[02] Elite: Nemorensis by Simon Spurrier Page A

streaking venomously between them, down amidst the umbral mass of planetary thunderheads. He felt abstractly (impossibly) as though he’d caught a glimpse of it – some indecent blur; a streak of the reaper’s scythe – before it struck.
    Certainly its grim results had been imperceptibly instant: one moment they’d been making a beeline for the cops, the next they were spinning, several hundred metres distant, sirens shrieking and main engines obliterated.
    Why didn’t the merc kill us?
he wondered – a seedy little thought amidst the morass.
He – or she – could’ve skewered us like a bloody whale.
    Why knock us down instead of wiping us out?
    But.
    But.
    But.
    Falling, falling, falling. No time, no brainspace, no sensory energy. Not as he moved seamlessly back to the Panic portion of his mental cycle and hammered impotently against the controls. Not with lights whirling and klaxons klaxoning and Teesa – unapologetic, uncowed, gurgling and delighted by the whole thing – doing something insane in his lap.
    ‘Frhop bnn shlli,’ she said.
Stop being silly.
Probably. ‘Whuh
nt
gnna duh.’
    ‘We are! We
are
going to die! We’re—’
    Quite abruptly the alarms died. The clouds thinned around them to a scrawny strata of turbulent steppes and peaceful plateaus, and Myq caught his first crazed glimpses of the surface far beneath. Green. Misted. Dank.
    The computer cycled through re-entry solutions, stabilisers hissing. And little by little the
Shattergeist
restored a modicum of balance.
    Myq felt weirdly robbed, still shuddering with pent-up emotion.
    [AUTO TOUCHDOWN] , the status-holo said, picked out in a reassuring shade of green. [REPAIRS REQUIRED. SEEKING LANDING ZONE.]
    [PLEASE DO NOT INTERFERE WITH THE AUTOPILOT PROTOCOLS.]
    [PLEASE RELAX AND ENJOY THE DESCENT.]
    The bloody thing even started playing soothing music without being asked.
    ‘Thank NoGod for that,’ he murmured.
    Which is when Teesa reached up blindly from his crotchal regions and gave the stick – the
control
stick – a violent yank.
    ‘What are you
doing
what are you
doing
what are you d—’
    The alarms started again. The ship banked furiously into another deadzone of hi-alt vapours, rattling and roaring at each cloudstrike, flipping end over end. Gravity starting to uncomfortably declare its presence.
    Myq tried not to puke. Tried not to come. Tried not to cry.
    Laughed a bit.
    Teesa just giggled and bent back to her task.
    ‘The merc was in the atmosphere,’ she said, a miniature maybefrown troubling her brow. ‘Just like you said.’ Rain, not
proper
rain, not
back home
rain; just an insipid layer of hanging damp, like fog with added gravity, fizzed round her shoulders.
    ‘S-so?’ Myq was still shaking.
    ‘Soooo, chances are they were still watching us on the way down. They could’ve killed us up there if they’d wanted, yes? But they chose not to. Why?’
    ‘I … I don’t …’
    She flicked rainwater off a vast overhanging … thing. Probably a leaf. It made a noise like a startled mouse and curled up, turning orange. She grinned hugely.
    ‘Look, if we’d come down in a niiiiice long straight line – smash, re-entry,
swoooosh
– they would’ve know exactly where to look. And then we could’ve found out what they had in mind. Would you have preferred that, Myq?’
    He sulked. ‘No.’
    ‘Well then. Little bit of random course adjustment never hurt anyone.’ She flapped a hand around herself – the ship, the rain, the mud, the
jungle
– and grinned. ‘Isn’t this
supernebular
?’
    She’d touched them down, refusing to let the autopilot handle things personally, just as the
Shattergeist
’s fuel reserves were honking and spuffling in alarm. Part gliding, part landing, part flying on fumes. What she called a ‘little bit of random course adjustment’ was, more accurately, the most terrifying stratotumble imaginable: crazily shifting course every few seconds, ploughing through cloudbanks, dodging gaseous