"Put the fragging guns down now!" one of the Inferno guards bellowed. He made the alternative clear by thrusting his own weapon out.

Skater ignored the command. Getting caught at this point wasn't an option.

The surviving yaks must have felt the same way, because one of them directed his pistol at Skater and Duran while the other unleashed half a clip at the nightclub's sec-team.

Leaping, accessing both boosted reflexes and extra adrenaline, Skater put himself over and behind the tow wall holding the plants. He hoped the wall would block the bullets. He dropped with his back against the wall in a squatting position and his pistol in a two-handed Weaver grip.

"Kid," Duran called. "You in one piece?"

Skater glanced around the comer of the wall and saw the ork in a defensive position behind an overturned table. "Yeah."

The gun battle was quickly heating up. The sec-teams had a momentary advantage, but more yakuza gunners drifted in from the dance floor and pushed them back, firing from whatever defensive positions they could find.

Every tick of the clock. Skater knew, put that much more distance between them and Maddock. "The stairs?" he shouted to Duran.

The ork nodded. "On your go, chummer."

"Do it!" Skater threw himself from cover, angling away from the thrust of the firefight. Bullets cut the air before and behind him. He didn't break stride. A round caught him high on the left shoulder but was stopped by the Kevlar-lined bomber jacket. The impact drove him off-balance, but he managed a stagger that got him to the door just after Duran burst through.

The twisting maze of stairs with flights leading down and up only held subdued lighting. A sec-guard in Inferno colors was coming up the flight of stairs leading to the second-floor landing. Before the man could raise his pistol in self-defense, Duran shoved the Squirt forward at point-blank range and pulled the trigger.

The DMSO gel ball smashed against the man's face, spreading visibly, and immediately taking effect.

Skater grabbed the handrail leading down to steady himself as he raced past the falling guard. Duran hit the wall ahead of them and pushed off, making the comer and gaining speed again. Seizing the handrail, Skater leaped and hauled himself over, knowing he was chancing a broken or sprained ankle, and landed with a jar halfway down the switch-back steps. He followed as Duran exploded through the first-floor door.

The corridor was empry, bui heads were popping out about twenty meters down where the main entrance was. No one seemed too eager to challenge them.

Skater glanced up at the maglev's floor indicator. "Says the cage is here."

"Only one way to find out." Duran plucked a broad-bladed combat knife from his sleeve in an eye-blurring movement. The edged metal flashed as he buried it to the hilt between the maglev doors and twisted.

The doors parted a few centimeters, enough for Skater to shove his fingers in and pull the door back, opening the other with it.

Maddock hung by a small wire that fitted snugly under his jawline and cut into the flesh enough to leave thin threads of blood seeping down his neck to stain his shin. His arms hung loosely, and his feet were fifty centimeters from the floor. Splashes of crimson spotted the stainless steel interior of the maglev cage.

Skater moved into the cage and used his free hand, his legs, and both elbows to leverage his head and shoulders through the escape hatch. The cage was a round, shiny egg-shape that floated up and down the shaft. Two floors above him, he spotted the elf woman floating through a set of double doors, levitated by her own power or someone else's. The shadowrunner kicked in his low-light vision and picked up three other figures waiting to help the woman make her exit. One of them was the elf who'd led the team that busted Skater out of Lone Star.

The elf spotted Skater and moved almost faster than Skater could counter, bringing up a shotgun and firing immediately.

Skater released his hold on the sides of the exit and dropped. The pellets caromed from the top of the cage like a sudden burst of hail, then rattled in smaller echoes against the sides of the maglev shaft.

"She had a backup team waiting in the wings," Skater said as he got up. "We'll never snag her now."

"We can't hold this twenty," Duran stated. "And I'm two rounds away from no-more-mister-nice-guy. The situation being what it is, I'm not about to surrender."

Holding the pistol in one hand, Skater used his other to search through Madtlock's clothing. There was nothing to be found; the woman had evidently gotten whatever she was looking for.

A glance back into the hallway showed that the possibility of retreat in either direction had been cut off by Inferno sec-teams. Duran put another man down with the last gel pellet from the Squirt, then hauled out his Roomsweeper heavy pistol.

"Inside," Skater told the ork. He fired three rounds and holed the standpipe fire extinguishing system near the group of men to their right. A hard spray of water jetted out from the punctures in the standpipe and created a rainbow-colored mist in the hallway that was difficult to see through as well as becoming an approach hazard.

For a moment, the return fire blistered the walls around the maglev doors.

"Kid, I sure as frag hope you've got a plan." Duran took up a position on the other side of the cage from Skater and fired a pair of shots into the hallway. The detonations were. deafening trapped inside the small space. "Our escape menu is getting about as limited as an incestuous cannibal's diet."

"Worse than that," Skater said. "At least an incestuous cannibal knows where his next meal is coming from."

Duran gave him a wry look.

"Cover me," Skater said.

"Another slotting crack like that," Duran warned, "and I geek you myself."

Skater lunged through the door long enough to fire three bullets into the maglev level display. A puff of smoke ejected from the crunched plates, followed by sparks and the start of a small fire. He withdrew back into the cage a heartbeat ahead of the gunfire that smashed into the doors. He tapped the down button for the second basement level.

Erratically, the doors closed with metallic grindings and protesting squeaks. More bullets spanged across the stainless steel and ricocheted over his and Duran's heads before they were shut out. The maglev dropped at once, starting Skater's stomach spinning with the near-feeling of weightlessness.

"Down?" Duran growled. "Down means we're going to be wearing a straitjacket of piascrete and have the building sitting on top of us."

The maglev arrived with a slight bump that belied the swirling sensation in Skater's stomach. He took the lead when the doors opened, following the Predator into the corridor. No one was in either direction. The closer to Hell a person got, the fewer people were around.

"This floor's connected to an underground garage," Skater said, orienting himself to what he'd learned about the building. Low-wattage security lights painted gray stripes of illumination across the floor. While the ork had worked the portaphone to arrange invitations into the nightclub, Skater had been using the Eurowind's small computer to download maps of the building provided by Archangel, which he'd used to plot routes for a hasty retreat. He counted doors, then went through.

'They'll have the garage sealed and watched," Duran said.

"We're not going through the garage doors," Skater said as they entered the parking area.

"Ops guy will have made us by now," Duran said, pointing to the lens of a vidcam in the wall. "They'll know where we're at."

"Give me a hand," Skater said, shoving his fingers into the recessed handle of a manhole cover in the comer. 'This fragging thing is heavy."