Instead I caught a glimpse of a human form dropping out of sight.
The world grayed before I understood what had happened. I was alone, in a narrower chamber with shifting walls and an egg-shaped portal in the floor. The blow to the back of the head had been meant to knock me into it. Rolling with it had driven me over the gap without any suspicion that the gap existed.
I ran a hand over the knot of pain in the back of my head, and brought it back slick with blood. The sight sickened me, but I’d been hurt worse. I staggered over and looked down, into the hole.
Whatever existed down there swallowed all light. A light breeze, blowing upward and cooling my face, felt so similar to the atmospheric conditions on the Uppergrowth that for a moment I paled, thinking that if I dropped on through I’d just pass on through, into the Habitat. The only indication that it wasn’t was another of those soft shuffling noises, just a few feet below…and the conviction, certain as my own name, that once I dropped down into that place, there would no longer be any place for either the Heckler, or me, to retreat.
I reminded myself that the Heckler had a weapon, familiarity with the environment, and enough malice for both of us, and ignored the internal voice that tried to tell me I had nothing.
Because I had more than nothing.
I had a reason to stay alive.
I looked down into the darkness, and thought I saw a dull, diffuse reflection maybe three meters below me. If it was not much farther away than that, it would serve, about as well as anything could, as something to land on. But it was a drop. Even if I didn’t break my legs, I could stun myself long enough to hand myself over to another blow on the head, or two.
But I hadn’t heard a thud when the Heckler went through.
Maybe it was safe.
Maybe not.
But given that there was choice, there was no point in debating it.
I placed my palms against the deck and lowered my legs into the opening, feeling any number of panicky moments between committing to the descent and the eternity I spent hanging on to the edge by my fingertips, trying to make up my mind.
Then I let go.
For less than a heartbeat I knew I’d just made a horrible mistake.
Then the sharp but welcome pain of impact reverberated all the way from the soles of my feet to the vertebrae in my neck. My legs buckled. My knees took the secondary impact, hitting a hard, cool surface unlike any I’d encountered on this station. My outstretched palms landed a second later, feeling a breeze that seemed to blow straight through this floor. I continued to fall, but by the time I felt the last of the impact it arrived as no worse than a slap on the cheek.
Aside from my own involuntary gasps, none of this made any noise.
I slammed the floor with my palm. This impact was silent. The floor was solid enough, even if dotted here and there with the pinprick openings admitting the most odd, upward breeze. But the floor itself made no sound.
A hiss screen of some kind? I risked an experiment. “Hello?”
Loud and clear.
Sound was possible here. I just wouldn’t hear footfalls anymore; not even muffled ones, making this a less than desirable arena for any fight in the dark, let alone one with an opponent who knew the ground well.
The voice of the rogue intelligences whispered in my ear. ((again * join us and we’ll stop this now))
Not wanting to give away my position, I subvocalized my answer. Why would I do that?
((because we are not monsters * we are only fighting for our lives * and now, of all times, you must be able to empathize with the sheer instinct for survival))
I felt my lips curl in a grin.
Not good enough.
Had I just heard someone gasp, a few meters ahead of me?
In this near silence, it was as telltale as an explosion. The Heckler had been hoarding breath. But a minute or two of holding air inside your lungs makes that sudden gasp, at the end of it, just a little more audible. Normal breath is harder to pick up, more difficult to track.
Another sound, not far away: the rustle of the Heckler’s clothes.
((suicide for them is genocide for us))
I don’t have the time to talk to you.
The sounds ahead of me came not with the metronomic regularity of a machine, but with the clear hesitancy of something afraid.
I rose to my feet, hating the audible creak of my knees and downright deafening rustling of my own clothes. The air was cool and clean, and despite my preference for artificial environments, a little too filtered for my tastes. But there was something else in it too: the tang of human perspiration.
My own was part of it. I’d popped a serious sweat since starting this hunt.
But not all of it came from me.
Another rustle: so subliminal that the Heckler must have been very close for me to hear it. I guessed five meters. Within five meters, in some direction: behind me, ahead of me, off to one side, whatever.
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 kic
k 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.
We were at the midpoint of a wide oval chamber, with a low ceiling and indistinct blue walls that looked much farther away than they really were. I could tell the difference because a hatchway, opening within my line of sight, seemed much closer than the walls that surrounded it. More blue glow waited on the other side. I knew, without asking, that the hatch would be the first of several, and that when I finished wandering whatever route back the AIsource had mapped for me, I would find the Porrinyards, waiting to see whether I’d survived.
A more immediate concern was the realization that the defeated woman beside me was not the only Christina Santiago in this chamber.
There was another: just a short walk away, demonstrating by her very presence what little I still had left to learn.
This Christina Santiago was naked and on her knees, struggling against chains that bound her to the floor on four sides. There were chains on her wrists, on her ankles, and wrapped in bundles around her neck. She fought them so fiercely that she bled wherever they touched her skin. Her upper arms and legs were corded in sharp relief from the sheer strain of the battle. The wounds inflicted by the fight were open, oozing tears in her back, her chest, and her limbs. Her jaw hung open in a soundless, yet defiant scream: part agony, part rage, mostly damned knowledge that struggle against her unseen captors was all she’d ever know. Her eyes shone with yearning, with contempt, and with the madness born of not having any other options.
Like all her work, it was a still life of pain. But she’d painted others as lost in defeat. She’d represented herself as still at war.
I considered what little I’d been told of the world she’d come from, and wondered just how much worse it must have been than any of the lesser horrors I’d known.
I was still trying to picture it when a pinprick of darkness, erupting in the center of my field of vision, expanded to become a full-sized AIsource flatscreen.
It spoke in the voice I’d come to know as the station’s central intelligence. Congratulations, Andrea Cort. It is now time to discuss the terms of your future employment.
I rubbed my neck, providing my raw throat precious little relief. “And if I said, to hell with you? That it was a deal made under duress? That I don’t want to work for you? Do you even care at all about what I want?”
Of course we do. We promise you: whatever it costs us, you will usually be free to act as you wish. You will just be doing it on our behalf, that’s all. Because it’s from that that we’ll take what we need.
I could only stand there, my chest heaving. Their assurances provided no sense of freedom whatsoever, even if I could trust their commitment to that promise. If anything, they only intensified my isolation from the race that birthed me, and which I had spent most of my life regarding from the perspective of an alienated stranger. From this point on, wherever I went, whatever I did, and whatever reactions I received, I would never be able to tell for sure whether I was dealing with the legitimate messy, unpredictable, selfish, selfless, cold, passionate, sane or lunatic whims of other people, or something else.
The bastard AIsource had known what they were doing, in standing aside while I confronted an enemy closer to my own size. They had allowed me time to build a hatred well within my ability to carry for the rest of my life. Or at least, as long as it took.
I didn�
��t want that feeling inside me. I wished I could put it down.
“Go to hell,” I said.
The AIsource took no special offense. As we have already said, Andrea: our ambitions on this matter coincide. And if it’s to happen, it will take a very interesting sentient to put us there.
I linked that to certain other things the rogue intelligences had said. “And that’s what you want? That’s what you’ve been trying to find out, all this time? How to die?”
To reiterate: we have much in common.
The hatchway continued to beckon me. I didn’t take a single step in that direction. I just swayed, my eyes shut against the force of the inevitable one last question.
What? the AIsource asked.
“I want to start with Bocai.”
Look back to the moment of your personal nightmare. Find out what else was happening, elsewhere in the universe, at that time, and be assured: it’s not just synchronicity. There’s a pattern.
It had the ring of a send-off, and that’s what it turned out to be. Though I stood there for another ten minutes, demanding further answers, the only reply I received was a distant, subliminal murmur that could have been nothing more than the distorted echo of my own voice, rebounding off some surface too far away to see.
Even after that I stood there for several additional minutes, trying to summon back the despair that had once threatened to overwhelm me, and which seemed easier to deal with than the infinitely more frightening prospect of facing whatever came next.
The worst thing, I found, was the awareness that when I walked through that distant portal I’d be returning to a world whose opinion of me would remain unchanged.
I thought of the last words I’d spoken to the broken woman at my feet. At least I’ve spent my life being judged for it. What about you, Christina?
She had spent the entire fight screaming anguished variations on the lament that she’d been judged all her life.
Looking down at her, now, I could only murmur, “Join the club.”
Emissaries from the Dead Page 34