'Who are you?'

That was as far as I got before the man turned the corner and fired. The shot went wide. I hadn't heard or seen the woman return fire, but the limb thumping to the floor with the gun still in hand, and the stump of an arm twitching with the arterial spray, did all the explaining. The following shot between the eyes cut off the screams.

'Help,' she said. 'I'm help.'

We tucked ourselves against the wall and peered around. Vayn Baron's unmistakeable bald head was retreating down the hallway, flanked by two new guards. The woman fired off two shots but they were too far away. They ran through a door before she could fire again.

She raced ahead of me and, after a second, slammed open the door after them. Exhaustion was starting to run through my blood stream and I was flagging behind. It doesn't matter how much you end up in foot chases and fire fights, there's only so much a man can take, especially if you're not trained for it.

I heard the snap before I saw the result. When I got to the door, one of Vayn Baron's new guards lay on the floor on his back, with his nose pressed directly into the floor tile. The woman was slapping her palms together to get rid of the sweat.

'Fucking psychopath,' I wheezed.

'Thanks for the compliment,' she replied.

We headed for a pair of double doors, from around which glaring dazzling light. Above it was a sign (I love helpful signs when pursuing notorious underground criminal masterminds) which read MAINTENANCE BAY. We were a few steps away from it when we heard shouting. A gunshot or two. Vayn Baron's raised voice.

'You're not doing this.'

We secreted ourselves either side of the doors and peered into the room through the glass panels.

Inside was what looked like a garage for the kars that we'd flown around the vaults. Several men in Red Rose uniforms were holding back Vayn Baron. One had a gun to his head. The lights were from a kar, ready to head up a ramp at the back of the large room and up to the streets. There were bodies on the floor with breath still rising from their mouths, ghostly in the harsh light.

'Sorry, old man. The boss doesn't like the way you've done things.'

Carea Euphero.

All the blood drained to my feet, and suddenly they felt so heavy that I would have needed ten people to lift me off the floor. My hands started to sweat and I considered holstering my gun to stop it from slipping out of my hands. I felt as if I had left my body and was floating in a tank somewhere, looking through the lens of a cybersleep matrix. This couldn't possibly be real.

'Don't think you managed things too well either. What was that fiasco at the hospital?'

'It all worked out in the end.'

Baron sniggered. 'Only because I've come through and saved the day. And now you're being told to put me out of commission? You break into my operation and try to take charge? You're not my handler, you're not even in my department. You're her favourite whore, been given a few chores to spread the workload.'

Euphero stepped up and placed a muzzle between his eyes. 'They've got a transport gate three blocks away, ready to get this precious little artefact off into the end of nowhere. There's a whole army converging on us. Police, C.A.T, Hoods, the lot. All you had to do was find out a vault number and an access code, and get out of here. Instead, they end up almost taking it off us.'

'The hoods more organised than we anticipated, I'll admit,' Baron replied.

'Then you should have been more organised and known that.'

I glanced across at my companion. She was glancing back down the hallway. I couldn't hear anyone coming, and they'd have to take out that door first if they wanted to come through, but it wouldn't take long. If you can manufacture a war inside an impregnable fortress for the possessions of the entire Empire, you can open a door without too much fuss.

For myself, my eardrums were ready to burst with the blood pumping through them. That Euphero and Baron knew each other, worked together, was a reality I hadn't been ready to face. That I should have considered it, seen it coming, expected it and been ready to meet it, was all irrelevant in the face of the truth. Sometimes we just don't want to accept things.

'Euphero,' a woman's voice said. One of Baron's holders, perhaps. 'We can't waste any more time.'

Euphero took the safety off. 'Goodbye, Vayn. I'll be sure to give your replacement your heartiest congratulations.'

Baron stiffened his back and puffed out his chest. 'If you're going to shoot me, let me have my final words.'

'Ten seconds.'

The woman put her gun to the door, ready to burst in. I wanted to tell her not to let the man die, to take out half of the problem. I also remember being completely unable to get myself to do anything which might stop her, even a whisper or a wave of the hand. Terror, hatred, fatigue; all these feelings ran rampant in my head like a hyuntiger let loose on the streets, and my head was in no fit state to try and leash it.

I turned back to the window. Vayn Baron had his back to me, and the light from the getaway kar turned him jet black, but I could feel his smile nonetheless. 'We fight for the same leader,' he began. 'For the same cause. Independent from one another, but well enough in our own regards.' He bent forward to push his face into Euphero's muzzle, trying to bore a hole into his skull before the trigger is pulled. 'But you're an A-grade bitch waggling her bits for her mistress, and sooner or later she's going to put you down. Your life is a moment. Mine will bloom again.'

The sound of a gunshot split the tension and a head flowered into bloody petals. The guard with the muzzle to his temple, headless, remained upright as the door was open and the woman was in the room, gun spitting fire and venom, silver hair golden in the light.

Baron dropped to the ground as Euphero shot a second too late. The glass window I had been looking through only a moment before exploded. It rained down my back as I pushed my door open, said a silent prayer to anything listening, and joined the fight.