“Okay, Sasha. You lost ’em,” the radio says. “But you still got a couple of them poon things hanging off your belly, so make sure you don’t snag ’em on anything. The cables are stronger than steel.”
That’s all Y.T. needs. She opens the door and jumps out of the chopper.
At least that’s how it looks to the people inside. Actually she grabs a handhold on her way down and ends up dangling from the swinging, open door, looking inward toward the belly of the chopper. A couple of poons are stuck to it; thirty feet below, she can see the handles dangling on the ends of their lines, fluttering in the airstream. Looking into the open door she can’t hear Rife but she can see him, sitting there next to the pilot, motioning: Down, take it down!
Which is what she figured. This hostage thing works two ways. She’s no good to Rife unless he’s got her, and she’s in one piece.
The chopper starts losing altitude again, heading back down toward the twin stripe of loglo that marks out the avenue beneath them. Y.T. gets swinging back and forth on the door a little, finally swings in far enough that she can hook one of the poon cables with her foot.
This next bit is going to hurt like hell. But the tough fabric of the coverall should prevent her from losing too much skin. And the sight of Tony lunging at her, trying to grab her sleeve, reinforces her own natural tendency not to think about it too hard. She lets go of the chopper’s door with one of her hands, grabs the poon cable, winds it around the outside of her glove a couple of times, then lets go with the other hand.
She was right. It does hurt like hell. As she swings down under the belly of the chopper, out of Tony’s grasp, something pops inside her hand—probably one of those dinky little bones. But she gets the poon cable wrapped around her body the same way Raven did when he rappeled off the ship with her, and manages a controlled, burning slide down to the end.
Down to the handle, that is. She hooks it onto her belt so she can’t fall and then thrashes around for what seems like a whole minute until she’s not tangled up in the cable anymore, just dangling by the waist, twisting around and around between the chopper and the street, out of control. Then she gets the handle in both hands and unhooks it from her belt so she’s hanging by the arms again, which was the whole point of the exercise. As she rotates, she sees the other chopper above her and off to the side, glimpses the faces watching her, knows that all of this is being relayed, over the radio, to Rife.
Sure enough. The chopper cuts to about half its former speed, loses some altitude.
She clicks another control and reels out the line all the way to the end, dropping twenty feet in one thrill-packed moment. Now she’s flying along, ten or fifteen feet above the highway, doing maybe forty-five miles an hour. The logo signs shoot past her on either side like meteors. Other than a swarm of Kouriers, traffic is light.
The RARE chopper comes thwacking in, dangerously close, and she looks up at it, just for an instant, and sees Raven looking at her through the window. He’s pulled his goggles up on his forehead, just for a second. He’s got a certain look on his face, and she realizes that he’s not pissed at her at all. He loves her.
She lets go of the handle and goes into free fall.
At the same time, she jerks the manual release on her cervical collar and goes into full Michelin Man mode as tiny gas cartridges detonate in several strategic locations around her bod. The biggest one goes off like an M-80 at the nape of her neck, unfurling the coverall’s collar into a cylindrical gasbag that shoots straight up and encases her entire head. Other airbags go off around her torso and her pelvis, paying lots of attention to that spinal column. Her joints are already protected by the armorgel.
Which is not to say that it doesn’t hurt when she lands. She can’t see anything because of the airbag around her head, of course. But she feels herself bouncing at least ten times. She skids for a quarter of a mile and apparently caroms off several cars along the way; she can hear their tires squealing. Finally, she goes butt first through someone’s windshield and ends up sprawled across their front seat; they veer into a Jersey barrier. The airbag deflates as soon as everything stops moving, and she claws it away from her face.
Her ears are ringing or something. She can’t hear anything. Maybe she busted her eardrums when the airbags went off.
But there’s also the question of the big chopper, which has a talent for making noise. She drags herself out onto the hood of the car, feeling little hunks of safety glass beneath her carving parallel scratches into the paint job.
Rife’s big Soviet chopper is right there, hovering about twenty feet above the avenue, and by the time she sees it, it has already accumulated a dozen more poons. Her eyes follow the cables down to street level, and she sees Kouriers straining at the lines; this time, they’re not letting go.
Rife gets suspicious, and the chopper gains altitude, lifting the Kouriers off their planks. But a passing double-bottom semi sheds a small army of Kouriers—there must be a hundred of them pooned onto the poor thing—and within a few seconds, all their MagnaPoons are airborne and at least half of them stick to the armor plating on the first try. The chopper lurches downward until all of the Kouriers are on the ground again. Twenty more Kouriers come flying in and nail it; those that can’t, grab onto someone else’s handle and add their weight. The chopper tries several times to rise, but it may as well be tethered to the asphalt by this point.
It starts to come down. The Kouriers fan out away from it so that the chopper comes down in the middle of a radial burst of poon cables.
Tony, the security guy, climbs down out of the open door, moving slowly, high-stepping his way through the web of cables but somehow retaining his balance and his dignity. He walks away from the chopper until he is out from under the rotor blades, then pulls an Uzi out from under his windbreaker and fires a short air burst.