[02] Elite: Nemorensis (6 page)

‘Why are you really doing this, Teesa?’ the little man hissed.

Teesa said
hah
.

Teesa shrugged, as if she’d known this whole stupid thing would fall apart.

Teesa fired a quiet smile at Myq, like:
at least we tried.

And then withdrew the gun from her pocket.

‘Freedom,’ she said, simply.

‘Very noble,’ the man spat, sweating openly.

And at last it occurred to Myq that in every tremble and snarl, ever since his failed escape, the strange little journalist with the cam-lens above his eye had worn the bitter aspect of a man fully expecting to die. ‘The noble psycho,’ he sneered, ‘who wants to set us all free.’

‘You misunderstand,’ Tee said. Giving him a strange look. ‘I mean
my
freedom.’

Myq became uncomfortably aware his erection was almost certainly visible, at approximately the same instant Teesa primed the gun.

‘Freedom to do exactly what the fuck I like.’

And she shot the journalist through the face.

They’d jumped five times, each in an entirely random direction, pausing only to sunscoop extra fuel, before his heart began to slow down. He packed Tee into the bunk and fed her calmnarcs, guiltily claiming they were celebratory stimms, until she stopped whooping and relaxed enough for him to attach nullgee straps to hold her down. She’d fallen asleep after an hour of blissed-out mumbling.

For her own good
, he told himself.
Heavy day.

Her own good.

They’d run, of course. Left the little guy dead on the floor, hole through his head. Blood and brains and cauterised skin. Left the remainder of the journalistic pack grunting and salivating in orgiastic overload and made sure the nullsignal airlock was locked behind them when they outcycled to freedom.

Still, it hadn’t taken long for the feeds to go live. By the time Tee was asleep, when Myq slumped down at the liminals to go fishing through bandwidths it was clear the circus had been raging for hours already.

There they were: crystal-clear and bloody-bright on every newscast out, two lovers hunched over a body. He shouting purple panic. She howling venomous victory. Neither decipherable. And yeah, cut and spliced through it all, the highlights of the recorded show, ships smashing apart, account number, Tee’s hands on hips, Myq’s swagger, ‘
redistribution of wealth’
, moistened lips, ‘
Why are you really doing this, Teesa?’

Why
are
you really doing this, Tee?

And the shot, and the blood. Over and over.

Phone-ins. Expert opinions. Senior cops vowing capture and conviction. Old band mates on low-width audio from half the galaxy away, claiming
we never liked him much anyway
. An endless, infinite wraparound slog of disgust and doom and impending justice.

And it wasn’t until Myq switched it off with a cry, unable to bear one more Legal Expert, one more Representative of This/That Church, one more Horrified Joe Average, one more
anyone
spitting on his name, that he thought to check the balance in the account they’d set up.

Fifty-three-point-seven million creds, it read.

And there, below the readout, a list of donation reference-messages scrolled endlessly down one side.

keep it up

u guys r so nebular

amazingshowthnx

love you love your work

Very quietly, very quickly, Myquel took some drugs.

The tally had hit fifty-five mill before he could even crack open the stimmpack, and from the bed in the corner, drifting alone through who-knew-what fantastical places in her mind, Teesa made a sound a little like a sob and whispered:

‘
Where are you? Please. Please. I’ve waited so long.
’

Even bombed off his overwrought tits, Myq was fairly sure she wasn’t talking to him.

The little man had barely changed since SixJen last saw him. Death notwithstanding.

Even the lens above his eye didn’t seem out of place – a practical stand-in for the monoshot laser he’d worn when she first met him. ‘Deathstare Dan’ he’d called himself, without irony, presumably to the endless amusement of his piratical comrades. It was a name as cringeworthy as it was inaccurate: she doubted he’d ever actually used the stupid thing to lethal effect. Certainly on the day she’d first discovered him, all those years ago, shivering in the lavatory of the bifurcated
Holyhead
, his attempt to shoot her had succeeded only in scorching his own sub-trendy haircut.

He was, always had been, and in death remained, a loser beneath pity.

Only the blackened hole through the middle of his forehead, neatly cauterised when created but now puckered by morbid contraction and frost-haloed by its spell in the freezer, marked him apart from the cowardly reaver whose life she’d spared long ago. He’d been dead only two hours.

The
The
had arrived at Tun’s Wart an infuriatingly short while after the
Shattergeist
hightailed into the warp. The clattering corridors of the station, mercifully insulated by the heavy walls of the morgue where she now stood, were still buzzing with excitement.

‘That’s him,’ she monotoned at the mortician. ‘Yes, indeed. That’s my poor, poor brother.’ She wouldn’t have bothered trying to make it convincing even if she were capable of emoting, and the mortician simply nodded with the subservient couldn’t-give-a-fuck-ness of a man already in receipt of a generous bribe.

‘I expect you’ll be wanting a moment alone,’ he said.

She nodded. It was good when people knew the game.

She got started the moment he was gone. Pressing the edge of her habitually-carried flechette into the moulding of the camlens and, with a grunt of effort and a viscous slurp, prying it from the corpse’s skull.

Poor little pirate
, she thought. Trying to mean it.

It was strange though, this inanimate reunion. She hadn’t thought of Dan, or of the
Holyhead
itself, in a long while. That bleak black monster had terrorised the exosystemic freight-lanes near Indaol for a half a decade already by the time she decided to go after it, and surely the years since – three? four? – were too few to justify her recollections becoming so foggy. Only an involuntary glance at the scars of her left arm marked the episode’s relevance to her past.

Numb.

Numb in memory and mind
.

The broad strokes of that great victory, at least, remained with her. At that time, she recalled, the hunt which to this day drove and consumed her had gone quiet, becalmed by a frustrating lack of information on the fugitive. No new glimmers of intel, no fresh sightings of the runner. Not for weeks. And as always during such lacunae she’d been determined to stay busy, to hone the skills and accumulate the wealth that would, she knew, give her the edge whenever the Real Chase resumed.

It hadn’t hurt that over the preceding year, while in pursuit of her prime target, she’d grown accustomed to hearing mention of the piratical
Holyhead
and its Captain, one Bradven Delino. So frequently had the dread vessel almost-but-not-quite crossed her path she’d become convinced it was somehow connected to her prey.

(Paranoia, she reflected, had been the last of her emotions to die.)

She’d spent a week at the oort cusp of the Indaol system, watching other mercs come and go. Each of them taking their doomed, dismal little shot at interstellar fame by picking a fight with Delino. She remembered him from the local Most Wanted vids as a disappointingly un-rakish man – the rumoured recipient of several letters of Marque from the Empire. It pleased some of the more senior Imperial senators, so the story went, to subsidise troublemakers near Federation space, and those pirates who bucked the swashbuckling trend in favour of pragmatism, hyperviolence and Actual Results were clearly the preferred agents of mischief.

Bradven Delino was the bigtime. He’d been, quite simply, SixJen’s most triumphant kill, and she remained familiar enough with the terms of instinct and emotion to understand that the mere thought of him should’ve brought her both pride and pleasure. It didn’t. She would’ve traded his scalp, she would’ve traded them
all
, for the luridly-dyed-in-pink-and-orange one that haunted her.

Teesa#32A[M/Tertius]

The runner.

Back in the morgue SixJen broke the strand of connective gristle between Deathstare Dan’s brain and the camera, lip curling at the sticky
snap
. For all her past exploits, all the tales and talents she’d accumulated during breaks in the primary hunt, she refused to let the trail go cold ever again. No more lacunae, no more pauses in pursuit. Not after coming so close last time. She unscrewed the camera’s backplate, shaking out a treacly residue of neuroconductive exotics, and permitted her mind to wander backwards while she worked. The memories of those former glories, increasingly obscured though they were, would have to suffice.

So, yes: the fringes of Indaol. A week watching other bounty hunters being erased by Delino’s outfit like salt in a hot spring. A second week sending an elaborate assortment of jury-rigged junkdrones and jalopies, each too pitiful to merit an assault, to drift through the dust-fields of the system where the
Holyhead
supposedly made its base. Sensors cranked high, remotely piloted at a safe distance.

She’d found Delino’s base on the twelfth day. The thirteenth through eighteenth she simply watched the
Holyhead
come and go. Docking, repairs, departing on its raids. Every time it returned, after hours or days, with ammo spent and cargo pods brimming.

On the nineteenth day, five seconds after the monstrous thing breached back from hyperspace in its accustomed place, she’d flicked a switch inside the
The
and came as close to a sense of excited satisfaction as she ever had.

That
part, obscenely, was the fuzziest memory of all.

The
Holyhead
struck realspace and ploughed into the mines she’d laid. The ripple of plasma that consumed the vessel took out most of its shields and half its turrets. The now-superfluous drones she’d been using, hastily retrofitted with unstable cores, kamikazed cheerfully into its flanks and accounted for the rest. By which time the EM-generators she’d painstakingly mounted on three local asteroids, each rock slightly greater than a mile across, had accumulated sufficient momentum to shove their colossal cargoes out of the oort-field and, one by one, into their targets.

Two had utterly erased the pirates’ base from the moonlet where it was lodged. The ops there hadn’t even had time to dispatch fighters to aid Delino, and SixJen was cautiously confident she could
just
remember the startled comm-shrieks on the wire as the mountainbombs struck.

The
Holyhead
, all but defenceless, was messily severed in two by the third monolith.

Thinking back now, she figured it’d taken about a day to wander through the wreck in search of the Captain. Some parts had clumsily autosealed against the vacuum, so she’d been obligated to schlep through fractured decks with pistol in hand, ungainly in her RemLok suit, killing those worth killing, collecting IDs on those bearing bounties. (That, she guessed, had probably been the part she’d enjoyed the most. It was difficult to say.)

She’d found Delino half dead in his cabin, in a section of the hulk still sealed from the void. A suite of rooms without personal effect or affectation; Spartan and spotless. She’d known, then, what he was.

But she’d said the word anyway, just to be sure. And he’d looked her in the eye and nodded. Said it back. And then she’d killed him.

And this –
This –
was the part she remembered most clearly.

Standing over him, as his weightless blood formed a grim coriolis, as she’d unbuckled the arm of her suit to calmly slice a fresh scar into her left arm –
number seven
– she’d contemplated the man’s approach to the obsession they shared. Shared, in fact, with all twelve of their brothers: those alive and those dead.

It was impressive, she’d decided. Throughout the whole of the great hunt which defined her she’d elected to seek the prey alone, deadly and determined, without companion or confederate. Her game, her rules, her cunning. But this man Delino? He’d raised a small army. He’d founded an enclave. He’d stretched forth his resources with far greater daring.

It’d got him killed in the end, but still.

Something
, she remembered muttering,
to think about.

On the way back to the
The
she’d found ‘Deathstare’ Dan hiding in the shitter. Once he’d got the tedious business of self-defence out the way, hair-eradicating skull-implanted lasershot and all, she’d given him a calculating glare and made up her mind.

‘You’re coming with me,’ she’d said.

Back in the now the mortician poked his head round the door.

‘You nearly done?’ he grumbled to the frozen air. ‘Only they’ll be wanting a report, and if h—’

‘Piss off or I’ll shoot you in the crotch.’

‘Rightio.’

She finished removing the datachips from the camlens interior and crammed it messily back into the socket. And spared a final glance for the face of ‘Deathstare’ Dan Megrith. Minion #1.

‘New life,’ she’d told him, the day she cut him loose. ‘New name. My gifts to you.’

‘Wh-wh-what’s the catch?’

She’d smiled. This was back when that was still a thing she sometimes did.

‘Constant vigilance.’

She’d told him what to look out for. She’d named the prey. She’d provided the strange and senseless human ‘
who
’, though of course had said nothing of the ‘
why
’. She’d given him a tiny iron clip, a magnetised earring he was instructed to wear at all times. ‘To stop the runner,’ she’d said, tapping her head, ‘from making you hers. To make you immune.’ She’d suggested he take work as an info-narc, a cop, a crim, a journalist. Someone, anyway, with big ears. She’d told him she’d implanted an extremely expensive micro-beacon into his snazzy new livestreaming biocamera, and she’d told him it would unfailingly auto-ping the
The
in the event of its removal. Or of his death. Or, critically, of him whistling aloud a specific little ditty, which she then proceeded to teach him.