Free Only Forward by Michael Marshall Smith

simply lose my fingers before falling the ten feet into the water, from which there was no hope of getting back up again. The pipe itself was only about a yard across. I estimated my chances of swinging myself neatly into it in a crouched position, as the lunatic Snedd had done, at just less than nil.
    Bollocks, I thought, my arms beginning to hurt. Bollocks.
    I might have hung there all day, or as long as my arms held out, had I not suddenly been given a massive incentive to move. There was a rush of air in front of my stomach, and a fraction of a second later I heard the soft phip of an energy rifle shot. As I looked round wildly, the same thing happened again.
    Some bastard was shooting at me.
    Intensely concerned at this development, I started to swing back and forwards as hard as I could, simultaneously craning my neck round to see where the shot was coming from. I couldn't see anything, but a whining ricochet off the top of the walkway thirty seconds later removed the minimal chance that it had been an accident.
    Somebody was actually shooting at me. They really were. I couldn't get over it. Give me a break, I thought. Surely I have enough grief on my plate as it is?
    The Stable police must have posted someone to guard the hole from the outside. That's who I'd seen in the Square. I stopped craning and sheltered my head behind one of my arms, now swinging back and forth at quite some speed. As I swung back another energy bullet slashed though the air where my stomach had been the moment before, and I decided that I had to get the hell out of this position.
    Another shot spun behind me as I swung forward, and I realised that I was going to have to go for it soon: the bullets were getting closer and closer. As I swung back I braced my wrists and tensed my arms: when I reached the highest point I was going to I whipped my arms as hard as I could, waited till I was speeding forwards, and let go.
    I came closer than I can say to screwing it up. I'd been so intent on flinging myself off as hard as possible that my feet went too far ahead of me, and for a terrible moment it looked as though I was going to end up smacking into the wall back first, smashing my skull in the process. I jacked my legs down and thrust forward with my arms, achieving semi-upright flight just in time to slam painfully into the wall just to the side of the pipe. As I fell I scrabbled out with my hands and the right one caught the lip of the outlet. I whipped the left over to it and for a moment my fingers slipped down the old masonry, but then they held.
    A bullet smacked into the rock a foot from my head. Christ on a bike, I thought irritably, why not blindfold me and set my clothes on fire too? Desperately, but carefully so I didn't slip, I hauled myself up towards the lip of the pipe. My right arm was in far enough to get a minimal grip on a groove in there when another bullet cracked into the wall, this one much closer.
    Sod it, I thought, and just heaved. I was up over the lip and into the pipe in one surprisingly fluid movement, in time to see a large chunk of rock disappear out of the wall at the level where my lungs had been seconds before. I scooted up the tunnel a couple of yards, until I was safe, and then sat down heavily, chest heaving. Things, I realised, had gone from crap to really, traumatically crap. There was no further sound of gunfire, but the guard outside would surely be radioing to the ones inside that an intrusion through the pipe was in progress.
    I'm pretty tough, actually, by most people's standards, but I'm not Snedd: if they knew I was coming, then three machine-gun-toting guards were going to be more than I could handle. Unfortunately, there was nothing else I could do. I couldn't go back, because the guard would be standing there, sight steady on the entrance to the pipe. Even if I sped down he'd be able to get me as soon as I hit the water, and I didn't want to die by being shot full of holes in a lake of turd soup. It