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moving more quickly through the traffic. There were three motorbikes behind them, each with a passenger riding pillion. Raven knew that they had to be the backup team that would be sent after them if they had somehow escaped the roadblock. She knew this because it was exactly what she would have done.
    ‘We’ve got company!’ she yelled to Nero, who twisted round and looked behind them.
    ‘Friends of yours?’ Nero replied.
    ‘Yeah,’ Raven said with a grim smile, ‘I think they’re just trying to return some bullets they borrowed from me . . . at about nine hundred and fifty metres per second.’
    Raven jammed the throttle open, suddenly grateful for the big engine in the police bike. She roared up the on-ramp leading up to one of the elevated stretches of high speed dual carriageway that crossed central London. The traffic was not really any lighter up on this new road but it was at least moving more quickly. Raven glanced in the rear-view mirror again and saw that their pursuers were still gaining on them despite the fact she was at full throttle. There was a muzzle flash in the rear-view mirror and a split second later the same mirror exploded into a thousand pieces as it was struck by one of the bullets that whistled past them. Raven weaved left and then right, trying desperately to make them as difficult a target as possible. Despite their situation, she almost laughed out loud as she caught a fleeting glimpse of the astonished look on the face of a passenger in one of the cars they screamed past. Anybody would have thought they’d never seen a woman in a cocktail dress and a man in a dinner suit on the back of a stolen police motorbike.
    She knew that they were running out of time. The bikes behind them were gaining and it would only take one bullet to end this chase very abruptly. She kept sweeping left and right across the road as another bullet pinged off the bodywork at the rear of the bike.
    Suddenly a portal appeared to open in the sky about fifty metres ahead of them as the rear hatch of the cloaked Shroud dropship that had been summoned by Nero’s emergency signal slid open. The pilot was trying to stay at the same speed as their bike but the loading ramp leading up into the aircraft’s interior was still a couple of metres off the ground. Raven knew that if the Shroud flew any lower it would risk a collision with one of the vehicles on the road ahead. She accelerated, closing the distance to the open hatch, her mind racing. How were she and Nero going to both get on board? A crazy idea flew through her mind and in the same instant she realised that it might be their only chance.
    ‘Get me the pilot of that thing on your Blackbox,’ Raven yelled to Nero. After a couple of seconds he passed her the slim device. Raven quickly shouted instructions to the pilot before handing the PDA back to Nero. She pulled one of the swords from her back and set the control on its hilt to switch the variable geometry forcefield that ran along its edge to its sharpest setting. Raven swerved the bike left, towards the safety rail that ran along the side of the raised carriageway as yet another volley of bullets chewed up the tarmac where the bike had been just a split second earlier. She held out the glowing blade and braced herself as its mono-molecular edge sliced through the steel uprights that held the safety rail in place. The blade passed through support after support, each one giving way with a small shower of sparks. After a few seconds she kicked out and sent ten metres of the unsupported safety barrier tumbling over the side of the road.
    ‘Keep your head down,’ Raven yelled to Nero as she braked hard and spun the bike round to face the direction they had just come from, leaving a smouldering semicircle of black tyre rubber on the road. ‘This could get a little bumpy.’
    The bikes that had been chasing them were now only a hundred metres away as Raven gunned the engine and sent the police bike shooting