[02] Elite: Nemorensis (2 page)

… but not quite sure enough, it was true, to risk drawing her attention to any post-eject drifters he noticed. Teesa never seemed to spot them herself (too busy admiring the wreckage, or fucking, or admiring the wreckage
while
fucking) and Myq instinctively avoided alerting her. Gratuitous epic-scale destruction was one thing, strafing stragglers and salting the metaphorical earth felt like a step too far into the dark.

As if there’s any going back now.

Still: a chiming chimey-thing was a chiming chimey-thing, a lit-up blinky thing was a lit-up blinky thing, and any responsible (
ha
!) captain (
ha
!) of any well-maintained (
ha
!) and properly licensed (
ha
!) craft owed it to him – or her – self to investigate. Even if he did happen to be off his tits on hormostimms. Or encumbered by the amorous attentions of a capricious sex fiend. Or even – no,
especially
– while actively attempting to delay ejaculation.

He squinted at the instruments, hunting the signal-light.

It was at this juncture that Teesa chose to throw back her head and howl like a wolf, which didn’t help. Then to yelp and thrash and breathe, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah.’ To clap ring-laden hands (she had a thing for trashy jewellery) onto his buttocks. And thereby to force him, as if she were operating some sort of fleshy rowing equipment, to up his tempo even further.

None of it, of course, conducive to anorgasmic sustainment.

Fortunately for Myq the blinking light more than came to his diversionary rescue. Less fortunately it did so by transmuting much of the approaching sexual volcanism into terror.

[LOC-PROX]
, the holo-log began: an entry made thirty seconds earlier.
[F.T.L-EGRESSION.]

Someone dumping themselves out of hyperspace in the stellar vicinity.

No biggie
, Myq selfsoothed.
Could be anyone.

[SCAN ALERT.]
Twenty-five seconds ago.

It’s fine. Everyone runs a local sweep after FTL. Common practice.

[NAV-POINT ASSOC:
SHATTERGEIST
HOMETAG.]
Seventeen seconds ago.

Someone … someone using us as a navigational fixed-point. That’s … completely normal. Orientation procedure 101, no probl—

[INBOUND VECTOR.]

Ohhhh—

[
SHATTERGEIST
AUTOSCANNING INCOMING VESSEL.]

Don’t be a cop please don’t be a cop don’t be a c—

[IDENT WITHHELD.]

Oh thank the almighty NoGod, cops have to self-I.D, everyone knows th—

[ALERT: FIRING-SOLUTION DETECTED.]

No no no no—

[ALERT: MULTIPLE FIRING-SOLUTIONS DETECTED.]

‘
Tee
, shit, Tee, stop, get off, we—’

Teesa hissed him to silence. Kept grinding and gripping with, impossibly, even greater urgency. His prick, against all neurophysical sense, unhelpfully failed to detumesce. Still he did his best to disentangle, to wriggle free, all while scrabbling blindly at ship controls he barely understood. And succeeding, evidently, only in exciting her even more.

‘Teesa, seriously, someone’s com—’

‘Me.’

‘Wh—’

‘Me. I am. Me!’

‘But—’

‘Don’t stop, don’t you dare stop—’

‘Ohfuck.’

On screen a glimmering blue dot drew a lazy contrail towards them, flickering with auto-detect infopings like camera-flash bursts, dragging to Myq’s mind a memory of that last show on Gateway. Glittering, sweaty, cheering swampworld Gateway where it all changed, where it all ended, where it all began. Gateway, where
Myq-L and the Bimblefunks
had played to their biggest crowd ever: a peristaltic ocean of pubescent shriekmonkeys clamouring through the Tumbledome, rending official vidshirts and rupturing their own throats. Gateway, which his promoters had relentlessly insisted was the Big One, the Biggest Of Them All, the hottest ticket out. Gateway, oh yes, where one could most efficiently access the communal hearts and wallets of its neighbouring cluster of loosely aggregated and only nebulously ‘civilised’ frontier worlds. And Gateway, which positively sloshed with the culture-starved barely-educated teenagers whose hormonal attention the rising star of Myq’s celebrity had particularly captured.

But, oh, Gateway, where he’d nonetheless found himself overwhelmed, crushed, gloom-wrecked – by the sheer provincial crapness of it all.

‘How are sales in Fed’-space?’ he’d asked that night, sweat-drenched and underwear-pelted, as he stepped offstage. ‘Did we chart?’

His managers had looked away.

The band didn’t understand, of course – though each member had been dredged from a similarly rustic morass to his own. Their perspectives had been overwhelmed within days of the tour’s start. Each subsequent show (Bigger! Louder! More profitable!) had simply drawn them further into a punchdrunk paradise of infinitely exceeded expectations. To the others, Myq’s frustrations, inarticulately ranted amongst the drug-packed leisure-suites the
Shattergeist
had once sported, had been bewildering at best and obscene at worst. Why couldn’t he just be happy? Why couldn’t he be satisfied with the adoration of his own stellar neighbourhood? Why torture himself craving the consideration of the brand-frazzled, fad-guzzling, money-bleeding, numberless pop-sophisticates of the Federation? Why waste time and ambition on a doomed quest for the lasting respect of 300 billion infamously fickle trend-junkies halfway across the galaxy?

Myq had never really been able to answer that one. Mostly because it seemed so entirely bloody obvious it defied expression.

Because they’re there.

That need to reach them all. That need to be known by them all. That need to transcend factionalism and achieve …
what?

Ubiquity
. That was what.
No-tor-iety
.

… Yeah,
that
need, that need had poured piss onto any personal successes his brain deemed less than total.

There’d been a falling-out after the show. A touch of Dramatic Storming Out; a little too much of the famed local gin. A
lot
too much violent troublemaking around town and a seriously large amount of waking up in prison with a hangover like a Mephistophelian migraine.

Oh, it amounted to nothing in the end. A little overzealous policing by a crew of drugged-up, off-duty deputies, helped-along by Myq’s sad habit aggressive cuddling when drunk. It’d all settled quickly into a resolution pattern when he made his One Permitted Call and the cops realised he really was who he said.

(‘Frankly,’ his prime-manager had buzzed down the line, ‘it’s exactly this sort of bad boy shit your brand needs.’) He was duly instructed to sit tight and await the world-quaking starfall of his own personal apocalyptic megalawyers to arrange bail.

But in the interim?

In the interim he’d stared through the bars of the drunktank at the girl in the next cell (‘
A slave abscondee
,’ the cops muttered, suddenly acting weird, slurring even worse than when they’d found him, ‘
awaiting extradition to the Empire.’
) all the while wondering why he’d developed a spontaneous erection.

… and all the while wondering how good a lawyer would have to be to spring out a band’s,
say
, Personal Secretary, at the same time as its star.

‘Hi,’ he’d said through the bars, weirdly nervous. ‘What’s your name?’

Ha
.

‘Teesa number 32A!’ squawked the voice which now filled the
Shattergeist
’s cockpit. ‘M-for-Matteus, third intake-tranche, owner/patron Madrien Axcelsus!’ An uninvited hail from the approaching vessel: to Myq’s overburdened mind it struck like a raucous gong, forming words only by a quirk of acoustic probability. ‘You are wanted for crimes too numerous to mention, principally …
ah
… corporate property-damage! Also homicide! You
will
sit tight or I
will
squash you!’

A man, Myq guessed, though it was difficult to be sure. All scrambled swagger and attitude.

‘Bounty hunter,’ Tee whispered. Still panting, still grinding, still slamming away as if everything were rosy. Still on the cusp of explosion. ‘He’ll kill us.’

Myq could hear the smile through her voice.

Insane. She’s fucking insane
.

‘Rabbit?’ he said.

‘Rabbit,’ she said.

They repositioned without debate. Still conjoined, still grinding; but at least now capable of reaching the liminals. Teesa wordlessly taking the pilot’s set, both of them cradled against gees by the flight bench.

A warning shot ribboned past, accompanied by a gentle chirrup of alarm: a mag-accelerated projectile which grazed their shields before caroming into the wreck of the mangled freighter. A promise of more to come.

Teesa shuddered in his lap. An involuntary spasm of joy, he guessed, at the precise instant the missile hit metal. It segued neatly into a new fit of howling and whooping, and before Myq could respond or stabilise she’d reached out – quite deliberately – and struck a control on the dash.

[SHATTERGEIST: WEAPONS PRIMED.]

He probably would’ve protested –
no wait don’t try to fight him he’ll kill us he’ll kill us he’ll kill us
– if his power of speech hadn’t been so profoundly robbed by exertion. So instead he thrust and steered and fired and laughed like a demon, and had just enough space, a calm lagoon beneath raging seas, to think:

I love her.

Sweet NoGod, I’m doomed.

On the console, like a beacon in fog, a second light had started to blink.

Now, this one?

This one lived, if you can call it that, in the present. This one sat in the dark. This one watched an exchange of plasmic artillery bring gardens of light and colour to the void and tried, in the final cavity of her mind still capable of abstraction, to remember the last time she’d smiled.

Difficult to know. Harder to care
.

SixJen. Her name (she still had one) was SixJen. Tall and brown and bald as a beetle, she sat straight and toyed unthinking with a pistol flechette: the toothed, hollow-tipped breed she favoured when forced to fight
out there
.

In the Real. As in: among
people
.

Her ship – the
The
– flopped imperfectly over itself and yawed lazily to port: a supremely choreographed part of its starring turn as Piece Of Debris #236. Other, more legitimate members of its company, lumps and cords of unrecognisable slag, metallic viscera from the murdered freighter, shunted and dispersed on either side, masking her drift. Nonetheless, as a precautionary measure, the
The
’s systems had been dialled as low as possible: preserving all detectable traces of heat.

SixJen the killer played possum and stared at her half-sleeping sensors.

On screen the oblivious combatants coiled and danced amidst ghostly vectors of radiation, as if performing for her sole delight. As if she was still capable of being delighted.

‘Got style-profiles for you,’ a voice said. Its tinny inflection (suggestive, SixJen always thought, of scurrying rodents), somehow contrived to sound both insolent and bored. ‘Partial, anyway. If you’re interested.’ It insinuated itself about the dreary cockpit without obvious source.

She almost frowned.

‘Define “partial”, Lex.’
Her
voice, naturally, was an unaffected monotone.

‘Well, okay … the merc? He’s nothing special. Look – am I right? ‘Course I am.’ If it had possessed a body the speaker might well have preened, at that. ‘He’s better than most flyers, maybe, fine, sure … But …’

… but SixJen could already see what the little voice was driving at. The bounty hunter who’d so flashily interrupted her exquisite stalking of the
Shattergeist
was a deft combatant, no doubt. She could smell the competence in every hard turn of his ship (
a classic-spec Cobra III
, she noted,
heavy on speed and explodo-mods; light on shields and daintier deadlies
) and in every swanky chaff-dodging barrel-roll he made. He knew when to thumb back and when to max-gee, could anticipate and pre-empt the fugitive ship’s attempts to bolt, and could cling grimly to its tail when it weaselled and wove into the debris-field still inflating around them.

And yet, and yet … like the specs of his kit, like the theatre of his entrance, even like the paintjob he’d inflicted on his bird – all gloss-black and gold chevrons – SixJen could detect in his every line, every move, every switch and salvo, a singular lack of imagination.

‘… but nothing special.’ She finished Lex’s line for him.

It always irked her, in some distant way, to agree with the little voice. A sensation
it
didn’t help by audibly sniggering.

SixJen’s nearlyfrown turned actual. Smugness, she held, was not an appropriate affectation for a machine. She groped for the tiny disc on her lapel which constituted Lex’s brain – 90% microsensors, 10% infuriatingly-programmed whiny ersatz-personality core, all currently diverted via the ship’s sleepy systems – and repeated her command while flicking its shell.

‘Define … “
partial”
.’

‘All right.
Ow
! Fuck’s sake! All right!’ The little computer often reacted, she’d noticed, as if capable of feeling pain. Just another idiotic impersonation of life – like everything it said – but a useful means, nonetheless, of bringing it back on topic. ‘I meant the rabbit, right? The runner. It keeps … shifting pattern. Can’t get a proper profile. No predictable strategy, no emergent trend. Schizophrenic flying.’

Right again.

On screen, in and around a zone of heavy debris – close to where the
The
hung inert – the
Shattergeist
flowed and flipped like a bright bead on a squall: as graceful as it was chaotic. In spite of its polished aesthetic the gold-class yacht (SixJen could recognise the curves and phallic body of an S.K. ‘Dolphin’ pleasureboat, even beneath the crazed welter of fins and lobstered plates someone insane, tasteless and wealthy had used to accessorize it) was built for comfort, not combat. And yet the
Shattergeist
described a course of inconsistent loops and lunges which decried its prolate build. In one phase it corkscrewed among the stellar junk like a dragonfly: soft course-tweaks suggesting a pilot of such instinctive prescience SixJen didn’t spot a single crumb of contact-flare on its bow, nor any but the most unnecessarily awesome deployments of the bounty hunter’s arsenal depleting its shield. And then, just as effectively, without warning, it assumed the role of a stellar thug: shouldering aside detritus to scatter walls of white-hot rubble into its pursuer’s path.