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  ‘Such a shame, I was starting to really like this dress,’ a woman’s voice with a Russian accent said, still muffled slightly by the ringing in his ears. Then there was a flash of purple and everything went black.

  Raven stepped back as the last member of the assault team toppled forward on to the road in a pool of his own blood. She glanced up the road towards the men around the lorry and saw that they were pulling more weapons from the boxes on the pavement. She ducked behind the still burning wreck of their car and dashed between the parked cars at the side of the road. Nero, who Raven had dragged from the burning wreckage, was unsteadily getting to his feet, an angry expression on his face.

  ‘The driver?’ he asked and Raven simply shook her head.

  ‘Time to go,’ she said, pulling the sheaths for her katanas from the back of the ruined car and strapping them on to her back.

  ‘Do you actually go anywhere without those?’ Nero asked, gesturing to the glowing purple blades of Raven’s modified swords.

  ‘I didn’t wear them to the opera, if that’s what you’re asking,’ Raven replied, looking down the street towards the men from the lorry who were cautiously advancing towards the burning car, weapons raised. ‘I left them in the car. I thought they might draw a little too much attention.’

  ‘It is a shame about your dress,’ Nero said as they hurried down the pavement away from the advancing assassins, using the parked cars for cover. Raven’s dress was scorched and torn in several places.

  ‘You can buy me another one when we get out of here,’ Raven replied as she glanced towards the far end of the road where she could see flashing blue lights. ‘Hold these.’ She handed Nero her swords.

  The policeman was just climbing off his motorbike as Raven ran towards him.

  ‘Oh, officer, please help,’ she said in a frightened voice as she approached him. ‘There’s been a terrible accident.’

  ‘It’s OK, miss,’ the officer said. ‘Just calm down and try to tell me exactly what happened. Ambulances are on the w—’

  He would later tell his colleagues that he had no memory of how he had been knocked unconscious. It was less embarrassing than admitting he’d been sucker punched by a beautiful Russian woman in a cocktail dress.

  ‘Get on,’ Raven said, taking her swords back from Nero and strapping them to her back before climbing on to the unconscious policeman’s motorbike. ‘And signal the Shroud.’

  ‘You are aware, of course, that I hate motorbikes,’ Nero said with a sigh as he climbed on to the back of the bike. He reached into his inside pocket as Raven started the bike and hit the emergency signal on his Blackbox. Raven gunned the engine and the bike shot away down the road.

  ‘This is not dramatically improving my opinion of motorbikes!’ Nero yelled from behind her as she wove at high speed through the slow-moving traffic ahead of them.

  Raven glanced at the rear-view mirror and caught a glimpse of something moving more quickly through the traffic. There were three motorbikes behind them, each with a passenger riding pillion. Raven knew that they had to be the backup team that would be sent after them if they had somehow escaped the roadblock. She knew this because it was exactly what she would have done.

  ‘We’ve got company!’ she yelled to Nero, who twisted round and looked behind them.

  ‘Friends of yours?’ Nero replied.

  ‘Yeah,’ Raven said with a grim smile, ‘I think they’re just trying to return some bullets they borrowed from me . . . at about nine hundred and fifty metres per second.’

  Raven jammed the throttle open, suddenly grateful for the big engine in the police bike. She roared up the on-ramp leading up to one of the elevated stretches of high speed dual carriageway that crossed central London. The traffic was not really any lighter up on this new road but it was at least moving more quickly. Raven glanced in the rear-view mirror again and saw that their pursuers were still gaining on them despite the fact she was at full throttle. There was a muzzle flash in the rear-view mirror and a split second later the same mirror exploded into a thousand pieces as it was struck by one of the bullets that whistled past them. Raven weaved left and then right, trying desperately to make them as difficult a target as possible. Despite their situation, she almost laughed out loud as she caught a fleeting glimpse of the astonished look on the face of a passenger in one of the cars they screamed past. Anybody would have thought they’d never seen a woman in a cocktail dress and a man in a dinner suit on the back of a stolen police motorbike.

  She knew that they were running out of time. The bikes behind them were gaining and it would only take one bullet to end this chase very abruptly. She kept sweeping left and right across the road as another bullet pinged off the bodywork at the rear of the bike.

  Suddenly a portal appeared to open in the sky about fifty metres ahead of them as the rear hatch of the cloaked Shroud dropship that had been summoned by Nero’s emergency signal slid open. The pilot was trying to stay at the same speed as their bike but the loading ramp leading up into the aircraft’s interior was still a couple of metres off the ground. Raven knew that if the Shroud flew any lower it would risk a collision with one of the vehicles on the road ahead. She accelerated, closing the distance to the open hatch, her mind racing. How were she and Nero going to both get on board? A crazy idea flew through her mind and in the same instant she realised that it might be their only chance.

  ‘Get me the pilot of that thing on your Blackbox,’ Raven yelled to Nero. After a couple of seconds he passed her the slim device. Raven quickly shouted instructions to the pilot before handing the PDA back to Nero. She pulled one of the swords from her back and set the control on its hilt to switch the variable geometry forcefield that ran along its edge to its sharpest setting. Raven swerved the bike left, towards the safety rail that ran along the side of the raised carriageway as yet another volley of bullets chewed up the tarmac where the bike had been just a split second earlier. She held out the glowing blade and braced herself as its mono-molecular edge sliced through the steel uprights that held the safety rail in place. The blade passed through support after support, each one giving way with a small shower of sparks. After a few seconds she kicked out and sent ten metres of the unsupported safety barrier tumbling over the side of the road.

  ‘Keep your head down,’ Raven yelled to Nero as she braked hard and spun the bike round to face the direction they had just come from, leaving a smouldering semicircle of black tyre rubber on the road. ‘This could get a little bumpy.’

  The bikes that had been chasing them were now only a hundred metres away as Raven gunned the engine and sent the police bike shooting back down the dual carriageway, straight towards them. Raven swerved hard to the right as a bullet passed by her head so close that she heard it buzzing like an angry hornet. She aimed the bike straight for the gap she had just carved out of the safety barrier and held her breath. As the front wheel of the speeding bike passed over the edge of the tarmac the dimly illuminated interior of the Shroud rose into view and the bike vaulted the gap. After what seemed like an interminably long second hanging in the air, the bike’s front wheel slammed down on the dropship’s loading ramp as Raven jammed the brakes on hard, ditching the bike on its side and pushing her and Nero away from it. The pair of them slid to a halt as the bike cartwheeled through the Shroud’s cargo bay before slamming into the bulkhead at the far end with a metallic crunch.

  ‘GO!’ Raven yelled towards the cockpit, leaping to her feet and slapping the button that closed the rear hatch. She ducked down as the pillion gunmen on the two bikes on the road below opened fire. They were wasting their time. The Shroud was too well armoured to be taken down by small arms fire. The hatch closed with a clunk and Raven braced herself as she felt the Shroud’s huge turbine engines rotate from their vertical hover position to full forward thrust as the invisible aircraft rocketed up into the night sky. Nero slowly sat up and brushed himself down.

  ‘Not a typical trip home from the opera,’ he said with a wry
smile.

  ‘Are you OK?’ Raven asked.

  ‘A few bruises in the morning I should imagine,’ Nero replied, getting slowly to his feet. ‘But other than that I’m fine.’

  ‘Good,’ Raven replied. ‘I think we both know what that was.’

  ‘Indeed,’ Nero said with a frown. ‘It appears that the time for discussion has passed. If it’s a fight that our former allies want then that, my dear, is exactly what we are going to give them.’

  chapter three

  ‘I still think it would be easier to just revise for our examinations,’ Wing said with a sigh.

  ‘And again he misses the point,’ Shelby said, grinning.

  They sat on the bed in Otto and Wing’s room in accommodation block seven and watched as Laura and Otto worked carefully on the dismantled device on the desk opposite.

  ‘It’s not cheating,’ Laura said defensively. ‘It’s about seeing whether or not it can be done. It’s the intellectual challenge of it.’

  ‘And the cheating,’ Otto said quickly, ‘don’t forget the cheating.’

  ‘Hmmm,’ Wing said with a look of obvious disapproval on his face.

  ‘You’re not helping, you know,’ Laura said, elbowing Otto in the ribs.

  ‘What?’ Otto said as he finished soldering one of the contact points on the device in front of him. ‘It’s not like we’re being trained to follow the rules here. If anything, I think Nero should reward us for our determination and initiative.’

  ‘Can you fit “determination and initiative” on a headstone?’ Laura asked as she leant in to examine Otto’s handiwork.

  ‘Now who’s not helping?’ Otto said as she peered through the magnifying lens at the device.

  ‘Looks good,’ Laura said. ‘We’ll make a hacker out of you yet, Malpense.’

  ‘Stop, you’re going to make me blush,’ Otto said with a grin.

  ‘All done then?’ Shelby asked, standing up and walking over to Laura and Otto. ‘Because you know how much I enjoy sitting and listening to you two rattle on about quantum phase discombobulators and all, but I’m exhausted.’

  ‘Do we really need to stop now?’ Laura asked. ‘What time is it?’

  ‘Ten minutes till lockdown,’ Shelby replied glancing at her Blackbox PDA, ‘and I for one do not want to end up being escorted to my room by security.’

  ‘Yeah, let’s just try and stay underneath Dekker’s radar as much as possible for the moment, shall we? I doubt that she’d be happy to find out what we’ve been working on,’ Otto said as he opened one of the desk drawers and lifted out the false bottom that he had recently installed. He placed the device inside the hidden compartment along with the various tools that they had managed to acquire from around the school.

  ‘You are, of course, assuming she doesn’t already know,’ Wing said with a slight frown.

  ‘Hey, look on the bright side, big guy,’ Shelby said, quickly kissing him on the cheek, ‘if she does know, at least we’d be locked up together.’

  ‘Hmmm,’ Wing replied, still frowning.

  ‘Come on, Shel,’ Laura said, trying hard not to laugh at the expression on Wing’s face. ‘Let’s leave these two to get their beauty sleep. Heaven knows they need it.’

  ‘Funny,’ Otto replied. ‘No really, you’re funny. Look at me laughing.’

  ‘Awww, did she hurt your feelings?’ Shelby said as Laura walked out of the boys’ room. ‘Don’t worry, we love you really. Even with that face.’

  ‘Missing you already,’ Otto said as Shelby hurried after Laura. ‘Or it might just be stomach cramps, it’s hard to tell, to be honest.’

  Otto put the rest of the contents of the desk drawer back in place, making sure that the hidden compartment was properly concealed.

  ‘Are you sure that this is wise?’ Wing asked, gesturing towards the drawer. ‘Especially if Chief Dekker is watching us as closely as you believe she is.’

  ‘Probably not,’ Otto replied, ‘but let’s face it, it’s hardly the first time that we’ve done something that was a bit risky.’

  ‘I suppose,’ Wing replied, ‘but I have actually been quite enjoying the fact that the past few months have had a lower than average amount of mortal peril. Indeed, I am almost at the point where I have forgotten what it is like to be afraid for my life or those of the people I care about.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Otto replied with a smile. ‘I’m sure that something spectacularly dangerous will happen soon enough. We wouldn’t want life to get boring, now would we?’

  ‘I like boring,’ Wing said, raising an eyebrow. ‘In fact, I would go so far as to say that I am becoming a genuine fan of boring.’

  ‘I’ll be sure to let Shelby know just how boring you think the past few months have been,’ Otto said, grinning. ‘I’m sure she won’t mind.’ Otto never liked to miss a chance to tease his best friend about his relationship with Shelby and this was too good an opportunity to pass up.

  ‘I’d rather you didn’t,’ Wing said, the tiniest smile appearing on his face. ‘I am still training her in the art of self-defence and our sparring sessions are quite painful enough as it is, thank you.’

  ‘You guys are still getting on OK, I assume?’ Otto asked as he pulled his Blackbox out of his pocket and placed it on his bedside table.

  ‘Yes, though it is occasionally puzzling,’ Wing said with a slight frown. ‘It sometimes appears that what Shelby says she wants and what she actually wants are two entirely different things. It can sometimes lead to . . . confusion.’

  ‘I really hate to tell you this, Wing,’ Otto said with a grin, ‘but I think that’s actually the way it’s supposed to work.’

  Dr Nero looked up from the tablet display he had been studying as Raven walked into his office. He nodded towards the seat on the other side of his desk.

  ‘I’ve received word from other members of the new ruling council,’ Nero said as Raven sat down. ‘There were assassination attempts on several of them at exactly the time that we were attacked in London. Two were successful. Jacobs and Milton are dead.’

  ‘Damn it,’ Raven said softly. ‘Why did we not see this coming?’

  ‘To be honest, I did,’ Nero replied, ‘but there was still a part of me that was hoping it would not come to this. The former council members may not be a part of G.L.O.V.E. any longer but they still have considerable resources at their disposal and they are of course intimately familiar with the way in which our organisation operates. They will have operatives within G.L.O.V.E. who are still loyal to them and I would expect them to ruthlessly exploit any weakness that those informants expose. There could hardly be a more dangerous enemy.’

  ‘I could try to root out any traitors who are feeding them information,’ Raven suggested.

  ‘No,’ Nero replied, ‘the last thing we need just now is a witch hunt. That’s exactly what they want, us turning inwards and fighting amongst ourselves. We just need to be doubly cautious and ensure that we control precisely who has access to sensitive information at the moment. Speaking of which, I’ve just been reviewing the dossiers of the latest intake of students.’ Some of them have great potential.’

  ‘You still want to go ahead with the retrieval of the new intake under the circumstances?’ Raven asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Nero replied. ‘I will not let this disrupt the normal running of H.I.V.E. The new intake proceeds as planned.’

  ‘Understood. The retrieval teams are all on standby,’ Raven answered with a nod. ‘Just give the word and we can begin the operation.’

  ‘Good,’ Nero said. ‘I trust that you don’t foresee any particular problems.’

  ‘No, a couple of the targets have proven to be somewhat . . . elusive, but it’s nothing I can’t handle.’

  ‘Of course,’ Nero replied. He had learnt over the years that there were very few problems that the woman sat opposite him could not resolve. ‘And preparations for the Hunt?’

  ‘Everything’s in place,’ Raven said with a slight smile. ‘I’ve
reconnoitred the operational area and it’s all clear. I’ll be ready to run the first assessment exercise as soon as the new student recruitment is complete. You know, in a strange way I’m actually quite looking forward to spending some time in that part of the world. It’s really quite beautiful, you know. It will almost be like a holiday.’

  ‘Remind me to never let you select my vacation destinations,’ Nero replied.

  ‘If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were getting soft, Max,’ Raven said with a wry smile. ‘You should come along and monitor the Hunt in person. Get out from behind that desk for a while.’

  ‘I’m quite happy behind this desk, thank you,’ Nero replied, raising an eyebrow slightly. ‘And I’ll be perfectly content to track the progress of the Hunt from a secure and more importantly warm monitoring station.’

  ‘Definitely getting soft,’ Raven said, her grin widening as she stood up to leave. ‘So, do you want me to launch the retrieval operations?’

  ‘Yes, but make sure that the catch squads understand the need for caution at the moment, Natalya,’ Nero said. ‘There are quite enough ruffled feathers out there already without us adding any more fuel to the fire.’

  Nero was particularly keen to make sure that the operation to forcibly recruit the latest crop of students for H.I.V.E. went smoothly. The school needed new blood now more than ever. Events surrounding the demise of Overlord had led to him taking the highly controversial decision to disband the ruling council of G.L.O.V.E., the Global League of Villainous Enterprise. To say that decision had caused chaos amongst the ranks of the world’s villains was an understatement. A few of the members of the council had agreed with his reasoning and were cooperating with his plan to rebuild G.L.O.V.E. as a more stable organisation, without the treachery and deceit that had run like a cancer through the old league. Most, however, had argued that what he was attempting was little more than a massive coup d’état and that he was simply trying to consolidate his own power base. He had to concede that he could understand why some people would see it that way. He may have known that his motives were genuine but it had proven impossible to convince many of G.L.O.V.E.’s former leaders that that was the case. One of the side effects of all of this was that H.I.V.E. had lost a significant number of students. While many of the children at the school were recruited against their will after displaying some particular talent for villainy, some were what Nero referred to as legacy students. They were the students whose parents were already part of the global villain community and had elected to send their offspring to H.I.V.E. so that they could be prepared for entry into the family business. A significant number of those students had been withdrawn from the school in protest at Nero’s decision to disband the council. The last thing he needed at the moment were any further complications.