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Doug woofed and bobbed his head in an affirmative. “While I do that,” I continued, “I want you to find some stairs leading to the corridor down there, so that once Bayta and I are out we can sneak back up here. If there isn’t any such access, we’ll have to split up—you head to Bay 39 on your own, and we’ll do the same. Think you can do that?”

Doug woofed again, and with a flick of his tail turned and headed back through the tangle of equipment. I finished tying the cable, slid the coil in through the access panel, then returned to the open section and squeezed through. The opening between fan blades was small, but the thought of Bayta in Shonkla-raa hands was a powerful motivator. A few seconds later I’d made it through and was at the grille.

I had two of the four fasteners off and was starting on the third when Minnario’s comm vibrated in my pocket.

I grabbed it, wondering if I dared take the time to get out of the cylinder before answering. All I needed now was to have one of the Shonkla-raa down there hear a Human voice wafting down at him from heaven.

But the minute I entered the dome life was likely to get very hectic indeed. Keying the comm, I pressed it close to my ear and mouth. “Compton,” I murmured.

“Emikai,” Emikai identified himself, an edge of grim satisfaction in his voice. “We have found her.”

I peered through the grille. Nothing out of the ordinary seemed to be happening down there. “Where?”

“A medical storage facility in Sector 18-B,” he said. “The patrollers are surrounding the area now.”

I felt the sudden pounding of my pulse in my throat. Could the Modhri be wrong about Bayta being in the medical dome below me?

Or had he never intended for me to find her in the first place? Had this whole thing been nothing but a scheme by the Shonkla-raa to get me out of the way while they dragged Bayta’s secrets out of her? “How did they find her?” I managed.

“The locator in her comm,” Emikai said with even more satisfaction. “Most people who disable their locators do not realize that law enforcers can reactivate them.”

I smiled tightly. So actually, they hadn’t found Bayta. All they’d found was her comm. An old trick, and a rather childish one at that, but Wandek probably figured that any time he could gain was worth the effort, even if it meant sending Bayta’s comm on a trip across the station. “I didn’t know that myself,” I lied. “Clever.”

“Do you want me to join the patrollers in their sweep?” Emikai asked. “I have completed the first part of my errand. I could go to 18-B before I seek out Attorney Minnario.”

“No, that’s all right,” I said. He had better things to do than join the rest of Proteus’s Jumpsuits in a wild-goose chase. “I’m closer to 18-B—I’ll go. You concentrate on getting Minnario to the bay without being spotted or stopped. Can you alert the patrollers that I’m coming and to hold off their raid until I arrive?”

“I will try,” Emikai said doubtfully. “But it may be difficult to hold them back. Filiaelians do not like kidnappers.”

“Neither does anyone else,” I said. “Tell them I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

I keyed off the comm and peered again through the grille. All seemed normal down there. Apparently, they hadn’t heard me, after all.

And then, the two Fillies I’d seen loitering along the approaches to Building Eight simultaneously strolled away from their posts. Their eyes moved casually around the upper part of the dome as they walked, as if they were merely admiring the mountain painting.

But I wasn’t fooled by the carefully crafted nonchalance. They’d heard me, all right, or else the broken fan had clued someone in to the fact that trouble was skulking around up here.

Either way, I was out of time. Wrapping the power cord once around my left leg, I got a grip on it with my left hand, pulled my right foot back, and kicked as hard as I could into the center of the grille.

It popped out with gratifying ease and a clatter that could probably be heard three corridors away. Kicking the coil out of the cylinder, I shoved myself off the lip into the open air and slid toward the deck below.

The two Fillies were already racing toward my landing point, along with three others I hadn’t been able to see from my angle. I yanked out my Beretta as I slid toward the ground, lined the muzzle up on the nearest of them, and fired.

The first shot was easy, the snoozer dropping the running Filly into a face-first sprawl and skid on the deck. Unfortunately, shooting while hanging from a rope meant the first shot was the only easy one you got. The gun’s recoil threw me into a sudden violent spin, and I wasted my second shot before I was able to nail one of the other Fillies with my third.

And then my feet hit the deck, my bending knees dropping me into a crouch as they absorbed the impact. The remaining Fillies were still coming toward me, but now that I had a stable firing platform I was able to drop them with three quick shots. Dodging through the field of sprawled bodies, I headed toward Building Eight at a dead run.

I was halfway there when the building’s door opened and two more Fillies stepped into view. They took a couple of paces toward me and stopped, waiting for me to come to them. I considered giving them a snoozer each, decided to wait until I was closer and could enjoy the thuds as they hit the floor, and kept going.

I don’t know what it was that alerted me: an incautious step, a hint of reflection off a window, or just some sixth sense I’d developed during the long months of this war. Whatever it was, I suddenly felt unfriendly eyes on the back of my head, and half turned to look over my shoulder.

All five of the Shonkla-raa I’d just put on the deck were on their feet again, loping silently toward me in an attempt to put me in a pincer that would take me down for good.

And as I skidded to a halt and spun around to face them, the Filly in the lead hurled himself into a pouncing tiger leap straight at me.

There was no time to line up a shot. I ducked to the side out of his path, dodged his flailing arm, and slammed the Beretta’s muzzle hard into his side as he passed.

Only instead of feeling the softness of flesh and the slightly flexible hardness of the bone structure beneath it, I felt the muzzle bounce off something hard and unyielding.

Apparently, Wandek had learned from Jagged Nose’s encounter with me outside Hchchu’s office and had dug up a few sets of snoozer-proof body armor.

The Filly sailing past finished his arc, landing and instantly spinning around for another try. Again slapping his arms out of the way, I jammed the Beretta’s muzzle up under his jaw, right where it joined his neck, and fired.

Snoozer rounds were designed to be fired through normal clothing from at least a couple of meters’ distance, and putting one directly into his throat this way was probably going to cause a significant amount of damage. But right now, I didn’t give a damn. As he gurgled and started to fall, I did a quick two-step around him to put him between me and the other four attackers and started methodically putting snoozers into their unprotected noses.

The old Shonkla-raa might once have been the undisputed lords of the galaxy, but I doubted that many of them had ever done any of their own actual fighting. This bright new generation probably hadn’t done any, either, and I fully expected that the sight of my exposed back would be more temptation than the two Fillies standing by Building Eight could resist.