Spin State - Chris Moriarty [11]
“Wait!” Cohen gasped, jerking out of her grip to turn back toward the comp station. Li followed his gaze to Kolodny’s empty hand—and she remembered the carbine jangling, unnoticed, unretrieved, onto the tiles.
“Too far,” she said—and handed him her own pulse rifle.
“No,” he said. “Keep it. You’re going to be covering me anyway. And the Viper’s useless in this. You shouldn’t be using it.”
“No one’s using the Viper,” Li said, reaching down to ease the Beretta out of its ankle holster.
She saw Cohen’s look of shock even through the mess Kolodny’s face had become. “Catherine, if you shoot someone with that—”
“I know,” she said, already moving again. “Let’s just make sure I don’t have to.”
Only fifteen meters to go. But they were the worst fifteen. No cover, just the slick white tiles underfoot, and the only shelter the flat of saline canisters just this side of the doorway. And they had to cross the whole width of the lab to reach those canisters.
As they started across, the first two guards skidded around the corner. One of them had Catrall’s carbine in his hands and was trying to override the DNA lock. The other had a sleek, expensive-looking firearm that Li’s oracle identified as a .308 Kalinin with Vologda optics.
She dove forward, head down, and slammed into the first guard at knee level before he had time to react. She kept driving with both legs as she hit him and felt his knee give out with a wrenching snap.
Before the other guard could swing the Kalinin’s long barrel around to bear on her, Li jerked the injured man to his feet and jammed the Beretta to his temple.
His partner froze. The Kalinin’s black muzzle wavered.
Li smiled grimly and hoisted her hostage up, keeping the Beretta pressed to his skull. She started toward the shelter of the saline canisters. If they walked out of here alive, someone was going to catch hell for that little piece of bad housekeeping.
Two more guards appeared in the doorway. Like the first pair, they wore unmarked coveralls and carried top-shelf weaponry. Li heard them shouting to the hostage to get his head down.
“I don’t think that’s good advice,” Li said. She tightened her arm on his neck, both to keep his head up and to remind him what a Peacekeeper’s wire job could do to flesh and bone.
Her internals were going crazy, targeting alarms screaming on and off as the gunmen’s range finders fixed on her, lost her, fixed on her again. If they were willing to shoot her hostage to get to her, she was finished. Anyone Li had trained would have pulled the trigger the instant she made the grab and accepted the risk of shooting a friendly for what it was: unavoidable. But so far these guys were acting like amateurs.
If her luck held, she and Kolodny would escape because of it.
She got behind the canisters and threw her hostage against the wall. “Listen,” she said. “I don’t have a clear shot on your friends, but I sure as hell have one on you. So let me tell you what you’re going to do.”
A moment later he was inching out from behind the canisters toward Cohen.
By the time the guards at the door figured out what she was doing, Cohen was already making the crossing behind the hostage, Kolodny’s carbine shoved against his rib cage. It worked, at least until they got halfway across the lab. Then Cohen stopped for no clear reason and slackened his hold on the guard’s neck.
But even as she thought the words, she felt him blowing off the link like leaves on a hard wind. Kolodny stumbled and fell, unable to keep her bearings when the AI went off-shunt. She knelt in the lab’s central aisle, slack-jawed, shaking herself like a diver coming too fast out of deep water. “Kolodny!” Li shouted. For a moment that must have lasted less than a heartbeat everything ground to a halt. Li saw the bloodshot whites of Kolodny’s eyes as she turned