[02] Elite: Nemorensis Read Online Free

she’d done to herself, with a faint flicker of shame: a sensation so unfamiliar that it perversely engendered an equal and opposite buzz of savage pride –
    I can still feel!
    – both of which Actual Emotions so overwhelmed her that she swiped away the blood without thinking, scattering a small swarm of glinting, weightless rubies to shatter and circulate through the cockpit.
    Her annoyance at
that
, depressingly, barely registered.
    Numb.
In and out. And worse every day.
    She clamped a hand to the wound, covering it and the countless others – some scabbed, some scarred – already whorling across the back of her right arm, noting that even on self-destructive autopilot her brain had been coldly rational enough not to slice too deep. In silent comparison she stole a glance at the back of her
other
arm.
The holy one
. No crazy crisscross there. No messy displacement guiltily recorded on tea-tone skin.
    The left arm, no, was not a canvas for the Casual Doodle.
    But still: the left arm displayed scars. Seven, in all. Deeper, more deliberate; each a puckered pair of thin keloid lips. Five she’d collected in person. The second victim, and the fourth, had each already accounted for one other apiece, hence seven. She’d gained most of them from back near the start, back when the chase seemed fresh and fierce, before the empty spaces and the creeping cold.
    Seven down
.
Four still out there
.
    It had never lasted this long before.
    She returned her gaze to the holo and shuttered down her eyes. The dogfight, she noted, was growing even dimmer.
    ‘We’re drifting out of range,’ Lex supplied. ‘You want me to get us cl—’
    ‘I’ll do it.’
    She flew perfectly, of course. A few exquisite tweaks, a few directional nudges to affect a course-change, parroting a Brownian-buffeting by other nearby junk, to carry them softly back towards the battle. So deft was her touch that the
The
barely lifted from its sleeper-state: expenditures of heat so faint that none but the most grotesquely refined systems could have detected them, and even then only with pilots undistracted by the more pressing concerns of mortal combat.
    More sharply defined onscreen by proximity, the merc’s Cobra was maintaining a constant stream of kinetic destruction: every fifth shell a blazing tracer, every twentieth a rad-dirty klikbug to help his vectoring. SixJen watched him tailspin from an outfacing loop to intercept the runner as it came back round – and for one hateful second she was certain he’d done it: had outflown the fugitive, had smuggled a direct line onto its least shielded front-facing aspect. But the clever little move paid no dividends. Even as the Cobra poured fire and tweaked for its strike the
Shattergeist
had already shifted out of alignment: a crash-halt followed by a monodirectional burst from a dorsal thruster. It simply dropped perpendicular to the combat, like an anchor into an abyss – precisely the sort of spatial sneakiness which marked out the born spacejockey from the glorified atmoflyer.
    ‘Huh,’ Lex declared. Algorithmically impressed.
    Far worse for the hunter, as he flopped and struggled to regain his line, was a massive slab of the dead freighter which came bumbling from the mass to fragment across his starboard fluke.
    Shitty luck
, SixJen thought without sympathy. Quietly self-censoring the arising notion that the
Shattergeist
’s eccentric moves might have been leading to this all along.
Nobody’s that good
.
    The shields on the merc’s Cobra held up, though barely, and the monstrous wreckage crumbled around them like an icesheet striking flame. But in all the foaming ionic chaos the Cobra’s inertia was annihilated, and it tumbled back from the collision with the selfsame force it was so flamboyantly expending to survive.
    And then the turn.
    In that one moment of shieldlight and confusion, as the hunter grappled with unhelpful physics and hurried to recharge his shield, the
Shattergeist
had all the