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  Vaughn took off after them, dodging and weaving through an endless procession of holidaymakers. A bottleneck into Central Crater stopped him cold. Shit. He used the time to access the external security feeds from Phobos’s lobby. The software clocked Kyra, Hemp and their mystery chaperon entering the foyer at 14:04, then leaving, again at an increased pace, at 14:11. This time Hemp wasn’t with them. What had happened inside? He thought about accessing the interior camera feeds to find out, but of more immediate concern now was her whereabouts, where she was heading. West along Aphelion Walk.

  And there, with supernatural instinct, the man with the map had his bearings all right. Adjusting his bag over his shoulder, he jogged down the lobby steps, folded his map and ran after Kyra with such unflustered efficiency it was as if he was late for nothing more than a spot in a rollercoaster queue his daughter was keeping for him.

  Vaughn threw a bickering couple ahead of him to one side and sprinted west to try to intercept him on the long curve of Aphelion Walk. A blur of old, worn, vaguely familiar sights and utterly new bright ones ate up the distance as he fixated on Sixsmith’s stiff, broad shoulders and blue jumper.

  But he was nowhere to be seen.

  With a deft, well-rehearsed sweep of his hand over the sleeve unit mounted on his right arm, Vaughn unleashed the remaining ‘germs’ ahead of him. They were about the size of mosquitoes but quieter and far swifter. He gave them the tagged images he’d saved of Kyra and Sixsmith and bade them find a match. A dazzling variety of well-kept orchids in a tubular greenhouse lined the right flank of Aphelion’s gradual arc. There was a narrow strip of yellow lawn between it and the path. Vaughn decided to run on this. It was the only way he could see to bypass the thickening thoroughfare that fed in from Nightshade, an underground rollercoaster that had just closed temporarily for maintenance. But the crowd pressed onto the lawn ahead of him. No way was he getting stuck behind it. Heart in mouth, he vaulted a gravlev pram with twin babies inside. Their mother’s squealed gasp forced him to look back. For a horrible moment he thought he’d clipped the fender and upended the pram, but no – thank God, it was just rocking.

  A vector alert flashed onto his visor display. One of the germs had located Sixsmith, heading straight for the Holst Auditorium. It opened up a vidfeed so he could see…there, there she was, swiping her Red Pass at the turnstile to enter the music arena. The mystery chaperon did the same. Not ten seconds ahead of their pursuer, who also had a Red Pass at the ready.

  Damn it. Vaughn hadn’t thought of that. The only way to access every ride and every attraction was to splash out on the most expensive park ticket. In his haste he’d plumped for the regular pass. He could upgrade at any time, but he’d have to queue at one of the ticket stations. No dice. Punters swarmed around them like pollinating bees. He needed another way in, and quick. Kyra had proved she could move, but what was her stamina like?

  Just before he entered the building, Sixsmith turned and clicked his fingers into the germ’s camera. The image blinked to dark. Worse, all the germs’ signals died, including the one in security ops that had been bootlegging surveillance footage for him. Potentially a serious breach there, as the drone had jacked into a protected system. Too late to worry about the blowback from that. He was chasing blind now, and that was that.

  Vaughn had to barge an elderly man out of the way to avoid another crowd crush. He was at the Holst before he realized it; the perfectly smooth semi-spheroid dome glowed with UV light, enough to create a kind of hazy outline effect that was supposed to resemble a planet’s atmosphere. Scanning the fire exits dotted around the exterior, he considered blasting one open with his Kruger. No, these places were labyrinths inside. He’d last spotted his quarries entering the lobby. That was where he needed to—

  The skylight!

  He leapt onto a trash receptacle, hopped onto the row of ticket booths – curved, slippery on top. Gasps of surprise and virulent vocal objections swelled beneath him as he focused on keeping his balance. The jump onto the dome was only a couple of meters but there was little to hang on to. Rivets, nothing but rivets. They looked substantial. He leapt. Screams followed him. The adamant soles of his boots slithered on the round steel rivets but his fingertips held. Splayed feet worked best, and he inched his way up. Vertical at first, then butt protruding, now bellying onto the dome roof. He peered down through the skylight but could see no sign of Kyra or Sixsmith. Vaughn drew his Kruger, set it to medium yield, and blew out the glass. It showered punters below and shattered on the hard floor. He dangled from the edge before dropping the four or five meters. Hurtful, despite the textbook knee bend and roll on impact.

  “I’m looking for a big guy in a blue jumper. Anyone seen him?”

  Most of them were agog, but a young couple pointed up the grand staircase. “There were three of them, nearly flattened us,” the man said. “The concert’s good, but it ain’t that good.”

  Vaughn took the stairs three at a time, drawing gasps and screams from those coming the opposite way – the sight of a custom high-yield pulse weapon jabbing in one’s direction tended to have that effect. There was no sign of them on the mezzanine balcony, so he kept climbing. Two more flights. Shouts of “Hey!” and “Watch it, asshole!” from up ahead spurred him into a higher gear. He was getting close.

  Two young uniformed ushers stepped out to bar his path, white gloves raised, but parted just as quickly when they saw he was armed. “Which way?” he asked.

  “J-J to N, s-second right,” one of them stuttered. “There’s not supposed to be running…”

  Most of the punters had taken their seats, presumably for the next symphony movement after this intermission. The auditorium lights were still on full beam, no signs of dimming yet. Vaughn saw his niece in the flesh for the first time as she clambered up onto the back of one of the lower seat rows and hopped down to the next. Agile, desperate. Her mystery chaperon, seeing they were cornered, had turned to face Sixsmith. He drew a switchblade and lunged. Somebody screamed. The entire area erupted when Sixsmith caught the man’s arm, twisted it up his back and snapped his neck in one fluid motion. It sparked a stampede.

  Vaughn spied the nearest exit from Kyra’s position – she’d spilled into row B after attempting one vault too many – and knew it was going to be close. People were trampling each other to get out of Sixsmith’s way. It created several bottlenecks between him and Kyra. As fast as he could throw them from his path, they gathered in the next aisle, and the next, unwittingly slowing him at every turn. But she, too, was trapped in a crowd driving for the exit. It swept her away from her assailant, but it wasn’t moving fast enough to give her much of a head start.

  “One of you call security!” he yelled at the two panicked ushers. They ran into each other in their bids to obey; one of them composed himself and remembered he had a remote intercom attached to his collar. “Tell them to wait at the exits and arrest a big Caucasian man with a dark blue jumper with shiny leather shoulder pads. Longish hair, blond highlights. He’s just killed two men. Did you get all that?”

  The youngster nodded frantically and relayed the info with a stammer. Vaughn dashed back down the way he’d come and picked a spot on a maintenance walkway that overlooked the passage those from Kyra’s exit would have to take before they reached the lobby. A tide of mindless commotion burst into the corridor. On one side, glazed gift shop windows; on the other, liquigraph posters for scheduled and future performances of galaxy-themed orchestral music. Vaughn waited. The forerunners bolted for the main exit, devil take the hindmost. Next came the jostling, shoving, heaving, electrified mass that scraped unfortunate outsiders against the fixtures and the glass, and squeezed its pummeled insiders into near suffocation. There was nothing he could do. Nothing anyone could do. A stampeding herd was just as mindless here in a premier resort as it was in the savage wilds of Hesperidia.

  He spied Kyra. She was being swept along, and she wisely wasn’t fighting it. Backward glances every few strides did her credit
– they were measured, purposeful, not panicked. All she had to do was surf with the crowd and it would take her out to safe custody, to his—

  No!

  Sixsmith was waiting outside the main entrance. The sly bastard had slipped out some other way, a side exit maybe, something Vaughn had missed. And she was heading right into his trap! Think, you son of a bitch, Vaughn told himself. Security hadn’t done his bidding – the big guy stood unmolested. There was no way to stop the tide. So either he jumped down to her or…

  “Kyra! Climb to me!” The cacophony of the crowd drowned out his cry, so he amped his ’pod’s external mike to its maximum decibels. “Kyra Stone!” She glanced up a split-second before everyone else. “Climb to me if you want to live!”

  Vaughn vaulted the rail and the safety paneling, and wedged his boots into the slender gap between the bottom of the panel and the walkway floor. With one hand he hung onto the rail; the other he lowered as far as he could toward her. Not nearly low enough for her to reach on her own. She would have to gain height some other way.

  “He’s waiting for you!” Vaughn pointed to the exit. “You need to climb to me right now!”

  Her voice couldn’t carry over the madness, but he saw her mouth the word How?

  “Any way you can. Get on someone’s shoulders. Come on, it’s now or never!”

  She bounced up, yanked at someone’s collar, tried clambering onto a man who offered her a knee-up, but the tide would not relent. She slapped a woman who was barging her constantly. Almost at Vaughn’s position now, Kyra worked herself into a rage. He saw her spit and grit her teeth as she leapt onto the back of a tall man in a checkered shirt. Luckily he was stout, forgiving. The way he helped her onto his shoulders suggested he’d been watching the situation unfold ahead of him and understood her quandary. With a frantic effort she rose onto his shoulders and stood, teetering, the man grasping her ankles for support.

  She was within reach, her hand outstretched to take Vaughn’s. Just another step, a few more inches…

  Her eyes that had narrowed with the effort suddenly bulged wide. Her face un-scrunched, revealing confused beauty for a moment, then puckered with panic as she fell. A crimson cloud spray-painted the people behind her. Kyra collapsed on top of the man in the checkered shirt, whose head had just been cratered. Whatever rounds he was using, Sixsmith didn’t care about collateral damage. A perfect shot right through the man’s ear, it had hit another punter after its exit. A crazy shot in a crowd like this, but killers-for-hire had few scruples. He mustn’t have been able to hit Kyra cleanly, so he’d made sure the human tide delivered her to him instead.

  Vaughn daren’t hang here a moment longer. Survival instinct took over – his, primary – hers, utmost. He dropped beside Kyra and shielded her for the few moments before the unrelenting surge of the crowd could no longer sweep around the corpse. People trampled it, stumbled over it, slid in the pool of blood. Vaughn kept her low as he let the tide take them. But for how long? When they reached the foyer they could make a break for another exit, using the chaos of the crowd as cover. But there was a risk Sixsmith could find an angle and pick them off. They might be too exposed. And he’d be expecting that move. No, far better to go off the map, turn the element of surprise against him.

  Vaughn drew his Kruger and fired a shot skyward. It was so loud that everyone instinctively ducked around him. He fired a second shot at the gift shop window, shattering it. But the tidal hiatus only lasted seconds, after which those on the floor were trampled. Vaughn muscled his way over to the window, dragging Kyra with him. They weren’t the first through the smashed glass, and in no time a mob of terrified punters was swarming about them, toppling anything in the shop that wasn’t bolted down, including each other.

  “Stay low. No space between us,” he said as he grabbed her by the hand and guided her to an emergency fire exit at the back of the store. Again, they weren’t the first outside. With the stampede having spilled out of multiple exits now, the volume of bodies between him and Sixsmith at the main entrance was considerable. He hugged the outside of the dome for a stone’s-throw sprint in the opposite direction before leading her up a verge hidden by a copse of exotic trees with auburn leaves. This led them to Antediluvian, one of the park’s original VR simulator attractions, a large conch-shaped structure inside which competing teams battled all manner of deadly virtual obstacles in imaginative Martian terrains that seemed absolutely real. It had been one of Vaughn’s favorites as a boy, and had clearly never gone out of fashion. Youngsters lined up individually to await team assignations, or in pre-selected groups, around umpteen bends of the cordon line.

  “Wait,” she crouched, panting. “Who…the hell…sent you?”

  “Your mom gave me the heads-up.”

  “My mom?”

  “We’ve not met. I’m her brother, Ferrix Vaughn. Detective. Omicron Bureau.”

  She coughed onto the grass, at the same time slowly shook her ahead in exasperation. Too many shocks for one day. He got it. But they were far from being out of harm’s way.

  “Just like that, after all this time.” She sounded disappointed. The goddamn nerve.

  “Yeah, we can get into all that later. Right now you need to summon everything you’ve got. I mean it.” He hauled her to her feet.

  “After all this time,” she repeated to his face. Hers was scrunched again, indignant.

  “Don’t give me any shit, Kyra.” He pulled her by the arm toward the guy cables holding a powerful satellite tower erect behind Antediluvian. She acquiesced. Guests weren’t allowed back here, but he followed the maintenance path anyway. It would be a good place to hide, at the back of the attraction. And it led to a promenade skirting the western perimeter of the dome, parallel to a ruby stream into which punters were invited to drop old coins (bought at Central Crater) and make a wish. He decided to let her rest for a minute behind a maintenance shed. If Sixsmith had indeed lost them, he’d probably hide out at a crucial crossroads on the way back to the main gate, so they’d have to be on their toes and ready to bolt for cover every step of the way. Doubtful the wily bastard would let them leave the park. He’d want to take her out here, any way he could, before the authorities swarmed in and the rakers turned this incident into a stellar circus.

  “One question,” she said, “then I’ll shut up.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Mom must’ve told you what I do, who I work for. Why are you risking your neck for a lowdown criminal?”

  “I’m not. I’m seeing my niece safely home.”

  “Admit it, you didn’t know I existed till she messaged you.”

  Vaughn slammed the back of his fist against the shed door. “Listen, sunshine, I’m the one person in the galaxy who can maybe, maybe get you out of this, if we’re lucky. So try to bottle the mindfuck, okay?”

  She plucked her sunglasses from her breast pocket, saw that they were broken, and tossed them away. Vaughn immediately fetched them and handed them back.

  “We don’t leave him any breadcrumbs,” he explained. “Nothing. We steal through here like a breeze and we make him do all the work. Okay?”

  “Okay. I get it.”

  “You can do this, Kyra. You’ve evaded him this far. That’s longer than he was counting on, so now we have the upper hand.”

  “Really? You’re better than him? Tell me you are.”

  Vaughn peered around the edge of the conch, satisfied himself Sixsmith wasn’t following. “I’ve taken guys like him down before.”

  “But he’s like something…it’s like he’s not human.”

  “They all seem that way, but I’ve never known one grow old. Not once they’ve got on my radar.”

  “Sure of yourself, aren’t you. Mom always said you liked to be right, that it was your religion.”

  “I do what I have to. Right now I have to get you back to her in one piece. Anyone says any different has their head up their ass. So unplug it and follow me.”

  She obeyed without hesitat
ion, replying, “You talk just like her, you know. Cut right to the point. No dressing it up.”

  “I shave that way, too.”

  She snorted a chuckle. “You even crack wise the same. You really must be Uncle Ferrix.”

  It was the first time he’d heard himself called that, and it sounded facetious, sarcastic, like the butt of an unfunny joke designed to humiliate him. But she’d acknowledged their shared blood. No one in his family had done that, face to face, in decades, not since the day of the sentencing, when he’d have given anything for words as easily deflected as Kyra’s. His niece might not be warming to him exactly, but she was on the same page for what they had to do next.

  That was something.

  A pair of uniformed guards, a man and a woman, came running toward them up the promenade. Vaughn considered enlisting their aid – extra firepower was extra protection – but he knew too little about the security operation here, and nothing about its personnel. Were these guards genuine? Or were they working for Sixsmith?

  He stepped aside to let them pass, and told Kyra to “Get behind me.” She did.

  Both guards eyed him in that fleeting-but-all-seeing manner all professionals worth their salt developed the knack for. He’d already seen what he wanted to see.

  “You folks know where you’re supposed to go?” the self-assured woman asked.

  “Sure. The main gate,” Vaughn replied. “It’s a general evacuation, right?”

  “That’s right. Assemble at the flop-ports. Someone will be there to guide you.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  Vaughn palmed his holster, watching them in his peripheral vision. “Kyra, walk ahead of me.”

  “Huh? Now I’m behind, now I’m in front. Which is it?”

  “Do what I say.”