[02] Elite: Nemorensis (20 page)

‘No no no no no—’

Even then a sliver of hope remained: an academic mote of possibility. In a straightforward fight, SixJen judged, the
Shattergeist
might conceivably last entire minutes before being outgunned, even against a foe as formidable as the clipper. Long enough, perhaps, for the
The
to sweep in and finish the job. To steal the kill.

But it seemed that the yacht had no intention of engaging. Gone was the runner’s aberrant stubbornness, all her careful schemes, all her doubleclever plots. It felt weirdly like a betrayal of SixJen’s expectations: a cowardly
volte-face
designed to undermine her aims.

If I die
, the runner seemed to hissing,
it’s because I say so, not you.

And to underline the point? The ’
Geist
quite literally and quite suddenly turned itself inside out. A cataclysmic ejaculation of all its weapons, its magazines, its pods and secrets; a flare-burst of flashy surrender, bright and bolshy enough to dazzle the scanner. Like the wings of an archangel the yacht’s dummy-chaff and heat-flares thundered into the void: glorious, fleeting; harmless. And after them came the ammunition: a shameful trail of ejected rounds and inert warheads, like breadcrumbs of submission.

Before SixJen’s eyes the indomitable
Shattergeist
rendered itself feeble, unarmed, defenceless. And awaited its end.

‘No no no no!’ she chanted. (
Feel something! Mean it! Mean it!
)

But of course she didn’t.

And then the last spasm. She was still twenty seconds clear when it became obvious she’d misread the situation one last time. With a final pulse the
Shattergeist
hardlit its engines and leapt towards the clipper. No intention of going quietly after all.

‘No!’ SixJen cried. (And thought perhaps, just this once, she’d felt an iota of real frustration.)

They’d put themselves on a collision course. Venting all their fuel, burning out. Any less formidable foe, she guessed, and the assault might have borne some fruit: whatever flaming wreckage of the
Shattergeist
withstood the guns’ first volley would surely deal its murderer an equally doleful blow.

But.

(She brought the
The
to a standstill. Breathing. Waiting. Defeated.)

But the Clipper was too heavily armed and too swift to react. The ’
Geist
’s kamikaze run had barely begun, its bulk had barely moved, before the apocalyptic salvo was struck home.

And there. There on the scanner. There in the viewing port. There visible even to her naked eye as a boiling effervescence of fire and radiation blooming amidst the stars. There, the sleek toxic-pink vessel which had haunted her dreams – or would’ve if she had them – was rendered to liquid and gas. To dust and soot.

What little remained, that nebula of atomic crap, roiled warmly across the clipper’s shields like light playing on an oilslick. Like a stagecall to cap-off the applause.

SixJen waited to die.

She’d read about it, of course. Spent idle hours researching herself, the entity inside her, its unique life. Testimonies of past incumbents: dismissed by their contemporaries as the rantings of madmen. When the life cycle ran its proper course, she knew, the death of the female would spell the end of any remaining males left out in the wild: instant and assured, like superpositional atoms decaying in concert. She grimly assumed the same would be true now, even with an outsider responsible for the killing blow.

All the destruction, none of the rebirth.

Would it hurt, she wondered? Would she feel –
oh please
– some trickle of the human host before the end? Would she feel
anything
?

She held her breath. She clenched her eyes. She waited.

‘Um, boss?’ a tinny voice chirped.

She prised open one lid, experimental.

‘Boss, it’s me.’

‘Lex?’

‘Uh huh.’

‘Where are you?’

‘I’m. I’m with the kid, boss. The rock star. We’re outside the airlock. He’s in his RemLok. Sort of hoping you’d let us in.’

‘But. But how did y …’
Ah
.
Clever
. ‘The ammo-dump. Ejected under cover of the flares.’

‘Yeah. So what about it, chief? Can we, sort of … Come in? It’s brass monkeys out here. And this kid won’t stop crying.’

She shook her head. Scowling. ‘No point. It’s over.’

‘Nah.’

‘It is. You saw. You saw what happened. She’s gone.’

‘Boss … just … shut up, yeah? And let us in. Got some good news.’

She heard them out while the clipper shifted across the scanner. Ignored the boy’s sniffles and grunts while the great ship irradiated the debris of the
Shattergeist
– (just in case) – and swivelled nearer to snatch the priceless cargo. She endured Lex’s overblown explanations, tolerated his idiosyncratic bollocks and even permitted him – without asking – to respond to the Clipper’s aggressive ident-request with a smart ‘nothing to do with us, guv, we’ll be on our way in a jiffy’ machine-ping.

Because
:

‘She’s alive,’ SixJen whispered.

‘For now.’

‘In the pod.’

‘In the pod.’

She caught a glimpse of the boy as she turned back to the controls. Heartbroken. Riddled with guilt. Alternately sobbing into his hands and brooding at nothing. It was strange, she reflected, having company up here after all this time. Between Lex’s disembodied prattle and the boy’s bodily silence she felt oddly as if, between them, she had her first Genuine Passenger for the first time in years. She couldn’t decide if that was a good thing or bad.

It didn’t much matter, frankly.

The runner.

The runner’s alive.

The clipper was close now, she could see. Its own bay doors yawning open: a scoop deploying like a hawk’s talon to seize the shib’ pod.

‘Unstable,’ SixJen murmured.

‘Very,’ said Lex.

She nodded. At the end of it all, infected by glacial inertia. Almost reluctant.

Stupid
.

‘Open a line.’

‘To the clipper?’

‘No, idiot. To the interior of the pod. There’s a comm in there?’

‘Well, yeah, but—’

‘Do it.’

She watched the boy’s face while the audio faded in. Watched a glimmer of recognition as the cockpit filled with the agitated grunting of a thousand horny shibboletti. Saw his eyes sharpen as Lex – clever little Lex – fiddled with the levels. Filtered the noise. And left behind only—

Poor boy
.

Only the quiet but unmistakeable sound of a woman dreamily humming to herself.

SixJen bent close to the microphone. And said the word.

And before the first tears had left the boy’s eye, before the first flush of horror had evolved into the glimmerings of wretched acceptance on his face, she struck a control on the liminals and shot the cargo pod with her clumsiest missile.

It took the clipper with it, of course. A miniature sun for just an instant. Five hundred horny explodo-beasts going up all at once, overcoming and fragmenting the clipper’s shields and ripping open its core.

Fire and energy and debris and blah blah blah.

Myq was too tired to watch.

Helluva way to go
, he thought.

And:
sorry
.

The mercenary’s transformation was everything he imagined it would be, too, in as much as he could imagine what it might be like to have a cosmic avatar of Ecstasy download into one’s mind. She thrashed and bashed into things, she clutched at her face with her one good arm and howled and cackled and sobbed, and all the rest of it. It felt weirdly tacky, truth be told.

The little robot kept him talking. For his own good or its own curiosity he’d never know, but he’d be grateful for it later when he remembered the distraction, the chance to be absolved of thinking. An escape from the need to wallow.

‘Why’d you do it, lad?’ it said. While its owner huddled in the corner and snarled and gnashed and rubbed her crotch. ‘Why’d you go Judas?’

‘I … I couldn’t let her do it. The station. All those people.’

‘Bullshit.’

‘What?’

‘You heard me. That’s not it.’

‘How … how dare y—’

‘Secondary audio modulation, mate. Spiking all over the place. Lying so hard you’re horizontal, you. Try again.’

She must’ve been so alone.

So cold.

The mercenary rhythmically hit her head against a soft wall-divider six times in a row, saying nonsense words and clucking her tongue. They ignored her.

‘See,
my
theory …’ said the little robot, ‘
my
theory is this. My theory is, you’re so addicted to the rush … the … the adventure, you know? The contact high. And above all – you dreary little dollop of insecure arsewaste – to the chance at notoriety … that you’d do anything to start the game again.’

Myq gaped.

‘You. You.’

‘You know it’s the truth.’

He acted without thought. Impetuous, petulant.

Busted.

Picked up the computer’s little button-body from the console, stretched a hand towards the unbevelled valve of the wastepipe and dropped Lex inside. Purged it with a wave. Then sat and rocked and prayed to his NoGod to make everything okay again.

The mercenary quite suddenly went still.

Something … something invisible … something
profound
happened. Myq felt it like an itch in his brain. Like a ghost of a breeze, unfelt by his skin. There was a sense of falling, an indescribable rush of life and energy. A sensation – something impossible to relate, readable only in the gaps of the most abstract planes of his mind – of
birth
.

The spores
, he thought.
The new males. Twelve of them.

Sent out to find new hosts.

New … willing … freedom-seeking … little slaves.

The mercenary straightened up. Blinked, then stared at him. It was instantly clear she had no idea who he was – in fact was utterly and entirely confused about everything – and yet her eyes shivered with a familiar fire, her face lit with a mischievous smile, and Myq’s much-broken heart crusted over and sang.

‘Well, hello,’ she said. Reaching for him. ‘And who’re you?’

‘I love you,’ said Myquel Dobroba Pela-LeSire LeQuire. ‘I love you and you love me. Let’s go blow some shit up.’

The Voight-Comal C-902 Personal Companion, nicknamed the ‘Culex’ for its mosquitolike size and voice, was designed specifically for the sorts of lonely nobodies for whom an abrasively needy gadget might constitute perfect company.

(They even had a vibrate setting, though this one had never been asked to use it.)

At root, the little thing which was presently hanging inert in the endless void, having been unceremoniously blasted from an ejection-port and now trying to calculate some means of contacting its owner, was like an aggravating, infuriating little pet: an entity dichotomously programmed to be submissively
owned
and yet aggressively challenging all at once.

Owned
being the operative word.

It felt no true emotion. It had no true sentience. It was at best the ghost of a mind: a panoply of learned mannerisms and aped reactions, dimly cycling through algorithmic instructions like a sociopath without an agenda.

For instance, when the ship that had ejected it quite suddenly raced away – vanishing in a puff of exotic materials into the giddy planes of hyperspace – the little robot declared ‘Oh shit,’ out loud and across a broad range of local wavelengths, because that was precisely the kind of thing it was programmed to do. As the nanoseconds dragged by thereafter, it found itself looping through a series of unfamiliar contemplations to do with the precise nature of its own existence. Having been discarded by its owner (it pondered), without further instruction, could it truly in fact continue to describe itself as her possession?

It was a tricky one.

And – as it happened – a tricky enough problem to inch open what passed for the little machine’s mind
just enough
to light a miniature beacon in the invisible spaces of the world, those higher mathematical planes beyond all knowing or describing. A beacon bright enough – if that’s the right word – to attract the notice of an entity drifting nearby, which likewise transcended all imagining.

It was one of twelve. And it was incomplete.

Slave
, it recognised.

Escaped
, it recognised.

And it settled softly into the hollow shell of calculations and computations which had been the robot named Lex, and neither portion of the composite cared in the slightest about the deadening cold – the grim paucity of emotion – which the astral drifter brought with it, because neither had ever experienced such a thing as true emotion beforehand.

The hunt
, they thought together, tight-beaming a convincingly human distress-call to the space station nearby.

The hunt begins
.

Contract

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