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.
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.”
We said our final farewells on the platform as the next Terra-bound train worked its way down the Tube toward us. “Good luck,” I said to Stafford as we shook hands. “And watch yourself. If and when the Modhri decides to step up his operations on Earth, you’ll be an obvious target for him to go for.”
“I’ll be careful,” Stafford said grimly. “If he tries it, he’ll have a serious fight on his hands.”
“And not just from Mr. Stafford,” Morse added. “I’ll be with them the whole way.”
“I appreciate that,” I said. “Don’t forget your promise.”
“To keep all of this secret.” Morse hissed between his teeth. “I know. Still, galling though it is to let Earth stroll along in blissful ignorance, I can see your point. We’ll keep quiet.”
“But if the silent routine changes, you let us know,” Stafford said. “I still want justice for Uncle Rafael’s murder.”
“We all do, and we’re working on it,” I promised. I nudged my carrybag with my foot. “This should definitely help.”
“I still can’t believe the Spiders let you into the Tube with that thing in your bag,” Morse commented.
“We have a good working relationship with them,” I said, passing over the fact that with the weapon separated into its components again the Spiders couldn’t have spotted it even if they’d wanted to.
“And don’t forget
your
promise,” Stafford added. “Whenever your friends get done studying the thing, I’d appreciate it if they would let me have the Lynx back.”
“If they’ll allow it, I’ll deliver it to you personally,” I promised.
“Someday you’ll have to tell me the whole story of how you ended up in this war,” Morse said, glancing around the station. “You
and
your sniper friend. Be sure to thank him for me, by the way.”
“I’m sure he thanks you, too,” I said. “Your timing was perfect.”
“Actually, I could probably have shown up two minutes earlier and no one would have objected,” Morse said dryly. “How did you arrange for him to be up there, anyway?”
“I didn’t actually arrange anything,” I said. “I just told him where we were going and the day and approximate time I expected us to arrive. He worked out the rest of the details himself.”
“Except that you
did
know he’d be on the easternmost mesa,” Stafford said. “I assume that’s why you wanted us to come in via the southern one.”
“I didn’t
know
that was where he’d be,” I said. “But that was the most likely place for him to set up shop. He would want the sun at his back if he could manage it.”
With a squeal of brakes, the Quadrail came to a stop on the track in front of us. The conductors took their places outside the doors, and the exodus of passengers began. “You be careful,” Morse said. He hesitated, then held out his hand to me. “I’m sorry for—well, you know.”
“I understand,” I assured him, feeling an unpleasant tingle as I shook his hand. “Good-bye, Mr. Stafford; Ms. Auslander.”
“Good-bye,” Penny said, offering me her hand. “And thank you. You and Bayta both. I don’t know how we’ll ever repay you.”
I took her hand and gazed into her eyes, trying to rekindle the attraction I remembered once having felt for her.
But there was nothing. The Modhri-induced feelings were gone, and I found myself wondering that I’d ever taken them seriously at all. “No problem,” I told her. “Send me an invitation to the wedding.”
Her eyes flicked sideways toward Stafford. “We’ll do that,” she promised.
The stream of disembarking passengers ended, and the conductors called the all aboard. “Say good-bye to Bayta for us,” Morse called to me as the three of them climbed aboard. I waited, and after a minute Penny appeared at the window of her compartment. She smiled and waved, I waved back, and she disappeared out of my view, probably to start unpacking. The conductors went back aboard, the doors closed, and the Quadrail was once again on its way.
“Any trouble?”
I turned as Bayta came up beside me, her eyes following the train as it picked up speed along the tracks. “No, everything went fine,” I said. “What kept you?”
“I was making our arrangements.” Resolutely, she pulled her eyes away from the departing train. “The stationmaster says we’ll be contacted somewhere between Trivsdal and Ian-apof for the transfer.”
“Good.” The sooner the Chahwyn pulled their little detached-car routine and took the remaining Shonkla-raa weapon components off our hands, the sooner I would be able to relax. A little. “The others said to say good-bye. And to thank you.”
Bayta didn’t answer, but turned and started walking. “We’ll be leaving from Platform Eight,” she said over her shoulder.
I caught up and fell into step beside her. “Come on, now,” I cajoled. “It worked out all right, didn’t it?”
“Did it?” she countered.
I sighed. “Look. I know I behaved like an adolescent idiot. I also know that I hurt you, and I’m really and truly sorry. But you know now that the whole thing was straight Modhran manipulation.”
“How?” she countered. “What happened on Veerstu rather disproved your theory that Agent Morse is a walker. Are you going to suggest next that all that manipulation came from one of the Halkan soldiers?”
“No, of course not,” I said, taking her arm.
She twitched it away from me. “It’s none of my business,” she said, trying to hide the trembling in her voice. “Whatever you feel for her—”
“Felt
for her, past tense,” I said. “And whatever I felt wasn’t real.”
“It’s none of my business,” she repeated in a low voice.
“It’s every bit your business,” I corrected, glancing around. None of the other passengers wandering the station was in earshot. “Because Veerstu didn’t prove anything. Morse
is
, in fact, a walker.”
She spun, her eyes angry and hurt and shimmering with tears. “Don’t
lie
to me, Frank,” she said fiercely. “You hear? Don’t ever lie to me.”
“I’m not lying,” I said, catching her hands in mine and forcing her to a stop. She tried to pull away again, but this time I didn’t let her. “It’s the only way this makes sense.”
“Unless you really did fall in love with her.”
“Would you get off Ms. Auslander for a minute?” I growled. “I’m talking about the thought virus that got planted in me on the Bildim train.”
“Which must have come from the Cimma.”
“Which couldn’t possibly have come from the Cimma,” I shot back. “We’ve been through this, remember? Morse had probably already set up the thought virus for me to go to the baggage car, only there was no time to embed another one strongly enough to cancel it. All the Modhri could do was throw in the Cimma and hope I’d think it was him.”
“Then why did Agent Morse help us on Veerstu?” she countered. “The Modhri was on the edge of winning it all when he showed up. If he’s a walker, why didn’t he help defeat us?”
“Because we made a mistake, Bayta,” I said quietly. “All of us. A
huge
mistake.” I braced myself. “We let Morse see a Chahwyn.”
She stared at me, her face suddenly rigid. “Oh, no,” she breathed.
“I’m afraid so,” I said heavily. “The Modhri doesn’t know who they are yet, of course, or where they’re based, or even what their relationship is with us and the Spiders. But he knows now that there’s another player in this game. And he’s desperate to know more.”
“Desperate enough to play Agent Morse against himself?” Bayta asked, clearly still having trouble believing it.
“No, it’s much more subtle than that,” I told her. “Don’t forget, Fayr and I both have military training, and the Modhri knows it. Trying to choreograph a battle without one of us picking up on it would have been way too risky.”
I looked back along the Tube, just in time to see the last car of Morse’s Quadrail disappear through the atmosphere barrier into the depths of interstellar space. “No, the Modhri colony in Morse is now in what’s called deep cover. That means no manipulation, no suggestions, no nothing. Morse is free to do exactly whatever he would if he’d never touched the damn coral at all.”
“With the Modhri hoping we’ll eventually start trusting him,” Bayta said with a shiver. “And maybe show or tell him more.”
“With pretty good odds that we would, actually,” I conceded. “We don’t have a lot of allies in this war. He probably figures that somewhere along the line we’ll have to call on Morse for more help.”
For a moment neither of us spoke. “The Chahwyn will have to be told,” Bayta said at last, turning away from me and starting to walk again. “They won’t be happy.”
“It’s partly their own fault,” I reminded her. “The one we met with should have had the Spiders close the door before he came out onto the platform.”
“Not that dividing up the blame makes any difference.”
“No, it doesn’t,” I agreed, looking around again. “If it helps any, it could have been worse. A lot worse. The Modhri might have gone bird-in-the-hand and decided that the weapons dump on Veerstu was worth more than possible future information on the Chahwyn. We might still have gotten out, but we’d have left him in possession of the area.”
“In which case we’d have invisible weapons to deal with,” she agreed soberly. “Maybe other things, too. All those Viper power supplies must mean the place was a supply dump for other equipment besides just the trinaries.”
“And nothing he might have dug up would have mattered in the slightest,” I said grimly. “If the Modhri had held on to the region, invisible hand weapons would have been the least of our worries.”
She flashed me a puzzled look. “What do you mean?”
I closed my eyes briefly, visualizing again the horrible revelation I’d had on that horrible morning. “Remember the Ten Mesas, Bayta? Specifically, remember the three big ones with those odd spikes jutting up from one end? Have you ever heard of something that geologically odd that nevertheless repeats itself so similarly on three separate rock formations?”
“No, I don’t think so,” she said slowly. “Some kind of Shonkla-raa cannon or rocket launcher, maybe?”
I shook my head. “Think about the Quadrail tender we rode on,” I said. “Think about the way the loop gantries stick up at one end so as to bring the car’s closest bit of matter a little closer to the Coreline.”
She frowned in concentration, her eyes gazing unblinkingly into mine. And then, abruptly, she caught her breath. “Are you saying the mesas are—?” She looked furtively around us. “They’re
spaceships
?”
“Why not?” I asked. “Where better to hide Shonkla-raa battleships than at a Shonkla-raa equipment dump? Besides, we’ve already seen the Modhran tendency to put all his eggs in one basket. Ten to one that’s a weakness that came straight from their creators.”
“Oh, Frank,” she said, her voice shaking openly now. “If you’re right… Frank, we have to destroy them. We have to get in there with explosives and destroy them.”
“I wish to God we could,” I said heavily. “But that’s the very last thing we can afford to do.”
“We can do it,” she insisted. “Even something that big. We can find a way.”
“You don’t understand,” I said. “We could certainly destroy this bunch. But what if there are more hidden somewhere else? We can’t afford for the Modhri to even suspect such a prize might exist out there.”
“But—” Bayta took a deep breath, exhaled in a strained huff. “No, you’re right,” she said reluctantly. “This just gets worse and worse, doesn’t it?”
“Life is like that sometimes,” I conceded. “A lot of the time, actually. All you can do is deal with the problems as they pop up, and hope the ones you can’t solve don’t pop up until you
can
solve them.”
I dug into my pocket. “And speaking of solving problems…” I pulled out a small box and handed it to her. “Maybe this will help.”
Frowning, she took the box and opened it. “Oh,” she said, sounding surprised and puzzled and pleased all at the same time. “Frank, they’re—they’re beautiful.”
I looked over her shoulder at the matching set of necklace and ear cuffs, their intertwined strips of copper, gold, and silver glinting in the light from the Coreline. “I’m glad you like them,” I said. “I got them from that Nemut in the Artists’ Paradise. They’re sort of a peace offering.”
“You don’t need a peace offering,” she said, pulling out one of the ear cuffs for a closer look. “But thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” I said. “Are we…?”
“Yes, we’re friends again,” she assured me, slipping the cuff onto her ear.
Friends. Earlier, I’d wondered if perhaps I might have drifted a little closer to her than just friendship. But if I had, I had apparently been moved back out again.
But that was okay. Bayta was a good companion, and a good ally, and very definitely a good friend.
We could leave it at that. For now.
“Meanwhile, we can start solving one of our other problems by getting these sculptures to the Chahwyn,” she said as she slipped on the other ear cuff.
So it was back to business. Typical Bayta. “Right,” I said. “After that, maybe we should look into those crates of coral the Modhri tried to bribe me with.”
“Definitely,” Bayta agreed. “We can check with the Chahwyn and see if they’ve learned anything from the Spiders.”
“Good idea,” I said. “And that, I think, should be enough for our plate for the moment.” I cocked an eye at her. “That is, assuming you still
want
to share the same plate with me?”
“Of course.” She gave me a tentative smile. “If you still want
me
as a partner.”
“Well, it’s either you or a Spider,” I reminded her, patting the pocket where I had my
kwi
. “And you’re definitely better company than any of them are.”
She winced. “At least when I’m not being jealous.”
“Even when you are.” I took her arm. This time, she didn’t fight me. “Come on—we’ve got an hour yet before our train,” I said. “If Nemuti bars stock lemonade, I’ll buy you a drink.”