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back down the dual carriageway, straight towards them. Raven swerved hard to the right as a bullet passed by her head so close that she heard it buzzing like an angry hornet. She aimed the bike straight for the gap she had just carved out of the safety barrier and held her breath. As the front wheel of the speeding bike passed over the edge of the tarmac the dimly illuminated interior of the Shroud rose into view and the bike vaulted the gap. After what seemed like an interminably long second hanging in the air, the bike’s front wheel slammed down on the dropship’s loading ramp as Raven jammed the brakes on hard, ditching the bike on its side and pushing her and Nero away from it. The pair of them slid to a halt as the bike cartwheeled through the Shroud’s cargo bay before slamming into the bulkhead at the far end with a metallic crunch.
    ‘GO!’ Raven yelled towards the cockpit, leaping to her feet and slapping the button that closed the rear hatch. She ducked down as the pillion gunmen on the two bikes on the road below opened fire. They were wasting their time. The Shroud was too well armoured to be taken down by small arms fire. The hatch closed with a clunk and Raven braced herself as she felt the Shroud’s huge turbine engines rotate from their vertical hover position to full forward thrust as the invisible aircraft rocketed up into the night sky. Nero slowly sat up and brushed himself down.
    ‘Not a typical trip home from the opera,’ he said with a wry smile.
    ‘Are you OK?’ Raven asked.
    ‘A few bruises in the morning I should imagine,’ Nero replied, getting slowly to his feet. ‘But other than that I’m fine.’
    ‘Good,’ Raven replied. ‘I think we both know what that was.’
    ‘Indeed,’ Nero said with a frown. ‘It appears that the time for discussion has passed. If it’s a fight that our former allies want then that, my dear, is exactly what we are going to give them.’

chapter three
     
    ‘I still think it would be easier to just revise for our examinations,’ Wing said with a sigh.
    ‘And again he misses the point,’ Shelby said, grinning.
    They sat on the bed in Otto and Wing’s room in accommodation block seven and watched as Laura and Otto worked carefully on the dismantled device on the desk opposite.
    ‘It’s not cheating,’ Laura said defensively. ‘It’s about seeing whether or not it can be done. It’s the intellectual challenge of it.’
    ‘And the cheating,’ Otto said quickly, ‘don’t forget the cheating.’
    ‘Hmmm,’ Wing said with a look of obvious disapproval on his face.
    ‘You’re not helping, you know,’ Laura said, elbowing Otto in the ribs.
    ‘What?’ Otto said as he finished soldering one of the contact points on the device in front of him. ‘It’s not like we’re being trained to follow the rules here. If anything, I think Nero should reward us for our determination and initiative.’
    ‘Can you fit “determination and initiative” on a headstone?’ Laura asked as she leant in to examine Otto’s handiwork.
    ‘Now who’s not helping?’ Otto said as she peered through the magnifying lens at the device.
    ‘Looks good,’ Laura said. ‘We’ll make a hacker out of you yet, Malpense.’
    ‘Stop, you’re going to make me blush,’ Otto said with a grin.
    ‘All done then?’ Shelby asked, standing up and walking over to Laura and Otto. ‘Because you know how much I enjoy sitting and listening to you two rattle on about quantum phase discombobulators and all, but I’m exhausted.’
    ‘Do we really need to stop now?’ Laura asked. ‘What time is it?’
    ‘Ten minutes till lockdown,’ Shelby replied glancing at her Blackbox PDA, ‘and I for one do not want to end up being escorted to my room by security.’
    ‘Yeah, let’s just try and stay underneath Dekker’s radar as much as possible for the moment, shall we? I doubt that she’d be happy to find out what we’ve been working on,’ Otto said as he opened one of the