[01] Elite: Wanted by Gavin Deas

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.
    Once burned, forever learned. The cloner in her shoe already had a copy of Sweet’s card ready to go.
    The two junkers pinned her arms and clamped her wrists in magnetic cuffs – the cuffs were linked to Cameron Sweet’s card too, which was going to make him look even more stupid than he actually was – and took her out of the hotel and shoved her in an elevator. She felt herself getting lighter as they moved towards the hub; then the elevator stopped and shifted sideways. It crawled along one of the gossamer circles of the great metal spiderweb that joined the Black Mausoleum’s docking hub to the station’s habitation rim. She could hear metal creak and groan and remembered how decrepit and old this place was. Eight hundred years? Nine? It had been falling apart for centuries.
    The elevator reached the next spoke and started moving rimward again, drawing to a stop in some administrative section off-limits to the general public – if, that was, the Black Mausoleum could be said to have a general public. They checked her in at a desk and took fingerprints and retina scans, both of which were fakes. They took pictures, not that anyone looked at that sort of thing nowadays. The pictures bothered her. They just might still have records of her in a New Caledonia uniform from ten years ago, if they troubled to look. She hadn’t worn much of a disguise to her face, assuming it would be found out too easily. If the drill hadn’t changed, they’d put her in a holding pen, come back after a few minutes for a blood sample and then leave her for twelve hours while they checked her records. Then came the part where they’d pull her out, strip her and depilate her, force her into a