Judgment at Proteus

chair he’d been heading for and retreated to the car’s rear corner near the Cimma.

The rest of us were just putting the final touches on the barrier of chairs cutting across the front third of the car when Morse reported that his Modhran colony was once again in contact with the walkers behind us. I told him to inform the Shonkla-raa that we were on our way back, that we would let them in once the train had been reconnected, and to please stop trying to jimmy open the vestibule door.

But my effort was for nothing. The Shonkla-raa had apparently instructed the Modhri to keep quiet, which meant none of the walkers could speak without a direct question or invitation from their new masters. Unfortunately, that left us with no option but to try to get the train back together before they succeeded in forcing open the door.

Morse also informed us that the planned assault line would be five walkers, followed by one Shonkla-raa, followed by the remaining walkers and the other Shonkla-raa. A nicely logical arrangement, I decided, giving them the maximum level of control while allowing the thrust of our counterattack to fall on the walkers instead of their masters.

For all of their arrogance and megalomania, the Shonkla-raa unfortunately weren’t stupid.

Bayta was even less use, info-wise, than Morse and the Modhri. As I’d told Fayr, the tone that controlled the Modhri also paralyzed and dazed Spiders, effectively knocking them out of the telepathic communications network. Bayta could sense the overall physical state of the Spider that the Shonkla-raa were using to pry open the door, but that was about it.

The defenders on the roofs of both cars were unaffected, though, and Bayta was able to keep tabs on the reconnection procedure. By the time the cars had been locked and the vestibule reattached all of us except Morse were standing ready behind the barrier of chairs. Bayta and Terese were holding tightly on to Rebekah as I’d ordered, all three women pale-faced but clearly determined not to give up without a fight. I stood in the middle of the line of Bellidos, the kwi tingling in my hand as I pointed it toward the vestibule door.

The door slid open, and as the command tone burst out into the car I saw a line of figures in the vestibule behind a big Halka glowering at me from in front. Aiming at his torso, I opened fire.

The standard military strategy when you’re clustered together against incoming fire with no cover is to get clear of the choke point as quickly as possible. But the walkers didn’t do that. They instead stayed right where they were, huddled behind the Halka.

And to my bewilderment, the Halka wasn’t moving, either. Especially he wasn’t falling. He was still standing upright, apparently immune to the kwi’s effect.

I put two more shots into him before I belatedly realized what was going on. The Halka wasn’t one of the walkers, but was simply some first-class passenger who’d been grabbed and forcibly planted at the front of the line. My first shot had indeed rendered him unconscious, but the walkers behind him were holding or propping him up to act as a living shield.

I got off one final shot, trying to aim past the Halka’s bulk, before Bayta succumbed to the tone and the kwi went silent.

And the walkers finally made their move.

“Bayta!” I snapped, uselessly squeezing the kwi’s trigger as the walkers began to file into the car, the first one in line casually and uncaringly dropping the unconscious Halka off to the side out of their way. “Bayta! Defenders! Anyone!”

But Bayta was already helpless, her arms frozen around an equally frozen Rebekah, and the defenders on the roof couldn’t hear me though the haze swirling through Bayta’s mind and from hers into theirs. Swearing under my breath, I dropped the kwi back in my pocket and picked up the nunchaku I’d borrowed from one of the injured Bellidos.

I’d half expected the walkers to come charging in screaming at the tops of their lungs like Viking berserkers, hoping to overwhelm us with sheer momentum. But the Shonkla-raa in charge of this particular mob were more subtle than that. The walkers strode stolidly into our car in a complete silence that accentuated the whistling from the Filly behind them. The line moved to the center of the car, staying well clear of our barricade and weapons, and neatly spread out to both sides as the second wave marched in behind them. The second group similarly fanned out into a battle line. As they arranged themselves, Morse, standing stiffly in his corner, moved up to join one end of the first battle line.

The two Shonkla-raa themselves, I noted cynically, stayed a good five paces behind the walkers, where they were even more out of range of our nunchakus.

“Nice,” I complimented them, mostly just to get in the first word. “You do children’s parties, too?”

Deliberately, the Filly on the right lowered his gaze to the three dead Shonkla-raa still sprawled on the floor where we’d left them. Then, he looked up at me and gestured to his companion. I tensed, but the other Filly merely took a step backward, and I could hear him crank his command tone volume up a couple of notches. “Impressive, Compton,” the first Shonkla-raa said, his voice calm but icy cold. “Once again, we seem to have underestimated you.”

He waved a sweeping hand across the silent rows of walkers. “Yet at the same time you continue to underestimate us. Tell me, what did you think you would gain?”

“Information, of course,” I said. “That’s the key to all successful wars.”

“And what have you learned?” the Shonkla-raa countered. “That your new ally”—his eyes flicked to Rebekah —“is as vulnerable to us as the Modhri? That your ally Bayta and her Spider friends are no threat to us?”

“But you can’t control them,” I pointed out. “As for Rebekah, you don’t have nearly as good a grip on her as you might like. I watched the way she moved when Yleli and his buddies brought her in. It was like watching someone walk through knee-deep water. I daresay she and her friends aren’t going to do you much good as soldiers.”

“And you think to neutralize our hold on the Modhri by joining him with this Melding?” the Shonkla-raa scoffed. “A futile hope, Compton. You have neither the time nor the resources for such a move.”

“How do you know?” I countered. “Because Morse says we don’t?”

The Filly’s eyes flicked to Morse. “We’re well aware that you don’t tell Morse everything,” he said. “We’ve already concluded that you showed him only one of the Melding’s many bases and only a fraction of the available coral.”

He was right on that one, anyway. Or at least half right. Not that I was going to tell him that. “So given that you don’t know how much Melding coral we have, you can’t be banking on that to stop us,” I said. “Ergo, you must be banking on our supposed lack of time. But since you don’t also have any idea when we started this whole operation, that’s also just a guess on your part.”

“You did not begin this operation until you escaped from Kuzyatru Station,” the Filly said flatly. “But even if you had, your timing would be irrelevant. The Shonkla-raa are on the move, faster than you can possibly imagine. Within weeks at the most your small rebellion will be broken.”

“Very impressive,” I said. “Also carefully and conspicuously vague. How can you proclaim your victory when you don’t even have the full list of your opponents?” I gestured to Fayr and his commandos beside me. “For example, Korak Fayr here. As I said, every successful plan requires information, and you don’t have enough of it.”

The Filly’s blaze lightened. “Clever, Compton,” he said. “You seek to provoke me into speaking about our plans, knowing that whatever else happens today—whether you die or whether we choose to let you live—that Bayta and the Melding female Rebekah will certainly be taken alive. You hope they will find a way to pass any information that you glean to the Spiders or the Modhri or Bayta’s people.”

I shrugged. “It was worth a try.”

“It was indeed,” he said, eyeing me closely. “I will confess in turn that I thought Osantra Riijkhan was showing unnecessary caution in trying to bring you to our side. I see now why he thought you worth recruiting.”

“It took you this long to figure that out?” I asked. “I thought Proteus Station alone would have been a sufficient resume.”

The Filly’s blaze darkened. “You were lucky.”

“Call it luck if you want,” I said. “The fact is that I’ve demonstrated a knack for killing Shonkla-raa. As you pore over your maps of the galaxy, I suggest you add that into your calculations.”

The blaze went even darker. “Indeed,” he said softly. “And you convince me. Osantra