[04] Elite: Mostly Harmless (27 page)

Eddie loomed over her with the machete as she hugged her knees up to her chest, trying to make herself as small as possible. Perhaps if she was really tiny some passing miracle might forget her life was supposed to be shit and bestow her with some luck? Eddie straddled her, sitting on her curled up knees as if taking a short tea break from the exertion of his attack. His eyes misted over as he gazed down at her quivering body.

‘You really do remind me of my mother you know?’ he said. He leant forward, peering into her face which was screwed up with pain and bloodied from his blade. ‘Such a shame I’m going to have to kill you now.’

As he leant forward Angel felt his weight shift to the top of her knees. Her body rolled back under it and he lost his balance momentarily. The gravity might be limited but the physics of it were the same as ever and in a flash of inspiration she realised she could use this to her advantage. If she used the force of gravity to roll back and pitch him up and out over the ledge of the cave she might buy enough time to get back on her feet and arm herself again. Not that it would do much good in the long run as she would still need to go through him and his machete to get to her ship. But despite everything, she wasn’t ready to give up just yet.

She allowed her body to rock with the momentum of his stagger, tensing her muscles and pulling her knees up even tighter, like a coiled spring. He put his arms out to the sides to steady himself and she saw her moment. Planting her elbows firmly on the ground she stretched her body back and up; extending her legs with all the force she could muster, and sending Eddie flying over her head and out of the mouth of the cave, arms flailing.

It worked!

Her millisecond of self-congratulation was cut short when she remembered a fall in this gravity wasn’t going to slow him down for long, even from forty-feet. He also had his body-thrusters, although they were tricky to use in freefall as you never quite knew the direction they would be thrusting in when you fired them up.

Getting stuck in a tree was just the start of the havoc a badly timed thrust could wreak. But once back on his feet he would be up and after her straight away. She had to get out of there. Rolling to her knees she snatched the knife up off the dusty floor and crept out to the mouth of the cave, as if walking on tiptoes might somehow hide her from the crazed pirate below. Eddie was still tumbling through the air, having taken the unwise step of engaging his thrusters to control the fall, which instead had sent him jetting out across the clearing towards a craggy rock face. He curled into a ball and put his arm over his head to protect it as he bounced off the rocks, firing off another short thrust that sent him blindly tumbling in the other direction.
Like watching a giant slow motion human pinball machine,
Angel thought, as Eddie’s body bounced off another wall and disappeared behind a large boulder. Maybe she could make it to the ship after all?

Her sagging optimism grasping hold of these last shreds of frayed hope, she fired up her own thrusters and leapt off the ledge. She was halfway across the glade before her feet touched the ground running. She took two pounding steps towards her ship when a blood-chilling shriek stopped her dead in her tracks.

She froze. The shriek repeated and she could hear thrashing and splashing as the inhuman cry of agony looped over and over. The splashing sound stopped but the screaming continued and then Eddie staggered out from behind the rock. Angel could tell it was Eddie as it wore his long black coat and the machete still hung in its hand. But the rest of the man was unrecognisable as the acidic gloop he had taken a dunk in burned away at anything that wasn’t made of Kevlar.  He dropped the blade and it clattered to the ground as he staggered towards her, arms rising again weakly, stretching out to her like a child seeking comfort in the arms of its mother.

‘My book?’ he gurgled as his vocal chords were eaten up by the acid he’d swallowed.

As he drew closer Angel could see his face melting right off his skull. Like the senator in the radiation belt only doused in chalky whiteness so he looked more like a snowman melting than a roasting pig. Angel stepped back as he stumbled towards her, green eyes no longer sparking out of the ruin of his face.

‘Mama?’ He went down on his knees and crouched forwards, starting to weep.  ‘Mama?’ he sobbed into cupped hands, giving Angel some respite at least from having to watch his features disintegrate. ‘Oh, mama, it hurts so much. It’s ripping and tearing and burning … and I almost had them, mama. Almost got them, you know?’

‘I know, Eddie.’

A comforting hand touched his back. It was Angel, patting him lightly on a small patch of shoulder that hadn’t been submerged when he tumbled into the pool of thick acid. He sobbed and screeched and howled, a stream of tortured expressions all tumbling out on top of each other as he rolled and writhed in agony. As his flesh broiled his body hissed and fizzed, wisps of noxious steam rising from it. He twitched and jerked against the incessant, needling anguish, throwing his head back and uncovering his face as he clawed at his bubbling fleshy gut with rapidly decomposing fingers. His eyes were completely gone now, as were his nose and ears. Angel could vaguely make out the shape of his mouth, but only because his jaw was opening and closing, teeth bared through a lipless grin.

‘Please…’ she could just about make out the words. ‘Hurts … so … much … Mama?’

Angel watched the unthinkable faceless monster that had once been Eddie. Eddie of the sparkling green eyes who was now rolling around on the chalky floor, sightless, unrecognisable and in very obvious distress. There was no doubting he was a dead man. The only question that remained was how long she was going to let him suffer? Angel had a sudden memory of an event from way back in her childhood, when she’d found an injured cat in the maintenance shafts and brought it home to care for it. Her father had taken one look at the wretched creature, back legs mangled from falling into an air filtration vent, and reached out and snapped its neck. She’d been about seven-years-old and the shock of seeing a life so abruptly ended had had a lasting effect on her. He father had tried to placate the screaming child by explaining it was cruel to let a dumb beast suffer when there was no chance of really helping it. Better to end the suffering swiftly and without fuss, making way for a cause that was less hopeless. Angel hadn’t been able to understand the lesson at the time and the memory had haunted her for years, eventually driving a cool wedge of mistrust between her and her father.

She’d run crying to her mother at the time, the dead cat limp in her arms. Maugvahnna had shrieked, calling for the housekeeper and shooing the distressed child with armfuls of pest-ridden stray cat out of her lounge in disgust.

Now though, Angel thought she kind of understood where her father had been coming from. The cat really had been at least ten stops past the end of the line for “destination salvageable”. The same could now be said of the pitifully weeping, ruined Eddie at her feet. In a couple of strides she had grabbed the machete and found herself standing over his body, surprised by her own intent as much as anything else. He rolled over on his back, unfurling a little as if he could sense the end approaching and was submitting to it utterly. Angel looked into where his eyes had once been. His sobs were fading to clicking, hitching, and impossibly wet sighs as his throat collapsed in around them.

‘Sleep well, Eddie,’ she said, raising the blade over her right shoulder and swinging with both hands. His head separated from his putrefying body with sickening ease, making a shloopy noise as it rolled across the dusty glade leaving a trail of goo behind it. Angel had clocked up her first genuine kill.

Over. It was over for Eddie anyway. And she needed to get out of here. She noticed the recipe book propped up against a heap of stones where it had landed from its own forty-foot fall when Eddie had tossed it out of the cave.
Weathered the trauma far better than h
im, Angel thought, as she scooped up the book and headed for her ship.

Chapter 26

Angel sat heavily in the command chair - at least as heavily as she could in the fifty percent gravity. She felt drained, emotionally as well as physically.
They say the first kill is the worst?
She could well believe that as she’d never felt shittier in her life. Eddie might have been a psychotic criminal, and yes he had been trying to kill her, but she had to admit she’d been growing to like him. She recalled that first morning, the glint in his eye as he watched her stomp around his quarters collecting her clothes. A hint of a smile twitched at the corners of her mouth. Once the hatch had been sealed tight and the air in the cockpit recycled and brought to pressure she pulled the tag on her remlok mask. A puff of chalky dust erupted as it was ripped apart and was swallowed up back inside the neck dispenser. The dust drifted down in a miniature cloud to deposit a milky film across the previously spotless dashboard. The interior hatch gave a sharp hiss and popped open. DORIS hovered in, propellers buzzing.

‘You look dreadful.’

Angel laughed bitterly, wiping caked blood and dust off her cheek. She looked ruefully down at her mauled knuckles. They were going to need medical attention to avoid an infection but it wasn’t urgent. Her number one priority had to be getting somewhere safe; somewhere away from the memory of the sickening crunch of Eddie’s head separating from his body under the weight of the blade.

‘He was in the hold,’ the robot said.

Angel looked up. ‘What?’

 ‘Eddie. He was in one of the body pods in the hold, stowed away all along. He followed you out after about ten minutes.’

‘Great. Well, thanks for your help
yet again
,’ Angel spat sarcastically, turning back to tap co-ordinates into the flight desk. ‘We’ve got enough fuel left for two jumps, so I’m going to skip a trip to the red dwarf and get the hell out of here as fast as possible. We can figure out a refuelling stop on the way back to the Hollows.’

DORIS starting chucking processors ominously. ‘You’re going back to the Hollows?’

Something about the incredulous tone made Angel stop prepping for take-off and look at the little robot again. ‘What do you mean? Why wouldn’t I?’

DORIS made a sound suspiciously like a huff. ‘You just decapitated one of its most notorious citizens. Unless you are planning to go in there, guns blazing, on a mission to usurp his nefarious reign and take over the Hollows, I’d say you’re not going to be very welcome.’Angel sucked on her bottom lip, considering. ‘But I didn’t do anything wrong,’ she whined, more to herself than the robot, which she suspected wouldn’t be overflowing with sympathy. ‘I only killed him to end his suffering. He managed to dunk himself in the acid bath all on his own and would have died anyway if I left him.’

 ‘Why would you want that to happen? You do know how much the bounty on his head was worth, right?’

Angel spun the command chair round to face the robot crossly. ‘I couldn’t give a fart in a flask about the credits on his head! How callous could you be?’

 ‘Well you should, because that bounty just made you pretty rich. Well, rich enough to pay back what you owe my client anyway, with enough left over to fill your hold with something to trade.  You’re going to be pretty popular at the Pilot’s Federation too once they receive my subspace communication informing them of the kill. They’ll be delighted to be rid of such a troublesome filibuster. That makes this a win win situation I’d say.’

Angel stared, opened mouthed. She wasn’t quite sure how to weigh up the implications of this news yet, but the pompous tone of the robot’s speech-synthesis chip was infuriating. ‘Try telling Eddie it’s a win win. Or Admin and Katherine for that matter who will no doubt have to find new work now.’

 ‘You humans have such a limited cache. Have you really forgotten they are murderous fugitives who shot up your ship and kidnapped you?
Boo hoo
, some self-confessed, really bad people get snuffed out and you get to go back to your nice comfortable, safe life as a station commander’s daughter. Low risk, like you said.’

 ‘A life I hate, with parents I hardly know, let alone like very much? And now I have to go back to them, cap in hand?’

‘As I have already pointed out, the bounty for Mental Eddie is considerable and certainly enough to set you back on track. You wouldn’t even need to speak to your parents if you didn’t want to. Plus you’ll have a well-equipped, modern space ship at your disposal - far better than that rust bucket you were piloting to begin with. I’d have thought you’d be delighted to be heading back to your nice, safe, uncomplicated existence shuffling rocks from A to B.’

‘You haven’t exactly given me a choice have you?’

‘Returning to Slough is the only logical course of action. And if I were you I’d make it pretty snappy. I started transmitting news of your kill the moment I registered it, also taking the liberty of straightening them out about the other kills you have been framed for too; you know, in the name of clearing your name.  Luckily I was able to recover the video from that ridiculous reporter’s spy-device to corroborate my version of events. So, it looks like you are squeaky clean again. Or you will be once the data gets processed and your status updated - which should take about ten more minutes.’

Angel stared, slack jawed as this information processed.

‘You can thank me later,’ DORIS said, then powered down into sleep mode.

Ten minutes?
Angel started frantically tapping panels on her dash to see what her status was. Still registering as a pirate, but for how long? She looked at the navigation panel. The sweeping arm of the radar showed at least a dozen red blips of potential trouble in short range scanning distance of her right now. She was still as hot as they were, but once her status updated ...

‘Shit!’ She planted her hand on the power pad. ‘Computer, engage autopilot. Get us off this planet as fast as mechanically possible!’  
‘
Initiating autopilot. Firing gravitational flux thrusters, disembarkation from planetary atmosphere in five … four … three … two … one …
’