[04] Elite: Mostly Harmless (8 page)

The cabin was suddenly lit up by twin beams of broiling fire as a beam laser cut up the space in front of her. She flung the flight stick from side to side, corkscrewing and rolling left and right to avoid the scorching path of the beams. The whole cabin shuddered and trembled as she threw the Cobra erratically about.

‘Mayday, mayday,’ she screamed into an open channel as she wrestled with the flight controls. ‘All combat capable ships, this is Alliance trade vessel
Hope Falls
. Urgent assistance required, sector G11. Urgent assistance! Please respond!’

She checked the shield monitor as the laser fire raked sizzling gashes across her fuselage. Eighty percent and falling with every hit. Her dash was blinking and flashing with a stunning display of system alarms as the onslaught intensified. If no help responded by the time her shields fell to twenty percent she would run up the white flag. Hand over the gold and hope to get away with the ship undamaged.

‘Where are you Kram? I’m getting hammered here!’

There was a brief moment of silence as the tracer fire stopped, then the ship’s radar started bleeping ominously as a volley of small dots were released. The radar showed three heading towards Kram who was limping around to her right; the other three were heading straight for Angel. She gulped and wheeled the ship through the chill of space, opening the heat sink vent and spewing a blanket of hot matter in her wake to throw off the missiles. A rapid concussion ripped through the cockpit as the missiles took the bait, cracking open the darkness with blinding light, warheads booming on every side. Angel’s head whipped cruelly from side to side as the ship was flung about, hull shrieking. Deep inside the belly of the craft pipes burst open, vomiting angry steam and gas. The glass in the forward windscreen made an ominous pinking sound as the fuselage twisted with the force of the after-blast swallowing the ship. Angel glanced at the shield readout –
twenty percent
. Dear Lady that was a big hit. One more of those and she was toast. She looked out of the side window to see the ‘Lance looming up again, close on her port side.

Kram was nowhere in sight. She looked at the console. Her heart sank. His ship’s wireframe was deconstructing in front of her eyes, replaced by a series of radiation and heat signature data scattered about. Before she could run a scan to check for an escape pod, a fresh volley of tracer fire demanded her attention. The Cobra’s thrusters howled like a wounded dog as she banked hard to the left, causing bullets to chip across her tail rather than ripping through the belly of her hull.

Shields were eighteen percent. She opened up a proximity channel.

‘This is Alliance trade vessel
Hope Falls
; attacking ship hold your fire. I am lowering my shields, you can have my cargo.’

She punched a few buttons on the keyboard and dragged the emergency autopilot control into the navigation bin on the dash. The shipped banked straight away as the computer took over the helm, flattening out its flight path and decelerating to a safe speed for emergency measures to be deployed. An SOS beacon started flashing on the dash letting ships in the vicinity know she was standing down, surrendering. Any more gun play would mean a reputation hit for her attackers - this was where the madness ended.

At least, that’s the way it usually went.

Sporadic chain gun fire chattered from behind her, plinking across the hull. With the shields lowered one bullet actually chipped a hairline fracture in the windscreen. It started spreading immediately.

‘What the—’

Angel grabbed her EVA helmet and slapped the comms panel again to make sure the channel was open. ‘Stand down. I SAID STAND DOWN! I’ve lowered my shields. I surrender. You can have the damn gold. It’s not worth my life.’

She watched, breathing hard as her assailants banked in a lazy arc and then levelled up to face her across a few clicks of cold space. Now the frantic pace of battle had calmed she could read the decal on the nose of the ‘Lance. Two broken red rings around a yellow disc with a section cut out - like that Pacman character from ancient earth computer gaming. The ship’s name was ‘Majogu’s Mutt’.

The comms link crackled as they patched into the channel.

‘You have thirty seconds to get your arse into a pod and get clear. I have a new dumbfire missile I’ve been itching to try out and your ship looks just about dumb enough for target practise.’

The voice sounded amused and there were goading cheers in the background.

‘Hey! Wait! I am standing down!’

‘Twenty nine … twnty eight … twnty seven …’

‘Piss!’

Angel hauled herself out of the command chair and propelled herself towards the escape pod hatch. A quick twist and it was open, the pod already powered up.

‘What about me?’

It was DORIS. Angel had all but forgotten about the bot.

‘Fifteen … fourteen … thirteen …’

Angel was swinging her feet into the pod now, straightening her body so that she could slip into the narrow cylinder.

‘I’m afraid you’re on your own; only room in here for one.’

The bot was saying something else but Angel already had the hatch pulled closed and was initiating the eject sequence. The tiny chamber hissed with pressurisation.

‘Five … four … three …’

She couldn’t hear the comms channel any more but she was counting down inside her head, praying the pod would make it out in time. As it popped out into empty space her ears popped too. The temperature fell sharply and reality shrunk down to a pinpoint, the beating of her heart the only sound. Her breath came next, fogging up the EVA helmet in front of her eyes. For a moment inside that misty bubble the oppressive silence of space seemed inescapably eternal. Then suddenly the galaxy was torn apart by the screeching din of a violent siren.

Chapter 8

The Asp’s sensors identified the chunks of twisted metal drifting through space as the carcass of a Cobra. The heat signature coming off what was presumably once a thruster suggested the wreckage was only a few hours old. Katherine whistled.

‘Someone really did a number on you,’ she said, scanners picking over the debris in search of anything worth salvaging.

She tweaked the roll lever, nudging her vessel out of the path of a particularly angry-looking lump of ex-hull and whistled again as a billion tiny fragments spun like stars through the silent space around her. It was unusual to see a cargo mule blasted apart like this. Whoever was responsible would have taken a big reputation hit and would most likely be wearing a healthy bounty on their head for their trouble. Katherine flipped the HUD to long range scanners to check if the attacker was still mooching around. She quite fancied a dog-fight if they were evenly matched and a bounty would definitely come in handy. An impressive snake’s nest of dreadlocks decorated with clay beads and metal cuffs floated about her face as she stared into the black depths. It got in the way a bit in zero-g, but she was very proud of her hair, which had seen her christened with her pirate name:
Dread Katherine
. Her flight suit was dark, even before a couple of decades of oily soot from life inside the Hollows had done their work. She wore a broad, heavy studded girdle cinching it tight about her waist. Matching gun-metal cuffs around her wrists and neck and a hooked bolt through the septum of her nose completed the look. It was a look that said ‘don’t screw with me’. People generally took its advice.

The scanner probed with its electro-magnetic fingers. Nothing close – at least nothing operational – but there was another heat-sig registering not far off the scanner’s outer range. Another wreck? Hard to tell at this distance. She flipped the HUD back to short range so she could finish up here and go check it out. The radar swept around her in a lazy arc as she eased her vessel carefully through the slowly tumbling chunks and spinning fragments.

BLIP.

Uh-oh. Katherine stared at the green dot on the outer circle of the scanner as it faded away and then pulsed back to full strength when the radar arm approached again.

BLIP.

Life. Most likely the Cobra’s pilot floating through space in the claustrophobic shell of an escape pod.

BLIP.

‘Oh, piss in a zero-g bucket ...’

The pirate thought briefly about turning around and ignoring it. The wreckage of the old Cobra suggested the body inside the pod was unlikely to be worth much. Picking up floaters from a recent skirmish almost always ended up being a pain in the cargo bay. You never recovered your costs unless there was a salvage reward on offer.

BLIP.

‘
Damn IT!
’

There wasn’t much else on the scanner so she decided she might as well scoop up the pod. Maybe its occupant would have a decent environment suit to trade for safe passage? She could definitely do with a new one as hers was falling apart at the seams … and it wasn’t like the Cobra’s pilot would need a flight suit with their ship in a million pieces all about them.

Katherine twitched the controls and the Asp’s tail-end swung around as the engines pulsed, rattling her teeth through the command chair. The vibration made her nose itch so she rubbed it with her grime-stained sleeve then tapped the display panel to lock on to the escape pod. She eased a few clicks of forward propulsion out of the thrusters, using her other hand to prime the salvage scoop.

‘Come to momma,’ Katherine cooed as her ship approached the drifting metal pod, rolling gently through the vacuum of space like a human-sized flask. She cut the thrusters as she drew alongside it, peering in through the vis-panel to catch a glimpse of her prize.

Inside she could see someone with arms clamped about their head as if in pain. She switched the scanner to biognosis.  Everything seemed in order; occupant undamaged, vital signs strong and the pod’s environmental readings were all normal. The body was slight, probably a women then. At that moment she looked up, hands clamped over her ears as her eyes met Katherine’s across the short expanse of nothing separating them.

‘Help me,’ she screamed silently through the vis-panel, clearly in agony.

‘Pretty,’ Katherine said as she got to work on the controls again, manoeuvring her salvage scoop into position. The anguished face staring up at her was both vulnerable and strong, the rough and practical shaved head adding to the illusion of tough fragility by the delicate bone structure it left exposed.

‘Maybe this will be a worthwhile salvage after all.’

* * *

As Katherine approached the large metal cylinder now clamped in her salvage rack she could hear a high whining sound, modulating in pitch from annoying to even more annoying as what would appear to be a siren blared inside the capsule. She pulled herself hand-over-hand along the grab rail lining the tunnels of her ship then planted her feet either side of the pod’s hatch before flipping a switch on her mag-boots to activate them. Her feet stuck to the metal surface of the capsule creating the illusion of gravity so she could reach down to turn the release valve. The metal tube hissed as the pressure inside equalised with the cargo bay. The siren grew louder.

When the hatch was fully unlocked Katherine hauled it open and the capsule’s passenger thrust her right arm up through the hole as if trying to get away from it. The arm screamed with the modulating tones of the siren and Katherine tripped the magnetic switch on her boots to off, tumbling backwards away from the offensive noise.  Next the shaved head with the delicate bone structure followed the arm out of the hatch and screamed at her.

‘Towel!’

‘What?’

‘A wet towel. To wrap around it!’

By “it” she clearly meant the thing on her wrist, which was the source of the racket. Katherine cast about for something to muffle it. No towels but she did use the vent pipes in here to dry her laundry, what little she did while she was at space, and there were some long socks and a bra tied to the thermal vent. Katherine launched herself off the grab rail across the room and pulled them off the piping. Angel had floated over too and stuck her arm out towards Katherine, who proceeded to wrap the damp socks around the blaring wrist clamp before tying them in place with the bra. The two of them tumbled slowly as one through the null-gravity as she worked.

Angel raised her eyebrows as the bra was tied on. Katherine had the decency to blush a little as the sound of the siren dulled slightly under the layers of clothing.

‘Not everyone carries a towel around with them,’
she shouted over the top of the still piercing sound of the siren.
‘How do we make that stop?’

‘My bot! Did you see it on the scanner?’

Katherine shook her head.

‘Proximity alarm. We need to be within fifty metres!’

‘Sit tight, I’ll take a look.’

Angel nodded and shoved her bundled up wrist between her thighs to deaden the blare a little more.

‘Please hurry. My brain is about to explode.’

Katherine had a moment to feel envious of the screaming wrist band, clamped as it was between those strong-looking thighs, all wrapped up in a damp bra. She smiled wickedly at the thought before pulling herself back into the ship, twisting the airlock tight behind her, leaving Angel alone with the din of the siren.

* * *

Just when Angel thought she could stand it no more the alarm suddenly stopped, leaving in its wake an equally deafening silence ringing with tinnitus bells. The airlock opened and the girl with the dreadlocks came back in. Her skin was pale, like most people of western Earth heritage who spent their life at space, but smeared with grey streaks of oil and grime – again another sign of a solitary pilot’s life in a floating tin can in constant need of repair.

‘Better?’

Angel felt vaguely uncomfortable under the girl’s scowling scrutiny.

‘Yes, much better. Thanks.’

‘How long have you been like that?’