[01] Elite: Wanted (9 page)

Once burned, forever learned. The cloner in her shoe already had a copy of Sweet’s card ready to go.

The two junkers pinned her arms and clamped her wrists in magnetic cuffs – the cuffs were linked to Cameron Sweet’s card too, which was going to make him look even more stupid than he actually was – and took her out of the hotel and shoved her in an elevator. She felt herself getting lighter as they moved towards the hub; then the elevator stopped and shifted sideways. It crawled along one of the gossamer circles of the great metal spiderweb that joined the Black Mausoleum’s docking hub to the station’s habitation rim. She could hear metal creak and groan and remembered how decrepit and old this place was. Eight hundred years? Nine? It had been falling apart for centuries.

The elevator reached the next spoke and started moving rimward again, drawing to a stop in some administrative section off-limits to the general public – if, that was, the Black Mausoleum could be said to have a general public. They checked her in at a desk and took fingerprints and retina scans, both of which were fakes. They took pictures, not that anyone looked at that sort of thing nowadays. The pictures bothered her. They just might still have records of her in a New Caledonia uniform from ten years ago, if they troubled to look. She hadn’t worn much of a disguise to her face, assuming it would be found out too easily. If the drill hadn’t changed, they’d put her in a holding pen, come back after a few minutes for a blood sample and then leave her for twelve hours while they checked her records. Then came the part where they’d pull her out, strip her and depilate her, force her into a chemical shower and then into a convict jumpsuit that stank of other people’s sweat. The Black Mausoleum had its own law. It hadn’t been much fun going through it once and Ziva had no intention of enduring it a second time.

The junkers lost all interest in her as soon as they had her in the holding pen. There were two other people inside, one an impish man who eyed her over the sort of absurdly overblown Zapata moustache that said he either came from the Moon or that he wished he did. The other was snoring on the floor, passed out and stinking of cheap rum. Ziva ignored them. She had to be quick and get the next minutes exactly right. Get them wrong, get trapped here until they figured out who she
really
was, and the best she could hope for was that they’d eject her into space without a suit.

She crouched against the wall and pulled her knees tight into her chest until she could reach her shoes and then extracted the clone of Sweet’s card and flipped it across the magnetic cuffs. They popped free. Moustache watched with interest. Ziva put a finger to her lips and swiped the card across his cuffs as well, but nothing happened. They exchanged shrugs. Ziva sat down again. They really could have done a better job of searching her. She bit her thumb and popped out the spring razor hidden behind the nail, then used that to nick the seam of her shorts and eased out three little black drones the size of apple pips. She licked a finger and wiped it over them, opening their DNA-locks. As they sprang into life, she slid them under the cell door. They fluttered into the corridor outside. It took the drones about thirty seconds to find and latch onto the three cameras out there and to take over their tiny algorithms.

The two junkers came back together right on cue. Sweet swiped his card and opened the door. As soon as they were in, Ziva triggered the drones latched to the cameras and kicked Sweet between the legs hard enough to rupture both his testicles. She had the shocker rod off Sweet’s belt while the second junker was still staring in disbelief – until she smashed his ankle with it. As he went down, she touched her copy of Sweet’s card to the base of the shocker, unlocking it, and zapped them both. The junker with the smashed ankle collapsed as though someone had cut all his strings. For Sweet it was more of a mercy than anything else …

Her heart was racing. She was half listening out for the first alarms or for the hiss of tranq-gas.
You got no back-up here, not this time
. She had to keep telling herself that.

She pulled the bodies away from the door and propped them up on the cell’s one bench, then practically tore their uniform jackets off. She tossed one to Zapata along with the second guard’s keycard and stuffed the other underneath the bench. If she’d put one of them on herself, it would have been like wearing a tent.

Still no alarms and the cell door was wide open. Ziva grinned. Couldn’t help herself. That was the thrill of it, the danger. They’d be out for hours. It was all so easy, like it was supposed to be. Amateurs.

Moustache man helped himself to the second junker’s shocker. The card had unlocked his cuffs. He gave Ziva a nervous glance.

‘Try not to be seen,’ Ziva said. ‘And try not to set off the alarms.’ She patted Sweet on the head as she left. ‘Don’t worry. It’s the thirty-fourth century. They can grow you a new pair.’

She headed deeper into the Black Mausoleum’s restricted arc, worming her way to their data cores, flicking her little seed-drones ahead. The drones were expensive but worth it: they fed every camera they infected into her Fresnels and put them on a loop for everyone else until she’d passed out of sight and called them back. It wasn’t a cloaking device but it was as good as one – unless she met someone in the flesh. How long before they found she was missing from the cell? Minutes? Hours? How long before someone started to wonder why Sweet and his friend hadn’t come back? Then they’d come looking …

The cameras showed a pair of junkers coming the other way. She had a few seconds, that was all. She flashed Sweet’s card against the nearest door but it didn’t work. Probably kicked off a warning of an unauthorised access attempt somewhere. She looked wildly for a place to hide and darted into another corridor a moment before the junkers came round the corner. There was nowhere to hide there, either. All she could do was press herself against the wall, shocker at the ready, and hope they didn’t look. She could hear them. The junkers were talking, laughing, one of them telling the other some story or other that apparently was hilarious. Ziva stayed perfectly still and quietly prayed that they’d walk on by.

‘… And then he gets out this bucket, right, only it’s not just a bucket …’

Cloaking device. Bloody Jameson again. There was a story – more of a legend – that he’d got his hands on a prototype cloaking device once. She couldn’t remember whether it was supposed to be Thargoid or whether it was some secret corporate military thing.

‘… It’s the biggest bucket ever made. You could hide a whole person inside it …’

And it obviously wasn’t true either, since a hundred years had passed and neither the Federation nor the Empire were flying around in invisible ships. Nor, as far as she knew, were the Thargoids.

‘… And he slams it down on the table in front of Christoph, and the look on his face …’

As far as she knew.

The junkers passed the end of her corridor, one of them gesticulating wildly, the other laughing with his friend. They didn’t turn and they didn’t look and they didn’t see her. Ziva listened as they walked away. For a while she stayed where she was. Catching her breath. Letting her heartbeat slow. It had seemed like such a clever idea back on the
Myla
. Trick them into bringing her through all their front-line security and then snoop about.

She set off again.
Snoop about?
She hadn’t thought this through, not properly. If the Syndicate caught her here, they’d kill her. It wouldn’t trouble them much, either.

A minute later, the cameras spotted someone coming towards her again. A woman on her own, walking quickly – seemingly in a hurry. The choices were better this time. Ziva slipped around an unlit corner and watched the woman rush past.

Close to the data cores now. Fuck knew what security they’d have on the cores themselves. She turned a corner and a door opened right beside her and she almost collided with another uniformed steroid-junker. He stared at her and started to open his mouth … Speed. That was always her edge. She snap-kicked him between the legs and whatever he’d been about to say died in a whimper. As he doubled over, she grabbed his hair with one hand, pulled his head down further and slammed the heel of her other hand onto the nape of the junker’s neck. He dropped and didn’t get up.

Cameras. Check the cameras. But the corridors around her were clear for now. She crouched and checked the junker’s pulse. Still alive, which was something. Whether he’d walk again without some expensive nerve surgery was another matter. That was the trouble with junkers – you never knew quite how hard you had to hit them to take them down. If she hadn’t almost walked into him, she could have used the shocker …

The camera behind her flashed a warning. Two men approaching from behind.
Damn it!
She had about five seconds. The open door was right there; she dragged the junker inside and closed it just in time. Now the camera ahead of her was flashing a warning too. Another pair of junkers, coming the other way. She looked about for a weapon. The unconscious man on the floor had a burst pistol but the grip would be coded to his palm print and probably to his DNA. He had a trio of stun grenades that wouldn’t be, though. Ziva bared her teeth. You could never go wrong with a stun grenade or two.

The junkers coming from behind passed the door where she was hiding and met the junkers coming the other way. They stopped and started to talk. Ziva made herself breathe slow and steady, forced her fingers to unclench. Sitting silent in the dark.
No reason to be anxious
, she told herself.
Patience. Patience. That’s all.
They couldn’t possibly know she was there but she couldn’t help herself willing them to move on …

A last exchange of nods and smiles and laughter and the junkers went their separate ways. Ziva let out a long, slow sigh and then made herself wait until they were out of range of the cameras. She waited another minute more to be sure, counting out the seconds. Each one seemed to last an age. While she did, she used the card from the junker she’d taken down to access the Black Mausoleum’s network and find out just how much further she had to go. Not far now. That was a mercy, at least.

Her ear buzzed. The
Dragon Queen
. The ship must have come in a lot closer and now it was riding the station’s network to find her. Which pissed her off, because if the
Dragon Queen
could do that then so could anyone else who happened to know she was there. And someone would be wondering, right now, who the hell was sending a signal in from empty space and who they were talking to.

‘What the fuck?’ she hissed, squatting in the pitch black. ‘Get off this channel …’

The delay was several seconds before the
Dragon Queen
replied. ‘You asked me to give priority routing to any call from Enaya.’ And yes, she had, and just hadn’t remembered to take the order off.
Shit
.

‘Take a message and make her go away. Don’t call me—’ but it was too late. The
Dragon Queen
had already patched the link.

‘Ziv!’

‘En.’ Shit. ‘En, I’m hiding out in a dark room on a station full of people who want to hurt me. There’s a body on the floor right next to me. Now isn’t the time. I’ll call you when I can.’

‘Ziv, It’s Aisha …’

‘Not here, not now. I’m sorry, En.’

‘Aisha’s gone, Ziv.’

‘Sorry, En,’ Ziva whispered. She cut the link.

The drones infecting the cameras told her that the corridor was still clear. She slipped outside. Three doors further down she found what she was looking for: the Black Mausoleum’s data cores. The card from the junker she’d taken down let her in: that’s what you got for having such archaic piss-poor tech. She had her drones infect the cameras outside, keeping watch for her while she crouched in the dark. At least the data cores themselves were only a few decades obsolete. She took off her other shoe and took the heel apart, slipped a wafer into one of the access sockets and bit her other thumb. A tiny wire popped loose. She plugged it into the wafer.
And here we go
…

It was mundane stuff. Maybe that was why they didn’t have much protection on it. The attack-ware on the wafer ripped through the server’s firewalls and quasi-sentient security algorithms like a knife through paper.
Yes. Good. Come on …
She passed over the personnel lists and the staff files and went for the station docking records, arrivals and departures, skimming as fast as she dared, looking for anything that might be Newman’s ship or that had come here shortly after the
Pandora
had died.
Come on, come on, where are you?
Any moment now, some sort of alarm would go off. Someone would come. Something …

She got what looked like it might have been Newman’s Cobra passing through a month before – there for a few days and gone again – but that was no news. Didn’t look like he’d come back. She couldn’t see anything with an obvious connection to the
Pandora
either.

Fucksticks.

She sat back, wondering what to do next. She’d have to leave fast – the moment anyone came looking for the junkers she’d left in the holding cell. She’d pushed her luck too far already …

There
was
one odd thing in the docking records. An Adder, the
Unkindness
, had come in from 61 Cygni carrying an escape pod it hadn’t had when it went out. There was nothing in the Pilot’s Federation bulletins about a ship going down in 61 Cygni but Darkwater had tracked one of the
Irrepresible
’s raiders there. Ziva knew the
Unkindness
of old, a Judas runner. She tried to find anything more about the pod, but whatever records there might have been were missing. It wasn’t that they were too well protected for her attack-ware to penetrate, they simply weren’t there at all. Odd.

She pulled what she could on the pilot of the
Unkindness
and carefully put everything back as she’d found it. The attack-ware wafer returned to her shoe, the wire under her thumbnail. She crept out of the data cores and returned the way she’d come, pulling the drones out of the cameras behind her as she went, hiding whenever anyone came the other way. Moustache Man might have done her a favour. When they found he was missing and then found the junker in the office, maybe they’d think it was him …?