[01] Elite: Wanted (32 page)
Ravindra dropped the unreliable crosshairs over the Fer-de-Lance. Her finger poised in the hologramatic control glove. A twitch would fire the pulse laser. She was impressed despite herself. Cutter versus corvette was a reasonably fair fight. Anaconda modified to light cruiser spec versus a Fer-de-Lance wasn’t. She could make out light coming from the other ship’s bridge. She moved the
Song
around until they were nose to nose. Less than ten feet apart. Closer than she had been to her son the last time she had seen him.
The
Song of Stone
. And there was Khanguire – close enough that Ziva could actually see her face and know it was her. The
Song
was maybe even more mangled than the
Dragon Queen
, but she’d survived. In the end that was probably all that mattered to Khanguire. She still had power too.
Lucky bitch.
The adrenaline and the endorphins were wearing off. Everything ached. Ziva peered to look Khanguire in the eye. Her finger moved to the trigger for the
Dragon Queen
’s lasers. She had one shot left. By the looks of things, that might be enough.
The finger hovered there, waiting.
The bounty hunter was still alive on the
Dragon Queen
’s bridge. Eschel was looking at her, but Ravindra couldn’t read her expression. She stared back. She could hear Jenny shift behind her, though the engineer said nothing.
The pulse laser twitched, its targeting system glitching, but from this range it really couldn’t miss.
‘I am never going back,’ Ravindra said quietly to herself.
Also by Gavin Deas from Gollancz:
Empires: Extraction
Empires: Infiltration
Also by Gavin Smith from Gollancz:
Veteran
War in Heaven
The Age of Scorpio
Quantum Mythology
Crysis: Escalation
Also by Stephen Deas from Gollancz:
The Adamantine Palace
King of the Crags
The Order of the Scales
The Black Mausoleum
The Thief-Taker’s Apprentice
The Warlock’s Shadow
The King’s Assassin
Dragon Queen
The Splintered Gods
The Silver King
The original novella, and inspiration to us all
Elite: The Dark Wheel
, by Robert Holdstock
Published by Gollancz
Elite: Wanted
, by Gavin Deas
Elite: Nemorensis
, by Simon Spurrier
Elite: Docking is Difficult
, by Gideon Defoe
Published by Fantastic Books Publishing
Elite: Reclamation
by Drew Wagar
Elite: Lave Revolution
by Allen Stroud
Elite: Mostly Harmless
by Kate Russell
Elite: And Here The Wheel
by John Harper
Elite: Tales From The Frontier
by 15 authors from around the world
Published by other publishers:
Out of the Darkness
by T. James (Published by Writer and Author Press)
First of all, thanks to David Braben and Michael Brookes at Frontier who made this possible and to Marcus Gipps at Gollancz who had the vision and who edited this. Thanks also to Olivia Wood for her work rearranging our words into coherent sentences and everyone else who worked behind the scenes. Thanks also to David Braben (again) and Ian Bell for destroying literally weeks of our lives with the original Elite until we learned how to dock without a docking computer.
Steve Deas would like to thank Gavin “What acknowledgements section?” Smith, who was managing perfectly well as an SF author without some fantasy writer showing up and throwing the laws of physics and occasional urban fantasy books at him. We learned a lot about how not to do collaborative writing and we’re still talking. If anything is wrong with the magnetar physics, it's entirely Steve's fault. The Ziva half of this story was largely written to a soundtrack of Fragile off the album Promises by The Boxer Rebellion.
Thanks to you, the reader for getting this far. If you liked this book, please say so. Loudly and to lots of people.
Gavin would like to thank all of the above as well, so he’s effectively copying Stephen’s homework. He’d also like to thank the workingman’s Ming the Merciless, Stephen Deas, for proving that physics gets in the way of science fiction (though I maintain that lasers are colourless in a vacuum), and repeatedly picking up the slack whilst I went off gallivanting around the world. I’d also like to thank Michaela Deas as well for their hospitality whilst working on Wanted.
I would not, however, like to thank the bastard who designed the little plastic lenses that you had to use to decipher the security code to gain access to the original game. In fact I’d like sharpen one of those lenses and stab him with it. Without you I’d probably play a lot more computer games today!
A Gollancz eBook
Copyright © Gavin Smith and Stephen Deas 2014
All rights reserved.
Elite: Dangerous universe, including without limitation plot and characters, © 2013, 2014 Frontier Developments plc. All rights reserved.
‘Elite’, the Elite logo, the Elite: Dangerous logo, ‘Frontier’ and the Frontier logo are registered trademarks of Frontier Developments plc. All rights reserved. All other trademarks and copyright are acknowledged as the property of their respective owners.
The right of Gavin Smith and Stephen Deas to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in Great Britain in 2014 by Gollancz
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane
London, WC2H 9EA
An Hachette UK Company
This eBook first published in 2014 by Gollancz.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 1 47320 129 3
All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.