[04] Elite: Mostly Harmless (16 page)

‘Okay, Miss Rose, we’re going to spin you up to 1.2-g. It will make you feel a little heavy, but not as heavy as a trip planet side if you’ve ever been down there?’

As Angel’s entire face was encased in an aromatic mummification she presumed this was a rhetorical question and continued breathing steadily through the small gap left around her nostrils. 1.2-g was hardly even a blip. It would feel a bit like riding a roller-coaster, nothing more. But she would be glad when this farcical process was over so she could get out into the gardens and start pacing in earnest. Why women like her mother subjected their bodies to these beautification rituals was beyond her comprehension, and the whale song was really beginning to annoy her.

The centrifuge started to spin gently and Angel’s chest tightened, her right hand instinctively searching for the clicker that would tell the controller she was compos mentis and happy to keep going. But this setup didn’t need a clicker as she wouldn’t be spinning anywhere near fast enough to go g-LOC. She tried to relax as momentum grew and it felt as if her body was slowly being smothered underneath a hundred pounds of softly singing whale blubber.

Chapter 16

Angel sauntered through the fragrant herb garden trying to keep a low profile. Her face was calm, and impossibly clean now, but inside her chest her heart was hammering a deafening rhythm. Slack-faced patrons in fluffy lilac robes padded aimlessly about, some murmuring softly to each other over the top of healthy-looking drinks in frosted tallboy glasses; some were wandering alone, like her, deep in contemplative thought. The eco-gardens were housed in a huge cylinder-like dome inside the central stack of the Observer II’s main hull. Angel could see stars and the planet turning lazily overhead with the gardens themselves bathed in the life-giving light of a thousand or more solar strips. Unlike most other places in orbit around Slough, there was no brash advertising in this restful place. The exclusive clientele had already paid their dues in extortionate treatment fees, Angel supposed, so their eyeballs got some respite too. Instead the solar strips keeping the vegetation alive cycled through a synchronised dance of colour that was supposed to represent the setting and rising of the twin suns of Lupon in Wolf 573. As she watched the lightshow wash its lavish cadence across the artificial landscape Angel had to admit it was rather a stunning display, if a little showy.

The stack of gravity rings circling the dome was accessible via a grid-work of platforms and lifting pads, regulated from some unseen elsewhere in the complex, so that the ambient gravity inside each section could be individually controlled by altering the velocity of its spin. Fluffy robes and crisp, pale-green uniformed bodies travelled up and down all around her. Entering one of the treatment chambers involved strapping in to an enclosed pod spinning in tandem with the central dome at just under one-g. The pod would then decelerate or accelerate in sync with the section of ring you wanted to enter. Angel watched as a large man with a bald, sweaty pate fought to keep his robe covering his balls as the pod decelerated to around zero-g and a beautechnician helped him up. Angel turned in circles, watching the pod spin around her head as the airlock to the steam chamber slid open, enveloping the little pod in hot steamy whiteness and hiding its inhabitants from view. 

Level five, chamber twenty-seven Angel noted internally and headed casually over to a platform that would lift her to the same point once DORIS came through with the planned commotion. They had decided to give it about ten minutes, allowing the councillor time to settle in to his float and the beautechnician time to move on to other duties. Right on cue there was a burst of activity spilling out of reception. DORIS streaked out of the doors, smoke spilling from its propeller engine which popped and fizzed worryingly. Everyone turned to stare at the circus as a small cluster of frantic assistants tried to grab hold of the malfunctioning bot and wrestle it under control. By the time the scene had dissipated Angel had also been swallowed by a steamy shroud and was pulling herself along the drag frame inside chamber twenty-seven, her heart galloping around her chest like a frenzied horse. She slid the door shut behind her and was instantly choked by the cloying embrace of the scented hot float chamber.

She touched the handle of her knife for the hundredth time and began skirting the bottom of the chamber, staying tucked in to the corner and out of sight in the comforting folds of steam.

‘Matthew? Is that you man? I’m dying of thirst up here. What in the flaming lady’s tits took you so long?’

The belligerent voice of the politician came drifting down through the smog from way up above. This was where it was hottest on account of the microscopic amount of gravity left in the chamber so certain acts of physics, like heat rising, knew which way was up. This was the preferred setting for regular hot floaters as it allowed a client to regulate the intensity of the experience to suit their taste by navigating up and down inside the tall chamber. The blinds had been switched to unidirection, so naked and sweaty occupants could enjoy the ambience of the light show in the main dome without the risk of bearing their buttocks to the world if they drifted too close to the glass.

Angel pulled herself slowly along the drag frame, staying at the base of the chamber where the steam was thinner until she could get her bearings and locate the councillor. Once she had spotted him she would use her suit’s micro thrusters to launch a rapid attack, slicing open his throat as quick as you like before making a bee-line for the exit; hopefully before taking too much of a steamy shower in his spurting blood. She shuddered at the thought and forced her mind to conjure up images of the fat, sweaty politician molesting a young slave girl who had most likely been snatched from her home and forced into prostitution when she was just an innocent child. It helped a little, so she bolstered the idea by imagining this was just a computer game. Three lives and a couple of power-ups - those were the drinks she’d had for breakfast - and if she could just make the kill shot without getting caught she could level up enough to get Mental Eddie off her back. Buy some more power-ups at Sue’s bar. A lot more power-ups.

‘Oh come on man, get up here! Am I to evaporate for want of an iced Perriard? Or do you expect me to drink my own piss?’

Piss and gravity,
thought Angel with a wry smile to herself, finally stealing enough courage from some mystical place in her psyche to let go of the drag frame and prepare to launch herself, full tilt, towards the sound of the insufferable bastard’s voice. She was positioning herself to make best use of the micro-thrusters as she kicked off when there was a sudden, tearing metallic groan and the atmosphere started to get unexpectedly heavier. Very suddenly.

‘No … wait … WHAT?’

The voice from above was getting louder, and not just because he was becoming more agitated. He was getting closer; rapidly. With a shuddering ‘thunk’ the steam chamber passed an orbit in sync with the central dome, but then continued speeding up, bringing the gravity to over one-g. Not a particularly foreboding weight on its own, but coupled with a fall from at least forty metres on to the deep scaffold of steel grab frames the prognosis for any falling politicians wouldn’t be good.

Angel flinched as a sickening slapping, crunch came through the sweaty smog off to her left. The machinery whined again and she had to steady herself on the grab frame as the chamber slowed down and fell into orbit with the central dome, lifting the extra weight off her body as the ambient gravity returned to normal.

What the fuck had just happened? Angel’s brain was still trying to formulate the question when her body leapt into action, vaulting over the scaffold that was now acting more like hurdles than a grab frame, towards the unmistakable sound of a soft body snapping over hard steel.

Out of the steam loomed the podgy councillor. He was pasty white; his flaccid naked body slick with sweat and massage oil. At first glance all Angel could think about was those ancient baroque oil paintings from way back in earth history. The way he’d come to rest  draped across the metalwork in a grotesquely elegant fashion, he looked like a Ruben’s nude; arched back to accentuate indulgent belly and plentiful breast, head thrown back as if in decadent laughter.

Angel jumped, letting out a little squeak as the body suddenly twitched three times and let out a long, slow fart as the muscles around the sphincter relaxed. His body had broken in at least three places, most notably the neck. His lifeless, startled eyes were staring straight at her through the steamy fug - and while there was no chance he would be identifying her to the authorities that didn’t make the scene any less creepy.

* * *

‘Commander? Commander Rose? Angel? Hey! Hey you! Ow! Ow fuck! FUCK!’

Angel swore under her breath as a skinny young man skittered towards her, tripping over a courgette planter in his haste to intercept her. It was Jack Nova, roving reporter from the Observer's Observer. The contents of his satchel spilled all over the ground along with several stacks of empty seed trays. She had been trying to slip away unnoticed from the scene but now the whole place was gaping at the kerfuffle he had caused.

Red faced and puffing, he disentangled himself from the mess and gave his trousers a cursory brush before hurrying back to his pursuit of Angel, who was still doing her best to melt into the scenery.

‘Angel! Hey! HO there! Phew, okay … there you are. It IS you. I thought it was! Why didn’t you stop?’

‘Oh. Hi Jack. Sorry, I didn’t see you.’

‘Didn’t? Didn’t see me? You were staring straight at me when I ran into the courgette bed! Come on Angel; remember you’re talking to a reporter now.’

‘I thought you were an intern, not a reporter.’

‘That was six months ago!’

Jack looked crestfallen, but it didn’t last long as he got his bag strap caught over the end of a grape trellis and the whole thing came tumbling after him.

‘Shit! Sorry…’ there was no-one particular around to apologise to, so it dissipated into the humidity and the grape-heavy trellis remained on the floor.

‘What do you
want
, Jack?’

Angel was still hurrying away as fast as looked potentially innocent, but the damned little reporter was keeping pace with her, fumbling to pull a tablet out of his satchel now it had finished its mischief with the trellis.

‘Oh that’s a nice greeting for an old academy classmate, I’m sure. Can you stop? Do you think we can stop for a second?’

‘You dropped out of the academy – to go to media school. Remember?’

Angel had no intention of stopping to chat.

‘Yes, but we registered together. The only reason I dropped out was they refused to insure me in any more simulators. Not much point training to be a pilot if they aren’t going to let you learn to fly!’

‘You were, ARE, a danger to yourself and everything else around you. I can’t imagine anything more dangerous than you in charge of a set of thrusters attached to a battering ram.’

Jack’s main problem in the pilot’s academy was his persistently morbid state of luck; coupled with a confidence streak wider than the Breenfreed Ludd asteroid belt, it made him a very potentially dangerous pilot to fly in the same star system as, let alone the same formation. There had been a collective sigh of relief when the cadets’ assembly was told he was flunking out.

‘Yeah, well … luckily for both of us it seems my future lay in journalism. And you are JUST the person I need to speak to for my side-panel on station gossip. Talk about TURN-A-ROUND! Wow! One minute you’re hanging off the rope ladder of the poverty bunks (although I guess your father wouldn’t
actually
have let that happen), sprung out of the cooling house on the station PR budget (and don’t for a minute try and deny THAT one as I have already chased down the digi-trail); then you go missing, lost at space for a few days at the EXACT … SAME ... TIME … as Captain Riley goes missing? Now there’s a coincidence, right?’

Angel came to a sudden halt, the series of insinuations she had just been hit with taking the breath out of her like a barrage of heavy-fisted gut shots. Jack stopped opposite her, puffing slightly from the effort of keeping up. His satchel finally relented and gave him his tablet.

 ‘Phew, thanks … so yes; and now here you are, back, in the FLASHIEST ride I’ve seen in dock for a long time … A. LONG. TIME ... am I right? The word is you made a KILLING on some freaky-lucky trade with some distant Imperial outpost - supposedly. Although I cannot verify this because the whole planet happens to be off-grid for a few days while their station command centre purges a virus from its link to the uniweb.’

Angel stared open mouthed.

‘So, come on Angel. What really gives? I was going to run with the story of you two vanishing off for some hanky-panky in Pog Hobdonia; everyone knows he got you that cushy job running the gold – yeah right,
gold
,’ Jack winked theatrically before coughing into his wrist and carrying on. ‘The Naval Captain and the Station Commander’s destitute daughter smuggling drugs into the pleasure zone? It has a ring to it doesn’t it? A kind of rough and ready romance. You’re like a 33
^rd
century Bonnie and Clyde!’

Angel’s cheeks flushed angrily and she forgot she was supposed to be making a hasty, quiet exit. She glared at him, feet apart and hands on her hips.

‘Why you! I’m a fucking pilot, alright? Not the station-fucking-captain’s daughter.’

‘Now, I didn’t say that, did I? A man who can fuck stations? That really
would
be news; although I’m not sure I’d be chasing after his daughter.’

Jack Nova grinned at his own wit and started tapping away on his tablet.

‘So,’ he said eventually, pointing a pen-camera at her, ‘what’s the story, Angel?’

Angel stood there, fuming at him for a few seconds.

‘No. Fucking. Comment.’

For a moment she’d been terrified but then she realised the shit she was spilling today was going to be all over the metaphorical-fan in about twenty four hours anyway. Nothing she could do about that - her life was finished in Slough. This gave her an odd sense of anticipation that wasn’t altogether unpleasant. All she had to do was keep this little git of a reporter quiet until they could get off the station.