Spin State - Chris Moriarty [214]
“Empty it,” she said.
He hesitated.
She cocked the hammer. He emptied his pistol, bullets ringing and skittering across the rough floor. “Now drop it.”
He dropped the gun at her feet, not taking his eyes off her, and she kicked it away down the drift. They looked at each other.
“I don’t want to kill you this fast,” she said. “I’d like to see you suffer, you son of a bitch.” She said the words without thinking, and the sound of them shocked her. But they were true, God help her. She’d killed more people than she could count or even remember, but this was the first time she’d actually wanted to murder someone.
“Got you where it hurt, huh? Who was that bitch whose throat I cut, anyway? Another girlfriend? Too bad I didn’t have more time to spend on her.”
Li forced the gun’s muzzle farther up under his jaw, as if she thought she could shut his mouth with the sheer pressure of it.
“They’re waiting for you,” he said, eyes on her trigger finger. “You’ll never get out of here alive, even if you kill me.” He licked his lips. “Especially if you kill me.”
Li backed off a step or two, keeping the gun leveled on him. That was when the other guard made his move.
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