The Third Lynx

The Modhri turned sharply to avoid him, dropping his nose and trying to half-ring beneath him. But the newcomer knew that one, too. Instead of shooting harmlessly past overhead, he did a half roll of his own and dropped down onto his target. Their sterns met, and both aircars wobbled furiously as their pilots fought to bring them back under control. The newcomer won the race, straightening out and curving hard back around toward the Modhri.

And then, both aircars lurched again as the second Modhri aircar caught a fatal burst from Fayr's gun and exploded in a blazing yellow fireball. The surviving Modhri, wobbling furiously in the shockwave, had barely regained his equilibrium when his vehicle was shattered by the stutter of sustained gunfire from the mesa.

The third aircar, his mission apparently completed, made a leisurely turn away from the mesa and headed in our direction. "Morse?" Gargantua breathed, his voice strangely gurgling with the unmistakable mark of massive internal bleeding.

"Morse is wristcuffed and asleep," I told him, wondering who the hell it was in the other vehicle. Had Fayr managed to get one of his other commandos to Veerstu in time for the party?

"You will die, Compton," Gargantua breathed again, his eyes glinting with hatred. "I will gut you like a food animal."

"Possibly," I said. "But whatever happens to me, in the end you are going to lose."

"We shall see," he said. "And we will meet again." With one final glare, he closed his eyes.

And one more Arm of the Modhri was gone. Hefting the kwi, I lifted my eyes again, wondering what the Modhri would throw at us next.

But the battle was over. The surviving walkers were in full flight now, most of them still staggering with residual pain as they hurried across the lightening landscape.

It was only then that I noticed that the ground was giving little shakes beneath my feet.

I frowned, looking around. The tremors were small and distant, like the feel of a heavy ground-pounder driving foundation pylons a block away. One of the distant walkers abruptly staggered a little harder, and a second later I felt another rumble. This one was accompanied by a small puff of dust a meter from the walker's feet, looking rather like the blow from a surfacing whale.

And suddenly I understood. The massive surge of pain through the Modhri mind segment was triggering explosions in the Viper power sources still buried beneath the dig site as the agonized walkers ran over them.

"I don't get it," Stafford said as he and the two women gathered beside me. "Is he just giving up?"

"Actually, he hasn't got much choice," I told him. "With his soldiers gone and Fayr holding the high ground, we hold the edge in firepower."

"But those walkers outnumber us twenty to one," Stafford objected. "He could arm them with nothing but rocks and still win."

"Not really," I said. "You see, he's in something of a no-win situation here. As long as he maintains control of the walkers' bodies, he's vulnerable to the full level of pain we're throwing at him."

"Ah," Stafford said, nodding as he finally understood. "But if he releases control back to the hosts to try to stop the pain from spreading, he can't make them fight us."

"Actually, it's even worse than that," I said. "If he releases control now, he won't be able to keep them ignorant that something violently strange has happened to them. You get a hundred rich and powerful people rushing to their doctors in a panic and someone's eventually going to find those polyp colonies. The last thing the Modhri wants right now is for hard evidence of his existence to leak out to the galaxy at large."

I nodded toward them. "Besides, if he continues to fight and loses, this mind segment will be wiped out, and the rest of the Modhri will never know what happened here."

"That happened to him once," Bayta said quietly. "He doesn't want it to happen again."

"So they just run away and wake up in the wilderness?" Stafford snorted. "Like that's not something strange?"

"He'll probably bring them back here once we're gone," I said. "That won't be nearly as hard to explain away."

"Except for all the bodies and destruction we're leaving behind," Stafford pointed out.

I shrugged. "I'm sure he'll be up to the challenge."

"Why do we have to leave at all?" Penny asked.

"Because if we don't, we'll probably be arrested for mass murder," I told her. "You want to try to explain all this?"

"Why not?" she countered. "We've got all the hard evidence we need, don't we?"

"We certainly have enough," I said. "Only we don't want to blow this into a full-court confrontation yet any more than the Modhri does. Don't forget, for all his vulnerabilities he still controls a lot of the power centers in the Twelve Empires. We go head-to-head and things will get very, very messy. For everyone."

"So that's it?" Stafford demanded. "We just walk away?"

"We just walk away," I confirmed. "And we keep our mouths shut."

"I don't think I like that," he said, an edge to his voice.

"Would you rather get a midnight visit from a couple of these?" I asked, nudging Gargantua's body with my foot. "You two just sit back, pretend this never happened, and let us deal with it."

"All right," Stafford said ominously. "For now."

I turned as the surviving aircar set down between us and the main tents. I lifted my kwi as the door opened, hoping against hope I would see a striped Belldic face peering out.

"Easy," Morse said as he climbed stiffly out of the pilot's seat. "It's just me."

For a moment I couldn't find my tongue. Neither, apparently, could anyone else. Stafford recovered first. "Well," he said, his tone studiously casual. "So much for him being a Modhri walker."

"As I believe I told you in the first place," Morse growled, walking over to us. "Maybe you'll trust me a little now. Incidentally, Compton, just for the record, that gadget of yours apparently builds up a resistance in the victim if you use it too much." He lifted his eyebrows. "Unless you planned for me to wake up while the party was still going on."

"Hardly," I managed. "How did you get out of the cuffs?"

He smiled. "Come now. I'm ESS. We aren't entirely without our resources, you know." He looked around. "So this was it?"

"Still is it, actually," I said. I looked around, too …and as I did so, I suddenly understood what this place really was.

God in heaven.

"Frank?"

I looked around. Bayta was frowning at me. "Are you all right?" she asked.

"Of course," I lied. "Back to business. By my count, there should still be one complete trinary weapon lying around somewhere. We need to find it and get it out of here, along with any spare Vipers that might have survived."

"Preferably before someone starts wondering what this strange glitch is on the weather satellite feed," Morse warned. "Let's get the loot, and get the hell out of here."