The blast shook his suit as it reached him, then a shower of dirt poured down from the sky, tapping on his metal skin.
A thick brown cloud of dirt filled the air in the gap between the houses, beside the corner where he’d been taking cover only a moment before. Beyond it, green squares moved on the HUD, showing where the other members of the section were moving toward them.
“Man down,” Bairamov yelled.
Gallo’s status showed red on the HUD, right in the middle of that dirt cloud. Suit damaged. Man inside… not good. But there was no time to worry about what might have happened to him.
The asshole who’d attacked them was heading into the fields. As Logan turned back toward him, the man ran headlong into the rows of corn, which twisted around him as he pushed through it, then bent back as he passed, leaving little sign of where he’d been. As Logan leaned forward and pushed his suit into a run, the shooter vanished into the corn.
Logan raced into the field, faster than an unassisted human could move, leaving a cloud of dirt in the air behind him as the claws kicked up the loose ground. Then he slammed into the corn, crushing the stalks that fell beneath his feet, and flattening more as his arms and legs slammed into the stalks to his sides.
He couldn’t see the shooter any more, but he could see the top of the corn bending up ahead where they were running. Did the guy really think he could outrun a Legionnaire in his nuclear-powered suit?
Logan raced on, making up about a metre of the gap with every one of the suit’s long steps.
A red circle appeared on the HUD, down on the ground somewhere just ahead. Then a patch of half a dozen more. Mines. The asshole was leading him through a minefield. Or, at least, a field of something round and metallic that was buried where Alice’s sensors could spot them.
Logan slowed, crouched, then leaped over the whole patch of them in one bound.
His head and chest rose above the top of the corn at the peak of his jump, and he could see the man again for a split second. Logan’s suit was rapidly gaining on his prey. But the shooter was almost at the edge of the field.
Logan raced on, stomping down the corn, until the last row bent aside as his suit forced its way through the plants, before he broke out of the field onto the plain beyond. Yellowing grass stretched from the edge of the corn down toward the river, and the grass was now bent and twisted where the shooter had forced his way through it.
The shooter was running flat out now, his arms swinging hard beside him, heading toward something grey that stood out against the brown dirt.
A concrete pipe about a metre across protruded from the hillside. A stream of brown liquid dripped from the end of the pipe, down into the river where it formed a dark swirl in the water until it was carried away by the current.
If the shooter was trying to escape through the pipe, there was no way Logan’s suit could fit into it to follow. If they got inside, and followed it back to wherever it came from in the mines, there wasn’t much chance of catching the man.
He’d probably already scouted every drain under the hills, and know exactly where he could get out.
“Halt, or I fire,” Logan yelled, and the suit amplified his voice into a booming roar that echoed back from the hillside.
The shooter ran on. Just metres from the pipe now.
The clawed feet of Logan’s suit tore up the dirt as he slowed and dropped to a crouch. He raised his rifle, and aimed at the running man.
The crosshairs on his visor lined up with the man’s back for a split second, then he dodged aside, trying to follow a zigzag path toward the pipe. Logan held the rifle steady, and waited a second until the man zigzagged back. As the crosshairs lined up on the man, he squeezed the trigger.
The rifle kicked, firing a single hypersonic gauss round that impacted a millisecond after it left the barrel, leaving no time for the man to dodge. A shower of bright red blood exploded from his chest, and sprayed across the dirt around him.
His body tumbled as it fell forward, and slid across the ground, before finally coming to a stop against a rock beside the pipe. The dirt around him slowly darkened as the last of the blood pumping through his veins oozed out onto the ground.
CHAPTER 8
The cops came sooner than Logan expected, racing into the ZUS in a swarm of black vans with sirens blaring. They stormed up the stairs into the apartment Jacques had found for Logan, and dragged him out into the street, then back to his old, familiar cell.
Finally, he discovered why they’d let him go.
They’d been following him ever since they dumped him in the ZUS, sure there must be more to him than what he’d told them, and expecting him to meet English contacts in France.
Now they seemed unhappy that the best he’d been able to offer them were drug dealers, pimps, and thieves. And, in return for that useless information, they’d let him out of prison to murder an aristo.
As Logan looked into their faces as they yelled at him in the dark prison cell, they seemed more scared than he was.
He knew what was coming for him. They had no idea what the aristos might do to punish them. But, if the stories Logan heard in the ZUS were anything to go by, it would be worse.
The usual beatings followed. More dunking in cold water. More long nights without sleep, with the flics banging on his cell door and yelling in at him whenever he closed his eyes.
Anything, it seemed, that might help to make him confess to something. Anything that could justify their actions to the dead aristo’s family.
And then it stopped.
In many ways, the silence and inattention was almost worse than the constant racket and beatings. He’d grown used to the predictable routine of the cell door opening as soon as the dawn light shone through the barred window in the stone wall of the corridor outside his cell, being half-dragged along the cold floor to the interrogation room because his legs couldn’t carry his weight any more, then beaten and yelled at all day until they dragged him back to his cell.
In a way, knowing what each new day would bring was peaceful and reassuring.
Now there was nothing. Just a silent, staring cop bringing a tray of gooey ration mush for Logan to eat every lunchtime. Feeding him enough nutrition to keep him alive, but not enough to restore his health, or his muscles.
No matter how much he tried to get the cop to talk to him, the man just ignored everything Logan said, and walked away along the corridor outside the cell as silently as he came in. And he kept up the silence for weeks.
Then they moved him to his new cell. And his last.
This one had a window of its own. A narrow window, high in the wall, sealed with thick metal bars. Low enough that he could see out of the cell by standing on the bed, but too small for a man to clamber through, even if he could find a way to remove the bars.
A window which overlooked the gravel courtyard in the centre of the building.
A vertical, rectangular, wooden frame taller than he was filled the centre of the courtyard. What little sunlight that reached the courtyard past the roofs of the multilevel cell blocks surrounding it glinted from a thick metal blade at the top of the frame. At the bottom was a hole in a wooden plank, about the size of his neck. In front, a bucket.
A guillotine.
The history teachers had spoken about the French Revolution at school. The government had killed thousands of aristos and peasants with those things. Chopped their heads off in front of cheering crowds.
Back then, it was just history. And now…
It could be him.
The next morning, he woke to the sound of men yelling in the courtyard. He blinked his tired and bleary eyes after a night of twisting and turning in the cold air on the hard mattress of his wooden bed while men screamed in the distance.