“Won’t you be in just as much danger from asteroids and planetary debris?”
Sindri smiled broadly. “There is an acceptable element of risk. The odds of something as small as Parallax Red speaking in celestial measurementsreceiving a direct hit are astronomically high. Pun intended. You and I will be safe, I give you my word.”
A second passed before Sindri’s last words penetrated Brigid’s consciousness. She echoed, “You and I?”
“Well, of course. You don’t think I’d leave you behind here or allow you to return to Earth, do you? That would be positively diabolical. You really must give me some credit. I’m not a monster.”
He stepped closer to her, placing a hand lightly on her right knee, gazing up earnestly into her face. “All I ask in return is your love.”
Brigid’s poker face failed her. She felt the muscles of her face contorting and twisting in disbelief and repulsion. She was too shocked to speak.
Voice dropping to an intimate pitch, Sindri continued, “You have a deep wellspring of passion. I desire to plunge into it, to taste the physical love of a human woman. All my life it was denied me. I kept myself pure for a woman like you. I never once, regardless of the temptation, defiled myself with a transadapt female. If you cannot bring new life from my seed, the simple act of implanting it will grant me one of my most heartfelt desires.”
Sindri’s caressing fingers darted up her leg, toward her thigh. Brigid snapped up a knee, the point of it cracking solidly on the underside of his jaw.
Teeth clacking together, Sindri staggered back a few paces, caught himself on the corner of the table and recovered his balance. He bared his perfect teeth in a ferocious scowl, then by degrees, it turned into a rueful grin.
“Darling Miss Brigid,” he said softly, “your assaults upon my person do not have the effect of dampening my ardor. Quite the contrary, I find myself even more aroused by the challenge. I am very accustomed to overcoming adversity when I desire an objective. Nothing has ever come easy to me.”
He stepped toward her swiftly. Just as swiftly, Brigid slid off the stool, upending it and holding it by the seat in front of her. Sindri laughed in delight and feinted at her with his walking stick.
Brigid stepped back, feeling frightened and more than a trifle ridiculous. She circled the table, fending off Sindri’s cane strokes with the legs of the stool. He chortled, crying out “Ho!” every time he lunged for her.
At the corner of the table, she swept the stool against the miniature glass maze of the purification system. It shattered amid a spray of splinters and foul-smelling chemicals. Sindri scrambled backward to avoid being cut and drenched.
Appraising the damage, he snapped, “You’re starting to piss me off. You just ruined the work of two days.”
“Then stop this foolishness,” she said sternly. “Whatever you want from me is not going to happen.”
Sindri’s face molded itself into the same mask of demented rage she had seen in the pyramid. He bounded forward, flailing madly with his cane, two-fisting it like a broadsword.
Brigid managed to block and parry his swinging swipes for a few moments. She thrust the stool legs at his face. One of them struck him on the nose, bringing forth a gush of blood from both nostrils.
He didn’t react to the pain or the sight of his own blood. Increasing the ferocity of his attack, he drove her steadily backward, around the table again in a flurry of blows.
Glass crunched beneath her boots, and she stepped in a puddle of chemicals. Losing traction for an instant, she stumbled, forced to take one hand off the stool to steady herself against the edge of the table.
That instant was all Sindri needed to leap at her, slapping aside the legs, grabbing the stool by a rung and wrenching it violently from her hand. Holding his cane as if it were a billiard cue, he punched the silver-reinforced tip of it deep into the pit of her stomach.
The impact drove the breath from her lungs in a gasp. Sindri glided to her side, hammering the back of her right knee with the cane’s knob, neutralizing the nerve endings in her leg. It buckled beneath her and she fell, catching herself on both hands.