Elite Dangerous: Wanted

Book 0: Elite: Dangerous

by Gavin Deas

Genres: Science Fiction; Military Sci-Fi; Space Opera

Synopsis

A pulse-pounding tale of space piracy and law enforcement, set inside the world of Elite: Dangerous When a routine bit of piracy goes wrong, the crew of the Song of Stone realize that there's a bounty hunter on their tail—one who might, finally, be able to outclass them. The Dragon Queen is feared across space, and for good reason. But even the bounty hunter doesn't realize what she's been hired to do, or what is in the container she's been sent to retrieve. And she's not the only hunter in the game. One of three distinct but subtly linked novels written by major authors who are fans of the game, this novel will be a must-buy for not only the 25,000 plus people who funded the new game on Kickstarter, but also for those fans of the original game.

Release date: November 1, 2014

Publisher: Gollancz

Print pages: 256

Sample

‘Have you ever killed before?’ The voice was little more than a low rumble. Ravindra stopped short as the massive fellow con – barrel-chested, red-bearded – stepped in front of her. He stood a little under six foot eight inches in his stained, white prison uniform. He reached down to touch the side of her face, her soft light brown skin. His hand was large and calloused.

Ravindra held his stare, looking up into hate-filled green eyes partially concealed under a heavy brow and thick red eyebrows. It was a stupid question. You didn’t get sentenced to hard labour in the high security section of Warren Prison Mine on Ross 128 unless you’d done something really bad.

His name was Red and he was the daddy in cell block 214. She was new. She was weary to the point of exhaustion from the first few days of mining. Her muscles were agony, she was still shaking from the cold that had seeped through her flesh and into her very bones, or so it seemed, and her hands, despite the gloves, were little more than a bloodied mess of burst blisters. Ravindra and Red were standing in a mile-long tunnel, one of the abandoned mine shafts originally cut by huge robot mining vehicles. The tunnel had been turned into a cell block.

She didn’t take her eyes off Red. She felt, rather than saw, people turn from her. Other prisoners. Some would be too frightened, others just deciding that it wasn’t their business. It was the guards turning away that bothered her the most, though she wasn’t all that surprised.

‘I think you have,’ Red rumbled.

Good call, Ravindra thought but remained quiet, seemingly impassive. She didn’t want to give anything away.

‘But I think you did it the easy way.’ He gripped her face. The strength in his fingers suggested he could easily crush her skull if he wanted. ‘I think you killed them from far away. The lazy way. I think there’s no strength in you.’ He tightened his grasp and pulled her up onto her tiptoes. It wouldn’t have been difficult for him to lift her up but maybe he didn’t want to bruise her skin. ‘Do you want to do this the easy way as well? Or the hard?’

She let him see fear. It wasn’t all faked.

‘Easy,’ she pleaded. ‘Where?’

‘Here,’ he said letting her down onto the soles of her feet. ‘So everyone knows what you are. Who you belong to.’

She looked around, apparently terrified.

‘Please …’ she begged.

‘There is no—’

She palmed the flint-analogue-tipped shank and jammed it into his wrist, then she pushed it all the way up his arm to his arm pit. His eyes widened. He didn’t scream. It was at this point that Ravindra knew this prison-cooked-steroid hulk was less than human; he was a monster. He shifted his grip. Massive, thick fingers wrapped nearly all the way around her throat. He lifted her a full two feet off the ground. Her vision filled with stars whilst simultaneously going dark as he cut off the blood and oxygen to her brain. She saw the vein bulging on his neck from pain and fury. At least she had a target. She jammed the shank into the vein. He didn’t stop squeezing. Everything was going dark. She tore the shank out. The vein fountained red. The monster staggered back from her, clutching at the wound. Trying to stem the gush with his hand. Ravindra fell to the ground, nursing her near-crushed throat. She forced herself onto her feet despite her flickering vision, despite the light-headedness, despite a desperate wish to pass out. She tried to say something. It just came out a choking rattle. Red was still on his feet, staring at her as his life leaked through his fingers.

‘Listen!’ she finally managed. Red collapsed to the ground. Guards were sprinting towards them. ‘Decide how many of you have to die before I get left in peace!’ Then the guards reached her. They beat her so hard with stun batons that she soiled herself.

‘Mum!’

No! You can’t be here! Ravindra thought. A moment of maternal panic as the confused boundaries between waking consciousness and dreaming memory merged. It was enough to make her sit bolt upright in her bed, drenched in sweat.

‘What?’ she asked blearily. She glanced out of the porthole. They called them portholes. They were actually just transparent parts of the hull. They were still small because they cost more than non-transparent parts of the hull. She’d paid through the nose for a cabin with a porthole. She could see the stratified blues and whites of Motherlode below them. From their position in the upper atmosphere she was looking at the planetary horizon. Reddot was living up to its name. The red dwarf star was little more than a small ball of red light far in the distance. It always made her feel cold, looking at it. Even high in the mountains, Quince had seemed warmer, more immediate.

Whit’s Station wasn’t a space station, though everyone treated it as such until they were faced with the maintenance bills for the strain that multiple atmospheric re-entry put on a hull. It was the control centre of an automated hydrogen mining operation. Robots built to withstand the incredible pressures in the lower atmospheres harvested the hydrogen and delivered it back to the station. The station itself was, in fact, a huge mushroom-shaped aerostat.

So far out on the Frontier and close, in relative terms, to a number of resource-rich systems, Whit’s Station would have been an easy target for pirates, claim jumpers and corporate raiders. So George Whit, entrepreneur and founder of the station, had turned it into a Freeport. He’d supplied hydrogen to the pirates, the claim jumpers and the corporate raiders. He’d provided port and fuel to legitimate ships as well: explorers, surveyors and prospectors.

On a number of occasions during its hundred and fifty year history, corporate interests had tried to take Whit’s Station over. Each time, there had been a loyal clientele prepared to fight them off. On one occasion, ships loyal to Whit’s Station had even fought off a squadron of ships backed by the Empire. Ravindra had fought in that battle. It was during that fracas they had captured the Song of Stone. Yes, the Whit family had been clever. They’d ensured it was easier to work with them than to try to take over Whit’s Station. And Ravindra had been given more reason than many to ensure that the Empire did not gain control.

The door to her cabin slid open and Ji looked down at his dishevelled mum. Ravindra had left the Warren Prison Mine pregnant. Everyone said that the seventeen-year-old Ji looked like a male version of her. There was nothing of his father in him. She had carried the stronger genes. Her owners and the gene clinics in Simpson Town on New America had made sure of that. He was tall, athletically slender, with dark hair that, at shoulder length, he kept much shorter than hers. They shared the same big brown eyes and high cheekbones that could make him appear either genuinely beautiful or very, very cruel, depending on the expression on his face. This morning the expression on his face was guarded. Seventeen years of maternal experience told Ravindra that this meant that Ji wanted something, something that she wasn’t going to like.

But he just nodded at the comms light. ‘Harlan’s trying to reach you.’

She cursed herself. She’d cut off the comms link so she wouldn’t be disturbed. She’d been up most of the night doing maintenance on the ship’s only military-grade laser. Without an Imperial naval shipyard, and the proper parts, it was a struggle to keep the powerful weapon functional.

‘All right,’ she acknowledged. Ji didn’t move. ‘I’m going to need to take this privately.’ Ji still didn’t move. He looked as if he was trying to find a way to say something. ‘You’re much more likely to get what you want when I haven’t just woken up with an important call waiting.’

He nodded and left the room.

‘Privacy check,’ she ordered. The cabin’s expert system assured her that the call was fully security screened. ‘Open call.’ Part of the wall became a screen. A blinking red light in the corner of the screen told her that the call had the highest privacy and security rating possible.

Harlan Whit, great-grandson of George Whit, appeared on the screen. He wore a spotless white linen suit and was sitting behind a large wooden desk that he’d paid a fortune to import from Earth itself. Behind the desk was a very large porthole looking down on Motherlode.

Whit was a plump, balding man in his early fifties. His appearance was deceptive. He looked the epitome of softness, particularly out here where he was surrounded by hard frontiersmen and women. There was intelligence in his blue eyes, however, and Ravindra knew that he was perfectly capable of looking after himself with his fists, with knives and with firearms, and that he could make utterly ruthless decisions.

The Whit family made sure that their children grew up hard. They also instilled in them the value of loyalty and fair play – if for no other reason than out in the Frontier you had to be able to trust who you were dealing with, to a certain extent. If you crossed a Whit, however, it would end badly for you.

‘You look like shit, young lady,’ Harlan told her, grinning.

‘Not so young anymore,’ she said, smiling back. She knew that her hair was a mess, her eyes were still full of sleep and her sleeveless Jjagged Bbanner T-shirt was soaked in sweat.

‘Bad night?’

She shrugged.

‘Newman’s in port.’

Ravindra cursed silently.

‘You sure you want to get in bed with these people?’

‘I’m sure I don’t …’

‘Look, I know I set this up, but you know who Newman works for. I can’t protect you from them.’

She nodded. She knew the risks involved. ‘Their reputation is for being harsh but fair.’

‘No, their reputation is for going to any lengths to do exactly what they said they’d do. That’s different.’

Ravindra sighed. She knew he was right. ‘It’s a big score, Harlan.’

‘Enough to stop being an outlaw?’ he asked smiling. It was what everyone talked about out here and nobody ever quite managed to do.

‘Living the dream,’ she said, smiling again. Then, more seriously, ‘It’s maybe enough for Ji …’

Harlan nodded. ‘There’s something else.’

‘Yeah?’ Ravindra asked wearily. She was pretty sure she wasn’t going to like what was coming.

‘Ji’s been hanging around the Magician.’

Ravindra absorbed that for a moment before responding. ‘Just so you know, I’m going to have a falling out with Captain Merkel,’ she said.

Harlan nodded. ‘Ain’t none of my concern, man’s a son-of-a-bitch as far as I’m concerned. I’ll speak to you when you get back, okay?’

Ravindra nodded. The screen went blank.

Shit, she cursed. They’re here today, and she had an argument with Ji to look forward to as well.

Ravindra had sent orders for the crew to assemble. She hadn’t sent anything to Newman. She’d go and find him when she was ready. She’d showered, changed and put in her lenses.

Reddot was nominally in Alliance space – or rather, they had declared for the Alliance in a bid to avoid Imperial and Federation interference. The system wasn’t quite resource rich enough, and the locals were just a little more trouble than they were worth, for either of the two big powers to make anything more than a token effort to try to control it. Being in Alliance space meant that her news feed mainly came from Frontier News. She had searches up for certain items from the main Imperial and Federation news organisations but the news could be anything from two days to more than a week old.

She walked into the kitchen, where the processor already had her concentrated-coffee-from-concentrate-beverage ready for her. It tasted foul but it was manufacturer- guaranteed to help her wake up. Ji was sitting at the breakfast bar, backlit by Motherlode through the kitchen porthole. His jaw was set, a look of defiance on his face. Ravindra pretended to ignore him as she searched the news feed playing on her contact lenses for anything of interest.

‘Stay away from the Magician,’ she said without looking at him. Trying to make it sound unimportant. Knowing that it wouldn’t work.

‘Okay,’ Ji said. This surprised her so much that she looked over at him. ‘Take me out with you. I know Newman’s back.’

Her heart sank. It worried her that he even knew they were working together. She wondered who else knew who shouldn’t.

‘Don’t be ridiculous …’ she started.

‘You were working when you were sixteen—’ he began.

Her anger was like a flash-fire. She prided herself on rationality but it often went out the window in the face of her only child.

‘And I was in prison at eighteen! I didn’t have any choice!’ she shouted at him. ‘You’re not coming out with me. Worrying about you could get me and the rest of the crew killed!’

‘Captain Merkel—’ Ji started.

‘Merkel is a glory boy idiot who’s going to be dead soon! He’s an amateur, a wannabe! He doesn’t have the slightest idea of what he’s doing!’

‘If you won’t—’

She was across the small kitchen and had grabbed him out of the chair and slammed him against the external bulkhead next to the porthole before she even knew she was doing it. ‘Stay away from Merkel!’ she screamed at him. He tried to push her away but she’d locked him down tight.

‘Let go of me! It’s good enough for you … Why isn’t it good enough for me?’ He was struggling, trying to escape her armbar.

‘Because I want something better for you!’

‘As a station rat?’ He stopped struggling as the anger drained from his face. Ravindra found herself looking at the face of a cold and distant stranger. ‘We had a chance at another life. We could have been far away from here a long time ago. Why didn’t you sell the Song when you took her?’

Because she’s my ship, Ravindra thought. She let go of him. He pushed past her.

‘You can’t stop me doing what I want to do!’ he screamed at her on his way out of the kitchen.

Good parenting, she told herself angrily, as she heard the door to the two-bedroom cabin slide shut. She was never going to be able to get across just how frightened she was for him – and all the time.

‘Merkel.’ It was rude enough to walk uninvited into the berth of another ship. It was even ruder to not address another captain or pilot by his title. But if Merkel was offended he didn’t let it show.

Merkel was a handsome man, a little younger than her. His short, spiky blond hair was styled by the only saloon on the station. His deep blue eyes and his smile, full of white ivory, were very disarming and had gone a long way to make him extremely popular among certain men and women. He was wearing the closest thing to up-to-date fashion that the Frontier could offer. Probably the results of his last sloppy score, Ravindra thought.

‘Captain Khanguire,’ Merkel said, smiling, his hands open in welcome as he came out from under the shadow of the Magician, a heavily modified Cobra Mk. III.

The rest of Merkel’s crew seemed a little more suspicious of Ravindra’s presence in their docking berth. Ravindra didn’t break step as she punched Merkel in the stomach with her right fist; as he started to double over, she brought her left fist up into his chin and then followed that up with her elbow in one swift action. He staggered back. She drew the burst pistol on her left hip and hit him in the face with it twice. His nose broke and blood squirted onto his face. He went sprawling over a packing crate.

The two men on Merkel’s crew started towards the pair of them while the the third, a woman, reached for a shotgun. Ravindra drew her right hand burst pistol and pointed it in their direction. A crosshair appeared on her lenses showing where the bullets would hit if she started firing.

‘You might get me in a rush, but he’ll die.’ She put the barrel of the left hand burst pistol against Merkel’s lips. ‘And I reckon I kill two of you before you get me.’ The Magician’s crew stopped moving. She pushed the burst pistol hard, chipping several of Merkel’s teeth, until she had forced half the barrel into his mouth. ‘Convince me that you’re going to have nothing more to do with my son.’

When Ravindra quit the Magician’s docking berth she was breathing hard. It hadn’t been the imminence of gunplay that bothered her – she was furious with Merkel. She had wanted to hurt him, maybe even kill him. She was walking the curving corridor that ran around the station connecting the docking berths when she saw four figures approaching her.

This is just what I need, Ravindra thought. She recognised the lead figure, a nondescript man with a goatee, and salt and pepper hair. His name was McCauley and he captained the Scalpel. They were a professional crew who took down big, dangerous scores, and were the only crew reputed to be colder and more ruthless than the Song of Stone’s. Ravindra had always had the feeling that McCauley disliked her, though she had never been able to work out why.

McCauley’s glare as he went by made Ravindra’s hands move instinctively closer to her pistols. When the four man crew of the Scalpel had passed she glanced back at them. McCauley was looking over his shoulder at her, still glaring.

Ravindra was sitting in a ‘coffee’ bar stripping down and cleaning blood and saliva off one of her burst pistols when Newman found her. He had the compact, powerful but not massive frame that she had come to expect from ex-military types. His hair was cut short, close to the scalp, and he was attractive in an average sort of way. Ravindra wasn’t quite sure how old he was, though she suspected he was close to her age. He was dressed conservatively but his dark coloured, utilitarian, multi-pocket trousers, his jacket and his boots all screamed ex-military. She couldn’t make out where he was concealing weaponry, but she was sure he was. So far he’d been courteous and very professional and he would be doing the most difficult part of the job. All of this appealed to Ravindra. But something about Newman’s strangely colourless eyes felt wrong.

Ravindra didn’t know a great deal about his background. There were stories that he was either ex-Federation special forces, or one of the Emperor’s own elite, genetically enhanced, clone soldiers. Now, however, he worked for very different masters.

Newman glanced down at the burst pistol, his expression devoid of emotion.

‘Everything okay, Captain Khanguire?’ he enquired.

‘Fine,’ she told him, looking up as she rapidly reassembled the burst pistol. ‘Now?’

He nodded.

‘I’d prefer more time.’

‘We’ve done enough sims. It’ll be fine, though I respect your commitment to preparation.’

She held up her right fist. Her personal computer took the form of a simple steel band around her middle finger. She bumped fists with Newman, touching his own ring computer. The final details of the plan were transferred to her securely. She saw the file appear in her lenses as a blinking icon in the lower right side of her vision.

‘You’re clear on the plan?’ Newman asked.

‘Yes,’ Ravindra said. Part of her was irritated and part was gratified at the question.

‘And your crew?’

She nodded. Newman turned to leave.

‘Captain Newman?’

He stopped and looked back.

‘I am aware of your background. I want this nice and smooth. No unnecessary grief.’ Ravindra spoke calmly.

Newman smiled. The smile didn’t quite make it to his eyes.

‘Don’t worry, Captain, we’ve done this before.’ Then he left. Ravindra noticed another man and a woman, similarly dressed, fall in behind him.

Ravindra walked into the docking berth. The sleek form of the Song of Stone still took her breath away. The smooth, rounded lines added to her stealth signature. The nacelles gave her an edge in both speed and manoeuvrability. The Song had started life as a Cutter in the service of the Empire. It had been one of the ships that had come to claim the Reddot system. At the time Ravindra had been piloting an old Cobra Mk. II. The cutter was the faster, more manoeuvrable ship and had carried a lot more firepower but Ravindra had out-flown the Empire’s pilot. Of course she had – the Song’s original pilot hadn’t been genetically modified to be the best slave pilot the genetechs in Simpson Town could create by manipulating an unborn foetus. The other benefit of using an Imperial Cutter was that anything they did tended to be blamed on Imperial privateers.

They had renamed the ship the Song of Stone. It was named for the think-tank that she had joined in the Warren Prison Complex. The think-tank had consisted of her current crew and had been run by Marvin Dane. Marvin had been captain of the Song before Ravindra, taking it over after the battle. He had been killed on a station in the Tiolce system by a bounty hunter. Ravindra still missed him.

The think-tank had been put together for two reasons only. They wanted to use their skill sets to become rich; and they were never, ever, going back to Ross 128. That was why, even though the bounty hunter had had the drop on Marvin, he hadn’t surrendered.

Ravindra walked up the ramp and into the ship. Like anything Imperial the inside was comfortable, bordering on the plush, though it looked a little worn now. She walked down the corridor towards the bridge. The data from the ship’s last diagnostic ran down her vision in a cascade. Everything was running well within parameters but she wanted to see more systems, particularly manoeuvring and weapons, running at optimum. She had decided a long time ago that this was what made the difference between this ship and her crew, and wannabe disasters-waiting-to-happen like Merkel.

She walked onto the bridge. The other four were waiting for her.

‘Harnack?’ she asked instead of saying good morning. Harnack was one half of the weapons team. He was responsible for the military laser. He was a small wiry man with a goatee. Ravindra knew that he seemed very serious unless you knew him well. He h. . .