Free Stackpole, Michael A - Shadowrun by Raven, Wolf

the distance to the girl.
    La Plante had already spun and dove toward the edge of the jetty. Bullets savaged the wooden decking all around him, but the silver-handed man lived a charmed life and avoided Stealth's retribution. A slug from someone's rifle blasted The Chauffeur to the ground, but he kept moving and scurried to cover. I couldn't smell blood because of the cordite filling the air, but I figured him to be smart enough to be swathed in kevlar the same as me.
    A gillette stood up right in front of me. I could see from the way he moved and reacted that he'd not seen me at all and had been angling a shot at one of my compatriots. I shoved the MP-9's snout into his stomach. Because of the speed at which I was running, he folded around it like a knight skewered on a lance, so I kept my finger off the trigger and sprinted the last three steps to the woman.
    Stealth screamed something at me, but I lost everything except his urgent tone amid the gun-battle's thunder. I saw flickering movement and light over by the ship, but I was so intent on the woman, it didn't register fully. Even the acrid, oily scent didn't trigger any emergency alarms in me.
    Traveling at roughly Mach 2.086, the bullet smashed into me between the shoulder blades, just to the right of my spine. Even though the kevlar of my coat snared the bullet before it could penetrate my hide, and the trauma padding absorbed some of the projectile's energy, it still packed quite a punch. It lifted me off my feet like a leaf in a cyclone and tossed me forward. My left arm scooped the woman to my chest as the MP-9 went flying. A heartbeat later I twisted in the air so my back hit the boathouse and shielded her from the collision.
    Suddenly a dragon's-tongue of fire flickered out through the space we had occupied before the bullet gave my feet wings. Without thinking I drew the Viper and pumped two rounds into the grunge wearing the flamethrower. The first bullet drilled an ugly hole into his right thigh, dropping him toward the ground.
    The second bullet took him high in the chest, and his dead body rolled to the foot of the gangplank.
    Before the body had expended all of its momentum, La Plante's visitor appeared at the head of the gangplank and gestured toward the wharf area. In a flash of blinding gold-white fire, a monstrous figure appeared— a creature utterly out of proportion to the rest of us. With golden skin and eyes to match, the heavily muscled cat-thing laughed aloud in a hideous voice as a grunge whirled and emptied his Ingram into it. The bullets ricocheted off in a puff of gold dust, leaving faint freckles on the creature's chest.
    In return for the decoration, the lion wearing a woman's head playfully swatted the grunge with its right Generated by ABC Amber LIT Conv erter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
    paw. When the body hit the ground and stopped rolling, its chest sagged like a broken zeppelin. The torpedoes in La Plante's employ immediately threw their weapons down and lit out for the marina clubhouse and parts beyond. I would have joined them except that the conjured beastie stood between me and that possibility. Kid Stealth, firmly gripped in his own form of battle madness, leaped over the crates he'd been using for cover and attacked the lioness. His leap carried him five meters into the air and nine forward, with sickle-claws glittering like stars in the night sky. The Ceska Scorpion in his left hand sprayed gunfire over the left side of the human profile, then his claws hit. The metal-on-metal scream ripped its way through the night, then died as a feline roar of pain accompanied the gold curlicues Stealth tore out of the monster's left shoulder.
    The creature dropped away from Stealth and rolled quickly onto its back. Stealth retracted his claws and jumped free to avoid being caught and crushed beneath it. In doing so, however, he hung motionless in the air just long enough for the cat's right paw to bat him out toward the bay. He