[02] Elite: Nemorensis by Simon Spurrier

flicked lines again. ‘Lex.’
    ‘They’re travelling, boss.’
    ‘ETA?’
    ‘Fifteen.’
Shit. So fast!
    ‘You know what to do?’
    ‘I … I think so, b—’
    ‘Lex, what’re they doing with their shields?’
    ‘That’s the … Boss, they’re … They’re still up.’
    No. No, that’s not what …
    What about your fun, bitch?
    You turn them off you turn them off you turn them off
—
    SixJen thought … like a dream … she thought she could see them. A pinprick of light, growing. No sense of scale or speed. Just a stealthy star, a tunnel, a
javelin
of flame.
    Incoming.
    ‘Seven seconds. No change.’
    Shit shit shit.
    ‘Fire.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘You heard me!’
Five. Four.
‘Fire, Lex! She’ll drop them.’
She’ll drop the shields.
She’s got to.
‘You fire right past us.’
    The light.
    Three
.
    The ionic glint of shields. The
Shattergeist
coming to smear them across the stars.
    Two.
    ‘But I could h—’
    ‘Just do it!’

SEVEN
    Myq worked it out on the way down. Moments of eerie clarity packaged neatly between uncharacteristic outbursts of anger at all of Tee’s crazies (as if impending death had finally lubricated his brain and freed it from hormonal enslavement), and even more numerous stints of spiralling, shrieking panic.
    We’re going to die!
    Plus sensory interruptions of a more sexual nature. Tee was getting frisky while they dropped from the sky. Of course.
    The eerie clarity part:
    ‘The merc!’ he snarled. ‘The fucking merc ship was hiding in the atmosphere! It was there all along!’
    It was the only plausible explanation. The sneaky bastard had been sniping at the battle from below, shielded from their scanners, hidden amidst the stratospheric clouds which the
Shattergeist
was, even now, bumbling and rolling its way through, venting fuel. Myq recalled a moment, mid-battle, while Teesa was occupied with squealing and blasting at the first Viper, in which one of its lagging comrades had abruptly limped into an orbital plunge on the scanner. Had that been due to the merc too? A missed shot? A test run? Or –
oh crap
– baiting the path?
    Setting Tee up for that last, headlong, murderous strike?
    … which implied –
crap crap crap
– that someone else considered his girlfriend’s frighteningly psychotic desire to mulch spacewalkers an entirely predictable piece of behaviour.
    All of which musings had led, inevitably, to the Uncharacteristic Anger part of his oscillating mood:
    ‘You … you dropped our shields, Tee.
Again
!’ Flapping his finger at her. ‘W … why did you have to drop our shields?’
    She gurgled something indecipherable. Possibly ‘
it’s more fun that way
.’ Her mouth was full.
    Myq wasn’t going to let her calm him down this time, not in the midst of a full-blown and frankly rather enjoyable tantrum. ‘Why do you do
anything?
’ he snarled.
I am soooo bored of being the boring one.
‘We’re going to fucking
die
!’
    They probably weren’t, of course. They’d spent literally gajillions – Teesa assured him that was a real number – upgrading the ship and its systems, wanky music software and all, precisely so they wouldn’t have to do too much thinking/worrying/giving-a-shit about the fiddly stuff in between all the Blowing Stuff Up.
    Still, with a medium-sized rocky planet rising to meet you at some considerable speed it felt rather good to flap and shout.
    It had all happened so fast anyway. They’d almost been upon the spacesuited cops when the hammer fell. A pair of thrashing bodies expanding hugely on screen, Tee’s excitement almost indecent in all its babbling, shivering absorption. (And worse, in all its infectiousness. Myq hadn’t exactly rushed to stop her, had he?)
    She’d unshielded the
Shattergeist
a scant half-second before impact, purring to herself. But in that same instant (
how did the merc
know
?
) the thunderbolt hit. A mag-projectile, he supposed, launched with exquisite care from directly behind the targets,