[01] Elite: Wanted (8 page)

‘
We
attacked
him
,’ Jenny said. There was just the slightest hint of accusation in her voice. Ravindra thought back, running through what had happened. It had seemed obvious that he was going to turn on them – the snipers, the insistence on meeting on the asteroid when the payment could have just as easily been handled on Whit’s Station. As certain as she had been then, after the fact she was finding explanations for everything. The snipers were reasonable operational security to an ex-military mind. To the paranoid, the crew of the
Song
’s close relationship with the ‘authorities’ on Whit’s Station was too much of a risk.

‘It was a burn. There’s no question of it,’ Orla told the engineer, glancing over at Ravindra as she did so. ‘We start second guessing and we’ll screw up. Harnack had seventeen hard years at this game, more before he ended up in the Warren. We all know the risks.’ Jonty’s head had jerked up at the mention of his lover’s name but the goldskin remained silent.

‘Do we run or deal with the Syndicate?’ Ravindra put to them.

‘Can we offload the cargo anywhere else?’ Orla asked.

‘It’s too hot,’ Ravindra said.

‘If we run, we may as well leave the cargo for them somewhere. Maybe they’ll leave us alone,’ Orla said.

‘I don’t think they knew what Newman was planning,’ Ravindra said.

‘I think we should contact the Syndicate. Give them the cargo, get paid, smooth things over. This mess isn’t our creation,’ Ravindra stated.
And then we don’t have to run
, she added silently.

‘You think they’ll care whose mess it is?’ Jenny asked bitterly.

‘I think it’s worth the risk. We still have the option to run if it all goes wrong,’ Orla said.

We do, but the longer we leave it the less chance we have
, Ravindra thought, though she kept it to herself.

‘We agreed?’ Orla asked. Jenny nodded but didn’t look happy. Ravindra nodded as well. The three of them turned to Jonty.

‘Newman,’ was all he said.

Orla was shaking her head.

‘That’s exactly the shit we don’t do,’ she insisted.

‘Never personal,’ Ravindra said. ‘Dane’s L—’

‘Fuck Dane’s Law and fuck Dane. Where’d that get him? Dead, that’s where, just like Harnack!’ Then Jonty’s face crumpled and the tears came. He slammed his fist into the edge of the control panel before slumping back in his seat. Jenny was closest to him. She reached over to squeeze his arm.

‘In time, brother,’ Orla soothed. ‘In time, we promise.’

You got all sorts in this job. Maintenance supervisor John Graham turned out to be one of the harmless ones. He lived in a decently sized multi-function cabin in a slightly low-gravity section of the station. Not prime real-estate but close enough to show he a had credits to his name. He had a nice smile and bright eyes under greying black hair, and the easy happy manner of someone who’d largely had what he wanted from life because what he’d wanted had never been too much. From Ziva, all he wanted was to be able to say he’d met the infamous Blink Dog. After five minutes of fan-boy awe and asking all sorts of dumb questions about whether this, that, or the other was true, he asked Ziva if she was as fast as they said she was. Ziva drew her pistol on him and he spent the whole next minute gawping and gasping and asking her to do it again – and could he make a recording of her doing it, please? She told him that would be just fine as long as he didn’t mind it ending with her shooting him and could he please tell her what he thought she might like to know.

‘That guy you were looking for. I heard a couple of his crew. I didn’t know they were with him until your avatar came showing their pictures. Didn’t think anything of it at the time, but I heard them talking about the
Black Mausoleum
. Kind of pricked my ears, that. That’s why I remembered them.’

‘How long ago?’

‘Couple of weeks.’ When he’d told her the rest of what he’d heard, it wasn’t the wasted trip she’d feared it would be. Putting Graham’s story together with what she already knew, Newman was working with the Judas Syndicate – with the Veil of Beta Hydri – and if Newman was working with a Judas crew then there was a very good chance the Syndicate had been behind the destruction of the
Pandora
. The Syndicate’s involvement brought its own problems. The smuggler she’d jumped with his Glen Halyconia six months ago had probably been working for the same Veil and she’d been to the
Black Mausoleum
before; but figuring out who was the Judas Veil in a thriving system like Beta Hydri would be like finding a needle in a haystack. The New Caledonia police already had an entire task force dedicated to nothing else. Which left her two courses: ask them, or find Newman and ask
him
instead.

Graham didn’t want money or any sort of reward. When he was done and Ziva had finished pacing his flat, talking to the
Dragon Queen
and using his bandwidth to search the Federation systems archives for anything they might have on the Syndicate in Beta Hydri, she felt almost sorry for him. She took him to a bar as thanks – on the promise that he stopped acting as if she was some kind of celebrity. He was fun enough company for a while, drinking and quietly listening to her stories. It felt good telling someone else about what she did and how things had gone down and the scrapes and squeaks she’d been through. Nothing confidential, nothing the world didn’t already know if it had cared to read the news reports, but it felt good having someone listen,
really
listen and pay attention the way Enaya never did. She might have stayed with him longer if the drink hadn’t got him. He told her she had beautiful eyes and she pointed out they were top-range Fresnel Technology implants that had cost her a small fortune and so they’d damn well better be beautiful. She left not long after that. The Purge still in her system made being in a bar rather less fun than it ought to be.

There was a message waiting for her back on the
Dragon Queen
. Darkwater had finally managed to reconstruct the outward jump trails of the two attacking ships. They’d followed one out into deep space and the other to the outskirts of 61 Cygni but after that, they were a dead end. No telling where the attacker ships had gone.

61 Cygni. Another place to add to her list.

Ziva left Pethes and Toad Hall, made the jump to Beta Hydri and docked in orbit over New Caledonia. Every civilised system had a few cracks and crevices that people like the Judas Syndicate could slip into, but Beta Hydri was special in that regard: Beta Hydri was home to the infamous Black Mausoleum, an old research station in its own weird elliptical orbit sharply offset from the ecliptic of the system. The Mausoleum had been built as the hub of an array of X-ray telescopes, but that had been almost a millennium ago and the station had been abandoned for centuries. With its odd orbit, it had been all but forgotten. No one remembered its original name any more. In the sketchy history that followed, it had been home to all sorts, largely ignored until it was taken over by a smuggling ring that had brought it all the wrong attention.

And there things got interesting. The New Caledonia police had tracked the smugglers, seized the station and that had looked like being that – a nice clean bust. But when they went to trial, New Caledonia had their arses handed to them: in the back and forth of politics between the Federation and the Empire and the formal incorporation of New Caledonia into the Federation, the Black Mausoleum had never been included in the treaty papers. An oversight, no doubt, but technically the station was still an Imperial outpost. The smugglers counter-sued the New Caledonia government. The Empire, when it eventually realised it had been invaded, gleefully backed them up and shouted about illegal acts of war. The Mausoleum had reverted to being a hideout for smugglers and pirates for a while as the Federation and the Empire argued, until the Lupus Group had moved in with the grudging backing of both sides And now, as far as Ziva could tell, it was exactly what it had been before – a hideout for smugglers and pirates, but now with all the hull breaches patched and with breathable pressurised air through most of the station and a thin veneer of law and order painted over it for the benefit of the New Caledonia authorities. Everyone knew you didn’t have to scratch very hard to make it flake.

All of which made the Mausoleum not the sort of place where a bounty hunter in a Fer-de-Lance showed up, parked her ship, went to a bar, asked a few questions and then came back and expected to find her ship still there. In fact she probably shouldn’t be expecting to leave the bar at all, at least not in one piece; so for this, Ziva sent the
Dragon Queen
ahead without her and switched her identity. She gave herself a flimsy backup that wouldn’t take too much scrutiny and then a more solid second one beneath. The new her – Olivia Red – bought herself a berth on the
Myla
, a dubious Python almost certainly fitted out for low-rent smuggling. The
Dragon Queen
would wait, running silent out in empty space, until called for. Which would make for an interesting exit, if it came to that.

Olivia Red kept herself to herself aboard the
Myla
. She stayed in her cabin and spoke to the crew as little as possible and generally gave the impression of wanting to be left alone. When they reached the Black Mausoleum, she paid in credit packs and found herself somewhere cheap to stay. The station was a hole, tiny, barely managing to fake half a standard gravity even around its rim. No matter. With a bit of luck, someone would have the curiosity to poke around and realise that Olivia Red was a fake. The Judas Syndicate had their fingers all over the Mausoleum
.
If she’d guessed right then someone would poke through the flimsy false identity to discover a dubious past calculated to stir the Syndicate’s interest in a vaguely unfriendly sort of way. Enough to provoke a visit from station security, at least.

Of course, there was always a chance that they'd poke through the second false identity too and work out who she
really
was, at which point life would quickly become very interesting in a particularly shitty sort of way.

Three hours after closing the door of her room behind her, down in the low-rent, low-gravity inner ring of the station, a pair of steroid junkers burst in on her. They were big men, six foot six and easily twice her body-mass. They towered over her as they walked in, full of their strength. Three million years of evolution still hadn’t done the male brain many favours when it came to size and its apparent importance, but Ziva backed away anyway, duly putting on a façade of female fear. The junkers made themselves at home, one sitting on the corner of her bed, the other drawing up a chair in front of the door so she’d have to go past him to get out.

‘What do you want?’ She had an open link to the
Dragon Queen
. Eventually the
Dragon Queen
would start trawling databases for who these guys were and who they worked for and all that sort of thing; the only snag being that the
Dragon Queen
was currently fifteen light-minutes away. By the time it got the question, found an answer and sent it back, chances were it wouldn’t matter anymore.

One of the junkers studied her hard. It was a look meant to be fierce and intimidating. It might have worked better if his eyes weren’t just a little too squashed together. ‘Olivia Red, is it?’

Ziva nodded and quivered. It was hard to resist hamming the act up just to see how far she could take it before they twigged they were being played.

‘What’s your business in the Black Mausoleum?’

‘None of yours. What do you want?’

The two junkers exchanged a glance. One reached inside his jacket and pulled out a card. Most places people just swapped electronic tags as a matter of course, but the Black Mausoleum had started life as a science station so long ago that they‘d still used physical cards. No one had ever bothered to change the system. Physicists, Ziva had discovered, liked swipe-cards. She had no idea why.

‘Cameron Sweet. Station security.’ The junker passed his card. Ziva took it and pretended to look at it while the sub-dermal reader in the tip of her left index finger quietly cloned its magnetics and her Fresnel eyes snatched an image. She slipped a Sly-Spy microdot tracker onto it for good measure. She’d have a clone of Cameron Sweet’s pass card in about thirty seconds and she’d be able to to monitor his movements too. She passed his card back. ‘What have I done? I only just got here!’ She paced nervously around the far corner of the room, keeping her distance. Keeping the façade.

‘We have a policy on immigration.’

Ziva laughed. ‘Last I looked, your policy was not caring who came here.’

‘We have a stricter policy on people like you. We have some questions. We’ll start with who you really are. Then some people might like to talk to you about how you can pay off the debt you owe.’

‘My name is Olivia Red!’

The junkers exchanged another glance. ‘You think about that,
Olivia Red
. While you do, you’ll come with us.’

Ziva tried arguing but the two junkers simply got up and grabbed hold of her. Feigning fear came easier with their fingers wrapped around her arms. They were strong. She normally dealt with strong men by not letting them touch her. The first time she’d come to the Black Mausoleum had been ten years earlier, on the trail of a milli-credit hustler who’d called himself Hombas the Fish and had apparently thought that wasn’t stupid. It was the last assignment she’d done in uniform. She’d come in the Viper she flew back then, made no pretence of who or what she was, and had been lucky to get out alive. If it hadn’t been for her partner, chances were she’d still be rotting in the same cells Sweet was taking her to now. Her partner hadn’t made it out. Three months and the New Caledonia police did nothing but shout and make noises and get laughed at. Politics. Demarcation. Limits of authority. That was when she’d quit, not that it hadn’t been coming for a while. Made a down-payment on her first ship, a battered old Cobra on its last legs. She’d come back to break her partner out but they’d ejected him into space months ago.