by Steve Perry
Sleel added to his discomfort. “Oh, Christo, I’m going to hit the fence!”
“Ah, fuck!” the man on the ground said.
And the flitter flew over the perimeter unmolested, just missing the top of the fence.
Sleel immediately dropped the craft so that it was nearly touching the ground and doglegged left. By the time the guard realized he had been fooled, Sleel had the flitter behind the plastcrete groundcar stop, where the guns couldn’t hit it. He shut the com off; no point in listening to all those threats.
He’d bought himself a few minutes. The van ought to be no more than a couple of kilometers ahead.
There was a fair amount of traffic toward the port; that ought to slow the van even more. Maybe he could still catch it. He could hook the radar back up, but that would take time. He could see the van with his remaining eye if he got that close.
If he caught it, he would ram it. He was going to die anyhow, what the fuck.
Cierto, sated, sat next to Doha in the van’s cab. They were approaching the port and the shuttle to his ship. All had gone well. Not as well as he had hoped, but it was the end that was important, and it had been nearly achieved. Once aboard his ship, it would be finished.
Wu saw the van approaching, spiraling down for a landing. She clutched the tube that held her sword, ready to extract it with the popper she’d attached to it. The van would settle just there, a hundred meters away. She stayed in the shadows of the hangar as the vehicle came to rest, fanning up dust and grit, then started toward it. If she circled around behind, she could use the line of boxcars for cover; they would not see her until she was almost on them.
Sleel approached -the port. There was the chem van, and there, just alighting from it, two people.
Looked to be a man and a woman from this height. Sleel’s jaw muscles tightened. Easier to take out two pedestrians than the van.
The flitter shook as if kicked by a giant’s boot.
What-?
The rearview cameras showed the problem. A flashing light atop the hopper behind him identified them as cools. Military police, looked like. He couldn’t hear them, his com was off, but they were firing on him. Well. It didn’t matter, he only had a couple hundred meters to go Another projectile hit the flitter, and with the boot that kicked it sideways came an explosion, followed by a grinding of stacked plastic that abruptly stopped.
Got the rear fan, Sleel thought.
The flitter slewed and began to fall. The computer would have compensated with the remaining fans, but Sleel had it on manual and he only had one hand. He reached for the control tab.
Not going to make it, he saw, as he slapped at the sensitive tab.
Shit-!
“Patron!” Dona screamed, pointing at the sky.
Cierto turned and saw a flitter coming toward him.
Behind the flitter was a police hopper. It fired on the flitter. The rocket’s explosion sprayed hot debris when it hit. The police vehicle fired again. The flitter rocked from the second explosion and began to fall out of control.
“Dios!” Cierto said. It was going to land right on top of him! Then he realized that the flitter would hit well short of where he and Dona stood.
The police vessel sheared away. Madness for them to be shooting here, Cierto thought. The flitter’s remaining fans whined, its repellors strained, it seemed about to pull up, but it crashed into the ground fifty meters away. Cierto saw the pilot clearly as the windshield shattered.
The matador!
Impossible.
He was struggling to get out of the ruined craft’s automatic seat restraints. He was lucky; the flitter had not hit nearly as hard as it could have. Then the man slumped in the restraints. Dead or unconscious.
“Quickly, to the boxcar,” Cierto ordered. Police would be here soon and he had no desire to be here when they arrived.
Dona followed her Patron to the shuttle.
The flitter crashed almost in front of Wu, blocking her view of Cierto. She started to circle around it, then saw the man inside. He was bloody, his eye-patched face covered with his own gore. He wore the uniform of a matador.
A low hum began to rise from the downed flitter, until the sound began to be painful to her ears.
Something was overloading in the flitter. The engine was going to go, and likely it would spatter the craft every which way, along with anybody close to it. Or in it.
Wu had no time to ponder a decision. Cierto was fast approaching escape. The matador inside the flitter was probably dying if not already dead and surely would be if the flitter blew apart.
Life or death?
Kildee Wu chose.
Chapter FOURTEEN
SLEEL AWOKE AND wondered where he was. Several things combined to give him an answer at about the same time: the smell of recirculated and too-sterile air, the clear but slightly fogged thincris plate twenty centimeters in front of his eye when he opened it, and even though he was naked, the realization that he was not cold, nor was he hot.
So he was in a Healy, coming out of an induced recovery slumber. It only took a moment to determine that his left eye, wrist and knee were covered or wrapped in the rubbery but shell-like tentacles of a Zigg-Roth generator’s extrusions, with injuries being fed a complex formula of enzymes and proteins and nanogear.
He felt no pain. In fact, he felt great, pumped, he knew, full of endorphins and enkephalins and gods knew what other wonderful chems. There were people who got addicted to rides in the medicator coffins; they never wanted to get out. Sleel had spent enough time in the things himself, having various body parts regenerated and otherwise deadly wounds staunched.
Contrary to what a lot of folks thought, the term “Healy” had nothing to do with healing per se; it was simply an odd coincidence that the inventor of the original machineries had been named that.
All of which was interesting, but now the question was: what had he done to deserve this? His recent memories were in a warm fog, just out of reach and sight and he couldn’t recall how he had come to be chewed up this way.. Like he was standing on a sandy beach somewhere, his near past at sea with the gulls and fishes. Nothing but sand and gentle surf around him.
The alpha brainwave detector chirped, telling Sleel and anybody with a monitor tuned in that he was awake. Well, shit. You can’t run and you can’t hide.
A woman’s face appeared outside the medical box and peered down at Sleel. He looked back at it.
Oriental stock, this face, with short, dark hair framing it. Violet eyes, smile lines, young, thirty or thereabout he figured. Some depth to it, the face, and very attractive. She wore pale blue skintights and a gray gi-style jacket; that was as much as he could see from this angle. And she was familiar, too, though he couldn’t put a name to the image.
“Welcome back,” the woman said.
Sleel managed half a smile with the part of his own face not covered by the Zigg-Roth’s semiflexible shell. “Thanks. Where have I been? And how did I get here?”
The woman smiled. Sleel liked the expression. Nice teeth, some real amusement.
“You are in the Bandari Mediplex. How much do you need filled in?”
Sleel hated this. It was bad enough his spetsdods were gone, worse that he didn’t know anything about his situation here. If knowledge was power, then he was about as strong as a newborn and damp hummingbird. Start simple, then. “You a medic?”
A repeat of the smile. “No. A friend of the family. I brought you here for a tuneup. I’m Kildee Wu. “
Sleel blinked. “Not related to Mayli Wu, by any chance?”
“My sister,” she said.
Sleel blinked again, trying to cover his astonishment. Now he knew why she looked familiar. Mayli had a sister. He would be double damned. “Small galaxy,” he said..
That shock cleared away some of his mental fog. Too much clarity. He remembered all of a moment seeing Jersey Reason’s head lying on the ground. That ugly note brought forth a stormy symphony of memories, rolling
over Sleel and his beach like a wave, a hurricane-driven breaker that pounded and foamed and knocked him tumbling.
Oh, fuck.
“You okay?” Wu asked.
“Yeah. Fine. He got away. Cierto.”
“Yes.”
It was too much. Sleel felt the emotions welling, filling him to overflowing. He wanted to scream, and if he had tried to speak in that instant, he would have choked on the words and tears. Bleakness raged in him. He had failed. Failed big. He bit his tongue to keep from using it.
“I know part of it,” she said. “About the attack at the retreat. You were hurt but you followed him to the port. Crashed your flitter before you could stop him. That broke a few bones arid ruptured your spleen, along with a few other odds and ends to add to what you already had. The medics said your chances were only one in three when they boxed you in there. You’d lost a lot of blood by the time they started the surgical lasers. You are lucky.”
“Yeah, lucky. How long have I been in r-sleep?”
“Three weeks.”
Sleel shook his head, not easy with the eye covering. “How do you figure into all of this?”
“I have some business with Cierto,” she said. The smile was gone and her face set into a harder cast. “I came across you while I was looking for him. ” She lightened her tone and broke the harsh mask with another smile, a smaller one this time. “Good to meet you after all this time. Mayli spoke highly of you.”
Sleel managed a chuckle. “I bet she did.”
“My sister thought you had great potential,” Wu said.
“Huh?” Here was another astonishment for him. Sleel had always taken great care to keep his relationship with Mayli antagonistic, or competitive, at least. He had worked long and hard on his facade to keep anybody from getting past it. She couldn’t have pierced it.
“Yes,” Wu said. “She said you were the biggest liar she had ever met.”
Sleel smiled, relieved. He was safe. “Well, I suppose I might have told a few stories-”
She cut him off, but gently. “No. Mayli’s gift was that she always could see past the manufactured to the truth; before she was a medic, before she was a whore, before she was a matador, even as a child she could do that. You never fooled her, Sleel. She knew who you were. Right from the first. She told me.”
If the woman had punched through the thick lid of the Healy and smashed him in the solar plexus she could not have stunned Sleel more.
She said, “You’ve had some visitors and callers. When you feel up to it, you can replay the recordings on the Healy’s reader. I’ve got some business to take care of, but I’ll be back later. “
And with that, she was gone.
Sleel lay there, trapped, revealed, all his built-up persona stripped away, and he had never felt more defenseless. He had failed as a matador, lost his client, and his protective wall was no more than rubble in front of this woman, as it had apparently been for her sister. He couldn’t do anything right.
For that, why wasn’t he in detention? Not that he would be going anywhere on his own for a while, but he had broken a few laws, local, planetary and galactic.
Shit.
Cierto sat in the tub of swirling hot water on the balcony outside his bedroom and watched the sun paint the sky in deep reds and flashy oranges as it set. He sipped at the stem of bubbly clear wine; he allowed himself one such intoxicant each day, and savored it that much more for its scarcity. The hot water throbbed about him, soothing after the two-hour session in the gym, alleviating the aches of sinew and muscle.
For the hundredth time, Cierto replayed in his mind the memory of his victory on Rift, the slaying of the thief. In mental slomo the man’s head fell and hit the ground yet again, bringing as it always did the smile to Cierto’s thin lips. He had a recording of it, of course, but for now, memory was better.
And also now, there was more: the woman. He had seen her at the port, moving for him, and the wonder of that still amazed him. There she was, full of the fire that a blind man could see, holding the plastic tube which surely contained a sword. She would have challenged him, he was certain of it, had not the flitter containing the dying matador crashed just then. She had turned away, had gone to attend to the man in the flitter.
The Patron of the House of Black Steel sipped at his champagne, angry at the memory. In that moment at the port, he wished that she had come for him. Even now he felt an irrational stab of jealousy that she had chosen to attend to the matador rather than try his blade. He would have killed her then, of course, and rightly so, but now with the luxury of time to consider it, he had decided that he was glad he had not had to slay her. Such a woman should not be wasted. Such a woman should be utilized.
He smiled once again into the last of his wine. Ah, yes, there was a particular use to which he could put this spirited woman, now that he had cleared the stain from his family’s name. She would be perfect for it. And it would be so very ironic, would it not?
Cierto carefully placed the wine stem into its holder and slid deeper into the swirling waters of the carved marble tub. The heat massaged his neck and shoulders, the peppermint-scented foam frothing up past his chin, tickling his nose. Already a plan had been put into motion. In a short while things would come to fruition. Life was ever so sweet and about to become sweeter still.
Wu went to the park for her daily workout. Part of her usual audience had gathered, waiting for her to begin. There were old men with no better place to go seated on the benches watching her, a couple of martial arts students, women with babies in strollers, a local cool who nervously fingered his chemical baton. Wu guessed that the cool was wondering if he could take her in a one-on-one, and she thought he had decided he could. She acknowledged the people with a short nod. She removed her jacket. Took her sword from its carrying case. Began her stretches.
As she loosened her hamstrings, she considered her actions of late. She had not planned to stay on this world after turning Sleel over to the medics. At first she told herself that she only wanted to be certain that a man her sister had loved and respected would live, but it was more than that. There was something about him that called to her, some aura that was ill-defined but definitely there. Much of her training with the sword touched upon the spirit, that easy-to-say-but-hard-to-see aspect of the arts that were at once the core and boundaries of them. During those times in which she had achieved zanshin, it was easy enough to feel. Other times, it was not so simple. There was something in Sleel’s spirit, some resonance that touched her, and while she could not pin it down squarely, it was enough that it was there. She had learned to trust those feelings, fleeting as they sometimes were, and when she could see or hear or feel them, they had never failed to prove worthwhile.
She rolled her shoulders and twisted back and forth, loosening the muscles along her spine and in her lower back.
So, Cierto could wait. In the tai chi balance of things, he was a very much yang objective, and too much of that could overbalance a woman, make her lose her center. Yin must be nourished, and while Sleel did not seem on the surface to be anything but flint, accepting the easily seen could sometimes be a mistake.
Ah, yes, she told herself, as much a mistake as allowing desire to get in the way of truth. Take care that this is not the case here, Kee Wu.
She reached for her sword. Perhaps she could cut away the illusions today. One could always hope, right?
Sleel watched the holoproj above the clear plate of the Healy, his one eye making the picture flat. The recorded images were otherwise crisp and lifelike, of Dirisha and Geneva looking directly into the visitor cam mounted to give the patient’s point of view.
“Well, well, there surely must be a whole slew of gods who look out for fools, that you got one all to yourself, Sleel.” The black woman smiled. “You should buy stock in this company.” She patted the medicator. “You sure get enough use out of the damned things.”
Geneva, always less flip, looked more serious. She was on the edge of
tears. “You should have called us for help, goddammit!”
Dirisha put one hand on Geneva’s arm. “The brat’s right, deuce. That’s what friends are for. We don’t have so many we can afford to lose any, even a piss-poor one like you. Get well, Sleel. Listen to Kee Wu. Give us a com when you wake up.”
Sleel touched the control. He’d been out for three weeks; Dirisha and Geneva had come to see him less than a week after he’d been boxed. Must have left for Rift the same day he’d crashed the flitter. Damn.
Apparently they trusted Mayli’s sister.
He started the holoproj again, scanning through the messages. Bork had called. So had Emile and Juete.
There was a com from Rajeem Carlos, former President of the Republic. He had spoken to some people about the matter, and Sleel needn’t worry about criminal charges. Ah. Calls from Grandle Diggs, Tork Ramson, plus half a dozen members of his matador class-Christo, it was like old home week here.
Sleel shut the messages off. He’d have to watch and listen to them later. Something was wrong with his good eye at the moment; he couldn’t see too well. Must be something in the recirculated air making him tear up so bad. Somebody looking at him would think he was crying.
Chapter FIFTEEN
IT WAS NOT Hoja Cierto’s habit to admit strangers into his sanctum. If men or mues were unknown personally to the master of the house, research was done. By the time he sat across from any new visitor to his domain, Cierto would know as much about them as possible. In some cases, more than a sister would know about her brother, or a father about his own son.
The man who sat stiffly upon the genetically grown dinosaur-leather couch went by the name of Ricard Ells. He was a kind of bounty hunter who survived by tracking down small-time felons who had jumped bond, finding runaway spouses and children, and locating odds and ends. Ells had spent a week recently in a medical kiosk having repaired injuries sustained in a fight on Koji, the Holy World.
Not all that unusual, for despite its name, some religions tended toward the way of the old god Mars. Ells had been tight-lipped about the source of his injuries and there was no existing record of who had nearly killed him by driving what the medics had described as several large splinters of bamboo nearly into the man’s heart. Ells had come to claim the reward posted for information on black steel. He had brought with him a small recording sphere which purported to contain images of a sword made of the material.
