Ecko gave him a flash of red eyes.
As dumb as you fucking like, he fired.
The mirror frosted, opaqued with cracks. Grey swore.
No fool, Salva had spun to cover the landing. She barked commands, clipped and cold. The goon just stood up and turned, wide-eyed at his own stupidity.
A moment later, the heavy boots of the patrol were pounding back up the stairs.
* * *
On the roof, the minigun suppressed again, heavy calibre rounds detonating further along the wall – it was shooting blind. Ecko snuck a second glance upwards, but the only light was the rotating LED that topped the Tate Leisure...
No cops. No ’copters, no aircars, no drones.
So – what? Grey could just let off suppression bursts with miniguns whenever he liked?
The firing stopped. Through the howling weather, Ecko heard the whirring of the barrels wind down, then cease.
Yeah, he thought, maybe that ain’t so smart, RoboCop. Now, what else you got?
Their impasse was unchanged: the ’bot couldn’t see him, he couldn’t get past it. Without Lugan to run a distraction, Ecko was going to be stuck here when Salva and her goons reached the top of the stairwell...
Where the hell had that biker bastard got to?
Ecko wondered if Collator knew that Grey’d got a fucking Takeshimi combat machine. Lugan’s Tech had been babbling the other day, “Experimental,” he’d said. “Not ready to leave Japan,” he’d said...
So what was this one – on fucking vacation?
The vertical red slice of the scanner swept again. The rain glistened like falling blood.
It knew where he was, huddled in the shredded remains of the roof garden – it was just gonna keep scanning ’til it got him. Salva couldn’t be far behind... Lugan was so not gonna reach him in time.
Where was Collator when you needed it? With its percentages and fucking scenario analysis? Ecko held down a sense of panic, he didn’t want to know the odds on what he was about to do.
You’re not, he told himself.
Yeah, I am.
The wall behind him had been shattered, pieces of rubble were still tumbling to the sidewalk far below. No security defended the roof’s edge. Not thinking about the drop, not thinking about it, he let his outrage at his own stupidity focus into white determination.
Swallowing a mouthful of insanity, he slid backwards over the edge.
There was no fucking way he was letting some experimental tin can get the better of the Bogeyman.
* * *
The goons burst, breathless, onto the top of the stairs – and they’d found only Salva. If she’d heard their confusion she ignored it, she was scanning, slit-eyed and unfooled.
The landing was the size of a food-cube; if there was something here, she appeared intent on finding it.
She glared round the walls, studying every millimetre. When she found nothing, she looked up, raising the muzzle of her rifle.
Still nothing.
Her expression narrowed.
Gotcha, bitch! With a grim smile, Ecko watched her ocular scanners flicker. Less than a metre above her head, he was backed into a corner, crouched like a nightmare with his shoulders crunched against the ceiling.
Her gaze went straight over him.
He didn’t dare move, she’d feel the air. He stayed as still as stone – even when she squeezed her trigger and loosed a short, sharp burst of ammunition directly upwards.
He stilled his breath. Dust and plaster scattered.
“Sal!” Grey stubbed his reefer out on the security desk. “Don’t trash the place. You lot, get a grip. Maynard, stay here and watch those readouts. You two, keep an eye on the stairs. Anything comes near you – shoot it.”
“Doc, if the building’s compromised, shouldn’t we –”
“If you patrol, it’ll take you out one by one. Stay put – and stay together.” He shrugged off the lab coat, revealing pale arms and more tattoos, blue with age. Old needle marks decorated his forearms. “Sal, time to hit the panic room.”
Ecko stayed still as the chemist moved to open his sanctuary door. Beside him, a hatchet-faced Salva still watched the ceiling.
As the goons settled down to squabbling about who’d seen what, the door into Grey’s lab swung open, then slowly closed.
Before it resealed, Ecko was through it.
* * *
One hand.
Two.
Flattened by the wind and hammered by the driving, freezing rain, Ecko clung to the edge of the roof.
The flexiweight in the cloak hem kept it from tangling his legs but its folds billowed and flapped as if threatening to drag him loose. His hands strained to hold him – his reinforced skin didn’t cover his fingertips and they stung with pain on the broken stone.
Ecko’s Tech – he called her “Mom” – had fashioned him many things. Laying a complex system of wiring into the motor nerves of his hands, she’d turned his fingers into inhumanly accurate callipers. Arrayed with tactile sensors, his bare fingertips could tell him the location of wiring in a wall, the movement of tumblers in a lock, the exact moment the breath stopped in someone’s throat...
But they also hurt like bastards if anything damaged them. He could feel all of it: every lump, every splinter, every crack, every chip and fragment of the broken wall. He could have mapped the destruction to the last half nanometre – the pain etched the landscape of the stonework into the blood on his fingertips.
His resolve set like cold steel, Ecko swung sideways along the roof’s edge – away from the can’s target arc. His jaw jumped with the hurt of every handhold, but he kept his oculars focused on the dirty, pitted ferrocrete before him. He closed his ears to the demented yowl of the wind, ignored the rain as it battered into his flesh. If he fell...
...He was playing Bogeyman, playing Bogeyman for real. Bogeyman didn’t mess up – and he didn’t fall off the fucking wall. For Bogeyman to end up as Pavement Pizza was inconceivable.
He sniggered like the first sign of panic.
One hand then two.
His feet swung loose, billowing uselessly as if his legs were broken. He could get no purchase on the slippery glass. After another metre, the pain in his fingertips was sparking stars across his vision. His hands were cramping, his arms and shoulders shuddering with strain. As the hurt increased, his fingers lied to him. A whole chunk of wall came away under his grip and he dangled precariously from one hand, the wind blinding him with his cloak hood.
For chrissakes, he thought to himself, get a fucking grip.
He sniggered aloud – then strangled it before it rose to a scream.
Desperate fear gave him strength. With a simian swing, he secured the second handhold and hung there, sick with relief. He dared not raise his head above the lip of the wall – that fucking can would blow it clean off.
Another two metres and he’d reach the corner.
* * *
Ecko’s briefing had covered only the corporate basics – approach, building security, office space – it hadn’t listed the contents of Grey’s lab. That shit was target numero uno on the list of stuff Ecko had to recon.
Gotcha!
Behind him, the door clanged shut and sealed with a slight hiss. Oblivious to the additional presence, Grey and Salva headed swiftly away across the gloom.
Leaving Ecko crouched at the bottommost edge of a nightmare cavern.
He’d been expecting the usual – some elaborate medical set-up. Computers, cryogenics, glass tubing, dry ice, some twisted lab assistant with genetics issues... The span of the entire building and four floors in height, this place had none of these things.