[01] Elite: Wanted by Gavin Deas Read Free Book Online Page A

hurt to put in an appearance in the flesh – it was a large part of what she did and what she was, and how she’d picked up the reputation and the bounties that she had. Bar full of macho space-pirates showing off their tattoos and new bicep enhancements and in walks a skinny bounty hunter woman hardly an inch over five foot tall. They used to laugh at her and, truth was, half the men in a place like that could have snapped her in half if they ever got their hands on her. That was the trick, though. There were smarter things a canny bounty hunter could do to sharpen themselves and Ziva had a quickness and co-ordination that had given her the nickname
Blink Dog
. Here and there some people swore she could literally teleport.
    She sighed. Enaya had crushed any sense of excitement she’d had. Now she just wanted to get it over with, wipe away the shit-stains who E-bombed escape pods just to cover their tracks and then go back to En and Ay, kick that wanker Odar Something into the chromosphere of the nearest star and tell En that everything would be better now. Make a whole load of promises that she’d mean to keep right up until the next itch got her and a big bounty twitched across the
Dragon Queen
’s antennae.
    She left the avatars to their work after she docked and quietly got drunk, alone in the
Dragon Queen
’s cockpit, bouncing lazily around in the false microgravity of the station’s core. She had a stash of Glen Halyconia smuggled from New Caledonia by a bounty she’d taken six months ago. She barely remembered his name now. Lanky white-skinned male. A pussy-cat and certainly not worth the price someone had put on him, not that she cared. They wanted him for smuggling. He’d dumped his cargo of Scotch and she’d picked it up and handed it back.
    Most of it, but not all. It had taken her a month to go through the first bottle. Three months ago it had become a bottle every week. At this rate, give her another three months and it would be one every day. Just as well she only had a dozen left.
    Shit. Her head was starting to spin. She wrapped her hands across her face. Closed her eyes. She might even have fallen asleep. Just floating.
    ‘Captain Eschel!’ The
Dragon Queen
was speaking to her. As soon as Ziva moved and opened her eyes, it went smoothly on. ‘An avatar has reported back with a lead on the information you were seeking.’
    Ziva tried to focus. ‘Newman? And?’
    ‘A station maintenance supervisor claims to know who Newman is working for but he won’t pass it on except to you in person.’
    Who Newman was working for? The second ship? Ziva rolled her head on her shoulders. She was drunk and felt sick and slightly hungover but that wasn’t a problem. She pulled a needle of Purge out of her pocket and stabbed it into her arm. It took a few seconds and then the hangover and the haze of the Scotch started to drain away. You could actually feel it happen, watch your own thoughts sharpen up again.
    Oh damn and she’d done it again, jabbed herself with Purge in the cockpit. ‘Shit! Water!’ She pushed herself sharply out of the pilot’s couch and shot down the corridor. Nice thing about micro-gravity: with a bit of practice you could get about real quick. Useful for those times when you suddenly
really
needed a piss and then to drink two litres of water because, for example, you’d shot yourself with Purge without thinking.
    By the time she left the
Dragon Queen
, she was as sharp as a knife. Tight leather, tight jeans, tight boots, pockets everywhere, belt, bandoleer, two holstered guns – worn openly. In part it was a matter of being practical and not wanting anything to float off or catch on anything in the low-gravity parts of the station. In a larger part it was what people expected when the Blink Dog came by. Whoever this maintenance supervisor was, he surely had a certain anticipation of what he was going to see.

Chapter Three
    ‘So?’ Ravindra had unlocked her high-backed pilot’s