‘Trine!’ she shouted. ‘Here!’ Her voice was almost lost in the general commotion, but the Hiver picked it from the air and limped towards her. They still had the regalia, Solace saw, their arms carefully folding the pieces back into their body.
‘Go! That way!’ Solace shoved Kris onwards, seeing the next few moments unfold in her mind. Heremon had gone to order the defence but Mesmon was right there and off the leash. He was going for Trine to get back their precious relics, punching down an out-of-place cultist and shoving one of his own people aside to do so. Solace, unarmoured, unarmed, went for him anyway. A human gangster got in the way and turned a magnetic pistol on her. Or offered it to her, as far as she was concerned, because he was far too close and a knife would have served him better. She got a hand on the barrel and twisted it against his thumb until he wasn’t holding it anymore, then slammed a shoulder to his chest and a heel onto his instep, knocking him onto his back as she turned the gun on an incoming Castigar. She was also too close to really be relying on ranged weaponry, but she was just quick enough to chew the thing’s blockish head off with half a dozen high velocity flechettes. All of which left her too late to help Trine.
Trine was still coming, though. Solace saw that Olli had rammed Mesmon with her walking frame again, hard enough to stagger him. Even as he recovered, glaring murder at her, the specialist yelled some kind of war cry. A section of her frame shot forwards, turned into a makeshift metal javelin. It lanced through Mesmon’s chest and pinned him to the far wall, writhing and howling. For a moment Solace dared to hope that it might have destroyed the symbiote at his back. Then of course he was working his way off the shaft, bloody foam at the corners of his mouth. She put seven flechettes into him to slow him down, but reckoned their effect would be minimal.
‘Solace!’ It was Kris’s voice, and she glanced over to see the woman standing by an armoured Partheni myrmidon.
‘Trine, that way!’ The Hiver had already gathered as much and was hobbling towards Kris accordingly. Solace looked about for Kit, but the Hannilambra was nowhere to be seen. ‘Olli—！’
The specialist was already scurrying in the other direction. She cast a baleful glance over her shoulder as she yelled ‘No!’ A gunman tried to get in her way and she rammed the tip of one of her walker’s legs into the man’s knee. Solace heard the crunch from across the room.
‘Olli . . . Timo, please.’ Solace ran after her. ‘We’ll get to the Vulture. We’ll get Idris.’ Solace glanced about, seeing that the throne room was almost empty, though she could still hear shots outside. A group of thugs had formed up around Aklu to escort the Essiel elsewhere. Sathiel and the cult had already left by another route. The chief remaining threat was Mesmon, still nearby and almost free. She shot him another three times just for the hell of it, emptying the magazine, then took up the projectile rifle dropped by the man with the smashed knee. She headed after Olli at a run.
‘Just leave me alone, Patho.’ Olli had taken one of the circular corridors out, following some indicator on the walker’s board. She wasn’t headed towards the Vulture. ‘I’ve business to take care of here. Something of mine to get back.’
‘Is it your suit?’ Solace demanded. ‘Olli, it’s not worth your life.’ And it’s not worth mine and I should leave her to it. She hates me anyway. Yet Solace carried on running, barely able to keep up with the skittering of the walker. At least Kris and Trine were with her sisters.
‘You wouldn’t understand,’ Olli shouted over her shoulder. One of the Harvest’s crew crossed her path, perhaps just some perfectly innocent technician on his way to repair something. Olli ran the man over, trampled him and barely slowed. ‘You don’t know how long it took me to make it mine.’ She looked at her instruments and took a sudden left-then-up, the walker scrabbling at the gradient, slipping a little. It gave Solace the chance to catch her. And then they had broken out into a spherical room. Someone’s quarters, no need to guess whose.
There was a bed suspended in a-grav in the room’s centre. A big one, too, suggesting that Mesmon either liked company or was a very restless sleeper. Several tanks and hoses were set into one wall, some concession to his hybrid biology. Maybe the symbiote liked to detach and go for a swim every so often. And there was the Scorpion, already mounted on one wall with its arms spread. Plenty of room for it, here; Mesmon’s quarters were bigger than the Vulture’s drone bay. He wanted a trophy, he’d said. And, despite all the Scorpion’s threat and power, here it was no more than a specimen pinned to a card.