The kid had apparently decided on Option B and was angling toward the edge of the passenger platforms and the cargo areas beyond. Morse and I reached the edge of the hedge we were paralleling and turned to match his new direction. 'Can you sic the Spiders on him?' Morse asked.
'They don't need …me to …tell them.' I said, silently cursing Morse the lung capacity that let him run and talk at the same time. ESS apparently made its agents do laps every morning.
'Well, they'd better get to it,' Morse warned. 'Lot of places over there where he can go to ground.'
'Only temp …orarily,' I said. Our Juriani and Halkan friends, I noted uneasily, had changed course as well. 'We've also …got outriders.'
Morse glanced to both sides. 'Damned amateurs,' he rumbled. 'Looks like he's making for that warehouse.'
He was right. The kid had shifted direction again and was heading for one of the big maintenance buildings. 'It's a …maintenance …building,' I corrected.
'Whatever,' Morse said impatiently. 'Come
But it was too late. Even as Morse started to pull ahead of me, the kid ahead reached the closest of the maintenance building's doors, pulled it open, and vanished inside.
'I'm going in,' Morse shouted over his shoulder. 'You circle around in case he comes out the other side.' Without waiting for a reply, he put on a burst of speed and left me in the dust.
I scowled as I veered to my right, heading for the nearest edge of the building. How I was supposed to cover all four sides of a warehouse-sized building by myself he hadn't said.
But there was nothing to do but try. The outriders were still paralleling me, I saw, apparently no more interested in following Morse into the maintenance building than they had been in converging on the kid out in the open air.
Only now, where there had been five outriders, there were only four.
One of the Halkas had disappeared.
I turned my eyes forward again, scanning the area. He might have simply run out of air and dropped out of the race. But I would hate to bet on that. I'd already seen how the Modhri presence inside a walker could push its host beyond normal limits of stamina and strength.
I was nearly to the corner of the building when the kid flashed into view, emerging from one of the side doors and running toward the next building over, a much smaller repair shop. He crossed the open space in a mad dash and disappeared inside.
I swore under my breath and changed direction. My walker escort had turned the same time I had, and unless I put on a pretty respectable burst of speed the two Halkas on that side were going to get to the door before I did.
But I'd run close to a kilometer already, and I didn't have the reserves left for a last-minute sprint. The two Halkas reached the door a good thirty meters ahead of me and disappeared inside. Ignoring the small sane part of my mind that warned me this was a stupid thing to do, I charged in after them.
For once, the sane part was right. I'd barely made it in out of the Coreline's pulsating glow when they attacked.
Fortunately, Modhri walkers or not, they were as worn-out from the run as I was. Their lunge was slow and disorganized, and I was able to dodge out of the way with only a single glancing blow off my shoulder. I took the nearest one down with a leg sweep, tried unsuccessfully to do the same to the other, and danced back out of his way, taking a moment to look around.
As our young fugitive had picked a good station to run in, he'd similarly picked a terrific place to go to ground. The repair shop was reasonably large, but over half of the open space in the center was currently occupied by a freight car with a disassembled rear wheel assembly. Between the car itself, the various equipment cabinets lining the walls, and the catwalks and crane tracks crisscrossing the space above us, we had the makings here of world- class hide-and-seek.
And with the Halka I'd tripped now back on his feet, I was again on the short end of two-to-one odds. 'Stafford!' I shouted as the two Halkas advanced toward me. 'Get out of here—fast—and get back to the stationmaster's office.'
Nothing. Behind the Halkas the door we'd come in through opened again and the two Juriani who'd been on my other flank appeared, panting heavily but clearly game to join in the fun. Four-to-one odds, now. 'Stafford, you're in danger,' I shouted again. 'Get out of here.' Again, the only response was my own echo off the high ceiling.
And I was running out of time. Westali combat training was all well and good, but four to one was still four to one. I backed up, looking vainly around for some sign of my quarry, wondering too where that missing Halkan walker had gotten to. There was a soft tapping sound behind me, and I spun around, whipping my hands around into defensive position.
But it was only a drone Spider. The smooth globe and slender legs hardly lent themselves to expressions or body language, but just the same I would swear this particular Spider looked startled. 'Don't just stand there,' I growled at him. 'Give me a hand.'
The Spider's response was to take a couple of rapid steps toward the Quadrail car to get out of my way. Radically nonaggressive beings, I reminded myself, as constitutionally unable to fight as the Chahwyn who had created them. I continued to back up, keeping ahead of the advancing walkers, hoping to find a spot narrow enough that they would have to come at me one at a time.
But I was nearly halfway through and hadn't found anything yet. I would have to try circling around the front of the Quadrail car when I got there and see if there was anything on the other side of the building.
And then, as I passed one of the tool cabinets, it gave a soft click.
The sound of a lock unlocking.
The drone still cowering over by the car couldn't simply wade in and help me fight the four walkers. But he'd done the next best thing.
He'd offered me a chance at a weapon.
I took a sideways step to the tool cabinet and swung open the door, grabbing the first long tool—a wrench— that caught my eye. Jumping back, slamming the door closed again, I once again faced my attackers.
The Modhri mind segment that included these four walkers must have known in that moment that he'd lost this group. But after having taken full control of them for this long he probably would have had to kill them anyway. The Modhri preferred to operate in the shadows, and four upstanding citizens of the galaxy who had inexplicably blacked out for this length of time might wonder about it a little too hard and a little too loudly.
So with absolutely nothing to lose, he sent them charging to the attack.
Four bodies under the control of the same mind made for an awesome fighting machine. But these four weren't fighters, and as such had no training or reflexes or combat experience the Modhri could draw on.
And it showed. I moved against one side of the circle as they closed in, taking out one of the Halkas with a blow to his knee before the others could get close enough to double-team me. I danced back again, ducked under a flailing Jurian arm, and jabbed the owner in one of his upper thigh nerve points. He went down even more spectacularly than the Halka had, and then there were two.
Normal attackers might have paused at this point for a little reevaluation. These two just waded in, the Halka going high, the Juri going low. The latter got a wrench across the side of his beak for his trouble, and he was down for the count.
But the numbers had been just a shade too right. His partner got in outside my arm, and I found myself being crowded sideways with arm and wrench pressed too tightly against my chest to do anything. I managed to shift the wrench to my left hand, but was shoved against a bank of waist-high diagnostic machines before I could get off more than a fairly weak blow across his upper arm.
He grunted with pain and grabbed at my wrist. I evaded that attempt, but his second try succeeded, and multiple jolts of pain lanced through my left forearm as his claws punched through my jacket and sank into my skin. His other hand slashed at my eyes; more by luck than skill I caught his wrist in my right hand.
For a second I stared into that flat, bulldoglike face, the sagging jowls and empty eyes an eerie reminder that what I was fighting wasn't the respectable, civilized being that had once called this body home. Then, clenching my teeth against the pain from the dug-in claws, I twisted my left wrist to the side, bringing the end of the wrench down onto the hand still stretched toward my eyes.
There was the faint sound of snapping bones, and suddenly my left arm was free as the Halka howled and
