Daemon

jetty stones again as the tail of the bobbing sedan settled back into the water, nearly coming down on her head. It flopped onto the waves, bubbling and hissing around them.
    She sensed that something large had just missed her. ‘Jon!’
    ‘It’s okay! Wait. It’s sinking.’
    ‘Where are the others?’
    ‘They’re gone.’
    She panted as they bobbed there for several seconds listening to bubbling water and distant engines on the tarmac above. His arm still around her. Soon there was just hissing.
    ‘Okay, swim. Follow my voice.’
    Merritt cradled the UMP on the bike’s broad gas tank and swerved from side to side trying to get around Loki’s BMW. Each time he approached, Loki stabbed on the brakes. Finally the road widened again. The corrugated fences of salvage yards and aging factories now fronted it. Merritt accelerated rapidly, roaring alongside the car.
    He searched for some weakness in the armor and noticed that brushed steel knobs appeared at regular intervals on the roof, hood, and trunk. They looked like high-end cell-phone antennas – a dozen of them, evenly spaced.
    Merritt braked and swerved as Loki tried to smash him into a line of parked cars. Merritt accelerated around the other side and lifted up the UMP. He glanced at the road, then took careful aim at the car. He fired a short burst. The shots ricocheted off the roof.
    Loki swerved toward him again, and instead of dodging away immediately, Merritt let him come in closer. He took more careful aim and fired again – nailing a metal knob.
    And barely denting it.
    ‘Son of a bitch.’
    Behind Merritt eight sedans screeched in from side streets. He glanced back over his shoulder to see them surging afterhim. He raised the UMP one-handed and opened up with short, controlled bursts. The front tires of first one, then another blasted out, and they quickly fell behind as the others accelerated. He knocked out the tires on still a third.
    The gun was empty. Merritt turned forward and saw ten more unmanned cars come in from side streets up ahead.
    No way to reload. Time to concentrate. He tossed the UMP onto the hood of a nearby car, then ripped the throttle and drove howling past Loki.
    Merritt dodged a hatchback emerging from a parking lot – which turned out to be a regular car with people in it. An onrushing AutoM8 immediately broadsided it. Half a dozen more AutoM8s streamed in from side streets behind him.
    Merritt turned forward again to see the AutoM8s approaching up ahead, surging his way in interlocking slaloms. It was an impenetrable roving barrier. A demonstration of networked swarming behavior that no human drivers could match. Merritt had a couple of seconds at most. A score of AutoM8s were all around him, closing fast – more coming in every second.
    He looked back at Loki’s BMW, then swerved and stabbed the brakes – bringing himself just feet off Loki’s front bumper. Still going seventy, he eased back on the throttle and, taking a breath, released his hold on the handlebars, falling backward onto Loki’s front hood as the BMW bumped his bike’s rear tire. The bike veered forward and to the side and was immediately crushed by a wall of oncoming AutoM8s, which raced past only inches to either side of the BMW. Several smashed head-on into pursuing AutoM8s, exploding into a whirlwind of plastic parts, glass, and tumbling metal.
    Merritt hit Loki’s hood hard, then slid back into the windshield. He rolled left, jamming his foot down onto a brushed metal knob at the corner of the hood, and clamped onto the wiper well with his hands. He braced his other foot against the knob on the far corner like it was a rock-climbing wall.
    He glared into the blacked-out windshield and pointed threateningly.
You’re not rid of me yet, asshole
.
    From the backseat of the BMW, Gragg stared in amazement at his pursuer now straddling the car hood. ‘You have got to be shitting me …’ He didn’t see that coming. He watched the man like a television show through the glass as the guy pulled an automatic pistol from his coat and aimed at the corner of the windshield.
    A series of muted cracks sounded. Divots appeared in the glass over a several-inch area. Gragg watched this calculated attempt to penetrate his armor with something bordering on admiration. The corners were typically the weakest spots on a bulletproof windshield. It was a cool-headed call – especially with scenery racing past behind him.
    Too bad the glass was three inches of