[02] Elite: Nemorensis by Simon Spurrier Page B

as the missiles jinked into final-approach vectors. She went to give the casing of his little button body a punitive flick – old habit – and only remembered he wasn’t there when she jabbed herself instead. She wondered if she would’ve smiled about that, once.
    ‘Sorry,’ he said anyway.
    Watching from afar
.
    No, kill theft wasn’t the big fear. She’d seen the
Shattergeist
fly. She knew a couple of farmcops in median-spec Vipers weren’t about to filch her holy moment.
    ‘Eighteen and twenty seconds.’
    Rather it was a simple matter of technical knowhow. Smartmissiles could be relied upon to grimly pursue targets only in the absence of obfuscatory radar returns. It followed that the one and only time a halfway decent pilot
really
didn’t want to be shooting his load early, and offloading his tactical ace, was in the seconds immediately after a target emerged from FTL—
    ‘Ten and twelve.’
    —when you couldn’t tell if there was some unfortunate sod right behind them, following them down the same pipe.
    ‘Ah balls,’ Lex chirped. ‘Three new returns.’
    ‘The target?’
    ‘Hightailing.’
    SixJen might’ve felt smug about the whole thing –
tolja
– if she’d had room in the remnants of her emotional brain for anything but a ghostly flicker of anger.
    On screen the
Shattergeist
dropped like a stone – that same perpendicular dodge it’d used against the rival merc last time she’d had it in sight. But the missiles didn’t even twitch in their course.
    Fizzing innocently in the fugitives’ place, still wreathed in all the diminishing wyrdlight of the FTL spout they’d spiralled down, like fresh-faced kiddies who’d chased a puppy into a fucking firing range, three manifestly undefended media ships popped into corporeality and replaced the ’
Geist
’s heat signature.
    ‘
Taa-daaa
,’ Lex mumbled mournfully.
    They were swallowed in fire.
    SixJen thought perhaps she might have seen one of them, the one spared a direct hit, limp onwards through the annihilation zone without being entirely atomised, but in the next second the chaos of combat unfurled all around her and the wellbeing of the journalists dropped from the list of her priorities.
    The
Shattergeist
let rip towards the cops. Arcing way off to the side, max-geeing inwards across the sunrise on the planet’s terminator, spitting ordinance.
    The runner’s not supposed to scheme!
    ‘It’s a bait run,’ SixJen barked. ‘Weak ordinance! Don’t buy it. She’s got bigger explodo than that in there. Just wants to draw you into a dogf—’
    The cops ignored her a second time.
Yee-haw
ing off to engagement and, in all likelihood, molecular death. SixJen didn’t even bother to sigh, so entirely was she unsurprised.
    ‘Boss?’ Lex said, fireblooms tracking across the scanner. ‘What action?’
    We know this game. You watch, hunter. You watch the fight
—
    The cops circling. Doing a little better than she’d feared, at least. Like binary suns, keeping the prey between and in front, caught in their crossfire—
    You watch the fight and when the prey’s exhausted, ohhh … when she’s weak and ready to die
.
Then
—
    ‘You gonna dial back?’ Lex supposed. Only a hint of boredom in the tinny voice. ‘Play possum, right? Watch ‘til the critical moment.’
    Then you strike
.
    Except
.
    Except the woman in the
Shattergeist
had seen through all of it last time. Knew the game. Knew it well enough to plan three moves ahead.
    Except the fugitive ship wasn’t playing the way the cops wanted today either. Their vicious little ménage-a-trois – like remoras orbiting a shark – spoilt again and again by the fugitives coughing out unexpected gouts of plasma from hidden pods, or somersaulting without warning to pursue a new course, or casually slicing off
this
cop’s autogun,
that
cop’s chaff-bay.
    The runner, SixJen figured, had been running too long not to’ve learnt a thing or two about the hunt.
    She wants to be