Michael Flynn - In the Lion’s Mouth

“Only!” said Ravn Olafsdottr, who, but moments before, would have named her the deadliest individual in the battle space. “Where have you been, sweet Domino? You have made new friends.”

“There is no time now,” he said. “But, here … In case…” And Domino Tight aimed his interface at her and downloaded what she supposed must be an accounting of his suit record. She would review it later; if there was a later.

The taijis still had the tridents on the defensive. They would pick them off at retail. Ravn closed her eyes and thought; but she did not think long. Finally, she sighed. “What banner,” she asked Oschous over the link, “did Padaborn fight under?”

“Forest-green,” he answered, “under sky-blue. Why?”

But Ravn Olafsdottr was reprogramming her shenmat so that her waist and legs were green and her blouse and sleeves were sky-blue.

“What are you doing?” Domino Tight asked.

“Forgive me, Gidula,” she said. Then she pulled the white comet from her arm, set aside the long arms, and hung her belt with close weapons, checking the loads or the edges as the case might be.

“We must rally them,” she said, “before Ekadrina can drive home the counterattack that Ari Zin creature opened up.”

Domino Tight peered around the edge of the shipper. “Where is Big Jacques? The tridents have fallen back onto the woods across the roadway. The taijis are closing in; but a few are still watching the warehouse against a sortie.”

Ravn nodded. She thought about Gidula, about Oschous, about Donovan. She remembered long nights with Domino Tight. She turned her grin on him. “Follow me.”

She backed away into the loading docks, then turned and ran through the building, ran through the main warehouse, crying “Padaborn! Padaborn is back!” She did not look to see if Domino Tight followed. Jacques’s magpies, those that had been inside the warehouse, saw her colors, cheered, and leapt up to join her. “Padaborn!” Half of Oschous’s magpies did the same, though surely they knew that Donovan was supposed to be Padaborn. Perhaps they thought now that Donovan had been a diversion, and that Padaborn had traveled with them sub rosa.

She had a moment to glimpse Donovan’s astonishment and Oschous’s widened eyes, then she was past them, into the burning annex.

“Through the fire?” she heard Domino Tight ask, though when she turned her head she did not see him.

“From which corner are we least expected; from which stage might we more dramatically enter the fray?” Ahead, framing had caught fire and the paneling was peeling and dripping into the main gangway. “Explosive rounds!” she called to the magpies following her. The truck door at the end of the hall must be weakened from the flames. “Plant your munitions around the frame, by the numbers. Call out!”

The boys behind her hollered, “One, Two, Three…” and she noted that half of them, even the black horses, had altered on the fly the colors of their shenmats, so that they too sported the colors of Geshler Padaborn. Gidula had been right about the inspirational power of his name, though wrong about so much else.

“Someday you must tell me, Domino Tight,” she said conversationally, “how it is that you have become invisible.”

“Don’t be too sure you want to know,” a voice beside her said.

The heat in the annex was intense, the flames a tunnel through which they sped. A portion of the ceiling came down in a shower of sparks. The runners scattered and danced around the debris, shaking off the fiery fragments. She heard one of the boys holler, loud and shrill, and Ravn thought the girl had been burned on the face. Breathing, even through the filters, was becoming difficult; and the heat was approaching the top of the shenmat’s rating. “Standard breakout, seventh modulation!” she called to the others above the sound of the crackling and snapping joists.

“Padaborn!” they shouted in return.

And there was the metal door ahead of them. It was the sort that rolled up into an overhead bin. On the floor, consumed in flames, lay the two taijis who had entered earlier, felled by the fire nests that Oschous had emplaced, dead well before being offered as a holocaust. Ravn measured the paces to the door.

“On my call, fires explosives. After breakout, fire as opportune to relieve the tridents. Ready, three, two, one, fire!”

Fire, indeed! A dozen guns let loose, each aimed at a different point around the door, and the rounds bored into the putty-soft walls and exploded as nearly simultaneous as made no difference. The door shuddered loose from the structure even as Ravn’s combat team hit it, feet first, and it toppled like a loading ramp onto the ground beyond. They poured out across the door, breaking in all directions, still shouting, “Padaborn!”—and three taijis too slow to realize that they were dead, fell with their backs still turned.

Ekadrina Sèanmazy turned a scarred and bloody face toward the newcomers who had burst so unexpectedly out of the inferno of the annex. She whipped a flying star in a single fluid motion even as she dove for cover and summoned the rest of her flock over her link. The star struck someone in the attack team, pierced the cords of his armor, but did not bring a cry to his lips as he fell. “Padaborn!” they shouted. Padaborn? She saw a green and blue apparition bear down upon her and she fired her dazer.

She did not wait to see its effect, but whirled in a three-point tumble to come down behind an old truck barrier, where she rolled to the side and brought a pellet gun to bear. The dazer should have jangled Padaborn, slowing him, allowing the bullets opportunity to pierce the armor.

But never be surprised when the enemy does something else. Padaborn had sidestepped just before the dazer pulse and was nowhere to be seen. Ekadrina quickly ducked back behind the barrier, disappointing several bullets eager to meet her.

Save for the crackling and collapsing annex, silence lay over the battle space. Of the combat team that had burst from the annex there was no sign; of her own taijis not a trace. This was not going well. Or rather, it was seesawing too wildly for the orderly tastes of Ekadrina Sèanmazy. First, the unexpected presence of the black horses, when it should have been the tridents caught in her pincers. Then the attack from the rear by tridents who should have been bottled up in the warehouse. The fight with Big Jacques from which they had both withdrawn bloody by mutual and unspoken consent. Then the intervention that Epri had so grandly promised succeeded brilliantly, only to unexpectedly collapse. Now Padaborn had returned from the living dead.

She lay still for a moment before, in a controlled, economical gesture, she strewed crispies to the other side of the old truck barrier, so no one could approach from that quarter without a betrayal. Then she flipped her wrist and extended a see-me-more fiber scope that she slaved to her goggles and extended above the lip of the barrier.

Nothing. Discreet pops and snaps from across the roadway told her that the fight with the tridents continued. “Odd numbers,” she whispered over the link, “disengage from trident. Padaborn had a troop lying in reserve. Some will try to relieve da tridents.”

“Padaborn!” said her Number One, and the way he said it made her wish she had not mentioned the name.

“He’s a sick old man,” she told Number One. “I have dat on best authority. Dis is a desperation play.” That the play had her pinned down behind a plasteel barrier did not make it any less desperate.