Aftershock (4 page)

‘Do you really think it’s wise for us to wait for them to make the first move?’ Raven asked as the car made its way through the busy streets.

‘I will not be the one to declare war,’ Nero said, shaking his head. ‘Perhaps conflict is inevitable but I won’t be the one that starts it.’

‘It could make us look weak,’ Raven said.

‘Let them make their move and then they will see how weak we are,’ Nero replied.

Raven recognised the steely determination in Nero’s voice, the very same determination that had propelled him to the head of the most powerful criminal organisation on Earth and then kept him there.

‘Why are we slowing down?’ Raven asked the driver as she felt the car suddenly decelerating.

‘Road’s blocked, Miss,’ the driver said, pointing to the road ahead where a lorry was unloading cardboard boxes on to the pavement. Raven stared at the men unloading the lorry and felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand up as one of them glanced at their car for just a moment too long.

‘Get us out of here!’ Raven snapped.

The driver hesitated for a moment and then saw Raven’s expression. He threw the car into reverse and hit the accelerator just as two high-sided vans pulled into the road behind them, blocking them in. The doors in the side of the vans slid open and half a dozen men in black body armour leapt out raising assault rifles.

‘Get down!’ Raven yelled as the soldiers behind them opened fire. The car rattled and shook as the high velocity rounds struck it. The car was armoured, of course, but there was still a limit to how much damage it could take before it was disabled. The driver threw the car into a forward gear and floored the accelerator, aiming for the narrow gap between the lorry ahead of them and the parked cars that lined the streets on either side. Raven saw one of the men reach into a box on the pavement. He pulled out a long tube-shaped object, placing it on his shoulder as he turned towards their speeding vehicle. There was a bright flare from the rear end of the tube and a missile shot down the street and struck the front of the car. The explosion flipped the car over and it landed with a sickening crunch on its roof, sliding to a halt thirty metres further down the road, its whole front end now little more than a twisted shell of burning metal.

The gunmen from the two vans walked slowly towards the burning remains of the vehicle. The point man signalled for the other soldiers to spread out around the car as he approached the passenger door. He knelt down and carefully peered inside. He immediately saw that the passenger compartment was empty and the door on the other side was ajar. There was the sudden clinking sound of something metal hitting the road behind him and he spun round just as the flashbang stun grenade detonated. He dropped to one knee, trying to regain his composure as bright swirling blobs of colour filled his vision, his retinas temporarily overloaded by the overwhelmingly bright flash from the explosion. At first there was nothing but ringing in his ears but that slowly cleared, replaced by startled screams and snapped bursts of what sounded like uncontrolled panic fire from his own team. He rubbed his eyes as things slowly came back into focus. A blurry figure strode towards him holding a pair of long, thin objects glowing with purple light.

‘Such a shame, I was starting to really like this dress,’ a woman’s voice with a Russian accent said, still muffled slightly by the ringing in his ears. Then there was a flash of purple and everything went black.

Raven stepped back as the last member of the assault team toppled forward on to the road in a pool of his own blood. She glanced up the road towards the men around the lorry and saw that they were pulling more weapons from the boxes on the pavement. She ducked behind the still burning wreck of their car and dashed between the parked cars at the side of the road. Nero, who Raven had dragged from the burning wreckage, was unsteadily getting to his feet, an angry expression on his face.

‘The driver?’ he asked and Raven simply shook her head.

‘Time to go,’ she said, pulling the sheaths for her katanas from the back of the ruined car and strapping them on to her back.

‘Do you actually go anywhere without those?’ Nero asked, gesturing to the glowing purple blades of Raven’s modified swords.

‘I didn’t wear them to the opera, if that’s what you’re asking,’ Raven replied, looking down the street towards the men from the lorry who were cautiously advancing towards the burning car, weapons raised. ‘I left them in the car. I thought they might draw a little too much attention.’

‘It is a shame about your dress,’ Nero said as they hurried down the pavement away from the advancing assassins, using the parked cars for cover. Raven’s dress was scorched and torn in several places.

‘You can buy me another one when we get out of here,’ Raven replied as she glanced towards the far end of the road where she could see flashing blue lights. ‘Hold these.’ She handed Nero her swords.

The policeman was just climbing off his motorbike as Raven ran towards him.

‘Oh, officer, please help,’ she said in a frightened voice as she approached him. ‘There’s been a terrible accident.’

‘It’s OK, miss,’ the officer said. ‘Just calm down and try to tell me exactly what happened. Ambulances are on the w—’

He would later tell his colleagues that he had no memory of how he had been knocked unconscious. It was less embarrassing than admitting he’d been sucker punched by a beautiful Russian woman in a cocktail dress.

‘Get on,’ Raven said, taking her swords back from Nero and strapping them to her back before climbing on to the unconscious policeman’s motorbike. ‘And signal the Shroud.’

‘You are aware, of course, that I hate motorbikes,’ Nero said with a sigh as he climbed on to the back of the bike. He reached into his inside pocket as Raven started the bike and hit the emergency signal on his Blackbox. Raven gunned the engine and the bike shot away down the road.

‘This is not dramatically improving my opinion of motorbikes!’ Nero yelled from behind her as she wove at high speed through the slow-moving traffic ahead of them.

Raven glanced at the rear-view mirror and caught a glimpse of something moving more quickly through the traffic. There were three motorbikes behind them, each with a passenger riding pillion. Raven knew that they had to be the backup team that would be sent after them if they had somehow escaped the roadblock. She knew this because it was exactly what she would have done.

‘We’ve got company!’ she yelled to Nero, who twisted round and looked behind them.

‘Friends of yours?’ Nero replied.

‘Yeah,’ Raven said with a grim smile, ‘I think they’re just trying to return some bullets they borrowed from me . . . at about nine hundred and fifty metres per second.’

Raven jammed the throttle open, suddenly grateful for the big engine in the police bike. She roared up the on-ramp leading up to one of the elevated stretches of high speed dual carriageway that crossed central London. The traffic was not really any lighter up on this new road but it was at least moving more quickly. Raven glanced in the rear-view mirror again and saw that their pursuers were still gaining on them despite the fact she was at full throttle. There was a muzzle flash in the rear-view mirror and a split second later the same mirror exploded into a thousand pieces as it was struck by one of the bullets that whistled past them. Raven weaved left and then right, trying desperately to make them as difficult a target as possible. Despite their situation, she almost laughed out loud as she caught a fleeting glimpse of the astonished look on the face of a passenger in one of the cars they screamed past. Anybody would have thought they’d never seen a woman in a cocktail dress and a man in a dinner suit on the back of a stolen police motorbike.

She knew that they were running out of time. The bikes behind them were gaining and it would only take one bullet to end this chase very abruptly. She kept sweeping left and right across the road as another bullet pinged off the bodywork at the rear of the bike.

Suddenly a portal appeared to open in the sky about fifty metres ahead of them as the rear hatch of the cloaked Shroud dropship that had been summoned by Nero’s emergency signal slid open. The pilot was trying to stay at the same speed as their bike but the loading ramp leading up into the aircraft’s interior was still a couple of metres off the ground. Raven knew that if the Shroud flew any lower it would risk a collision with one of the vehicles on the road ahead. She accelerated, closing the distance to the open hatch, her mind racing. How were she and Nero going to both get on board? A crazy idea flew through her mind and in the same instant she realised that it might be their only chance.

‘Get me the pilot of that thing on your Blackbox,’ Raven yelled to Nero. After a couple of seconds he passed her the slim device. Raven quickly shouted instructions to the pilot before handing the PDA back to Nero. She pulled one of the swords from her back and set the control on its hilt to switch the variable geometry forcefield that ran along its edge to its sharpest setting. Raven swerved the bike left, towards the safety rail that ran along the side of the raised carriageway as yet another volley of bullets chewed up the tarmac where the bike had been just a split second earlier. She held out the glowing blade and braced herself as its mono-molecular edge sliced through the steel uprights that held the safety rail in place. The blade passed through support after support, each one giving way with a small shower of sparks. After a few seconds she kicked out and sent ten metres of the unsupported safety barrier tumbling over the side of the road.

‘Keep your head down,’ Raven yelled to Nero as she braked hard and spun the bike round to face the direction they had just come from, leaving a smouldering semicircle of black tyre rubber on the road. ‘This could get a little bumpy.’

The bikes that had been chasing them were now only a hundred metres away as Raven gunned the engine and sent the police bike shooting back down the dual carriageway, straight towards them. Raven swerved hard to the right as a bullet passed by her head so close that she heard it buzzing like an angry hornet. She aimed the bike straight for the gap she had just carved out of the safety barrier and held her breath. As the front wheel of the speeding bike passed over the edge of the tarmac the dimly illuminated interior of the Shroud rose into view and the bike vaulted the gap. After what seemed like an interminably long second hanging in the air, the bike’s front wheel slammed down on the dropship’s loading ramp as Raven jammed the brakes on hard, ditching the bike on its side and pushing her and Nero away from it. The pair of them slid to a halt as the bike cartwheeled through the Shroud’s cargo bay before slamming into the bulkhead at the far end with a metallic crunch.

‘GO!’ Raven yelled towards the cockpit, leaping to her feet and slapping the button that closed the rear hatch. She ducked down as the pillion gunmen on the two bikes on the road below opened fire. They were wasting their time. The Shroud was too well armoured to be taken down by small arms fire. The hatch closed with a clunk and Raven braced herself as she felt the Shroud’s huge turbine engines rotate from their vertical hover position to full forward thrust as the invisible aircraft rocketed up into the night sky. Nero slowly sat up and brushed himself down.

‘Not a typical trip home from the opera,’ he said with a wry smile.

‘Are you OK?’ Raven asked.

‘A few bruises in the morning I should imagine,’ Nero replied, getting slowly to his feet. ‘But other than that I’m fine.’

‘Good,’ Raven replied. ‘I think we both know what that was.’

‘Indeed,’ Nero said with a frown. ‘It appears that the time for discussion has passed. If it’s a fight that our former allies want then that, my dear, is exactly what we are going to give them.’

chapter three

‘I still think it would be easier to just revise for our examinations,’ Wing said with a sigh.

‘And again he misses the point,’ Shelby said, grinning.

They sat on the bed in Otto and Wing’s room in accommodation block seven and watched as Laura and Otto worked carefully on the dismantled device on the desk opposite.

‘It’s not cheating,’ Laura said defensively. ‘It’s about seeing whether or not it can be done. It’s the intellectual challenge of it.’

‘And the cheating,’ Otto said quickly, ‘don’t forget the cheating.’

‘Hmmm,’ Wing said with a look of obvious disapproval on his face.

‘You’re not helping, you know,’ Laura said, elbowing Otto in the ribs.

‘What?’ Otto said as he finished soldering one of the contact points on the device in front of him. ‘It’s not like we’re being trained to follow the rules here. If anything, I think Nero should reward us for our determination and initiative.’

‘Can you fit “determination and initiative” on a headstone?’ Laura asked as she leant in to examine Otto’s handiwork.

‘Now who’s not helping?’ Otto said as she peered through the magnifying lens at the device.

‘Looks good,’ Laura said. ‘We’ll make a hacker out of you yet, Malpense.’

‘Stop, you’re going to make me blush,’ Otto said with a grin.

‘All done then?’ Shelby asked, standing up and walking over to Laura and Otto. ‘Because you know how much I enjoy sitting and listening to you two rattle on about quantum phase discombobulators and all, but I’m exhausted.’

‘Do we really need to stop now?’ Laura asked. ‘What time is it?’