Halfhead (27 page)

Quietly he backed into the bedroom, pulling the door almost shut behind him. Someone was breaking into his apartment in the dead of night and he was pretty damn sure it wasn’t the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Peitai. The little git had used Governor Clark to lean on Director Smith-Hamilton, but it looked as if Will was about to get something a lot more permanent.

He settled back against the wall, cursing under his breath. An assault team was the last thing he wanted in his home at quarter to two on a Tuesday morning. They’d have light-sights, they’d have infrared, they’d have Zappers, Screamers, Whompers, and God knew what else. All he had was a Palm Thrummer…and Detective Sergeant Cameron.

With one hand he grabbed the duvet and dragged it off the bed. Before Jo could start swearing he slapped the same hand over her mouth and pointed at the bedroom door with
his Thrummer. She scowled up at him in the gloom, and then another clunk came from somewhere inside the flat. Her eyebrows shot up.

Will let go of her, put a finger to his lips, and went, ‘Shh…’

She mouthed the word, ‘Fuck,’ then scrabbled through her discarded clothes.

Will clicked his throat-mike and activated the emergency channel. ‘Control, this is Hunter: do you copy?’ he whispered, stuffing the earpiece into place.

‘Sir?’

‘I need a pickup team here and I need it
now
.’

‘Sir?’

‘Just do it!’

‘Sir, all our teams are out on—’

‘I don’t care if you have to call in your sick granny! Reserves, anything! Just get them—’ Will’s earpiece exploded into a barrage of static and he dragged it out.

Jo whispered, ‘How we doing?’ She was stark naked, holding a brand-new Field Zapper. The thing was three times the size of her original sidearm, the telltales casting a soft blue glow over her caramel skin. She caught him looking and shrugged. ‘What? Thought if I was going to hang around with you I’d better pack a bit more firepower.’

‘They’re jamming the coms channels. We’re on our own: nothing in, nothing out.’

She swore quietly. ‘How many?’

‘Couldn’t tell.’ Will cranked his Palm Thrummer up to full. ‘At least four.’

‘So what’s taking them so long?’

‘How the hell should I…’ He cleared his throat. ‘Sorry. Get a little tense when people are trying to kill me.’

They sat side by side in the dark, both weapons pointing at the partially open door.

‘Maybe they’re doing a room to room search?’

Will shook his head. ‘If they’ve got infrared goggles they can see our heat signatures. They don’t need to search.’

‘What if they’re on low-light?’

Will opened his mouth to say: ‘Don’t be daft’, but it
would
explain why they hadn’t just charged straight into the bedroom. A smile tugged at his face. If they were using light-amplification goggles, they were in for a nasty surprise.

He crept towards the bedroom door, keeping close to the wall. ‘Cover your eyes and get ready to run.’

Outside, in the lounge, he could hear soft, careful footsteps. They were getting closer.

Will risked a glance through the slit between the door and the frame, into the living room beyond. A strange-looking creature with goggles over its eyes looked straight back at him. In the split second it took them to recognize each other Will took in the troop boots, the vid-helmet, the heavy gloves and the full-sized Thrummer.

He closed his eyes and shouted, ‘Lights!’

Suddenly the entire apartment exploded into brilliant daylight—he could see pink through his eyelids—and then the flat was full of swearing.

‘Lights off!’ He grabbed Jo’s hand and charged out through the bedroom door.

Will’s night vision was still good as he barged into the trooper with the Thrummer and sent him flying. The man smashed through the coffee table, hands clasped to his goggled eyes, blinded by the sudden brilliance. The room was full of them, staggering around clutching their heads. Will ran for the front door, Jo hot on his heels.

She snapped her Field Zapper up and sent a blue arc of lighting into the chest of the nearest invader. He screamed and flew backwards as every muscle in his body contracted, sparking like a Catherine wheel into the control panel. The Whomper in his hands barked and something red and wet sprayed across Will’s cheek. He turned, just in time to see a
man in combat gear, with a shark-sized bite out of his torso, twitch and judder to the floor.

Will didn’t stop at the front door, just ran straight through, shouting, ‘Lights!’ again as he crossed the threshold. He could hear swearing erupt for a second time as he and Jo sprinted for the lifts.

She was spray-painted raspberry red all down one side. Naked or not, it wasn’t an erotic sight.

They skidded to a halt at the end of the corridor. Will punched the button for the lifts. It bleeped back at him and the doors slid open, revealing a startled-looking woman in combat fatigues, her Thrummer unhitched and resting against her foot.

‘Shite!’ Jo shot her in the face with the Field Zapper.

The trooper’s head crackled with hot blue sparks and a deafening roar filled the lift as the Thrummer went off, taking the woman’s left foot and a chunk of flooring with it.

‘Will you stop doing that!’ Will leapt into the lift. It was full of pink mist that smelled of raw meat and roasting ozone. Hot red blood pumped from the woman’s truncated leg, spreading out in a slippery puddle, dripping through the hole in the floor. Fifty-seven stories straight down.

‘Stop complaining and get us out of here!’ Jo dropped to her knees and wrenched the Thrummer from the unconscious trooper’s hand.

Will pressed the button for the building’s shuttle bay and sank back against the cool mirrored wall as the doors slid shut and the car started to accelerate downwards.

Jo wrestled the crash webbing off the twitching body in the middle of the floor. ‘You see how many?’

‘Seven that I counted, plus this one. Standard pickup team is ten, not including the pilot. My guess is there’s another two covering the exits.’

‘Catch.’ She threw the webbing at him and he fastened
it over his dressing gown, twisting it round the right way so the spare power cells for the Thrummer were easy to get at. When he was all buckled up she passed across the assault rifle and then laughed at him. ‘What
do
you look like?’

‘At least I’m wearing something!’

‘True.’ Jo unsnipped the catches on the front of the woman’s jumpsuit and sat her up, pulling the limp arms out of the sleeves. ‘How much longer?’ she asked, trying to drag the jumpsuit’s one remaining leg over the trooper’s heavy boots.

‘Thirteen floors.’ They were already decelerating.

‘Damn!’

‘Ten, nine, eight, seven—’

‘I can’t get the bastard thing over her bloody boot!’

‘Two, one.’

The lift went ‘ping’ and Will braced himself against the back wall, Thrummer pointing at the twin doors. As they gently slid apart Will looked out through the opening gap into the shuttle bay. Two men were standing on the platform—one carrying a Whomper, the other a Screamer, both weapons pointed in his direction.

Will didn’t wait for introductions, just jammed his thumb down on his Thrummer’s trigger, tearing a hole in the lift doors at chest height. The two men dived for cover as he held the button down, filling the air with vaporized metal and the sound of tortured bees. He slapped the control panel with his other hand and sent the elevator back up to the ground floor, the lift shaft clearly visible through the new four-foot hole in the doors.

‘Got it!’ Jo stood, a blood-soaked, tattered jumpsuit in her hands. She managed to get one leg into it before the elevator juddered to a halt and Will shoved her out into the building foyer.

‘What the hell was that for?’ She staggered against the
wall as, behind them, the floor of the lift exploded upward. The unconscious body of the one-legged trooper jerked as round after round tore into it. ‘Ah, got you.’

Mr Duncan, the building’s night porter, came scuttling round from behind his brass and marblette fortress.

‘Fit’i hell’s ga’in oan?’

‘Get back behind your desk and keep your head down!’ Will ran for the front entrance, pulling Jo along behind him. ‘And call for help!’

They burst out into the street and the rain.

Jo struggled her arms into the jumpsuit. ‘Which way?’

‘There.’ He pointed across the street to the path that led away into the darkest depths of Kelvingrove Park. ‘We go anywhere else and people are going to get hurt.’

‘Trust me,’ she said, running after him through the park gates, ‘those bastards come anywhere near me, people are going to get hurt.’

Will was already soaked to the skin, his bathrobe flapping out behind him like a towelling cape. The Thrummer in his hands still had a good two-thirds charge left and he had another pair of power cells strapped to the webbing. If they could find some decent cover they might actually get out of this alive.

They hammered, barefoot, down the path, between hissing yellow orbs of light, setting off holo adverts as they passed. Will tried his throat-mike again.

‘Control, do you read me?’

The response was garbled—small spurts of words interspersed with waves of hard, white noise.

‘Anything?’ Jo was breathing hard now and so was he.

‘Jammer’s breaking up the signal. Backup might be on the way, but I don’t know how long it’s going to take.’

He looked back over his shoulder, just in time to see seven heavily armed troopers explode out of the front door of the building and screech to a stop on the pavement. For a moment
it looked as though they might have got away with it…but one of the figures must have seen the chain of glowing adverts Will and Jo had left in their wake, because he pointed straight at them.

‘Bastard! We’ve got to hide.’ Jo grabbed a handful of Will’s soaking dressing gown and ran off at ninety degrees to the path, dragging him into the darkness.

Cold, slippery grass whipped at their shins, the rain and the night swiftly gobbling up the sodiums’ feeble glow. There wasn’t enough light to see his hand in front of his face, let alone where he was going. Will went down hard, twisting his ankle and slithering to a halt in the mud beneath a sharp-edged bush.

From his skewed vantage point he could see the assault team charging along the path like polished beetles, the sodium light glinting off their wet body armour.

‘Will?’

‘Shhh!’ he hissed through clenched teeth. ‘Get out of here. I’ll hold them back.’

‘Bollocks you will.’ She dropped down next to him in the mud.

‘We stand a much better chance if we split up.’

She shook her head, but Will reached out and held her face in his hands. ‘You need to go. You need to get as far away from here as possible.’

‘I’m not leaving—’

‘No you’re not. We’re just splitting up, that’s all. Making it more difficult for them to find us.’ His ankle was killing him: he was going nowhere fast and he knew it. ‘Once you’re out of the park, get on the nearest shuttle and go anywhere. Soon as you’re out of jammer range, call control and get a pickup team out here.’

‘I—’

Will pulled her down to him and placed a soft kiss on her lips.

‘Over there!’ The shout was followed by the high-pitched whine of a Whomper on full. It barked, blasting a chunk of waterlogged turf into muddy rain right in front of them.

‘Go!’

Jo didn’t need another telling; she picked herself up and charged off into the bushes.

Will pulled the Thrummer up and flicked on the light-sight. Its hard green line streaked out from under the bush, into the middle of the shouting trooper’s chest. Will pressed the trigger and the man’s torso evaporated. Four troopers watched, mesmerized, as the man’s shoulders slumped into his hips, before the whole grisly mess slapped into the path in a mist of red. When the green targeting beam leapt to the next one in line they hit the deck hard. But not before Will got off a second shot. The Thrummer growled and someone lost everything between their left elbow and their spine. The survivors scrabbled to their feet and ran for it, doing their best to get the hell out of there before Will fired again.

He picked one at random and stripped the skin off their back before the weapon chimed empty in his hands.

‘Three out of seven. Not bad for a half-naked man in a bathrobe.’ Will racked the Thrummer upright and shot the battery pack out into the mud. He could hear them crashing through the bushes on either side, trying to outflank him while he reloaded. With a grim smile he slapped the next power cell into the slot and cranked it up to speed. The telltales danced along the body of the weapon as the tines began vibrating inside.

The night lit up with a blue flash. Over to his left a bush was torn apart into its component molecules, the fragments of chlorophyll swept away in the torrential downpour. He took a guess at the source and swept the area with his Thrummer. Undergrowth leapt into the air, crackling with static electricity. The weapon’s roar filled his ears, shaking the
teeth in his head as he swung it back and forth, decimating anything in its path. It was deafening.

He didn’t hear them coming up behind him until they were almost on top of him.

Will span round, the Thrummer coming with him, tearing its way through shrubs and earth, his finger still hard on the trigger. The first one into the clearing caught the weapon’s wake full in the face. His body ran on another step before it realized there was nothing giving the orders anymore and went down, fountaining arterial crimson into the rain-battered grass. The second trooper dived in beneath the Thrummer’s arc and slammed into Will’s chest, sending him sprawling into the bloody mud.

Something hard crashed into the side of his head, snapping it around. Hot yellow blobs filled his vision. The world span. And then someone clambered on top of him, straddling him, locking his arms against his sides, pushing him down into the quagmire. Pain burst across his scalp as the woman grabbed a handful of hair and forced his head back. Her fist hammered into Will’s nose, sending warm salty blood pouring down his throat. The next blow closed his left eye, smashing his head further into the mud.