Read [02] Elite: Nemorensis for Free Online Page A

weirdly loyal to Tee’s ugly term.
    ‘Destructertainment,’ she repeated, her hand again finding his.
    And, yeah, this time:
    ‘… destructertainment,’ the reporters mumbled. Nodding along. Loosening collars, wiping brows. Partly, Myq supposed, they were in shock: they’d had the unexpected good fortune of the region’s newest novelty presenting itself to them on a platter. But mostly?
    Mostly, it’s her.
    Smiling. Watching them like an artist unveiling her opus. And just as she basked in their wonder, so they basked in her.
    Most of them
.
    The sticky guy at the back, Myq had observed, had barely glanced at the destruction on screen. Something about him, surpassing even his condescending little turn before, prickled at the base of Myq’s spine.
    ‘You will have noticed,’ Tee was saying, with the same calm tone one might use to address a company of wayward teenagers, ‘that you can’t livecast from this room. That’s nothing to worry about.’ Several of the journos had indeed dreamily reached to fiddle with cameras and mictech, their adoration briefly polluted by a note of consternation. ‘Lead in the walls. And some sort of scrambler signal, I don’t really understand it myself. But, please, we’re more than happy for you to record everything you see. You’ll appreciate we’d simply like to be well on our way before any transmissions actually occur.’
    Despite the sizeable dent this restriction put in the journos’ pursuit of a scoop, still they nodded and smiled with foggy understanding.
Good, horny, sluggish little puppets.
    Every Coriolis station in Federation space, so it transpired, had a room like this. After decades of frostwar with the Empire, replete with intelligence scares, political scandals and unhelpful tech-innovation, it had been belatedly agreed by those in command that the easiest way to obviate paranoia was simply to ensure VIPs were never far from a wall without ears. Despite the prohibitive costs of installing such data-sanctuaries station owners had rushed to cough-up for a ‘Whispering Room’ of their own, sensing with mercantile glee the opportunity to charge equally extortionate amounts for rental and use. There was never a shortage of people with secrets.
    The hacks accepted the news of their non-immediacy without grumble. In fact the longer they spent in the room the more their professional decorum, the bulldog loyalty to their particular rag, the unspoken enmity and competition which had crackled between them at first, eroded in the tidal wash of Tee’s performance. On one side a man was now openly fondling the buttocks of the gentleman in front, while a couple in the centre, professional nemeses for all Myq knew, kept leaning together to exchange lusty kisses before remembering themselves and breaking apart. Then forgetting again.
    Watching, Myq caught himself stifling a grin more than once, until the dread suspicion occurred that he was simply regarding his own fate from the outside: that these people were no different from him; that he, like them, was enslaved, ensorcelled, enchained, by the mad urge to dance to Teesa’s tune.
    And hot on the heels of that revelation: the inevitable
How?
    And just as inevitably, like all questions of pertinence which arose in Teesa’s presence, the query was annihilated before it could germinate. This time, at least, not by Tee herself.
    The sweaty man in the hat bolted for the exit.
    Wants his fucking scoop!
    Myq shifted on instinct to chase, realising instantly it was hopeless. And grasping, somewhat slower, the full weight of the disaster that would arise from as small a thing as a man opening the door. The data-sanctuary would collapse. The battery of cams and transmitters would, with automatic obedience, start livecasting all they’d seen.
    And then: cops.
    And then: shooting.
    And then: the end.
    (Myq wasn’t sure, abstractly, if ‘the end’ he was concerned about was ‘of life’ or ‘of the adventure’, but it