Mel Odom - Preying for keeps

Skater leaped to the second car back from the engine. His balance was coming more surely to him now. The drag created by the wrecked car had thrown everything off. He was aware of the passengers in the car below him. Screams sounded over the whipping wind and twice he was shot at by someone other than McKenzie's soldiers.

"Jack," Archangel said, "he's just entering the last car before the engine."

"And a lot of his soldiers trailing along with him," Trey put in.

"You've got to retrieve that deck," Archangel said. "Once McKenzie gets it, he can use the credstick to change all my passcodes and make all those accounts and files inaccessible to me. I'm trying to download what I have at this end now, but I'm going to have to borrow some hard-drive space somewhere. I'll need a few minutes to arrange that."

Skater made himself run harder. All of their futures hung in the balance. The deals they'd made with the dragon. ReGEN and NuGene. Ariadne and Tavis Silverstaff. With care, and a little time, most of it could be salvaged. He was certain of that. He made the leap onto the last passenger car, kicking in the boosted reflexes and feeling the adrenaline surge through him. He got his second wind, felt his senses become more acute and his body resume its coordination despite the fatigue eating at him.

Larisa had given her life for the information Archangel had tapped, and had staked her daughter's future on it. He'd gambled and lost everything himself. If Emma was going to have a chance, he couldn't fail.

He got to the edge of the car just as the Mafia soldier with the deck crashed through the door into the engine. Placing his free hand on the edge of the car, Skater vaulted onto the platform in front of the engine. His hip slammed painfully up against the railing and he grabbed it. When he tried the door, it was locked.

Stepping back, he rammed a foot into the door. The lock shattered and came open, the light inside spilling outward. He went forward with the Predator in his hand, his free hand cupping the butt of it as he tucked i[in close to his face.

The interior of the monorail engine was built in a T-shape, with a short corridor between the electromagnets that led into the control cross-section. Voices came to Skater over the throb of the transformers. He recognized McKenzie's at once.

Gunfire broke out behind him, made alternately louder and muffled by the swinging door. Whoever was in the engine with McKenzie must have thought the sound of the breaking lock was part of the general racket echoing through the monorail.

"Kid," Duran called over the commlink, "we're pinned down. You're solo."

"I read you," Skater replied. He kept moving forward as gunfire crashed behind him.

"Look out," Wheeler called. "There's a maintenance rig coming at us up ahead."

Skater peered around the corner and saw McKenzie in the control booth with three other men. He was holding the deck in both hands, looking rumpled but not hurt. On the other side of the windshield, the lean lines of the skeletal maintenance rig designed for working on a monotrain that had stalled between stations swelled into view.

"It's matching our speed," Wheeler said. "Closing the gap between us. We're coming. Just hang on."

Skater knew McKenzie wasn't going to wait, though.

Even now, he'd managed to get another team aboard the monotrain. That maint-rig had to be his doing.

The control room was generally unoccupied except during safety inspections, Skater knew. There were no innocents in the area. He used the commlink. "Wheeler."

"Go."

"You've still got access to the engine's dog-brain?"

"Yepper."

"On my mark, put on the brakes. Does everyone copy? The rest of the team quickly checked in with an affirmative.

The maint-rig closed on them, only meters away now and moving fluidly enough to change speeds with them. Sensing the presence at his back. Skater wheeled. Duran stood there, breathing hard, blood covering his upper body. "I got your back, kid."

"Where's Elvis?"

"He got shot up pretty bad, but those slotting trogs are hard to kill. He's holding the rest of McKenzie's people off us till the others arrive."

In the control booth. Skater saw McKenzie toss the deck aside and take the steps down to the side door. The maint-rig was getting closer, filling the windshield now as it came at them.

"Wheeler," Skater called, "do it!" He hung onto the side. clutching at a pipe as tightly as he could.

A heartbeat later, the engine's brakes shrilled as they seized up. The engine and the cars had an antilocking system on the brakes to prevent derailment and compensate for load shifts, but anyone not belted down still got a hefty reminder about the physical laws of momentum and inertia. Screams and curses from the passengers cowering for their lives ripped through the noise.

Skater felt like his arm had been torn from its socket, but he held on grimly. Through the windshield, he saw the maint-rig shoot away quickly, then its brakes joined the shrill screaming of metal on metal.

The three Mafia soldiers were scattered across the control booth. But standing in the doorway as he was, McKenzie kept his feet, which told Skater that the man had cyber-enhancements. There was no other way he could have stood against the braking action. Even before the engine had come to a complete stop, McKenzie was in motion. The side door let out over the four-story drop, but that didn't keep him from finding handholds along the bullet-shaped nose and scrambling toward the maint-rig.

The three Mafia soldiers were getting to their feet, looking back at Skater and Duran.

"Go, kid!" Duran growled. "I'll handle things here." Skater broke cover at once, locked on McKenzie's fleeing form sliding across the engine's nose. A bullet hit him in the side, slipping around the Kevlar plates, and ripped into flesh. He was knocked off-balance but didn't know how bad he'd been wounded. Staggering, he made it into the doorway with difficulty and leathered the Predator.

Warm blood continued to run down his side as he swung out over the four-story drop and reached for the first handhold. He missed, and swung wildly back. Both feet came off the last rung in the doorway. For an instant he hung over the city, about to be dropped into it like a treat to a hell hound. The sprawl wouldn't even remember him once he was gone. Then his feet found purchase and he pushed himself onward. He located the handholds and footholds he needed, crawled across the hot metal of the engine. Bullets cracked and whined around him as gunners in the maint-rig tried to shoot him.

Skater was aware of the bloody trail following him as he slid off the engine and dropped onto the monorail's track. The single metal rib was only slightly less than two meters wide, hammered smooth by the wear and tear of years of service.

McKenzie was moving rapidly, but not running, across it. The distance separating him from the maint-rig was less than sixty meters and closing.

Both monorail vehicles only had running lights, nothing that would project enough illumination to cut through the darkness around the track.

Skater was aware of the gunfire lighting up the inside of the engine he'd just quit, as well as the numbing chill that had spread up his side. He ran after McKenzie, keeping to the shadows and not pulling the Predator because it would give the Mafia guns a flash to fix on. The footing beneath his boots was uncertain, and his boosted reflexes were strained to keep him on the track. Bullets whipped by his face, but as he closed on McKenzie, he knew he was offering an increasingly smaller target for the hostile shooters to hit. McKenzie, whether he wanted to or not, was protecting him.

"Shoot the fragger!" McKenzie screamed, trying to pick up the pace.