[01] Elite: Wanted (15 page)

‘I didn’t say …’

‘Fuck you, Ziv. Just … just fuck you.’ The link broke.

It took another hour for the avatars to come back and compile a file. It wasn’t much. Ravindra Khanguire. Captain of the
Song of Stone
. Born and bred an Imperial slave pilot and probably involved in a genetic manipulation program from conception. Convicted in her absence for a murder in the Empire but by then she’d escaped – for a slave, almost as serious a crime, and both would carry a bounty. No records in the Federation until she was taken in for piracy at the age of eighteen. Did some time in Warren Prison, came out almost two decades ago – and had come out pregnant too, though Ziva couldn’t find any record of any offspring. Nothing more until she showed up as a registered trader in the Pilot’s Federation, not that she ever did all that much trading. The
Song of Stone
itself was an Imperial cutter. There weren’t any official records of modification but you didn’t need to be an expert to look over the bulges in the hull and know it had undergone some extensive rework. There were hardpoints on the outside for a fistful of drones and a turret where most cutters had never had a turret. It was impossible to tell what the
Song of Stone
was packing beneath its weapon nacelles. The whole shape of the back of the ship had been changed at some point and that had to mean a serious engine modification.

Getting much on the crew was like getting blood out of a stone. The avatars dug out the former captain, Marvin Dane, and that was about it. The
Song
had done a couple of things it shouldn’t. Dane had attracted a bounty. Not a big one, but someone had gone after him for it, caught him in Tiolce and taken him when he was away from the
Song.
He’d gone down fighting. The only other name she could get was Jonty Davis. He had a partner, a Gurkha by the looks of him. Jonty and Dane and Khanguire had all been in Warren Prison together, so there was the connection. Dane had made a crew in there and they’d stayed together after he’d died. At a guess, from the prison records, that made the Gurkha Harnack Sahota.

‘
OK, Khanguire, but how do you make your money?
’ A fast, armed cutter was perfect for a pirate. There were records of the
Song of Stone
moving about Federation and Alliance space and even flitting into the fringes of the Empire, but there was no way to tell what the
Song
had carried and traded. The Federation and the Empire would both have records; but the Federation wouldn’t have shared them even back when Ziva had worn a uniform; and as for the Empire, well, that would all depend on getting the right Senator interested in being helpful. The Alliance was even worse, a case of going to each world one by one and trying to get access. There was something off about the
Song of Stone
’s movement, though. It wasn’t the pattern of a working ship. There was no back-and-forth of a steady trading circuit and she frequently loitered in the same system for days or even weeks, or else vanished into empty space for a while. Not the sort of thing a regular trader could afford to do. The
Song
moved as though she were a ship of leisure, a ship not tied to any needs.

The
Song
moved, Ziva suddenly realised, like a bounty hunter. There was nowhere it kept going back to, no apparent home, but it did keep vanishing from the records within a jump or two of Reddot.

Whit’s Station.

‘
And you don’t hunt bounties, do you?
’ Ziva checked with the Pilots’ Federation on the off-chance but Ravindra Khanguire had never claimed a single bounty. Didn’t mean she hadn’t done it under another name, of course.

Not one record of the
Song of Stone
being involved in any sort of attack after she changed hands. Not even a hint of it. Every official record came back as unremarkable. A clean bill of health. Nothing of note. Nothing except the time Khanguire had done on Ross 128 and what Newman had told her with his brain hazed by Truth.

Something caught her eye. Three years back Khanguire had been in Barnard’s Star and vanished for a month. Ziva cross-checked against the public record to be sure, but yes – a few days after the
Song of Stone
vanished, the infamous
White Star
incident had kicked off. The battlecruiser
White Star
had been en route from Earth, heading out towards the Alliance with a collection of old-Earth artefacts and pieces of art. A goodwill voyage to the Alliance worlds after which the
White Star
had continued on into the Empire, which was how everyone remembered it now. But Ziva remembered it for the débâcle at the start of the journey, the fuck-up around the convoy of freighters that tailed around with it.

A Federation battlecruiser on a well-publicised route from the centre of Federation space to the rim and beyond had inevitably attracted dozens of free traders hoping to travel under its protection. And of course they had, and it was only when the
White Star
was almost at the edge of Federation space that it discovered three Pythons had gone missing during the course of the journey. The convoy travelled fifty light years before the first of the missing ships eventually turned up without the first idea what had happened. The others, eventually, had had the same story: they’d jumped, following the
White Star’
s route, and arrived straight into a storm of jamming and under attack from what appeared to be an Imperial privateer. The
White Star
confirmed the events, reporting that on three occasions a Python travelling as part of the convoy had been attacked, that it had sent Condors to assist and that the attackers had immediately withdrawn and jumped away – leaving the Python apparently unharmed to continue on its way. The Pythons had responded appropriately to hails and the Condors had turned back each time.

Except what had
actually
happened was that some enterprising privateer had built collapsible Python shells around the chassis of some long range reconnaissance drones and filled them with enough response circuitry to give all the right sort of answers to basic hails. The
real
Pythons had been boarded and jumped before the Condors could see through the jamming and the pirates had left one of their decoys behind. Every time the
White Star
was due to jump, the decoys would attach themselves to one of the innocent Pythons and then detach at the other end and that way the numbers had looked right and no one had twigged that anything was wrong. Doing it once was audacious enough but getting away with the same trick three times was a scandal. Whoever was behind it had had the sense to stop and quit while they were ahead, too, which was more than most pirates managed.

The Federation had quietly brushed the whole affair under the carpet. No one ever knew who had jumped those Pythons except that it had been an Imperial cutter; but they called her the
Red Hourglass
for the red pirate timer the cutter had broadcast in the seconds before each attack.

The
Red Hourglass
.
That
rang a bell. Ziva checked the logs from the
Pandora
’s data recorder and there it was: the same thing.

She looked further. And yes, now and then, whenever the
Song of Stone
dropped off the radar for a while, somewhere in the surrounding systems a ship vanished, taken out by the
Red Hourglass
, the Imperial privateer. Now that Ziva knew what she was looking for, the pattern was obvious. It was clinical and clean. Ships ambushed right on the edge of a system straight after jumping in. By the time any Vipers got there, the jump trail was cold. The cargoes vanished, the crews were left drifting in escape pods and the
Red Hourglass
was a ghost. No one had a clue who she really was.

Khanguire had been doing this for years. And no one had caught on.

‘Captain, refuelling is complete. I have a course prepared to take us to Stopover.’

Darkwater. Hand over Newman and then to Delta Pavonis and Enaya and home. Ziva shook her head. ‘Take us to Reddot, to Whit’s Station.’

When she checked, the bounty on the
Red Hourglass
was up at a hundred thousand credits.

‘How did you meet Khanguire?’ Ziva asked. ‘I don’t mean who set up the hit and brought her in on it, I mean how did you first actually meet? Did you go to her ship? Did she come to yours?’ She had Newman awake for the jump and now the
Dragon Queen
was making its way warily in from the Kuiper belt. There wasn’t much point in pretending she was something she wasn’t, not in a place like this. Commercial ships didn’t come to Reddot. Pirates did. Pirates and bounty hunters with more balls than brains. She was coming in quiet, hoping to get close enough to Whit’s Station without being seen to set her attack-ware against their data cores, and maybe see whether Newman was right and Khanguire was here. She doubted either part of that plan was actually going to work which left plan B – pay Harlan Whit’s protection money, dock with the station and brazen it out. Doubtless there would be a few people less than pleased to see her.

Newman sneered at her. ‘What do you care?’ She hadn’t bothered with more Truth this time, just had him locked up in his makeshift cell and piped him into the cockpit via a screen.

‘I don’t. I’m curious. She seems too meticulous.’

‘What the fuck’s that supposed to mean?’

‘It means I’m curious to know how you met.’

But if he answered, Ziva didn’t hear. The
Dragon Queen
cut him off and all her displays snapped to tactical. Two Sidewinders and what looked like a heavily modified Asp II had micro-jumped to less than a thousand clicks away. They hadn’t actually opened fire but it was about as clear as a fuck-off could be without dressing it in a nice anti-matter wrapping. Whit’s Station wasn’t the Black Mausoleum. A bounty hunter coming to Reddot in the open was as good as asking to be used for target practice.

Ziva sighed. So much for silent running.

‘Alice, Merkel’s groupie, where does she live?’ Ravindra demanded. Harlan narrowed his eyes but let her speaking to him like that pass.

‘Why?’ Harlan asked.

‘Ji’s there, I need to get him,’ she told the station boss evenly.

Harlan regarded her for a minute, trying to make up his mind about something. ‘Merkel and his crew’s paid up,’ he said. ‘And the station’s had enough excitement for one day.’

Ravindra took a step towards him. Harlan didn’t move. He was standing there, in the shadow of the
Song of Stone
, both hands on his cane, looking at her impassively. A few of his more observant security people had noticed the exchange.

‘He’s my son, Harlan. I need to go and get him, make sure that he’s okay. You know me; I don’t want trouble unless it’s absolutely necessary. Now you can tell me, or I’ll go and find out myself.’

‘Jonas, Harrelson, go with her. Make sure everyone plays nicely with everyone else,’ he said, turning to two of his security detail. Harrelson was a massively built female who looked as if she had only just managed to squeeze into her suit, and Jonas was a thin, sly-looking man who moved with nervous energy and had mean eyes. Harrelson nodded. Jonas turned and headed for the door. Ravindra watched them leaving and then turned and looked at Harlan.

‘They’ll take you there,’ he told her. Ravindra looked as if she was about to argue but thought the better of it.

The two Sidewinders and the Asp were ignoring Ziva’s hails, but they couldn’t hide their transponders. She had nothing on the Sidewinders – the
Lemming’s Wrath
and the
Jon Wood
– but the Asp was the
Nephilim
and she had that as part of the Harris Gang, wanted in the Alliance for three hit and run attacks. Which probably meant the
Nephilim
was working with a corporate Federation backer, but she wasn’t about to say no to an extra two thousand credits for taking it down.

She sent an avatar across. ‘Whoever you are in there, I’m not strictly working. So wave and say hi and keep your distance and we’ll all get on fine.’ While she was talking she brought the power plant up to maximum and engaged the tracking systems on the four missiles currently latched to her external hardpoints. She put them all on the Asp and had them go active in case that helped make her point.

The Asp kept coming straight at her. The two Sidewinders split away. Slugging it out at short range made it all about who had the best shields and armour and not much else, and on that basis the Asp, as modified as it was, was probably going to shave a win. Which meant breaking off and letting them chase her away or calling his bluff and shooting.

Ravindra hammered on the apartment door. It was one of the inner apartments, no porthole looking out over Motherlode. The corridor outside stank of urine, the floor was covered in refuse and the walls were covered in graffiti. The graffiti often contained the artist’s opinion of the people who lived in the corridor. The words on Alice’s door, for example, said: ‘Try-too-hard whore’. Ravindra almost smiled. She reached up to hammer on the door again. Jonas grabbed her wrist.

‘Take it easy,’ he told her quietly. His voice was a low rasp. It sounded affected.

‘Take your hands off me right now,’ Ravindra told him. He held on just long enough to make a point but not long enough to get beaten.

The door slid open.

‘Do you know who I …’ the blonde haired woman who answered the door tailed off when she saw them. She was wearing only a t-shirt and her underwear. Blonde hair, blue eyes and well-endowed, she had a shop-bought prettiness to her, was an unimaginative wet dream. She also had a large auto-pistol held loosely in her right hand. It looked too heavy for her to use properly.

‘I half expected a cutlass,’ Ravindra muttered and pushed past her.

‘Hey!’ Alice shouted and started to bring the pistol up. One of Harrelson’s massive hands enveloped the heavy pistol and took it.

The Asp had a bounty on him. So there was that. But it was more that she’d be fucked forever in Reddot if she let the Harris Gang chase her off.