[01] Elite: Wanted (11 page)

The
Unkindness
raced for the system of rings. Clear of the minefield, Ziva fired her own engines hard. The
Dragon Queen
had the best customised drives that money could buy but the Adder was up at maximum burn. Inside her cocoon, the
Dragon Queen
flooded Ziva’s system with adrenaline and a swarm of nanites to keep all the capillaries open in her brain while they shut off most of the blood to her arms and legs and forced her heart into overdrive. The only time Ziva had ever wished she wasn’t built the way she was had been the day she’d discovered that big men like Newman could push the limit just that little bit more. The
Dragon Queen
would grudgingly let her sustain an acceleration of about sixteen gravities if she was in the cockpit gel-couch and let it take over her blood-chemistry and circulatory system. Grudgingly.

Even with stretched engines, the
Unkindness
was maxing at ten gravities. At that sort of acceleration, Ziva couldn’t move and couldn’t speak and the
Dragon Queen
pretty much had to fly itself. It watched her eyes and took a few basic commands from the way she moved them. Sometimes from a sequence of blinks.

The
Unkindness
abruptly flipped, decelerating at full burn as it neared the ring system and suddenly Ziva was closing fast. The Adder fired a salvo of missiles. Ziva switched the laser targeting to her Fresnels and started taking them out before they could get close enough to fragment into sub-munitions. She held her fire on the Adder itself until she knew she could hit it exactly where she wanted to. Newman was wasting his time. He was hopelessly out-gunned. He had to see that, didn’t he?

The
Dragon Queen
autonomously launched a salvo of interceptor dronelets. The defensive pulse lasers opened up again. A lone rogue broke through and a pinhead-sized anti-hydrogen warhead detonated a few metres from the
Dragon Queen
’s skin. The ship shuddered as its shields absorbed the sudden storm of high-energy exotic particles.

Another few seconds and she’d be on top of him. Ziva flipped the Fer-de-Lance, matching the Adder’s deceleration. The
Unkindness
fired another salvo. By now, the two missiles she’d fired from the minefield were keeping station with him but he still wasn’t getting that he was beaten. She had one of the two missiles target the Adder’s own salvo and blew them to pieces close enough to junk his shields and scorch his hull.
Give it up, Newman
. But she couldn’t talk to him with the engines on full burn and he wouldn’t be able to answer even if he wanted to.

The Adder’s beam laser began firing. The
Dragon Queen
twisted into corkscrewed flight, making herself harder to hit and spreading the damage as widely as she could; but a single beam laser wasn’t going to hurt a Fer-de-Lance in a hurry. Half the time the Adder was firing through the plume of her engines anyway, wasting itself.

They were down to less than a thousand clicks between them but the Adder had almost reached the rings. Newman launched another salvo of missiles – as though he somehow hadn’t noticed what had happened to the one before.

What the hell are you doing?
Ziva took out his salvo and this time she fired back, beaded up on the Adder’s engines, keeping the power low on her dual military X-ray lasers, not wanting to do any more damage than she absolutely had to …

The
Unkindness
exploded as though every containment field inside its fusion core had failed at once. The
Dragon Queen
’s reactive cockpit went opaque and space turned utterly black. Displays lit up smoothly around Ziva, following her eyes. The Fer-de-Lance cut its acceleration to a more tolerable three gravities.

‘I didn’t hit him
that
hard!

‘The detonation of the
Unkindness
was a self-destruct device.’

‘And the pilot?’

‘There is no escape pod beacon. The pilot is gone.’

Along with her thirty-five thousand credits, unless she could prove he’d been on the ship. Which would mean cutting a deal with that jackass Veil back on the Black Mausoleum and that didn’t seem too likely. ‘No. Newman’s not the blaze of glory type. He didn’t blow himself up out of spite. He’s out there. Start scanning those rings and moons.’
Shit! Unless he wasn’t on it in the first place. Unless she’d got it wrong …

‘That will take a very long time.’

‘Do it anyway. Do all the trajectory maths stuff, whatever you need to do. He came out of that explosion somehow.’

‘That is highly improbable.’

Which made it all the sweeter when the
Dragon Queen
finally worked how the pilot had done it – how he’d collapsed all the magnetics in just the right way to create a funnel in the middle of his miniature nova and catapulted his escape pod out through the vortex and straight into the mess of rings and miniature moons, and how he’d used the explosion to mask his manoeuvring. He was sitting in the middle of a ring system now, powered down and silent. The
Dragon Queen
was right – searching the debris would have taken a year or more. But if you started with the premise that Newman
hadn’t
blown himself up, if you reconstructed what else had to have happened, no matter how unlikely, in order for him to survive, then there weren’t so many places he could have ended up. It only took the
Dragon Queen
half an hour to pick him out.

There was always the chance he was carrying an anti-matter warhead in there with him. Ziva took him the quiet way, letting him think she’d missed him and then dropping a salvage and recovery drone as she passed by. A dozen tiny bots detached themselves from the
Dragon Queen
’s hull and swarmed over to Newman’s pod. Three of them bored into it, slow and steady, while the others sealed the breaches they left behind so the pod wouldn’t register even a microscopic loss of pressure. Once they were in, the bots found the pod’s single passenger and sedated him. The rest was easy. The recovery drone brought him back to the
Dragon Queen
and Ziva reeled him in with the fuel scoops. She took a good long time sweeping both him and the pod for any kind of radiation, for viruses, bio-contaminants and anything that might possibly explode. When she was done, she took a good look at him. Thirty-five thousand credits, sleeping like a baby in front of her.

‘Hello, Newman,’ she said.

‘The station’s just hard scanned us,’ Orla said. Jenny looked up from her control panel. Jonty remained slumped in his chair. He had been drinking steadily since the ice asteroid. Ravindra should have said something but she didn’t want the fight right now. She felt her heart sink.

What now?
she wondered. A nimbus of flame surrounded them as they made re-entry, dropping towards the bands of colour that were Motherlode’s surface.
Whit’s Station
looked tiny against the backdrop of the gas giant.

Harlan Whit’s face appeared on the comms screen monitor. The image was covered in static. Orla used her hologramatic control gloves to throw the image up onto the cockpit. Part of the transparent hull became the screen. The static cleared as they completed re-entry.

‘What happened to you?’ Harlan asked.

‘What’s up, Harlan?’ Ravindra responded.

‘Looks like you took a bit of a beating.’

Ravindra moved her hands and brought the
Song of Stone
in on a longer approach than normal. They had switched their transponder back on, which was normally more than enough for Whit’s Station. This time, however, the station had hit them with a scan so active it had probably lowered Jonty’s sperm count.

‘Is there a problem?’ Ravindra asked, then she cut the comms link and turned to Orla. ‘Any weapon locks?’

Orla glanced back at her. ‘That’s probably something I would have mentioned,’

They were all tired. The adrenalin had worn off and left them edgy and narky with each other. Well, that and the death of one of their own.

‘That’s not how I play, you know that, girl,’ Harlan told them when Ravindra came back online. He must have guessed what she had asked Orla. He was one of the few people that Ravindra would let get away with calling her ‘girl’. ‘We’ve got some things to discuss, though. You need to come and see me when you land.’

‘Sure,’ Ravindra said, not liking where this was going. The
Song
hit some turbulence and Jonty made a complaining noise from behind her as her hands traced patterns in light to minimise the effects of the chop. ‘I’ll speak to you soon,’ Ravindra told Harlan and then nodded to Orla, who cut the link. Ravindra thought for a moment. The
Song
was flying smooth now. Below her she could see thunderheads gathering. Lightning crackled, electrical displays thousands of miles long. Ahead of the
Song
the huge mushroom shape of Whit’s Station was getting closer and closer.

‘This is a long way from over,’ she said. She glanced behind her. Jenny looked absorbed in going over the damage control reports from the fight on the ice asteroid, but Ravindra knew the engineer well enough to know that she was worried. Then she glanced at Jonty. He was a drunken, red-eyed, tear-stained mess, which wasn’t what she needed right now. She glanced at Orla, who was looking back at her.

‘I’ll get some Purge down him,’ Orla told her. ‘He’ll be fine.’

Ravindra nodded, unconvinced. Still, she turned back to the station, which now filled their view through the transparent part of the hull.

‘You going to use the docking computer?’ Jenny asked.

‘Real pilots don’t use docking computers,’ Ravindra answered, smiling despite herself. It was an old routine.

‘But they do sometimes fly into the side of stations, right?’ Jenny asked. Ravindra could hear the smile in her voice. Ravindra glided the
Stone
into the station and then triggered the forward manoeuvring thrusters and almost exactly killed the forward momentum. With a flick of her fingers she extended the landing struts and brought the
Song
into land.

‘I only did that once,’ Ravindra said as she ran through the post-flight checks. ‘And I was drunk.’

It was an old joke. It had happened during the celebrations just after the Imperial attempt to control the system. Usually it made them all smile, but it felt a little empty without Harnack there to join in. Ravindra thought about him, frozen down in the hold. There wouldn’t be time to do anything with his body. She unstrapped the seatbelts and stood up. Turning around she found Jonty glaring at her over a drink bulb full of flavoured vodka.

‘Jenny …’ Ravindra began.

‘I’m on it,’ Jenny said, meaning that she would do what she could about the damage the
Song
had suffered.

‘I don’t know how long we’ve got,’ Ravindra said.

‘Go and speak to Harlan, we’ll handle this,’ Orla told her.

Ravindra nodded and walked out of the bridge.

‘Mum?’

Shit!
Ravindra thought as she heard Ji’s voice come over her personal comms link. He sounded angry.

‘What the
fuck
did you think you were doing?’ he shouted over the link.

Ravindra was walking through the station’s main multilevel commercial concourse. It was lined with shops, bars, cafes and restaurants of varying degrees of quality and repute.

What do you want me to do, Ji?
She wondered.
Have a screaming match with you in the middle of the station?

‘Ji, I’m sorry, we’re going to have to talk about this later,’ she told him over the comms link. A screen popped open in her lenses, showing her son’s angry face.

‘You never do! We don’t talk! You just tell me stuff and expect me to do it, and when I try to reason with you, suddenly you don’t have the time!’

Yes, because becoming a pirate’s reasonable; it’s what every mother dreams of for her kid
, Ravindra thought.

‘Look, I’m right in the middle of something …’

‘Criminal shit …’

‘And I can’t talk right now. I promise you we’ll talk later.’

‘Talk? People can’t talk to you, look what you did to Merkel! One of my friends!’

No, he really isn’t.

‘I’ve got to go.’ Ravindra had reached the bank of elevators that would lead her right up the centre of the station and into the head of the mushroom where Harlan’s office was.

‘If you’re into something, I can help,’ Ji said. There was desperation in his voice.

‘We’ll speak later,’ Ravindra told him. She was starting to get looks from other people waiting by the elevators.

‘Don’t hang up on me!’ Ji screamed. Ravindra cut the link. She wondered how, less than a day ago, she had been in a fight for her life and kept her head without any problem. A conversation with her son, on the other hand, and she was already shaken up.

The elevator doors opened and she stepped in. The elevator sent a signal to her ring computer letting her know that it would be taking her up into the restricted section.

Security, in the shape of a couple of Harlan’s dependable old hands, was waiting for her in the carpeted hallway as she stepped out of the elevator. Ravindra knew them both and they exchanged friendly greetings. To her surprise they didn’t take her direct to Harlan’s office. Instead they took her to the station’s control centre. Inside there was a raised platform that ran between rows of sunken control panels where all the workings of the station, from financial and life support to the automated hydrogen mining operation, were handled. A significant part of the personnel present ran air traffic control and looked after the port facilities.

They used hologramatic control gloves and a mixture of glasses and monocular heads-up-displays, though much of the wall was covered in flat screens and holo-projections of various control systems for ease of use by the section supervisors. The rest of the wall was a huge transparent window looking out over Motherlode’s planetary horizon.

From the station’s position Ravindra could see an Anaconda, wreathed in flame, making a classic flat-bottomed entry into the atmosphere. The spearhead-shaped craft was an old design, but this one looked new. Sleek, for such a large ship, it displaced more than nine hundred tonnes, and it was heavily armoured. Although nominally a freighter, Ravindra knew that some navies still used the Anaconda in a frigate or light cruiser role. They were fast for their size and could be modified to pack quite a punch. Although Ravindra would never consider trading in her Cutter, she had always thought that the Anaconda were magnificent craft. That hadn’t stopped her attacking a few in her time.