Free [01] Elite: Wanted by Gavin Deas Page B

smugglers and pirates, but now with all the hull breaches patched and with breathable pressurised air through most of the station and a thin veneer of law and order painted over it for the benefit of the New Caledonia authorities. Everyone knew you didn’t have to scratch very hard to make it flake.
    All of which made the Mausoleum not the sort of place where a bounty hunter in a Fer-de-Lance showed up, parked her ship, went to a bar, asked a few questions and then came back and expected to find her ship still there. In fact she probably shouldn’t be expecting to leave the bar at all, at least not in one piece; so for this, Ziva sent the
Dragon Queen
ahead without her and switched her identity. She gave herself a flimsy backup that wouldn’t take too much scrutiny and then a more solid second one beneath. The new her – Olivia Red – bought herself a berth on the
Myla
, a dubious Python almost certainly fitted out for low-rent smuggling. The
Dragon Queen
would wait, running silent out in empty space, until called for. Which would make for an interesting exit, if it came to that.
    Olivia Red kept herself to herself aboard the
Myla
. She stayed in her cabin and spoke to the crew as little as possible and generally gave the impression of wanting to be left alone. When they reached the Black Mausoleum, she paid in credit packs and found herself somewhere cheap to stay. The station was a hole, tiny, barely managing to fake half a standard gravity even around its rim. No matter. With a bit of luck, someone would have the curiosity to poke around and realise that Olivia Red was a fake. The Judas Syndicate had their fingers all over the Mausoleum
.
If she’d guessed right then someone would poke through the flimsy false identity to discover a dubious past calculated to stir the Syndicate’s interest in a vaguely unfriendly sort of way. Enough to provoke a visit from station security, at least.
    Of course, there was always a chance that they'd poke through the second false identity too and work out who she
really
was, at which point life would quickly become very interesting in a particularly shitty sort of way.
    Three hours after closing the door of her room behind her, down in the low-rent, low-gravity inner ring of the station, a pair of steroid junkers burst in on her. They were big men, six foot six and easily twice her body-mass. They towered over her as they walked in, full of their strength. Three million years of evolution still hadn’t done the male brain many favours when it came to size and its apparent importance, but Ziva backed away anyway, duly putting on a façade of female fear. The junkers made themselves at home, one sitting on the corner of her bed, the other drawing up a chair in front of the door so she’d have to go past him to get out.
    ‘What do you want?’ She had an open link to the
Dragon Queen
. Eventually the
Dragon Queen
would start trawling databases for who these guys were and who they worked for and all that sort of thing; the only snag being that the
Dragon Queen
was currently fifteen light-minutes away. By the time it got the question, found an answer and sent it back, chances were it wouldn’t matter anymore.
    One of the junkers studied her hard. It was a look meant to be fierce and intimidating. It might have worked better if his eyes weren’t just a little too squashed together. ‘Olivia Red, is it?’
    Ziva nodded and quivered. It was hard to resist hamming the act up just to see how far she could take it before they twigged they were being played.
    ‘What’s your business in the Black Mausoleum?’
    ‘None of yours. What do you want?’
    The two junkers exchanged a glance. One reached inside his jacket and pulled out a card. Most places people just swapped electronic tags as a matter of course, but the Black Mausoleum had started life as a science station so long ago that they‘d still used physical cards. No one had ever bothered to change the system. Physicists, Ziva had