The warty thing looked right at Dairine too-and cried out in some language she couldn't understand, a bizarre soprano singing of notes like a synthesizer playing itself. Then it yanked the leash sharply and let the deinonychus go.
Dairine scrambled to her feet as the deinonychus loped toward her. Terrified as she was, she knew better than to try to run away from this thing. She slammed the computer's screen closed and waited. No kicks, she told herself, if one kick doesn't take this thing out, you'll never have time for a second-It leapt at her, but she was already swinging: Dairine hit the deinonychus right in the face with the computer and felt something crunch. Oh, please don t let it be the plastic, she thought, and then the impetus of the deinonychus carried it right into her, its broken jaw knocked against her face as it fell, she almost fell with it. Dairine stumbled back, found her footing, turned, and began to run.
Behind her more voices were lifted. Dairine ran like a mad thing, pushing through crowds wherever she could. Who are they, why are they after me? And where do I run. .
She dodged through a particularly dense crowd and paused, looking for a corridor to run down, a place to hide. Nothing. This part of the Crossings was one huge floor, very few niches to take advantage of.
But farther on, about half a mile away, it looked like the place narrowed. .
She ran. The noise behind her was deafening. There was some shooting: she heard the scream of blasterbolts, the sound that had set her blood racing in the movies. But now it wasn't so exciting. One bolt went wide over her head. It hit a low-floating bit of the ceiling off to one side of her, and she smelled the stink of scorched plastic and saw a glob of it fall molten to splat on the floor. Dairine sprinted past it, panting. She was a good runner, but she couldn't keep this up for much longer.
Bug-eyed monsters! her brain sang at her in terror. These weren't what I had in mind! "What are they-"
"Emissaries," said the computer, in a muffled voice since its screen was shut over its speaker.
Dairine kept running. "From where?"
"Indeterminate. Continue run?"
"If it'll get me out of here, yes-!"
"Last level of education finished-"
She told it, gasping, as she ran. She told it her mother's maiden name, and how much money her father made, and at what age she had started reading, and much more useless information. . And then while she was telling it what she thought of boys, something caught her by the arm.
It was a three-fingered hand, knobby, a slick dark green, and strong with a terrible soft strength that pulled her right out of her run and around its owner as if she were spinning around a pole. Dairine cried out at her first really close look at a bug-eyed monster. Its eyes were an awful milky red that should have meant it was blind, but they saw her too well entirely-and it sang something high at her and grabbed her up against it with its other hand, the nonchalant don't-hurt-it grasp of the upper arms that adults use on children, not knowing how they hate it… or not caring. Dairine abruptly recognized the BEM's song as laughter, once removed from the horrible low laughing she had seemed to hear in transit. And suddenly she knew what these things were, if not who. "No!" she screamed.
"Intervention subroutine?" said the computer, utterly calm.
Dairine struggled against the thing, couldn't get leverage: all the self-defense she had been taught was for use on humans, and this thing's mass was differently distributed. Not too far away she heard more of the horrid fluting, BEMs with guns, coming fast. Half her face was rammed up against its horrible hide, and her nose was full of a stink like old damp coffee grounds. Her revulsion was choking her: the grasp of the thing on her was as unhuman as if she were being held by a giant cockroach. . and Dairine hated bugs. "Kill it!" she screamed.
And something threw her back clear a good twenty feet and knocked her head against the floor. .
Dairine scrambled up. The BEM was gone. Or rather, it wasn't a BEM anymore. It was many many little pieces of BEM, scattered among splatters of dark liquid all over the floor, and all over everything else in the area, including her. Everything smelled like an explosion in a coffeeshop.
Hooting noises began to fill the air. Oh, no, Dairine thought as she grabbed the computer up from the floor and began to run again. Now this place's own security people were going to start coming after her.
They would ask her questions. And no matter how little a time they did that for, the BEMs would be waiting. If they waited. If they didn't just come and take her away from the port's security. And even if she killed every BEM in the place, more would come. She knew it.
She ran. People looked at her as she ran. Some of them were hominid, but not even they made any move to stop her or help her: they looked at her with the blank nervousness of innocent bystanders watching a bank robber flee the scene of the crime. Dairine ran on, desperate. It was like some nightmare of being mugged in a big city, where the streets are full of people and no one moves to help.
The blasterscreams were a little farther behind her. Maybe the one BEM's fate had convinced the others it would be safer to pick her off from a distance. But then why didn't they do that before?
Unless they wanted me alive. .
She ran and ran. That laughter in the dark now pounded in her pulse, racing, and in the pain in the side that would shortly cripple her for running. Something she had read in Nita's manual reoccurred to her: Old Powers, not friendly to what lives: and one of the oldest and strongest, that invented death and was cast out. . Part of her, playing cold and logical, rejected this, insisted she had no data, just a feeling. But the feeling screamed Death! and told logic to go stuff it somewhere. These things belonged to that old Power. She needed a safe place to think what to do. Home. . But no. Take these things home with her? Her mom, her dad, these things would.
But maybe Nita and Kit could help.
But admit that she needed help?
Yes. No. Yes.
But without resetting the transit program, she couldn't even do that. No time. .
"Can you run subroutines of that program before you finish plugging in the variables?" Dairine said, gasping as she ran.
"Affirmative."
"Then do it, as soon as you can!"
"Affirmative. Name of best friend-"
She wondered for a second whether 'Shash Jackson was still her best friend after she had cleaned him out of his record money three days ago. Then she gave his name anyway. Red lines of light lanced over her head as she ran. And here, the ceiling was getting lower, the sides of the building were closer, there were smaller rooms, places to go to ground. .
The stitch in her side was killing her. She plowed through a crowd of what looked like ambulatory giant squid on a group tour, was lost among them for a moment, in a sea of waving purple tentacles, tripping over their luggage, which crowded aside squawking and complaining-then came out the other side of them and plunged into a smaller corridor about the size of Grand Central Station.
She kept giving the computer inane information as she ran down the corridor, pushing herself to the far side of the stitch, so that she could reach someplace to be safe for a minute. There were more gates here, more signs and seating areas, and of? to one side, a big shadowy cul-de-sac. She ran for it, any cover being better than none.