James Swallow - Icarus Effect

The assassin was directly on her heels as she emerged into the middle of an observation space, walled in on three sides by elegant glass windows. Velvet couches and master-crafted faux-Elizabethan tables were side by side with minimalist holographs and inset data consoles.

Anna grabbed at a footstool and hurled it behind her, trying to slow Federova down, but she missed and stumbled. The Tyrant woman was suddenly on her and she heard the soft hiss of augmented muscles. Anna came off her feet and Federova pitched her into the air.

She spun and crashed through a glass lamp, bouncing off the half-moon bar at the back of the room. Pain flared along her side as she plowed through an arrangement of glasses and liquor bottles. Air blasted out of her lungs in a croaking howl and she tipped over and down.

Dizzy, blood wet on her face where her earlier wound had reopened, Anna struggled into a crouch. There was broken glass everywhere she laid her hands. Blinking owlishly, she saw a bottle of bourbon lying on its side, and she grabbed it by the neck.

Anna rose as Federova came in to hurt her again, and brought down the bottle like a club. The assassin tried to deflect the hit away, but the glass shattered on her arm and she hissed in pain.

Despite herself, Anna showed teeth in a feral grin; to get something from the silent woman, even the smallest of utterances, was a little victory in itself.

The rich, brown liquid spattered across Federova and the curved bar, and she staggered back a step. That was all the time Anna needed to yank the flare launcher from her pocket.

She squeezed the trigger bar and a smoking dart chugged out into the air, skipping off the bar in a blare of sputtering phosphorous. Federova went for cover as the flare ignited the bourbon spills and carried on across the room, battering itself against the inside of the windows. Orange smoke, acrid and cloying, choked the air.

Coughing, Anna fired off another shot and clipped the Tyrant woman with it. Federova's bolero jacket instantly caught alight, red flames leaping up at her face.

Through the thickening haze and shrieking of the trapped flares, Anna stumbled blindly toward the windows, desperate to escape. Behind her, she heard the tinkle of breaking glass and the crackling chugs of a fire taking hold, as one of the couches became a torch.

Federova came out of the roiling smoke ahead of her, a furious revenant blocking her path. Her skin seared and her face twisted in hate, the

Tyrant looked like something spat from the fangs of hell.

The stolen jet ski rode low and fast over the wave tops, leaving the water in skipping blasts of power as it skimmed across the wake of the

Icarus. The stern of the yacht loomed high before Saxon, just as a glint of bright light flashed along the mid-deck. For a moment, he thought it was a reflection from the sun, but then it happened again, and this time thin plumes of orange smoke coiled from the cracked windows.

Saxon twisted the throttle and gunned the motor, bringing the jet ski around to approach from the near side, where the haze would hide his approach.

The voice on the radio repeated itself in French, English, and Mandarin, warning the Icarus to cut power and heave to, by the authority of the

Swiss civil police.

Namir's lip curled and he silenced the speaker, shooting an angry glare across the yacht's flying bridge as Barrett entered.

The big man's face was thunderous, and his scarred cheek was red with lines of blood, spilled like tear tracks from his eye. "What the hell is going on down there?" he demanded, jerking a thumb toward the aft. "The fire alarms are going crazy! Kelso wasn't on the mid-deck, so-"

"Yelena has her," Namir snapped. "She's cleaning up your mess."

"The bitch got the drop on me!" Barrett roared.

"Imbecile!" Namir shot back, with such force that the other man fell silent. "You underestimated the woman and she made you pay for it!"

Coils of smoke, black threads joining the flare fumes, drifted past on the wind. Fire-suppressor lights blinked across the control boards and

Namir could hear an alarm bell ringing somewhere beneath them. He advanced to the helm control and pulled the throttle levers back to the zero mark.

"What are you doin'?" said Barrett. "Where's the pilot?"

Namir nodded toward the rearward sky deck where the unmarked Tyrant veetol was waiting. "He's warming up the helo. We're abandoning ship." He ground out the words in annoyance. "This operation is turning into a clusterfuck! We have to extract now, while we can still salvage something." He glared out of the bridge's canopy. "Police launches are on the way. Our mission security has been compromised. Apparently someone alerted them as to our extralegal status."

"Saxon?"

"Does it matter?" he snarled. "Our objective was achieved, even if Taggart didn't die. The Humanity Front is in disarray, the media will report what we want them to say. We are done here."

"We're just gonna cut and run?" Barrett replied. "First we lose the jet and now this tub?"

"Let it burn," Namir told him. "The cost is nothing against the gains. We'll be across the border before the Swiss realize what has happened, and by the time they've doused the flames, the group will spin the truth to whatever best suits their needs."

Federova's fingers were like iron rods where they bored into Anna's flesh through the smoke-dirtied sleeves of her blouse, and each motion of her pushing and shoving her across the decks was a new flash of pain. The assassin worked a nerve point in her arm and it was like her skin had been doused in acid.

She gasped and kept moving, tasting blood in her mouth. Anna caught a brief glimpse of herself in the curve of the Icarus's gray glass windows as she passed; once upon a time she would have loved to find herself walking the decks of an elegant vessel like this, but now she looked like an apparition, some walking wounded left behind by the passing of a war.

Federova marched her to the upper tier and shoved her forward. The wind across the open sky deck caught her and she staggered. Across the flat space, the unmarked black flyer that had gathered her up from the Mont Blanc bridge was poised, ready for takeoff, rotor rings humming at idle. Namir and Barrett were waiting, and the big man's face lit up with a dark, hateful smile as he saw her approach. He took a step forward, flexing the thick, heavy digits of his machine hands.

Anna tried to back away, but there was nothing behind her but a curved line of steel rail and the slope of the flying bridge. The silhouette of the yacht angled away down to the main deck and the prow, the profile like a knife blade edge-on. Smoke wreathed the drifting vessel.

Namir held up a hand to halt Barrett before he could tear his payback from her. "I want Kelso intact," she heard him say, over the drone of the rotors. "If we can't interrogate her here, we'll do it at a black site."

"No…" She struggled again as Barrett grabbed her and pulled her along until she was almost off her feet. "No!" Anna threw punches and kicks, but they battered off the other man without effect.

A dark pit of terror opened up inside her chest. Until this moment, Anna had been able to hold on to the thinnest thread of hope, the slimmest chance that she could still find a way to escape from the Tyrants and survive. That hope disintegrated as she was dragged toward the helo, the hard, unflinching certainty falling down upon her that she would have no future, no respite, no escape "Hey!" Ahead, Namir rapped on the cockpit hatch, calling to the pilot. "Answer me!" He tugged at the handle and the canopy opened; the pilot's lifeless body shifted and spilled out onto the helipad. The dead man's neck was canted at an unnatural angle.

Anna saw a figure drop from the cover of the tail fin and jam a shotgun barrel into the meat of Namir's neck.