Free [02] Elite: Nemorensis by Simon Spurrier Page A

meeting Teesa, despite being neither exhausted nor sore, and despite the more-than-conspicuous wriggling of her arse against his lap, he did not have an erection.
    ‘You … Tee, you said you were a chauffeur, right? Back when you were … y’know?’
    ‘A slave.’
    ‘Yeah. So. Not a biology teacher?’
    Another half turn to face him, another sideways smile, another bum-squirm. Another profound failure to arouse. ‘Long time ago,’ she said. ‘Learnt a lot since then. Lot of water under the bridge.’
    Right
, he thought.
Yeah.
    Like that bit about how you crippled your boss and set fire to the whole place.
    Water. Bridge.
    He hadn’t summoned the courage to ask her about that yet. Partly, he supposed, it felt like such a petty thing to quibble over, in context.
    Like:
Hey Tee, y’know how we spend most days exploding stuff? How we’ve probably racked up a double-nebular body count? How you shot a guy in the face back in Tun/Ton? Okay, well, just so’s you know, all that pales into comparison to you Not Telling Me about a significantly-less-horrible episode from your distant past.
    Whiny crap.
    Here was the truth: Teesa wasn’t
his
. Wasn’t anyone’s. Someone like her never would be, never could be, never should be. Myq felt stupid and childish for even being hurt at the lack of disclosure; rendered a whinging brat by his unthinking need to understand and know her fully.
    I love her. NoGod help me, I love her.
    I want every part of her. Memories and all.
    Teesa ripped the cargo ship apart with supreme indifference. The music software barely seemed to respond, sensitive to her ambivalence. She spared, Myq noticed, a perfectly aimed shot for a single smallish shibboletti tumbling past, which burst in a satisfying haze of spores.
    ‘Take those things,’ she said, nodding at the twist of fur and skin which remained of the creature, inured to the operatic curtains of nuclear fire blossoming nearby. ‘They’re barely conscious, they’re just as happy in a vacuum as atmosphere, they’re totally inedible, they’re extremely ugly, but they have one of the most exciting reproductive cycles you’ll ever hear about.’
    ‘Uh, Tee …?’ Myq said. She’d softly started guiding the ’
Geist
into the flaming debris. ‘What’re y—’
    ‘What happens is, they’re all female. Every single one. Grow up from spores, see? Airborne – tiny little things. Settle on a bit of plant matter, om-nom-nom, few years later you’ve got your basic shaggy shibboletti. And they’re very valuable. I mean, that’s exactly the point. Somewhere down in those ballbag skins there’s a clutch of drippy little glands that make some of the finest narcotics known to man. Illegal in the Federation, but in the Empire? Or some quaint little indie-world? These beasties’re worth a bomb, Myq.’
    She smirked at that. Like sharing a joke with herself.
    As if dreaming, Myq watched lumps of wreckage and great green tangles of dead shibboletti carom off the shields. She drove them deeper into the morass, searching, so it seemed, for something. But beneath his confusion at her plans, beneath his bewilderment at her weird ejaculation of expertise, beneath even his growing panic at the startling lack of horniness crackling between them, Myq felt a tiny spark of memory light up in his mind.
    A commodity baron
, a wheedling little voice said.
Someone in … ohhh … someone in the glander-trade.
    The reporter. The dead reporter had said that.
    ‘Tee,’ Myq said. ‘Tee, how d’you know so much about shibbole—’
    ‘Now here’s the fascinating part. If you get enough of the damn things together, all at once, one of them starts to change. Takes a week or two. Becomes … well, for want of a better word: male.’
    ‘Your owner … back when you were a sl—’
    ‘Sssh, listen.’ She banked right, nudging aside a sheet of dented hull. Checking, so Myq thought, to make sure the media ships were close at hand. ‘Now, the gland-merchants?