Read [01] Elite: Wanted for Free Online Page A

Barely on our sensors at all. I’d say she was there for a rendezvous and got bounced before anyone else showed. They weren’t waiting for her, but they jumped in seconds later and right at the same place. They threw up jamming everywhere and all we have is what the Orca got off before they shut her down. After that we don’t know. So: two ships, one corvette or cutter size, one smaller, no identity, no distinguishing marks except they knew what they were doing. They did whatever they did and then blew everything to pieces. We saw the explosion from here. By the time we got Vipers that far out, the hyperspace trails were cold. I’d say they knew perfectly well we couldn’t get out there fast enough. Eschel, there weren’t any survivors. They executed the crew who stayed on board and E-bombed the escape pods. All of them. Whoever did it was one cold bastard.’
    ‘They E-bombed the escape pods? Christ!’
    ‘Quite.’
    ‘Could be my guy. He’s clinical but he’s a got a big streak of psycho going with it.’
    ‘I don’t care whether he’s your guy or not, they’re both your guys now. Fifteen thousand for each of them, Eschel, if you can bring them in and keep it quiet. They pissed in our yard.’
    Over the next few hours, Ziva angled the
Dragon Queen
in to the nearer of the two gas giants. The Fer-de-Lance skimmed hydrogen until the ship’s tanks were full. The autopilot could manage that perfectly well all on its own, so she reviewed what Darkwater had on the
Pandora
and her demise. It wasn’t much more than the avatar had said. Private yacht, not a trader, so they had no idea what she might have been carrying. By the time the Vipers started recovering what fragments were left of the Orca, the
Dragon Queen
was already micro-jumping to the edge of the system. As expected, the Orca’s black box told her precisely nothing: two ships had come in out of hyperspace running the sort of generic transponders that could have been picked up anywhere, retro-engineered with black code that anyone with even the most basic connections could have fixed up. What was much more interesting was the precision of the attack. They’d hit the Orca hard and fast but only with enough to take down its shields. Then precision hits to the drives and the engines and the defensive lasers. They’d been
careful
, as though trying not to do more damage than they absolutely had to. There weren’t that many crews who’d take down a freighter in a Darkwater system and whoever had done it here had known exactly what they were doing and how to do it.
    She listened to the flight recording. ‘Make this easy on us and nobody will get hurt. Any resistance will result in your deaths and we get what we want anyway.’ The voice had the whining accent of someone from Imperial Achenar, not that that meant anything. And then they’d boarded and rounded everyone up and done whatever they’d come to do and then, before they left, they’d started beating the crew and the passengers, wilfully shooting them. It was hard to say from the audio and there was almost no surviving video, but the cries and pleading for mercy were more than enough, gunshots, more screams, swearing and shouting as though the boarders had cut down their prisoners, torturing and killing for the fun of it.
    And then it stopped suddenly and they shot everyone; only they didn’t quite, because after they left, three escape pods had launched. And then the E-bomb.
    Ziva listened to the recordings again and shuddered. The killings had a brutality and a touch of madness to them that could have been Newman but the precision of the attack … that had a touch of someone else. Newman had a partner now? Or maybe she was chasing up a blind alley and it wasn’t him at all.
Who are you?
    The
Dragon Queen
jumped and jumped again, hopping through the relative civilisation of Barnard’s Star to Pethes. Pethes was one of those places where the general values of the Federation had kicked off and