The Third Lynx

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