• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

‘Cranks. Coming for us. It’s picking up signals—’

‘Helmet.’ He waved a hand in front of Janis until he felt the helmet in it. He half-sat, cautiously, slid the helmet on and flipped the glades down, jacked the lead into the gun and keyed the screensight to head-up. The gun’s two views – where it was pointing, and what the eye-on-a-stalk was seeing – overlay his own like reflections in a window. They had never looked so distinct.

‘What did you get, gun?’

There was a pause as the computer interrogated the even tinier mind of the gun’s basic firmware.

‘Phone call, public, CLA encryption style, otherwise no data extracted. Source vehicle now entering square at—’

And there it was, flashily outlined in red: a black Transit van with black windows, turning the corner. It drove around the square and rolled to a stop a couple of metres in front of the truck. Kohn made out two heat-images behind the light-shaded windscreen of the van.

He turned on the engine and grabbed the steering-wheel with his left hand. Janis watched.

‘Seat. Belts,’ said the truck.

‘Oh, shut the fuck up.’

Janis clunk-clicked the belt on the driver’s side and looped her arms through it, grasped it firmly with her hands, letting it take her weight.

‘Good,’ Kohn said, like some psychopathic driving instructor. ‘Expect a jolt. Now take the brake off and give us some juice.’

He braced his legs together against the lower edge of the dashboard. The truck lurched forward. There was a heartening crunch as its steel fenders rammed the thin metal and hard plastic of the van. Janis yelled but it was surprise – the impact hadn’t been too severe.

Kohn jack-knifed up and out of the cab, hit tarmac and made a low lunge for the van door, his body wrapped around the gun. He used the butt to smash the side window and whirled the weapon around to cover the inside. A young man and a young woman, both long-haired, oily-denimed, hailstoned with safety glass and still shaking from the collision. The man reached under the dashboard. Kohn fired one shot across the back of the man’s hand and into the corner below the steering column. The hand snatched back and something hydraulic failed at the same moment.

‘Out,’ Kohn said, and stepped backwards off the running-board.

They came out. The woman had her hands on her head. The man held his bleeding hand to his mouth.

‘You come for me?’

The woman shook her head, the man nodded.

‘Well, now you’ve f—’

Kohn’s words were swamped by a thrumming roar, a skidding screech.

He turned his head – the gun stayed steady like a handrail – and saw an overdeveloped ’thirties Honda rocking gently where it had halted, a couple of metres away. Its rider was built to match, all the way from leather boots to leather cap. He dismounted, thus revealing that what had looked like a spare fuel-tank was actually an armoured codpiece. His arm and chest muscles would have been troubling even without the holografts.

He held up a badge. ‘Rough Traders,’ he said. ‘Do you have a problem?’

Kohn pointed the gun groundwards and said, ‘A disagreement.’

‘Does anyone wish to lay a charge?’

The couple by the van shook their heads.

‘Nor me,’ Kohn said. ‘But I wish to claim a ransom for a hostage, and I’ve had some difficulty persuading these two. I think you’ll find that they do have the documentation.’

They nodded frantically. Kohn felt some tension ease. It had been just a guess that Donovan’s mob would try to maintain the cover.

‘How much?’

‘Five hundred marks,’ the woman said, finding her tongue at last. She held out a grubby banknote. Kohn made an insultingly elaborate show of scanning it with one of the gun’s sensors (which duly registered that it didn’t contain any large masses of moving metal) and wrote out a receipt pertaining to the release of one Catherin Duvalier for the sum of, etc. The rent-cop witnessed it and the man took the top copy, with the wrong hand at first.

‘Please make sure this is delivered to the person mentioned in it,’ Kohn said, handing over a second copy to