[02] Elite: Nemorensis by Simon Spurrier

Deathstare Dan’s brain and the camera, lip curling at the sticky
snap
. For all her past exploits, all the tales and talents she’d accumulated during breaks in the primary hunt, she refused to let the trail go cold ever again. No more lacunae, no more pauses in pursuit. Not after coming so close last time. She unscrewed the camera’s backplate, shaking out a treacly residue of neuroconductive exotics, and permitted her mind to wander backwards while she worked. The memories of those former glories, increasingly obscured though they were, would have to suffice.
    So, yes: the fringes of Indaol. A week watching other bounty hunters being erased by Delino’s outfit like salt in a hot spring. A second week sending an elaborate assortment of jury-rigged junkdrones and jalopies, each too pitiful to merit an assault, to drift through the dust-fields of the system where the
Holyhead
supposedly made its base. Sensors cranked high, remotely piloted at a safe distance.
    She’d found Delino’s base on the twelfth day. The thirteenth through eighteenth she simply watched the
Holyhead
come and go. Docking, repairs, departing on its raids. Every time it returned, after hours or days, with ammo spent and cargo pods brimming.
    On the nineteenth day, five seconds after the monstrous thing breached back from hyperspace in its accustomed place, she’d flicked a switch inside the
The
and came as close to a sense of excited satisfaction as she ever had.
    That
part, obscenely, was the fuzziest memory of all.
    The
Holyhead
struck realspace and ploughed into the mines she’d laid. The ripple of plasma that consumed the vessel took out most of its shields and half its turrets. The now-superfluous drones she’d been using, hastily retrofitted with unstable cores, kamikazed cheerfully into its flanks and accounted for the rest. By which time the EM-generators she’d painstakingly mounted on three local asteroids, each rock slightly greater than a mile across, had accumulated sufficient momentum to shove their colossal cargoes out of the oort-field and, one by one, into their targets.
    Two had utterly erased the pirates’ base from the moonlet where it was lodged. The ops there hadn’t even had time to dispatch fighters to aid Delino, and SixJen was cautiously confident she could
just
remember the startled comm-shrieks on the wire as the mountainbombs struck.
    The
Holyhead
, all but defenceless, was messily severed in two by the third monolith.
    Thinking back now, she figured it’d taken about a day to wander through the wreck in search of the Captain. Some parts had clumsily autosealed against the vacuum, so she’d been obligated to schlep through fractured decks with pistol in hand, ungainly in her RemLok suit, killing those worth killing, collecting IDs on those bearing bounties. (That, she guessed, had probably been the part she’d enjoyed the most. It was difficult to say.)
    She’d found Delino half dead in his cabin, in a section of the hulk still sealed from the void. A suite of rooms without personal effect or affectation; Spartan and spotless. She’d known, then, what he was.
    But she’d said the word anyway, just to be sure. And he’d looked her in the eye and nodded. Said it back. And then she’d killed him.
    And this –
This –
was the part she remembered most clearly.
    Standing over him, as his weightless blood formed a grim coriolis, as she’d unbuckled the arm of her suit to calmly slice a fresh scar into her left arm –
number seven
– she’d contemplated the man’s approach to the obsession they shared. Shared, in fact, with all twelve of their brothers: those alive and those dead.
    It was impressive, she’d decided. Throughout the whole of the great hunt which defined her she’d elected to seek the prey alone, deadly and determined, without companion or confederate. Her game, her rules, her cunning. But this man Delino? He’d raised a small army. He’d founded an enclave. He’d stretched forth his