She stiffened, eyes suddenly huge in the dimness, yet even now there was no panic in their depths. They were cool and still, for the terror of that silent voice eddied against a shield of glass. She sensed its presence, felt it prickle in her palms, yet it could not touch her.
"Who—what—are you?" she asked the emptiness, and a silent laugh quivered deep at her core.
"Have mortals forgotten us, indeed? Ah, how fickle you are! You may call me Tisiphone."
"Tisiphone?" There was an elusive familiarity to that name, but—
"There, now," the voice murmured like crystal, singing on the edge of shattering, and its effort to soothe seemed alien to it. "Once your kind called us the Erinyes, but that was long, long ago. Three of us, there were: Alecto, Megarea ... and I. I am the last of the Furies, Little One."
Alicia's eyes opened even wider, and then she closed them tight. The simplest answer was that she'd been right the first time. She must be mad. That certainly made more sense than holding a conversation with something out of Old Earth's mythology! Yet she knew she wasn't, and her lips twitched at the thought. Didn't they say that a crazy person knew she wasn't mad? And who but a madwoman would feel so calm at a moment like this?
"For all your skills, your people have become most blind. Have you lost the ability to believe anything you cannot see or touch? Do not your "scientists' deal daily with things they can only describe?"
"Touche," Alicia murmured, then shook herself. Immobilizing tractor collars circled her left leg at knee and hip, lighter than a plasticast yet dragging at her as she eased up on her elbows. She raked hair from her eyes and looked around until she spied the bed's power controls, then reached out her right hand and slipped her Gamma receptor over the control linkage. She hadn't used it in so long she had to think for almost ten full seconds before the proper neural links established themselves, but then the bed purred softly, rising against her shoulders. She settled into a sitting position and folded her hands in her lap, and her neck craned as her eyes flitted about the room once more. "Let's say I believe in you ... Tisiphone. Where are you?"
"Your wit is sharper than that, Alicia DeVries."
"You mean," Alicia said very carefully, a tiny tremor of fear oozing through the sheet of glass, "that you're inside my head?"
"Of course."
"I see." She inhaled deeply. "Why aren't I hanging from the ceiling and gibbering, then?"
"It would scarcely help our purpose for me to permit that. Not," the voice added a bit dryly, "that you are not trying to do precisely that"
"Well," Alicia surprised herself with a smile despite the madness which had engulfed her, "I guess that would be the rational thing to do."
"Rationality is an over-valued commodity, Little One. Madness has its place, yet it does make speech difficult, does it not?"
"I imagine it would." She pressed her hands to her temples, feeling the familiar angularity of her subcutaneous Alpha receptor against her right palm, and moistened her lips. "Are you ... the reason I don't hurt more?" She wasn't speaking of physical pain, and the voice knew it.
"Indeed. You are a soldier, Alicia DeVries. Does a warrior maddened by grief attain his goal or die on his enemy's blade? Loss and hatred are potent, but they must be used. I will not let them use you. Not yet."
Alicia closed her eyes again, lips trembling, grateful for the pane of glass between her and her loss. She felt endless, night-black grief waiting to suck her to destruction beyond whatever shield this Tisiphone had erected, and it frightened her. Yet there was resentment in her gratitude, as if she'd been robbed of something rightly hers—something as precious as it was cruel.
She sucked in another breath and lowered her hands once more. Either Tisiphone existed, or she truly was mad, and she might as well act on the assumption that she was sane. She opened her hospital gown and traced the red line down her chest and the ones across her abdomen. There was no pain, and quick-heal was doing its job—the incisions were half-healed already and would vanish entirely in time—but they confirmed the damage she'd taken. She let the gown fall closed and leaned back against her pillows in the quiet room.
"How long ago was I hit?"
"Time is something mortals measure better than I, Little One, and it does not exist where you and I have been, but three days have passed since they brought you to this place."
"'Where you and I have been'?"
"You were dying, and I am not what once I was. My power has waned with the passing of my other selves, and I was ever more apt to wound than heal. Since I could not make you whole, I took you to a place where time has no business until the searchers came to find you."
"Would you care to explain that a bit better?"
"Would you care to explain blue to a man born blind?"
"You sound like one of those assholes from Intelligence."
"No. They lied to you; I know what I did and would tell you if you could grasp my meaning."
Alicia pursed her lips, surprised by Tisiphone's quick understanding.
"How should I not understand? I have spent days examining your memories, Little One. I know of your Colonel Watts."
"Not my Colonel Watts." Alicia's voice was suddenly cold, and a spurt of rage took Tisiphone by surprise, squirting past the clear shield, as Alicia remembered the utter chaos of the Shallingsport Raid. She shook it away, suppressing it with a skill the Fury could not have bettered.
"All right, you're here. Why? What are you going to do?"
"You asked for vengeance, and you shall have it. We will find your enemies, you and I, and destroy them." "Just the two of us? When the entire Empire can't?" Alicia's laugh was not pleasant. "What makes you think we can do that?"
"This," the voice said softly, and Alicia's head snapped up. Her lips drew back from locked teeth, and a direcat's snarl caught at her throat. Rage flooded her veins, loosed from beyond the shield within her, distilled and pure and hotter than a star's heart. Loss and grief were in that rage, but they were only its fuel, not its heat. Its ferocity wrenched at her like fists of fire, and panic touched her as her augmentation began to respond.
But then it vanished, and she slumped back, panting and beaded with sweat. Her heart raced, and she was weak and drained, like a chemist's flask emptied of acid. Yet something quivered within her, pacing her pulse like an echo of her rage. Determination—no, more than determination. Purpose which went beyond the implacable to the inevitable, ridiculing the very thought that any power in the universe might deflect it.
"You begin to see, Little One, yet that was but your anger; you have not yet tasted mine. I am rage—your rage, and my own, and all the rage that ever was or will be—and skilled in its use. We will find them. On that you have my word, which has never been broken. And when we find them, you will have the strength of my arm, which has never failed. If I am less than once I was, I remain more than you can imagine; you will have your vengeance."
"God," Alicia whispered, pressing trembling hands to her temples once more. An icicle of terror shivered through her—not of Tisiphone, but of herself. Of the limitless capacity for destruction she had tasted within her fury. Or—she swallowed—was it within her Fury?
"I—" she began, and chopped off as a man in nursing whites charged through the door and skidded to a stop when he saw her sitting up in bed. His eyes widened, then dropped to the bedside monitors, and he lifted a neural lead from the central console. He pressed it to the terminal on his temple, and Alicia hid a twisted smile of sudden understanding. Her vital signs must have gone off the scale when that bolt of distilled rage ripped through her.