I did not need vision to know that my enemy was frozen, like a nocturnal animal paralyzed by the sudden attention of a beam of light.
“So?” I asked, dripping contempt from every syllable, “not going to taunt me? Just going to remain hidden and hope I miss you?”
No answer.
How delicious, after how small I’d been made to feel, to know that something in the universe held its breath, to avoid being heard by me.
I took a single tiny step. “Those were some pretty imaginative messages you sent. Vicious, all of them. I confess I mistook them it for ordinary hate mail. But it wasn’t a grudge that made you send them, was it? It was fear. You knew the AIsource wanted to recruit me, and you knew your side was less than pleased with you. You knew there were limits to how much you’d be protected.”
More silence.
“None of this had to happen. You didn’t have to terrorize anybody. Considering the conditions in the Habitat, you could have faked a simple accident. And even if your keepers gave you free rein to do whatever you wanted to do next, you could have harassed Hammocktown in any number of subtler ways. You didn’t have to pursue old grudges. You didn’t have to put on a show.”
The unseen presence surprised me by laughing out loud, closer to me than I would have liked. “I did if I hated the bitch.”
I turned toward the voice. “And that’s the real problem, isn’t it? Growing up with no love. Denied human interaction. Always feeling apart. Hate was the only thing you were ever any really good at, wasn’t it. You let it make you a monster.”
“Look who’s talking.”
The comeback drew no blood whatsoever. It just made me sad. “But at least I’ve spent my life being judged for it. What about you, Christina?”
I sensed, rather than heard, her charge.
The impact against my gut knocked the breath out of me and propelled us both several body-lengths backward, in what would have been an immediate plunge to the floor had I not wasted several of those feet struggling to stay upright.
We hit the floor together, without so much as a thud, the only sounds being her curses and my own gasps of pain.
Something solid exploded against the side of my face, splitting my lip and filling my mouth with the taste of blood. Another wild swing grazed my temple, drawing a line of fire and slamming the already injured back of my head against the silent floor. I groped for her jaw, my stunner already hungry on my fingertips, but I’d already used it twice on this station and had lost whatever element of surprise I might have enjoyed with her otherwise; she just wrapped her hand around the fingertips in question and yanked it off, enduring the momentary zap in exchange for the savage pleasure of flinging my only weapon into the darkness. She didn’t seem to feel any pain it must have caused her. She was too busy screaming words saturated with lifetimes of humiliation and deprivation and pain.
By now she was straddling my upper abdomen, keeping me pinned to the floor as she raised her hands over her head for another blow. I brought my legs up in a vague attempt to kick her in the back of the head. I failed. She was leaning too far forward now, too lost in the need to scream whatever she was screaming. My legs fell back down and slammed the floor hard, an impact that may have been silent but which in rebound gave me just enough momentum to attempt a roll. She had to brace her right hand against the floor to compensate, an act that took her weapon out of play for maybe another three seconds. It gave me the opportunity I needed to take all my strength and all my desperation and all my need to survive and put it into a single roundhouse punch against the side of her face.
I might as well have done nothing.
I understood why when she went for my neck and I grabbed her wrists to hold her arms in place. It was a ridiculous contest. Like so many of Gibb’s people, she was all corded, hypertrophic muscle. I had always kept myself fit, in part through Dip Corps regimen and in part through regular rejuvenation treatments from AIsource Medical, but fitness for a representative of the Judge Advocate was nothing compared to the fitness required of the high-altitude specialists who staffed Hammocktown. They were all used to lifting their own weight, at length, with minimal muscle strain.
Even with my hands wrapped tightly around Santiago’s iron-cable wrists, straining to hold back the inevitable, I could offer only token resistance as the screaming woman forced her hands downward, toward my throat.
I had been places like this before. I had been small and I had been helpless and I had been irrelevant in the face of power greater than my own.
I felt my mouth twist in the beginnings of a strangled scream as Christina Santiago’s hands, undeterred by any of my attempts to hold them back, closed tight around my neck.
Her thumbs dug deep into my windpipe.
Her grip was unbelievable.
It not only cut off my breath, it eliminated the possibility of breath.
It turned air into an abstraction.
My world turned blood-red around the edges.
I felt that blood-red start to go gray.
I realized I knew what Santiago was screaming.
I knew I was about to die and I knew she had all the advantages and I ignored the internal voice that tried to tell me I had nothing.
Because I had more than nothing.
I was Andrea Cort, dammit.
And that’s when my own thumbs, clutching at Santiago’s face, located her eyes.
I had gone straight for those points of weakness, showing no more restraint, or for that matter common decency, than her own.
We were both screaming now. Santiago because she was sure she’d been permanently blinded, me because her grip around my throat had given way and provided me with the air that made screaming possible.
I withdrew my bloodied right hand and jabbed her again in the face, this time feeling her nose go.
The space between us became a slapstick battle of fingers as we each clutched for the wrists of the other. I managed to evade her grip long enough to rake again at her face. She reared back to avoid another attack on her eyes. I took advantage of that fleeting moment of unbalance by rolling to my left and this time, miraculously, succeeding in shaking her off.
((last chance, counselor * decide which side you’re on))
Santiago and I were both dazed, battered figures, crawling away from each other as we struggled with the wounds already inflicted. She was bleeding into her eyes from twin gouges just below the brow. I was dazed, disoriented, concussed, gasping, and in shock.
In that moment, we both knew the winner of our battle would be entirely determined by whichever one of us managed to get up first.
Santiago recovered faster.
But I was the one who seized the hair on the back on her head and with all my might, slammed her face into the floor.
The absence of any impact sound brought the sounds of her battered flesh into sharp relief. I could have been repelled, but instead I pulled her head back and slammed it down again, two, three, and then four times, feeling the impacts reverberate all the way up my wrists.
Then I fell back and watched in case she got up again. But Santiago was, if not unconscious, for the moment at least too dazed to fight; her slight stirrings slow and clumsy and no longer an imminent threat.
She even wept.
It was several seconds before I collected enough air to speak. “Damn you.”
The words could have been intended for Santiago, but the rogue intelligences or Unseen Demons—whatever name I’d eventually decide to stick with—knew who was being addressed. ((that’s what they want of you, andrea cort * they want to be damned * it’s up to your conscience whether you choose them))
And that’s when some idiot turned on the lights.