[01] Elite: Wanted by Gavin Deas Page A

chemical shower and then into a convict jumpsuit that stank of other people’s sweat. The Black Mausoleum had its own law. It hadn’t been much fun going through it once and Ziva had no intention of enduring it a second time.
    The junkers lost all interest in her as soon as they had her in the holding pen. There were two other people inside, one an impish man who eyed her over the sort of absurdly overblown Zapata moustache that said he either came from the Moon or that he wished he did. The other was snoring on the floor, passed out and stinking of cheap rum. Ziva ignored them. She had to be quick and get the next minutes exactly right. Get them wrong, get trapped here until they figured out who she
really
was, and the best she could hope for was that they’d eject her into space without a suit.
    She crouched against the wall and pulled her knees tight into her chest until she could reach her shoes and then extracted the clone of Sweet’s card and flipped it across the magnetic cuffs. They popped free. Moustache watched with interest. Ziva put a finger to her lips and swiped the card across his cuffs as well, but nothing happened. They exchanged shrugs. Ziva sat down again. They really could have done a better job of searching her. She bit her thumb and popped out the spring razor hidden behind the nail, then used that to nick the seam of her shorts and eased out three little black drones the size of apple pips. She licked a finger and wiped it over them, opening their DNA-locks. As they sprang into life, she slid them under the cell door. They fluttered into the corridor outside. It took the drones about thirty seconds to find and latch onto the three cameras out there and to take over their tiny algorithms.
    The two junkers came back together right on cue. Sweet swiped his card and opened the door. As soon as they were in, Ziva triggered the drones latched to the cameras and kicked Sweet between the legs hard enough to rupture both his testicles. She had the shocker rod off Sweet’s belt while the second junker was still staring in disbelief – until she smashed his ankle with it. As he went down, she touched her copy of Sweet’s card to the base of the shocker, unlocking it, and zapped them both. The junker with the smashed ankle collapsed as though someone had cut all his strings. For Sweet it was more of a mercy than anything else …
    Her heart was racing. She was half listening out for the first alarms or for the hiss of tranq-gas.
You got no back-up here, not this time
. She had to keep telling herself that.
    She pulled the bodies away from the door and propped them up on the cell’s one bench, then practically tore their uniform jackets off. She tossed one to Zapata along with the second guard’s keycard and stuffed the other underneath the bench. If she’d put one of them on herself, it would have been like wearing a tent.
    Still no alarms and the cell door was wide open. Ziva grinned. Couldn’t help herself. That was the thrill of it, the danger. They’d be out for hours. It was all so easy, like it was supposed to be. Amateurs.
    Moustache man helped himself to the second junker’s shocker. The card had unlocked his cuffs. He gave Ziva a nervous glance.
    ‘Try not to be seen,’ Ziva said. ‘And try not to set off the alarms.’ She patted Sweet on the head as she left. ‘Don’t worry. It’s the thirty-fourth century. They can grow you a new pair.’
    She headed deeper into the Black Mausoleum’s restricted arc, worming her way to their data cores, flicking her little seed-drones ahead. The drones were expensive but worth it: they fed every camera they infected into her Fresnels and put them on a loop for everyone else until she’d passed out of sight and called them back. It wasn’t a cloaking device but it was as good as one – unless she met someone in the flesh. How long before they found she was missing from the cell? Minutes? Hours? How long before someone started to wonder why Sweet and