She waited, ignored the sweat running down from her brow, her armpits. Okay, Macmillan, so you’re trying to calculate if that brush is so thick that it would obstruct a surprise attack, prevent an ambush. And you’re balancing that against your tactical training and instincts: to never take an apparently unavoidable path. But the clock is ticking, you’re exhausted, and if you don’t have my head on a stake when you meet your masters—
Macmillan slipped out of the undergrowth and back on to the trail, glancing at the scattered leaves and bent fronds that marked Nasr’s passage. Decided, he hefted his combitool and moved forward quickly, entering the bait ground.
Macmillan got three meters farther along the path before a thin, shrill keening rose around him. Surprised, puzzled, he stopped, lifted the axe—
And was suddenly at the center of a cloud of what looked like flying, fanged salamanders with far too many eyes. Landing in his hair, on his florid face and arms, they began biting, darting off, flying back in for another mouthful. Macmillan swung the axe fruitlessly—
Despite the uneven ground and obtruding foliage, Dora sprinted the twelve yards separating them in just over four seconds. He clearly heard something behind him; he’d half turned when her flying kick hit him like a jackhammer, dropping him. She rolled up, backed away — and was surprised at how fast Macmillan recovered. But he was being swarmed by flying, biting salamanders, and Dora was not. A few ventured near her but, upon coming closer — particularly where she’d rubbed up against the water-strider — they shied away with an annoyed snap of their translucent wings. Macmillan feinted with the axe; she backed up a step, but did not watch his eyes, or even his elbows. Peripherally, her attention was riveted on his feet: where and when he committed to an attack with an axe would be decisively signaled by his stance.
Macmillan was sly; he shuffle-stepped. But Dora had been in far too many melees to be fooled; the arch of his first foot remained high when his toes hit the ground, a physical sign that this was not to be his last step.
He swung, missed, planted his feet as he pulled back the axe to swing again.
Gotcha.
With Macmillan’s body twisted away, the axe still cocking back for a lethal blow, Dora jumped in with a side-kick that punched directly into her opponent’s kneecap. He yowled, faltered; she let split-second instinct inform her that there was no ruse in either, and followed with the hardest spinning roundhouse she could deliver. An idiot attack, really, unless you know—know—you have the time to deliver it. At which point, it was like hitting your adversary with a sledgehammer.
Which was the result. With his knee already buckling at an unnatural angle, the kick caught Macmillan in the ribs. Two snaps — one small and reedy, the other heavier — accompanied the impact. Dora both grimaced and grinned: lost my little toe; he lost his ribs. I’ll take the trade.
Macmillan had also lost the grip on his weapon; Veriden kicked it away. When he brought his head up — eyes desperate, pleading — she gauged his probable reach, danced to the outside of his left arm and front-kicked him square in the face. He went back with a grunt, his eyes unsteady. Good, she thought, pushing away some of her sweaty hair. Now, to get permanent control of the situation—
* * *
The howl of pain with which Macmillan came back to his senses was sure to call down his employers, so Dora made her speech quickly. “So how’s it feel having a freshly broken leg, bitch?”
Macmillan’s face was a rictus of pain; his left tibia was not merely broken, but splintered. A tooth of bone peeked through the savage wound.
“So here’s what I want to know, loving father: when your leash-holders come and find their dog laid out, immovable, what do you think they’re going to do? Take you back so you can lick your wounds in their kennel?”
“Don’t care,” Macmillan groaned. “Did this. For. Katie.”
“Yeah, well, I hope it was worth it. You’ve killed a lot of good people. Well, I’ve got to get going; don’t want to be here when your owners show up and find I’ve lamed their bitch.” She turned and darted out the other side of the bait ground, his curses following her. She ran until he was completely out of sight, then doubled back and padded toward her first ambush point, but further into the woods, virtually invisible behind the canopy of a small cone-tree.
Dora only had to wait two minutes before she saw the first signs of the attackers: movement in the brush on the eastern side of the glade. Meaning they had probably not found Riordan; if they had stumbled across that first clearing, they would have seen and followed the trail that she and Macmillan had left. In which case they would have entered this glade from the north.
It was another minute before two clones emerged, sweeping the tree line with their weapons, then staring at the occasional winged newt-gators that landed on Macmillan, took a savage tear at his flesh, and flew off again. The Scotsman, between swatting them away and occasional groans, produced and choked down a mix of pills that looked like painkillers and the amphetamines that Riordan had been popping.
After walking the perimeter of the clearing and detecting where Dora’s and Macmillan’s tracks had entered it, the clones waved an all-clear. Four more figures entered the open space.
Dora did not even have to think about identifying their leader. His weapon, a liquimix Jufeng, marked his status as clearly as his height and distinctive facial features: angular, with prominent cheekbones and a high forehead. Not only taller than the clones, he had the tigerlike build of a decathlete on steroids. The clones hung at his heels, alert to his commands, like a pack of hounds following a hunter.
The leader approached Macmillan, gestured for him to be pulled beyond the ready reach of his winged tormentors, looked down at the broken man.
“You are Macmillan.” It was a statement that bordered on a question as he assessed the man’s shattered leg. “You have been bested in a fight. And you have failed in your mission.”
Macmillan gasped out responses through his pain. “I carried out the instructions I decrypted from the file that your people added to my palmtop, the one that was in my coldcell. I got rid of the first saboteur after he crippled the Slaasriithi ship. I sabotaged the group as best I could down here, made their leader sick—”
“Not so sick that he couldn’t mount a disappointingly effective defense. Well, let us call it a delaying action. The automated weapons platform we found. It was of Slaasriithi manufacture?”
“Yes. They brought it up about an hour before you arrived. There was no way for me to—”
“Failure is failure,” the leader decreed. “I understand what you attempted to do: cripple them, yet keep them together so we could easily locate and exterminate them.”
“Yes, after you failed to take care of them in orbit and the legation split up. After that, I had no way of getting the job done myself. There were too many survivors planetside, and Riordan and Veriden were both dangerous enough on their own. No opportunity arose where I could be sure of killing one without the other being aware that I had done it. And then I would have had to kill the second one and finish off all the other survivors. So I did the one thing that ensured they would all be destroyed: I remained with them. So I could be your beacon.”
“You mean, so we could do your job. Typical low breed.”
“No, damn it. Think it through: you had the necessary force to do the entire job with no chance of failure. I was one against many and not well-armed. Besides, the longer we were here, the more the wildlife seemed to — well, adopt Riordan. I think he may be—”