“Of more amusement value to me is your choice of nom de guerre. You wish to bask in the reflected glory, alleged glory, of the O’Neal family, of course. But to claim the human mentat as your sister? What a transparent lie, even if you did find the correct name. Your features are nothing like Michelle O’Neal’s, of course. And the sister died in a nuclear explosion in the war, at the hands of her own primitive killer of a father.” His taunt took on a rich slur, an accent more inflected with the attributes of his own native tongue, even while he continued to speak English. For a Darhel, prizing as they did their psycholinguistic skills and the interspecies use of the voice for manipulation, this was a massive lapse.
“My features have changed, of course. I look very different from my childhood appearance when the Tir Dol Ron sent a team to kill me, and my grandfather, when I was eight Terran years old.” She glanced off to the side, examining the nails of an elegantly cocked hand, as if he was beneath her notice.
Pardal sat straighter in his chair, ears pricked forward.
“You are, at that, remarkably well informed, for the pathetic, lying, glory-seeker that you are.”
“As you are remarkably complacent for a Darhel facing not only a contract court, but the ignominy of triggering financial ruin for an entire group. You don’t dare detain me, you know. My merely making these allegations to a contract court would cost you your job, simply for the incompetence of permitting the scandal. I have, of course, made prior arrangements to have the allegations delivered if I do not return.”
“Preposterous exaggeration,” he drawled, but breathed more deeply, accent thickening. “You begin to bore me.”
“Expect your troubles to get worse, instead of better.” She had cribbed one of the classic Darhel finale lines from their literature, typically delivered by a clear victor in one of these verbal cat fights. She could only hope the Indowy scholar had translated it accurately enough. As was customary, she had also delivered no specific threats. The purpose of these dominance struggles was never to do something, only to undermine the losing Darhel’s personal confidence.
She turned to leave, to leave him knowing, intellectually, that he truly could not detain her and had just lost a dominance struggle of their own kind to a mere, primitive, human female.
She knew she had shaken him to the brink of rage when, knowing the interview was concluded and, inevitably, relaxing a bit from the taught wire of confrontation, he couldn’t resist a parting shot, in his own tongue. “This isn’t over!”
It had been a brief conversation. Its entire punch lay in the stylized nature of tone and body, play and counterplay, of Darhel interactions. This one moment was the goal of the entire playlet. He was now reacting to her not as he would to an impudent human, but as he would to a rival Darhel. Not completely, not consciously.
She touched the Provigil-C injector on one hip, driving the drug into her bloodstream. The buckley, prepped for her turn from the start, activated its holographic projection as she spun and leaped, spread eagled, teeth bared, ears flattened back against her head. Her yellow cat-pupilled eyes gleamed, feral. Her black hair and facial fur glinted with metallic silver. Her leap was imbued with all the skill of an avid dancer for counterfeiting the emotion of motion — even for dances alien to her own understanding.
The Darhel Pardal, aroused by the hormonal responses to an intense dominance conflict with his own kind, saw in that one single instant a rival Darhel leaping to kill him. His hindbrain overwhelmed his forebrain for that bare instant. Even as he realized that the leaping figure was a human woman and not a rival Darhel, the Tal poured into his system like floodwaters through a breached earthen dam. His rage redoubled with all the fury of a doomed thing for its killer.
The ravening beast, unleashed at last, exploded upward from the trappings of civilization, bounding off the desktop and crossing the room in an instant, claws out and teeth bared to rip out the throat of the Other. If the assassin had still been there to see it, he would have looked more like some hell-begotten cross between a fox and a werewolf than an Elf. The gray cloak billowed behind him and he paused for a tiny fraction of a second to rip it off, shredding it in the process.
That fraction of a second, combined with a similar fraction for the leap, was all the time it took Cally O’Neal to cross the office in the other direction, standing against the windows. It is an odd fact that for a skilled tumbler, across a short distance, a human being can roll faster than she can run. Running takes precious bits of time here and there starting and stopping, acting and reacting. A tumbling pass is smooth, continuous — if the athlete has the balance for it.
As a life-long dancer and martial artist, Cally’s sense of motion was exquisite. If her balance had been a knife, she could have shaved with it. Her muscles, most importantly her upper body muscles, had the strength and speed of the latest Crab-designed upgrade. None of it saved her from getting batted into the remains of the desk with rib-cracking power. The dress shredded under Pardal’s claws. The only reason he didn’t get her flesh as well was the super-tough Indowy-crafted body-suit beneath the dress, which gave her a tougher hide than chain mail, while having none of the extra weight and causing no impairment to mobility.
She hit the desk and kept rolling, over the other side and onto her feet, bounding aside at an angle as one hundred and fifty kilos of rabid Darhel hit the spot she’d just left. He got her again, slamming her into the two-inch-thick glass with a force that wrenched her neck and knocked her head against the glass, making a sickening thud.
“Forty seconds and counting,” the buckley announced from where it had landed on the floor about ten yards and five years ago, and the drug kicked in. For another split instant, Pardal turned with maddened eyes, locating the buckley on the floor. Barely hesitating, he obviously dismissed it as “not prey,” launching himself at her again. Used to taking a punch, head crack or not, Cally hadn’t stopped moving, and was halfway across the room again.
With the Provigil-C in her system, shaking her apart, with all the adrenaline and other combat hormones of her own, life dissolved into a sharp-edged, blurry game of Dodge the Darhel. Aware of everything and nothing, the instants rang off her brain like separately frozen photographic stills. All moments splintered into a constant progression of now as the buckley, now ignored completely by both, counted off the eternally slow seconds. Four… three… two… one…
Seeing a Darhel collapse on holo was one thing. Having one chasing you do it was another. One second he was leaping, the next he was hitting the floor in a lazy roll himself. He simply stopped, curled into a seated position on the floor, naked except for his own fur, and the rage melted away, along with the last vestiges of intelligence in his eyes. His expression was the closest thing to beatific she’d ever seen on a Darhel face. It was downright creepy.
“You were right,” she said, nudging him with a bare toe before looking for wherever she’d kicked her shoes off. “Now it’s over.”
There had been no risk of anyone coming into the office after Pardal lost it. They’d all heard stories and nobody, human or Indowy, wanted to be anywhere near a raging Darhel. Cally found the floor, in fact, deserted as she limped back to the bathroom to retrieve coat and purse. The coat was now strictly necessary, as she had to stuff what scattered strips of the cashmere dress as she’d been able to find in her purse. There hadn’t been much. At one point in his fit, she’d seen Pardal eating some of it, so it wasn’t hard to guess where the rest had gone. Certainly nobody would be looking for it inside his guts. Traditionally, they didn’t do forensic investigations at all, a Darhel in lintatai being beneath contempt.