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.
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.
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?”
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
