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

system.’
    Ziva’s thoughts of Enaya vanished. Newman? ‘How close? One jump?’
    ‘One jump.’
    And she was just sitting there, fuelled and ready to go right out on the edge of La Rochelle’s gravity well. ‘Anyone closer?’
    The
Dragon Queen
purred. ‘No one registered.’
    That was that then.
    ‘Take us there.’
    The
Dragon Queen
turned gently, twisting on yaw and pitch thrusters before starting the stuttering series of micro-jumps out to La Rochelle’s Kuiper belt and the jump to the Stopover system. The journey wasn’t all that long but it was long enough to run the simulation one more time. As usual, Jameson beat her.
    Stopover was one of those systems where lots of ships came to visit but no one ever stayed. There wasn’t much there, just a tight binary of stars whose tidal gravity had been enough to chew up any rocky inner planets long before the first amino-acids of life had evolved on Earth. There were two distant gas giants orbiting so far out that the stars were little more than bright points of light, which made them an excellent stop for skimmers fuelling up between jumps to Delta Pavonis, Epsilon Indi, Barnard’s Star, 61 Cygni, Ross 154 or Formalhaut. With so many populous systems nearby, Stopover had grown the way such systems often did; whispers among the free traders of a good place to skim that spread slowly into the corporate shipping world just a little less quickly than they had reached the pirates and freebooters and bounty hunters who took to lying in wait. After losing a dozen or so Anacondas and Pythons, the corporations got pissy enough to pay Darkwater – always and forever the Federation’s favourite private military contractor – to station a corvette in the system. And then Darkwater had done what they always did: built a station and started charging everyone who wanted to use it. To Ziva’s mind, it pretty much amounted to demanding protection money. It worked out well enough for the corporations who paid a monthly tariff, but the free traders hated it. The Pilots’ Federation had always had a thing about Darkwater. The other corporate security groups too, but Darkwater in particular had a name for being dicks.
    The
Dragon Queen
got the usual ping as soon as she arrived: a twenty credit ‘voluntary charge’ for using the facilities covered under Darkwater’s protection. Ziva, who’d been flying solo for fifteen years and flew a ship armed with lasers, shields and engines all tuned to better specs than Darkwater knew how to spell, tended to tell them to fuck off; or rather, she told the
Dragon Queen
to tell them to fuck off and the
Dragon Queen
offered something more polite and waved her bounty hunter licence at them. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. Sometimes she skimmed free fuel in peace and quiet, sometimes she played hide-and-seek in the gas giant’s upper atmosphere with a wing of irritable Vipers. They had a kind of unofficial game and they’d done it enough times that they all knew the rules: if they ever got a lock on her while she skimmed, she paid. If they didn’t then they let her be the next time she came through.
    ‘Pay it,’ she told the
Dragon Queen
. This time was different. ‘And remind them who we are.’ Someone had stiffed a freighter under Darkwater’s nose. Took some balls to do that and Darkwater were going to be pissy as a swarm of angry wasps about it. The sort of pissy that usually came with a nice fat bounty and she wasn’t about to queer her pitch for that over a meagre twenty credits.
    It didn’t take long for someone from the Darkwater station to avatar onto her bridge either, a full hologram rendering. A commander, by the flash on his shoulder. Not some flunky but one of the station’s senior officers. Could even be the watch officer. The hologram wasn’t
him
, of course – that wasn’t how Darkwater worked. No faces. Instead it was a complex algorithm that generated the illusion of a generic person. In this way,