The Third Claw of God (28 page)

With the breath knocked out of me, my body wanted nothing more than to curl into a ball and wait for air and order to return to the universe.

I rolled anyway, getting to my hands and knees in time to see Wethers slide down the wall and drop to a crouch. The pale skin of his face had darkened to a shade of purple that would need only a little additional intensity before it went black. His eyes protruded so far from their sockets that they seemed about to pop out, like marbles. He tried to stand again, but his convulsions denied him even that; his legs kicked outward and his ass hit floor, making him look oddly comfortable even as he still scrabbled at his neck.

At the black line that had appeared around his throat.

His fingers sliding across that line without gaining any purchase.

I speed-crawled toward him, the distance feeling infinite, each step feeling like minutes in a race where life and death could be measured in heartbeats. It may have taken me all of three seconds to get to him, lifetimes, more as I pulled myself over his thrashing legs and he fought in his panic to throw me off. A knee in my belly robbed me of what little breath I had left; and when I grabbed him by the wrists and tried to pull his hands from his throat he fought me, his already bulging eyes overflowing with panic. Had I enough air for speech I would have shoutedLet go you asshole, I’m trying to save your life!

It was only because he was already weakening that I was able to wrestle his hands away from his throat and get a close look at what had constricted him. It was a black, shiny ribbon of some kind, looped around his neck, its endpoints a pair of silver toruses intent on pulling the material between them tight. The donut holes at the center of each torus roiled with black spots, a lot like the receding patterns that afflict human vision after too much time spent staring at bright lights. I didn’t know whether they were gas exhaust or some manifestation of the energy source that powered them, but they hurt my eyes to look at. There was no time to worry about whether the endpoints were too dangerous to touch. The danger was already here. The toruses were too narrow to admit my fingers, so I grabbed them with my fists and fought to loosen the stranglecord between them. They bucked violently, like little missiles intent on resuming their previous trajectories. The first jolts almost tore them free of my grip, and I had to struggle so hard that for one terrible instant I realized that I’d become so intent on winning the wrestling match that I’d overcompensated and was now fighting to tighten their grip on their victim’s neck. If Wethers died, the evidence would show that I’d murdered him.

I heard voices from my own immediate future.

I’m not surprised. I always expected this.

She’s Andrea Cort. Do you know what she did when she was just a little girl?

Once a monster, always a monster.

It’s time to put her down like the mad dog she is.

“God DAMN it!”

Maybe it was a burst of strength born of adrenaline and maybe the toruses decided to change targets and maybe they bucked in the wrong direction just in time to match my own effort, but the loop came loose all at once, releasing Wethers and sending me falling backward, against the opposite wall of the narrow hallway. I landed ass-first, just as he had, with my legs straddling his. Able to breathe now, he gasped a deep grateful inhalation that did little to help me as the black material between those two toruses thrashed with the fury of a deadly thing denied blood.

It wasn’t my first stranglecord. It’s been an eventful life. But every other one I’d ever seen had been no-tech: rope or wire or even cloth, powered by malignant hands. I’d never seen, nor ever dreamt of, a stranglecord that operated out of its own volition: one that could be wound up and sent after a target, fired up by its own eagerness to see the dirty job done.

The black material was hard to see when held on edge; not quite nanostring, as that would have made it invisible, but still finer than a human hair. Seen head on it was about as wide as a decorative ribbon, though its cold blackness rendered it about as festive as a starscape without stars. I remembered Wethers struggling to tear it from his throat and for just a moment felt sorry for him; flush against his flesh, assuming its contours, it might have been about as easy to peel off in one piece as a layer of paint. The toruses at either end were probably the only safe way to handle it, as close as they came to being safe. For a moment I wondered how much AI the device possessed, whether it had enough intelligence to be decoded or even questioned.

Then the black loop lengthened, convulsed, and closed around my right wrist. It happened so quickly that I didn’t realize what had happened until after the pain of constricted flesh became the most important thing in my universe. I gasped and, out of reflex, kicked, striking Wethers in the groin, a vivid illustration of the guideline that one should never do anything to further incapacitate the only other person present in a room where something is trying to kill you. He fell to his right, moaning; as for me, I cursed and did the instinctive thing, which was try to free my right wrist with my left hand—a big mistake when the act of bringing both hands together accomplished nothing but to give the stranglecord some precious slack to maneuver with so it could attack again.

Another convulsion, and a second loop tightened around my left wrist. The ribbon contracted, and my closed fists came together in a painful, knuckle-rattling collision.

“Wethers, help me!”

No good. Even if he was a fighter, and I had no guarantee that he was or that he’d want to come to my rescue even if he could, recovering to the point where he was capable of action might take him several minutes yet. Right now he was too busy curled into a ball, coughing and choking and trying to absorb enough air to react to the pain. By the time anything I yelled got past the pounding of the blood in his ears, the stranglecord would have broken my wrists, worked its way free, and probably moved on to my neck, doing to me what it had tried to do to him.

“Oscin! Skye! Anybody!”

It was no good. These were luxury accommodations. The rooms were soundproofed. I could set off explosions in here and nobody in the parlor would hear a damned thing. The ribbon binding my wrists expanded, allowing my fists to separate, then contracted again, pulling them together with fresh bone-rattling force. I gasped from the pain, considered screaming again, had the terrible thought that if I hadn’t gotten an answer it might be because there were a dozen more of these fucking things loose on the Royal Carriage, wrapping tight around the throats of Oscin, Skye, Dejah, Jason, Jelaine…

Another clap. The bones in my hands ached. I felt a slash agonizing in its suddenness, and blood oozed from the spaces between my fingers.

If I didn’t let the thing pound its way free, it was going to start carving. Next time you’re sitting on the ground, with your legs stretched out before you, place your hands in a cuffed position and see how easy it is to get up. Now try doing it in a narrow hallway with your legs entangled with those of a semiconscious man on the borderline between merely coughing and out-and-out puking. Further, try doing it while trying to hold on to the business end of a saw, one that by the way happens to hate you and doesn’t mind hurting you as much as it can so it can let go and find some effective way to hurt you more. I guarantee that it’s one of the more unpleasant and more difficult things you’ll ever have to do.

I might not have managed it if I hadn’t had a wall at my back.

I bent both legs at the knee so I could brace my feet against the floor andpush. My back slid up the wall. The stranglecord between my wrists bucked again, almost throwing me off balance, but I compensated, stumbling one step to my right and somehow managing to avoid tripping over Wethers’s outstretched legs.

The pressure around my right wrist intensified, becoming a line of fire. Redness started glistening around the edges.

If this got much worse, the damned thing was going to saw my hands off.

“WETHERS! Dammit!”

He’d be no help. He was no longer coughing, but he wasn’t exactly responsive either. He might not have ever fought for his life before, might not have ever learned that the instinctive urge to curl up into a ball and hide, rather than hurl yourself back into the path of something that had already caused you pain, accomplished nothing but to make yourself a passive target.

That was a lesson I’d learned on Bocai.

I stumbled toward the suite’s bedroom, holding the willful stranglecord at arm’s length, lurching as the toruses clenched in my fists jerked from side to side in an attempt to throw me off balance. They were strong enough to make me walk like a woman fighting an abductor who had her by the arms. Not quite as strong as me, but they were getting stronger, and it would not be long now before exhaustion took everything I had.

That’s why I needed a weapon.

I jerked as I passed the bed, fell against it, let out a cry as the slicing pain in my wrists deepened to agony, screamed louder as it intensified further, took another couple of steps and fell against the bed again.

My satchel sat against the transparent bulkhead, the panoramic view of Xana replaced by the shields lowered at the moment of the emergency stop.

I fell to my knees and collapsed, missing it by half a meter, managing the last couple of steps in a series of convulsive kicks.

My satchel is a Tchi artifact, by my estimation the greatest accomplishment of a species obnoxious in ways that include festering paranoia. The exterior has no visible seams, not even any hinges or joints capable of betraying by their very existence just how the damned thing would open had it any intention of doing so for anybody other than myself. My Dip Corps credentials are enough to get it past customs wherever I choose to go, and the latch, keyed to half a dozen markers that begin with a DNA scan and end with a neural signal I can transmit by touch, has always been the chief safeguard that prevents its contents from ever being searched or even safely handled without my permission. That’s always been a good thing, since the bounty on my head has made me as paranoid as any Tchi, and I never cross borders, anywhere, without contraband of the sort that, if found, can get even somebody with diplomatic immunity arrested, jailed, or killed.

There were several items inside that might be able to disable or destroy the stranglecord tightening around my wrists; there was even one that could vaporize this entire carriage, though I was not yet in enough agony to see that as a viable option.

Of course, I wouldn’t be able to get to them, even if I had time to get to them, without opening my hands.

And if the stranglecord’s previous capabilities were any indication, things were going to get very bad very fast the second I released the toruses.

But it wasn’t like I had a choice.

I heard Wethers yelling for help outside. It didn’t help me now. The pain was so bad by now that I didn’t even brace myself and take a deep breath. I just did it, revealing palms sliced from end to end and smeared with blood. The two toruses they’d held reacted almost comically, rising a centimeter or so above the skin, then tilting like heads performing double-takes at an unexpected development. Then they flew, each trailing its end of the cord, each whipping the other way around my trapped wrists, to free itself for what probably would have been an immediate assault on my neck. Reacting to the welling pins and needles as circulation returned would have been a great way to get killed.

Instead, as the stranglecord came loose, I grabbed it at its midpoint and hurled it as far as I could. The damned thing sailed over the bed, but changed trajectory before it would have hit the opposite wall, the toruses coming in low over the bed, with the stranglecord a shared banner between them. The son of a bitch could fly. How the hell was I supposed to fight a stranglecord that could fly?

I was still on my back and there was no chance of survival if I took the time to stand, so I grabbed my satchel, my all-important satchel with the weapons I’d hoped to use against the damned thing, and flung it. The toruses carrying the stranglecord performed a little loopy somersault and evaded it, recovering even as my satchel disappeared from sight on the opposite side of the bed. I rolled, saw the stranglecord coming in low, kicked at it, felt a plunk as my right foot glanced against one of the toruses. It recovered fast, looped around, and went for my throat. I tried to dodge again, but there was not enough time and it wrapped around my neck with a force so dizzying that my bare throat felt the heat of the snap as the material impacted with skin.

The toruses pulled, and the stranglecord constricted, intent on cutting off my air, my breath, my life.

“Fuck you!” I shouted, able to shout only because I’d covered my throat with my hand a fraction of a second before the damned thing closed its noose. When the stranglecord tightened, it was against my knuckles, the skin there burning as the material drew taut enough to cut off circulation. But lost circulation in a hand is far easier to survive than the loss of oxygen to the head…

I rolled, somehow rose to my feet, lurched off-balance as the toruses wrangled me like a horse controlled by its rider, and slammed the back of my head against the bulkhead, hard. I felt blood on the back of my neck: the stranglecord breaking skin there. Protecting my throat wouldn’t save me for very long if the monstrosity managed to saw through my spine. Quadriplegia’s temporary, if you survive long enough to get some halfway decent medical care; I’ve suffered injuries on that scale more than once, and never been inconvenienced for more than a few hours. But a severed spine leaves you helpless against anyone or anything intent on inflicting damage more permanent. Paralyzed, I’d be an easy target for anything the stranglecord wanted to do…

My free hand probed the cord, found one of the toruses, and yanked hard, pulling the material from my neck.

Still protecting my throat with one hand, I used the other to swing the cord like a whip, slamming the torus at the other end against the bulkhead. There was a flash of light when it hit, some kind of energy discharge, but the torus itself did not break. I swung again and slammed it against the endtable; there was another spark of light, but less intense, as if the thing had managed to roll with the impact, lessening it, avoiding the damage that would prevent it from pressing another attack. A third swing at the bulkhead and the torus managed to curve away from the impact completely, instead defying momentum to go for my eyes.