R4 hears engine before anyone else

"You're not gonna linger," Steeljack said, "And you're not gonna check an' see if anyone or anything is here. Let's just..."

Seconds earlier, Saxton had looked up, started glancing around like a startled dog. Now Steeljack was doing it as well. Something wrong? It didn't look like anything was going down. They were crammed into a narrow alley that looked like the midway between a wet market and the Gaza strip, clotheslines and barbed wire and overgrown vines tangled all up the walls above him, people thronging around him, bumping and jostling him as they headed past. The smell was foul and the noises were intolerable. But, over the general crowd sound, Chuuya could hear something new. The pop and rev of an engine.

Hale acted first. He swept up everybody in his arms, hefting the big metal schlub and Fourze and Chuuya easily and leaping up out of the alley and shredding through everything in his path. Saxton had touched down some hundred meters away in a slightly-less-crowded plaza. Instantly rock and dirt blew everywhere.

"Fuck!" Stone fragments rocketed away from the impact site like shrapnel. One scraped Chuuya's cheek. "Fuck! Fucking idiot!"

After Saxton dumped them out onto the floor, Chuuya rolled and got himself on his hands and knees. His hands found the rim of the crater. He pulled himself up. Which way had they even come from? He was completely disoriented, his sense of balance kept tilting at a Dutch angle and his stomach was doing backflips. The engine. They'd jumped away from the engine noise. Which alley was it coming from?

There it was! A wolfish howl, a little to his left, growling louder and louder. Shouts of dismay, stomping feet, crashing and creaking and snapping of wood. That sounded more like a damn rampaging monster than a vehicle. Come to think of it, how could anyone ride a motorcycle through a crowded alley like that? You'd have to plow straight through everything and everyone in your path. Unless--

A few stragglers managed to make it out, but that was it. The motorcycle rider blew through, red blood painted over his shining black armor. The sight was so ridiculous that Chuuya could hardly understand what he was seeing. It was a full-on, storybook, fairy-tale knight with a sword the size of a claymore. On top of a motorcycle.