’ squeaked En, and then someone shot Aisha in the gut. Ziva felt her entire body turn suddenly numb.

The camera swivelled again, this time to a man wearing an immaculately tailored Imperial suit. He had a bowler hat and from under the hat flowed a white veil that obscured his features. In one hand he held an old-fashioned Tesla pistol. He gave Ziva a moment, maybe half a second, before he asked: ‘Ziva Eschel. Do I have your attention?’

‘Who the fuck—’

The Veil fired again. The camera turned to show Aisha sprawled across the bed now, blood all over her. In the cockpit beside Ziva, En was screaming.

‘What you see here is a drone, Eschel,’ said the Veil. ‘A simple remote-controlled robot with a holographic projector. Cheap, expendable and yet very precise. I am elsewhere. Take a moment to check that for yourself if you wish.’ He paused. ‘This drone carries an anti-matter charge. You’ll be perfectly safe in your ship. However, if you make any attempt to contact anyone, if you don’t do exactly as I say, I will detonate the device. The girl here has thirty minutes before she dies if she doesn’t receive trauma attention. The nearest emergency medical drone will take three minutes and six seconds to reach her. If you follow my instructions, I will allow the trauma drone to save her. Do you understand?’

The voice. She knew the voice. The voice that had spoken to her in the elevator as she’d been leaving the Black Mausoleum. A Syndicate Veil. Well, there was a thing.

‘If you so much as …’

The man shot Ay in the chest this time. In the right lung. Then he cocked his head and waited. ‘You have about nine minutes now before she dies,’ he said eventually. ‘Tell me, do you understand? Yes or no?’

‘Yes.’ Ziva spoke through gritted teeth. Enaya was still screaming.

‘I paid a visit to a mutual friend not long ago. I had to tell her at length how unhappy it makes me to appear like this. Do I have to explain to you too?’ The Veil glanced at Aisha.

‘No.’ Ziva shook her head.

‘You understand how we work, bounty hunter,’ said the Veil ‘How I value my anonymity. What it means for me to have to make a trek to this planet and orbit over your head. What all this hardware costs. I’m going to tell you what to do and you’re going to do it.’

Ziva turned to Enaya’s and saw the tears rolling out of her eyes, the helpless desperation, the hopeless pleading. She nodded, slowly.

‘If you open your mouth and utter a single word, I will kill your lover’s daughter. If you try to bargain or negotiate, if you do anything except exactly what I tell you and exactly when I tell you to do it … When you’re done, I’ll simply leave. You can come after me then – if you like.’ He frowned. ‘Eight minutes. Do you understand? You may nod.’

Ziva nodded. The temptation to do almost anything else, to tell the
Dragon Queen
to take off and chase this fucker right into the heart of a star if she had to, to send a message, to spit in his face, to have one of the avatars she had lurking nearby try to infiltrate his ship, anything … But she knew the Judas Syndicate well enough. Every bounty hunter came across them sooner or later. The ones that lived left them alone.

‘We have no dispute with you, Eschel. You haven’t ever hurt us enough. But sometimes this is the price of doing business. Are you armed, Eschel? You may nod.’

Ziva nodded.

‘You have Newman on your ship. Yes or no?’

‘Yes.’

‘I want to see him. Show him to me. Seven minutes.’

Ziva took a deep breath but she must have taken too long about letting it out again. The Veil lifted the Tesla. Enaya wailed. Ziva jumped up before the Veil could fire. She hesitated an instant to see what he’d do. When the Veil hesitated too, Ziva nodded and ran for the hold.

‘Six minutes,’ said the Veil.

‘Permission to speak?’ asked Ziva as she ran.

‘That depends on what you say.’

She opened the airlock seals to the cargo bay and then the second airlock into Newman’s pod, a hovering camera drone buzzing at her shoulder. ‘I’ve got him sedated. He can’t talk.’

‘Pull your camera back so I can see you both at once.’

The drone buzzed back a little way.

‘I don’t need him to speak, Eschel, I need him to die. Now draw your pistol and shoot him in the head. You have fifteen seconds before I kill this girl. The Syndicate will keep a recording of you murdering him. If you come after me, I’ll use it. Ten seconds. Do as I say and do it now. Five seconds. Four. Three. Two …’

Ziva shot Newman in the head.

‘Well done, Eschel. I’m sure that was hard. An emergency medical drone has been called. Stay where you are, Eschel. Bring your ship in if you like, but
you
will remain where you are, as will the camera. You will continue to show me Newman’s corpse until it’s too late for any reconstruction. The trauma drone will arrive shortly before your ship. Once you land you’re free to do as you wish. I suggest you take the intervening time to consider your situation. Two weeks from now you will all be alive and well and this will simply be a bad memory. Consider the alternative paths we might have taken and then leave us alone, Eschel.’

The
Dragon Queen
had found the Veil’s Anaconda now, already curling out of low orbit behind a hard fusion plume. The ship piped it directly to her Fresnels. The Anaconda had a name. The
Omerta
. And a partner – that mystery corvette. It had followed her all the way from Whit’s Station. The Anaconda was so heavily militarised there was nothing much left of the original design except the shape. The cargo bay bulged oddly and the engines were putting out at least twice the thrust of a production model. A tiger dressed as a sheep.

‘Khanguire,’ she breathed.

The Anaconda micro-jumped and abruptly the link to the Veil was gone. The
Dragon Queen
was almost at the retreat. An emergency trauma drone was skimming in ahead of them from the west; for a moment, Ziva wondered if it was a missile tipped with anti-matter and almost had the
Dragon Queen
shoot it down. But she didn’t. She didn’t dare. Just stood there and waited to see what would happen until it landed in the motel courtyard in a swirling haze of dust thrown up by its rotors and detached a cadre of trauma bots.

The
Dragon Queen
touched down a minute later. ‘Follow the Anaconda,’ Ziva told it. ‘Find out where he goes.’ And then she ran with Enaya until they were safely far enough away for the Fer-de-Lance to engage its engines. It shot straight up.

The trauma drones wouldn’t let her get close. By the time Ziva reached them, they had Aisha wrapped up in stasis gel and were busy settling her into a surgery tank. The junkers were all dead, neat round holes in their heads. Murdered by the drone Veil which had then wiped itself clean and quietly slagged its own circuits. Like he’d said, a cheap disposable bot. En stopped outside the room, her face in her hands, watching aghast, murmuring to herself.

‘My baby, my baby …’

Trauma bots didn’t mess about. They’d fix Aisha up here and now, repair all the shredded tissue from the Veil’s three bullets and then lock her down in a regeneration tank while they figured out who she was, who was going to pay and whether anyone had any rights over her. Until then they bustled even Enaya out of the way.

‘En …’ Ziva touched her arm. Enaya flinched away. ‘En … She’ll be okay … She’ll be …’

Enaya rounded on her. ‘She’ll be
okay
?’ She took a step away as Ziva came closer. ‘
Okay
? She’ll be
okay
?’

‘They’ll fix her up. They do an …’ She’d lost count of the number of people she’d seen patched up by trauma drones back when she wore a uniform. Far worse than this. ‘They’re excellent …’

Enaya kept backing away. The look on her face was terrible. Harrowed. ‘You,’ she hissed. ‘
You
did this.
You
brought this down on us. All because of
you
!’

Half a mile up in the sky the
Dragon Queen
’s fusion plume kicked in and she rocketed away into space. The dull boom of the ignition shook the flimsy walls. Across the horizon, the spectacular double sunset of Arcturus and Kalliste setting together lit the world with a brown like old blood.

The price of doing business.

Khanguire.

A lot of people shook after a gunfight. Ravindra didn’t, usually. She did now as she held Ji and they both cried. Orla watched over them in the shadow of the
Magician
. The docking berth was full of dead bodies.

‘Okay, this is no good,’ Orla said finally. ‘We need to go.’

They didn’t talk then. Ravindra made sure that Ji was all right. They, mainly Merkel, had beaten on him a bit but not too much. He was mostly scared, and hurt by Alice’s betrayal. It appeared that he really had fallen for the girl. Ravindra, on the other hand, was pleased she’d killed her.

Orla had looked after Ji’s wounds in the
Song of Stone
’s common room. Ravindra had fallen asleep on the sofa. Orla had ended up putting them both to bed. She put Ji in Harnack’s cabin and Ravindra in her own.

Ravindra opened her eyes. They felt sore and dry. She’d fallen asleep wearing her lenses. She checked the time display. She had slept for twelve hours. She barely slept half of that normally. It was time that she couldn’t afford to waste. She still felt tired. She sat up on her bunk, her back against the cold bulkhead. It was the first time she had stopped in more than forty-eight hours. The first time she wasn’t trying to think on her feet in crisis management mode. The first time she’d had to really think about the ramifications of her options.

She was a good pilot. The
Song
was a fine ship. She ran a hand down the bulkhead affectionately. She had no chance against an Anaconda and a corvette. The corvette was a comparable ship to the cutter, a little slower, a little less manoeuvrable, but also a little more heavily armed and armoured. The Anaconda, on the other hand, was a monster. Though it was fast and manoeuvrable for its size, she would still be able to fly rings around it. The problem was that it was a heavily armed, and armoured, behemoth. On top of that she was down two gunners and whether or not they could get their engineer back at all, let alone in a fit state to do her job, was as yet unknown.

Then there was Ji.

She sent a text to Harlan. As grateful as she was, for everything, she wasn’t ready to speak to anyone just yet. He replied a few minutes later. She read and then re-read his reply. He had found her a cracksman. Then she took the lenses out and rubbed her eyes. She leant back against the bulkhead, grateful that she had done all the crying she was going to do for a while.

Ravindra stepped out of her cabin. She could hear voices – Orla and Ji. She could smell coffee brewing and eggs and pancakes cooking. Mostly on the ship they ate meals prepared from food cartridges, like every other ship’s crew. She’d insisted on the coffee machine and real coffee. Orla had a portable stove/grill combination and when she had time to track down real ingredients, actual food, as Orla called it, she would treat the rest of the crew.

There was an incongruity about the cutter that Ravindra had never quite come to terms with. The
Song of Stone
was a thing of beauty and grace. Inside the ship there was often a warm, comforting atmosphere. It was home. Yet it was a warship, a tool of destruction that she personally had used to kill. Many, if not most, of those she’d killed had been either innocents or people just trying to do their job.