[01] Elite: Wanted (5 page)

The algorithm behind the illusion managed to look annoyed and abashed at the same time. It sighed. ‘The victim was an Orca, the
Pandora
. She stayed right at the edge of the system. Barely on our sensors at all. I’d say she was there for a rendezvous and got bounced before anyone else showed. They weren’t waiting for her, but they jumped in seconds later and right at the same place. They threw up jamming everywhere and all we have is what the Orca got off before they shut her down. After that we don’t know. So: two ships, one corvette or cutter size, one smaller, no identity, no distinguishing marks except they knew what they were doing. They did whatever they did and then blew everything to pieces. We saw the explosion from here. By the time we got Vipers that far out, the hyperspace trails were cold. I’d say they knew perfectly well we couldn’t get out there fast enough. Eschel, there weren’t any survivors. They executed the crew who stayed on board and E-bombed the escape pods. All of them. Whoever did it was one cold bastard.’

‘They E-bombed the escape pods? Christ!’

‘Quite.’

‘Could be my guy. He’s clinical but he’s a got a big streak of psycho going with it.’

‘I don’t care whether he’s your guy or not, they’re both your guys now. Fifteen thousand for each of them, Eschel, if you can bring them in and keep it quiet. They pissed in our yard.’

Over the next few hours, Ziva angled the
Dragon Queen
in to the nearer of the two gas giants. The Fer-de-Lance skimmed hydrogen until the ship’s tanks were full. The autopilot could manage that perfectly well all on its own, so she reviewed what Darkwater had on the
Pandora
and her demise. It wasn’t much more than the avatar had said. Private yacht, not a trader, so they had no idea what she might have been carrying. By the time the Vipers started recovering what fragments were left of the Orca, the
Dragon Queen
was already micro-jumping to the edge of the system. As expected, the Orca’s black box told her precisely nothing: two ships had come in out of hyperspace running the sort of generic transponders that could have been picked up anywhere, retro-engineered with black code that anyone with even the most basic connections could have fixed up. What was much more interesting was the precision of the attack. They’d hit the Orca hard and fast but only with enough to take down its shields. Then precision hits to the drives and the engines and the defensive lasers. They’d been
careful
, as though trying not to do more damage than they absolutely had to. There weren’t that many crews who’d take down a freighter in a Darkwater system and whoever had done it here had known exactly what they were doing and how to do it.

She listened to the flight recording. ‘Make this easy on us and nobody will get hurt. Any resistance will result in your deaths and we get what we want anyway.’ The voice had the whining accent of someone from Imperial Achenar, not that that meant anything. And then they’d boarded and rounded everyone up and done whatever they’d come to do and then, before they left, they’d started beating the crew and the passengers, wilfully shooting them. It was hard to say from the audio and there was almost no surviving video, but the cries and pleading for mercy were more than enough, gunshots, more screams, swearing and shouting as though the boarders had cut down their prisoners, torturing and killing for the fun of it.

And then it stopped suddenly and they shot everyone; only they didn’t quite, because after they left, three escape pods had launched. And then the E-bomb.

Ziva listened to the recordings again and shuddered. The killings had a brutality and a touch of madness to them that could have been Newman but the precision of the attack … that had a touch of someone else. Newman had a partner now? Or maybe she was chasing up a blind alley and it wasn’t him at all.
Who are you?

The
Dragon Queen
jumped and jumped again, hopping through the relative civilisation of Barnard’s Star to Pethes. Pethes was one of those places where the general values of the Federation had kicked off and spiralled in the sort of unfortunate way that made the Empire point and laugh – a fractured almost-anarchy of vaguely hostile corporate enclaves and faux-democracies where nothing much had any value and credits were everything. The sort of place where no one asked too many questions about the laser scorches on your ship’s hull and why you needed your ablative shields replaced or where that cargo of exotic exploding pigs had come from. But whoever had taken out the
Pandora
wouldn’t come openly to Pethes. Darkwater would have their spies here; in fact, in a world like this, they probably had their own enclave where they quietly did all the sorts of things that more civilised systems wouldn’t tolerate. But Newman had come here on and off in the last few months. It had been Ziva’s next port of call anyway, looking to pick up his trail.

For some reason there was a Federation Farragut battlecruiser in system today. Ziva micro-jumped in and took manual control of the
Dragon Queen
, skimming the cruiser’s length carefully just outside its exclusion range. It was a thing of function rather than beauty, she thought, but you didn’t get to see one up close all that often. They were very roughly the shape of an arrowhead, if you could say that about something that was two klicks from nose to tail. She took it from the bows, rolling and weaving and jinking along the length of it but veering away from the cowled engines hidden away behind their massive flat slabs of metal. You didn’t get too close to something that could light up a fusion torch a hundred kilometres long whenever it felt like it. As she flew loops around the cruiser, she scanned the news feeds but couldn’t gauge much of a reason for it being there. Maybe it had come to put the shits up the various local corporate dictators and presidents-for-life. The Federation did that sort of thing now and then to remind systems like Pethes that there was a wider galaxy out there and that they did, sometimes, pay attention.

Newman wouldn’t be here. Not with that cruiser. No matter.

Buzzing a Farragut wasn’t as much fun as buzzing an Imperial Majestic Interdictor. With the Majestics you could dive right through that rotating ring they had in the middle, although they did tend to get
really
pissy about that sort of thing. Just as well that a Fer-de-Lance was about the only ship that could outrun a squadron of Imperial fighters; still, eventually even the Farragut got annoyed and sent an irritable avatar and a squadron of F63 Condors to shoo her away. She fought the urge to play with the Condors for a bit and set the
Dragon Queen
heading for Toad Hall, the only decent orbital station in the system, launching a series of avatars ahead of her to start searching for Newman’s contacts and poke around her own network of information junkies, sleaze-merchants and dirt-mongers. Not that she expected any of them to know anything about the
Pandora
. Whoever had set that up was far too smart.

‘You have a k-cast,’ drawled the
Dragon Queen
.

‘Go.’ Darkwater, she supposed, with more information from Stopover; except it wasn’t, it was Enaya.

‘Ziva! Love! Where are you?’

For a second, Ziva froze. ‘Enaya. Um … I’m in Pethes just now. I’m … I’m still after Newman.’ She waited a few seconds but Enaya didn’t reply. The k-cast signal strengthened enough that she started to get pieces of low-grade grainy video, jerky and broken up. ‘God! You look terrible.’

‘It’s been …’ Enaya looked away and it was a moment before she looked back. ‘It’s Aisha, not me. I told you Odar the shithead was back, didn’t I? … It’s … Ziv, I’ve been trying to get hold of you for days. You never answer. Why don’t you ever answer?’

‘En, you know how it is. I’ve micro-jumped from one end of a dozen systems to the other. You know how that screws everything up.’ Which was true enough but didn’t explain why she hadn’t replied. ‘It’s just … ah, En, I don’t know what to say. This guy, I should have had him two weeks ago and I missed him and now he’s all over the place and I know it’s—’

‘You could say you’re coming home, Ziv.’ Enaya cut her off. ‘You could say you’re sorry you didn’t come home when you promised, just like you didn’t the last three times. I need you here. I don’t know what to do. Aisha needs you.’

Ziva scoffed. ‘Aisha doesn’t need
me
. She hates me.’

‘No, Ziv. She just knows that you won’t put up with her shit the way I do. She’s so … Oh, Ziv, you don’t know how it is with her. And that … that
man
. She’s talking about going away with him and I don’t know how to stop her. She’s sixteen, Ziv, that’s all. Sixteen! And he’s six years older and … You know what he’s like. I found this out only yesterday: he’s already been in prison!’

‘I know, En. I checked him, remember?’

‘And you didn’t tell me?’

‘He was gone, En. I didn’t think …’

‘I don’t know what to do, Ziv. I need you to help me with this. I can’t do it on my own.’

‘I …’ Ziva closed her eyes and took a deep breath. ‘I can’t, En. Not yet. Not now. Look, as soon as I’ve got Newman, I’ll come. I promise. But I’ve got to get this guy. He’s a—’

‘I don’t care what he is.’

‘I got flagged, En.’

‘And what’s that supposed to mean?’

‘It means I’ve got to clear this one or I might not work again.’

For a moment the video cleaned up and Enaya was looking right back at her in crystal clarity. Ziva stared, struck by how beautiful En could be. That was why they’d fallen for each other five years ago. Ziv was a skinny, scrawny fireball with a manic energy that was exactly the same now as it had been thirty years ago when she’d hit her teens, with all the strength and fortitude Enaya wished she had but didn’t. And the only thing that had ever made Ziva pause was staring at En, because no one could be that statuesque. Even now, En still had that magic. She was a genetic throwback, almost pure Persian. Most people assumed she’d had chromosome therapy or been cosmetically tailored pre-birth on some back-water black-market genetic chop-shop, the sort of places that hived out in the asteroid belts in systems like Pethes and powered down and prayed every time a Federation battlecruiser came past. But Enaya was natural. There might have been some in-breeding somewhere in her past but Ziva didn’t ask and didn’t care. She was what she was – however she got that way – gorgeous and beautiful and a wonderful lover.

‘Is that it? Is that all you’ve got to say?’ asked Enaya.

Ziva jerked back from her memories. ‘Don’t you get it, En? I might not work again. I might have to sell the
Dragon Queen
.’ She wouldn’t, though. She wouldn’t ever do that.

‘Good,’ snapped Enaya. ‘That would be good. I’d like that. You don’t need to do this, Ziv. Not anymore. We could go to Alioth and Andbephi. I always wanted to see places like that. Places where the universe shows us its colossal beauty. We could surf the chromosphere of a Canum Venaticorum variable binary and skim hydrogen all the way from one star to the next. We could find our own Delta Scuti and bathe in its wax and wane. We could see the attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion or whatever it is. Together. I remember, Ziv, all these things you said you wanted. We could take Aisha with us. We could go to Earth …

‘He’s going to ruin her, Ziv. He’s going to get her into all sorts of terrible things.’

Ziva bit her lip. Thank fuck for crappy k-cast bandwidths and shitty video. ‘I got to go,’ she whispered. She broke the link before En had a chance to see how her eyes glistened.

She’d been thinking, after buzzing the battlecruiser, that she might leave the
Dragon Queen
in dock and spend an evening carousing some of Toad Hall’s bars, checking for names in person. It never hurt to put in an appearance in the flesh – it was a large part of what she did and what she was, and how she’d picked up the reputation and the bounties that she had. Bar full of macho space-pirates showing off their tattoos and new bicep enhancements and in walks a skinny bounty hunter woman hardly an inch over five foot tall. They used to laugh at her and, truth was, half the men in a place like that could have snapped her in half if they ever got their hands on her. That was the trick, though. There were smarter things a canny bounty hunter could do to sharpen themselves and Ziva had a quickness and co-ordination that had given her the nickname
Blink Dog
. Here and there some people swore she could literally teleport.

She sighed. Enaya had crushed any sense of excitement she’d had. Now she just wanted to get it over with, wipe away the shit-stains who E-bombed escape pods just to cover their tracks and then go back to En and Ay, kick that wanker Odar Something into the chromosphere of the nearest star and tell En that everything would be better now. Make a whole load of promises that she’d mean to keep right up until the next itch got her and a big bounty twitched across the
Dragon Queen
’s antennae.

She left the avatars to their work after she docked and quietly got drunk, alone in the
Dragon Queen
’s cockpit, bouncing lazily around in the false microgravity of the station’s core. She had a stash of Glen Halyconia smuggled from New Caledonia by a bounty she’d taken six months ago. She barely remembered his name now. Lanky white-skinned male. A pussy-cat and certainly not worth the price someone had put on him, not that she cared. They wanted him for smuggling. He’d dumped his cargo of Scotch and she’d picked it up and handed it back.

Most of it, but not all. It had taken her a month to go through the first bottle. Three months ago it had become a bottle every week. At this rate, give her another three months and it would be one every day. Just as well she only had a dozen left.

Shit. Her head was starting to spin. She wrapped her hands across her face. Closed her eyes. She might even have fallen asleep. Just floating.

‘Captain Eschel!’ The
Dragon Queen
was speaking to her. As soon as Ziva moved and opened her eyes, it went smoothly on. ‘An avatar has reported back with a lead on the information you were seeking.’

Ziva tried to focus. ‘Newman? And?’