Dyson's Drop by Paul Collins Read Free Book Online

That’s when she stumbled.
    A moment’s glitch was all it took. She lost her balance on the dew-slick surface and started to slide. The slide became a wild skid towards the yawning edge of the roof and a drop of twenty floors.
    Anneke threw herself down, lying full length on the rooftop. Her mind shifted into overdrive. She had two options. She could activate a sticky grappling field that would slow her slide and even stop it, but which would set off every sensor alarm within three hundred metres.
    Or she could fall.
    She decided on the latter. A 3-D memory tattoo of the Draco Quarter told her what was below the roof edge. It whipped towards her as she picked up speed. She reviewed it in her mind’s eye, the whole process taking less time than a blink.
    A courtyard, seven metres wide, then another building, sixteen floors high. A fall of fifteen metres. Barely doable. She calculated swiftly and realised she needed more speed, not less.
    She twisted round, sliding headfirst. Then, with every instinct crying out for her to stop her slide, she started paddling, pushing herself down the sloping surface faster and faster.
    Suddenly she shot out into space.
    And fell.
    She did a half forward roll which her momentum completed, so her feet pointed to the ground. The roof of the opposite building, happily sloping in the other direction and ending in a rooftop garden, rushed up at her as she arced across the gap, dropping like a stone. The chill night air rushed past her.
    She had to do this just right, first time.
    The angle of the other roof was in her favour. Forty degrees. That would lessen the impact. Her Normanskian muscles, which turned her powerful legs into equally powerful shock absorbers, had to do the rest.
    Hit. Roll. Slide.
    That was what it would have to - Ooooomph!
    The impact smashed the air from her lungs, making her gasp as pain shocked through her limbs. Then she was rolling, relaxing into a slide, which ended in a tree as she fell into the rooftop garden.
    Then all was still. Anneke blinked, her senses reeling, compensating, and calculating. She took three quick deep breaths, the body mnemonic for shutdown.
    Her pulse subsided and her breathing returned to normal. Then it spiked again when a voice, below her, said, ‘Can you get my kitten while you’re up there?’
    Anneke peered down. A little girl was staring up at her with a tear-stained face. Anneke looked about, finally spotting the kitten scrunched tightly into a fork, terrified at the large intruder.
    Anneke dropped out of the tree and handed the girl her kitten, which immediately buried itself, trembling, into her woolly top.
    ‘She’s such a bad girl!’
    ‘Somehow, I don’t think she’ll do a lot of tree climbing after this,’ Anneke said, then added under her breath, ‘me neither, if it comes to that.’
    ‘What were you doing in my tree?’ asked the girl.
    ‘I . . . er . . .’ Anneke sighed. Kids and their questions. She decided to tell the truth. ‘I fell off that building over there.’ She pointed.
    ‘What were you doing up there?’ Just ... getting some fresh air.’
    ‘You shouldn’t be in the tree.’
    ‘Sweetie, you are so right. I have to go now. You take care of your kitten, okay?’
    ‘I will. Her name’s Curly.’
    Anneke scratched Curly under the chin, then, using her memory tattoo to guide her, climbed onto the adjacent rooftop and continued on her way. A few minutes later she was within sight of her destination.
    This was the headquarters of the Ekud ‘embassy’, a front for the Ekud K’dar, a ruthless criminal ‘family’. Just as many freedom fighter organisations in the past had political arms that sought changes through the political system, so many crime families had bifurcated into a crime group and affiliated Clan. Ekud was one of these. The Clan existed in the public eye and did business as normal. It represented the legit and semi-legit interests of the founding family, the Ekud K’dar.
    But the Clan