Chapter 89 The wild chase

Chapter 89 The wild chase
"The second I prove who I am publicly," I said, "every person with a weapon and a reason to use it stops looking at the revolution and starts looking at me."
"That's exactly right," Tasha said.
"But if I don't prove it, the watch is just an object. The legal authority doesn't activate. Nothing changes."
"Everything changes if you're dead," she said. "Adrian hunted Grandisfield for seven years, and Grandisfield didn't have a bloodline claim to two nations. His claim was to one." She looked at me steadily. "You activate that verification sequence publicly and they don't send operatives. They send armies."
"So we do nothing?"
"We do nothing until we're in a position where doing something doesn't get us killed in the first five minutes."

I looked at the watch on the table between us. She was right. 

My eye-ring lit up with a notification I didn't recognize at first, a Men of Moon administrative channel I'd never been flagged on before. I opened it.
Colonial Security Directive 7. Emergency powers authorization. List of designated insurgents.
My name was third. Tasha's was fourth.
Grandisfield, Garron, Kellan, Haruki, and eleven others filled the rest of the list.

"They moved fast," Tasha said, reading her own screen.
"They already had this prepared. They were just waiting for the right moment to file it."
"Which means—"
The front door came off its frame.

Three operatives through the door in under two seconds, a fourth covering the window, weapons raised before either of us had fully processed the sound of the frame splintering.

Rusk came through last.
He looked around the apartment, at the watch on the table, at the two of us on our feet with weapons drawn.
"Put them down," he said.
"How did you find us?" I said.
"You came back to the most obvious address connected to your name in Aquila's housing registry," he said. "It wasn't difficult."

The operative nearest the window moved sideways to cut off the kitchen corridor. Another one shifted toward the table, toward the watch.
I shot him before he reached it, grabbing the watch.
Tasha took the one by the window in the same second, both shots clean, the apartment suddenly much louder and then much quieter in the space of a heartbeat.
Three left. Rusk and two others, all of them having moved the moment we fired, positions changed.
We were backed against the far wall in the bedroom.

"Low," Tasha said quietly, without moving her lips much.
I knew what she meant. We'd fired twice each getting here. I had four rounds left. I didn't know her count but her expression told me it wasn't generous.

We hid behind the wall sitting on the floor.

"There's nowhere to go," he said. "The corridor is covered. The window is covered. Put the weapons down. Regardless, you will die today."

I looked at the wall to my left. The maintenance ladder ran floor to ceiling in the corner, iron handles bolted directly into the paneling, leading up through a ceiling hatch to the building's first floor rooftop access. It had been there when Matt and I moved in, a leftover from the original construction that we used rarely. Only when we needed to be alone.

I looked at Tasha.
"Ladies first," I said.
She moved.

Rusk moved the same moment she did, shouting something to his operatives, and I fired once toward the center of the room without aiming at anyone specific, just enough to make three people find cover for two seconds, and then I was on the ladder behind Tasha, climbing fast, the hatch above us already swinging open where she'd pushed through it.

I came out onto the rooftop and pulled the hatch shut behind me, which would hold for maybe thirty seconds against a man Rusk's size.

I strapped the watch on my wrist before Tasha spoke.

"Go," she said.

The rooftop was narrow, the dome's ambient light casting everything in the same flat pale glow it always did at this hour, the street two floors below visible over the edge, evening foot traffic still moving through the district in steady streams.

Rusk came through the hatch seconds later. He saw us at the edge of the roof.

"Don't," he said.
I looked at Tasha.
"Lower gravity than Earth right?" I said.
"Guess so…" she said.
"On three then."

She went on two, which was very Tasha, dropping off the edge, and I watched her hit the street below.

I looked back at Rusk crossing the rooftop toward me holding his gun about to fire. He shot and missed the first one.

"You know something," I said. "For a dead man's errand, you are remarkably committed."

Then I stepped off the edge. The drop lasted longer than it would have on Earth, the reduced gravity stretching it out, enough time to think briefly about whether this had been a good idea, and then the street came up and I bent my knees.
The crowd around us scattered in a radius, people backing away, a few of them already pulling out eye-rings to record whatever they thought they were seeing.

"Transit," Tasha pointed.
We ran.

The underground transit entrance was two blocks east, the stairs going down fast under our boots, the platform visible below with a train sitting in the station, doors open, the departure chime starting its three second warning.

We hit the platform as the doors sealed shut. Tasha looked at the train and then at its  roof.

"No," I said.

She was already climbing the access ladder on the platform pillar, swinging herself onto the roof of the last car as the train started moving. I grabbed the ladder and went after her, pulling myself up and flat against the roof as the train accelerated into the tunnel, the platform lights disappearing behind us, the tunnel walls closing in on both sides.

The ceiling of the tunnel sat maybe forty centimeters above our heads.
Maybe. And the train kept accelerating.

I pressed myself completely flat, the roof vibrating under my chest, the tunnel walls a blur on either side, the wind from the movement hitting my face hard enough to make it difficult to keep my eyes open.

Tasha's hand found my arm in the dark.
"Hatch," she said, shouting over the noise.
I felt for it with both hands, the maintenance hatch built into the roof of every train for exactly this kind of emergency probably.

It didn't move.
I pulled harder.
The tunnel end was visible ahead, the wall coming up fast, the gap between the train roof and the ceiling shrinking as the tunnel curved downward.
I pulled with everything I had.

The hatch gave.
"Go!" I shouted.

Tasha dropped through feet first and I followed her immediately, pulling the hatch down above me as the train entered the lower section of the tunnel, the ceiling scraping the metal handle above my fingers as I let go of it and fell.

I landed hard on the floor of the cart, one knee taking most of it, the hatch banging shut above me.

The cart was half full. Twenty, maybe twenty five people, all of them staring at the two figures who had just fallen through the ceiling in the middle of their evening commute.

Nobody spoke for a moment. Then a woman near the center of the cart stood up from her seat and gestured toward it.
"Sit," she said, looking at me. "Both of you."
A man next to the empty seat stood up as well, nodding toward his own seat.

Tasha sat down. I sat down beside her, my knee aching, my lungs still catching up with the last ten minutes. The train kept moving through the dark tunnel toward Aquilas, the car settling back into its normal rhythm around us, conversations resuming in low voices.

Tasha leaned her head back against the seat.
"You were crazy back there," she said quietly.
"Thank you."

She closed her eyes. I watched the tunnel walls blur past the windows and held Tasha’s hand in mine, and let the train take us somewhere quieter than where we'd been.