Chris Moriarty - Spin State

She didn’t see it herself, but she saw the quickly suppressed flash in Kintz’s eyes that told her something was happening behind her back. She glanced around, Kintz still in her sights. The guard was inching toward her, slowly, deliberately, his eyes locked on Bella’s. And Bella was letting him.

“Shoot him!” Li screamed. But Bella was frozen, shut down with terror, standing on the edge of a cliff she couldn’t force herself over. Li spun around, snapped her elbows straight, and fired a single shot over Bella’s head and through the guard’s eye socket.

Kintz was on top of her before she could swing back around. He went for the hurt arm, of course. She had known he would. What she hadn’t known was how fast the arm would fail her.

Bella tried to help. Li saw her out of her peripheral vision, circling around them, holding the Beretta stiffly out in front of her, trying to decide where to aim the gun. As if she even knew how to aim it.

“No, Bella!” she barked. “No shooting. Just take the air tank and leave. I’ll catch up if I can.”

Kintz didn’t even give her time to notice if Bella had obeyed her. He wasn’t her match in skill, but she was handicapped by her stripped-out arm, and the punishment she’d gone through in the past few hours. And by the five years and eight inches and thirty kilos Kintz had on her.

He slammed her against the drift wall, threw her hard, and was on top of her before she could get her arms or legs under her. He jerked her onto her stomach, jammed his knee into the small of her back, and bent her bad arm back so savagely that she couldn’t breathe without feeling the twinge of stretched-to-snapping tendons.

She heard him reach for his belt, heard the click of handcuffs releasing. “I’d kill you right here,” he said, “but Nguyen almost had our heads over Sharifi. Your lucky day.”

“Not behind my back,” she said as he slapped the first cuff on. “Not unless you want to carry me up.”

He stopped, rolled her over, let her hold her hands out in front of her while he locked the second virusteel ring around her wrist and single-keyed in a preset compressed code.

He was in no hurry now that he had subdued her. He almost seemed to be waiting for something. He frisked her, ran his hands up and down her legs, into her crotch. She watched him think about the fact that they were alone.

“You must really have fucked up on Gilead,” she said, needling him. “Or were you just too pissant incompetent for them to trust you with a real Corps job after that?”

“You need to learn to shut up,” he said, and put a hand down her shirt.

She let him get a good feel. She saw his mouth open a little, his breath come faster. “You’re pathetic,” she said.

He took hold of her legs and jerked her flat on the floor. “Roll over.”

“Don’t have the balls to look me in the face?”

He hit her so hard she didn’t even feel the blow. When she came to, he was on top of her and already fumbling at her belt. He got that unfastened all right, but the pants and the tie-down of the Beretta’s empty holster took two hands. She waited, eyes closed, until he had both hands engaged. Then she balled her hands into a double fist and swung them, letting the weight of the cuffs add to the momentum of her internals.

She caught him on the right temple. Not ideal, but she stunned him—and opened up a long gash in his skull that would bleed into his eyes with a little luck.

He staggered to his feet and aimed a crushing kick at her ribs, but she was already rolling away from him.

She glanced around as they squared off against each other. The gun was too far away. She’d never get there in time. But Kintz couldn’t get to it either—not without risking a kick from Li’s still lethal legs.

This would be a good time, Bella , she thought. But of course, Bella was nowhere.

“You fucking digger bitch,” Kintz said. “Fucking stinking dirty half-bred cunt!”

Li laughed. She didn’t know where the laugh came from, but suddenly it all seemed pathetically ridiculous, from Kintz’s tired insults to the fact that they were fighting for the same planet both their ancestors had wasted lifetimes trying to escape from. “Guess you should have stuck to the half-breeds you could buy in Helena,” she gasped.

After that, they didn’t talk anymore; they were both short of breath, and they knew that the next time they went down one of them wasn’t getting up again.

Li would have liked to be able to wait Kintz out, let him get impatient. But she couldn’t afford to. She was too tired, too battered. She would flag before he did. She had to draw him into doing something stupid, and she had to do it while she still had the strength to take advantage of his mistake.

She danced in, let him get a glancing hit on her, jumped away, deliberately stumbling a little. He took the bait; he reached for her, missed his hold, reached again.

This time she let him catch up to her. She forced herself not to think what would happen if this ploy didn’t work, if he really did get her down. She kept her hands up, locked together. As he gripped her, she braced her feet and drove her hands toward his face with all the strength she had, fingers rigid.

He screamed and staggered back, clutching his eyes. She threw herself down the drift without even looking to see if he was following and reached the Colt in a cloth-ripping, face-forward slide.

His first kick connected just as her fingers touched the gun. He slammed into her ribs, her kidneys, her stomach in a flurry of blows so violent that only the certainty of death if she failed kept her hands locked around the revolver.

She rolled over, baring her stomach, and looked up at him. One eye was still open, though the skin around the socket was torn and bleeding. The other was a gushing mess.

She raised the gun only to have him kick it aside. He fell on her, trapping the gun between them, scratching and grabbing for it, his breath roaring in her ears with the tight scream of adrenaline and agony. They wrestled, grunting like dogs fighting for a bone, locked in a deadly tug-of-war. She felt Kintz prying her fingers from the sweat-and-blood-slicked grip. Her pulse drummed in her skull. Her lungs and fingers burned. Her grip slipping, belly to belly with Kintz, hardly knowing where the gun was aimed, she fired.

She heard the wet thump of bullet hitting flesh, felt hot blood rush over her legs and stomach.

It took a long time for him to die, and she didn’t dare move the gun, even to flick the safety back on, until she was sure his fingers had slacked. When she finally pushed him off her his one remaining eye was open and his limbs loose and heavy. She wiped the blood off her face and stood up—only to find herself staring down the barrel of her own gun.

“Bella,” she said.

“Not quite.” Haas’s smile looked all wrong on Bella’s pale face, and in the construct’s dark eyes Li saw the same frozen, uncomprehending panic she’d seen when she’d gone under the loop shunt.

“You took your time,” she told Haas.

“I had other fires to put out,” he said. “And I didn’t want to get on the shunt and show my hand too soon. Bella’s been getting… difficult.”

“Christ,” Li whispered, sick at the thought of what Haas had done, at the sure knowledge that this had been the nightmare behind Bella’s eyes every time she’d spoken of Sharifi’s death. She might not have remembered, but she had suspected. And she had used Li to chase down that suspicion—hoping all the while that it would turn out to be wrong, that Li would find some other explanation.

Haas bent over Kintz, pulled a second pair of cuffs out of his belt and tossed them to Li. “Cuff your ankles,” he said, and watched while she did it. “Now give me your hand,” he said.