[01] Elite: Wanted (26 page)

‘My name is Ziva Eschel,’ she said to the empty air. ‘I’ve murdered a man and this is my confession.’ Murder without cause. Executing a prisoner. There wasn’t any way to paint that except that she’d crossed the line at last. The shocking part was how easy it had been. How she hadn’t even hesitated.

She paced the empty landscape around the retreat. Everything was cheap. Old plastic that had started to go brittle with age and no one to care for it but the drones. Even the aerojets in the landing field were drones. Drones to service the drones that looked after the drones that looked after the now-and-then people who came here.

Drones. She was looking at her life.

Aisha and Odar had chosen this place because of how abandoned it was. Perhaps they thought no one would find them. Was that what she’d been doing for the last twenty years?

Ziva closed her eyes and saw Newman again, saw his head jerk back as she shot him. There was no getting away from that.

A police aerojet was on its way. The trauma drones had reported back. They had Aisha and were flying to wherever was the nearest outpost of civilisation. The drones had let Enaya fly with her. Family. Ziva wasn’t family and so she’d been left behind. En didn’t want her anyway.
You did this. You brought this down on us.

Yes, Ziva thought. It was her fault. She
had
brought this down on them, simply because of what she was. She’d turn herself in, stand up and be judged for what she’d done and when they let her out of prison, she’d spend the rest of her life hunting Veils.

Probably a very short life, then.
She deleted the recording she’d been making and started again. ‘My name is Ziva Eschel …’

A tone rang in her ear. The
Dragon Queen
, back in low orbit over Arcas.

‘Did you follow them? Where did they go?’

‘They left Arcturus. Their jump trails indicate their destination was Beta Hydri.’

The Black Mausoleum. ‘And then?’

‘Captain, standing orders dictate—’

‘Yes, yes.’ Never to jump without her. Those were her instructions and of course the
Dragon Queen
obeyed because the
Dragon Queen
, beneath her persona, was nothing more than a complex interaction of linear expert systems that had no choice. The immutable rules of algorithms. The
Dragon Queen
would have let Aisha die because it wouldn’t have seen any other way. The Veil would have known his threats were pointless and so would never have made them. Humans, on the other hand, were fallible.

‘I have picked up a k-cast for you from the Sly-Spy in Whit’s Station. The spoofing has been removed.’

Khanguire, gloating? Whatever this was, Khanguire wanted her to hear.

Can you hear me?
The k-cast was audio only, but there was no mistaking Khanguire’s voice.

‘Yes, you fucking—’ But the k-cast was going on.

Yes.
A male voice. So this was a recording then.

The Cave, Jackson’s Lighthouse.

When?
Christ, was that the Veil? It just might have been.

As soon as you can get there.

A pause. Then a different voice.
He must know it’s a trap.

I think he really wants his cargo.
Khanguire again. The next words she spoke seemed directed to the bot, to Ziva.
What about you?

The k-cast ended as the Sly-Spy duly reported its own destruction and died. For few seconds Ziva simply stood where she was, too dazed to think.

‘When did that come in?’

‘Twelve minutes ago.’ Not that there was any way to tell how long the k-cast arrays had spent trying to find the
Dragon Queen
to pass it on. Not long, though. She tried to do the maths in her head. Khanguire must have had that conversation before the Veil’s ship had jumped to Beta Hydri but he’d gone there anyway.

Which gave her a chance.

Sometimes a decision came and made itself without being asked. In Ziva’s experience, those ones were often the best. ‘Come and get me,’ she snapped. ‘Run the male voice against the man who shot Aisha. Dump every bit of weight we don’t absolutely need. Prime the anti-matter injectors for the core.’ She could already see the bright spark of a fusion plume in the sky far overhead. ‘Get a jump ready to take us out to Jackson’s Lighthouse. Overcharge the shield generators and shut down everything electronic that isn’t military-hardened.’ Not that it would help much, but it would help some. ‘When you’ve picked me up and we’re clear of Arcas, set two attack drones for survey and telemetry, three for decoys and weapons-ready everything else.’

The
Dragon Queen
acknowledged. After a little pause it asked: ‘Do you wish to arm the energy bomb?’

Ziva watched the spark as it grew brighter. ‘Yes. I
especially
want you to arm the E-bomb.’

The Cave. She almost laughed. Of all the fucked-up places in the galaxy, Khanguire had gone for the Cave.

So here was the trick. You jumped into Jackson’s Lighthouse and hopped as close as you could to the dark side of the Cave, wherever it was in its erratic orbit around the Lighthouse. After that, you came in fast and you didn’t hang around because the moment you appeared anywhere near the Cave, your ship got savaged by bursts of x-rays and gamma-rays strong enough to flay your shield; and once
that
went down then the strength of the Lighthouse’s magnetic field began to destabilise the core containment of your reactor. The radiation was bad enough with the Cave acting as a shield. In the direct beam of the pulsar it was much, much worse.

It was a rite of passage; something that young punk pilots did to prove themselves. You got it wrong and it was a race to see whether or not you got fried by gamma radiation when your shields failed or whether your core destabilised and destroyed your ship. You rarely had the time to jump back out of the Lighthouse before the harsh environment degraded your systems. It was a dumb thing to do and a dumb place to go. Ravindra had done it twice. Once because she was young and stupid and the second time had been to hide some very hot cargo for another crew to pick up. The second time had badly damaged the
Song of Stone
. The first time had nearly killed her.

She came out of jump space and everything went to shit. The
Song
had already shut down every non-hardened system and even then several others immediately failed. Warning data appeared in her lenses as shields and core containment started to degrade. Whenever the pulsar’s beam swept anywhere close the scanners were all but useless, due to interference on nearly all spectrums.

‘Sorry, baby,’ Ravindra whispered to the ship. She was looking around hoping to physically see the Cave, very much aware of the distant glow of the pulsar. So far away it seemed an innocuous, even pretty, white light. What got her each time was that the pulsar was so
small
, a pinprick with two faint bluish lines stretching out from it marking the x-ray beams that lanced out from the magnetic poles. That and how fast they spun through space. ‘What’ve you got for me?’ she asked Orla.

‘Multiple screens of static and interference,’ Orla muttered.

‘That’s not very helpful,’ Ravindra said. She didn’t like feeling helpless, just waiting to be cooked by hard radiation. They had downloaded the orbital data on the Cave from the observation station two light-minutes away, whose only job was to observe the pulsar. The station had been set up in 2673 after the stellar collision of the two dwarf stars in the binary system had created the pulsar. Some time later a passing nickel-iron planetoid had been pulled into an erratic orbit around the Lighthouse; and since it was constantly being dragged closer by the pulsar’s magnetic field, the whereabouts of the Cave were only ever a very educated guess. So when you made the last micro-jump in, you needed to jump in close to have a chance of finding the Cave in the first place, but you also had to make sure you didn’t get caught in the pulsar’s beams. They would rip shields apart faster than the sustained fire of a Majestic-class Interdictor. They called it being in the eye of the Lighthouse. She had waited for two days, left Jenny to the tender mercies of the Judas Syndicate for two days, just so she could be sure that the Cave would be in the path of the pulsar’s beam.

‘Okay, I have a gravitational anomaly that loosely fits the shape and size of the Cave,’ Orla said.

‘Loosely?’ Ravindra asked. The coordinates appeared in her lenses. It was roughly five thousand kilometres away, starward. Ravindra watched the spinning beam of the Lighthouse. The trick was to make the dash from well outside the worst of the danger zone into the shadow of the Cave quickly enough to keep your shields intact while keeping as far as possible from the very heart of the spinning beam.

‘What do you want from me?’ Orla asked, an unfamiliar hint of desperation in her voice. ‘And remember when you accelerate that I’m still hu—’

Orla was thrown back into the gel padding of her acceleration couch by seven gravities of thrust. Ravindra looked at the beams. It wasn’t enough. She had sunk into the gel of the couch. She could feel the force against her body, pulling at her skin and battering her musculature. Her flight suit was doing the best it could to compensate by injecting gel into pads over certain areas of her body, like the joints. She was looking at the countdown. They weren’t going to get there in time. Ten gravities. Orla had passed out. Ravindra could see a black dot ahead of her, more an absence of stars than anything else, though she wondered how much was wishful thinking. Her vision was red with warnings from the ship as system after system went down. She was convinced that the distant light was brighter now. Modified genes or not, she couldn’t keep this up. Yes, she’d pulled a turn at fifteen gravities once, but that had been for a brief moment in a deadly combat. Not sustained like this. She looked at the distance remaining to what she hoped was the Cave, compared it to the time before the next burst ratio. She didn’t like what she saw. Twelve gravities. She would have screamed if she could. She would have been worried about breaking something in Orla’s body if she’d been able to think about anything other than pain and keeping the
Song
on track.

Through blurred vision she was sure that she could see the dark shape of the Cave, seeming to hang still in the blackness. She shifted course incrementally, putting yet more stress on her skeleton, putting the distant but brightening light of the Lighthouse into eclipse.

At the last moment she reversed thrust. Her body screamed at her. She struggled to retain consciousness. She had a moment to take in the scarred and pitted canyons of the surface of the current dark side of the Cave before everything was thrown into shadow and light filled her vision all around the Cave. She had a moment to think. She saw a cave big enough to fit the
Song
in and she angled the ship towards it. Her lenses were full of red warning icons.

Then she passed out.

She awoke when the acceleration couch had administered a stimulant. The Cave was riddled with a network of huge caverns and tunnel networks formed as massive induced eddy currents from the pulsar heated it up and now and then vaporised parts of it. The same forces drew the planetoid closer with every orbit and would eventually destroy it, but not for a few hundred years.

They were in the eye of the Lighthouse. Light shone through the induction-gouged holes in the rock from the far side of the planetoid. The ship had automatically moved itself to a dark part of the massive cavern. Shielding itself from the worst of the Lighthouse’s radiation excesses.

From head to toe, Ravindra ached. She accepted an injection of painkillers from the acceleration couch and then another stim to avoid the loss in coordination that the powerful painkillers would cause. She glanced over at Orla. The other woman was unconscious, but nothing looked broken. The medical telemetry she was receiving from Orla’s couch seemed to confirm that. She ordered the couch to inject the other woman with a painkiller and a stim as well.

They were in Jackson’s Hole, the largest and most prominent of the caverns on the current dark side of the Cave. It was where she intended to meet the Syndicate. Prep would involve checking the area, looking for an escape route. Normally they’d seed the space with missiles, but here they wouldn’t even be able to reliably send the signal to engage them; their own automated guidance systems weren’t hardened to the same level as a ship and they wouldn’t be able to track targets. Even dumb proximity-fused warheads were going to be unreliable. Loitering inside the Cave gave some shelter from the pulsar’s magnetic field, but it was still strong enough to wreak havoc on anything without a shield. Missiles became expensive aim-by-sight rockets. Smart-mines became obstacles to everyone. They only real advantages they had were Ravindra’s modified genes and the fact that they would, hopefully, have time to update the last map of the inside of the planetoid.

She would pilot and work the various beam weapons. Orla would watch the scanners – for all the good they would do in this environment – run the missile batteries,
and
manage engineering, unless they were able to get Jenny back.

They waited and waited. They had mapped as much as they could using optical systems and an expert system to interpret the data and turn it into a three-dimensional representation of the inside of the Cave. Even then they had to deal with a near-constant degradation of the
Song
’s systems. Ravindra felt like the ship was rotting about her.

They had situated the ship less than three kilometres from the mouth of Jackson’s Hole, and the position gave them visuals on the entrance to the mouth of the cave via the transparent hull that surrounded the bridge. They trained the long-range optical systems on the cave mouth as well, but the images were grainy and intermittent.

They were in about the third most obvious hiding place. If the Anaconda and the corvette came in hot, wanting to take out the
Song
and then take their chances using fuel scoops to sift through the wreckage for the cargo, then the
Song
’s hiding place might give them a few more seconds of life.