Engineman - Eric Brown [97]
"I don't mean we should get back together again, okay? But there's no reason why we can't meet occasionally, get to know each other again. No commitment, just friendship?" She reached across the table and took his hand. "I need someone, Ralph, and for chrissake so do you."
He wanted to tell her that he needed no-one. "I see no reason why we can't meet socially," he said awkwardly. He saw the pity in her eyes and it burdened him.
They finished the meal in silence.
When Mirren next looked up, Caroline was staring across the dance-floor towards the bar. Her expression hovered between suspicion and alarm.
"What's wrong?"
"Nothing," she smiled brightly. "Have you finished? I feel like a long walk."
She paid quickly, inserting her card in the table-top slot before he had the chance to argue. "Come on."
Her haste to be away surprised him. "How about another drink?" The alcohol was nicely dulling his senses.
"No, let's get out of here. Follow me."
She stood and side-stepped from the booth. She took his arm in what would seem to observers like an amorous embrace: she almost dragged him around the edge of the dance-floor towards the main exit. Then, without warning, she steered him quickly through a pair of black-painted fire-doors. He was surprised by her strength.
"What-?"
"Run!" They were in a dim corridor. Mirren ran. Caroline, ahead of him, burst through a second pair of fire-doors. They emerged in a darkened alley.
"Where's your flier?"
"Ah... in the central dome. I came by taxi."
"Shit!"
"What is it?"
She pulled him by his arm and ran along the cobbled alleyway. "You were being targeted. A dozen street thugs. They were watching you."
Mirren felt a hot flush of disbelief, then fear. "Me?"
"What did that off-worlder character really want, Ralph?"
Behind them, an explosion shattered the quiet night, echoing deafeningly between the narrow alley walls. Mirren looked over his shoulder. A hole gaped in the brick wall of the night-club. Six thugs leapt through. They knelt amid the tumble of bricks and aimed their weapons. Caroline dragged him to the ground. He heard the air shriek as projectiles sliced overhead, tracer indicating their vector. Caroline pulled a small pistol from her jacket and returned fire. She pulled Mirren upright and hissed, "Run. Turn left at the end!"
She was kneeling, her pistol held in both hands at arm's length, spitting fire. The thugs took cover behind the fallen masonry. Mirren ran, turned the corner and leaned against the wall, panting with a combination of exhaustion and fear. Caroline joined him, tearing round the corner as if all the hounds of hell were on her heels. "Christ, Ralph. You know how to make enemies. These jokers mean business."
The alley terminated in a T-junction with a wider street. Twenty metres to the right was an intersecting main road, full of bright light and pedestrians. To the left, the street descended into shadows and a tangle of alien greenery.
"This way," Caroline said. They sprinted into that section of the street taken over by the alien jungle, Mirren anticipating the lancing pain of bullets between his shoulder blades at any second. Their footfalls no longer rang on the metalled surface; vegetation provided a treacherous carpet underfoot, and overhead the night sky was hidden by a canopy of leaves and vines. A quiet calm closed in around them, reassuring Mirren that the thugs would give themselves away by the sound of their pursuit. At the same time, now that his initial shock at the attack had worn off, it came to him how close he had been to death - and that without Caroline the thugs would have killed him with ease.
If he was being attacked because of his involvement with Hunter... then what about the rest of his team? Dan and Fekete and the others?
Caroline was jogging ahead of him, her breath coming easily. Her whole attitude cried out resolve and Mirren almost wept with gratitude.
She pulled up, placed a hand on his arm for him to hush. She looked back the way they had come, a tunnel forced through the jungle by those