‘Ow, and no,’ Grace finally answered. ‘The bike’s still running.’
On the satellite feed he watched her climb back on the Speed Triple, take off across the grass and drop back down onto Alcester Road South.
Du Bois’ route analysis finished. He slewed the Range Rover hard right, off Alcester Road South, and accelerated. Moments later, he turned hard right onto a residential road that ran parallel with the Alcester Road. He continued accelerating, overtaking cars and forcing oncoming vehicles to brake hard.
The bike had lost one of its mirrors, the paintwork was messed up and, most worrying, one of the handlebars was a little bent, but it was still running. Grace wove in and out of busy traffic and the multiple car accidents the Sprinter was leaving behind it. She watched it hit an oncoming car head-on not far in front of her. The car’s momentum was halted, then reversed, and it flew backwards into a shopfront. The van sideswiped a double-decker bus and made it wobble. It was still wobbling as Grace rode by. She knew the van’s body was armoured. She was wondering about the tyres.
Grace pulled the bike out into the oncoming traffic to peer around the van, looking for an opening. The van moved to block her. Grace dropped a gear and then leaned in low, slewing the bike hard left, coming around on the inside of the van and then accelerating hard. The van veered hard left and tried to force her off the road. The side of the van touched Grace’s elbow and she took the bike onto the pavement. Startled pedestrians flashed by.
Grace reached inside her jacket with her left hand and drew one of her Berettas. The van half-mounted the pavement as it tried to crush her into the shopfronts rushing by. Pedestrians were diving into the shops to get out of the way. Grace accelerated as she fired a long burst at the van’s rear wheel, and then another at the front wheel as she overtook the Sprinter. The van closed the gap. Sparks flew and glass smashed as it scraped against the shopfronts, but Grace was already past. She leaned to the right, coming off the pavement and back onto the road. Grace aimed the gun behind her and fired off the rest of the magazine, mostly in frustration, at the van’s windscreen. Sparks flew from it, but nothing much else happened. If her shots into the wheels had any effect, she couldn’t see it.
In her remaining mirror, Grace saw a hatch in the front of the windscreen pop open and a gun barrel appear through it. She slewed the bike into oncoming traffic, weaving in and out as the driver started firing, the bullets ripping indiscriminately into the vehicles on the road.
Du Bois was driving the Range Rover at ridiculous speeds through narrow roads with cars parked on both sides, trying to catch up with the van.
‘I need more gun,’ Grace told him over their link. On the satellite and CCTV feeds, he watched her weaving in and out of traffic, taking fire from the van.
‘Seven-six-two and a grenade launcher,’ du Bois said.
‘We’ll need the weight of the jeep to force him off the road,’ Grace told him.
It’s not a jeep, du Bois thought automatically. ‘Okay, I’m going to—’ Du Bois slammed on the brakes. There was a car in the middle of the road. Du Bois left black marks on the Tarmac but managed to bring the Range Rover to a halt just in time to avoid a collision.
Grace sped up, trying to put enough distance between her and the Sprinter that he would stop firing at her. There was too much collateral damage in the way.
The road was mostly clear ahead as she roared through a junction with a pub on the corner. More shops and pubs lined the road, but they began to look nicer, more upmarket, the closer they got to the town centre. She glanced behind her and was appalled to see the Sprinter catching up. She twisted the throttle, coaxing more speed out of the bike as she wove between the few other vehicles on the road. Grace knew she was the one being chased now.
Du Bois stared. He couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing. The driver of the car had stopped to have a chat with a pedestrian. He leaned on the horn. The man in the car gave him the finger and the pedestrian laughed. Du Bois thought about showing them the gun. Actually, he thought about shooting one – if not both – of them, but he managed to control his anger. He moved the Range Rover forwards until it touched the rear bumper of the car and then accelerated. The Range Rover pushed the car forwards, building speed, until du Bois saw a convenient space among the parked cars on one side of the road. He turned the wheel and put the car through the gap and into a wall. He stopped, backed the Range Rover out and resumed his course.
There was a park on his right. He braked mounted the pavement and drove up a tree-lined, steep grass bank. He picked up speed, heading for the path, scattering joggers and dog walkers as he roared through the park. The armoured Range Rover hit the locked gates at the end of the path at speed and crashed through them.
Grace leaned down so low that her shoulder nearly touched the Tarmac as she turned onto the Belgrave Middleway, part of the ring road surrounding the city centre. She knew the Sprinter wasn’t far behind her.
It had gone wrong somehow. They were supposed to be chasing the van.
Ahead of her she saw a police car parked on one of the bridges that crossed over the road. She leaned low and swerved off the Middleway, heading up the ramp towards the bridge. There were two policemen, both armed – probably the only two armed-response officers in Birmingham who hadn’t been at Druids Heath. She assumed they were waiting for the Sprinter. Grace mounted the pavement and brought the bike to a stop right next to the railing. She climbed off and left it idling, then pushed up the visor of her crash helmet.
‘Gentlemen, I need one of your carbines and I’m afraid I don’t have time to argue with you.’
‘Miss, I need you to clear this area immediately!’ one of the officers said, walking towards her, hand held up. Grace closed with him quickly. She kicked up at his Heckler & Koch G36 carbine with sufficient force to break it in half, catching him in the chin, powdering bone and causing him to spit blood and teeth. Then she brought her foot down on top of his head in an axe-kick, fracturing his skull and driving him into the ground. His partner was already turning towards her, raising his G36. Grace closed with him and grabbed the weapon before he could bring it to bear. She yanked it hard, dragging him towards her by its strap. Still wearing her crash helmet, she head-butted him, breaking his nose, then pulled the carbine’s sling over his head. Grace was aware of the Sprinter getting closer. The police officer was staggering, pawing at her. Grace glanced at him irritably. She grabbed his Taser from its pouch on his webbing, pushed him back and Tasered him in the face until he hit the floor, twitching and drooling.
Grace brought the carbine up to her shoulder, which was a little awkward as she was still wearing her crash helmet. She aimed the reticle of the holographic sight at the Sprinter’s armoured windscreen, directly over the driver’s position. She fired short burst after short burst, but again the bullets just sparked off the glass. She continued firing as the van left the Middleway, heading up the ramp towards her. The magazine on the G36 ran dry, so she tossed the weapon. The van slewed around the corner and onto the bridge. Grace leaped on the bike as the van bore down on her. She put her right foot on the bridge’s railing, screaming as she pushed with augmented leg muscles. She managed to lift the bike up and over the railings and jumped moments before the Sprinter ploughed through the spot where she’d just been standing. The vehicle ran over the two prone police officers and smashed into their car. Grace and the bike fell twenty feet to the road and hit it hard. The suspension cushioned the fall but the impact still drove the bike up into Grace. Her teeth clattered together and a few of them broke. Blood filled her mouth, which she spat out as the impact forced the wind out of her. She knew she’d torn something in her leg manoeuvring the bike over the railing. She’d also heard something crack on the bike as it hit the road, but the engine was still running as it bounced back up on its suspension. She heard the screech of tortured metal above her as the police car was rammed through the railings of the
bridge and plummeted to the road.
Grace twisted the bike’s throttle. As the bike lurched forward, she cried out as pain lanced through her leg. With a thought she released chemicals to deaden it. Her internal systems were already repairing the damage she had received.
The bike was handling sluggishly. It was picking up speed, but not quickly enough. On the other side of the road, she saw the Sprinter driving the wrong way down the bridge’s on-ramp, cutting into the oncoming traffic and causing havoc. Grace twisted the Speed Triple’s throttle, willing more speed out of it, but the van was gaining on her. It hit the central partition and lurched across it, bearing down on her. Glancing behind, the van filled her vision.
The Range Rover hit the Sprinter doing ninety miles an hour and pushed the van across the road. For a moment it looked like the Sprinter was going to turn over, but the driver managed to regain control.
Du Bois put the four-wheel drive between the Sprinter and Grace and matched speed with her bike. She reached over and grabbed hold of the railing above the driver’s door. The Sprinter sideswiped the Range Rover, forcing it into the bike, and Grace pulled herself from the Speed Triple as it flew into the concrete wall at the side of the road. Somehow her feet found the Range Rover’s running boards.
Then the Sprinter was gone. It had turned sharply right towards the city centre. Du Bois braked hard and slewed the Range Rover right. Grace held on for dear life.
She reached back and opened the driver’s side rear passenger door. She put one hand on the top of the open door and the other on the roof of the speeding Range Rover, then pushed herself over the door and slid into the leather upholstery of the back seat. The door slammed shut behind her as it hit the wreck of a car left in the Sprinter’s wake.
‘Give me something to shoot this fucker with!’ Grace screamed. Du Bois unlocked the concealed gun compartment in the back of the Range Rover with a thought. Grace leaned over the back seat, opened the hatch, grabbed the M320 grenade-launcher and pushed it open. She loaded a forty-millimetre high-explosive armour-piercing grenade, then pushed open the thick armoured glass of the sunroof and stood up on the back seat.
‘Wait until you’ve got a clear shot, and watch for collateral damage,’ du Bois shouted.
The Range Rover was weaving left and right as du Bois raced after the Sprinter, gaining on it now as it ploughed through traffic.
The Sprinter turned right on the Paradise Circus Queensway, driving into oncoming traffic. More cars swerved out of the van’s way. One of the oncoming vehicles clipped the van and was launched into the air. Grace dropped back into the vehicle as the airborne car clipped the roof of the pursuing Range Rover, slamming the sunroof shut. Du Bois almost lost control of the vehicle, but managed to wrestle it back. Grace stared at the sunroof for a moment, then pushed it open and stood up again.
Brakes squealed and tyres smoked as the Sprinter slowed and turned left alongside the neoclassical town hall. The street was empty of people and traffic. Grace fired the grenade-launcher just as the van reached the end of the side street. The grenade hit the van in the rear right-hand corner. The explosion lifted the back of the other vehicle off the ground and swung it around. The van came to a halt in an open pedestrian area containing a shallow, stepped amphitheatre. Du Bois pushed the accelerator to the floor, intent on ramming the Sprinter, but astonishingly the van was still running. It shot forwards, and du Bois had to brake hard and slew the Range Rover around the corner. Pedestrians scattered.
‘He’s heading for New Street,’ Grace said as she reloaded the grenade-launcher with a flechette round. Silas was going to drive the armoured van right down a busy pedestrian street. The van sped through the gap between Council House and the town hall.
‘Down! Belt!’ Du Bois downshifted and floored the accelerator again. Grace slid into the rear seat and tried to pull one of the seat belts on.
The Sprinter sped into Victoria Square, heading for the steps that led down to New Street. More pedestrians scattered. Du Bois hit the back of the van at the top of the steps, forcing it into a stepped fountain in an explosion of water and the grinding of tortured metal.
Grace hadn’t managed to get the seat belt on properly. She was flung forwards and battered her face against the front seat. Her arm was caught in the seat belt, which stopped her momentum, but she cried out as it was wrenched out of its socket.
The Range Rover was grounded, see-sawing on the fountain’s stone lip. The Sprinter tottered at the highest point of the fountain, and then toppled over, sliding down the fountain’s water-covered steps.
Du Bois, furious now, was out of the Range Rover and running after the van. As he ran, he switched out the magazine in his .45 for the magazine of nanite-tipped bullets. He swarmed up onto the Sprinter, which was now lying on its side.
Grace managed to stagger out of the Range Rover, gripping her arm. She saw du Bois kneeling on the upturned van. He reached for the door to open it.
‘No!’ Grace screamed.
Du Bois was surprised to find the door unlocked. He pulled it open as he heard Grace. He was more surprised when he saw something that looked like a clockwork mannequin sitting in the driver’s seat, and then the claymore mine went off.
Du Bois was blown high into the air as ball bearings tore through his flesh. Blackened meat landed, wetly, on the ground close to one of the Sphinx statues that watched over the square.
Silas crawled out of the canal, his clothes shedding water as he did so.
‘Excuse me?’
Silas froze. The voice had a very soft Middle Eastern accent that Silas couldn’t quite place. He turned slowly to see a nondescript-looking man, clearly of Middle Eastern descent, wearing a well-tailored but tastefully subdued suit and a keffiyeh headscarf. At first Silas wondered if this was just a passer-by, but then he realised his wards had been tricked. The demons that surrounded him, released from his blood, hadn’t detected the man. Silas was immediately on his guard.
‘This may sound like a strange question, but have you ever eaten the brains of an archer?’
‘Who are you?’ Silas demanded.
The man stepped forwards. Silas had a moment to see some kind of wriggling, metallic tendrils extend from the man’s fingers before they rammed into his head. Silas sank to his knees, drooling.
Hamad looked down at the peace of filth whose secrets he was stealing. It was another weak link in the Circle’s chain, another bit of information, no matter how old. He knew what the man had done and sought permission to kill him, but the Brass City refused. Silas was too valuable to them. He was keeping two of the Circle’s operatives very busy.
He had not been easy to track, but the electronic realm all but belonged to the Brass City. They eventually separated the carrier signal for his strange Alpha- and Theta-wave transmissions from the background noise and triangulated his position.
Hamad took what he wanted from the sick man’s mind, and a little more. Then he retracted the tendrils and let Silas fall to the ground. He might not have been allowed to kill him, but he had not been explicitly ordered against helping others do just that. He sent out a heavily occulted email to an old enemy.
35
A Long Time After the Loss
Cascade was a third-string Consortium world very much in the later stages of its industrial exploitation. Maybe a few hundred years away from becoming a gutted, skeletal planet like New Coventry, with an excess biomass too poor to get off the planet. The Consortium might then designate it a conflict resolution world if they needed a war, or if they just wanted to burn off some of the biomass.
It was nominally a shallow-water world, but the planet’s vast hydrosystem had been so utterly polluted by run-off from numerous mining ventures and the inevitable subsurface conflicts over the mines that chemically it was problematic to describe the filthy, mostly-black, turgid liquid which covered the surface of the planet as water.
Cascade still had enough value left that the corporate authorities didn’t want heavily armed ships breaching their atmosphere or, more to the point, their orbital-defence cordon. Scab could have bridged in from planetary Red Space, but the Basilisk II had been badly damaged doing that on Lotus Eater. Instead they docked at one of the entrepôt orbital stations, a slum of a habitat called the Tricorn.
After they found another asteroid to harvest, they used the Basilisk II’s smart-matter hull to extensively reconfigure the yacht’s appearance. The only thing they couldn’t do was change the signature of the drive that had originally come from the Church frigate, the St. Brendan’s Fire. That was why they had chosen the Tricorn as their entry point: the Church was the only organisation capable of recognising individual bridge drive signatures. The Tricorn was the entrepôt with the least Church presence.
Like the ship, Vic, Scab and Steve the Alchemist were also disguised. Though there was only so much that could be done with a seven-foot-tall hard-tech-augmented insect. On the other hand, most insects looked the same to the other uplifted races.
They were restricted on what weaponry, armour, virals and aggressive and defensive software they could take to the planet, and all weaponised nano-swarms were illegal. They carried the legal stuff openly, mostly sidearms and other hand weapons, and armoured clothing, plus two portable assemblers programmed with specific template builds. As for the other things they’d need, they smuggled in what they thought they could get away with and left the rest.
They became anonymous travellers, shuffling through the Tricorn’s vast, grimy departure halls towards waiting drop-shuttles. As they were jostled and bumped, Vic glanced down at his human partner/captor and wondered how close Scab was to killing someone in this crowd. It didn’t help that the walls were showing footage of the latest of the clone Scab’s pirate atrocities. These were interspersed with stories about the Consortium blockade of and ongoing sanctions against Pythia for breaking its planetary quarantine. Scab was pointedly looking down, his eyes closed, chain-smoking and listening to something via a pair of ancient audio crystals. Vic was amazed at the restraint Scab was showing. He guessed his partner had finally found something important enough to encourage a modicum of impulse control.
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