by Steve Perry
The lac T-stepped in and shimmered, changing colors, and suddenly it held two blades, one in each hand.
Such was not cheating, since Chinese split-sword was within its programming, but to go from facing an opponent with a cutlass to one with twice the armament was certainly apt to give a man pause. Perhaps fatally so.
Not Cierto. Instantly he dropped to his left side under the lac’s whirling figure-eight slicings and whipped his own weapon out in a flat arc ten centimeters above the floor. He felt the muscles of his lat and shoulder burn with the effort. Everything he had went into the cut. So sharp was the zhaverfrayshtol sword’s edge that the blade sheared completely through the lac’s left ankle. Before the surprised lac could finish its crippled fall, Cierto rolled, came up, and drove the point of his sword up under the lac’s sternum, skewering its heart. There was a convincing spurt of blood as the man jerked his weapon free and the lac crumpled to the floor. Were it a man, it would be dead.
The lac shimmered and vanished as Cierto stood. He saluted the fading simulacrum by bringing the flat of his sword to his forehead before snapping the weapon down in the ritual slinging of blood. This was hardly necessary, since the blood disappeared along with the lac, but it was part of the technique. Then he turned to face the fifteen students gathered around the perimeter of the fighting ring. Perspiration rolled down Cierto’s muscular body and his heart beat rapidly, but he smiled at his students. The smell of his own sweat was high, and he was tight, especially in the shoulders and arms from swinging the sword, but he was alive.
“Miguel. What have I demonstrated?”
“That you are without peer, Patron.”
“This is true, but not the answer I seek. Juanita?”
“You have demonstrated that you can defeat even a man who cheats.”
“Also true, senorita, but the wrong answer. Josito?”
“Once the sword is drawn there are no rules.”
Cierto nodded. “Ah, at last the correct response. None of the classical styles offer the ankle as a target for the sword; nearly all of the sport styles limit attacks to the upper body. In sport you play by the rules. In combat to the death, there are no rules. Opponents without feet can hardly chase you around and once down, become lesser threats. They might still kill you if they are adept in ground attacks or defenses, but you will have an advantage if you know how to take it.”
He wiped sweat from his eyes. “When I was much younger and less skilled, my own left foot had to be regrown due to this very same strike when I dueled with another who also walked the Masashi Flex. I was fortunate to survive. It was not a lesson to be forgotten.”
Josito said, “What of this opponent, Patron?”
Cierto’s smile thinned. “I was defeated, but my opponent was weak and so allowed me to live. This was a mistake-someday there will be another match.”
Cierto’s smile returned to full brightness. “Josito, since you have understood the lesson, you have therefore earned the right to be next misionero. You are now Proyectil Sacro.”
The young man flushed with sudden joy and pride. “Patron! You honor me!”
“Si. Do not dishonor our house by failure. As the Holy Missile, you have a great responsibility. Other projectiles before you have failed to reach their target and since we have not heard from Karenita, we must assume that she, too, has been unsuccessful.”
“I will not fail, Patron!”
“Such is my hope.”
When the students had filed out, Cierto wiped the perspiration from his body with a towel, cleaned the oils of his hand from the grip of the sword, and wiped the blade with a small square of cotton victoria cloth. Again, this was unnecessary, since the blood upon the blade had been but imaginary, a computer-generated falsity without substance. Plus the ebony metal of the sword itself, the unique zhaverfrayshtol, was virtually immune to staining. The blade had been folded over and hand-hammered in a manner similar to the old Damascus and Japanese styles of hot forging; the secret formula for the black steel thus worked had been handed down from Patron to Patron for centuries, not too long after mankind had first left the Earth. The body of the slightly curved blade would bend almost seventy degrees without breaking, it was as the finest spring steel, while the edge was tempered by the use of special ceramic clays that made it hard enough once it had been sharpened to score virtually anything less than diamond.
The secret had belonged to Cierto’s house for two hundred and forty-five years.
A wave of emotion as black as the sword he cleaned came over Cierto. No longer was the formula the secret of the House of Black Steel. Fifty-five years earlier the method had been stolen, in the time of Cierto’s grandfather. The old man had been only a few years away from his death, and it had fallen to his son, Cierto’s father, to find and punish the thieves. He had begun the task but had died before it had been accomplished. It had taken Cierto nearly a decade to finish the search. A score of men and women had been killed to uncover the names of the thieves who had dared trespass upon the House of Black Steel.
There had been five of them. Only one remained alive, and he was resourceful; but with luck, he would soon join the others.
Oddly enough, there had been no mention of any usage of this particular kind of black steel anywhere in the known galaxy. There were many ways to make metal dark, of course, from dyes to heat treating to the addition of certain minerals, but no other that produced the weapon-grade material used in the casa’s swords. Cierto had a computerfax firm searching, and while the material was best suited for the making of perfect swords or knives, there were certainly other uses for such a substance. The reward he offered for information pertaining to this subject was quite large. As far as he had been able to find out, the secret had never come to light elsewhere. That was good. When the last thief met his end, perhaps the secret would once again belong to none other than the House of Black Steel.
He looked at the weapon he held. The metal was indeed black, but not a flat black. There were lighter and darker streaks, wavy lines, where the folding that made the many hammered layers showed. It seemed to make the blade glow in rich, dark shades from point to guard. The hilt was a broad curved band of nickel-stainless steel, mirror bright to contrast with the blade, and the handle was of curlnose tusk, burnished smooth, the ivory gone a buttery yellow with age and use, fastened to the full tang with chrome-blued bolts. The sword had belonged originally to his father’s father’s father, had cost a month in the life of a master craftsman to produce, and was priceless. Certain wealthy collectors of such weaponry would give nearly everything they owned for such a piece as this, hundreds of thousands of standards, without a moment’s hesitation. And unlike a museum item, this was still an active blade, bathed in the flesh and blood of more than a hundred men and women. A score of those killed had been by Cierto’s own hand, weaving a shroud of fatal thickness. Cierto did not think the sword of his great-grandfather had an equal anywhere in the galaxy.
And if he could help it, it never would.
In a small Place of the Way, a dojo on Koji, the Holy World, a woman sat seiza in the middle of a large room. Save for herself, the room was empty of other life; empty too, was the woman’s mind as she meditated upon the Void. The floor upon which she knelt was of highly polished zebrawood, the planking chosen and laid in such a way as to create large zigzag patterns. The woman wore hakima, a long split skirt of white silk, and a gi-style black silk shirt with three-quarter sleeves.
Next to her on the floor, handle nearly touching her left knee, was a katana-patterned sword, edge outward, point to the rear, nestled inside a wooden sheath with twenty-three coats of white lacquer upon it. The blade of the curved sword was of black steel, hand-hammered in the old method; the handle was of pebbled ray hide, crisscrossed in the traditional manner with the diamond-wrap turnings of black silk cord, enclosed at the butt with a plain cap of stainless steel; the guard, too, was a circle of solid stainless steel the diameter of a small teacup, bearing a simple etching o
n one side. The weapon was four hundred years old; it had seen much use and it had dealt in both life and death, sparing more often than it had slain. It had come to the woman from her older sister, who had died during the overthrow of the Confed six years past. Before that, it had belonged to their mother, received as a wedding gift from her mother.
The woman meditated upon the Void. Next to her the sword lay waiting. In a moment she would pick up the sheathed weapon and it would be freed in an eyeblink to move through the intricate motions of Kaji-te, the kata called “Fire Hand.” In a moment. But for now, the sword waited as its mistress meditated upon her entrance into the Void-a sword which had been made with such precision and care it had hardly an equal in all the galaxy.
Sleel looked around the house owned by Jersey Reason with grudging approval. He’d seen better private security, but not much better and not at many places. The house sat in the middle of a large lot-that had to be very expensive, given real estate prices on Hawaii-with clear views to the property lines in all directions. To the west lay the sea, to the east the road, and other houses bordered the north and south edges of the lot. A line of banana trees and other tropical foliage partially hid an electric come-see-me fence, but there were no trees close enough to offer a way over the three-meter-tall mesh. A locked gate to the front and one to the rear were the only ways through the fence.
“Here’s the security console,” Reason said.
Sleel nodded and looked at the setup. Overlapping sensor fields from permanent units buried under the ground covered every centimeter of the property, and any one could be disabled without losing a full scan. Zap fields could be triggered to cover the doors and windows; the house itself was hardwired to note circuit interruptions, motion, infrared or high-speed projectiles, any of which detectors could be combined with the others. On full alert, the house would be hard to sneak up on, Sleel knew. Armored photomutable gel cameras mounted in fifteen locations gave views of the house and all approaches to it, including from straight overhead, and the computer was smart enough to know what it was seeing.
“You got missiles on the roof?”
“Yes. Doppler-guided Peel one-oh-threes. Anybody who flies over my house at less than half Republic aircraft minimums is in for a big surprise.”
Sleel nodded. He ran through the computer system’s other armaments. His checks were permitted only after the security reader had identified Reason’s voice, retinal patterns and a code phrase before allowing access. There were robot guns hidden about the grounds, gasbombs, and the house itself was sheathed in armor sufficient to stop small arms fire outright and probably slow down most bigger stuff. Not a cheap job, and one Sleel ordinarily would give passing marks to-except that the Puget Sound house and the one in Australia had similar protections. Whoever had come for Reason before knew some stuff.
Not good.
On the other hand, Sleel was fairly certain that should anybody swinging a big blade come knocking upon the front door, he could handle that. The first thing he’d done when he’d failed to stop the attacker at the airport with shocktox darts was change the loads on his spetsdods to a formulation designed to knock down large wild animals. It hit harder than shocktox, did the animal trank, but that was too bad.
People trying to chop him into soypro patties didn’t rate real high on Sleel’s popularity poll. If it took them two hours to wake up from the chem’s effect, or if they didn’t wake up at all, well, that was too bad, too. They should think about the risks before they pointed a sharp thing at him, that was how Sleel figured it. And if that didn’t do the trick, he had some black-market Asp loads tucked away in his ammo case. Emile probably wouldn’t approve such things, but he had higher principles than did Sleel. Where Khadaji had knocked down a big chunk of an army with Spasm so they could recover after six months in tetany, Sleel would probably have killed ‘em outright. He’d never been much of a big-picture man himself. Dead attackers hardly ever bothered you again, Sleel figured, if you didn’t count Marcus Wall, and when they tried to kill you, they lost their rights to keep wasting the communal oxygen.
“Okay,” Sleel said. “I want to do a tour of the place on foot to check out things myself. To do this right we probably should have three or four other people rotating duty, but for now, we’ll wait and see what your friends in the local cool shop have to say. If we get something, we’ll check it out.”
“I defer to your expertise.”
Sleel shook his head. Funny old geep. Hard to look at him and realize he’d been the best thief in the galaxy, for longer than Sleel had been alive. Well. That didn’t matter. What mattered was that he was now Sleel’s client, and he couldn’t have anybody killing him. That would make Sleel look bad, and that was the worst sin of all.
The com chimed and announced a call. Sleel took it. The woman on the other end of the call gave him visual, and she was quite attractive in a dark sort of way. She had brown hair chopped short in a military buzz, even features, and from what he could see, wore some kind of uniform. He kept his own transmission pictureless.
“I’m looking for M. Reason.”
“He’s not available. I’ll take a message.”
“I have some information for him.”
Sleel recognized the voice from the call in the car earlier. It was the local cool; what was her name?
Bley? Bligh? “I’ll download it, you like.”
“I’d rather deliver it in person.”
“At your convenience, fem.”
“I’ll be by in an hour.”
Fifty-nine minutes later a small flitter arrived at the front gate. Sleel was watching it on the monitors, and the resolution on the holoproj was good enough to show him that Officer Bligh or her double was at the controls. He touched a control and the gate slid open. He watched the gate until it closed behind the car. The cool parked the vehicle near the front door. Sleel had one of the cameras zoom in on the flitter’s interior tightly enough to show that it was empty save for the woman.
“Company,” Sleel called out. “Stay out of sight until I check her in.”
Sleel took a couple of deep breaths and shook his shoulders and arms, loosening them. The cool wore street sheets, tight-weave orthoskin pants and tunic, probably with spidersilk armor under them, he would guess, proof against the most common handguns. She carried a military-grade hand wand on her belt in an appendix holster, and a shockstik baton dangling from a crowpatch on her left hip. She also had a dispenser of plastic cufftape anchored to her belt next to the shockstik. Standard police issue all, it looked like. Still, you never knew for sure. Things weren’t always what they seemed.
“V. Bligh,” the woman said into the doorcom.
Sleel watched as the computer checked the voiceprint with the one Reason had on file. “Match,” the computer said. “Vicki Bligh, Kona Police.”
“Admit her,” Sleel said.
Bligh entered the house and the door slid shut behind her. Sleel stepped into view, watching her.
“You’re the guy at the port,” she said. “The matador. You working for M. Reason now?”
“Yep. And I know you’re a cool and all, but would you mind putting the hardware there on the table?”
Bligh nodded. She put her wand, the shockstik, and a single-charge backup hand wand she’d had tucked into a calf pocket on her left boot onto the table.
Sleel said, “Hard object scan, subject Bligh.”
The computer said, “Keycard, left tunic breast pocket. Cosmetic tube, right tunic pocket. ID cube, left pants pocket, infoball, ID cube, three stad and two demistad coins, right pants pocket.”
“If you would,” Sleel said, waving at the woman.
“M. Reason is being very careful these days.”
“A sad necessity,” Sleel said.
She put the other items onto the table.
“Poison scan, table,” Sleel said.
“Negative known poisons,” the computer said.
“Okay. This way, please fem. You can collect
your gear.”
“Aren’t you worried about this?” She hefted the wand.
“No. I can shoot you before you could use it.”
“You have a high opinion of your skill.”
“Yeah, well, that’s how it is.”
She holstered the wand and stik, and pocketed the other items.
“Okay, Jersey,” Sleel called out.
In the library, Bligh slotted the infoball and extra ID cube into the holoproj’s reader. The air lit with an image. It was the face of the woman with the sword, from her ID.
“The name given is Karenita Thompson,” Bligh said. “That may be false, given that all the other information seems to be bogus. “
Sleel and Reason watched as the image turned in the air. A young woman, attractive enough, hair dyed a pale blue. Dead now.
Sleel had the comp enhance and enlarge the tattoo. It was odd-looking, a solid black design about the size of stad coin. “What’s that?”
“Looks like a silhouette of a little house,” Bligh said. “Not in our files. We’re running it through Republic Security.”
To Reason, Sleel said, “Any of the others wearing one?”
“I didn’t notice. The first one is at the bottom of Puget Sound, the second probably feeding the dingoes. I should have kept them, but I didn’t realize they were part of a parade at the time. “
“She died from a systemic toxic shock,” Bligh said. “She had a chemical nanoimplant in her brain. The ME says it was triggered by a specific combination of delta and theta waves that come only in very deep sleep or unconsciousness.”
“Yeah? What did she do at bedtime every night?”
“A manual override.”
“Be nasty if you forgot to turn it off,” Sleel said. So. The assassin wore a failsafe. Get knocked out and you died. Forget to turn it off, you died. Nobody would get it out of you unless they happened to pick it up on a scan before it triggered. And since you were put into a deep sleep for brainscan, that would pretty much stop anybody poking around in your skull for answers. Cautious.
