[02] Elite: Nemorensis by Simon Spurrier Page A

buzz was of the
Shattergeist
and its nihilistic adventures. Infuriatingly, there’d been no video received yet of its most recent predations, and the vox-reporters were still being vague about the ‘where’. If SixJen had been a cynic (she was) she might have guessed (she did) that the hacks were being deliberately circumspect about the places they were called to, in order to keep the Feds from showing up to spoil the fun. But the fact remained: the
Shattergeist
had occupied itself the past few days ripping holes in cargo freighters before committing an act of calculated murder so gratuitous that the on air outrage-spouters could barely line up fast enough to decry it.
    No shields.
    Eight ejected pilots. Hit-and-run. No shields.
    She wanted to feel the crunch
.
    And the donations? They just kept on coming.
    SixJen had tried to explain to the commander her hunch, tried to illustrate why the
Shattergeist
would, she was sure, turn eventually towards Shibboleth; even tried to persuade him that the ‘unfortunate cargo ships’ in the carefully-edited vox-reports were quite possibly the very ones which had been setting off from his homeworld all week …
    But her explanations sounded frail and speculative even before she’d said them, plus she dared not risk her insight being spread around –
my kill, my kill, nobody else’s
. So she’d waved it all away mid-argument, swallowed the jagged pills of Only Three Ships with stony-faced grace, and got the fuck on with Waiting In Orbit.
    ‘Yuz got thraydays,’ the Commander’d said as she left.
    SixJen wasn’t the type to generalise along ethnic lines – she distributed her apathy towards the living with politic equality – but as the missiles fired by her new comrades snaked into the void she mused that it didn’t reflect well on the people of Shibboleth that the two police pilots appeared even denser than their boss.
    ‘Firecrackaway!’ one whooped.
    ‘Foxwun, foxwun!’ cried the other.
    She was beginning to wish she hadn’t involved the locals at all.
    ‘Scanners got the confirm on the target,’ Lex chirped, his voice an unlikely relief in the tight confines of the borrowed copship. ‘It’s definitely them. Tweedledum’s missile goes kablooey in forty-two, Tweedledee’s in forty-four.’
    Those idiots
.
    The runner, the prey –
sad eyes, sad eyes
– had appeared at the edge of the Shibboleth cluster with all the arrogant swagger SixJen had been expecting: the pimped-out yacht all but screaming its ident. The copships (all Vipers, all decked out in LookatMe reds and blues, fellow pilots barking yokel machismo), had let slip their smartkillers the second the scanners pinged. Two lazy contrails of dispersing soot and radiated heat.
    ‘I told you,’ she monotoned into the comm, wishing she still had it in her to snarl, ‘to wait for my mark.’
    The men ‘pffft’d’ predictably, resuming their steroidal pigshit. ‘Yerl still get y’money!’ she made out, as if that settled it.
    That’s what mercenaries want, right?
    ‘Thirty and thirty-two seconds,’ Lex said.
    ‘Any reaction?’
    ‘Not a peep. Target’s just chilling. Probably too busy biffing in there. You think they even know what’s coming?’
    ‘They know.’
They’d better.
    Strangely enough SixJen’s irritation, which existed in the abstract sense that she should be feeling it but couldn’t, was not predicated purely on the risk of being robbed of her kill. Oh, naturally that was an element: she’d taken pains to arrange the limits of her cooperation with the cops and had spent literally hours out here with Mingus and Dingus twiddling thumbs, double checking they understood the same.
    Reason to suspect visitors of interest en route
—
    In exchange for ident and tactical intel I demand the following rights
—
    No action until my say-so
—
    Here to support me, not vice-versa
—
    Do
not
fire unless
—
    Etcetera etcetera.
    ‘Maybe it’s your winning way with people,’ Lex muttered,