Molehunt (26 page)

After she and Deema had escaped Lotang's labyrinth, she had changed hotels, increasing security level by several factors. Fraddo knew the hotel owner, an underworld figure, inevitable in such a place, and all part of doing business. It helped that he was not especially friendly with Lob Lotang.

As soon as Anneke had a chance, she checked the signals from the suitcase probe and its little sister, whose task had been to board the OEP. What they had found left her stunned.

Although Anneke did not think Lotang would pursue Deema, she was of some value as a hostage and bait. Fraddo assured Anneke that she was in trustworthy hands.

Anneke input the coordinates returned by the probes, and launched.

Below her hung the green and lush world of Telugus. She would never go there. In another two hours she would be docking at an old Orbital Engineering Platform.

M
AXIMUS ran for his life. It was two hours until midnight but he had begun to suspect that he might not live to see the next day.

After the threader had been hit, he had sat on a bench for fifteen minutes, assembling scattered thoughts. Apart from the disorientation of hitting the ground at a hundred kilometres per hour and living, he suspected he had been affected by ‘field daze', intense field harmonics which created biochemical scrambling of the brain's neural pathways.

Maximus felt as though he were drunk, and because he never allowed this to happen, it was something he was unused to. People made bad decisions when they were drunk; pouring vodka into the cracker bowl and setting it alight to liven up the party, or vomiting in the host's fish tank so they wouldn't feel that humans were having all the fun.

Thus Maximus had sat on a bench for a quarter of an hour, a luxury that had nearly cost him his life. Watching other bewildered survivors stumble about, he had snapped out of his stupor, standing up quickly to scan the area. This action made him stand out. He saw them immediately, judging by the way they moved, three hit-mercs.

Maximus did the only thing possible. Sauntering over to a hovering ambulance, he climbed into the front seat and floored the accelerator. Fortunately, the ambulance was empty except for two corpses from the initial blast, both far too mangled to be rebuilt.

Even as he acted, Maximus knew it would be close. He was right. Having secured full kill-rights under the Myoto
deathword
, the hit-mercs opened up with everything they had.

Laser pulses, n-beams and pea-sized explosive mortars blasted towards him. This was to be expected. The hit-mercs had anticipated a moving target, zeroing the possible vectors open to a hover vehicle. But hovers don't hover, they fly. Thus they zeroed in on the horizontal vectors, rather than the vertical ones.

After feinting a sideways move for an alleyway, Maximus rerouted all power to the vertical jets and stabilisers, hit the safety override bar and stamped the throttle to the floor. The acceleration slammed him into his seat, shock absorbers whining in protest. The view outside changed drastically. He was airborne, the sudden thrust flinging the vehicle one hundred metres straight up. He trimmed the stabilisers and kicked in the rear jets. The great thing about ambulances was that, unlike urban vehicles, they were designed for emergencies. In fact they were like urban racers with an emergency room welded on.

As far as Maximus was concerned, this
was
a medical emergency. And he was the patient.

The ambulance shot forward. Maximus brought the nose down slightly, picking up more speed as he lost height and leaving the chattering, flashing combat zone in his wake. The onboard computer flashed red continually, indicating what Maximus was doing was outside its design specs.

On the other hand, if he had taken the control systems of the ambulance by surprise, the same could be said for the hit-mercs.

There was a downside to escaping them. Wounding the pride and reputation of a predator made the job personal. They would be gunning for him now – he'd made them look like fools. Then again, saving their pride would have got him killed. It was a fair exchange.

If he made it to midnight it would be prudent to leave Reema's End for a while. No problem. He was planning a vacation to the Orbital Engineering Platform on the other side of Telugus anyway.
Vacation?
he thought.
No, more of a business trip
.

Shots were still being aimed his way, however. Maximus steered the ambulance for cover between buildings, whipping down a broad boulevard, the walls looming on either side. He banked sharply and shot into a side street, skimming over the heads of citizens diving for their lives.

A building at an intersection took a direct hit from a homing mortar that failed to make a left hand turn as sharply as Maximus had. Maximus imagined glass and plasteel debris raining down on the street below, but by then he was several blocks away, wearing the grin of a survivor.

This time he did not allow himself to get cocky.

Grounding the ambulance on a ten-storey building, he jumped into a drop tube. The ambulance had been great to escape in, but it was like a flying bullseye.

Maximus stepped out of the drop tube, went down the emergency staircase of the building and out the back exit into a smelly little lane lined with the cardboard huts of the homeless. After what he'd been through, he looked like one of them, though he smelt of sweat, explosives and burning plastic rather than stale urine. This was the way he wanted it, being anonymous, being part of a crowd. Those chasing you had to take out a crowd to get you. Taking out that many people meant taking out part of the city, and doing that meant getting the
deathword
from thousands of angry friends and relatives.

After casually scanning the lane he walked briskly to the left, looking more as if he were late for a drug deal than running for his life. He headed deeper into the city, making for Hurqurl, where the local citizens were more respectable, unlikely to lift a finger to aid the hit-mercs or give a damn about a
deathword
unless there was something in it for them.

For the next two hours he loitered about, stopping people to ask for directions just to be seen talking to them. He doubled back on himself, bought souvenirs and left them in random places after writing meaningless messages on them. Those pursuing him would have plenty of false leads to slow them down.

He had originally thought he would give the mercs the slip, but what he actually did was filter them out. With the mercs gone he became aware that somebody else was tracking him. Someone who made the mercs look like kindergarten dropouts.

Maximus began to sweat. That was bad. Fear could be detected in sweat, and letting people know that he was frightened was not a good way to stay alive.

Myoto knew he was in Hurqurl. They had interdicted the whole area, setting up roadblocks, closing the subway entrances, and stopping threaders from docking. Maximus was impressed. The company had resources, influence and a bad attitude where their enemies were concerned. They were determined to get him.

The joke was that he could not call for help. If he did, he lost. He would also lose face. The Cartel would relegate Quesada immediately and appoint another CEO. Besides, who would come to help him?

If Maximus's great plan was to succeed, he had to survive. Even if his great plan failed, survival was a big improvement on the alternative. He had already bested Myoto, but now the net was drawing tighter. There was a new player in the game, and this one was cunning and intelligent.

Maximus got a funny feeling between his shoulderblades. A special gift of genetics, an extra sense, warned him a trigger was being pulled on a weapon aimed in his direction. Maximus ducked to the left, dropping as he did so. An almost silent shredder hissed past as he bolted into an alleyway. Shredders the size of a pinhead bore into any fleshy bodies and started mincing tissue, needler technology in a different package, excruciatingly painful – at least for a short time.

He dropped a microspike as he ran, taking full advantage of twists in the maze of alleys and lanes, as well as the huge rubbish skips, burned-out wrecks and printfab hutments. His pursuer had to negotiate this and single him out amid the chaos. All Maximus had to do was run. He had put two hundred metres between him and the spike when he heard it detonate. A satisfying scream; someone had come within its detonation radius; someone carrying lethal hardware.

Maximus saw a figure, just a flicker of movement, a blurry shape between buildings three hundred metres ahead. He thought he recognised it: tall, elongated, blood red tunic, moving with an odd inhuman gait. That was bad. Most predators wore black, going about their business unseen. Someone wearing red had to be confident.

Maximus skidded to a stop.

Had he seen the Envoy?
Don't be stupid
, he told himself.
What you saw was a member of the Envoy's species
. There was no reason for Lotang to employ only one of these creatures. For all Maximus knew, the man had a whole garrison of them.

This was the new player he had sensed earlier.

Predicting the kill-patterns of mercs was one thing. Trying to profile an
alien
was another. He had no parameters to work with. What were its values? What was it frightened of? How fast could it react? Did it get angry and make stupid decisions? Did it get angry at all? In terms of pursuit, it was ahead of the mercs.
It was probably from a predator species, cat or wolf
.

In that moment, Maximus knew the chase had become serious.

He took another lane, at right angles to his previous path, and tried to put distance between himself and the new exporter. He assumed the Envoy look-alike was working for Lotang, but what did
that
mean? Perhaps the red alien was yet another innocent bystander. Well, that would be no problem, because Maximus had killed more than his share of innocent bystanders.

Had Lotang decided he would rather die than be controlled and manipulated? Maximus's profile of the man said otherwise, but sometimes people's profiles changed when pushed too far. The survivor suddenly became the suicidal terrorist.

‘Cheer up, Lotang, life is worth living,' Maximus muttered hopefully.

Were the two Corporations working together? If not, there was a possibility Maximus could play them off against each other. At the same time, the risk was that his evasion measures calculated for Myoto's specific hunt pattern, could drive him straight into the path of another hunt.

Maximus came to this realisation just as it happened.

As he raced down the permamac lane, his body sensors picked up leakage of constrained energies from blast weapons. He swerved into an alleyway but it began to curve, taking him back in the direction of the Envoy.

Time for a change of plan
, thought Maximus. He swung sideways into a store. It was attached to a restaurant. He hurried out through the kitchen and into the dining area. As a waiter came forward to greet him he shouldered past, then, seeing the front door starting to open, hurriedly turned back. Knocking the waiter aside, he raced down a corridor and burst back into the kitchen.

Maximus sprinted past the surprised staff and slammed open the back door, darting into the alleyway. Instead of turning left or right he raced across the alleyway and into another open doorway. A maze of narrow corridors frustrated his pace, but five minutes later he was out the other side, leaving behind a security guard with a broken jaw. Hailing a hover taxi, he waved a one hundred cred note in the driver's face. The money spoke with its usual persuasive charm, and the taxi took off at speed.

Maximus was too canny to stay in the taxi for long. Five blocks away, as the taxi slowed for a corner, Maximus upped the amplitude on his deflector field and jumped from the moving vehicle just in time. The almost frictionless field let him coast sideways into a parking lot. He slid down an exit ramp, narrowly avoiding a hover truck. Behind him the taxi blossomed into a fireball of lurid red and yellow. He managed to switch off his field and snap-roll to a stop.
Would anyone be fooled by their hit on the taxi? Probably not. I wouldn't be
.

Maximus took the ramps towards the underground. Down more than a dozen levels, he slowed, moving along rows and rows of parked vehicles, formulating his plan.

He need not have bothered.

A beam pulsed out at him from nowhere, missing him only because of his deflector armour. He could smell ozone, and feel scorching heat on his face, but his body had already taken over and he was fifty metres away, crab-running behind hover cars, vigilant, every sense on alert.

That was close. How had he been found so fast? Whoever had ashed the taxi would have thought him dead, but whoever else was hunting him had a more realistic view on his ability to survive.

Damn, it must be that Envoy creature
.

Maximus turned back. It was time to become the hunter. He had to remove this threat before it completely overwhelmed his profiling of the hunt patterns.

He still had an hour till midnight. An hour until he could no longer be killed. Not legally, anyway.