[02] Elite: Nemorensis by Simon Spurrier

boy.’
    He gaped a bit at that. Another hop. Another crash from hyperspace.
    ‘Where are we going?’ he started up again. ‘Why did you have to …? Those. Those bloody reporters, look. Shouldn’t we try to lose them? Tee, why did you do that?
What’s going on?
’
    And so on.
    ‘You’ll see,’ she kept saying. Peeling off her clothes. Peeling off his. ‘You’ll see.’
    ‘But. Why did you
do
that? Why did you have to do tha—?’
    ‘I didn’t have to, Myq.’ Was that a flicker of irritation he saw, deep in her eyes? ‘I didn’t have to, but I did. That’s sort of the point, darling.’
    On one of the stopovers, when his self-conscious worrying evidently overcame her predilection for enigma, she shot him a carefully-rehearsed
get ready to be wrong
look, logged into the remote-access bank, and waved for his attention.
    Donations tumbled in faster than the system could track.
    ‘See?’ she said.
    There aren’t any limits.
    And then the last hop. The stars settling to static. A cloudy green planet rotating below. And Tee smirking at him, both still sweaty from the last bout.
    ‘Shibboleth,’ she said.
    A commodity baron
, Myq remembered.
Someone in … ohhh … someone in the glander-trade.
    Apparently one of his indentured workers shot him in the spine and nicked his shuttle.
    The questions were already rising in his chest when Tee interrupted them with a great yelp of joy and the music, still infuriatingly loud, ear-raped with a blast of crazy.
    Alarms, lights, fiery flares and missile contrails.
    [ALERT: MULTIPLE FIRING-SOLUTIONS DETECTED.]
    The cops were waiting.

SIX
    ‘All right,’ SixJen said. ‘It’s them.’
    The cops –
the idiots
– began to whoop and cheer down the radio. She should’ve expected that. She might even have excused it, coming as it did from a pair of action-starved provincial flyboys so hopped on stimms and AggroUps it was a miracle they didn’t get into a fight every time they passed a mirror, if they hadn’t both blundered one step further into the realms of dickwitted overexcitement by instantaneously firing off their missiles.
    Idiots.
    In all their paranoid tightfistedness, and with a neurotic refusal to give credence to the insights of a mere mercenary, the top brass at Shibboleth’s semi-privatised no-bit LawCom had assigned a meagre two ships to assist in SixJen’s orbital vigil. Even when she’d taken a passable stab at feigning incandescence towards the precinct commander –
don’t you know who I’m talking about? They’re coming
here
, you sticky little mistake! –
the man conceded only one extra ship, and no extra pilot.
    ‘Dunyer wreck it neither,’ he’d warned, waggling a finger.
    She was grouchily grateful for that, at least. She’d decided she couldn’t field the
The
directly against the
Shattergeist
, not now the runner knew its shape and ident. One glance at SixJen’s pride and joy (as it were) on the edge of a firefight and that psychotic little witch could be sure to—
    To what?
    Run a mile? Hit FTL and not look back? Turn and bring the fight?
    Or reveal she’d been expecting it all along and unveil her master plan?
    (The runner’s not supposed to bloody scheme!)
    None of those outcomes accorded with SixJen’s preferred species of victory anyway – both achieving
and
surviving it all at once. So an honorary cop she’d have to temporarily be. But the commander’s skinflintery, alas, had gone further still.
    “Arfload of ammo’s all yer having,’ he’d burbled, thicker than his own accent. ‘Dun
know
yer, dun
trust
yer, dun
like
yer. An whyth fuck wouldey fugertives com
ere
hennywise? You earda ‘casts. Theyoff aving funs ‘sploding freighters in the oo-knows-where. Caught my’sown fucking daughter dernating to ther bankyccount, other day.’
    The newscasts had indeed trickled through. It was perhaps illustrative that even here, on a frontier farmworld so independent it had manufactured its own accent – even
here
all the