And the walkers finally made their move.
“Bayta!” I snapped, uselessly squeezing the kwi’s trigger as the walkers began to file into the car, the first one in line casually and uncaringly dropping the unconscious Halka off to the side out of their way. “Bayta! Defenders! Anyone!”
But Bayta was already helpless, her arms frozen around an equally frozen Rebekah, and the defenders on the roof couldn’t hear me though the haze swirling through Bayta’s mind and from hers into theirs. Swearing under my breath, I dropped the kwi back in my pocket and picked up the nunchaku I’d borrowed from one of the injured Bellidos.
I’d half expected the walkers to come charging in screaming at the tops of their lungs like Viking berserkers, hoping to overwhelm us with sheer momentum. But the Shonkla-raa in charge of this particular mob were more subtle than that. The walkers strode stolidly into our car in a complete silence that accentuated the whistling from the Filly behind them. The line moved to the center of the car, staying well clear of our barricade and weapons, and neatly spread out to both sides as the second wave marched in behind them. The second group similarly fanned out into a battle line. As they arranged themselves, Morse, standing stiffly in his corner, moved up to join one end of the first battle line.
The two Shonkla-raa themselves, I noted cynically, stayed a good five paces behind the walkers, where they were even more out of range of our nunchakus.
“Nice,” I complimented them, mostly just to get in the first word. “You do children’s parties, too?”
Deliberately, the Filly on the right lowered his gaze to the three dead Shonkla-raa still sprawled on the floor where we’d left them. Then, he looked up at me and gestured to his companion. I tensed, but the other Filly merely took a step backward, and I could hear him crank his command tone volume up a couple of notches. “Impressive, Compton,” the first Shonkla-raa said, his voice calm but icy cold. “Once again, we seem to have underestimated you.”
He waved a sweeping hand across the silent rows of walkers. “Yet at the same time you continue to underestimate us. Tell me, what did you think you would gain?”
“Information, of course,” I said. “That’s the key to all successful wars.”
“And what have you learned?” the Shonkla-raa countered. “That your new ally”—his eyes flicked to Rebekah—“is as vulnerable to us as the Modhri? That your ally Bayta and her Spider friends are no threat to us?”
“But you can’t control them,” I pointed out. “As for Rebekah, you don’t have nearly as good a grip on her as you might like. I watched the way she moved when Yleli and his buddies brought her in. It was like watching someone walk through knee-deep water. I daresay she and her friends aren’t going to do you much good as soldiers.”
“And you think to neutralize our hold on the Modhri by joining him with this Melding?” the Shonkla-raa scoffed. “A futile hope, Compton. You have neither the time nor the resources for such a move.”
“How do you know?” I countered. “Because Morse says we don’t?”
The Filly’s eyes flicked to Morse. “We’re well aware that you don’t tell Morse everything,” he said. “We’ve already concluded that you showed him only one of the Melding’s many bases and only a fraction of the available coral.”
He was right on that one, anyway. Or at least half right. Not that I was going to tell him that. “So given that you don’t know how much Melding coral we have, you can’t be banking on that to stop us,” I said. “Ergo, you must be banking on our supposed lack of time. But since you don’t also have any idea when we started this whole operation, that’s also just a guess on your part.”
“You did not begin this operation until you escaped from Kuzyatru Station,” the Filly said flatly. “But even if you had, your timing would be irrelevant. The Shonkla-raa are on the move, faster than you can possibly imagine. Within weeks at the most your small rebellion will be broken.”
“Very impressive,” I said. “Also carefully and conspicuously vague. How can you proclaim your victory when you don’t even have the full list of your opponents?” I gestured to Fayr and his commandos beside me. “For example, Korak Fayr here. As I said, every successful plan requires information, and you don’t have enough of it.”
The Filly’s blaze lightened. “Clever, Compton,” he said. “You seek to provoke me into speaking about our plans, knowing that whatever else happens today—whether you die or whether we choose to let you live—that Bayta and the Melding female Rebekah will certainly be taken alive. You hope they will find a way to pass any information that you glean to the Spiders or the Modhri or Bayta’s people.”
I shrugged. “It was worth a try.”
“It was indeed,” he said, eyeing me closely. “I will confess in turn that I thought Osantra Riijkhan was showing unnecessary caution in trying to bring you to our side. I see now why he thought you worth recruiting.”
“It took you this long to figure that out?” I asked. “I thought Proteus Station alone would have been a sufficient résumé.”
The Filly’s blaze darkened. “You were lucky.”
“Call it luck if you want,” I said. “The fact is that I’ve demonstrated a knack for killing Shonkla-raa. As you pore over your maps of the galaxy, I suggest you add that into your calculations.”
The blaze went even darker. “Indeed,” he said softly. “And you convince me. Osantra Riijkhan’s hopes notwithstanding, I think it best that your life ends today.”
“You’re welcome to try,” I said, stepping back from the barricade to where Bayta and the two girls huddled together in their frozen clump. “But let me add one other factor into your considerations.”
Abruptly, I flipped the nunchaku around in my hands and looped the cord around Bayta’s neck. “You’re not going to be dissecting or otherwise studying Bayta,” I said into the suddenly rigid atmosphere as I held the cord against her throat. “And she is most certainly not going to die in your hands. If I die, she’s dying with me.”
Maybe the Shonkla-raa really thought his troops could get through the barrier and the waiting commandos before I could carry out my threat. Maybe he’d simply had enough talk for one day and decided it was time to move on to the main event. Whichever, the eleven Modhran walkers standing in parade formation abruptly started forward, eight of them moving ahead of the others.
The intent was obvious. The front eight were to hurl themselves over the chairs and onto each of the Bellidos, dying or being incapacitated in the process but hopefully pinning down their targets long enough for the remaining walkers to move in for the kill. A simple, straightforward strategy, and one that the Shonkla-raa had the numbers to actually pull off.
But as the walkers moved forward, the old man curled up in his chair behind the Shonkla-raa opened his eyes.
For maybe two heartbeats he gazed at the scene in front of him. Then, sliding silently out of his seat, he headed toward the rearmost of the Fillies, curving back around to his rear to stay out of both Fillies’ peripheral vision. His hands dipped into his jacket as he headed forward and emerged with a pair of small handles. I caught a subtle glint of metal wire from between them.
And as he reached the rearmost Filly, he flipped the garrote wire over the other’s head and brought his hands together, simultaneously spinning a hundred and eighty degrees around to turn back-to-back with the Filly. The alien gave a choking gasp, his hands clutching uselessly at his throat as he was forced to bend over backward, his command tone cutting off as the garrote paralyzed his voice box.
The second Filly spun around, sheer stunned surprise freezing him for a fatal half second. Still hanging on to the handles, the old man twisted himself up off the floor, the movement tightening the wire even more around the Filly’s throat, and snapped a devastating side kick into the other Filly’s throat.