Judgment at Proteus

Carl’s collection of bottles and pulled out the stopper. “The Shonkla-raa aren’t going to let any of them live.”

“That doesn’t mean we have to be a direct party to their murders,” I pointed out as I took another of the bottles and gave the rest of the assortment a quick look. Carl hadn’t found any flambe fluid, which burned a lot hotter than alcohol, but he’d put together a selection of Halkan rotgut that ranged from a hundred twenty to a hundred thirty proof. Not perfect, but it would have to do. “Besides, I’m guessing that grinding a bunch of bodies into the wheelworks would probably damage something and lock us down solid.”

“Yes, it probably would,” Bayta confirmed, a shiver running through her as she took one of the bottles from Carl and starting working on it, watching me closely to see how I was putting the bomb together. “How many do we need?”

Abruptly, there was a loud thud and the car seemed to shake. “What was that?” Terese gasped.

“They’re trying to push us over,” Rebekah said.

Morse grunted. “Good luck with that,” he said. “Just as well Compton scrapped the idea of coming the whole way by tender. One of those they might have been able to knock over.”

“Six of them ought to do it,” I told Bayta as I started stuffing one of the cloth fuses into my bottle. “The plan is to—”

“Hold it,” Morse cut me off. “They can hear us, remember.”

“Only if they think to ask their walkers what I’ve got planned,” I said. “Doesn’t matter. The plan is to put a fire barrier on both sides of the door and then kwi as many of the walkers as I can as they charge at me up the middle. When the fires start dying down, I can feed them extra fuel straight from the other bottles.”

“All while you’re busy shooting people?” Terese asked tightly. “You planning on growing a few extra hands in the next two minutes?”

“I’m open to suggestions,” I said as I finished one cocktail and started on the next. “You may have noticed my current lack of useful assistants. Unless you’re volunteering?”

She took a deep breath. “Actually,” she said, “yes, I am.”

I looked up from my work, momentarily at a loss for words. Terese’s face was pale and tense, but there was a stubborn determination there that, for once, wasn’t in opposition to something I was trying to do. Hanging out with Rebekah had apparently been good for her. “I accept with thanks,” I said. “Grab that bottle from Morse and come over here.”

I positioned Sam and Carl in front of the outer door, their legs interlocked and braced against the walls and ceiling. I crouched behind them, kwi in one hand, lighter in the other, my six Molotov cocktails at the ready. Terese squatted behind me where she’d be at least a little protected, the other liquor bottles uncapped beside her.

“Okay,” I said as yet another thud rocked the car. The Shonkla-raa weren’t giving up easily. But then, it wasn’t their own personal bodies that were being bruised and battered in the useless attack. “Everyone else, inside the compartment. When the door closes, Bayta, fire up the kwi. Five seconds after you do that, have the Spiders open this door. And only this door.”

“Understood.” She hesitated, as if wanting to say more but knowing there was no time. “Be careful.”

“And take care of Terese,” Rebekah added quietly.

Ten seconds later, the door slid shut behind them, and the kwi wrapped around my hand began its activation tingle. “Get ready, Terese,” I said as I lit the fuses. “Here we go…”

And in front of me, the car door irised open.

The Shonkla-raa had been keeping track of our plans and progress, all right. The door was still opening when, with no sound other than that of the Shonkla-raa command tone that burst in through the open door, a wall of Human and alien flesh surged into the opening as the walkers tried to shove their way inside.

But for once, the Shonkla-raa’s magic command tone was working against them. As Terese had already pointed out, the instant the door opened Sam and Carl froze solid, wedged in place and blocking the attack like a set of surrealistic prison bars.

And in that same instant I saw the Shonkla-raa’s strategy.

He knew I had the kwi, and that I could instantly zap the people who were shoving against the defenders. The problem was that the physical driving force of the surge was coming from the walkers piled up at the rear of the crush, people who were being blocked from the kwi’s effects by the rest of the crowd in front of them.

I could reset the kwi for one of its three pain settings and try to distract the mind segment that way. But I’d seen Shonkla-raa drive their captive walkers through pain before, and I doubted even my highest setting would stop them. Simply knocking out the front line would be even less useful. The crowd pressing behind them would continue to shove their unconscious bodies forward against the barrier, turning them from active attackers into passive battering rams.

Which left me only one option.

Maybe the Shonkla-raa out there thought I would shy away from the prospect of torching fellow Humans. If so, they’d severely underestimated my resolve. Clenching my teeth, I scooped up one of my Molotov cocktails and lobbed it through the interlocked Spider legs toward the rear of the mob.

A normal glass whiskey bottle would simply have thudded against head or torso and dropped clattering onto the ground. But Quadrail bottles were deliberately designed to be useless as an impact weapon. Instead of thudding into the close-packed people back there, the bottle’s flimsy plastic split across its tear lines, scattering the alcohol and burning fuse across the crowd.

My second and third firebombs were in the air before the first one ignited.

Group pain shared through a group mind was one thing. Individual pain—real, live, and immediate—was something else entirely. The forward surge against my barrier seemed to hesitate as I sent my fourth and fifth bombs sailing into the crowd to explode into their own patches of fire.

With a normal mob, under normal circumstances, I would be hearing multiple screams of agony by now. But not this mob. Not these circumstances. Under Shonkla-raa rule the standing order was apparently not to speak unless spoken to. The shock front wavered, then pressed ahead even as the blue-edged flames danced across the hair and shoulders of those behind them.

Over the whistle of the command tone, I heard a sort of gurgling sob. Like the Shonkla-raa, Terese also hadn’t expected me to be willing to do whatever needed to be done. But there were no words of reproof or horror, and that single sob was all I heard, and even as I threw my last Molotov cocktail I saw her move two of the uncapped bottles forward into my reach.

But for the moment I wouldn’t need them. The attack had hesitated at my second and third bombs. Now, as my sixth detonated into flame, the entire crowd wavered, then drew back a little as the pain flooding the mind segment briefly overrode even the Shonkla-raa’s control over it. They only moved a little, not more than half a meter and for no more than a couple of seconds before their new masters regained control and forced them back under their telepathic whip.

But that half meter was all I needed. With the forward pressure from the rear of the crowd no longer pressing the front line against the train and my defender barrier, I leveled the kwi at our attackers and squeezed the trigger.

My first target’s knees buckled, dropping him into a heap on the platform. I held down the trigger, sweeping the kwi back and forth across the line, collapsing them like legs of an overloaded table.

The Shonkla-raa tried to surge them forward again, trying furiously to regain the initiative. But they were too late. With the front line down, the stacks of unconscious bodies had become an impediment to further forward movement, slowing the advance still farther and giving me that much more time to mow them down. If the Fillies were stupid enough or determined enough to keep at it, they would quickly run out of troops.

Unfortunately, they were neither. I’d just started on the third row, with maybe twenty out of the hundred walkers down for the count, when the rest abruptly scattered to the rear and to both sides. I managed to nail three more of them as they ran, and then they were out of range or my line of fire.

I took a deep breath, instantly regretting it as the distant stink of burned clothing and flesh assailed my nostrils. Now that the crowd had dispersed I had a clear view of the burn victims I’d created, lying or writhing on the platform with wisps of smoke curling up from their smoldering bodies. I fired a kwi blast into each of them, to at least give them the temporary respite of unconsciousness.