Tunnels 05 - Spiral

superhuman speed. In a blur he’d disarmed the other two Limiters, quite literally tearing one of the soldier’s heads from his torso, using only his bare hands.
    Although it all happened in not much more than the blink of an eye, Will allowed himself to think they might be in the clear.
    Until the Styx twin shouted at him.
    “You’re not getting out of this one, Will!” Rebecca One cried. “Not this time!”
    She’d drawn her handgun and was pointing it directly at him.
    Will was frozen to the spot.
    Rebecca One’s finger tightened on the trigger.
    In a heartbeat, Drake was on the move.
    “Sparks!” he cried, flinging the test tube at him as he put himself in the way of the bullet meant for Will. It struck Drake in the shoulder, but his momentum was enough to carry him forward. As Rebecca One went for a second shot, he swept her over into the crater with him.
    Vane had joined the fray, but she’d set her sights on Elliott. The Styx woman pounced at the girl, knocking her to the ground. The egg tubes were out of her mouth and trying to insert themselves into Elliott’s.
    Will had his Sten up and was attempting to get a clear shot at the Styx woman. But Vane knew this, and kept rolling over, taking Elliott with her. Will dropped his Sten, instead trying to pry the woman off with his hands.
    But, as if they had minds of their own, the pairs of insect limbs were lashing at him like animated lengths of barbed wire. As he came close to Vane, one of the limbs raked across his face, opening up a gash on his cheek.
    An egg tube sank into Elliott’s mouth. The girl was shouting with alarm, but it was garbled.
    Will could see a pod squeezing down the tube.
    “Come here, blondie,” Sweeney growled. He wrenched Vane from Elliott, the woman’s insect limbs bunched together in one of his massive hands. The Styx woman could do nothing as she was lifted from the ground, her legs kicking ineffectually.
    Sweeney turned to the approaching Styx Limiter and troop of New Germanians, Vane suspended high in the air. She was wailing like a banshee, liquid spraying everywhere. “You make tracks right now, or I’ll squash Ugly here under my foot!” he shouted.
    The Limiter hesitated.
    “Shove off, Sticky!” Sweeney shouted. He shook Vane threateningly. “I’m not going to tell you again!”
    The Limiter didn’t have much idea of what had just happened, but in the absence of any other orders, he couldn’t put Vane’s life at risk. So he and the New Germanian squad turned the way they’d come.
    “Drake!” Elliott gasped as she picked herself up. She and Will tore to the edge of the crater and peered in. Although they’d already fallen a long way, they could see that Drake and Rebecca One were still locked together in their struggle with each other.

    Lower and lower they fell, spinning dizzyingly around. Drake’s arm was broken at the shoulder and he couldn’t move it. And although his hand was numb and his fingers unresponsive, he hadn’t let go of the detonator. With his other arm he was trying to stop Rebecca One from taking a shot at him.
    But he was losing blood and could feel himself succumbing to shock. Drawing on his last reserves of energy, he managed to wrestle the pistol from her grip. It went spinning off, but now she tried to gouge at his face and eyes with her nails.
    He had a glimpse of the side of the void, a red blur as it flashed past him. He realized how far they’d fallen.
    He knew he probably wasn’t far from the nuclear device he’d planted.
    But he didn’t know if Sweeney would detonate it with him directly in the blast radius.
    He couldn’t take that risk.
    At that moment, Drake knew he was likely to lose his life.
    Rebecca One was preventing him from reaching the detonator with his good hand. But he had to reach it somehow.
    That was when he remembered the booster attached to the side of his Bergen. He stopped shielding his face from the twin’s vicious onslaught and managed to detach the booster and fire it up. The propellant mix was still on the maximum setting from when he’d last used the booster.
    He and the Rebecca twin accelerated down the rest of the void, quickly reaching breakneck speed.
    Drake angled the booster so that they went into a spin. His limp arm swung into his field of vision and into his reach.
    They were still moving at an incredible rate as he cut the booster and snatched the detonator from his numb fingers.
    He and Rebecca One had almost reached the