“Understood,” Fayr said “Move them to the front of the car. We’ll make our stand there.”
He looked at me as if daring me to argue the point. But I just nodded as I moved to the final Filly. “Sounds good,” I said. “Let me finish this scan and I’ll help you move some of the chairs. Might as well make them come at us one at a time.”
“Good idea,” Fayr said, looking around the car as his men started moving their injured to a section of floor near the front vestibule door. “What about them?” he asked, nodding toward the two sleeping passengers.
“Leave them,” I said. “If we wake them up, they’ll just be inconvenient witnesses that the Shonkla-raa will have to kill. No point making this any more of a bloodbath than it has to be.”
Fayr eyed me closely. “Such words imply you expect the Shonkla-raa to win.”
“Well, they sure as hell have the numbers,” Morse said darkly as he unfastened one of the seats from the floor and began moving it toward where the Bellidos were setting up shop. “All of us together—with the element of surprise—barely took down three of them who weren’t expecting trouble. They’ve got two more back there, plus ten Eyes.”
“Eleven, counting you,” Fayr said pointedly.
Morse grimaced. “Good point,” he conceded. “Maybe you’d better take me out of the equation right now.”
“One walker more or less isn’t going to make that much difference,” I said grimly. “Especially one with a cracked rib or two. Besides, numbers or not, we still have the edge in weaponry.”
“So we do,” Morse said, frowning at the nunchaku in Fayr’s hand as he passed the Bellido on his way to another seat. “How in hell did you get those aboard, anyway?”
“Quite openly, in fact,” I told him. “All they are is a pair of status gun barrels, filled with water and sealed with pressure-threaded caps, then tied together with the guns’ decorative tassels.”
“Interesting,” Morse said. “The ESS experimented with stuff like that on occasion. But I don’t think they ever came up with anything nearly this effective.”
“You really have to be a Bellido loaded with status guns to get away with it,” I reminded him as I finished the final scan and put the reader away. “Let me know when you’re in contact with the rest of the mind segment, will you? It might be useful to know how the Shonkla-raa are lining up before they pop that door.”
“Bear in mind that if we can spy on them, they can also spy on us,” Fayr pointed out as he pushed another of the seats toward the barricade Morse and the others were putting together. “And if you don’t feel like disabling Agent Morse, you should at least order him to stand well away from us.” He turned to look at Terese and Rebekah. “And the female walker should go with him.”
I grimaced. The last thing any of us wanted was to have an enemy operative in our midst, and Rebekah qualified almost as much as Morse did.
On the other hand, Rebekah’s polyp colony was the modified Melding variety, which I’d already seen wasn’t quite as firmly under Shonkla-raa control as Morse’s standard Modhran colony.
Moreover, we already knew the Shonkla-raa wanted to get hold of both Rebekah and her crates of coral. If I put Rebekah on the enemy side of the car, the Fillies might decide to grab her and call it a day. I couldn’t risk that. “Morse can go away,” I told Fayr. “But Rebekah will stay with us. Bayta and Terese can hang on to her and make sure she doesn’t cause any trouble.”
“That’s dangerous,” Fayr warned. “Particularly since Bayta will be helpless once the control tone sounds.”
“Specifically, she’ll mostly freeze in place,” I said. “If she’s already got her arms locked around Rebekah, they should stay that way. And Terese will be there to help, too.”
“We’ll keep her from making trouble,” Bayta said quietly.
Fayr still looked dubious. But he nevertheless nodded. “Very well,” he said. “But Morse leaves.”
“No argument,” I agreed, catching Morse’s eye and pointing him toward the back corner near the Cimma. “Over there, Morse, if you please.”
“Let me help you finish the barrier first,” Morse said, heading for another seat.
“I’d rather you move away from us,” Fayr said tartly before I could answer. “We don’t know exactly when you’ll be fully under Shonkla-raa control.”
“It won’t be until they get in here with their damn command tone,” Morse said. But he obediently passed by the chair he’d been heading for and retreated to the car’s rear corner near the Cimma.
The rest of us were just putting the final touches on the barrier of chairs cutting across the front third of the car when Morse reported that his Modhran colony was once again in contact with the walkers behind us. I told him to inform the Shonkla-raa that we were on our way back, that we would let them in once the train had been reconnected, and to please stop trying to jimmy open the vestibule door.
But my effort was for nothing. The Shonkla-raa had apparently instructed the Modhri to keep quiet, which meant none of the walkers could speak without a direct question or invitation from their new masters. Unfortunately, that left us with no option but to try to get the train back together before they succeeded in forcing open the door.
Morse also informed us that the planned assault line would be five walkers, followed by one Shonkla-raa, followed by the remaining walkers and the other Shonkla-raa. A nicely logical arrangement, I decided, giving them the maximum level of control while allowing the thrust of our counterattack to fall on the walkers instead of their masters.
For all of their arrogance and megalomania, the Shonkla-raa unfortunately weren’t stupid.
Bayta was even less use, info-wise, than Morse and the Modhri. As I’d told Fayr, the tone that controlled the Modhri also paralyzed and dazed Spiders, effectively knocking them out of the telepathic communications network. Bayta could sense the overall physical state of the Spider that the Shonkla-raa were using to pry open the door, but that was about it.
The defenders on the roofs of both cars were unaffected, though, and Bayta was able to keep tabs on the reconnection procedure. By the time the cars had been locked and the vestibule reattached all of us except Morse were standing ready behind the barrier of chairs. Bayta and Terese were holding tightly on to Rebekah as I’d ordered, all three women pale-faced but clearly determined not to give up without a fight. I stood in the middle of the line of Bellidos, the kwi tingling in my hand as I pointed it toward the vestibule door.
The door slid open, and as the command tone burst out into the car I saw a line of figures in the vestibule behind a big Halka glowering at me from in front. Aiming at his torso, I opened fire.
The standard military strategy when you’re clustered together against incoming fire with no cover is to get clear of the choke point as quickly as possible. But the walkers didn’t do that. They instead stayed right where they were, huddled behind the Halka.
And to my bewilderment, the Halka wasn’t moving, either. Especially he wasn’t falling. He was still standing upright, apparently immune to the kwi’s effect.
I put two more shots into him before I belatedly realized what was going on. The Halka wasn’t one of the walkers, but was simply some first-class passenger who’d been grabbed and forcibly planted at the front of the line. My first shot had indeed rendered him unconscious, but the walkers behind him were holding or propping him up to act as a living shield.
I got off one final shot, trying to aim past the Halka’s bulk, before Bayta succumbed to the tone and the kwi went silent.