Free [02] Elite: Nemorensis by Simon Spurrier

lap and wrapped her hands round his, pinning them to the stick, then executed a few impetuous barrel rolls while wriggling. Bored, he supposed, of killing pseudocows.
    ‘How much do you know,’ she said, turning up the music, ‘about life cycles?’
    ‘You what?’
    ‘You know … egg laying, larval stages, all that.’
    ‘Can’t say I’m much of an expert.’ He squinted at the side of her face. Her voice sounded weird. ‘Why?’
    ‘Interesting subject.’ She jiggled gently against his crotch – a silent titter, a private joke. Then steered the ’
Geist
slowly, inexorably, towards the half-dead cargo ship, still gamely firing at them.
    The media vessels, Myq noticed, were gently shunting forwards. Sensing, he supposed, something special.
    ‘I mean, it’s not always just a case of … ha, of When Mummy and Daddy Love Each Other Very Much. Mammals are pretty fucking dull, comparatively speaking.’
    ‘What’s got into you?’
    The cargo ship hosed a stream of ordinance against their shields. Freshly tuned and powered-up for the tenth time – the fruits of numberless donations – they barely registered the tickle of lead. The software, Myq noted glumly, was still cheerfully associating the salvo with fart sounds.
    Tee didn’t seem to mind. In fact, Tee didn’t seem to be paying attention to much of anything except her own words.
    ‘Even terra life, you know? Plenty of weirdness there. Insects spend most of their lives as grubs. And young crustaceans are just these … these blobby little plankton things for months before they get all crusty and clawy. And as for sex? Ha! Fish don’t fuck, poor things, just squirt their junk all over the place and mix it up. Most birds – did you know this? Most birds don’t even have cocks or cracks. Just these slimy patch things.’
    ‘Tee, you’re … you’re kind of freaking me out. Why do you know all this? And what’s it got to do w—’ Myq stopped. Blinked. The music, as if psychically reactive, affected a long descending whistle tone, like a bomb falling into his brain.
    Oh no …
    Teesa half turned to face him, a quizzical smile on her face. ‘What is it?’
    He cleared his throat. ‘Are you … are you trying to suggest we have a kid?’
    She just threw back her head and roared with laughter.
    ‘Just checking,’ he muttered.
    The
Shattergeist
now hung a scant few kliks from the cargo ship. The squat thing, entirely wrecked along one flank, had nosed its way protectively into the field of debris round the even-more-successfully-buggered corpses of its fellows. Some of the crews from the other ships had bailed in time: the scanner now finding them gathered in a frightened little cluster of RemLok suits just behind the surviving vessel.
    Which, as if intuiting that the predator responsible was finally intending to finish the job, finally gave up on its pointless firing.
    Teesa tapped a control –
weapons hot … here we go …
– and picked up on her monologue as if it was never interrupted.
    ‘
Non
-terrestrial life –
now
. Soooo much weirdness. You’ve got your supra-binary life forms, first of all. Three genders, four, even five. Different combinations of parenthood, different outcomes for different environmental situations. You’ve got your novel life forms which reproduce through, what, through consumption or decomposition or bloody parasitic possession. And that’s before you get to the trippy aphysical stuff. You know there’s a thing out in the Frelix system that spends two thirds of its life as a drifting chain of pheromones? And now they think – “
they
”, y’know? The experts – they think we’re going to start recognising a lot of humdrum stuff as exotic higher-plane life. Piece of music that won’t get out of your head? Madcap idea you’ve just got to spread around? What’s that if not reproduction?’
    Myq gurgled.
    He, throughout all of this, was having something of a crisis. For the first time he could remember, since