Re-Coil - J.T. Nicholas Page 0,42

corpse’s pockets, but my sudden and dramatic entrance had interrupted him. Interrupted, perhaps, but it seemed I hadn’t surprised him, as he raised a heavy pistol of unfamiliar design and, not bothering to stand, squeezed the trigger.

I dove back behind the wall, barely in time, as a hail of bullets sprayed through the opening that my coil had so recently filled. They smashed into the wall on the other side of the hallway, drilling neat holes into the apartment across the way. I silently prayed that it was empty, or, at least, that no one was in harm’s way. That worry turned more personal as the unknown gunman tracked his fire in my direction.

I dropped to the floor as more rounds blasted through the wall where I had been standing, showering me in a rain of broken composite and dust. It was only a matter of moments before the gunman tracked his weapon across a vector that would intersect with some important part of my anatomy. It wasn’t the best of solutions, but I wasn’t overflowing with options, so I shoved the barrel of my Gauss pistol around the corner of the doorjamb, tilted it slightly up and in the general direction of the kneeling man, and began pulling the trigger. The snap of the electro-magnetically accelerated twelve-millimeter rounds was lost beneath the louder report of my assailant’s chemical burner, but his steady stream of fire abruptly stopped.

For the briefest of instants, I felt a flash of hope. Maybe my blind fire had gotten lucky after all. But Chan had not been idle during the precious seconds that had elapsed from when the first shots rang out. Sarah pinged me with an urgent request to accept a video feed, delivered directly from Chan. I approved, and a window popped into view. I immediately moved it to the upper right corner of my vision, but even there it was particularly distracting.

We lived in a world of pervasive technology, where almost every device was wired to the Net in some form or fashion. Many, maybe even most, of those devices had some sort of integrated camera. Chan must have hacked the apartment’s network, because the feed I was receiving showed the gunman as he moved deeper into the apartment, diving behind the counter in the kitchen. The view switched to show him calmly inserting another long magazine into his handgun.

Not so lucky after all, I supposed.

“HabSec’s on their way,” I called into the apartment, then leapt to my feet and darted to the other side of the doorway, the side not already riddled with bullet holes. Sarah had added another indicator beneath the video feed, this one showing me the rounds remaining in the Gauss pistol’s magazine. Twenty-six. In those brief seconds I’d already fired off fourteen rounds.

“They still call them police officers here in the domes, Mr. Langston. You are Carter Langston, aren’t you?” The man’s tone was polite, almost urbane. “And their average response time to this location is almost eight minutes. I assure you, we still have plenty of time.”

He moved while he talked, and the video feed from Chan’s various inanimate spies tracked him to the edge of the counter. He crouched low, pistol held with the barrel pointed up toward the ceiling. There must have been a viewscreen in the kitchen, because the resolution was high enough for me to make out his features. He had high, narrow cheekbones that fell sharply to a long chin that almost came to a point. Yellow-tinted glasses—an affectation as most forms of visual impairment were easily correctable—obscured his eyes, and his jet-black hair was slicked back to form a sharp widow’s peak on his forehead. White linen gloves sheathed his fine-boned hands, standing out sharply against the grips of the pistol. He looked more like a man destined for the opera house than one hell-bent on murder.

“How do you know my name?” I demanded.

“I’m afraid it was given to me by a client of mine. You’ve angered someone, Mr. Langston. Angered them enough that they would prefer it if you were removed from the game for a while. You, and Shay Chan, and Zomas Harper, and, of course, Mr. Copeland, here. By the way, did you bring Ms. Chan and Zr. Harper with you? That would have been uncommonly considerate.”

No mention of Miller.

The message, in text, flashed across the bottom of my vision, sent, no doubt, from Chan. And she was right. Either the polite assassin was unaware of Miller