The Third Claw of God

13 STRANGLEHOLD

The attack was so smooth, so graceful, so organic in its terrible precision, that for its first precious seconds my eyes and my mind lagged behind the moment, refusing to recognize his collapse against the wall as anything but a moment of pathetic clumsiness, brought on by exhaustion and the trauma we’d all been through in the last few hours.

Even when he grabbed for his throat for both hands, his blind fingers clutching at the black line that now banded his neck, I mistook his difficulty breathing for a heart attack, or a careless swallow that had sent saliva down the wrong pipe. His protruding eyes, his gaping mouth, the sudden terrible knowledge written on his face, my own dulled realization that something awful was happening to him—they were all inhabitants of that first second, so complete even in this the moment of their birth that there was no time to apply logic and consider where they might have come from.

I thought Claw of God and reached for him.

A burst of pain and I found myself propelled backward, aware only that I’d been struck in the jaw. By the time I tripped over the leg of the chair Philip Bettelhine had vacated only a couple of minutes before I’d figured out that the fist had belonged to Wethers, and by the time I realized to my intense dismay that I was going to fall I’d decided that the bastard must have faked whatever the hell he wanted me to believe was wrong with him, so he could catch me with a sucker punch.

By the time I smashed into the floor with a force that summoned fresh pain to the same hip I’d bruised during the emergency stop, I was past wanting to kill him for getting past my defenses and well into the realm of that’s not what this is.

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 shouted Let 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 and push. 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.

I yowled, spun, avoided the impact, but lost balance and went down again.

It wasn’t the first time I’d been faced with a ludicrous death. Ask me about Catarkhus or One One One sometime. But the idea of being outwrestled and outfought by something small enough to be held in my fucking hands was more than I could take. I shrieked in dismay and outrage and just flung the Juje-bedamned thing away, not even caring if it came back in a second or two, wanting only a moment’s freedom from it, a second or two so I could breathe without feeling its hateful touch on my skin.

Wherever it went in the next second or two, I don’t know, because somebody was yelling in the outer room. “Andrea! What’s happening?”

“Counselor!”

Skye. Paakth-Doy. A perfect opportunity to scream for help again.

Stupid, unreasoning instinct took care of that one. “Stay out there!”

I managed to get a hand atop the bed and used it to pull myself to an imperfect upright position just as I caught a flash image of something black flying at my face. I threw myself backward onto the mattress and rolled, catching another flash image of a crude noose zipping through the air right above me. My wounded hands left bloodstains on the comforter as I flipped back over the opposite side of the bed, hitting the floor just as Skye and Paakth-Doy came in at a dead run, shouting my name.

The stranglecord, which had been headed for my neck again, changed course and went for Skye.

I cried, “Shit!” and went for the satchel again. No time to open it, no time to get anything I trusted to put this thing down, no time to do anything but throw the goddamned bag again and hope I knocked the stranglecord out of the way long enough to improvise something else, maybe a blanket torn from the bed and thrown as a makeshift net…

There was a fwap.

Skye stood stock-still, her fists closed around the toruses, her arms extended so far apart that the deadly stranglecord hung taut as wire between them. It thrummed, vibrating with a fury that reduced it to a gray blur; she still held it motionless, as far as it could stretch, rendering it incapable of pressing its attack.

“I am impressed,” said Paakth-Doy.

The speed Skye had just demonstrated by plucking that thing from the air, and the strength she was still demonstrating by holding it in place, impressed me too. “Nice catch.”

She grimaced. “This is…not exactly a…long-term solution, Andrea. It’s propulsive units are…disproportionately powerful, for their size.”

Right. I went for my satchel, undid its seal, and peeled away the several identical black suits before uncovering the several items best kept a secret from planetary customs.

The most mundane among them was a stasis tube designed for the transportation of perishables; not illegal in and of itself, but clear evidence of criminal intent in that the substance it carried was a genetically keyed nanopoison illegal for me to possess. It was my personal suicide solution, one that would have not only killed me but also denatured all my genetic material, preventing identification of my corpse.

If you ever wonder whether your life’s taken a wrong turn or two, consider how fucked up your circumstances would have to be for that to qualify as a reasonable component of your carry-on luggage.

Skye’s voice had a distinct tremor. “Andrea? Whatever you’re going to do…”

“I’m coming, love.” Twisting a certain lock at one end of the tube popped off the protective shields at the endpoints and provided access to a fair-safe that sent a microwave burst through the contents, deprogramming the nanites and giving the liquid suspension all the virulence of distilled water. A further, cleansing blast of molecular excitation reduced what was left to vapor, which the tube then vented with an audible hiss.

Even as that happened, the smears of blood my injured hands had left on the metal turned to lighter shade of pink; evidence that a very few of the nanites escaping through the vapor were still intact, and capable of dissolving anything with my genetic material. Strictly speaking, it wasn’t safe for me to deactivate it myself. Strictly speaking, I should have been in another room, giving instructions from a distance. But strictly speaking, I shouldn’t have to carry anything capable of breaking down my own cells…

“Andrea!” Skye again, her voice now betraying real pain.

“I’ve got it!” The tube’s endpoints irised open, and it snapped open along its length, each half reflecting the other in cross-section. I grabbed it, stood up, and ran over to Skye, positioning the bottom half of the tube under the stranglecord, then snapping the upper half shut over it.

The locks engaged and the endpoints irised shut, trapping most of the cord inside; but the endpoints still extruded, and Skye still held a bucking torus in each hand. All I’d done, so far, was give a flying stranglecord the potential to become a flying club if released to fly on its own accord. But at least Skye didn’t have to hold those toruses anymore.

She released them and took hold of the tube itself. “Thank you, Andrea. Are you all right?”

“Of course she is not all right,” an irritated Paakth-Doy said. “She is injured. Sit down, Counselor, and I will tend to your wounds.”

“We don’t have time for that, Doy—”

She placed her hand on my shoulder. “You may enjoy playing the bitch, Counselor, but in this I promise I can be a much bigger bitch than you. I am talented at it. As you said to me not long ago…Sit your ass down.”

I blinked several times, thought of several unforgivable things I could say to her, applied them to logic and common sense on one side and my urgent need to hit something on the other, then nodded and lowered myself to the side of the bed.

Paakth-Doy left to get her first aid kit, muttering an excuse-me when she was just out of sight.

I didn’t know who she’d spoken to until Wethers appeared in the doorway, rumpled and pale and wide-eyed and still rubbing his throat with one hand. He said nothing, just stared at me, evidently paralyzed by the cognitive dissonance between the human impulse to thank me for saving his life and his obligation as an officer of the Bettelhine Corporation to continue regarding me as threat to the family secrets. After a moment he dropped eye contact, gulped, then winced, the very effort of swallowing painful.

I spared him the embarrassment of speaking first. “Are you all right?”

He gave a slow nod before managing a hoarse, “I thought I was dead.”

“Must have been frightening,” I remarked, unable to resist a sarcastic, “and you with so much to live for.”

He looked down. Damned if my words hadn’t wounded him.

When Skye shifted her grip on the tube, the toruses at the endpoints of the cord protruding from both ends thrashed indignantly, still looking for a throat to encircle. “Don’t be too hard on him, Andrea. You owe him your life.”

I tried to imagine a pale and almost inarticulate Wethers stumbling into the parlor, into the middle of all those people, with wild stories of a self-propelled stranglecord. “I’m surprised we don’t have a mob scene in here.”

Wethers thrust his chin out, and croaked. “I work for the Bettelhines, Counselor. I know how to be discreet, and I suspected that you would want me to be. Under the circumstances I suppressed any signs of my own condition until I could let your companion here know that you needed immediate assistance.”

I flexed my hands, and winced. “That was…good thinking.” I thought but did not add, Almost too good. Forgetting that Wethers was even now only a few minutes removed from threatening me with the wrath of the Bettelhine empire, anybody else in that circumstance would have been hollering his head off. The revelation that a high-ranking Bettelhine employee could be prepared to exercise that inhuman level of discretion, in that kind of life-or-death situation, raised hard questions about what else Bettelhine employees might be prepared to do. “Have you ever…seen this device before?”

Wethers shook his head.

“I have,” said Skye.

She started to say where, but that’s when Paakth-Doy returned carrying her first aid kit. Doy had to duck under Wethers’s arms as she passed him in the bedroom doorway, but managed it without so much as an excuse-me as she rushed to my side with the nanite pen.

As Paakth-Doy closed my wounds, Skye said, “It’s another obscure antique weapon, this one of Ghyei design. Their aristocracy called it Fire Snake, and once a medieval time much filled with intrigue and backstabbing used to happily set it loose in the homes of relatives higher in the line of succession.”

I had never heard of these Ghyei; they were not one of the major powers, nor one famous for any other reason. “You know too much of this shit, love.”

Skye’s lips twisted. “Blame a morbid imagination.”

“I’ve never noticed it before.”

“The two of me weren’t always the same person you know.”

Uh-huh. “Do you think it’s a genuine artifact or a recreation?”

“Given the diameter of the average Ghyei throat, which two or three human beings would be able to inhabit comfortably, it’s pretty safe to say they wouldn’t find a Fire Snake of this size useful except as dental floss.”

Paakth-Doy, intent on closing the slits on my palms, emitted an unwilling giggle at that. We all looked at her. She colored, shrugged an apology, and went back to what she’d been doing. My palms numbed, tingled, grew cool, and then pleasantly warm. “What’s it doing here?”

Skye seemed surprised I’d ask such a bone-stupid obvious question. “I’d assume the same thing the Claws of God are doing here. Killing people.”

Wethers said, “I think Counselor wanted something a little more specific than that.”

“I appreciate that,” Skye told him. “But whether this one was targeted for yourself, for Counselor, or for any target of convenience, remains a question. From the speed with which it went after me when I entered, I’d have to say that it seemed willing to go after anybody within a certain proximity, prioritized by threat level.”

That made sense. I asked her, “What are the odds that it was here when we moved into the suite?”

Skye considered that. “I would say about equal to the odds of it being placed here at some point in the past few hours, by one of the people you’ve been interviewing.”

That was how I figured it as well. But that didn’t help much, as Dina Pearlman, Monday Brown, Wethers, Arturo Mendez, Paakth-Doy, and Philip Bettelhine had all been in here since the emergency stop; it was just as possible that somebody else had pulled a fast one and put the Fire Snake in our suite at some point when neither the Porrinyards or myself were looking.

Wethers said, “I don’t believe it myself, Counselor, but since this is your suite it’s just as possible given the facts that the damned thing belongs to you or your companions and that you set it off here to distract us from your own guilt in the murder of the Khaajiir.”

Paakth-Doy gave him a disbelieving look.

I shook my head. “Don’t worry about it, Doy. He has a point. That is a possibility.” I then faced him and said, “Just as it remains possible that you dropped the thing from a pocket and allowed it to attack you in my presence. Just as it remains possible that it had been programmed to strangle you up to the point of permanent damage but no further; that it was supposed to give me a good fight but no more, and that your diligence in summoning help so soon after you’d expressed such contempt for me amounted to nothing more than a charade designed to make you look trustworthy and above suspicion in the other crimes aboard this carriage. I don’t particularly believe any of that, Mr. Wethers, any more than you profess to believe in the theory you offered. But it also fits the facts. And as you say, it’s a theory I’m forced to keep in mind.”

Wethers rubbed his eyes, with a terrible weariness that might have been building for much of his adult life. “Noted.” Then he faced me again, his expression as sad and lost as any I’d ever known. I had been told that he had no family but the Bettelhines, no love but for his career; I’d lived in similar isolation for much of my own life before meeting the Porrinyards, and could only wonder if he dealt with the loneliness the same way I had, by becoming proud of it and nurturing it like a pet fed on loathing and venom. “But as grateful as I am to you, for saving my life, what I said before still goes. This is Bettelhine territory. And you really don’t want to abuse your privileges as a guest.”

I regarded him with open curiosity. “I wanted to ask you about that. Do you often threaten people the Bettelhines want here?”

“I take less pleasure in it in your case than I did before you saved my life, but yes, I do. It’s part of my job description. Guests, even honored guests, remain welcome only as long as they know how to behave. And you wouldn’t be the first one it’s been my duty to chastise.”

Charming. But for what it was worth, he seemed to be telling the truth about enjoying the ominous threats less now than he had before the stranglecord attacked him. Not that he seemed to enjoy much of anything. The more time I spent with him the more he struck me as trapped inside himself, and unable to escape, a feeling I’d also gotten from, among others, Colette Wilson and Arturo Mendez. I remembered things Pescziuwicz had said and felt a chill at the insistence of the warning.

So I asked him again: “What did you people do to Bard Daiken?”

He remained silent, his eyes apologetic but failing to offer even a momentary promise of safety.