[02] Elite: Nemorensis (5 page)

She chose not to state aloud the implied reality: that anyone dispatched by a hateful editor on just such a fool’s errand must surely be the lowliest, most internally despised wordmonkey on any given payroll. The assembly, Myq liked to think, were grateful for that kindness.

‘You came,’ she trilled. ‘You came, and I want to thank you. From the bottom of my heart –’ she brushed a hand across her own chest – ‘thank you for coming.’

Myq caught himself watching her with the same fascination, the same weird semi-aroused hang-on-every-word reverence, as the journos. It was the precise brain-obfuscation he’d become so willingly accustomed to, nothing new there, but he’d never truly seen her like this. Never heard her sharing words with more than one listener. Never known her to stay on one topic for more than a few mercurial seconds, let alone lasso a crowd with such empty charm and clumsy innuendo.

‘Thank you for coming,’ she whisper-repeated, innocently wetting her lips.

(One of the journos, a woman, actually moaned.)

She’s hypnotised us
, he thought. And then felt bizarrely, horribly, unforgivably, jealous at having to share it.

‘So,’ Tee finished with the reasoned air of someone who’d had the last word in a disagreement but didn’t want to gloat. ‘We’d like to reward you for taking that chance.’

She nodded at Myq—

Me! Nobody else! Fuck you guys!

—and he tapped a control set into the lectern. Tee gestured expansively at the projectorama behind them, leading eyes and cameras in an obedient swivel.

Above, in glorious oblate holodepth, footage from the
Shattergeist
’s senselogs zoetroped through an endless loop of explosions, strafes, mag-snipes and manufactured collisions. Three weeks and fifteen ships: freighters, cargo runners, two shuttles, an obese managerial pleasure liner (empty, it later transpired) and a colossal steely wreck half-salvaged by a corporate grinder-crew which the pair had blown up just for the hell of it. Into the mix they’d edited more intimate shots from the interior of the ’
Geist
’s cockpit: the lovers laughing, cheering, kissing; reacting with passion and poignancy to the parade of artisanal destruction.

But nothing sordid
, Myq thought, stifling a sarcastic smirk.
NoGod forbid we should offend anyone.

This, the pair had agreed, splicing footage of catastrophe and carnage, should be a montage fit for a family show.

‘Destructertainment,’ Myq heard himself say again, weirdly loyal to Tee’s ugly term.

‘Destructertainment,’ she repeated, her hand again finding his.

And, yeah, this time:

‘… destructertainment,’ the reporters mumbled. Nodding along. Loosening collars, wiping brows. Partly, Myq supposed, they were in shock: they’d had the unexpected good fortune of the region’s newest novelty presenting itself to them on a platter. But mostly?

Mostly, it’s her.

Smiling. Watching them like an artist unveiling her opus. And just as she basked in their wonder, so they basked in her.

Most of them
.

The sticky guy at the back, Myq had observed, had barely glanced at the destruction on screen. Something about him, surpassing even his condescending little turn before, prickled at the base of Myq’s spine.

‘You will have noticed,’ Tee was saying, with the same calm tone one might use to address a company of wayward teenagers, ‘that you can’t livecast from this room. That’s nothing to worry about.’ Several of the journos had indeed dreamily reached to fiddle with cameras and mictech, their adoration briefly polluted by a note of consternation. ‘Lead in the walls. And some sort of scrambler signal, I don’t really understand it myself. But, please, we’re more than happy for you to record everything you see. You’ll appreciate we’d simply like to be well on our way before any transmissions actually occur.’

Despite the sizeable dent this restriction put in the journos’ pursuit of a scoop, still they nodded and smiled with foggy understanding.
Good, horny, sluggish little puppets.

Every Coriolis station in Federation space, so it transpired, had a room like this. After decades of frostwar with the Empire, replete with intelligence scares, political scandals and unhelpful tech-innovation, it had been belatedly agreed by those in command that the easiest way to obviate paranoia was simply to ensure VIPs were never far from a wall without ears. Despite the prohibitive costs of installing such data-sanctuaries station owners had rushed to cough-up for a ‘Whispering Room’ of their own, sensing with mercantile glee the opportunity to charge equally extortionate amounts for rental and use. There was never a shortage of people with secrets.

The hacks accepted the news of their non-immediacy without grumble. In fact the longer they spent in the room the more their professional decorum, the bulldog loyalty to their particular rag, the unspoken enmity and competition which had crackled between them at first, eroded in the tidal wash of Tee’s performance. On one side a man was now openly fondling the buttocks of the gentleman in front, while a couple in the centre, professional nemeses for all Myq knew, kept leaning together to exchange lusty kisses before remembering themselves and breaking apart. Then forgetting again.

Watching, Myq caught himself stifling a grin more than once, until the dread suspicion occurred that he was simply regarding his own fate from the outside: that these people were no different from him; that he, like them, was enslaved, ensorcelled, enchained, by the mad urge to dance to Teesa’s tune.

And hot on the heels of that revelation: the inevitable
How?

And just as inevitably, like all questions of pertinence which arose in Teesa’s presence, the query was annihilated before it could germinate. This time, at least, not by Tee herself.

The sweaty man in the hat bolted for the exit.

Wants his fucking scoop!

Myq shifted on instinct to chase, realising instantly it was hopeless. And grasping, somewhat slower, the full weight of the disaster that would arise from as small a thing as a man opening the door. The data-sanctuary would collapse. The battery of cams and transmitters would, with automatic obedience, start livecasting all they’d seen.

And then: cops.

And then: shooting.

And then: the end.

(Myq wasn’t sure, abstractly, if ‘the end’ he was concerned about was ‘of life’ or ‘of the adventure’, but it didn’t seem quite the right time for comparative analysis. Somehow it never did, when Teesa was around.)

The hat man reached the threshold. Cast a manic hand towards the slidelock.

And slammed to a halt with an undignified squeak.

On the wall beside him, three federal inches from the side of his face, a perfect dandelion of soot and metal cooled with a glassy crackle and a puff of smoke. The man stared at it, trembling. And then twisted, along with Myq and every autolens in the room, towards Teesa.

Where did she get a fucking gun …?

She slipped it back into a pocket, a half-glimpsed laser gadget in pink and vomit-green, and smiled innocently.

‘Let’s try to keep toilet breaks until the end, shall we? We have a lot to get through.’

The man shuffled back to the pack, avoiding every eye. Once again whistling his sad little tune.

‘We’re here today,’ Tee said, ignoring him, ‘to tell your viewers, listeners and readers about an exciting money-spending opportunity. Myq?’

Heads turned towards him. He gaped once or twice, still floundering in the electric atmosphere of A World Where Tee Has A Fucking Gun, and then surrendered to the spell. Went with the flow.

Same old, same old
.

‘It’s remarkably simple,’ he said. ‘On screen behind me now you’ll notice a code number. That’s an account held at the First Bank of Intangia: a clever little concern nominally registered on the Independent world Bohmshohm but in fact lacking for branches, headquarters or … well, any premises at all. Which is to say: not somewhere the Federation can go and get antsy.

‘So what we’d really like is for you, you at home, hi, nice to meet you, for you to send a bunch of money to that account. Which we’ll then basically use to carry on doing what we’re doing now. That is: blowing up ships belonging to the unbelievably wealthy corporate arsebags whose influence affects every last part of your lives.’ He smiled. ‘Cos it’s expensive, that sort of thing.’

Renting signal-proof conference rooms, for instance.

Not having the criminal connections required to sell stolen stock wherever we go, for instance.

Constantly multiplying, upgrading and reloading the ferocious armaments of a once-luxurious tour ship, for instance.

Buying blackmarket pink-and-green laserguns without fucking telling me, for fucking instance.

‘In exchange for this act of generosity, we’ll make sure we send all the tasty footage from said acts of Blowing Corporate Stuff Up onwards to the very same journalists from whom you just heard this appeal. How about that?’

The reporters nodded dreamily. Most of them, those not actively necking each other, were still staring at Teesa and not really listening. The cameras, happily, seemed to know what to do.

As did the prick in the hat.

‘So that’s what this is all about, is it?’ he said. Sweaty-faced, red-eyed, still flinging glances at the door. ‘You’re anti-corporate. This is a … what, a political thing?’

Myq lost a couple of candyfloss seconds trying to decide if he pitied or envied the man his exemption from Tee’s spell, and only tuned back in when she stiffened beside him with an angry tut. He knew without waiting how it would go if he let her handle the Official Response, because it was the very same argument they’d had that morning.

Look
, she’d snarled, unbuckling his clothes.
I don’t give a damn about the corps
a
nd nor do you. We should just be honest about it. We want to … to break stuff. Right? To laugh and screw and scorch a trail. What’s so bad about that? You think there has to be a meaning? There doesn’t! You think we need a, what? A message? A bloody moral? We don’t, Myq! All we need’s to be alive and to smash and to run and run and never slow down, and I bet … I
bet
you, darling … I bet that’s something everyone else wants too
.

This morning? He hadn’t believed her. Didn’t buy it. But then this morning she’d shortly thereafter done something with her mouth which had silenced all his objections. Which, alas, was unlikely to reoccur here. So he settled a calming hand on her shoulder, marvelling that he still had such presence of mind (just touching her made his cock stiffen and his brain turn to soup) and took a smart step forwards into the camera light.

‘Yes,’ he told the journo before Tee could speak. ‘That’s exactly it.’

People need a cause
, he’d told her, before she’d got his pants off.
People want the explodo, yeah, fine. But they need to give themselves an excuse for it too.

‘It’s about distribution of wealth,’ he said. He’d practised this. ‘In a federation of three hundred billion, 95% of the wealth is controlled by less than a million individuals. Almost all of them with ties to the megacorps which exist – supposedly – outside the sphere of political enga—’

‘So you’ve got a beef with the superwealthy?’

Mike opened and shut his mouth a few times, monologue ruined.

‘Y … yeah,’ he stammered ‘Yes, because w—’

‘But aren’t you Myquel Dobroba Pela-LeSire LeQuire? Former musical star from the Alliance territories?’

‘Well … well, y—’

‘By which I mean: weren’t you more than a bit bloody rich yourself?’

Ohshit.

He’d known, of course, that sooner or later a positive ID would trickle down from the cops on Gateway. The prospect hadn’t seemed to matter much in the run up: he’d known there was no going back, no return to Normal. Not since the instant Tee’d whispered
let’s take the ship
that fateful morning after the jail.

But for it to happen so quickly? And to hear his name stated with such blunt indifference by an increasingly irritating little pustule in a hat?

‘I … I’ve seen first-hand what financial unfairness looks like,’ he invented madly. ‘As you can see, I’ve turned my back on all that.’

‘So how far does it go, Myq?’ The journo dabbed absently at his forehead. ‘You got a problem with
anyone
earning money? That it? Honest business people too?’

‘Of course not. Only th—’

‘So what if someone’s worked hard all their life? Sweated blood. Let’s say a … a trader. Built up a nice fortune as a result of their labours. You got a problem with him too? You want to go blow up his ship?’

‘Look, I don’t know who y—’

‘A commodity baron, let’s say. Someone in …
ohhh
… someone in the glander-trade.’

To his credit Myq sensed the trap before it yawned open, though not quickly enough to either understand nor evade it. Teesa sucked in a breath and twitched beside him.

‘Someone,’ the journo said, ‘like, let’s pluck a name … someone like Madrien Axcelsus.’

‘Who?’ It rang a bell.

‘Imperial businessman. Nice guy, by all accounts. Badly injured in his prime. Very sad. Only woke up recently.’

‘What’s this got to do w—’

‘Apparently one of his indentured workers shot him in the spine and nicked his shuttle.’

Oh
.

‘Killed six other slaves on the way out.’

Ohhhhhhwait—

‘Set fire to the whole place as she fled.’

You what?

The little man’s beady eyes flicked sideways from Myq to Teesa.

‘Is that the sort of wealth re-distribution you’re about, oh noble social warriors?’

Myq realised as if dreaming, weirdly indignant that the man knew more about Tee than
he
did, that every single other journalist in the room was now ferociously engaged in removing clothes, rubbing and stroking and sweating and sucking with their eyes shut.

But not him. Not the guy in the hat.

Why not?

Only the cameras maintained a dispassionate overwatch, obediently autopanning back and forth between the bastard and his targets.