“Klesko, Presidential Security Detail,” he snapped. An agonized hiss escaped his lips. “Oh, Christ, they took him!”
“The Invaders?” Glen asked him.
Before the man could answer, Tanaka saw Shannon signalling from the flitter that the way was clear.
“Time for talk later,” Nathan announced. “We’re moving out.” He caught the security chief’s eye. “Agent Klesko, are you armed?”
The big man felt under his jacket and came up with a compact, boxy machine pistol.
“Never had time to get it out,” he admitted ruefully.
“I will lead,” Tanaka told him. “You watch our rear.” He swept a stern glance across the others. “You must all move quickly and go exactly where I go. Is this understood?”
“We’re with you, Nathan,” Daniel O’Keefe assured him. He seemed to have shaken off his shock; his voice was clear and purposeful.
The bodyguard led them out of the alley at a trot, glancing carefully back every few seconds to make sure the others were keeping up. Glen had an arm around Val’s waist and was half-carrying her to make sure she didn’t fall behind. Though her loose-fitting, privately-tailored dress hid the fact well, it was painfully evident that she was entering the third trimester of her pregnancy as she struggled to keep the pace. Tanaka bit back a curse, slowing so as not to put too much distance between them, though all his instincts screamed at him to find cover.
It seemed so surreal: the five of them running across the plaza with not another living soul in sight, as if they were the last humans left on Earth. Overhead, an automated airship projected a holographic advertisement for the latest wrist computer, crawling along in cheerful ignorance like an absurd monument to a long-dead civilization. That haunting illusion was abruptly and violently shattered by the howling scream of turbojets and the angular, angry lines of an AG-10 Osprey strike fighter.
Glen and Val ducked reflexively as the swing-wing aircraft ripped through the air only a hundred meters overhead, missiles streaking off hard-points under each wing. Smoke trails from the weapons traced a line to targets on the other side of the Senate building, the resonating rumble of their detonations nearly throwing all of them off their feet. The fighter banked left, away from the mushroom of black smoke climbing into the darkening sky, circled back and came in for another run at the Invaders.
“Go,” Tanaka urged the others, who had stopped in their tracks to watch the spectacle. “Keep moving!”
He grabbed Glen Mulrooney by the arm and pushed him forward, sending all of them stumbling on through the plaza. Coming in lower this time, the Osprey’s jetwash was an exhalation of hot breath down their backs, the roar of the engines tearing at their ears. A savage sound of ripping cloth echoed off the plaza floor as the plane’s nose cannon spat out a hail of high-velocity slugs at unseen Invader positions.
Valerie screamed and clasped hands over her ears, but Glen kept her running, and Nathan held out a moment’s hope that the distraction of the attack might aid in their escape. If they could just get to the flitter while the Invaders were still pinned down.
From the front of the Senate Building a line of smoke streaked into the sky, intersecting the Defense Command aircraft as it pulled up from its strafing run. The pilot had no time for countermeasures as the point-blank missile slammed into the rear of his plane, consuming the twin turbojets in a swelling sphere of flame.
Tanaka and Klesko bore the civilians to the ground beneath them, knowing what was coming, feeling the rush of wind as the burning fighter passed overhead and crashed through the roof of a sidewalk cafe’ not a hundred meters away. A column of fire consumed the structure, and a sheet of burning fuel washed out from the wreckage, a wall of flame that cut the plaza in two, blocking their way to Shannon and the flitter.
Shannon spat a curse and hit the controls to close up the flitter’s hatches, feeding the drive fans a jolt of power even before they swung shut. The hovercraft jerked forward, spinning around 360 degrees before Stark got it under control and gunned it across the plaza. She pulled back on the control stick and jammed her foot into the throttle, bouncing the flitter over the fiery barrier and curving around only meters from Tanaka and the others.
“Hurry!” Nathan yanked Valerie and Glen to their feet as the flitter’s gull-wing doors hissed open ever-so- slowly.
“Look out!” Klesko gestured with the muzzle of his pistol, shoving Senator O’Keefe behind him.
Tanaka spun around and saw emerging from behind the Senate Building the ungainly bulk of an Invader Hopper, bounding toward them with the howl of laboring turbines and the whine of servomotors, a halo of smoke still trailing from its missile launch pod from the round that had taken out the fighter.
“Get in,” the bodyguard urged Valerie and Glen, practically throwing them into the rear passenger compartment of the Police vehicle.
He turned to help Klesko get the Senator in beside them, but from the corner of his eye he could see the rust-colored anthropomorphic tank swivelling toward the flitter, the heavy cannon between its legs tracking in their direction.
“Shannon, go!” Tanaka ordered so forcefully that Stark followed without thought, pushing the accelerator to the floor with the doors still open and Senator O’Keefe’s legs hanging out the side.
The flitter shot away so suddenly that Agent Klesko, who’d been half-leaning against it to help Daniel O’Keefe into the cab, fell forward off balance and wound up on one knee when the Hopper’s cannon fired. Tanaka threw himself to the ground as the round plowed into the remnants of a statue of Ronald Reagan, blowing it to plastiform splinters and nearly blowing out the two men’s eardrums.
Shannon pulled the flitter into a tight turn, feeling the drag of the open doors and whispering a prayer that none of her passengers would fall out of the vehicle. She knew that the Invader machine would be trying to target the flitter with a missile, but she wasn’t ready to abandon Nathan and Agent Klesko.
“Cover me,” Nathan snapped to Charlie Klesko, breaking into a sprint without waiting for the man to acknowledge, running
The Hopper’s main gun tracked the flitter around in its arc and fired off another round, but the shot missed by a good meter, detonating against the maglev station. Shannon finally had the doors closed and she stood the aircraft on its side, pulling negative gees as the flitter darted sideways through the machine’s line of fire. The Hopper’s circular footpads drummed the pavement as it stepped gingerly around, to bring the aircraft back into its firezone.
Nathan Tanaka and Charlie Klesko circled around the thing’s legs, the Security agent keeping a watch the way it had come, his machine pistol held at arm’s length. Tanaka scanned the machine, looking for weaknesses, something he could use to give Shannon and Valerie time to get away, knowing he only had seconds.
From one of the four circular openings in the boxy missile launch pod on the machine’s right shoulder the rounded grey snout of a nose-cone jutted, shunted forward by internal rails. Tanaka didn’t hesitate—there was the chance the warhead couldn’t be detonated by a bullet, the chance that nose was armored, the very great chance that the blast of his success could kill him and Klesko—but the first and only priority was protecting the woman to whom he’d committed his life and the woman to whom he’d been willing to commit his heart.
He raised the Invader rifle to his shoulder, centered the open sights on the missile and squeezed the trigger. The buttstock jolted his shoulder and the steel-core, boat-tailed bullet punched through the thin metal of the missile nose-cone and into the lump of plastic explosives within.
Two hundred meters away and fifty meters off the ground, Shannon cried out involuntarily when she saw the flash from the Hopper’s launch pod, and the twilit sky was illuminated by the fireworks of the machine’s complement of anti-aircraft missiles cooking off simultaneously. A concussion of heated air and thunderous sound buffeted the little aircraft, putting Shannon into a fierce struggle with the flitter’s controls. Hardly able to hear the screams from the passenger compartment above the ringing in her ears, she finally brought the hovercraft back to level.
Beneath them, a haze of black smoke floated over the plaza, obscuring the site of the explosion. Shannon desperately angled the flitter’s main fan towards the concealing cloud, trying to clear it and find Nathan. The smoke wafted across the plaza in spiraling eddies, spilling slowly off the ostrich legs of the Hopper. They were all that was left of the machine, standing there comically, as if some cartoon character had dropped an anvil onto the machine’s cockpit and taken it through a hole in the ground, leaving the legs behind.
Not thirty meters away from the machine lay a human body, sprawled and unmoving, and a second was about ten meters beyond that, equally insensate. And a pair of Invader biomechs were coming toward them.
“Mulrooney!” Shannon exclaimed.
“What?” The man pulled himself forward, sticking his head into the cockpit over the back of her seat.
