[04] Elite: Mostly Harmless (22 page)

Angel was about to get up and walk away when a heavy set man with broad features that reminded her of the Spinners back in Slough rose to his feet, edging towards her as he fingered something tucked inside his sleeve. It didn’t take a genius to work out what was running though his mind.

‘I, on the other hand,’ he said and a deep voice not taking his eyes off of Angel, ‘am just passing through, so have no particular attachment to your so-called “sanctions”. So if you ladies and gentlemen don’t mind I think I’ll cash in this little bonus. Stay out of my way if you want to stay alive.’

He slipped the blade out of his sleeve, closing the gap between Angel and himself with startling speed for his size. Angel stepped instinctively away from him, tripping over the rock she had been sitting on. She tumbled backwards, sprawling with legs akimbo as he knelt and placed a knife against her throat.

‘You’re coming with me darlin’,’ he leered. ‘We’re going kiss goodbye to this damp-ridden rock, find ourselves a nice friendly naval boat and then I’m going to pick up a tidy little cred-packet. We might even have some fun on the way. You know? Take the scenic route.’

He grinned into her face, showing a crooked row of yellow teeth with several missing. His breath smelt of vinegar and smoke. He winked. Then quite without warning his head exploded in a mess of blood, brains and bone fragments, as a long hook-bladed machete slammed into the side of his face.

* * *

‘Anyone else want to challenge the house?’

Eddie was struggling to pry his machete out of the broad stranger's cheekbone. It seemed like nobody did. Angel squirmed out from underneath the grisly tussle between blade, boot and ruined head, shaking visibly.

‘Seems I can’t leave you alone for trouble finding you,’ Eddie said to her with surprising warmth.

The blade popped free with a squelch and he levelled the bloody tip at John Graham, who tried unsuccessfully to sink deeper into the rock he was sitting on.

‘As for you, you creepy little bile bug,’ his voice had switched back to toxic calm as he scowled at the cowering man over the fire. ‘Your face has popped up too many times in close proximity to trouble lately. I'm beginning to think this might not be a coincidence.’

The face in question quivered and went very pale.

‘I … I didn't … Like I said to your friend here … I just have one of those faces …’

‘Yeah, well. If I see it again I am going to separate it from your skull. Got me?’

John Graham nodded and Eddie reached down to help Angel up off the floor.

‘You're coming with me.’

* * *

Back at Sue’s, Eddie deposited the still shaky Angel in a booth and went over to the counter, waving Admin and Katherine away as he ordered a bottle of pink liquid and picked up two tumblers. He slid in to the bench beside her and filled the glasses. ‘Drink,’ he instructed, pushing one in front of her.

She didn’t need to be told twice. The liquid felt hot and potent, instantly calming her racing heart as it scorched a path down her neck.

‘Better?’

She nodded mutely as he refilled her glass.

‘And what did we learn tonight?’

She looked at him, confused. His eyes twinkled with the mischievous something that had so infuriated her when she’d woken up unexpectedly in his bed a few days ago.

‘We learned that tasty little bites like you don’t go wandering around the pits on your own. Not unless you want to be spit roasted and served up to the navy,’ he said, picking up his own drink and sipping it appreciatively. ‘Ah, twenty year old Ari Rushton,’ he smacked his lips almost comically. ‘It’s expensive, but worth every credit. You might want to savour the next glass. A drink like this deserves to be appreciated.’

Angel stared down at her glass, already half-empty for the second time. She kicked herself mentally. ‘So this is how it is now? You keep me in economic servitude by plying me with hidden costs and doctoring the small print?’

He looked genuinely offended. ‘Well that’s a nice way to talk to someone who just saved your life.’

Angel felt the anger of her helplessness rising like bile. ‘Like you saved Katherine? And how many others that you’ve forced into a life of crime? Your whole notorious crew is probably just made up of terrified debtors, as much a slave to you as they were to whatever danger you supposedly saved them from!’

A dark shadow fell across his expression and Angel had cause to kick herself again mentally. Had she forgotten she was addressing a psychologically unstable blood-thirsty pirate? All of a sudden he rounded on her, grabbing the front of her flight suit and shaking her like a rag doll. ‘You know nothing about my life; my motivation. Would it hurt people to just be a little more understanding? Perhaps give me the benefit of the doubt occasionally? Do ya think? DO YA THINK?!’

He let go abruptly, causing Angel to collapse back into the booth, brain still rattling.

‘Would it actually be too much trouble to expect a little respect for everything I do around here?’ Eddie continued, punctuating every third syllable with a thump on the table.

The pink liquid in their glasses quivered with every impact. Angel quivered too, shrinking as far back into the booth as she could, eyes wide. This seemed to give Eddie pause for thought and his expression softened. He stopped taking out his temper on the furniture and reached back into the booth, pulling Angel up to a seated position beside him and then straightening up her rumpled collar apologetically.

‘Okay, look. Believe it or not I like you Angel. You remind me of …’ he trailed off, eyes going misty.

‘Of what?’

He looked into her eyes, a penetrating gaze that made her stomach flutter in that strange way again. ‘My mother. She wasn’t much older than you when … when …’ he trailed off again.

Angel drained her glass and reached for the bottle to refill them both, despite the cost. ‘When what Eddie? What happened to make you so mad at the world?’

An air of defiance appeared, restructuring his tortured expression. ‘When my whole family was butchered by Thargoids, that’s what,’ he said eventually, voice loaded with venom. ‘When those shit-licking insects attacked our research base, invaded our home and tore apart my sisters while my father screamed for mercy. Then they ripped apart my parents too, took their bodies apart limb by limb, like they were dissecting them to see what was inside. It took over an hour for my father to stop crying. Mother must have passed out pretty quickly as I didn’t hear her scream for very long. My sisters were just seven years old - twins - but I guess they were too small to bother dissecting so at least their massacre was mercifully quick.’

 ‘Dear Lady,’ Angel said, touching Eddie on the arm.

He jerked away. Angel could practically hear the effort of him fighting to get his emotions back under control.

‘How old were you?’

He gazed at nothing across the table, eyes bleary with tears. Angel waited quietly as what must have been excruciating memories chased each other across his twisted expression. 

‘I was twelve. Mother shoved me into a cupboard under the lab bench when the screaming started. Father was out in the hothouse with the twins, clipping samples from the bio-garden. I never saw them kill the girls, but I saw the mess they had made afterwards; and the screaming … I will never forget the screaming …’

Angel didn’t know what to say, so she drank some more of the comforting but expensive pink liquid instead. Eddie did the same before turning to face her. She held her breath as he held her gaze, searching her face with desolate eyes. Eventually he reached out and cupped the side of her face gently. His touch was soft and warm and sent sparks of something unfamiliar to Angel coursing through her nerves.

‘She was so beautiful. So perfect; the brightest star in the galaxy; smart and funny too.’ He was talking about his mother, lost in the fleeting happiness of a time long past. Then his eyes clouded over. ‘And they butchered her like she was livestock.’ He looked away, visibly struggling to reign in his feelings. ‘And they are going to pay for it,’ he said after a moment. ‘All of them. It’s the only thing that drives me, Angel. Nothing and nobody is more important to me than avenging my family’s slaughter … I’ve been searching for the source of the Thargoids for two decades and I’m so close. And they are going to pay, Angel. They are going to pay, every last one of them.’ His mood changed, lifted on the shoulders of the imagination of his revenge. He held the pink bottle of expensive booze up to the light, admiring it with sparkling green eyes. ‘And this fine bottle of vintage Rushton is on me.’ He grinned, downing the rest of his glass in one; the tragic story of his family seemingly all but forgotten. ‘So you’d better just wind in your neck and start drinking like a pirate.’ Angel didn’t need to be told twice.

Chapter 22

‘What about
Fallen Angel
?’

‘It’s a bit poncy,’ Admin’s voice crackled across the comms link. ‘You need something that will make people quake in fear, not sigh wistfully.’

Angel sat quietly for a few moments, watching her breath puff out in billowy white clouds as the temperature inside the Viper’s cockpit dropped to twenty-five-below-zero. They were tucked away in the Dalkev Bos asteroid cluster behind a slow-moving hunk of space rock that looked like it might have once been part of a moon.

‘How’d you get your name?’ she asked eventually.

‘Me?’ Admin said. ‘I earned a reputation for being someone who could … organise things. You know? Vanish something from one pocket, make it appear in another; right place/right time to overhear a vital piece of intel and pass it on to a rival group, that sort of thing. There are benefits to being small and I had to find a way to survive when my folks decided not to return from a raid when I was five. People are generally pretty happy to let you live if you are little enough and make yourself useful enough.’

‘How about you, Katherine?’

The white noise of silence drifted over the comms link for a few seconds.

‘Are you serious?
Dread
Katherine? Have you seen my hair recently?’

‘Oh,’ said Angel, feeling a bit silly. ‘I just thought maybe you had grown those dreadlocks to fortify your image? That the “dread” bit really came from some epic battle that left you feared and revered as a killing machine?’

The cool silence of deep space was suddenly broken by a sharp tone as a blip on Angel’s radar lit up. The short range scanner was picking up an energy fluctuation about three clicks to starboard. The scanners show the signature was typical of the prelude to a hyperjump tunnel opening up.

‘Ooh,’ said Katherine appreciatively. ‘Closer than I thought. We’re going to have to be quick on our wings or we’ll lose the advantage. Are you ready, Rosy Posy?’

Angel ignored the obvious dig at her potential pirate name. ‘Let’s do it.’ She hovered her hand over the control panel, ready to power up on Katherine’s signal. ‘Three …’

Angel felt her chest tighten as she watched the amber dot of the passenger carrier draw closer and closer on the other side of their broken moon. Her buttocks clenched. Her skin tingled, flushed with heat in spite of the cold. She felt suddenly exhilarated as adrenaline coursed through her veins.

‘Two …’

She realised with some surprise she was actually enjoying herself; the thrill of danger was turning her on, getting her blood pumping with hot anticipation. After a lifetime spent chasing the safer option it was quite a rush.

‘One … GO, GO, GO!’

A steely calm descended as she planted her palm solidly on the power grid, sparking the ship to life as if the heat from her very blood had somehow triggered the boot up sequence. The dashboard burst into light, drawing out maps and powering up shields and weapons arrays in glowing readouts.

If she thought
her
dashboard was blazing right now though, the Dolphin’s would be going haywire. When two heavily armed fighters decaled to the baddest crew of pirates this side of Riedquat suddenly popped up on your radar, it tended to raise the alarm.

Katherine’s huge Fer-de-Lance eased forward and Angel toed her Viper’s thruster to match its speed. This ship was called
Chandnør Waffoospark the Mad Swede
, which made no sense to Angel, but it was definitely the most terrifying thing she’d ever piloted.

The passenger carrier would be powering back up after its recent jump. A sitting duck more than a Dolphin right now. The comms link clicked as Admin looped them in to an open proximity channel.

‘Good morning ladies and gentlemen. This is your hijacker speaking. I’m very sorry to bring you bad news today, but you’re going to have to hit the evac pods. You see my friend here in the Viper has a rather large payload of heat seeker missiles aimed straight at your cargo bay and a very twitchy trigger finger. I’d say you have about … ooh, let’s say ninety seconds before she can arm them. Then I’m afraid it’s boom, boom, shake the room.’

Admin made sure his point was hammered home by releasing a spray of tracer fire across the people-carrier’s bow. Angel watched as the poorly defended Dolphin’s shield reading dropped to ninety percent.
Wow,
she thought,
this senator really was hoping to pass under the radar.
This thing had hardly any defensive upgrades. Never mind passenger class, this vessel was barely scraping by as cattle class.

‘Pirate, stand down!’ came the panicked reply over the open channel. ‘We have nothing of any value. Stand down!’

‘I think we’ll be the judge of that, thanks very much,’ said Admin, firing again.

Shields at eighty percent.

‘Wait! Look, I can take down the shields and you can scan for yourself. There is nothing in our hold but old junk from some frontier labs we’re bringing back for filing. We’re not worth the bother!’

‘Oh you can take down your shields alright, but you’d better be on the way to an escape pod afterwards. Seriously. This bitch is about forty seconds away from being fully armed then your cargo bay is going bye bye.’