Final Days by Gary Gibson Read Free Book Online Page A

forward, Saul grabbed Tanner by the shoulder, pulling him close and twisting him around before the street soldier, who had been standing directly behind the pharm manager, could get a clear shot at him. He reached down and clasped his hand around Tanner’s fist, where it held the pykrete gun, aiming the weapon at the street soldier and squeezing. As if by magic, a line of fine red dots appeared across the soldier’s neck and chest, and he dropped to his knees with a gurgling sound.
    Saul tore the flechette pistol from Tanner’s grasp, then ducked beneath the table before Kwan had a chance to fix him in his sights. He could hear the sound of chunks of compacted cellulose and ice water thudding into the wood a second later.
    Kwan dropped on to all fours, to try and take aim a second time. His head flowered red as Saul fired, the flechettes tearing into his vulnerable flesh. Kwan collapsed, his legs and arms twitching spastically.
    Tanner stumbled away to hide behind the couch. Saul looked around and saw Hsingyun fumbling desperately with the door, cursing in his panic to get out. Saul fired a stream of flechettes towards his ankles. Two intervening chairs spun away from the side of the table, as if shoved aside by invisible hands, and Hsingyun went down screaming.
    Saul darted back out from under the table, and meanwhile glanced towards the couch. Several bottles previously standing on the table next to the TriView rolled noisily across the tiled floor.
    ‘Tanner,’ Saul shouted hoarsely, ‘if you so much as twitch from where you are, I swear I’ll blow your fucking head off. Do you understand me?’
    There was a muffled reply, just audible over the sound of the chainsaw and the combined shrieks of both the torture-doll and Hsingyun.
    Saul backed towards the door, and Hsingyun, and a moment later Tanner’s head popped back up over the top of the couch. Saul fired without thinking, the flechettes ripping gouts of foam out of the couch. Tanner made a strangled sound and fell backwards, crashing into the TriView, its sounds of carnage cutting off instantly.
    He turned back to Hsingyun and found him slumped half-conscious against the door in an ever-widening pool of blood, his lower legs now a mess of pulverized meat. Saul kept a tight grip on the Koch, and used his free hand to rifle through Hsingyun’s pockets until he located the device that could get him past the minefield.
    Now all he needed to do was get to the surface alive – and pray the ’copter was still parked where they’d left it.
    And if it wasn’t, he was totally, irretrievably, fucked.
    He dragged Hsingyun out of the way and cautiously pulled the door open. When he leaned out, he could see no one bar the distant figures of white-suited workers going about their business.
    There was so much noise out there that no one had even heard the fighting.
    Saul had got most of the way back to the spiral staircase before someone finally raised the alarm.
    A high-pitched whine filled the air, followed by a muffled shout from somewhere nearby. Saul started to rn, and heard shots echoing through the cavernous space behind him. In that moment he remembered that his parka was still back there in the conference room. That was going to be a problem once he got outside.
    He reached the stairs and clanged his way up them as fast as he could go: three, four, five steps at a time. There came more shots, one ricocheting off a step ahead of him as he climbed higher. He glanced back to see the street soldier who had departed with Hsiu-Chuan, waving his hands as he yelled at two other men in white worker gear, both with pykrete rifles gripped in their hands.
    Saul reached the dome and burst through the outer door and on to the ice. The cold came as a brute physical shock that brought him to a sudden halt, gasping as he filled his lungs with freezing air. Saul was wearing nothing more than a light business suit, barely sufficient to keep him warm on a January afternoon in New