Zhukov had a radio and sidearm and probably combat training. Tommy couldn’t just whisk the girls away and not count on the man summoning help.
“Take the keys.” Tommy handed the keyring to Knickknack. “Free the girls, get them headed back to where you were chained.”
“What are you going to do?” Knickknack whispered.
“Focus on the girls.” Tommy checked the door to the men’s locker room. He wanted to keep the Undefended females out of the fight. They were like alley cats when it came to fighting: painted claws out and scratching while howling curses. It might be effective against other girls on street corners, but not against men armed with guns.
The door swung inward. Zhukov was bigger than Tommy but not braced for an attack from the rear. Tommy caught the man by the collar and dragged him fast through the door.
The locker room was an assault on Tommy’s nose, of piss and damp and mold. Nor was it empty; two men stood by the wash sinks on the far back wall, looking surprised. Zhukov spun out of Tommy’s hold and pulled his gun.
Tommy stepped back. He fed into Zhukov’s mind the image of two lesser blood oni warriors standing in place of the men: the ones that were over six feet tall with a pig-snout nose and tusks. Their sharp nasal grunting. Their musky reek. Zhukov shouted with surprise and emptied his gun into his coworkers.
“Blyat!” Zhukov shouted the word like a curse. The gun shook as he kept it aimed at the dead bodies. “What the hell are those? How did they get in here?”
There was a sudden barrage of gunfire outside the building. The cargo truck’s loud horn sounded long and urgent. Tommy had never heard a more clear “come now” signal.
The door opened behind Zhukov. Knickknack stood in the doorway, looking shocked.
The guard whirled and pulled the trigger on his gun. Luckily, it was empty.
“Stupid fuck!” Tommy cut Zhukov’s throat. “I told you to focus on the girls!”
Knickknack backed out of the door, mouth open, eyes wide. “I–I-I thought you might need help.”
Tommy wiped his knife on Zhukov’s clothes and sheathed it. The gunfire outside was only increasing in volume. What the hell was happening out there? “Come on.”
The hallway was crowded with frightened girls. They apparently had afforded themselves use of the showers in the woman’s locker room: they smelled of cheap hand soap and clean flesh. Without their heavy streetwalker makeup, they all appeared young and innocent. He might have been wrong about their ages; none of them looked older than eighteen. All the kids were bruised and battered. Knickknack wasn’t the only one with a black eye and the girls all had marks on their arms to show that they had been roughly held by men with large, strong hands.
An alarm started to sound as they headed cautiously through the maze of hallways back toward the big machine room.
“Is that a fire alarm?” Peanut Butter Pie said.
“Maybe,” Knickknack said.
Tommy wanted to get back to his hoverbike without running into any more groups of armed guards.
In the machine room, the far wall was slowly lifting. He hadn’t noticed before but it was actually a huge airplane hangar-like door. The entire massive wall was folding up in four separate sections. Beyond the gleaming white manufacturing room, rails led down a steep concrete slope to the water. The muddy scent of the river was spilling in through the opening doorway.
The loud alarm might be to warn people that a boat was launching. Certainly the freshly created machine seemed to be preparing to leave — arms and clamps were retracting and the hum of a motor was coming from the thing. There was a weird chiming noise, similar to a hoverbike’s spell chain spinning up.
Bullets pinged off the side wall. Tommy glanced out toward the river. There was a tugboat maneuvering a river barge filled with oni warriors toward the boat ramp.
“Shit,” Tommy hissed. “Run!”
Loud elf fusion music started to play on a loudspeaker and a squeaky girly voice announced in English, “We are Pittsburgh! We are Team Tinker! Hooyah! Launching Tesla Mark Two Point Oh! Team Mischief, Go!”
The large newly fabricated machine lifted up and roared sideways out the opening. It had been a spell chain spinning up that he had been hearing.
“What the hell is happening?” one of the girls shouted.
That was what Tommy wanted to know. He wasn’t sure what the giant mongrel hoverbike thing was but it seemed to be on their side.
Olivia was desperately honking the cargo truck’s horn again as Tommy led the Undefended out of the big building and around the corner to where he had left his bike. He was glad to see she’d shifted the big vehicle so that it was protected by the building. The marines were behind heavy cover, returning fire at the oni. There was no sign of the Midas Erobern people; the rats had piled into their cars and fled. At some point Gaddy had slipped through the trashed gate and now sat on her hoverbike beside the truck.
The Undefended skittered in circles, not wanting to get closer to the gunfight.
Olivia spotted them and scrambled out of the cab to wave the Undefended toward her. “Come on! Get in the truck!”
“Go!” Tommy ordered, shoving them. He stopped at his hoverbike. All the Undefended except Knickknack ran to the truck.
The boy paused to look around. “Is Mokoto here? It’s all my fault that Joyboy is dead. I don’t want Mokoto hurt because I was stupid. None of this would have happened if I didn’t let Toad talk me into growing those drugs. If I hadn’t started to work Liberty. Hell, I should have just gone home for the summer! Mokoto didn’t come, did he? He’s not getting shot at?”
“He’s not here!” Tommy roared. “He sent me, okay?”
Knickknack looked relieved and pleased. “Oh! Good! Okay. Right. I’ll get in the truck, then.”
“They’re setting up a heavy machine gun!” Dagger shouted. “We cannot hold this position!”
“Pull back!” Olivia ordered. “Get in the truck! We’re leaving!”
The marines dashed back, covering one another as they retreated. The machine gun opened fire, chewing through the pallets that the marines had been hiding behind. The truck had heavy cover behind the building but they needed to pull into the oni firing range to clear the gate.
“Hold on!” Tommy called as he pulled his hoverbike up beside the cargo truck. “We need to take out the machine gun before driving through its line of fire!”
“I can try ramming the fence,” Olivia said.
Tommy scanned the fence line. Yes, the truck could probably easily ram through the chain-link fence but the jumps for Tinker’s racetrack blocked the sidewalk beyond.
The large flying vehicle suddenly swooped down to hover beside Tommy. Up close and without all the fabricating machines attached to it, the thing looked more like a tank, with a long tube barrel sticking out in front. “We are Pittsburgh!”
“We are Team Tinker?” Gaddy said even though she wasn’t on Tinker’s hoverbike racing team.
“Hooyah!” the hovertank said in its little girl voice. “Leave that barge to us!”
“Okay,” Tommy said when it became obvious that everyone else was speechless.
The hovertank swooped around the corner of the building with the speed of a hummingbird. There was a quiet poof and a small white ball went sailing out of the cannon. A foot or two from the muzzle, the ball transformed into a massive ray of white-hot energy that flashed forward. The beam hit the machine gun and sliced through the deck of the barge.
“Chi-chi-chi!” one of the marines cried. “Spell arrow!”
Tommy had never seen a spell arrow do that kind of damage. How did anyone get it ramped up to do that? Why was the hovertank using something akin to a spitball? How?