[01] Elite: Wanted (4 page)

She stopped herself. Took a deep breath. It rankled, that was all, being consistently beaten by a dead man. This had been Jameson’s last jump. It was a mystery what had happened to him after he’d been ambushed by the two glory-hunters in their shiny new Fer-de-Lances. They hadn’t taken him, that much was sure, but no one knew where he’d gone after that. His flight profile had shown him heading back to Lave but he’d never arrived. Bounced out of hyperspace by Thargoids, some said. Caught in a wormhole, said others. Just had enough and vanished, perhaps. Ziva thought the last was the most likely. He’d had nothing left to prove, credits coming out of his ears, and it must have grated after a while, idiots picking fights everywhere he went just because of who he was.

Speaking of which …

She took another deep breath. She was putting it off, that’s what it was. That was why she’d had so much sim-time over the last two days. Putting off the choice she had to make. Somewhere within a few dozen light-years was the pirate she only knew as Newman. Newman had a nice fat bounty on his head, nice enough to get the
Dragon Queen
through the service she was due. Then Ziva could see a man in Darkes Hollow about getting the storage capacitors on the ship’s twin x-ray lasers tweaked up; and
then
she’d finally be able to make full use of the black market mil-spec power circuits the two weird women had traded her in Eta Cassiopeiae a few months back. It had been one of those don’t ask, don’t tell back door transactions, although given the presence of the Federation Navy training facilities, it was more a case of which ship they’d been stolen from rather than whether they’d been stolen at all. She’d known that and she’d still bought them.

Even after all that, Newman’s bounty would still leave enough over for a few months down-time to sort her shit out with Enaya.

The thought made her check her k-cast messages again. Micro-jumping played havoc with every piece of communications equipment she’d ever met but she hadn’t missed much this time. Another very polite message from Radall Martic Holdings raising their offer of corporate sponsorship to two hundred credits per solar day plus all fuel, service and repair bills, inviting her to come and discuss freelancing for their
Federation’s Most Dangerous
show.
Federation’s Most Dangerous
was syndicated across pushing a hundred worlds now and Radall Martic had half a dozen bounty hunters commissioned to it, some of the best. From what Ziva had picked up, the show paid a lot better than the bounties they pulled in for it. She even watched it sometimes – checking out the competition.

The other message was from Enaya. Another one. Ziva had been tracking Newman for weeks now and his trail had gone cold. She’d been gone too long and Enaya’s messages were getting irritable.
I miss you, Ziv. When are you coming back? I need to talk to you about Aisha. You still haven’t caught Newman? How much longer?
En kept trying to call her when she was jumping from system to system or micro-jumping across them and Ziva hadn’t replied for more than a day. Which made her a shit and a coward and she knew it, but what was there to say?
I miss you too, but I lost him and I don’t know how much longer I’m going to be.
Somehow that didn’t seem enough. En would smile as she always did. She’d talk a lot about her daughter Aisha and try to hide the disappointment and the anger, but she wouldn’t manage to keep it at bay, not quite. The latest message was more of the same, along with a tirade about how Aisha’s on-off junkie boyfriend was back, the galaxy’s biggest shithead. It had started a year ago and ended with En threatening to call the police on him if he ever came near Aisha again. Six months later he turned up on the doorstep when Enaya was out. He’d told Aisha that he’d made a mistake, that he was clean, that she was all he wanted, now and forever. He had a knack for it, for turning Aisha’s world on its head, and for about three weeks he’d been all that mattered again. But sure enough the drugs crept back. It had been Blast the first time but the second time he’d been pushing Antimatter too. Enaya had found out, she and Aisha had had a cataclysmic row and the shithead boyfriend got himself banned. Ziva had taken Aisha up to orbit in the
Dragon Queen
afterwards, trying to take her mind somewhere else, but she still remembered Aisha’s face. Aisha had pretended it was all okay but it very obviously wasn’t. She was like her mother that way.

Odar. That was his name. Odar Something. Odar Shit-for-brains, and she knew from one extremely unfortunate experience that when you stripped him down to bare skin there really wasn’t very much there.
I’ll track him down if you want me to
, she’d said to En afterwards.
I’ll hunt him and I’ll find him and see where he goes and make sure he never bothers Aisha again.
En hadn’t said a word.

‘I’m picking up breaking news from the Adamantine Palace,’ murmured the
Dragon Queen
. The voice simulation Ziva had it running was a deep syrupy baritone, mellifluous and soothing in a fatherly sort of way. Enaya would have been all over her about the psychology of that voice, but Enaya had never heard it. Enaya didn’t want anything to do with the
Dragon Queen
and the life Ziva lived inside her.
I don’t want to know
, she always said.
I just wish you’d stop
.

Ziva cut the engines and let herself drift weightless. ‘They got any bounties up?’

The
Dragon Queen
brought up the list. A dozen Point of Principles, the fifty- and hundred-credit bounties put up by the Federation for parole-breakers, bail-jumpers and busted non-transit orders – the petty criminals scumming at the very bottom of the food chain, the sort of bounties that didn’t cover their own costs and didn’t get hunted without some additional reason. At the other end you had ships like the Imperial privateer the
Red Hourglass
; and right at the top, the Veils of the Judas Syndicate, the kingpins of the most secretive and insidious organised crime syndicates in human space. A quarter of a million if you brought one in but no one ever had. The Syndicate made it abundantly clear that any bounty hunters who came after them would gain their full and fatal attention. The Syndicate would do it, too, no matter how it hurt them. The Veils’ pride in fulfilling their promises matched even their murderous greed for credits.

‘Go on, then. What’s this news from the Palace?’

‘It’s breaking from the Pilot’s Federation. They’ve got a ship missing and a k-cast distress beacon. Looks like an Imperial ship down in the Stopover system.’

Ziva’s thoughts of Enaya vanished. Newman? ‘How close? One jump?’

‘One jump.’

And she was just sitting there, fuelled and ready to go right out on the edge of La Rochelle’s gravity well. ‘Anyone closer?’

The
Dragon Queen
purred. ‘No one registered.’

That was that then.

‘Take us there.’

The
Dragon Queen
turned gently, twisting on yaw and pitch thrusters before starting the stuttering series of micro-jumps out to La Rochelle’s Kuiper belt and the jump to the Stopover system. The journey wasn’t all that long but it was long enough to run the simulation one more time. As usual, Jameson beat her.

Stopover was one of those systems where lots of ships came to visit but no one ever stayed. There wasn’t much there, just a tight binary of stars whose tidal gravity had been enough to chew up any rocky inner planets long before the first amino-acids of life had evolved on Earth. There were two distant gas giants orbiting so far out that the stars were little more than bright points of light, which made them an excellent stop for skimmers fuelling up between jumps to Delta Pavonis, Epsilon Indi, Barnard’s Star, 61 Cygni, Ross 154 or Formalhaut. With so many populous systems nearby, Stopover had grown the way such systems often did; whispers among the free traders of a good place to skim that spread slowly into the corporate shipping world just a little less quickly than they had reached the pirates and freebooters and bounty hunters who took to lying in wait. After losing a dozen or so Anacondas and Pythons, the corporations got pissy enough to pay Darkwater – always and forever the Federation’s favourite private military contractor – to station a corvette in the system. And then Darkwater had done what they always did: built a station and started charging everyone who wanted to use it. To Ziva’s mind, it pretty much amounted to demanding protection money. It worked out well enough for the corporations who paid a monthly tariff, but the free traders hated it. The Pilots’ Federation had always had a thing about Darkwater. The other corporate security groups too, but Darkwater in particular had a name for being dicks.

The
Dragon Queen
got the usual ping as soon as she arrived: a twenty credit ‘voluntary charge’ for using the facilities covered under Darkwater’s protection. Ziva, who’d been flying solo for fifteen years and flew a ship armed with lasers, shields and engines all tuned to better specs than Darkwater knew how to spell, tended to tell them to fuck off; or rather, she told the
Dragon Queen
to tell them to fuck off and the
Dragon Queen
offered something more polite and waved her bounty hunter licence at them. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. Sometimes she skimmed free fuel in peace and quiet, sometimes she played hide-and-seek in the gas giant’s upper atmosphere with a wing of irritable Vipers. They had a kind of unofficial game and they’d done it enough times that they all knew the rules: if they ever got a lock on her while she skimmed, she paid. If they didn’t then they let her be the next time she came through.

‘Pay it,’ she told the
Dragon Queen
. This time was different. ‘And remind them who we are.’ Someone had stiffed a freighter under Darkwater’s nose. Took some balls to do that and Darkwater were going to be pissy as a swarm of angry wasps about it. The sort of pissy that usually came with a nice fat bounty and she wasn’t about to queer her pitch for that over a meagre twenty credits.

It didn’t take long for someone from the Darkwater station to avatar onto her bridge either, a full hologram rendering. A commander, by the flash on his shoulder. Not some flunky but one of the station’s senior officers. Could even be the watch officer. The hologram wasn’t
him
, of course – that wasn’t how Darkwater worked. No faces. Instead it was a complex algorithm that generated the illusion of a generic person. In this way, everyone from Darkwater looked roughly the same.

‘Didn’t take you long,’ said the illusion sourly.

‘I’m good at what I do,’ shrugged Ziva. ‘You got my credentials?’

‘We’ve had them for a long time, Eschel.’

Ziva watched as the illusion looked her over – not, since it was an illusion, that that meant anything.

‘You know the deal – first come, first served. The opening bounty has been set at ten thousand credits, but that’s likely to rise. First respondent gets twenty-four hours before we open it up. You’re flagged, though. You were a bit too damn quick for my liking.’

Which meant they’d lodged a query with the Pilots’ Federation indicating her possible involvement in the attack, and it would stick to her like a dark cloud until they took it away again. ‘Flagged? Fuck off!’

‘Get the scum who did this, Eschel, and we’ll clear it. Unless you’d like to come and work for us. Corporate are setting up their own show against
Federation’s Most Wanted
.’

Ziva’s eyes narrowed. The avatar was an illusion and its expression conveyed nothing, but there was something in the voice … ‘Do I know you?’

‘You’ve been through here enough times, Eschel. We all know you’re trouble.’ The illusion had hesitated, though, which as good as told her that she did. She racked her memory for anyone from Darkwater she might have pissed off. It was a long list. Then a grin spread over her face.

‘I
do
know you! You’re that Viper pilot! The one who took a pot-shot!’ That had been five years ago and she remembered what fun she’d had playing with him afterwards, sitting right on his arse for twenty solid minutes through rings and around moons and in and out of the gas giant atmosphere, keeping a lock on him no matter what he did. ‘Still sore because they made you apologise, or is it just because you know I’m the better pilot? I made it up to you.’

‘Yeah, if by that you mean you let me pay for you to get steaming drunk. You’re still flagged, Eschel.’

‘I was quick because I’m already after someone. He’s near.’ She sent Newman’s history across. ‘So how about you double your bounty and drop your flag before I shove it up your arse?’

‘How about I send a dozen Vipers to bring you in?’

‘If you think you can, Darkwater. I flew Vipers for five years before I turned private so I might feel sentimental and let you keep a few. And of course, I do have enough fuel to jump straight back to La Rochelle if I feel like it; then maybe I might flag you right back for being a clusterfuck of shit-eating butt-plugs and we can see who else turns up to take your bounty. Corporate are setting up against
Federation’s Most Wanted
? How long do you reckon it’ll be between me putting the news absolutely everywhere and a hunter sponsored by Radall Martic coming this way? Hey – maybe they might send two or three and make a Christmas Special out of it.’

The illusion hesitated again. ‘You’re bluffing, Eschel.’

Which she had been, right until he said that. She shrugged and told the
Dragon Queen
to turn about.

‘Eschel! Wait! There were two ships. What they did was beyond the pale. Fifteen thousand for each captain. Not the ships, Eschel, the people. We’re not the Pilots’ Federation here. Another thousand for each crewman you bring in.’

Ziva stopped the
Dragon Queen
. ‘Two ships? How big?’

‘One corvette or cutter size, one smaller. We don’t know.’

‘You don’t
know
? Where did they go?’

‘We don’t know that either.’

Ziva burst out laughing. ‘You didn’t get a trace on their trail after they jumped out? I hope whoever got bounced out there didn’t pay their twenty credits or you’re going to be looking at a very embarrassing compensation suit.’