Free [04] Elite: Mostly Harmless by Kate Russell Page A

DORIS. Angel had all but forgotten about the bot.
    ‘Fifteen … fourteen … thirteen …’
    Angel was swinging her feet into the pod now, straightening her body so that she could slip into the narrow cylinder.
    ‘I’m afraid you’re on your own; only room in here for one.’
    The bot was saying something else but Angel already had the hatch pulled closed and was initiating the eject sequence. The tiny chamber hissed with pressurisation.
    ‘Five … four … three …’
    She couldn’t hear the comms channel any more but she was counting down inside her head, praying the pod would make it out in time. As it popped out into empty space her ears popped too. The temperature fell sharply and reality shrunk down to a pinpoint, the beating of her heart the only sound. Her breath came next, fogging up the EVA helmet in front of her eyes. For a moment inside that misty bubble the oppressive silence of space seemed inescapably eternal. Then suddenly the galaxy was torn apart by the screeching din of a violent siren.
     

 
     
    Chapter 8
     
    The Asp’s sensors identified the chunks of twisted metal drifting through space as the carcass of a Cobra. The heat signature coming off what was presumably once a thruster suggested the wreckage was only a few hours old. Katherine whistled.
    ‘Someone really did a number on you,’ she said, scanners picking over the debris in search of anything worth salvaging.
    She tweaked the roll lever, nudging her vessel out of the path of a particularly angry-looking lump of ex-hull and whistled again as a billion tiny fragments spun like stars through the silent space around her. It was unusual to see a cargo mule blasted apart like this. Whoever was responsible would have taken a big reputation hit and would most likely be wearing a healthy bounty on their head for their trouble. Katherine flipped the HUD to long range scanners to check if the attacker was still mooching around. She quite fancied a dog-fight if they were evenly matched and a bounty would definitely come in handy. An impressive snake’s nest of dreadlocks decorated with clay beads and metal cuffs floated about her face as she stared into the black depths. It got in the way a bit in zero-g, but she was very proud of her hair, which had seen her christened with her pirate name: Dread Katherine . Her flight suit was dark, even before a couple of decades of oily soot from life inside the Hollows had done their work. She wore a broad, heavy studded girdle cinching it tight about her waist. Matching gun-metal cuffs around her wrists and neck and a hooked bolt through the septum of her nose completed the look. It was a look that said ‘don’t screw with me’. People generally took its advice.
    The scanner probed with its electro-magnetic fingers. Nothing close – at least nothing operational – but there was another heat-sig registering not far off the scanner’s outer range. Another wreck? Hard to tell at this distance. She flipped the HUD back to short range so she could finish up here and go check it out. The radar swept around her in a lazy arc as she eased her vessel carefully through the slowly tumbling chunks and spinning fragments.
    BLIP.
    Uh-oh. Katherine stared at the green dot on the outer circle of the scanner as it faded away and then pulsed back to full strength when the radar arm approached again.
    BLIP.
    Life. Most likely the Cobra’s pilot floating through space in the claustrophobic shell of an escape pod.
    BLIP.
    ‘Oh, piss in a zero-g bucket ...’
    The pirate thought briefly about turning around and ignoring it. The wreckage of the old Cobra suggested the body inside the pod was unlikely to be worth much. Picking up floaters from a recent skirmish almost always ended up being a pain in the cargo bay. You never recovered your costs unless there was a salvage reward on offer.
    BLIP.
    ‘ Damn IT! ’
    There wasn’t much else on the scanner so she decided she might as well scoop up the pod. Maybe its