Gray smoke that stank of scorched metal filled the air. Bridy slung her tricorder at her hip and flipped open her communicator. “Quinn! Do you read me?”
His anxious voice crackled with static. “Bridy, get outta here!”
“I can’t leave you here.”
“Every second you’re yapping, the Klingon’s running! I know this shooter—he’s here for me. You get the Klingon. I’ll handle this.”
“You’re sure?”
“On three! Ready?”
She holstered her phaser and checked her tricorder. The Klingon’s bio-readings were continuing to move away at a brisk pace. “Ready.”
“One. Two. Three!”
Quinn popped up from cover, firing wildly at the Nausicaan while letting out a whooping battle cry. Bridy sprinted from the doorway, down the street, and around a corner in pursuit of the Klingon. She struggled to hold her communicator steady while she ran. “I’m clear! Meet me at the ship!”
“Roger!”The next sound over the comm channel was a shrill whine of weapons fire, followed by a string of Quinn’s most colorful curses. Then the channel clicked off. Bridy closed her communicator, tucked it away, and drew her phaser as she pressed on, desperate to make up lost ground.
The street behind her echoed with weapons fire and the whine of approaching sirens, and for a moment she suffered a fleeting pang of guilt at leaving Quinn to fend for himself. Then she shook off her doubts. He’ll be fine,she assured herself as she broke into a full run. I’m sure Quinn knows what he’s doing.
7
Quinn yelped in pain as a bolt of supercharged plasma grazed his left shoulder and burned a streak through his jacket, shirt, and flesh. He zigzagged and ducked without slowing down, while wondering, What the hell am I doing?
Fiery streaks of orange blazed above his head as he turned a corner. He stumbled and slid half a meter on the gritty pavement. He tried to break his fall by extending his left arm and was rewarded with searing pain in his wounded shoulder. Muttering curses, Quinn pushed through his pain and kept moving.
His footfalls crunched on bits of gravel and echoed off bare walls of sun-baked stone. Overlapping them were those of Quinn’s pursuer, a Nausicaan bounty hunter he had seen haunting the dom-jot tables aboard the Omari-Ekonmore than a year earlier. The lanky humanoid was much faster than Quinn had expected, and he seemed to be closing the distance between them at an alarming rate.
Desperate to get a few steps ahead of the bounty hunter and lose him in the maze of intersecting alleyways—some of which were nothing more than short passages that dipped under buildings and connected to other alleys—Quinn caromed off walls and crashed through loose mounds of garbage while trying to make turns at a full-on sprint.
Bounding up a short flight of stairs, he saw a door ajar directly ahead. He charged through it into a sweltering kitchen and slammed the door shut behind him. Clouds of scalding vapor billowed around him as he twisted and dodged past the cooking staff, most of whom looked like Saurians or Kaferians, an antlike species that had always given Quinn the creeps. One of the Saurians stepped into Quinn’s path holding a saucepan from which blue-and-orange flames danced. A frantic chorus of chittering and hissing filled the air, but Quinn blocked it out and kept on moving lest the Nausicaan follow him through the back door.
He hurried down a narrow corridor toward the dining room, hopeful that he had found a place to hide. All I have to do is pay off the maître d’ and get a table in the back,he told himself. Once the Nausicaan moves on, I can go back to the ship.
Quinn’s hopes of hunkering down in a safe haven vanished as he stepped into the dining room. Every patron in the restaurant was a Gorn. Two dozen archosaurs looked up at him and, in unison, hissed their disapproval. Two massive Gorn standing on either side of Quinn lunged at him.
Just my luck,he realized. I pick the one joint in the alien quarter that’s reserved for Gorn only.
The Gorn bouncers seized him with scaly hands and lifted him several centimeters off the floor. Quinn flailed his hands to get their attention. “Hey, guys, c’mon. I can see the door, right? I can let myself out, really. There’s no need to—”
They hurled him through a green-tinted window.
He struck the glass-strewn pavement first with his elbows, then with his chin. Pedestrians recoiled and gave him a wide berth. Jagged shards of shattered glass cut his palms as he forced himself up. He glared at the widening circle of spooked aliens that were staring at him. Thanks for making yourselves into a target with me as the goddamned bull’s-eye,he fumed. He lurched back into motion as a plasma bolt ripped into the street behind his foot, turning asphalt into slag.
Shouldering and shoving, he made his own path through the crowd. People raced in all directions at once, all whipped into a panic by the screeching of the Nausicaan’s rifle and the wild ricochets of hot plasma deflected off metal surfaces.
A fiery flash kissed Quinn’s face with heat as it ripped past and slammed into the back of an alien woman half a stride ahead of him. She collapsed face-first, dead before her limp body struck the sidewalk.
Quinn ducked and detoured right, down a wide alley. As soon as he did so, he realized it was a mistake. Less than fifteen meters away, the alley came to an abrupt end more than twenty meters above the next street, which had been built at a lower elevation on the hill. There were no doors in the alley and no sign of a ladder or staircase ahead. Screams resounded from the street behind him: turning back was not an option. There was nothing to do but run faster and try to leap over the street ahead to a window of the building on the other side.
His breaths were ragged and short and his heart slammed inside his chest as he ran for his life. At the last moment he fixed his sights on a closed window just below the roof of the building, kicked hard off the last edge of ground beneath his feet, and launched himself over the gap.
For a fraction of a second stretched by his fear, he felt himself rise . . . and then gravity took over. Free fall made his guts feel as if they were about to erupt from his mouth. Arms windmilling, he screamed with primal fear as his body traced an ever steeper arc across the void.
Bolts of energy raged past him, each one closer than the last.
The building’s façade raced forward to meet him.
He shielded his face with his crossed forearms as he struck the window. It shattered into millions of granular bits as he made impact. Then he struck the heavy, burgundy-colored curtain on the other side and pulled it with him as he fell to the floor. He tucked and rolled, only to become half-cocooned in the drapery. Shouts of anger and alarm went up from the next room while Quinn thrashed and kicked and pulled himself free of the smothering fabric.
Another barrage of plasma fire surged through the bashed-open window. Quinn ducked for cover, then blind-fired a return salvo. He kept firing out the window as he backed out of the room and pushed past a furious Selay, whose cobra-like hood was fully spread in an impressive threat display.
“Sorry,” Quinn said to the irked reptilian as he made a break for the door.
The portal slid open ahead of him, and he retreated into the corridor. He looked around for a lift, only to see it crisscrossed with a strip of green tape printed with alien symbols that he was fairly certain meant “out of service.”
There was one central stairwell. Its design was open and airy, which to Quinn meant vulnerable as hell. He pondered his options: try to descend seven floors before being intercepted, or climb one floor to the roof.