Free Immortal Twilight by James Axler Page A

cherry-red car. The vehicle was clear of the skyway road now, fifteen feet past the raised crash barriers and beginning to drop as acceleration gave way to gravity. Even as the vehicle spiraled through the air, pulled toward the ground, the front end fell away and plummeted over the edge of the docks toward the ocean, the glow of superheated metal shining like lightning where the laser had cut through it.
    The Deathbird fired again, sending bullets in a steady stream at the careening vehicle. Inside, Brigid pulled herself in a ball as best as she could, wincing as the bullets struck the side of the car with the loud report of hail on a tin roof. A moment later the car—or what was left of it—struck the side of the shipyard building in a crash of plate glass, breaking through on the second story and sending a dozen workers running. It skidded across the tiled floor on its right wing for twenty feet before striking a wall and coming to a halt.
    Noise was replaced by silence, like an emptiness had come in the wake of the crashing car. Outside, the Deathbird spun in place above the elevated roadway, searching for its target, unable to get low enough or close enough to see where Brigid had landed. The car had left a streak of scuffed paint across the pale floor tiles where it had come through the windows. It looked like a trail of blood, leading to a wounded animal. Office workers were poised around the red wreck, stunned and helpless as they wondered what had just happened.
    Inside, Brigid felt one hundred new aches in places she didn’t know could hurt. Even if this was a dream, it still hurt like hell. And there was no way of waking up, not with the glist buzzing around her system and the whole VR dream engine feeding information to her brain. She had to play it out or shut it down. There weren’t any other options. But then, that’s why she was here, wasn’t it?
    She shifted against the seat restraint, reaching up to the driver’s side door where it now sat to her left but also above her. She tried the handle, pushed at the door. The door was heavy, and its springs seemed determined to get it closed again as soon as she had it open more than an inch. She cursed, an incomprehensible shriek of annoyance, then leaned across until she could shove at the door with both hands. After a moment, the door swung open and teetered there, scraping against the ceiling of the room.
    It was a lobby, Brigid saw when she climbed free of the wreck. In a moment she was on the floor, eyeing the office workers who watched her with incomprehension. She stood before them, dressed in formfitting black leather that accentuated her sinuous limbs, her long legs ending in heeled boots that came midway up her thighs. Her hair was in disarray from the crash and she shook it back—regretted it instantly when the impact of the crash left her dizzy.
    “You need help, miss?” one of the office people asked, tentatively offering Brigid his hand.
    Help? No. She just needed to remember everything so she could run the op the way they’d planned it. Where she was just now, the so-called traum wirklichkeit, was a faked reality designed to confuse the senses. Users would enter the dream structures after they’d been primed with glist, the psychedelic drug distilled from mutie sweat, creating a seamless transition from real to dream, where a preset environment was waiting to greet them. The environments varied from dream factory to dream factory, but the principles were always the same—once the user was in the dream he or she should never have cause to question it, even though it was at its core a highly advanced computer simulation. The glist smoothed off the hard edges, making it seem more real, turning the traum wirklichkeit into the user’s only reality.
    In theory, there was no way to awaken from a traum wirklichkeit experience until the operators—generally black-market criminal gangs—stepped in to bring a user around. That gave the operators