[01] Elite: Wanted by Gavin Deas

junkers would know that trick by now. They wouldn’t fall for it a second time.
    ‘Where are you?’ she shot the question to the
Dragon Queen
as she sprinted through the station.
    ‘Half a million kilometres away.’
    ‘When you get here I need an out. The way we did on Tau Ceti.’ She reached the closest of the spindle elevators that would take her towards the hub. A squad of junkers was milling about, presumably watching out for her. They were dumb enough to be clustered together and the shocker took out three of them at once before the last pair realised she was there. One of them swivelled, bringing a shotgun to bear. The other started talking urgently into his hand. Most places Ziva went, everyone started screaming and running at the first sight of a gun. On the Mausoleum people ran, right enough, but they didn’t run screaming. They ran with the grim, silent speed of people who’d seen this sort of thing too many times before.
    The elevator doors were closing, the handful of passengers inside dashing out between them as the evacuation alarm sounded. Ziva raced the other way. She ducked behind a roving refreshment bot as the junker fired his shotgun, then she darted out and shocked the other one. He went down like a falling tree while she ran on, dodging and weaving. The junker with the gun got off another shot before she threw herself through the elevator doors. Ziva felt the sting of a pellet tear her shoulder, turned, fired the shocker one more time as the doors closed and then sat back. She heard the hiss of the vacuum seal close around the elevator and the bump as they started to move. She had it to herself. In some ways this was a good thing, in other ways … not so much. She released her drones to take out the cameras.
    They couldn’t have gone more than a dozen metres towards the hub when the elevator lurched to a stop.
    ‘Ziva Eschel.’ Ziva didn’t recognise the voice but it was too smooth to be some junker. ‘This is how you stay alive: put the weapon down. Get on the floor and put your hands on your head and say very clearly the words “
I surrender.”
’
    Ziva sought out the elevator cameras and pouted at the nearest. Hopefully, it was blind by now. Hopefully, whoever was doing the talking couldn’t see her. ‘But I don’t want to.’
    ‘How exactly do you think this is going to go, bounty hunter?’
    ‘To whom am I talking?’
    ‘I run the
Black Mausoleum
. That’s all you need to know.’
    ‘Ah. A Veil, then.’
    ‘You could be useful to me, Eschel. Give me a reason not to kill you.’
    ‘Actually, I was thinking something more along the lines of threatening to start executing hostages unless you let me descend to the hub, board my ship and leave.’ She smiled. ‘Or threatening not to blow up some bombs I left around the place. That sort of thing.’
    ‘You’re in a sealed elevator out on one of the spindles. How about you do what I say and I don’t evacuate you into space?’
    ‘Hey, maybe there’s a dozen other people here!’
    ‘Eschel, even if I cared, you don’t have any hostages and there aren’t any bombs. You might have blinded the cameras in there but really, how stupid do you think we are?’
    ‘Well, actually …’ She’d barely got the words out when a soft alarm went off behind her Fresnel eyes. Every spacer carried a pressure monitor.
    ‘And the bitch of it, Eschel, is that I’m not planning on killing you, just on dropping the oxygen level enough to make you pass out and then having a whole shitload of fun getting you to do my dirty work. I’m thinking a really exotic genetic disease to hold over you and your loved ones, but I’ll settle for a tiny sub-cranial anti-matter bomb if I have to. What do you think?’
    ‘I think that whoever you are, you’re a fucking arse.’
Ship! Where are you?
    There was a sudden flicker as the elevator lights went out. Lines of ultraviolet scintillation scarred space outside, the tell-tale of military-grade x-ray