[02] Elite: Nemorensis Read Online Free PDF Page B

Blown Up? He hadn’t decided yet how he felt about that, and had defaulted in the interim to a strategy of unthinking avoidance.
    Tee, typically, who’d been at the controls throughout the whole fight, in spite of a theatrically protracted orgasm, had thought the whole thing glorious fun.
    But now? Now Myq would’ve jumped at the chance to be locked in a hellatious dogfight, missiles inbound and shields failing, if it meant he could just escape the sweaty silence of this so-called press conference.
    ‘“
Destructertainment
”,’ one of the journalists echoed, as if sampling the word. A clammy little man at the rear with a backgammon hat and a camlens implanted above his left eye, he packed into that one repetition a sophisticated combination of complex and well-considered derision and disgust. Along the way it absorbed into its specific articles of mockery a more general package of revulsion aimed, so Myq neurotically intuited, at the lovers’ undeserved self-importance, their grimy clothing, his own backwater accent, and all the associated rural triviality his very being implied.
    Myq was feeling unusually sensitive today, and dimly suspected he knew why.
    He’d never had to share Tee’s attention with anyone before.
    ‘Um,’ he said. ‘Yeah. Destructertainment. That’s right.’
    The little man whistled a mad melody under his breath and heavy-lidded his eyes. ‘Destructertainment,’ he repeated. Then whistled again.
    Tee gripped Myq’s hand harder. The word, like this whole thing, had been her idea. Ironically enough it had been during one of the ‘avoiding-all-trouble’ stretches, drifting out in the spatial boondocks, while Tee lazed like a cat and he rubbed anti-chafe meds onto his nethers, that they’d got their first inkling of the media fallout from their spree. Cycling through lowband newsies and one or two highband bulletins from the local cluster, he caught reference to their destructive excesses three times within an hour. In each case the
Shattergeist
’s shenanigans were reported with all the requisite outrage he’d expect of the morally-vanilla newsnets – ‘
wanton and obscene destruction
!’ ‘
no obvious motive!’ ‘not a single thought spared for collateral damage
!’ – and yet in each case there was also a hmm-provoking note of incongruity.
    In the first clip, for instance, after all the fire-and-brimstone stuff, the story segued into an indignant medley of vox pop soundbytes, amidst whose predictable condemnations and sighs (‘
What’s the galaxy coming to?’
) a couple of younger voices announced they thought the footage of the
Shattergeist
looked ‘actually kinda supernebular’, and bluntly proposed there were worse things one could do with one’s time than shit on the profit-margins of the megacorps.
    ‘Huh,’ Myq had said, squirting more ointment.
    The second broadcast was a glitzier, vid-complete affair whose visual element switched between a glossy anchorwoman and various blackbox recordings (from the victims’ POV, naturally) of the
Shattergeist
in action. It upped the ante by not only naming the fugitive vessel directly, but the Alliance-space ‘pop-band’ from whom it’d been reported stolen. And then, the pertinent signal amidst the noise, it signed-off with a weird Public Safety message imploring parents to prevent their kids from stealing ships in an attempt to emulate the criminals.
    Which
, Myq pondered,
sort of implies some of them already tried …
    The third piece, audio only, was so drearily condemnatory he almost switched it off prematurely. But as the report ended and clangy adolescent MehRap artfully faded-up to replace it, the newscaster, unaware his mic was still live, blurted, ‘Ya know what? That sounds like a lotta fun. Those kids’re okay by m—’
    The feed died as swiftly as an anonymous producer could flip a switch.
    ‘People,’ Myq had murmured to himself, articulating a piece of bloody obvious wisdom as if in receipt of a holy