by R. M. Olson
“On it, you bastard.”
The com chip was easy. She grabbed the credit chip as well, make it look a little more like a robbery. She went through his coat pockets a couple of times, then his trouser pockets, then patted down the front of his shirt.
“Masha, you sure—”
“Jez!” It was Tae, and his voice was strained. “What happened?”
She frowned. “Nothing. I mean, other than the fact that I just knocked out a professor and am robbing him blind.”
“Because there are a whole lot of police heading to your coordinates as we speak. You have about thirty-five seconds.”
She glanced around.
Damn.
She patted him down again, rolled his limp body over, and yanked off his jacket.
“Where the hell would a professor keep his damn ID, Masha?” she growled into the com.
“Jez! Get out of there!” Tae hissed.
From around the corner, she could hear the faint hum of skybikes.
Damn, damn, damn.
She jerked the professor’s shirt open.
There, on a thin chain around his neck.
“Got it!” she whispered, breaking the chain with a quick jerk of her wrist and shoving the ID in her pocket.
Five police bikes shot around the corner. She straightened, and gave them a grin.
The officers slid off their bikes, weapons drawn. A black, cylindrical drone hovered over their heads, red light blinking.
Weapons drone.
Hell, this job had been pretty boring up to this point anyways.
“Raise your hands and step away from the body,” called an officer, com amplifying her voice.
Jez stepped back, slinging the jacket over her shoulder, and tried to put a haughty look on her face.
“Hey,” she drawled. “Took your time getting here. This plaguer attacked me. I barely managed to fight him off.”
The police officer frowned at her. “What?” she said, at the same moment Tae hissed into her earpiece, “What the hell are you doing?”
“I said, you dirty plaguers, it took you long enough to get here. This man jumped me, tried to steal my credits.”
“We got here as soon as we got the emergency alert,” the woman said, straightening slightly.
“Yeah? Well, last time I trust your damn emergency alerts, then,” said Jez, trying to make her voice as arrogant as possible. “Could have been killed.”
The woman was still frowning at her. “He jumped you, you say?”
“Yep. But we’re all good now. You can go. Maybe call a medic for this idiot on your way out.”
“Because the emergency call came from someone named Stanislav Gurin. A professor at the University of Prasvishoni. Fifty-five years old.”
Damn.
She put on her best smile. “Always did look young for my age.”
The officer straightened and muttered something into her com. Behind Jez, the other officers tensed. The red light on the drone began to flash slowly.
This was going sideways quickly.
“Jez—” Tae sounded distinctly worried.
She dived to one side as a laser-blast from the drone scarred a smoking hole in the concrete where she’d been only a moment before, rolled to her feet, and grabbed the prone form of the professor, hauling him up as a sort of shield.
“Hands up!” the police officer shouted.
“In your damn dreams,” Jez shot back. She chucked the professor’s limp form at the officer, and as the woman instinctively stepped back, Jez yanked out her own modded heat gun, pointed it at the drone, and fired.
There was a crackle of sparks as the drone’s shields overheated in the face of whatever the hell Ysbel had modded Jez’s pistol with, and then it dropped to the ground in a heap of misshapen, melted metal. Jez took advantage of the police officers’ momentary distraction and ran for her life.
Over her shoulder she caught the mad scramble of officers for skybikes, and then she was around the corner, pounding down the street.
“They’re calling in reinforcements,” Tae said in a strangled voice. “What were you thinking?”
She shrugged. “Almost worked.”
“It did not almost work!”
The bikes rounded the corner, and she barely dodged a heat blast. She swung around another corner and ducked behind an open door. As a police skybike rounded the corner after her, she lunged forward. The man was riding low, and she managed to grab him around the waist as he shot past, swinging her legs up behind him.
“What the hell—” he began, half-turning in his seat. She reached around him and jerked up on the handles, and the bike shot towards the sky. She fumbled for the restraint release. He figured out what she was doing a split second later and grabbed her arms, trying to pry her off him. His free hand groped for his gun. She brought up one knee, jamming his hand hard against the frame of the bike. He howled and tried to shake her off. She clung on grimly.
“What the hell are you doing, Jez?” Lev was speaking through his teeth.
“Busy now,” she grunted.
The officer’s fingers were prying her hands loose from his waist, his short fingernails cutting into the meaty part of her palms. She retaliated by smacking her forehead hard into the base of his skull. He grunted, and she blinked back stars.
Bastard had a hard head.
They were out of the buildings, and screaming towards the city force-field now. An impact at this speed would turn both of them into an impressive fireworks display.
The officer seemed to have figured this out as well, and he let go his grip on her hands to yank the handles down. Now they were heading for the buildings, and neither of them were in a position to steer.
There. Her fumbling fingers found the release, and she hit it. The restraints strapping the officer to the bike flipped back.
He hit the restraints again, but she was close enough that the thin bands caught both of them, strapping them to the bike and shoving her up against his back.
Jez grinned. “Just couldn’t get close enough, could you?” She jerked the handles from his nerveless fingers just before they hit the surface of the nearest apartment complex, leaned hard to the right, and skinned the bike along the surface of the roof, the rough prefab blocks almost scraping her boots. Then she dove back between the buildings.
“What’s happening?” she muttered into the com as she threaded a narrow street, whipped around a corner, and shot down an alley.
The officer finally seemed to come out of his shock, and he grabbed instinctively at the restraints. She couldn’t see his face, but from the way his hands were shaking, she assumed he liked this just about as much as Lev did. She grinned, flipped the bike upside down, and shot over a crowd of pedestrians, her short hair almost brushing their drab coats and colourful scarves. Someone looked up and swore, and she grinned back cheerily and made a rude gesture.
The officer had completely given up on knocking her off the bike, and now seemed fully focused on staying on himself.
“You’ve got about fourteen officers on you now.” Tae’s voice was a sort of resigned horror. “Pull up your com screen, I’ll shoot you the specs. Looks like they’ve shut off the bike’s com.”
She pulled the bike upright and slapped her com against her knee, and a holoscreen popped up over her wrist.
Red dots were converging on her from all sides.
She yanked the handles and leaned hard, and the bike flipped a hairpin turn in an alley almost too narrow to permit it and shot off in the other direction.
The officer glanced down at the screen hovering over her wrist and seemed to regain some of his equilibrium. He grabbed for the handles, and for a second the bike jerked as they fought for control. She leaned forward, forcing his body down, and the bike picked up speed, almost scraping the dirty walls of the alley. At the last second, she jerked the handles back again, pointing the bike at the sky and missing the dead-end by millimetres. The officer gave a sort of strangled scream and
went limp.
She grinned. “Hey Lev, this guy actually fainted! Guess I can’t complain about you throwing up anymore.”
Lev muttered something that sounded like, ‘I don’t blame him.’
She leaned forward over the officer’s limp body, dropped down until they were skimming along the ground, and hit the restraints. He slumped to one side, and reluctantly she straightened slightly, slowing the bike just a touch as he rolled off.
“Got him,” she whispered in satisfaction.
“Yes, well that will be a relief when the rest of the police blow you out of the sky,” said Ysbel dryly.
“That assumes they can catch me,” said Jez with a grin.
“Jez.” Masha’s voice was cold, and for just a moment Jez’s muscles tightened instinctively at the tone. “Bring the bike back around, and come by the entrance to the alley. And please be ready to roll off.”
Jez rolled her eyes and sighed. “Yes, cap’n.”
A heat blast seared over her head, and she glanced quickly over her shoulder.
Drone. Figured. They weren’t going to send an officer in after her between the buildings, considering they’d probably figured out by now that there wasn’t a damn officer on the force who could keep up. She yanked out her heat pistol and cracked off a couple shots over her shoulder.
The drone exploded.
The wind through her hair, the tingle in her hands, the air whipping her face, the cursing through her com—you couldn’t get a whole lot better than this, honestly.
She glanced down at the map on her com.
Not good.
Four police bikes surrounded the entrance to the alley she was heading down, and on the other side, four more bikes. Three others hovered over top.
She straightened abruptly, and the bike jerked and slowed to an idle.
“Jez.” Tae sounded frantic. “Can you get back here?”
She took a deep breath, loosened her hands on the handles, and half-closed her eyes. “On it,” she murmured.
“What are you—”
She leaned forward, and the bike shot towards the entrance to the street again.
They must have had a bead on her, because the heat-blasts were flying before her bike exited the alley. At the last second she jerked back on the handles and the bike shot upwards, missing the shimmering fizz of the heat-blasts by centimetres, and before they had time to re-calibrate their aim, she spun the bike and shot back down the alley in the opposite direction.
The four bikes shot in after her.
She leaned until she was almost flat against the bike. The speed sucked the air from her lungs and pulled tears from her eyes, and she would have been laughing with sheer delight if she had any breath. Heat blasts sizzled past her, and one caught the back end of her bike, sending the controls momentarily haywire. She glanced over her shoulder to make sure they were following close enough, and just as the front of her bike would have come through the entrance to the alley, just as the heat-blasts from the four officers stationed at that exit lit the air, she flipped her bike upside down in an abrupt maneuver that sent her over the heads of the startled officers and back in the other direction.
Behind her she could hear the shouts and curses as the four police bikes shot into the firefight, the heat-shields in their uniforms sparking and glowing, and then she was out the opposite now-clear exit and speeding back towards the alley where it had all started.
“What the actual hell was that?” Lev’s voice sounded strangled.
“Called flying, genius-boy. Hey Tae, be there in about twenty seconds, if they don’t shoot me down first,” she said into the com.
“I—” Tae sounded almost speechless.
“When you come by, I’m going to spray some explosive gel onto your bike,” interrupted Ysbel. “Roll off when you pass the alley. Tae has already programmed your signature into the bike com, so when it blows it will look like you were still on it. And my explosives will blow it into small enough pieces they won’t be able to tell you weren’t.”
“And that, Ysbel, is why you’re so hot,” she said, grinning.
She slowed slightly as she approached the alley. Technically, it had been long enough since her most recent stint in jail that her ribs were technically not broken. Still, she was pretty sure they wouldn’t appreciate her hitting the ground at this speed. She dropped the bike lower, until again she was almost scraping the concrete with her boots, and then at the last second she jerked the bike to one side and hit the restraints, letting the momentum throw her off just as the bike shot past the alley. A spatter of a sharp-smelling, viscous liquid sprayed above her head as her shoulder hit the concrete, and then the world was a blur of sky and pavement and a scream of protest from her tender ribs as she rolled and came up hard against the wall of the alley.
Not as hard as she’d expected, though. She’d assumed she’d have at least another broken arm to show for the day’s escapade.
In the distance, a low ‘boom’ that sounded like thunder, if thunder was loud enough to blow your eardrums, echoed through the street, and she glanced up. The world was still spinning madly, but she could feel something soft under her, which was—not what she’d expected. She blinked, trying to get the world back into focus, and found she was looking into Tae’s spinning, scowling face, and Masha’s spinning, cold one.
“I’m going to have so many bruises from this,” Tae grumbled. She grinned at him reflexively, still blinking.
He’d braced himself, and broken her momentum with his body. He and Masha, which was honestly a little shocking.
And the most shocking part of all of it was—well, she wasn’t even that shocked.
“Thanks,” she said, after a moment. He glowered at her and shoved her off him.
“What in the system were you thinking, Jez?” he grumbled. “I told you the police were on their way.”
She pushed herself into a sitting position, although the world was still spinning dizzily. “Just figured we didn’t want to make this thing too boring,” she said with a smirk. She tried to reach into her pocket, and almost fell over. A muscular pair of arms hoisted her to her feet.
“We’d best get moving,” said Ysbel’s voice from behind her. “They’re going to come check it out soon enough.” She let go of Jez’s shoulders, and Jez staggered, caught herself, and shook her head, blinking hard. Then the four of them ran, Ysbel catching Jez when she weaved too far to one side or the other, police sirens wailing behind them.
When they finally turned down the small, grungy street to Jez’s old apartment, the dizziness from her rolling fall had finally dissipated.
“No tracking?” Ysbel grunted, pausing at the steps that led down to the apartment. Tae pulled up his com and checked carefully.
“No. Doesn’t look like it.”
“Good,” she said. “I suppose we go in and find out if Lev has had a heart attack yet.”
“And,” Jez said, grinning, “I suppose we figure out if Masha can do what she said she could do. Because I—” she reached into her pocket, “did exactly what I said I would do.” She pulled out the ID and held it up with satisfaction. “Guess it’s your turn now, you bastard.”
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