From the apartment he’d vacated came the crash of another window breaking and the heavy thud of a body landing on the floor.
Quinn bounded up the stairs to the first switchback, drew his stun pistol, and shot the lock off the door to the roof. The door swung open ahead of him.
And away we go.
Kajek rolled onto his back, ignored the hissed threats of the Selay standing over him, and roared as he plucked a thick shard of broken glass from his left forearm. He had remembered Cervantes Quinn from their fleeting acquaintance on the Omari-Ekonas a paunchy, middle-aged human given to sloth and alcoholism—not as someone with the stamina or gurambato make a leap such as this.
He tossed aside the jagged hunk of glass and stood. Either Quinn has changed or I’m chasing the wrong person.
As Kajek moved toward the door, the Selay stepped into his path, intent upon voicing his outrage despite the fact that Kajek couldn’t understand a word the reptilian said. Kajek backhanded the scaly pest, launching him up and back against a wall. The Selay collapsed to the floor, stunned but clinging to consciousness.
Footfalls echoed from the corridor outside, followed by weapons fire. Kajek drew his plasma rifle from its sheath on his back and followed the sound of his fleeing bounty. He pivoted into the hallway, his rifle level and steady. The reek of human sweat and fear pheromones lingered in the muggy air. Following the scent, he arrived at the building’s central staircase and glanced down. The open layout of the building’s interior made it all but impossible for Quinn to have escaped by descending. Then Kajek looked up and saw it was only one flight to the door ajar at the top of the staircase. He’s on the roof.
Kajek charged his weapon to full power and ran up the stairs. He paused at the roof-access doorway and listened, but heard nothing, and then he opened it. Bright sunlight half-blinded him for a moment, and he tensed in anticipation of an ambush. None came. Wind buffeted his ears, and sirens wailed in the distance.
The roof was peppered with squat blocks, housings for climate-control turbines, but none were large enough to provide cover for Quinn. Kajek turned in a slow circle, looking for any clue as to the human’s path, but the roof’s surface was pristine white concrete. The building was flanked on two sides by much taller buildings, and its front offered nothing but a sheer drop to the street thirty meters below—leaving only the rear of the building as a possible escape path.
Drawing near its edge, he spied a pair of handholds for a ladder. It’s a long way down, human,he gloated. Can you climb faster than I can shoot?He poked the muzzle of his rifle over the roof’s edge and fired a few blind shots, just in case Quinn was lurking on the ladder, hoping to snipe Kajek when he showed his face. The sharp whine of plasma fire echoed and faded away, met only by silence. Curious and concerned, Kajek slowly leaned forward and looked down.
There was no one on the ladder, on any of the escape platforms, or in the alley far below. Each platform had a single, featureless portal marked “no reentry” in Gorn Standard, meaning Quinn could not have used one to sneak back inside the building. The bounty hunter furrowed his brow, baffled.
He froze as he felt the icy kiss of metal on the nape of his neck.
Quinn’s voice was low and steady. “Don’t move or you’re dead.”
• • •
Quinn strained to stop his bloodied hand from trembling as he kept the muzzle of his pistol against the Nausicaan’s neck. His arms, back, and chest were aching and cramped after hanging upside down for nearly two minutes from a narrow beam on the underside of a mid-flight landing in the building’s main staircase. He had dangled like a bat twenty meters above the atrium floor while waiting for the bounty hunter to pass him on his way up the stairs.
“Back up slowly,” Quinn said. He backpedaled two steps and let the bounty hunter retreat from the edge. “Throw your weapon off the roof.”
The Nausicaan turned his head ever so slightly to peek back at Quinn. He sounded amused. “That’s a stunpistol, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, at point-blankrange.” He steadied his aim. “That means you’ll live—but with mud for brains. Now toss the rifle, crab-face.”
The command elicited a growl from the bounty hunter, but then he hurled his rifle away, into the alley behind the building. Seconds later, Quinn heard the clatter of the weapon striking pavement far below. “Nicely done,” he said.
He lowered his aim and shot the Nausicaan twice, once in the back of each knee. The hulking alien howled and collapsed in a heap. Quinn planted one booted foot on his foe’s neck and relieved him of a disruptor pistol, two combat knives, and a bandolier of miniature grenades.
Quinn nodded to himself. “That’s better.” He shackled the bounty hunter’s wrists with his own magnetic manacles. “I set these to release automatically in four hours. By then you might get the feeling back in your legs, if you’re lucky.” He rolled the ugly bastard onto his back. “What’s your name?”
“Kajek.”
“Ganz sent you?”
“Yes.”
He crouched above Kajek and pointed his pistol at the bounty hunter’s face. “So, what’s this about? Zett? Or something else?”
“Zett.”
“Sonofabitch.” Quinn frowned and shook his head. “I knewdusting that little prick would come back to haunt me.”
“Killing me will not save you,” Kajek said. “Ganz will send others.”
“I’m not gonna kill you.” He poked Kajek’s chest. “You’re gonna take a message to Ganz. Tell him Zett went out of his way to come after me. The little thug made it personal, and he got what he deserved.”
“Is that your story?”
“It’s the truth.” Quinn stood. “Zett had it coming.”
“We all have it coming, human.”
“Some of us sooner than others.” He backed away from Kajek and made a threatening gesture with his pistol. “Do notcome after me again. Because I promise: next time, I willkill you.”
The Nausicaan spread his fangs and grinned. “You will try.”
8
Bridy had no trouble following the Klingon spy’s path through the crowded streets of Tzoryp. All she had to do was look for pedestrians who had been knocked down or shoved aside, or for vehicles that had slammed into walls, barricades, or each other while trying to avoid hitting the lunatic sprinting through traffic.
She had shoulder-checked and trampled more than a few people herself in the past few minutes, and the angry choir of sirens and horns swelling in her wake made it clear she also had inconvenienced a fair number of drivers.
Rounding a corner, she spotted a commotion on a footbridge above a busy road. In the middle of the kerfuffle was the spy, still running flat out and firing his disruptor wildly, generating panic and casualties to cover his escape. Bridy sprinted after him, and her body protested with every running step. Her legs ached, and she felt as if her heart were pumping acid. The city’s thick, polluted air stabbed her with knifing pains between her ribs after every labored breath.
The footbridge was littered with fallen bystanders. Bridy vaulted over some and sidestepped others, and she only narrowly avoided a wild, random blast from the fleeing Klingon. She leaped over the stairs at the end of the bridge and was less than thirty meters behind her quarry.
The Klingon headed for a starship construction yard, fired his disruptor to vaporize a force-field generator along its perimeter, and raced headlong through the massive eruption of white-hot sparks. Deep warning klaxons clamored across the sprawling industrial park and resounded off the metal scaffolds that surrounded a small starship’s skeletal frame, most of which lay below ground level in a yawning pit full of robotic welding arms.
Workers in powered full-body load-lifter exoskeletons lumbered awkwardly out of the Klingon’s path as he dashed through the work site and over a ramp into the starship frame, unleashing a flurry of disruptor fire every step of the way. As the last worker plodded clear of Bridy’s path, she raised her phaser and opened fire on the Klingon. Her weapon’s electric-blue beam sliced through a chunk of the starship frame but missed the enemy agent.