by Mike Brooks
“Sadly,” Roman sighed. “Have you learned how to fly that thing yet?”
“You sound like my father, Roman,” Boris said, twisting his gravelly voice into one with a lisp and what sounded to Rourke like a stereotypical rural accent. “ ‘How long has it been since you passed your test, Boris? You know they advise retesting every three years, don’t you, Boris? Isn’t it time you got a proper job instead of being behind a damn steering wheel, Boris?’ ” He spat on the ground. “Parents, eh? They never let a thing like making a mess of their own lives get in the way of telling you how to live yours.”
He looked like he was going to say more, but cut himself off as brisk footsteps from behind Rourke announced the arrival of Sergei Orlov, with Nicolai at his shoulder. Roman stepped up smartly to open the limo’s rear door, and the gang boss boarded the car without having to break stride, with Nicolai following him in. Roman shut the door behind them both and skirted the rear of the vehicle to enter on the other side while Rourke did the same at the front, climbing in beside Boris, who gently fed power to the drive and pulled away smoothly. Regardless of whatever criticisms his father might have to offer, Boris certainly seemed an excellent driver to Rourke.
“The construction site, sir?” Boris asked as they climbed into the air and headed towards the public air routes.
“Yes,” Orlov replied. “Roman, call ahead. I don’t want to be kept waiting around.”
Rourke heard the faint beeps as Roman activated his comm, presumably to call a site supervisor, and took the opportunity to look out of the window. It was the first time she’d flown in an aircar over New Samara that hadn’t been in a stolen vehicle at night, and you always got a different perspective looking at the streets from above. Her training had drummed into her the importance of knowing your location as well as you could from all angles, but that had fed into an interest in simply seeing how a city had been put together. Some places had grown organically, whereas others had been planned in their entirety from the start, and it didn’t usually take a great deal of observation to work out which. In the case of New Samara, it was fairly self-evident that the Red Star government had always known exactly how big they were going to let the planet’s one temperate city get. However, from what she’d heard, they had made some concessions to expansion recently, one part of which was Orlov’s new development.
It didn’t take a genius to work out how it was that Sergei Orlov had managed to get that concession; Larysa had been known to say that the boss had so many politicians in his pocket that he walked with a limp, although even Larysa had better sense than to use that wording within Orlov’s hearing.
It was while looking out of the window and taking in the layout of the streets that Rourke noticed the black Takagi Sunrise pulling out of a side lane. Nothing remarkable in and of itself, of course: There would be more than one black Takagi Sunrise in New Samara; in fact, there were probably at least a couple of hundred. However, her experience with Galina meant that she’d paid very close attention to every single one she’d seen since, and this one was accelerating so that it was pulling directly underneath them on the flight lane below.
“We’ve got someone beneath us,” she said to Boris, pressing her head against the window in an effort to keep tabs on the other car. “Change la—”
There a loud, metallic bang from beneath them, and the limo’s drive abruptly cut out.
“Bail!” Rourke yelled as the car’s nose began to dip. She opened the door beside her and threw herself heedlessly into the rushing air, slapping her chest as she did so to activate the parachute.
Of course, while being in a plummeting aircar when it hit the ground probably wasn’t a good idea, jumping out of one was not without its problems. Boris had been flying in the third lane up, which was probably the worst place to be: too far to fall safely, not far enough for the parachute to provide much assistance. Rourke’s leap took her clear of the air lane but directly into the side of the building, and she grunted in pain as she slammed into the unyielding surface. She caught a confused glimpse of images: Roman and Orlov falling together, their parachutes unfurling as they did so; the limo careering towards the ground; other aircars veering or braking sharply to avoid the chaos; another chute, probably Nicolai’s, getting caught on the front of another vehicle in a different lane. Rourke didn’t see what happened in the last instance because she was spun away by the force of her own impact, but it would almost certainly be fatal for someone.
The pavement, which was mercifully wide, rushed up at her. She thought for a horrible moment that she was going to hit facedown, but then her parachute opened enough to catch some air and arrested her momentum slightly. While not enough to slow her much, it did jerk her upright, and she was able to get her feet under her to drop and roll instead of landing in a way that would probably have broken her arms and knees. Even as it was, she felt a spike of pain up her right leg from the impact, and she winced as she got back to her feet and hurriedly detached her chute.
She looked around and caught sight of Roman and Orlov, a little farther up the road. Orlov was pushing himself backwards out of the road with his arms, but Roman’s chute had become entangled in an ornamental cherry tree, and he was reaching up, trying to disconnect it while still a few feet off the ground. Rourke hurried to them, trying to ignore the pain in her leg. “Sir! Are you hurt?”
“My ankle,” Orlov replied through gritted teeth, gesturing at his leg. “I think it’s sprained.”
Rourke hissed in frustration and scanned the traffic around them, searching for the Sunrise. The limo was some way farther down the street, lying on its side, and their crash had clearly caused various other more minor accidents as vehicles had swerved or braked to avoid the chaos and hit each other. Aircars were landing, drivers were gesticulating at each other, and horns were sounding. She caught a glimpse of a dark-suited figure lying in the road with people starting to cluster around him. Nicolai or Boris? She couldn’t tell from here, but probably Nicolai. She suspected Boris was either still in the limo or crushed beneath it.
“Sir, we need to move,” Rourke said firmly. “It was the GIA: They’ll have seen us bail out, and they’ll be coming back for you.”
Orlov looked up at her sharply. “You’re sure?”
“A Takagi Sunrise came underneath us just before we went down,” Rourke said grimly, reaching down. Orlov took her hand, and she pulled him upright with some considerable effort, then steadied him as he staggered. “I didn’t see the plates on either occasion, but it’s too much of a coincidence given the car I saw when I was with Galina.”
“They’ll come back, in front of all this?” Orlov asked, gesturing with one hand and taking in the chaos on several levels of the street.
“Taking a car down in broad daylight isn’t subtle,” Rourke said. “It looks like they want you dead, by whatever means necessary.” She looked over at Roman as the bald bodyguard finally managed to get himself free and dropped to the ground. “You okay?”
“I’m fine,” Roman answered shortly. His hand was already inside his jacket and gripping his gun. “What was that?”
“Overload bolt, probably,” Rourke said, scanning their surroundings. “It’s like a shockbolt, but for aircars rather than people: overloads the electronics and shorts out the drivers.” Being in the open and surrounded by people wouldn’t help them now, she doubted; they needed to get Orlov out of sight.
Or did they?
For a moment, Rourke hesitated. The GIA, her former employers, were making a direct bid to kill Sergei Orlov, the man currently holding her hostage. In most circumstances that would be a good thing. She didn’t even have to lift a finger; all she had to do was stand around and wait for the Sunrise to come back, then watch them blow the mobster away. It sounded like an ideal scenario.
Except that it wasn’t. Rourke knew better than most that the GIA would view her as expendable at best, and that was only if Danny Wong had actually told anyone who she was before approaching her. E
ven if he had, his subsequent disappearance might have been blamed on her. The odds were that the GIA now considered her to be part of Orlov’s team, and therefore in this situation she’d be regarded as kill on sight. The operatives certainly weren’t likely to include her in whatever extraction plan they had, assuming they even had one.
More importantly, Orlov dying right now didn’t help her any. His death and her survival wouldn’t look at all good to whomever might be left in Orlov’s organisation, and she had no resources to get off-world. Even if she did, she had no idea where Drift and the others were, and it still left her with the problem of them coming back and stumbling into a situation where she was gone and they’d take the fall for it.
Besides which, this was exactly why she’d grown weary of her active service. Orchestrating an aircar accident that endangered the lives of civilians to kill one man, and not even because he was an interstellar criminal. No, this was simply to try to destabilise a sector, to bring economic and political uncertainty to the lives of billions as companies foundered and new predators arose in the murky, all-pervading world of organised crime to try to replace the suddenly absent big fish. The status quo of Orlov’s dominance would be gone, and with him would go all the protection rackets and clear demarcations of territory. There would be blood in the streets and back alleys as different organisations tried to bite off pieces of his former empire, and ordinary people got caught in the middle.
Besides, she’d rather liked Boris and couldn’t help feeling slightly responsible for Nicolai. He’d been a conscientious student and eager to learn.
She held out her hand to Roman. “Give me your gun, call for backup, and get him out of here.”
Roman’s brow wrinkled. “What?”
“His ankle’s hurt, and I’m not big or strong enough to support him properly for long,” Rourke said briskly. “If you’re helping him, then you won’t be able to shoot straight, and I’m the better shot anyway. We can’t stagger around waiting for them to come back and finish the job. Give me your gun and go. I’ll take care of them here.”
Roman looked to Orlov for guidance, and Rourke felt the gang boss nod.
“Do it, Roman,” Orlov said, his voice tight. “She’s talking sense.”
To his credit, Roman didn’t hesitate once he’d been given an order. He pulled out his gun and handed it to her, then ducked in to replace her under Orlov’s left arm as she slipped away. Rourke armed the weapon with a buzz, holding it in both hands with the barrel pointing at the ground.
“Now go,” she told them. “Head back to the Grand House. I’ll meet you there if I can’t catch up with you.” The GIA agents would know they didn’t have long before emergency services responded to the pileup, including the police. If they were coming back, they’d be coming back now.
Orlov and Roman began to move away, and Rourke considered her next course of action. Their chutes were an obvious marker and would be where the agents would surely look first, which provided her with obvious bait for a trap. A somewhat improvised trap, to be sure, but a trap nonetheless.
She stepped out into the road, weaving her way through the ground-level traffic that had now slowed to a crawl due to the congestion caused by the accidents up ahead. She made it across the two lanes on her side to the vehicles going the other way, which were moving a little quicker, then picked her way past the first of those as well.
As she was looking down the second lane of ground-level traffic, waiting for a gap, she saw a black Takagi Sunrise heading in her direction, slowing a little more as it glided past the wrecked limo on the opposite side of the road.
She couldn’t stay where she was, so she took a chance and darted out in front of a sleek red wheeled coupe. It slammed on its brakes but didn’t sound its horn, possibly because the driver had caught sight of her gun, and she made it to the other side of the road where she ducked between two large garbage bins outside a shop and peeked back out again.
The Sunrise came on.
Rourke scrubbed the palm of each hand in turn down the legs of her bodysuit and took a firm grip on Roman’s pistol. There was a chance that the car was protected in some way with bulletproof glass or the like, but she just had to hope that wasn’t the case. Besides, they’d need to have an open window if they were intending to shoot anyone. The question was, did Rourke want to shoot first? Was she confident enough that this car, this fairly common make and model, definitely contained GIA agents that were intent on killing Sergei Orlov and anyone else who got in the way?
The Sunrise began to indicate, pulling into the inside lane now it was around the congestion caused by the crashed limo. That meant there were only two lanes of traffic—the ones travelling eastwards—between it and the discarded parachutes. Its windows were open, but it wasn’t so cold a day that this was at all remarkable.
Rourke watched it, keeping as much of her as she could in cover, hoping that it would just drive on by and not show any interest, but the Sunrise slowed for no apparent reason as it came alongside the discarded parachutes. Rourke had a split second to make her call and wrestled with indecision. Was this innocent rubbernecking, or were the two figures she could see in the car assassins in the employ of the North American government, looking for their quarry?
The pale face of the passenger turned towards her, scanning her side of the road. She met a pair of blue eyes that widened in shock and recognition, saw the shape of a gun being brought up, and knew that her suspicions had been borne out.
The agents had probably been expecting their targets to be recovering from their emergency skydive, and still with their parachutes. Even when checking the other side of the road, they certainly hadn’t anticipated that they’d driven into a trap. They were presumably expecting dazed, disoriented gangsters who thought their drive had failed naturally and didn’t even realise they were being targeted.
Their mistake.
There was only a momentary difference in their reaction speeds, but it was enough. Roman’s pistol barked twice, and the gunman’s head jerked back, the rear window and windshield abruptly coloured with red spatters. The driver’s instinctive flinch caused the Sunrise to swerve aside, but then he regained control and began to climb without warning, causing other aircars to swerve and blast their horns.
Rourke couldn’t let him get away. He was more mobile than her and might come back for her when she didn’t have the element of surprise and before she’d regained the relative safety of the Grand House. Also, there weren’t many—or indeed, any—other petite black women who were seen in the company of Sergei Orlov. Right now she might be nothing more than a side note, but the only way to avoid drawing massive attention to herself as the killer of one GIA agent was to take care of the other before he could report back.
She straightened up to get the best angle of fire possible and began emptying the clip of Roman’s gun at the Sunrise.
Metal sparked as bullets ricocheted off, her low angle shots deflected by the car’s bodywork, and for a moment she thought her efforts would be in vain. Then a bullet caught the rear windshield, smashing it. The Sunrise kept rising, but its sharp ascent was nose first, and for one second, Rourke had a clear view up through the inside of the vehicle.
She managed to get three shots off before the gun clicked empty. The Sunrise was still climbing away from her.
And it kept going.
Rather than veering away when it reached the top lane of traffic, the Sunrise continued rising towards the clouds, spinning gently as it did so. It would presumably carry on until it reached its altitude limit, and hang there until the fuel cell gave out and the lifters died or—more likely—the emergency services that would even now be hurrying to the scene of the limo’s crash retrieved it before it could fall on anyone. The driver was either dead or incapacitated enough to be unable to control their vehicle.
Rourke didn’t waste time watching any further. She could do nothing more in any case, and that little exchange had taken place in far more of a public view
than she was used to. She needed to ditch Roman’s gun before someone caught her with it, and get back to the Grand House as soon as possible.
She turned and broke into a run. Running was suspicious, but she wanted to get away from the immediate vicinity and the sirens she could hear on the air. Once she was a couple of streets removed, she’d slow down into a walk.
Overall, she was rather glad that she’d been taking an interest in how the city was laid out.
BROTHERLY LOVE
Chief Han was, in Jia’s personal opinion, a bit too fucking slow for her own good. Not in terms of intelligence—you probably had to be pretty smart to become security chief, even if you were taking bribes from the Triax—but simply in terms of covering ground. Jia was never going to claim to be athletic, since she spent most of her time in a spaceship’s limiting confines and kept her weight down mainly by drinking coffee and chewing appetite suppressants, but she was pretty sure that if she thought someone was shooting at her, she’d be moving a damned sight faster than Han was now, even in slightly impractical shoes.
She briefly toyed with the idea of asking Muradov for a second shot to encourage her along a bit, but decided that Han might hear her and so kept her mouth shut.
“Where are we going?” Han demanded as they ducked between palm trees and ornamental shrubs. The edge of the casino’s front plot was coming up, bordered with a low hedge at roughly knee height. Beyond it was the pavement, and a side street off the main boulevard with a line of parked cars down each side. Kuai had parked theirs in a space farther up the street, on the far side.
“Just over here!” Kuai puffed. Jia could see that he was in pain and guessed that running was aggravating the old bullet injury in his leg. Then again, he’d always been a crybaby. “We’ve got an unmarked car parked on this street.”
“An unmarked car?” Han was still with them, but she seemed less and less certain as they ran. “Where did you get that?”
