Stormblood, стр. 39
I squeezed.
A burst of blue energy punched clean through Lyndon’s face.
He twitched, still flying towards me, as if his body was figuring out what had happened to it, before slapping down on the concrete next to me. My chest shivered with stormtech, the beginning of its chemical calmness lapping at my senses. Sliding me into the rhythm of combat-readiness. I felt good. Peaceful.
I jerked myself back out of it, resisting the stormtech, the alarms still pulsing like a seizure around me. The fight had cost me time I didn’t have.
Someone had heard the shot and now the corridors were starting to swarm with assailants. I was already sprinting away down the hall when I heard screams at my back. The rapid fire of weapons crackled, bullets spraying across the walls behind me, pinging off my armour as I put my head down and ran faster, breath echoing in my skull. The corridors burst with sun-bright flares of light, concrete spraying around me. Every shot felt like being smacked with a hammer, but the hard-sheeted plating of my armour stopped any from punching through—
—until a flash of immense pain, as if someone had stabbed a hot rod into my flesh.
Armour-piercing rounds.
If they’d hit my spine, I’d be done for. But my limbs were still pumping and I was still moving. I burst into the massive ship garage I’d seen on my arrival, the footfall of my pursuers behind me. I whipped around, barely registering the charging figure before he slammed into me with bone-crushing force. Crates shattered and went skidding away as we crashed into the chainship skeleton, the hull buckling around my armour. My assailant hooked my legs out from behind me and tried to pin me in place as someone in an exoskeleton came running to help.
‘I got him!’ he yelled, fumbling out another one of the soot-black gizmos to paralyse my suit. It whined to life, inches from my face. ‘Now, hold him! Hold—’
I wriggled a leg free, gritted my teeth and kicked him in the stomach, sending him windmilling away. I punched my second assailant in the sternum in a wild, blind panic, slamming the gizmo against his head. He didn’t have time to scream as it latched onto his skull and blasted him with a healthy dosage of EMP. Barely unconscious, his exoskeleton smoking, I hefted him up and threw his bulk into the incoming path of my pursuers. They yelled as two hundred kilos of metal and meat slammed them to the floor. I tore ahead, feet skidding across the polished decking, heart pounding in my throat.
There was no exit. No convenient doors leading to freedom. I was trapped and had no time to double back. The only other option was an inconspicuous, boxy garage holding an autovehicle. Its bloody chainglass door was locked. The footsteps pounded closer as, not daring to get my hopes up, I fumbled Lasky’s keycard out and swiped it.
The garage door chimed open. I plunged inside and into the autovehicle. Hands shaking as I boost-started the engine. The display warmed to life with an array of icons as the windscreen shattered, glass and bullets bursting around me. Someone yelled as I revved the engine and stabbed in an address, overriding every option I could see.
The autovehicle roared forward, punching through the garage door with a great wrenching crack. I hunkered as far down as I could as a salvo of gunfire shattered the rear window and clawed at the sides. Dust and ash swirled through the windows as we went swerving around a turn. Bullets crackling along the bumper, and then tailing off as the autovehicle curved onto the main road. No one followed as we negotiated the cracked roads of the Warren and calmly merged into the traffic on the main streets.
My visor fogged up as I breathed a belly-deep sigh of relief. I heaved myself up, strapped myself into the bucket seat and breathed easier as we slipped deeper into the floor.
Then I remembered that whoever those people were, Artyom was with them.
I spent the rest of the ride in sour silence.
13
Skin & Bone
I don’t remember where I parked the autovehicle. I didn’t care. Don’t even know how long it took me to get home. The stormtech boost had dissolved into my guts, taking my high with it. I barely had the energy to walk and ordered my damaged armour to do the job, hydraulics moving on autopilot.
The bullets in my back ground like bone fragments with every burning step. Impossible to tell how injured I was with adrenaline masking the worst of the pain. But I’d managed to contact Grim and, for once, he hadn’t argued and had agreed to come straight over. It’s almost night, I realised, staring up at the gloaming in the artificial sky as my armour marched me up the stairs. It’d been almost twenty-four hours since I’d first spotted Artyom.
I collapsed out of my suit the moment I got through the door. It was like shedding a layer of stone flesh. I spluttered and gagged as I tugged the wires out from my mouth and painfully dislodged them from my teeth. I gasped, finally able to close my mouth, before unwrapping the wires