Traction City Read Online Free PDF Page B

policemen.
    â€œBomb!” shouts a voice, out of the vapours and the swirling snow.
    The Engineers stare at the thing just long enough for Anders to butt their chief aside and swing a punch at the nearest gunman. He grunts and goes backwards, crashing into the one with the giant Stalker-gun, which goes off, arcing blue lightning everywhere. In the jagged light of it Anders sees the girl Fang swing a high kick into the face of the second gunman, who drops his weapon as he falls. She doesn’t see the leading Engineer stepping towards her from behind, drawing a shiny silver pistol. But Nutter does, and throws himself between girl and gun as it goes off. Then Anders has the Engineer by his rubber collar. He wrenches the gun out of the man’s hand. The fly’s-eye goggles shatter as he drives his head against the nearest duct.
    Something bumps against the toes of Anders’s boot and he looks down and sees that it’s the bomb. Only it isn’t a bomb; it’s the biscuit tin from Airdock Green police station. Smiff stands in the swirling steam, staring at the felled Engineers.
    â€œI followed after you, Sarge,” he says.
    Anders finds that he’s too shocked to say anything. The dazed Engineers are grovelling on the deck. He kicks their guns away and goes to Nutter, who’s crouched by a duct, hand pressed to the wound in his shoulder. Fang stands watching him. “He saved me,” she says. “Why’d he do that?”
    Nutter groans, looking like he wonders the same thing.
    â€œBecause you’re a human being and so’s he,” says Anders, moving Nutter’s hand and studying the wound. “Also, it’s his job.”
    â€œBlimey,” says Nutter, his face pale grey, tears running down it.
    â€œYou’ll be all right,” Anders promises him, although he’s not sure how, because even if he can get Nutter patched up there’s going to be trouble coming down on them for assaulting an Engineer Security Team. “Come on. . .”



9
    He heaves Nutter up, yells for Fang and Smiff to follow and sets off up the deck’s steep slope, all thought of hunting the Collector gone, starting the long walk back to Airdock Green. They’ve gone ten paces when he hears a voice behind shout, “After them!”, and a bullet flicks past him and spangs off a stanchion. He wishes he’d hidden those men’s guns better, or brought them with him, or thought to hit them harder. It occurs to him, as he pulls Nutter into the feeble shelter of an alleyway, that he should perhaps have killed them.
    Nutter has fainted. Anders lays him down, says to Fang, “Take care of him,” and quickly undoes her handcuffs. Then he creeps back to the alley’s end. There’s an old shrine there to Sooty Piet, the god of the Engine District. Ander’s crouches behind it and peers out between the beer bottles and sheafs of lucky money that have been propped against the plinth as offerings.
    The Engineers are making their way towards him, leaning forward like mountaineers as London heaves itself up a steep ridge and the slope of the street grows more extreme. There are five of them, and for a moment Anders wonders where the fifth one came from, before he realizes that the one at the back is far too tall to be an Engineer, and that his eyes are stabbing rods of green light through the mist.
    â€œWatch out!” he shouts. He can’t help himself. He’d leap out into his hunters’ path to warn them of the threat, but Smiff has crept behind the shrine with him, and holds him back.
    â€œNo, sarge!”
    One of the Engineers shrieks as the Stalker scythes him down. The others turn. The giant gun-thing goes off again, scrawling its blue lightning all over the Stalker, but it seems the Engineers have miscalculated; the current doesn’t seem to bother him. The electricity wraps around him like tinsel round a Quirkemas Tree as he cuts down