Without a glance back towards Badger, watching from the shadows, River stepped between the two technicians-come-guards, the only occupants of the space shuttle sent by her pursuers to apprehend her. This was going to be easier than she’d thought. Only two guards! Did they think she’d gone soft? She smiled faintly to herself as her brain whirred into action, assessing the angles and trigonometry of the small craft. Killing people with maths was always fun.

Badger had tied her hands tightly behind her back and one of the two uniformed goons had just checked on Badger’s thoroughness. Satisfied, they closed the doors and made ready to take off.

Neither guard was therefore watching as River adeptly untangled her hands and carefully sized up each of them. Her eyes raked the cabin and located the three cameras positioned to see every angle. Clearly the masterminds of her capture were watching. The cameras would have to be taken care of swiftly, if she could. Two of the three cameras were fairly low down. She didn’t have much time. A shuttle like this was strictly short distance. With precision, grace and artistry, she rose up suddenly from the bench on which she sat, and, using a sideways hand chop to the windpipe and a right-footed kick to the head, she felled both guards nigh on simultaneously and with an exactness which meant that each body was slumped neatly over one of the two lower cameras. Then reaching up using the follow-through of the same fluid movement with which she had felled the first guard, she gently angled the final camera so it had a nice, if restricting, view of the cabin roof.

So far so good. She lent down and divested one of the guards of his gun. Her slim plan was to crash the shuttle, making it look like all on board had perished. Hopefully, if her calculations were correct, this would not be the case. The mathematics was tricky though and the next bit was gonna hurt. She pulled a piece of webbing from a guards belt and tied it in a tourniquet tight round the third finger of he