[01] Elite: Wanted (17 page)

‘Her name is Ziva Eschel and she’s a bounty hunter.’ Harlan said and sent her a data packet across their open comms link. Ravindra opened it and information started cascading down her vision. Ten years in the federation police in Beta Hydri, five years as a Viper pilot. Ten years as a bounty hunter. ‘She’s taken down some heavy ships as well: the
Broken Heart
, the
Widow Maker
, the
Red Goat.
’

‘She was the one that took Vanos down?’ Ravindra asked, impressed despite herself. She was scan-reading the information. It was telling the story of a pilot who was a bit more than competent but also someone who was careful, clever and thorough and, unusually for a bounty hunter, had always kept on the right side of the law. She didn’t want this woman on her six, not at the moment. ‘What makes you think that she’s after me?’

‘I’ve got some data rats in a number of different systems working for me. They’re paid to look for certain keywords, including the
Red Hourglass
.’

The
Red Hourglass
, the name their victims had given the
Song of Stone
. Most people who were even aware of the ship’s existence assumed that it was an Imperial privateer. It wasn’t enough in itself but Ravindra didn’t like the coincidence that this Eschel had done a search on the
Red Hourglass
and then come to Whit’s Station.

‘There’s more,’ Harlan said grimly. ‘She pulled your records. Imperial and Federal.’

Shit
, Ravindra thought. ‘I’m going to have to kill her,’ she said.

‘Not here.’

‘For someone I’ve given a lot of money to over the years, you’re saying no to me a lot.’

‘Because you keep wanting to break the rules, the ones that make this place work.’

‘What, no preferential service for loyalty?’ she asked, knowing the answer. She could see the fusion torch of the
Dragon Queen
’s engine now as the ship fell towards Motherlode’s atmosphere. Harlan turned to look at her.

‘If I make one exception, everyone knows they can’t trust me.’

Ravindra turned to face Harlan. ‘She’s a bounty hunter.’

‘She’s paid up. You want to take her, you do it off my station. It’ll be made clear to her, in no uncertain terms, that the same applies. She can’t hunt here. If she does, she gets spaced. Same goes for you but it would piss me off a lot more.’

Ravindra nodded, rubbing her face.

‘Look,’ Harlan said. ‘Everyone’s going to know what she is. Maybe you’ll be lucky and someone else will take care of her for you, and then I’ll have to come down on them for breaking the rules.’

Ravindra was of the opinion that she’d been lucky many times in her life, but she didn’t think that today was going to be one of those times. She walked away and stood on the observation deck over the docking berth levels, looking down as the Fer-de-Lance, the
Dragon Queen
, came in. The piloting was done with the grace of economy. No unnecessary movements, no flourishes, just like the ship itself, a utilitarian, armoured spearhead whose modifications promised speed, manoeuvrability and a prodigious capacity for violence. She didn’t like the sound of the pilot. Or rather, she did – Eschel sounded careful, confident and capable. To Ravindra’s mind she was what a bounty hunter should be, she just didn’t want Eschel hunting
her
. This was not what she needed right now; although it was difficult to imagine when she
would
need to be pursued by such a capable bounty hunter. Ravindra turned and headed up towards the main concourse. As she walked she checked both her burst pistols. A moment later she received a comms request from Harlan. Ravindra glanced up at the security cameras and then opened the link.

‘Keeping kind of a close eye on me, aren’t you?’

‘Remember what I said – she paid for protection,’ Harlan told her.

‘Before or after she took down Harris and those idiots in the Sidewinders?’ Ravindra asked. As if she didn’t know. That had been a message. Ravindra decided she would re-watch the footage of the dogfight. She would analyse the other woman, look for weaknesses. ‘If she tries to take me or kill me, then she’s going down, otherwise I’ll play nice.’ Ravindra cut the comms link.

She looked up to see McCauley sat at a table outside one of the ‘coffee’ stands, sipping from a small cup, looking straight at her.

What is his problem?
she wondered. She was angry enough to go and get in his face but she just didn’t have the time. She sent out a comms request.

Whit’s Station kindly gave the
Dragon Queen
the sort of welcome scan that scorched paint. Ziva returned the favour, careful to keep her own active arrays in their commercial-zone mode so that anybody who happened to be paying attention wouldn’t know how hard the
Dragon Queen
could burn back if she wanted to.

‘You’ve paid up, so you can come in,’ shrugged the avatar of Harlan Whit. ‘If you hunt on my station or even lie in wait, I take your ship and then I space you. You might not be very popular or very welcome, but that’s your problem, not mine. You pay me and behave, no one touches you or your ship. That’s as far as it goes. Cross my lines and God help you.’

Ziva raised an eyebrow. ‘Anyone touches my ship, my ship will get very cross with them, and none of us would like that. I have a Sidewinder pilot with no bounty on him and I’d like to release him back into the wild. See if he can find some new friends who can take better care of him this time. I’m keeping the other one. You have a problem with that?’

‘
I
don’t. Can’t promise he hasn’t got friends here who might think otherwise, rules notwithstanding.’

‘I suggest you keep an eye on them, then. I won’t be here long.’ Ziva shut the channel. She’d paid and Whit had a solid reputation, and that was that. It wasn’t going to be much of a stay anyway. Let the Sidewinder pilot out, a quick check around the docking bays for the
Song of Stone
, send a few avatars out into the station to see if anyone had anything they wanted to say about Khanguire. Then out and gone and back to Stopover to ditch Newman. She nosed the
Dragon Queen
in closer to the station, lightly scanning all the other ships in the area. In high orbit overhead, five thousand miles above the aerostat of Whit’s Station, a refitted Federation corvette scanned her back. She pinged it for a transponder signal and got nothing. She had the
Dragon Queen
memorise its configuration to compare against Federation data cores when she was back somewhere more amenable.
Another pirate?

She pulled back the fuel scoops and took over manual control of the Fer-de-Lance, feeling the tiny nudges back and forth from the whirls and eddies of the gas giant’s upper atmosphere. She slipped the
Dragon Queen
gently under the aerostat’s mushroom canopy and the balloon that held it aloft as the station opened a bay for her. The
Dragon Queen
kept her lasers primed and engines hot ready for a quick and nasty getaway if needed, but no one had locks on her. Ziva glided into the station, keyed the ship’s energy bomb to her own life-monitor and adjusted the
Dragon Queen
’s safety protocols so it would look like the E-bomb would go off if she were killed – it wouldn’t, but maybe the appearance would give any trigger-happy pirates who came her way at least a momentary pause for thought. The ship settled into its docking cradle. It had been a while since she’d landed in an aerostat. All the fun of docking with an orbital station and gravity as well. At least it wasn’t spinning.

She hadn’t even unstrapped when a blank avatar winked into life beside her and a disembodied voice spoke.

‘I hear you’re looking for me,’ the voice said. It was probably a woman, deep and perfectly controlled, although that didn’t mean anything. Avatars had algorithms to create voices just as much as they did to create faces.

‘Really? Who are you and how much are you worth?’

‘There’s a bar on level four. It’s called Hope. Meet me there – I’ll buy you a drink.’

Ziva snorted. ‘Shall I wear a shirt with a big cross-hair on it too?’
Who the fuck was this?

‘If you like.’ The avatar winked out as the link broke. Ziva made a face.

‘I don’t suppose you have any idea who that was?’ she asked the ship. ‘Any way to trace it back to whichever one of the several bounties I’m sure are here?’

‘We have voice transcripts of Ravindra Khanguire’s exit hearing when she was released from Warren Prison. There is a good match. Would you like to hear them?’

Khanguire? For a moment that stopped her dead. But it was hardly likely, surely? ‘Go on then. While you’re at it, start crawling around all the station subsystems and see if the
Song of Stone
is here.’ While the
Dragon Queen
piped Khanguire into her ear, she set up a dozen avatars and cast them out into the station, hunting for anyone who might have information they’d like to sell. ‘Really? You think that was really Khanguire?’

‘The match is a good one. Not excellent.’

‘Show me the pictures we have of her and get me surveillance on that place she mentioned.’
She
. Damn. Ziva
wanted
it to be Khanguire.

Pictures flashed up across the cockpit monitors. Ravindra Khanguire as she was almost twenty years ago. Slender – wasted from her prison term – dark skin, tall, statuesque. Unsettlingly like En.

‘There is no surveillance available,’ said the ship.

‘Marvellous.’ Ziva let off an irritable sigh. ‘Send a spy drone ahead of me, then. Patch it to my Fresnels.’ She got up and collected her pistols. Chances were it wasn’t Khanguire waiting for her. Whoever it was, what she was about to do was really stupid.
We’ll see how much that protection money was worth then, shall we?

Hope was one of the oldest bars on the station. It had the most history. It was a small cramped place made of various nooks and crannies amongst the support struts of the station. Enough to provide a degree of privacy, as did the countermeasures that Harry – barman, owner and oddly taciturn stim junkie – had installed. Hope wasn’t a party establishment, it wasn’t where crew and captains gathered to drink and tell stories. Hope was where you did business. On one of the few occasions that anyone had coaxed more than a few syllables out of the jittery Harry, he’d told them that was why he’d named it Hope.

Ravindra had a reasonably central table looking at the door. One hand was on the glass of brandy that she felt she both needed and deserved, the other was under the table close to one of her burst pistols. She watched as the door opened and a small robot floated into the bar and had a good look around. Harry reached under the counter and drew his EMP pulse projector.

‘It’s all right, Harry,’ Ravindra told him. ‘That’s with me.’

‘I don’t care,’ Harry groused. ‘It’ll make the other customers nervous.’

Ravindra glanced around at the completely empty bar.

‘It’s the principle,’ Harry explained.

Ravindra looked up at the robot. ‘Lose the ‘bot.
You
don’t try anything, neither will I.’

The robot finished looking around and then left. Ravindra imagined that with all the jamming and countermeasures in the bar it hadn’t found much anyway. She tapped her comp ring on the table transfer pad, spending some credits as she did so.

‘Disappear please, Harry,’ she said. Harry nodded and made himself discreet.

She hadn’t been sure what to expect. Most bounty hunters she only saw from the outside of their heavily armed ships. There weren’t that many who had the ovaries to set foot on Whit’s Station, regardless of whether they’d rendered unto Caesar or not. What she saw was a small wiry woman dressed in a t-shirt and a pair of jeans. Ravindra assumed that she was concealing significant armour under the clothes, although if she was, it wasn’t at all obvious how. A burst pistol hung from her hip and her belt had a number of little loops and pouches that could hide all sorts of nasty little tricks. She had short spiky black hair and there was something vaguely feral about her. She looked like a fighter.

‘Eschel?’

The bounty hunter nodded. ‘Khanguire. You didn’t change your face when you came out of prison, then?’

No
, Ravindra thought. She was older, a little fuller in the body because she wasn’t having to hunt for mine-rats to supplement meagre prison rations. Otherwise she looked much as she had when she came out; except now she had her hair again. It was held in a braid all the way to her waist. Gods, how she’d missed her hair. It was her one concession to vanity. She gestured at the seat in front of her. Eschel looked at the chair and then glanced at the door; clearly she didn’t like having her back to it.

‘Drink?’ offered Ravindra.

‘What have you got?’ Eschel kept a wary distance.

‘You look like a whiskey girl to me, bourbon – not Scotch. Harry keeps some good stuff here for Harlan. That do you?’

‘Half right.’ Eschel came slowly closer and eased into the chair directly across the table. ‘Scotch though, not bourbon. I took a bounty a few months back who was smuggling it out of New Caledonia. Gave me a taste for it.’

Ravindra tapped the transfer pad on the table again and then got up and walked behind the bar. ‘I need my life to get significantly less complicated.’ She poured a generous Scotch and brought it back to the table. Eschel stared into the glass as she swirled it. She seemed oddly hesitant.

‘Don’t we all?’ she said at last. ‘But I can help you there. Turn yourself in. It’s all about as simple as it gets after that.’

‘Trust me, that’s just not the case.’

‘Then what’s to talk about? I chose not to wear the shirt with the cross-hairs, by the way.’

‘Sure?’

The bounty hunter blinked and cocked her head. ‘I spend half my life around shit-stains and scum and junkers. But to be honest, I thought you were better than that. I’d admire the professionalism if it wasn’t for the people you killed.’ She gave a little shrug. ‘Also, you can never be
quite
sure I haven’t got a little bit of anti-matter somewhere tagged to my vital signs. We can start shooting at each other if you’d like to find out.’