[02] Elite: Nemorensis (15 page)

‘I got shot in the arse,’ he mumbled.

‘Poor baby,’ she said, typing something into the console. ‘Wanna fuck?’

And then it stopped.

Just stopped. Ground down by queasy inertia and burnout one lazy afternoon on Baltha’Sine Station, two days later.

There was no warning that it would (none that Myq had detected, anyway). No sense – for him – of a destination being reached, a death-rattle coming to its end. The chase, the rampage, the momentum; all of it simply paused – as it had before on a dozen repair stops, a hundred refuellings, a thousand gory lacunae to watch their victims disintegrate (then transmit the footage to the news ‘casters). It paused, but for the first time it did not resume.

Dragged to a halt by the party to end all parties, a hangover like an invidious bioweapon and, above all else, Myq’s own simple arrival at a moment in which he had a little extra time to think.

‘
Too late
,’ Teesa mumbled in her sleep, turning over in the next room. ‘
Where are they …?
’

Hunched on an airfloat (arse still too sore to sit conventionally), Myq peered glumly round their berth – third spinward spoke, VIP suite, angled (according to long spacer tradition) onto the docking bay containing the
Shattergeist
, in all its vile-pink, grunting-honking-farting-shitting shibboletti-filled cargo-podded glory – he smoked a restorative vapourbrand and sighed. He could still taste the wretched creatures’ whiff at the back of his throat after two days in transit.

It’s over
, Myq thought.
It’s over and I don’t know why
.

Thinking back to the saturnalian insanity of their arrival celebration, he liked to pretend he’d detected that subtle shift in pace the very moment they’d airlocked-in. But no. The truth was, as semiclads and nonclads alike had come swarming forth from the waiting crowd with flower garlands and banners, as the security guards they’d hired in advance (his idea) took up position, as cameradrones flickered and fruity punch flowed, as the party got underway like some great doomsday engine, Myq had magically intuited not a single notion of the dawning end. Had thought of nothing, in fact, except surrendering himself entirely to the adoration of the people.

Here, after all, was fame.
Here
was the notoriety he’d craved his whole life. The people of Baltha’Sine had greeted him and his lover like young gods.

Of course (he now told himself, consciously dialling down his own self importance) it wasn’t as though Baltha’Sine was a particularly well-appointed receptacle for celebrity. Home to only two million or so souls, the great cartwheel-city was part of neither the Federation (whose teeming masses he’d yearned to seduce, back when his ambitions were first overspilling their bounds), nor any of the other big factions. And yet to Myq’s mind it was almost uniquely appointed as a cosmic weather vane: a place of cultural crosswinds and magpie-snatched influences.

Baltha’Sine sat at a territorial junction where the piecemeal borders of the Empire, the Federation and the Alliance succumbed to a diplomatic no-fly zone: a place where products and resources deemed too risqué or restricted by one faction could be quietly shuffled to another. The station had its own gloriously disinterested cops (whose principal role appeared to be politely informing outside agencies that their jurisdictions were
back that way
) and an exceedingly short list of laws. It was a place where adventurous students could spend a few years then forget to go home; to which artists could gravitate and piss away all their enthusiasm; where the cheerfully maladjusted could become invisible.

Accordingly its residents were almost pathologically open-minded: harvesters and hoarders of every idea, practice, imagery, religion, fashion, obsession, technology, entertainment, rumour, drug and deviancy which bubbled into the top layer of taboo from all three of the Main Galactic Players.

And on Balatha’Sine – on this perfectly formed acid-test for one’s own importance – it turned out that Myquel Dobroba Pela-LeSire LeQuire and Teesa#32A[M/Tertius], were the obsession
du jour
. The mayor had even indulgently paused the station’s centrifugal sections for a couple of hours (causing several thousand drinks to be messily liberated from their glasses) solely to stop Myq’s buttock from twinging.

(The memory of that relief, typically, started up the ache again. He adjusted himself on the air-cushion and absently rattled the little translead pot the ’
Geist
’s autodoctor had presented him, containing the projectile it’d dug out. He’d tried impressing a few strangers with it at the party –
I got shot, you know –
but the lumpy missile inside looked more like button than an excitingly pointy bullet, and people were generally too blitzed to care.)

The madness had raged for twelve hours. The comedown, alas, looked set to last considerably longer.

‘Wherrrre …’ Teesa whispered again.

And there was the problem. It was as if she’d simply and suddenly exhausted whatever reserve of … of
whatever it was
… that had been driving her. As if her endurance of the past months, her boundless energy and capacity for enthusiasm, her oscillating moods and mercurial rages, in fact all the relentlessness which defined her (which had somehow modulated from impossibility to normality in the short time they’d known each other) had sputtered and died.

‘No no no no no no,’ she whispered quietly from the bed, smacking her lips.

Not to put too fine a point on it, Myq found himself thinking clearly for the first time in weeks.

He thought – or rather, he
had
thought – that he knew the cause of the sudden arrested momentum. Before the party hit full stride, before the first Teesa-confuddled kids started getting naked, before even the first dance/fight got underway in the station’s central plaza, the Mayor had nervously pulled them aside to make an announcement.

‘He’s … he’s not here,’ the dumpy woman had said with an air of fretful confession, wringing her tattooed hands.

‘Who?’ Myq blurted. Noticing only afterwards that Teesa was already reacting: lower lip jutting, a philosophical nod.

‘Well … Axcelsus,’ the Mayor said, as if it were obvious. ‘The shibboletti trader. He
is
why you’re here?’

Oh, oh, oh.
It all came out like pus from a wound. Myq stumbling his way through it, planting questions with all the casual indifference his splintering dignity could manage.
Well, of course that’s why we’re here, yes, of course, of course, hahaha, so he’s, he’s gone, has he? How, uh, how long’s he been here? When did he leave?
All while Teesa avoided eye contact and said nothing.

Madrien Axcelsus. The same Imperial slave-owning, super-wealthy prick from whom she’d first escaped. The one she’d shot in the back as she left.
Don’t ask, don’t ask.
A trader famed for his importance to the shibboletti-gland game, who – it transpired – had been one of Baltha’Sine’s biggest sharks for the past few months, trading under the depressingly awful assumed identity of ‘G. Lander’.

In that sticky moment Myq finally twigged. He hadn’t wanted to, hadn’t asked to, had in fact consciously prevented himself from digging too deep, not daring to risk the discovery there was something mundane behind their quest.

Vendetta.

It’s all a bloody vendetta.

He’d grimly pieced it together with a feeling akin to falling.
She drives up the prices of shib’ glands. (
She’d checked them, he remembered, when they first landed on Shibboleth
.) She knows Axcelsus’s trading name from the Old Days, so she knows he’s here. She announces a now-priceless cargo of live shibboletti
(the very message she was typing when she rescued him outside the club, for NoGod’s sake)
, before setting course.

Inviting interested traders to bid.

Axcelsus.

This whole … fucking … thing… just to coax him out of the woodwork.

It was almost heartbreakingly tawdry. And, worse, the men and women of Baltha’Sine had worked it all out long before dumb, deliberately ignorant Myq had given it a thought. It was embarrassing, it was disappointing, it was bloody depressing. And it wouldn’t even have the benefit of success.

‘When … when we knew you were coming,’ the Mayor had warbled, ‘we tried to put him in custody. We thought we could … we could present him as a gift.’ She distractedly rubbed herself along one thigh. ‘But he was already gone. I’m so sorry. We’ve got a trace on him heading for the Empire – I mean, he would. He’s very well connected. But … But please, don’t leave. Not just yet. We’re so excited to have you.’

And they were. And they’d showed it last night, even though between every cocktail and stimmstick – or the first few anyway – he was floundering with the fresh knowledge, with the almost unbearable need to take Tee aside to demand answers. And contending, all along, with the equally unbearable determination not to think about it. To bathe in the adoration and Let That Be Enough.

After all, Tee didn’t seem that fussed. It was strange. She’d clearly reacted to the news, a stoic
humm
, but no more. And almost as soon as the mayor released them back into the throng it was gone, forgotten, lost in the fun and the flirting.

And
ohhh
, she’d loved him so hard. She’d said it a dozen times in one night, after all these months of laughing it off. She’d touched nobody else. She’d clung to him as they smiled and danced and basked, and wherever they went people loved one another; hurt one another; shouted and fought and fucked and
lived
. And
she
was
his
alone.

He glanced back at her now – snoozing. Only the shifting of the quilt to say she was alive. He watched her little face and thought of the kids she’d killed in the nightclub, the man she’d glassed (to rousing cheers) last night, the cop she’d immolated above Shibboleth, the truckers’ bodies popping against the hull off the shoulder of #A5FFP, the little journalist flopping dead like a boneless thing.

She’s not what you think
. The mercenary had said that.
She’s not what you think
.

He dreamily opened the translead pot: a sudden determination to hold the bullet. Its lightness surprised him, glossy smooth and almost perfectly unthreatening. He strummed it once or twice, like a plectrum for the guitar he used to pretend-play when he was in the band, and sniffed. A bubble of dejection scrolling upwards along his spine.

‘You’re an idiot,’ the bullet told him.

Myq had already snapped ‘No, I’m not,’ before he realised he’d gone insane. It felt weirdly overdue and perversely comforting.

‘Here’s a thing,’ the button-projectile said – its voice miraculously contriving to soothe and annoy all at once. ‘Did you ever ask her how old she is?’

‘You’re talking.’

‘I repeat my original assertion. You’re an idiot.’

‘Right.’
Go with the flow
, he figured.
So you’re mental. At least you’ll never be lonely again.
‘No, actually. I never asked how old she is. Why?’

‘Do me a favour? Switch on the console there. I can etherlink no problem, but you’ve got to let me in.’

‘You’re a bullet. Or a … a button. Or something.’

‘I’m a Voight-Comal C-902 Culex-line Personal Companion. And you continue to be an idiot.’

Myq sputtered gently, for safety. The word
Culex
felt weirdly significant, even amidst the headachey thunderheads and
delirium tremens
. Something the dead-eyed mercenary had said as he’d staggered away from her?

The King by the Lake. Tell him.

Slowly, as if trying to prevent himself from noticing, Myq stretched out and sense-gestured at the console. It
oop
ed to life.

‘Cheers,’ the button said.

Instantly images began to cycle across the curtain-screen. Most were grainy – clearly captured by cheap surveillance cameras or the rudimentary sensors of humblebots – but the scenario throughout was clear: a lavish estate on some tropical world, a fire bubbling from ornate embrasures, a set of bodies lined up, an obese youth in trader’s furs crumpled at the foot of a stairwell.

And her.

Of course, her
. Striding away. Moodily shadowed. Curling a lip while stealing into a shuttle. He almost smiled at the sight: she’d barely changed since. Her hair had been a tad longer, eyes a tad dryer, clothes cut in the simple nylinen of an indentured worker. But still her.

Still insane.

Myq realised with a sigh he didn’t need to see this. Didn’t want to.

‘So what?’ he said, keeping his voice low.
Don’t want to wake her
. ‘I know this story. You’re, what …? You’re trying to tell me she’s not an angel? Golly. I’m amazed. That’s, yeah. That’s really opened my eyes. I think I’ll shit you out the waste-chute now, if it’s all the same to you.’

‘Idiot.’

‘Look, I’m sure it’s violating some sort of customer directive to keep calling me th—’

‘Look at the timestamp, dummy.’

Myq sighed and squinted closer.

Then a little closer.

‘That’s. No, that’s wrong.’

‘It’s not wrong.’

‘But that’s twenty years ago. The camera must’ve been fau—’

The little drone tutted. Cycled through a dozen images from the same scene – all whilst somehow radiating a sense of indulgent impatience – each of which confirmed that Teesa’s bloody escape from the clutches of Madrien Axcelsus really was (
no, no, no, that’s stupid
) two decades old.

‘All right,’ the little voice chirped. Enjoying itself. ‘Revelation number two.’

A new image flashed up. A grim portrait: steeped in baroque pomposity and all the fiddly bric-a-brac of officialdom.

PILOT’S FEDERATION BOUNTY LICENCE
, the over-designed title read.
SANCTIONED AGENT TERESA NINER.

The face below was harsh-lit: flat-skinned and sallow. The hair had been shaved clean off, the cheeks hollow with malnourishment, and the eyes—

Fuck, no.