Read [02] Elite: Nemorensis for Free Online

epiphany, ‘really like seeing shit getting blown up.’
    Tee had merely farted softly from the bunk in the corner, chromatophore tattoos flashing yellow and purple, and giggled in her halfsleep. But when she woke …?
    When she awoke:
the idea
.
    This … bloody … idea.
    Outstaring a roomful of confused contemptuous journalists and trying to monetise madness.
    ‘Is this,’ said the sweaty little reporter, he of the crap hat and the sophisticated interpersonal expression of contempt, ‘a joke?’
    ‘Save your questions for the end, please,’ Tee inserted. They’d agreed Myq was going to do the talking (for reasons he could neither remember nor currently fathom) but as Tee stepped forwards with hands on hips he could see the effect she carried with her – ‘
it’
, the
thing
, the
change
– stealing over the assembled hacks like a toxin. One by one they forgot him, their arched brows softened away, their apathy was drowned in enchantment. Some licked their lips. One woman fiddled thoughtlessly with her hair. At least one man, Myq was sure, absent-mindedly adjusted his own undercarriage.
    Tee smiled sweetly. She was good at that.
    ‘I know you’re wondering why you’re here,’ she said. ‘I know you must have low expectations. Yesterday we extended an invitation to every journal, castnet and two-bit tabloid in this system. A press conference hosted by persons unknown, regarding matters undisclosed. Not very promising, is it?
Ha
. No. But, oh! Oh, you came.’
    She chose not to state aloud the implied reality: that anyone dispatched by a hateful editor on just such a fool’s errand must surely be the lowliest, most internally despised wordmonkey on any given payroll. The assembly, Myq liked to think, were grateful for that kindness.
    ‘You came,’ she trilled. ‘You came, and I want to thank you. From the bottom of my heart –’ she brushed a hand across her own chest – ‘thank you for coming.’
    Myq caught himself watching her with the same fascination, the same weird semi-aroused hang-on-every-word reverence, as the journos. It was the precise brain-obfuscation he’d become so willingly accustomed to, nothing new there, but he’d never truly seen her like this. Never heard her sharing words with more than one listener. Never known her to stay on one topic for more than a few mercurial seconds, let alone lasso a crowd with such empty charm and clumsy innuendo.
    ‘Thank you for coming,’ she whisper-repeated, innocently wetting her lips.
    (One of the journos, a woman, actually moaned.)
    She’s hypnotised us
, he thought. And then felt bizarrely, horribly, unforgivably, jealous at having to share it.
    ‘So,’ Tee finished with the reasoned air of someone who’d had the last word in a disagreement but didn’t want to gloat. ‘We’d like to reward you for taking that chance.’
    She nodded at Myq—
    Me! Nobody else! Fuck you guys!
    —and he tapped a control set into the lectern. Tee gestured expansively at the projectorama behind them, leading eyes and cameras in an obedient swivel.
    Above, in glorious oblate holodepth, footage from the
Shattergeist
’s senselogs zoetroped through an endless loop of explosions, strafes, mag-snipes and manufactured collisions. Three weeks and fifteen ships: freighters, cargo runners, two shuttles, an obese managerial pleasure liner (empty, it later transpired) and a colossal steely wreck half-salvaged by a corporate grinder-crew which the pair had blown up just for the hell of it. Into the mix they’d edited more intimate shots from the interior of the ’
Geist
’s cockpit: the lovers laughing, cheering, kissing; reacting with passion and poignancy to the parade of artisanal destruction.
    But nothing sordid
, Myq thought, stifling a sarcastic smirk.
NoGod forbid we should offend anyone.
    This, the pair had agreed, splicing footage of catastrophe and carnage, should be a montage fit for a family show.
    ‘Destructertainment,’ Myq heard himself say again,