spitting it out at the rear in centimetre-perfect slabs.
She rolled into a crouch, reaching for the Neutrino blaster, which had been on her hip until recently. All she found was air.
The multimixer was swinging round for a second run, bucking and hissing like a mechanical Jurassic carnivore. Giant pistons thumped, and rotor blades carved scythe-like through whatever surface fell beneath their blades. Debris was shovelled into the machine's belly, to be processed and shaped by heated plates.
It reminds me a bit of Mulch, thought Holly. Funny what crosses your mind when your life is in danger.
She back-pedalled away from the mixer. Yes, it was big, but it was slow and unwieldy. Holly glanced upwards to the cab, and there was Doodah, expertly manipulating the gears. His hands flashed across the knobs and levers, dragging the metal behemoth towards Holly.
All around was pandemonium. Shoppers howling, emergency klaxons sounding. But Holly couldn't worry about that now. Priority one: stay alive. Terrifying as this situation might be to the general public, Holly had years of LEP training and experience. She'd escaped the grasp of far quicker enemies than this multimixer.
As it turned out, Holly was mistaken. The multimixer was slow as a whole, but some of its parts were lightning fast. For example, the containment paddles, two three-metre high walls of steel that slotted out on either side of the front rotor to contain any debris that might be thrown up by the rotor blades.
Doodah Day, an instinctive driver of any vehicle, saw his opportunity and took it. He overrode the safety and deployed the paddles. Four pneumatic pumps instantly pressurized and literally blew the paddles into the wall on both sides of Holly. They bit deep, sinking fifteen centimetres into the stone.
Holly's confidence drained down into her boots. She was trapped with a hundred curved strip blades tearing up the ground before her.
'Wings,' said Holly, but only her LEP suit had wings, and she had given up the right to wear that.
The paddles contained the vortex created by the blades and turned it back on itself. The vibration was terrific. Holly felt her teeth shake in her gums. She could see ten of everything. Her whole world was bad reception. Beneath her feet the blades greedily chewed the pavement.
Holly jumped at the left-hand paddle, but it was well lubricated and afforded her no purchase. Her luck was equally bad with the other paddle. The only other possible avenue was straight ahead, and that wasn't really an option, not with the deadly rotor waiting.
Holly shouted at Doodah, maybe her mouth formed actual words. She couldn't be certain, not with the shaking and the noise. Blades snicked through the air, grabbing for her. With each pass they tore strips from the ground beneath her feet. There wasn't much ground left. Soon she would be feeding the multimixer. She would be shredded, passed through the machine's innards and finally laid as a paving slab. Holly Short would literally be part of the city.
There was nothing to do. Nothing. Mulch was too far away to be of any assistance, and it wasn't likely that any civilian would attempt to mount a rogue mixer, even if they had known she was trapped between the paddles.
As the blades closed in, Holly gazed towards the computer-generated sky. It would have been nice to die on the surface. Feeling the heat of the real sun warming her brow. It would have been nice.
Then the rotor stopped. Holly was sprayed with a shower of half-digested debris from the mixer's stomach. A few stone slivers scratched her skin, but that was the extent of her injury.
Holly wiped the grime from her face and looked up. Her ears rang with the engine's aftershock, and her eyes watered from the dust that settled on her like dirty snow.
Doodah peered down at her from the cab. His face was pale but fierce.
'Leave me alone!' he shouted. His voice seemed weak and tinny to Holly's damaged eardrums.
'Just leave me alone!'
And he was gone, scurrying down the access ladder, maybe heading for his bolt-hole.
Holly leaned against one of the paddles, allowing herself a moment to recover. Tiny sparks of magic blossomed on her many cuts, sealing them. Her ears popped, whined and flexed as the magic automatically targeted her eardrums. In seconds, Holly's hearing was back to normal.
She had to get out of here. And there was only one way. Over the rotor.
Past the blades. Holly tipped one gingerly with a finger. A droplet of blood oozed from a tiny cut, only to be sucked back in by a blue spark of magic. Those blades would cut her to ribbons if she slipped, and there wouldn't be enough magic under the world to stitch her back together again. But the rotor was her only way out, otherwise she would have to sit it out here until LEP traffic arrived. It would be bad enough causing this kind of damage with the weight of LEP public liability insurance behind her, but as a freelancer she'd probably be thrown in jail for a couple of months while the courts decided what to charge her with.
Holly threaded her fingers between the blades, gripping the first bar on the rotor. It would be just like climbing a ladder. A very sharp, potentially fatal ladder. She stepped on a lower bar and boosted herself up. The rotor groaned and dropped fifteen centimetres. Holly held on, because it was safer than letting go. Blades quivered two centimetres from her limbs. Slow and steady. No false moves.
One bar at a time, Holly climbed the rotor. Twice a blade nicked her flesh, but the wounds were not serious and were quickly sealed by blue sparks. After a brief eternity of utter concentration, Holly pulled herself on to the hood. The bonnet was filthy and hot, but at least it wasn't sharper than a centaur's tongue.
'He went that way,' said a voice from ground level.
Holly looked down to see a large frowning gnome in a city services uniform pointing towards Crystal.
'He went that way,' repeated the gnome. 'The pixie who threw me out of my mixer.'
Holly stared at the burly public services guy. 'That tiny pixie threw you out?'
The gnome almost blushed. 'I was getting out anyway, he just tipped me over.' He suddenly forgot all about his embarrassment. 'Hey, aren't you Polly something? Polly Little? That's it. The LEP hero.'
Holly climbed down the cab ladder. 'Polly Little. That's me.'
Holly landed running, her boots crunching on pebbles of crushed pavement.
'Mulch,' she said. 'Doodah is coming your way. Be careful. He's a lot more dangerous than we thought.'
Dangerous? Maybe, maybe not. He hadn't killed her when he'd had the chance. It would seem that the pixie had no stomach for murder.
Doodah's stunt with the multimixer had caused chaos in the plaza.
Traffic police, nicknamed Wheelies, were pouring in and civilians were pouring out. Holly counted at least six LEPtraffic magna-bikes and two cruisers. She was keeping her head down, when one of the traffic officers hopped off his bike and grabbed her shoulder.
'Did you see what happened, missy?'
Missy? Holly was tempted to twist the hand on her shoulder and flip the officer into a nearby recycler. But this was not the time for outrage — she needed to redirect his attention.
'Why, thank goodness you're here, Officer,' she twittered in a voice at least an octave higher than her normal tones. 'Over there, by the multimixer.There's blood everywhere.'
'Blood!' exclaimed the Wheelie, delighted to hear it. 'Everywhere?'
'Absolutely everywhere.'
The traffic cop dropped Holly's shoulder. 'Thank you, missy. I'll handle it from here.'
He strode purposefully towards the multimixer, then turned back.
'Excuse me, missy,' he said, recognition glimmering in his eye, just out of reach. 'Don't I know you?'
But the hooded elf had disappeared.
Ah well, thought the Wheelie. I should probably go look at the blood everywhere.
Holly ran towards Crystal Street, though she felt sure there was no need for haste. Doodah had either decided that there was too much heat on him to reveal his bolt-hole, or Mulch had him. Either way it was out of her control. Once again, she lamented the loss of LEP backup. In her Recon days, all it would have taken was a quick order into her helmet microphone, and every street in the area would be cordoned off.
She skirted a street-cleaning robot, turning on to Crystal. The narrow street was a service lane for the main shopping plaza, and consisted mostly of delivery bays. The rest of the units were rented out for storage. Holly was surprised to find Doodah directly in front of her, rummaging in his pocket, presumably for the access chip to his unit.
Something must have held him up for a minute. Maybe he had ducked behind a crate to avoid the Wheelies.
