I smiled grimly to myself. Now, instead of facing three-to-one odds, I would have a one-to-one followed by a two-to-one. It wasn’t perfect, but it was the best I was going to get.
I was two steps from combat range with Thin Blaze when I suddenly remembered Doug.
They will keep you from traveling where you should not go, Hchchu had said about the watchdogs’ job, and prevent you from harming anyone.
And suddenly, I realized this might not be a simple single and duo after all. It might instead end up as a single and a duo plus a pineapple-backed dog under strict orders and with the teeth to back them up. I had no idea how far Doug would go to prevent me from taking out the Fillies, but even if he just hung on to my ankle he was going to severely cramp my style, possibly badly enough to get me killed.
Unless I got creative.
Thin Blaze was almost to me now. I extended my right arm toward him, as if offering to shake hands. Back on the super-express Quadrail I’d successfully nailed Emikai with this one. Time to see if the average non-cop Filly would fall for it, too.
He did. He reached for my extended arm, and as he did so I smoothly withdrew it, forcing him to lean forward as he tried to chase it down.
His full attention was still on the annoyingly elusive arm when I reached across with my left hand, grabbed his right hand, and twisted it up and back. Simultaneously, I grabbed and locked his elbow with my right hand and swiveled around on my left foot, twisting the trapped arm upward and forcing the Filly to bend forward at the waist.
During my sparring sessions with Emikai aboard the Quadrail, I’d always stopped at that point. Here, with three-plus assailants whose ultimate intentions were still unknown, I couldn’t afford to be so charitable. Turning the helpless Filly another ninety degrees, I gave his arm a hard shove and sent him flying straight into his two startled friends.
Their shrieks of surprise, protest, and anger were drowned out as Doug let out a howl of his own, possibly a shot-across-the-bow warning that I’d just crossed the line. The howl turned suddenly into a startled yip as I reached down, scooped him up by his midsection, and hurled him as hard as I could behind me.
My aim and timing were perfect. The two Fillies who were hurrying in from that direction had just enough time to goggle in disbelief before Doug slammed across both their torsos. The impact sent all three of them sprawling in a confused tangle of arms and legs and claw-tipped paws.
There was a farcical aspect to it, but I didn’t have time to properly appreciate the show. Spinning around again, I charged into the first group of Fillies, still off-balance after having had their spokesman slammed into them. Thin Blaze still had his back to me, so I took him first, hammering a blow into one of his upper-leg nerve centers and dropping him hard onto the deck. One of the others, attempting to do a tiger leap at me, instead caught a foot on his friend’s shoulder and took himself down even more efficiently than I could have done. The third managed to actually get off a punch, which I dodged with relative ease before taking him down with a pair of jabs of my own. Leaping over the twitching bodies, putting them between me and my final two opponents, I turned around and prepared for round two—
Only to discover that the fight was over. The two who’d been trying to sneak up on me were still extricating themselves from their entanglement with a dazed-looking Doug, but already they were backing as quickly as they could toward the cross-corridor behind them. By the time they disappeared around the corner the three at my feet were heading in the same direction, crawling then hobbling and finally limping as feeling and function began returning to the relevant parts of their bodies. I watched them go, ignoring their looks of impotent rage, until the last of them had vanished around the corner.
{Incompetent fools,} a voice growled from behind me.
I turned around, simultaneously taking a long step away from the voice toward the middle of the corridor. The door to Yleli’s apartment had slid open, and standing beneath the arch of multicolored paper was the Filly whose furtive exit from the funeral ceremony had caught my attention and sparked this whole thing in the first place.
And now, up close, I saw that I’d been right. Sticking prominently through the V-neck of his tunic was the oversized throat the Filly genetic engineers had given him. The mark of professional singers and Shonkla-raa.
{So be it,} he said, taking a step out of the apartment toward me and letting the door slide closed behind him. {I’ll simply have to do this myself.}
NINE
The mourners in the dome had gone silent again, giving the air the quiet stillness of a midcontinental Western Alliance afternoon just before a thunderstorm. The Filly’s eyes were dark and malevolent, his hands large and ready, the whole package topped off with an unholy glitter of anticipation.
Which didn’t mean I should assume he knew everything. “Sorry—what did you say?” I asked, reprising my ignorant tourist role and wondering how far I could push the game this time.
As it turned out, not very. “Don’t play the fool, Compton,” the Filly said contemptuously, switching to excellent English. “We know all about you, and about your war against my servant the Modhri. A Human of your talents and experience most certainly is capable of understanding Fili.”
“Which you expect to be the language of the future?” I suggested, giving him a quick but careful study. Filly faces were tricky for Humans to tell apart, but I was almost positive that this was the Filly I’d dubbed Blue One, one of the group of Shonkla-raa that Usantra Wandek had dragged Bayta and me in to see when we first arrived at Terese’s medical facility.
“Of course,” he said. “As it was also the language of the past.”
“I’ll have to take your word for that one,” I said. He hadn’t bought my game of pretending not to understand Fili, but maybe I could still convince him I didn’t know the Shonkla-raa were on the rise again. “As to that comment about incompetent fools, what did you expect from local talent? What did you do, grab the nearest bunch of yokels and tell them I was going to trash Yleli’s place?”
“Something like that,” the Filly said, taking another step toward me. “But I didn’t expect anything more from them than to soften you up.”
“You might be surprised at how little softening has actually taken place,” I warned, taking a couple of hasty steps back.
“Oh, don’t look so concerned,” the Filly chided, coming to a halt. “At the moment, you’re worth more to us alive than dead.”
“That’s comforting,” I said, a hard knot forming in my stomach. Of course I was worth keeping alive. Why kill me when a touch of Modhran coral would turn me directly into one of their slaves? “How about you? Are you worth more alive, too?”
He smiled, a thin, evil thing. “If you wish for more combat, I can certainly oblige you.”
“I’m sure you can,” I murmured, trying desperately to think. He could almost certainly take me—that much we both knew. Yet for all that brimming confidence, he didn’t seem in any hurry to get things started. Was he waiting for backup to arrive? More locals, or another Shonkla-raa or two? In either case, giving them time to get into position was a guarantee that I would get my head handed to me.
But what were my other choices? Turning tail and trying to run for it wouldn’t work—from my fight with Asantra Muzzfor aboard the super-express Quadrail I knew that Shonkla-raa were pretty fast on their feet. Besides that, I didn’t much care for the image of being run to ground like an antelope on the Serengeti.
But facing him straight-up and unarmed this way wasn’t going to work, either. What I needed was to find a weapon.