Holly skirted the pair, shouldering her way on to the plaza outside. Outside, relatively speaking. Everything was inside when you lived in a tunnel. Overhead, the sunstrips were set to mid-morning. She could trace Doodah’s progress by the trail of chaos in his wake. The vole kiosk was overturned. Lumpy grey-green curry congealed on the flagstones. And lumpy grey-green footsteps led to the plaza’s northern corner. So far, Doodah was behaving very predictably.
Holly shouldered through the ragged line of curry customers, keeping her eyes on the pixie’s footsteps.
‘Two minutes,’ she said, for Mulch’s benefit.
There was no reply, but there shouldn’t be, not if the dwarf was in position.
Doodah should take the next service alley and cut across to Crystal. Next time they were going after a gnome. Pixies were too fast. The fairy Council did not really like bounty hunters and tried to make life as difficult for them as possible. There was no such thing as a licensed firearm outside the LEP. Anyone with a weapon, without a badge, was going to prison.
Holly rounded the corner expecting to see the tail end of a pixie blur. Instead, she saw a ten-tonne yellow multi-mixer bearing down on her. Obviously, Doodah Day had finished being predictable.
‘D’Arvit!’ swore Holly, diving to one side. The multi-mixer’s front rotor chewed through the plaza’s paving, 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.’