She took a few steps toward me and offered her hand. “Will you join us?”
24
“No,” I replied.
Solovyov sighed and dropped her hand. She stepped back and looked past me.
“Make it painless,” she said. “He deserves that much.”
I turned to see a blur rushing toward me, then I saw a flash of light as she swung her fist at my gut. The attack looked odd, her arm angled wrong for a punch. I caught her wrist rather than block the hit, and it proved to be the wise choice. She was holding a hooked blade nearly the size of my hand. She raised her other arm, unsurprisingly holding a similar blade, and stabbed down at my neck.
Against a knife, the safest thing you can do is close in. The natural urge to back off only gives the opponent space and opportunity, meaning the best place to be is paradoxically as close as you can get. I turned into the attack and pressed myself against her cheek-to-cheek. I hooked my free arm around the small of her back, lifted with my knees, and leaned backward. Inertia took care of the rest, and Katerina tumbled over my head as we fell to the floor.
On Earth, that might have been the end of it. Katerina’s skull would have smashed against the marble tile and she would either die or be rendered unconscious from brain trauma. But Callisto’s gravity undercut the throw, and she had ample time to prepare a breakfall. She instead landed three meters away on the flat of her back, her feet absorbing what little impact there was. She was back up and ready to fight in a fraction of a second.
Solovyov was still standing by his body in the pool, placidly watching us fight with her hands clasped behind her back. Despite the intelligence behind those dark eyes, it was still the frail body of a young girl. There was every possibility Solovyov could get hurt if this continued, whether through accident or Katerina’s intentional malice. If I wanted to end this cleanly, I needed a weapon. The men in the kitchen were my best option.
As I started to back toward the door, Katerina mockingly warned, “Don’t make me chase you, Tycho.”
She was fast, but so was I.
I spun and kicked off into a sprint. Taking my eyes off of her was a risk, but he who dares, wins, as they say. If any of the men outside had recovered, my plan would become magnitudes more complicated, but now that I knew the stakes we were playing for I wasn’t so concerned with avoiding casualties. Everything was on the table, and I was fully prepared for me and Solovyov to be the only people walking out of this alive.
Katerina caught up to me as I entered the living room. The patter of her feet against the wooden flooring gave her away, and I was able to parry what would have been a backstab. She went with the momentum and turned her back to me, bringing a knife around in an overhand slash. It came slow and obvious, and I stopped it with a high block. Katerina then followed up with a low overhand stab with her other arm that was much faster and far more subtle. I responded with a clumsy knee block more on instinct than thought. If not for my prosthetics, that would have meant a potentially lethal wound.
Instead her blade cut through my clothing, punched through my pleximesh skin, and skipped across the graphene shell of my augmented leg. I’d felt none of it. Her wrist twisted as the knife bounced off and she nearly lost her grip. She hopped forward into a low roll rather than press the attack and came back up two meters away in a fighting stance.
“How much of you did they need to rebuild after Europa,” she asked. “If I cut that handsome face off, will I find an android staring back at me?”
When she came in for the attack this time, it was with a rapid series of double slashes—left high and right low at the exact same moment, or right high and left low, or one stabbing and the other slashing. It was all I could do to defend, taking cuts across my arms but feeling nothing. I wasn’t gaining any momentum in the fight, but then neither was she. At best, she was dulling her weapons as they struck against my augments.
Frowning, she changed her strategy. Instead of launching two attacks at the same time, she reverted to her pattern of attacking with one knife and then the other. She’d seen it provoke a response to her first attack and leave me exposed for an opportunistic follow up with her second. Why she would think I was so easy was a mystery, but if she was willing to underestimate me, I was willing to take advantage of it.
I only missed my block once, but this time it cost her the knife in her off hand. She stabbed at my chest with her left hand and I went to block it, but instead of landing on her wrist as I’d intended, I caught the blade hard with my forearm. Her hand slipped down the handle on impact and, with no guard or quillon to stop it, ran across the blade.
She half-gasped, half-growled, and her eyes went wide as she dropped the knife and pulled her hand back. I used the pause in the fight to clear some space. Looking back, that was probably the one choice that led to everything that followed. If I’d pressed the attack instead and ended it then, maybe things would have gone differently. That’s the trouble with hindsight: it’s only easy to be wise in the after.
Her hand bled freely from the deep cut, and in the seconds that followed she stared straight at me and did nothing to stop it. When she finally moved, it was slower than I’d expected from Katerina.
Slower, but that’s not to say it was slow.
She whipped her hand toward me and her blood spattered across my face. I shut my eyes and turned away before I could even think of what a mistake that was. I tried to blink my vision clear, but only my right eye would stay open. I saw Katerina within arm’s reach, her left hand pulled back for a punch, and was too late to do anything about it.
Her knuckles sank into the bridge of my nose. I smelled water and saw lighting. I felt myself fall backward and tried to take a step to catch my balance, but as I did my stomach exploded in pain. White-hot fire welled up from just below my ribs and my knees gave way. Then I felt it again, just to the left of the first. And again.
I fell to my knees on the floor. Katerina stood over me, saying something that didn’t register over the searing pain of the stab wounds in my gut. She kicked me in the face, and the world went dark for an instant. It came back when my back hit the floor, and as I looked up at the ceiling the lights were suddenly almost blinding.
“We found the part of you still human after all,” she said, stepping over to straddle me. She got on her knees and pressed the tip of her knife against my chest, then placed her still bleeding left hand on the end of the handle. “I want to thank you. You made me work for it, Tycho. Service to the Eleven is usually less...interesting.”
She was sure it was over, and all that was left was to push the blade through my heart, but she still had to get the last word in. That arrogance is what gave me the opening I needed. I cupped both hands and clapped her sides as hard as I could. I heard a muffled, wet pop and felt her body give way like water. She screamed, fell to the right, and lay on her back on the floor, clutching her chest.
We both kept like that for what felt like hours. Me, trying to find the strength to stand despite the stabbing, her struggling to breathe through shattered ribs. Eventually, I rolled onto my good side and pushed up onto my knees. I wiped the blood from my left eye with the back of my hand and looked to my right to see Katerina on her hands and knees, vomiting blood and watery bile.
I stood, holding my side and feeling light-headed, but not in as much pain as I had been. A part of me knew that was not a good sign, but I pushed the thought from my head and staggered toward the kitchen to find a weapon. I could die after Katerina did, not one minute before.