Fortress by David Drake

Author:David Drake [Drake, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-12-18T06:22:27+00:00

A car was driving up the sidewalk toward him, opposite to the flow of traffic which the nearer lane would have had if George's Audi had not blocked it. A net bag full of soccer balls, dropped by some shopper or peddler to the sidewalk, burst and spewed its contents in all directions as the car neared at twenty miles an hour.

The car had only one headlight, the left one. Gisela had come back to fetch him, despite the tangle and the bloody violence that anybody with sense would've driven like hell to avoid. One thing about having the shit hit the fan: it taught you who you wanted to keep among the people you knew.

Kelly stepped off the curb to let the Mercedes by and flung open the door of the coupe that squealed to a halt beside him.

"There's another one out there," Kelly said, meaning the Audi and too wired to wonder whether or not he was understood. He flopped onto the low seat and pulled the door closed after him. "Hope to god it doesn't find us."

The dancer pulled around the tangled Audi and the car it had backed into, then cramped her wheel hard and bumped off the curb again with a clang from the low undercarriage. The vehicle immediately behind the cars paired by the collision had begun to back clear to skirt the obstacle. Gisela accelerated through the momentary gap, ignoring both the screamed curses and the clack as she smashed off her outside mirror against the fender of the higher car.

"I'm taking you to the pickup point," she said in German. They had spoken in English before, but stress had thrown the dancer back to her birth language. Kelly was fluent enough in German that the change didn't matter to him, but the fact of it was a datum to file. "We - we've needed somebody like you, for the people you know. This has proven how little time there is."

Kelly started to say, "Wait," although waiting was the last thing he really wanted to do in this confusion with its chance of fire and explosion and its certainty of heavily-armed patrols descending at any moment. Instead, as Gisela negotiated the acute turn onto Tesfikige Street, bumping over the curb again to clear the van stalled in the intersection, Kelly said, "Gisela, run me back to the Sheraton. There's something I need in my room there."

"Are you sick in the head?" she demanded, sparing him a glance.

"Didn't say it was a great idea," the American said as he met her eyes. "But I've never volunteered for a suicide mission, and that's what tonight'll have been if I don't have some way to cover my ass." He grimaced and looked away. "Yeah, and get a change of clothes, too. These" - he felt the back of his coat with his free left hand - "haven't come through the night much better than I have."

"But you'll come," the woman said. She was driving normally. The

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