the figure-eight stroke and smashed the first three shots away, impact sparks sheeting from the energised sword blade. Then I struck an
uwe sax, an ulsar and a ura wyla bei in rapid series, deflecting squashed rounds into the panelling around me. Wood splintered.
I dived sideways as further shots punched into the hallway carpet and exploded on the inter-wagon doors. People were screaming in the cabins all around.
I rolled and came up on my feet as the first Vessorine rounded the car-end corner and fired half a dozen times. His ejecting shell-cases pattered off his torso in a fog of blue smoke and his gun muzzle lit up like a blowtorch. Point blank.
Except I was behind him.
His gunfire shredded the wagon wall and ruptured the window frame. Barbarisater removed his head.
The second one was charging and firing too. He let out a mask-muffled bellow as he saw his comrade collapse in pieces.
I threw an ura geh sequence that diverted the white blurs of his bullets, then followed in with a uin tahn wyla that chopped the barrel off his weapon, a reverse tahn stroke that severed his forearms, and then the ewl caer. The death stroke.
Hot red blood was already spurting from his arm stumps and steaming in the freezing air as Barbarisater plunged through his ceramite chest armour and burst his heart. The gunshot walls were painted with instantly frozen dribbles of bloody ice.
A bullet creased the corner of my jaw with enough force to rip open the flesh of my chin and knock me to the carpet. I tried to rise, but the third Vessorine was right over me. I heard his weapon rack.
He screamed. I smelled a burning in the cold air.
I looked up.
The Vessorine was trying to shield himself, as if from a swarm of stinging insects. Crezia's cyber skulls were flitting around him, stabbing repeatedly with their surgical lasers.
His yelps were cut off by the double crack of a las-weapon.
The janissary collapsed like a deadweight at my feet.
I looked down the hall and saw Eleena Koi in the doorway of my room, holding her pistol in a defiant two-handed grip.
'Eleena!' I yelled. 'Get the others out of the compartment! Get mem out into the hall and move them this way!'
'But Medea-' she began.
'Do it!'
I ran to the cut-out car window and hauled myself out into the vicious chill. I had to sheath Barbarisater and it didn't like it. Outside, it was bone-achingly cold and the blizzard pummelled me with hail hard as stones. There was precious little in the way of handholds and the exterior of the car was iced up.
I found something to cling to… solid runnels of ice, I think. My fingers went numb.