No loose rocks here, no branches, no keys … no weapons at all. This thing has no Adam’s apple. I suspect that her eyes are as cool and hard as marbles.
Nemes moves to the left again, glancing toward Aenea. “I’m coming, sweetheart,” hisses the thing to my friend.
I catch a glimpse of Aenea out of the corner of my eye. She is standing on the ledge just beyond the platform. She is not moving. Her face is impassive. This is unlike my beloved … normally she would be throwing stones, leaping on an enemy’s back … anything but allowing me to fight this thing alone.
This is your moment, Raul, my darling. Her voice is as clear as a whisper in my mind.
It is a whisper. Coming from the auditory pickups in my folded-back skinsuit cowl. I am still wearing the damned thing, as well as my useless climbing harness. I start to subvocalize in response, but remember that I’d jacked into the ship’s communicator in my upper pocket when I called the ship from the summit of T’ien Shan and I will be broadcasting to the ship as well as Aenea if I use it now.
I move to my left, blocking the creature’s way again. Less worn to maneuver now.
Nemes moves faster this time, feinting left and slashing in from my right, swinging her right arm backhand toward my ribs.
I leap back but the blade slices meat just below my lowest right rib. I duck, but her claws flash—her left claws go for my eyes—I duck again, but her fingers slice a section of my scalp away. For an instant the air is filled with atomized blood again.
I take one step and swing my own right arm backhand, chopping down as if I were swinging a sledgehammer, my fist connecting with the side of her neck just below her right jawline. Synthetic flesh pulps and tears. The metal and tubes beneath do not bend.
Nemes slashes backhand again with her scythe arm and claws with her left hand. I leap away. She misses completely.
I step in quickly and kick the back of her knees, hoping to sweep her legs out from under her. It is eight meters to the broken railing at the far edge. If I could get her rolling … even if we both go over …
It is like kicking a steel stanchion. My leg goes numb at the force of my kick, but she does not budge. Fluids and flesh collapse over her endoskeleton, but she does not lose her footing. She must weigh twice what I do.
She kicks back and breaks a left rib or two of mine. I hear them crack. The wind goes out of me suddenly, explosively.
I reel backward, half expecting a ring rope to be there, but there is only the cliff face, a wall of hard, slick, vertical rock. A piton bolt slams into my back, stunning me for an instant.
I know now what I will do.
The next breath is like breathing through fire, so I quickly take several more painful breaths, confirming that I can breathe, trying to get my wind back. I feel lucky—I don’t think the broken ribs have penetrated my left lung.
Nemes opens her arms to prevent my escape and moves in closer.
I step into her foul embrace, getting inside the killing sweep of the bladed forearm, and bring my fists together as hard as I can on either side of her head. Her ears pulp—this time there is a yellow fluid filling the air—but I feel the permasteel solidity of the skull under the bruised flesh. My hands, rebound. I stagger backward, hands and arms and fists temporarily useless.
Nemes leaps.
I lean back on the rock, raise both legs, catch her on the chest as she descends, and kick out with all of the strength in my body.
She slashes as she flies backward, slicing through part of my harness, most of my jacket and skinsuit, and the muscle above my chest. It is on the right side of my chest. She has not cut through the comlink. Good.
She backflips and lands on her feet, still five meters from the edge. There is no way that I am going to get her to and over the platform edge. She will not play the game under my rules.
I rush her, fists raised.
Nemes brings her left hand up, cupped and clawed, in a quick, disembowling scoop. I have slid to a stop millimeters short of that death blow and now, as she pulls her right arm back in preparation to scythe me in two, I pivot on one foot and kick her in her flat chest with all the strength of my body.
Nemes grunts and bites at my leg, her jaws snapping forward like a large dog’s. Her teeth chew off the heel and sole of my boot, but miss flesh.
Catching my balance, I lunge forward again, gripping her right wrist with my left hand to keep the scythe arm from scraping my back clear of flesh down to my spine, and stepping in close to get a handful of her hair. She is snapping at my face, her rows of teeth directly in front of my eyes, the air between us filled with her yellow saliva or blood substitute. I am bending her head back as we pivot, two violent dancers straining against one another, but her lank, short hair is slippery with my blood and her lubricant and my fingers are slipping.
Lunging against her again to keep her off balance, I shift my fingers to her eye sockets and pull back with all of the strength in my arms and upper body.
Her head tilts back, thirty degrees—fifty—sixty—I should be hearing the snap of her spinal cord—eighty degrees—ninety. Her neck is bent backward at right angles to her torso, her marble eyes cold against my straining fingers, her wide lips stretching wider as the teeth snap at my forearm.
I release her.
She comes forward as if propelled by a giant spring. Her claws sink into my back, scrape bone at the right shoulder and left shoulder blade.
I crouch and swing short, hard blows, pounding her ribs and belly. Two—four—six fast shots, pivoting inside, the top of my head against her torn and oily chest, blood from my lacerated scalp flowing over both of us. Something in her chest or diaphragm snaps with a metallic twang and Nemes vomits yellow fluid over my neck and shoulders.
I stagger back and she grins at me, sharpened teeth gleaming through the bubbling yellow bile that drips from her chin onto the already slippery boards of the platform.
She screams—steam hissing from a dying boiler—and rushes again, scythe arm slicing through the air in an invisible arc.
I leap back. Three meters to the rock wall or ledge where Aenea stands.
Nemes swings backarm, her forearm a propeller, a whizzing pendulum of steel. She can herd me anywhere she wants me now.
She wants me dead or out of the way. She wants Aenea.
I jump back again, the blade cutting through the fabric just above belt line this time. I have jumped left this time, more toward the rock wall than the ledge.
Aenea is unprotected for this second. I am no longer between her and the creature.
Nemes’s weakness. I am betting everything … Aenea … on this: she is a born predator. This close to a kill, she cannot resist finishing me.
Nemes swings to her right, keeping the option open of leaping toward Aenea, but also pursuing me toward the cliff face. The scythe swings backhand at my head for a clean decapitation.
I trip and roll farther to my left, away from Aenea. I am on the boards now, legs flailing.
Nemes straddles me, yellow fluid spattering my face and chest. She raises the scythe arm, screams, and brings the arm down.
“Ship! Land on this platform. Immediately. No discussion!”
I gasp this into the comthread pickup as I roll against Nemes’s legs. Her bladed forearm slams into the tough bonsai cedar where my head was a second before.
I am under her. The blade of her arm is sunk deep into the dense wood. For just a few seconds, she is bent over to claw at me and does not have the leverage to free the cutting edge. A shadow falls over both of us.
The nails of her left hand slash the right side of my head—almost severing my ear, slicing along the jawbone, and just missing my jugular. My right hand is palm up under her jaw, trying to keep those teeth from opening and closing on my neck or face. She is stronger than I am.
My life depends upon getting out from under her.
Her forearm is still stuck in the platform floor, but this serves her purpose, anchoring her to me.
&nbs
p; The shadow deepens. Ten seconds. No more.
Nemes claws my restraining hands away and wrenches the blade from the wood, staggering to her feet. Her eyes move left to where Aenea stands unguarded.
I roll away from Nemes … and away from Aenea … leaving my friend undefended. Claw cold rock to get to my feet. My right hand is useless—some tendon slashed in these final seconds—so I raise my left hand, pull the safety line from my harness—I can only hope it is still intact—and clip the carabiner onto the piton bolt with a metallic slap, like handcuffs slamming home.
Nemes pivots to her left, dismissing me now, black marble eyes on Aenea. My friend stands her ground.
The ship lands on the platform, turning off its EM repellors as ordered, allowing its full weight to rest on the wood, crushing the pavilion of Right Meditation with a terrible splintering, the ship’s archaic fins filling most of the space, just missing Nemes and me.
The creature glances once over her shoulder at the huge black ship looming above her, obviously dismisses it, and crouches to leap at Aenea.
For a second I think that the bonsai cedar will hold … that the platform is even stronger than Aenea’s calculations and my experience suggest … but then there is one horrendous, tearing, splintering sound, and the entire top Right Meditation platform and much of the stairway down to the Right Mindfulness pavilion tear away from the mountain.
I see the people watching from the ship’s balcony thrown back into the interior of the ship as it falls.
“Ship!” I gasp into the comthread pickup. “Hover!” Then I turn my attention back to Nemes.
The platform falls away beneath her. She leaps toward Aenea. My friend does not step back.
Only the platform falling out from beneath her keeps Nemes from completing her leap. She falls just short, but her claws strike the stone ledge, throw sparks, find a hold.
The platform rips and tears away, disintegrating as it tumbles into the abyss, some parts striking the main platform below, tearing it away in places, piling debris at other places.
Nemes is dangling from the rock, scrambling with her claws and feet, just a meter below where Aenea stands.
I have eight meters of safety line. Using my wobble left arm, my blood making the rope dangerously slippery, I let out several meters and kick away from the cliff where I dangle.
Nemes pulls herself up to where she can get her clawed fingers over the top of the ledge. She finds a ridge or fissure and pulls herself up and out, an expert climber overcoming an overhang. Her body is arched like a bow as her feet scramble on the stone, pulling her higher so that she can throw herself up and over the ledge at Aenea, who has not moved.
I swing back away from Nemes, bouncing across the rock—feeling the slick stone against my lacerated bare sole where Nemes has torn away my boot—seeing that the rope I am depending upon has been frayed in the struggle, not knowing if it will hold for another few seconds.
I put more stress on it, swinging high away from Nemes in a pendulum arc.
Nemes pulls herself up onto Aenea’s ledge, to her knees, getting to her feet a meter from my darling.
I swing high, rocks scraping my right shoulder, thinking for one sickening second that I do not have enough speed and line, but then feeling that I do—just enough—just barely enough—
Nemes swivels just as I swing up behind her, my legs opening in embrace, then closing around her, ankles crossing.
She screams and raises her scythe arm. My groin and belly are unprotected.
Ignoring that—ignoring the unraveling line and the pain everywhere—I cling tight as gravity and momentum swing us back—she is heavier than I—for another terrible second I hang connected and she does not budge—but she has not found her balance yet—she teeters on the edge—I arc backward, trying to move my center of gravity toward my bleeding shoulders—and Nemes comes off the ledge.
I open my legs immediately, releasing her.
She swings her scythe arm, missing my belly by millimeters as I swing back and out, but the motion sends her hurtling forward, farther away from the ledge and rock wall, out over the hole where the platform had been.
I scrape out and back along the cliff wall, trying to arrest my momentum. The safety line breaks.
I spread-eagle across the rockface, begin sliding down. My right hand is useless. My left fingers find a narrow hold … lose it … I am sliding faster … my left foot finds a ledge a centimeter wide. That and friction hold me against the rock long enough for me to look over my left shoulder.
Nemes is twisting as she falls, trying to change her trajectory enough to sink claws or scythe into the remaining edges of the lowest platform.
She misses by four or five centimeters. A hundred meters farther down, she strikes a rock outcropping and is propelled farther out above the clouds. Steps, posts, beams, and platform pillars are falling into cloud a kilometer below her.
Nemes screams—a shattered calliope scream of pure rage and frustration—and the echo bounces from rock to rock around me.
I can no longer hold on. I’ve lost too much blood and had too many muscles torn away. I feel the rock sliding away under my chest, cheek, palm, and straining left foot.
I look to my left to say good-bye to Aenea, if only with a gaze.
Her arm catches me as I begin to slide away. She has free-climbed out above me along the sheer face as I watched Nemes fall.
My heart pounds with the terror that my weight will pull both of us off. I feel myself slipping … feel Aenea’s strong hands slipping … I am covered in blood. She does not let go.
“Raul,” she says and her voice is shaking, but with emotion, not fatigue or terror.
With her foot on the ledge the only thing holding us against the cliff, she releases her left hand, sweeps it up, and clamps her safety line on to my dangling carabiner still attached to the piton.
We both slide off and away, scraping skin. Aenea instantly hugs me with both arms, wraps both legs around me. It is a repeat of my tight embrace of Nemes, but fueled by love and the passion to survive this time, not hate and the urge to destroy.
We fall eight meters to the end of her safety line. I think that my extra weight will pull the piton out or snap the line.
We rebound, bounce three times, and hang above nothing. The piton holds. The safety line holds. Aenea’s grip holds.
“Raul,” she says again. “My God, my God.” I think that she is patting my head, but realize that she is trying to pull my torn scalp back into place, trying to keep my torn ear from coming off.
“It’s all right,” I try to say, but find that my lips are bleeding and swollen. I can’t enunciate the words I need to say to the ship.
Aenea understands. She leans forward and whispers into the comthread pickup on my cowl. “Ship—hover and pick us up. Quickly.”
The shadow descends, moving in as if to crush us. The crowd is on the balcony again, eyes wide, as the giant ship floats to within three meters—gray cliffs on either side of us now—and extrudes a plank from the balcony. Friendly hands pull us in to safety.
Aenea does not release her grip with arms or legs until we are carried in off the balcony, into the carpeted interior, away from the drop.
I dimly hear the ship’s voice. “There are warships hurrying in-system toward us. Another is just above the atmosphere ten thousand kilometers to the west and closing …”
“Get us out of here,” orders Aenea. “Straight up and out. I’ll give you the in-system coordinates in a minute. Go!”
I feel dizzy and close my eyes to the sound of the fusion engines roaring. I have a faint impression of Aenea kissing me, holding me, kissing my eyelids and bloody forehead and cheek. My friend is crying.
“Rachel,” comes Aenea’s voice from a distance, “can you diagnose him?”
Fingers other than my beloved’s touch me briefly. There are stabs of pain, but these are increasingly remote. A coldness is descending. I try to open my eyes but find both of them sealed shut b
y blood or swelling or both.
“What looks worse is the least threatening,” I hear Rachel say in her soft but no-nonsense voice. “The scalp wound, ear, broken leg, and so forth. But I think that there are internal injuries … not just the ribs, but internal bleeding. And the claw wounds on his back go to the spinal cord.”
Aenea is still crying, but her tone is still in command. “Some of you … Lhomo … A. Bettik … help me get him to the doc-in-the-box.”
“I’m sorry,” comes the ship’s voice, just at the edge of my consciousness, “but all three receptacles in the autosurgeon are in use. Sergeant Gregorius collapsed from his internal injuries and was brought to the third niche. All three patients are currently on full life support.”
“Damn,” I hear Aenea say under her breath. “Raul? My dear, can you hear me?”
I start to reply, to say that I’m fine, don’t worry about me, but all I hear from my own swollen lips and dislocated jaw is a garbled moan.
“Raul,” continues Aenea, “we’ve got to get away from these Pax ships. We’re going to carry you down to one of the cryogenic fugue cubbies, my dear. We’re going to let you sleep awhile until there’s a slot free in the doc-in-the-box. Can you hear me, Raul?”
I decide against speaking and manage to nod. I feel something loose hanging down on my forehead, like a wet, displaced cap. My scalp.
“All right,” says Aenea. She leans close and whispers in my remaining ear. “I love you, my dear friend. You’re going to be all right. I know that.”
Hands lift me, carry me, eventually lay me on something hard and cool. The pain rages, but it is a distant thing and does not concern me.