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

spiralled in the sort of unfortunate way that made the Empire point and laugh – a fractured almost-anarchy of vaguely hostile corporate enclaves and faux-democracies where nothing much had any value and credits were everything. The sort of place where no one asked too many questions about the laser scorches on your ship’s hull and why you needed your ablative shields replaced or where that cargo of exotic exploding pigs had come from. But whoever had taken out the
Pandora
wouldn’t come openly to Pethes. Darkwater would have their spies here; in fact, in a world like this, they probably had their own enclave where they quietly did all the sorts of things that more civilised systems wouldn’t tolerate. But Newman had come here on and off in the last few months. It had been Ziva’s next port of call anyway, looking to pick up his trail.
    For some reason there was a Federation Farragut battlecruiser in system today. Ziva micro-jumped in and took manual control of the
Dragon Queen
, skimming the cruiser’s length carefully just outside its exclusion range. It was a thing of function rather than beauty, she thought, but you didn’t get to see one up close all that often. They were very roughly the shape of an arrowhead, if you could say that about something that was two klicks from nose to tail. She took it from the bows, rolling and weaving and jinking along the length of it but veering away from the cowled engines hidden away behind their massive flat slabs of metal. You didn’t get too close to something that could light up a fusion torch a hundred kilometres long whenever it felt like it. As she flew loops around the cruiser, she scanned the news feeds but couldn’t gauge much of a reason for it being there. Maybe it had come to put the shits up the various local corporate dictators and presidents-for-life. The Federation did that sort of thing now and then to remind systems like Pethes that there was a wider galaxy out there and that they did, sometimes, pay attention.
    Newman wouldn’t be here. Not with that cruiser. No matter.
    Buzzing a Farragut wasn’t as much fun as buzzing an Imperial Majestic Interdictor. With the Majestics you could dive right through that rotating ring they had in the middle, although they did tend to get
really
pissy about that sort of thing. Just as well that a Fer-de-Lance was about the only ship that could outrun a squadron of Imperial fighters; still, eventually even the Farragut got annoyed and sent an irritable avatar and a squadron of F63 Condors to shoo her away. She fought the urge to play with the Condors for a bit and set the
Dragon Queen
heading for Toad Hall, the only decent orbital station in the system, launching a series of avatars ahead of her to start searching for Newman’s contacts and poke around her own network of information junkies, sleaze-merchants and dirt-mongers. Not that she expected any of them to know anything about the
Pandora
. Whoever had set that up was far too smart.
    ‘You have a k-cast,’ drawled the
Dragon Queen
.
    ‘Go.’ Darkwater, she supposed, with more information from Stopover; except it wasn’t, it was Enaya.
    ‘Ziva! Love! Where are you?’
    For a second, Ziva froze. ‘Enaya. Um … I’m in Pethes just now. I’m … I’m still after Newman.’ She waited a few seconds but Enaya didn’t reply. The k-cast signal strengthened enough that she started to get pieces of low-grade grainy video, jerky and broken up. ‘God! You look terrible.’
    ‘It’s been …’ Enaya looked away and it was a moment before she looked back. ‘It’s Aisha, not me. I told you Odar the shithead was back, didn’t I? … It’s … Ziv, I’ve been trying to get hold of you for days. You never answer. Why don’t you ever answer?’
    ‘En, you know how it is. I’ve micro-jumped from one end of a dozen systems to the other. You know how that screws everything up.’ Which was true enough but didn’t explain why she hadn’t replied. ‘It’s just