Only Mitchell had designed this one for destruction, not production. And if the antennas were now in position . . .
He ran through the metal forest towards the aft superstructure, hunting for a way in before anyone aboard realised they had a visitor.
Mitchell and his two guards half carried, half dragged the struggling Nina along the length of the hold, the generator’s magnetic rings hanging threateningly overhead. Excalibur waited for them at the far end on what Nina now saw was a platform mounted on a crane arm that would lift it up to the centre of the ring. ‘You’ll be staying with us for a while,’ Mitchell told her. ‘At least until we can find someone else who can energise the sword.’
‘Gee, I feel so special,’ Nina snapped. ‘Didn’t you think about testing your own people before moving into kidnapping? You know, keep it in the psychotic, traitorous family.’
‘I did. Nobody worked. I would have gone wider, but trooping hundreds of people through the ultra-secret weapons platform and asking them to hold King Arthur’s sword to see if it glowed might have raised a few questions.’
They reached the platform. Excalibur had been diligently polished, not a speck of dust on it. It rested point down in a black frame of carbon fibre, held in place by a clamp round the cross-guard. And there was another clamp, larger and more box-like, open and waiting round the hilt. Nina felt a chill. Inside the clamp was an indentation . . . just large enough for her hands to fit inside.
Mitchell saw her growing look of horror. ‘Yeah, I thought you wouldn’t hold it voluntarily.’ He nodded, and the two men pushed her closer.
Nina struggled to wrest her arms from their grip, keeping her fists clenched. ‘If you think I’m gonna stick my hand in that thing—’
Another nod. The man to her right punched her injured thigh. The resurgent pain hit Nina so hard that she almost blacked out.
By the time she started to recover, it was too late - her hands had been prised open and placed round Excalibur’s hilt, and the clamp closed with a decisive
‘No!’ she cried, trying to pull free. ‘Lemme go!’ But the box was tight round her wrists, hard edges cutting into her skin. Both hands were pressed against the cold metal of the sword, and the blade was shining brightly. Charged with earth energy, the molecules along its edges aligned into a single line of sharpness, it could cut through almost anything.
But that didn’t help her. The clamps round the guard and hilt held it in place in the frame, locked solid.
Nina wanted to kick Mitchell, but the pain in her wounded leg was too intense for her to move it. All she could throw at him was spit and invective. ‘Fuck you.’
Mitchell irritably wiped away the glob of her saliva from his left eye, and was about to operate the platform’s controls when an urgent voice crackled over the walkie-talkie of one of the guards. He took it from the man and listened, eyes slowly widening first in surprise, then sudden anger. ‘Find him and kill him!’ he snarled. ‘Now!’
Nina’s eyes widened too, with something she hadn’t expected to feel again - delight. ‘Eddie, huh? You’re screwed now!’ she crowed.
‘There are forty people on this ship—’
‘Tough luck on them.’ Stung, Mitchell hit the controls to elevate the platform. Trapped, alone, Nina was lifted to the centre of the vast generator.
34
Ahatch at the rear of the fake containers led into the superstructure. Chase went through it, gun covering the passage beyond. No sign of anyone. So far, so good—
An urgent, honking alarm sounded, a voice booming over the PA system: ‘All hands, intruder alert! Repeat, intruder alert!’
Not so good. The parachute must have been spotted.
Chase drew his second gun, a Heckler and Koch USP Expert now in each hand. It wasn’t his preferred choice of weapon, but the .45-calibre bullets would be more than adequate at close quarters.
Not knowing Nina’s location, he decided to start with the most logical place. If Mitchell planned to fire the weapon, he needed both Nina and Excalibur to make it work, and the hold was the only place large enough to house the earth energy generator. He prowled the corridors until he found narrow stairs leading down, and started to descend—
Someone was running towards him.
Caught halfway down the steep flight, Chase hooked his arms over both banisters and slid down the stairs with his guns held out in front of him. An armed man was below; Chase fired twice, knocking him back in a spray of blood. He reached the end of the banisters and clanked on the deck, seeing another man and taking him down with a single shot to the head before spinning at a sound behind him and blowing away a third.
He hurried forward. Though an open hatchway at the end of the corridor he saw more stairs leading down—
A man leaned out from behind the hatchway and fired at him. The bullet zipped past Chase’s head as he threw himself sideways, shooting back. Both shots clanged uselessly against metal.
Shadows darted across the wall beyond the hatch, more men on the stairs—
He fired another shot to encourage them to stay back as he looked for cover. There was a hatch in the wall - he pulled it open, using it as a shield as more gunfire spat from the end of the corridor. The hatch jolted as bullets slammed into it, coin-sized dents erupting across the metal.
Shouts from behind. More people were coming after him.
He was about to be pinned down . . .
With no other choice, he jumped through the door and slammed it behind him.
The room beyond was a storage area. Some of the stacked equipment resembled the magnets of Vaskovich’s generator, and he also saw a pack containing a glidewing like the one Mitchell had used to reach Grozevny. But he didn’t care about the room’s contents - only that there were no other exits.
Unless—
A large duct emerged from the ceiling, feeding fresh air into the enclosed hull - with another vent in the wall below it. Chase raised both guns and blasted the vent cover to pieces. He jumped on a pile of boxes and bashed the broken louvres away, then clambered inside.
The duct was wider than he’d expected, and he felt a warm breeze against his face as he scrambled along it. It wasn’t so much for ventilation as for cooling, to let hot air out. He heard the hatch being thrown open behind him. More shouting as men burst into the room and found nothing but hardware - but it wouldn’t take a genius to figure out where he’d gone.
He aimed one gun back at the vent entrance, moving as quickly as he could towards the light coming through grilles in the duct floor ahead. Another shout - someone had seen the open vent. He glanced backwards. A head appeared in silhouette within the rectangular opening. A shot from the USP, and the head disappeared in several different directions at once.
A fusillade of bullets would come along the vent at any moment—
He reached the first grille, getting a brief sense of a cavernous space beneath before smashing at it with his pistols. The thin metal immediately buckled. He kept striking it until one end broke away from the frame and it swung loose.
There was a girder several feet below. Not much, but it was all he had. He dropped through the hole as shots ripped into the duct walls just above him.
He hit the beam and slithered down it, the metal tilted at a steep angle. One of his guns spun away to the floor far below as he grabbed the support, both legs hanging over a long vertical drop.
Pulse pounding, he saw he was hanging from the framework supporting a horizontal copy of Vaskovich’s system. One of the huge rings of electromagnets was suspended from the other side of the beam by massive insulators. More rings stretched away along the length of the hold to—
Though it wouldn’t be long before he was found.
He pulled himself up, finding a foothold. The generator didn’t seem to be active yet - but with the antenna
