Ascendance Read Free

combat coveralls. His memory wasn’t the only part of him that’d got a tune up.
    ‘Anyway,’ he said, trying not to think about the tattooed hottie, ‘there’s no way you can stop her from getting home.’
    Unless a sniper puts a bullet in her head, I suppose.
    ‘If you could live with 50,000 nuclear warheads pointed at you for so long, I reckon you’ll cope with a treacherous blonde and her samurai sword. She’s going to tell her bosses the same thing about me, which you may not care about, but I do.’
    Both Trinder and Comeau turned their attention fully back to Dave.
    ‘You didn’t think I’d thought it through, did you? Because if you have a hard-on for taking Varatchevsky out of the game, it has to be a lay-down certainty that your opposite number back in the USSR feels the same way about me. Right?’
    ‘It’s not the USSR anymore,’ said Trinder.
    ‘Beatles reference,’ said Dave as the exotic young woman hurried up to them. ‘Anyway, my super friend and I have agreed we won’t be doing any more UFC cage matches. In fact, we’re going to catch up in an hour or so, after she’s talked her guys off the ledge, and we’re going to swap information. The thing she killed, this big-ass Thresh daemon, it’s not like Urgon. It knows different things, which seems to mean that she knows different things. It’d be cool if she and I could compare notes and –’
    ‘Absolutely not,’ Trinder barked. He spoke so abruptly, so loudly, that the young woman who was jogging toward them flinched. It was a more obvious reaction than the slight flush Dave had seen on her caramel-coloured features, the widening of her eyes, when she’d got a whiff of ol’ Super Dave’s secret sauce. ‘You can’t share intelligence with an enemy agent.’
    And then Trinder froze. His teeth, yellowed by nicotine, bit off the end of the last thing he had said. His nostrils flared and his eyes slitted, giving him a dangerous canine appearance.
    ‘What the hell?’ said Dave, and then realised someone other than him had hit the pause button. Comeau was frowning, hands on hips. The Asian chick had been caught mid-stride and was actually floating, suspended a few inches off the concrete floor. Dave could see now that she wasn’t Vietnamese as he had thought, but some mix of races which had passed through Southeast Asia at some point, with a good pinch of African-American stirred into the melting pot. The doors on the elevator from which she had emerged were starting to close, and he could see Madigan and the shoulder of the young Russian woman through the gap. He looked back toward the ramp, surprised, yet not at all surprised, to find Colonel Varatchevsky, still rocking her spanky black motorcycle leathers, striding down from the street. A sword hilt poked up over one shoulder.
    Dave’s first thought was that she had come, or been sent, to retrieve the traitor, the secretary he had rescued.
    ‘I thought we were gonna be cool,’ he said. It sounded like a protest, a weak one. He didn’t see how he could stop her taking the girl back without an explosion of cartoon violence that would bring this building down around their ears just like the Russian one.
    ‘I heard what Agent Trinder said. You can’t share with the enemy.’ Karen smiled.
    She took her foot off the accelerator – it had to be her; Dave had done nothing – and they dropped out of warp.
    ‘Yes he can,’ she said, raising her voice, addressing Trinder directly.
    The tattooed female agent gave a little squeal of surprise as she landed and found the enemy in their midst. Trinder cursed and Comeau drew his weapon again but Dave put a hand on his arm. Comeau’s draw seemed inhumanly fast, until you understood what ‘inhuman’ really meant.
    ‘Don’t, man,’ said Dave, easing the agent’s gun arm back down.‘She’ll kill you before you can even squeeze off a shot.’
    ‘I will,’ said Karen, a statement of fact, not a threat.
    ‘Stop her, Hooper. Put