"And how did it simply go off?"
"I have a theory," I said. "With your permission, I'd like to test it. Bayta?"
Gargantua's eyes flicked over my shoulder again; and as I felt the familiar activation tingle from the kwi concealed beneath my glove, I raised my fist to point at Gargantua's stomach and fired.
The great strength of a group mind is its near-omnipresence and instant communication. Its great weakness is the equally instant sharing of pain. Gargantua jerked as the kwi's jolt lanced through him, the entire ring of walkers staggering back as the same pain echoed into their nervous systems through their own Modhri colonies. I fired again and again, hoping like hell my theory was right. I could tell Gargantua was starting to adjust to the pain, starting to fight it back to a level where he could function again, the look in his eyes proclaiming that his first action once he was back on balance would be to rip the kwi from my hand, taking my entire arm with it if necessary.
And then, behind him, the Shonkla-raa weapon exploded.
Distance, plus Gargantua's own sizable bulk standing in front of us, protected our group from the worst of the blast. The walkers immediately in front of the weapon weren't so lucky. The concussion ripped through them like a massive green fireball, shattering their bodies and throwing them in all directions. The Halka who'd been actually holding the weapon was vaporized where he stood.
The blast sent a second, even more violent wave of pain through the remaining walkers. Again they staggered, enough to give us a little breathing space. "Get out of here!" I snapped, grabbing Penny's arm and giving her a shove back toward the mesa we'd come from. I picked out one of the nearer walkers at random and gave him a jolt from the kwi, "You and Stafford. Head for the perimeter fence and keep going. We'll hold him here."
"How?" she gasped, waving a hand at the ring of beings still surrounding us. "They're there. They're all there."
"Don't worry about them," I told her. "They're walkers, remember? He isn't going to risk them getting hurt—he wants them alive and intact. Now, run—I want you out of here before he brings in the rest of his soldiers."
But it was too late. I turned back around to find Gargantua looming suddenly over me, his eyes blazing with rage and hatred and pain. Even as I tried to dodge to the side he grabbed my right wrist, twisting my arm over to point my fist and the kwi harmlessly toward the sky.
And behind him the large tents erupted with Modhran soldiers.
There was no doubt whatsoever as to who and what they were. While the walkers in the disintegrating circle were staggering away from me and my weapon as fast as their pain-spasming legs could carry them, the eight newcomers were staggering with equal determination directly toward us.
"And now you will die," Gargantua spat into my face.
I didn't doubt for a second that he meant it. With the kwi no longer adding to their pain, the soldiers' staggering and twitching was starting to fade as Modhran stamina reasserted itself with a vengeance. By the time they reached me, they would almost certainly be up to the task of tearing me into confetti-sized pieces.
And after they'd vented their rage, they would take Bayta, Penny, and Stafford to wherever the nearest coral outpost was and turn them into zombies like themselves.
Only it wasn't going to be that way. "No," I said, looking Gargantua—the Modhri—straight in the eye. "I think not." Turning my head toward the Nemut still carrying my supposedly silenced comm, the comm which I'd wired to be permanently active, I filled my lungs. "Now!" I shouted.
And as if he'd been hit by a thunderbolt from the rising sun, one of the approaching soldiers leaped a meter sideways in midstep. He hit the ground, skidded a few centimeters in the dust, and slid to a halt.
The Modhri was fast, all right. The dead soldier had barely stopped moving when the last soldier in line reversed direction and disappeared back into the tent. As he did so, another of the soldiers also jerked and fell.
The third and fourth soldiers had joined their comrades in death before the sound of the first shot crackled faintly through the air.
Gargantua twisted around, squinting into the sun, the Modhri trying desperately to find the source of the unexpected attack. The last three soldiers had dropped, and the distant gunfire from Fayr's hypersonic rifle had settled into a steady cadence, when the one who'd gone back inside reappeared, a glistening Shonkla-raa trinary weapon clutched in his arms. Dropping to one knee in the partial concealment of the tent door, he turned the weapon toward the east.
And suddenly the air was filled with a fury of green fire, stitching a pattern across the ground at the base of the mesa silhouetted against the rising sun.
With the Modhri's attention temporarily focused elsewhere, I got a grip on Gargantua's wrist where he still held my right arm, lifted both feet off the ground, and kicked with all my strength into his torso.
He folded backward and collapsed with an agonized grunt, his grip suddenly going limp and sending me sprawling onto the ground. I scrambled back to my feet, leveled my kwi at the last soldier, and fired. He jerked, the flashes from his weapon weaving briefly off target as a fresh jolt of pain lanced through him.
And I was thrown a meter backward and slammed flat onto my back as the weapon and its handler disintegrated in another massive green fireball.
Once again I climbed back to my feet, blinking against the dust and smoke and afterimage …and it was only then that my brain belatedly caught up to the fact that only eight soldiers had come charging out of the tent at the Modhri's urgent summons. Gargantua, lying gasping for breath on the ground, made nine, while his vaporized fellow Halka made ten.
Two soldiers were still unaccounted for.
I dropped into a crouch, bringing up my kwi as I started to look around. An instant later, I threw myself flat onto my stomach as, out of nowhere, an aircar roared past, nearly taking my head along with it. I twisted around, tracking his movement, tensing for the moment he would spin around and come back for another try.
But the Modhri knew his priorities, and at the moment I wasn't one of them. The aircar kept going, jinking back and forth like a hooked fish as it grabbed for altitude and blazed at top speed toward the eastern mesa. A second later, a motion to my left caught my eye, and I looked to see a second car lift from somewhere north of us and begin corkscrewing its own way toward the mesa.
Fayr saw them coming, of course, and the thunder of the distant rifle fire abruptly changed pitch as he switched from single fire to three-round bursts. But the Modhri was as good at this as Fayr was. The two aircars dodged madly as they drove toward Fayr's sniper post, neither of them creating a discernible pattern he could anticipate and capitalize on, the two craft angling in from widely different directions to keep from presenting an easy one-two target.
And unlike normal fighter pilots, they had no regard whatsoever for their own lives. When they reached the other end of the target range they wouldn't bother with strafing or shockwaving or any other fancy maneuvers. They would simply ram full speed into Fayr's position.
There was nothing I could do to help. Nothing, except to keep pouring pain into the Modhri mind segment, distracting him as much as possible. I stood over Gargantua's broken body, hitting him with jolt after jolt from my kwi, watching the aircars closing the gap, knowing that my feeble efforts weren't even delaying the inevitable.
And then, straight out of the glare of the rising sun, a third aircar appeared, driving close along the side of the mesa.
With his attention on the other attackers, I doubted Fayr even knew it was there, and I tensed helplessly as it neared his position. But to my surprise, it shot past the end of the mesa, shifting direction to head straight for the nearer of the approaching Modhri aircars.