And then Jude forgot about taking her second gulp as the first clone swivelled Jude’s double-barrelled stungun once, fast-forward round his trigger finger cowboy style, and blasted the Japanese woman. Bottles exploded and ears popped as sound bounced in waves from whitewashed walls like sonic ricochet. Only, when everyone looked, the ballerina wasn’t there any more. Instead there was just an ugly pile of shattered glass from the table behind her and a fat man on his knees, blood oozing slowly from one ear.
Mekuramashi, Fixx thought admiringly. He’d read about it, even coded it as a cheat into his sims, but he’d never seen mekuramashi in action. The art of distraction.
She was across the room now, balanced on her toes, blade still parallel to the floor, except this time she was crouched on top of a bottle-strewn table. All around her the table’s occupants had frozen, shocked into sudden protective silence.
The clone standing over Fixx lifted his Colt, finger tightening round the trigger, thumb flicking the laser sights into action. And as a tiny diode lit to say the automatic was sighted in, Fixx grinned. The one thing you could say for prosthetic limbs was they meant never having to worry about muscles wasting...
His kick caught the clone on the side of his knee, popping its joint in a single tear of gristle. And then Fixx’s metal fingers closed around the fallen clone’s hand, crushing it against the handle of the Colt. Bones inside the hand cracked like twigs then twisted as ball-joints ruptured between palm and fingers, needle-like splinters of metacarpal pushing out through the clone’s skin as Fixx shifted his grip, found the man’s fingers and ground them to bloody pulp.
Fixx couldn’t remember how long it had been since he’d last enjoyed himself so much. Twisting the Colt out of the clone’s bleeding hand, he rammed it into the shrieking open mouth. The clone stopped screaming.
Up on the table, the Japanese woman looked irritated. Brief annoyance twisted her lips into a sneer. Though Fixx didn’t know if he or the clone was the target for her contempt. She flipped sideways off the table top, somersaulting over her own blade to land neatly on a deserted patch of floor.
She wasn’t drawing fire away from the crowded table: Fixx could see from the hard certainty in her eyes that the woman didn’t give a fuck about civilians. Why would she? As Fixx always said, “There are no innocent bystanders. What were they doing there in the first place...?”
The woman was clearing herself space to move, the fifteen or so people in the bar falling back, away from the woman and away from the stungun. When the gun fired again, she flipped neatly away from the sonic wave, covering her ears to shield herself from the blast. That she could do both in one-sixthG said she’d been trained for off-planet work, probably in a lowG or free-fall dojo. And what that suggested, Fixx wasn’t too sure. Serious money, maybe.
The essence of Kamui-style was to clear the mind of every distraction: to concentrate only on matching, meeting and defeating each blow. Except Shiori was using basic Kamui mixed with West Coast Two Skies...
The stungun was useless now, both barrels already blown. Which left the suited man with the automatic, inconveniently tucked inside his shoulder holster, or with Jude’s moby which was still clutched in his left hand. That might be enough against a bushido blade — if you were very, very good — but Fixx wouldn’t want to bet on it, not if it was his life. Instead he concentrated on stuffing the barrel of his Colt further down the first clone’s gurgling throat. Give the clone long enough, he’d learn to swallow the whole gun.
“Who sent you?” It was the girl, her words soft, sweetly lilting. The moby-holding clone said nothing, but his head twitched as he hesitated between trying to free the other clone or going after the Japanese woman. He was the bio-equivalent of a point-and-kill missile, good for hitting one target, not made to amend code on the fly.
“Who sent you?”
Shiori needed to know. Reporting back information like that was usually worth a little extra, whoever her client was. But Shiori never got a chance to claim a bonus, because instead of answering the clone flipped up his hand and released the moby, its tiny electric harpoon dragging out a hair-thin strand of molywire in its wake.
Observation and perception are two separate things: so said Miyamoto Mushasi. And Shiori knew the Water Scroll by heart. Knew the whole of Five Rings, come to that.
She moved so fast that no one saw it happen. One second she was standing watching the dart race towards her heart, the next she’d spun sideways — matador-style — to let the dart flick by and bury itself in the adobe wall beyond, electricity flickering like blue fire along the molywire.
The woman smiled and flicked her blade in a lazy double circle, its razor-sharp tip tracing an effortless figure of eight through the air. She didn’t even blink when the clone dropped the moby in disgust and finessed a narrow steel cylinder out of nowhere, yanking it apart to reveal two short metal handles joined by a thin chain.
-=*=-
Learn to see everything accurately, said the sixth number in the Earth Scroll. And she did, not consciously but clearly, deep down in the reptilian basement of her brain. Her dark eyes never faltered.
Both ballerina and clone were dancing now, moving round each other in cold silence. One end, then the other of the clone’s nanchuku flowed in an arc and then flicked twice across his front in a blinding figure of eight. Hachiji-Gaeshi.
Flipping one handle over his shoulder, he caught it behind his back and whipped the handle out towards the woman, into a circle, and then caught it under his arm. Waki-Basami. Flick and catch, turning his body as he did so, building a flowing protective shield of shining steel.
He was good, Fixx realized, watching the clone hold the Japanese ballerina at bay. It had to be more than just basic neural programming that moved the nanchuku with such ease. And judging from the corpse-white hue to the clone’s skin and the liquid gurgle of his voice, the man hadn’t been hatched more than a week.
Upper position, lower position, middle position... Right-hand guard, left-hand guard. Shiori ran through all five without even knowing she had. Acting not by thought but on instinct, the blade an extension of her arm, her mind as sharp as its fractalled edge.
Neither had yet come close to touching the other: the tip of the silver sword never quite crossing the seamless arc of the nanchuku, the swirling steel handles never extending their arc far enough to clash with the blade.
It was a ballet of beautiful, complex physics; of laws of conservation of angular rotation. But the silent regulars didn’t see it like that. They just saw a thin Japanese woman flick her sword from side to side while the suited man in front of her spun complex webs of flashing metal.
She didn’t even seem to be watching the nanchuku. In fact, as far as Fixx could tell, her eyes never once moved from the clone’s sullen, sweating face. She just made move and counter-move. It was Zen-fucking-perfect, a deadly poetry that went way beyond simple motion...
Without realizing it, Fixx began to put the lethal ballet to music, wrapping their motion around with swirls of sound. Battered, clinically concussed, wired on cheap amphetamines, Fixx was still grinning fit to burst as he threw in a backbeat and mixed in some temple drums somewhere inside his head. One hand kept the barrel of his Colt stuffed deep into the throat of the clone lying bitter-eyed beside him, the other began to tap out a ridiculously complex click track.
The rhythm tapped out by his right fingers got ever more ornate as Fixx tried to thread a second fractured backbeat into the mix, heel clicking against the ground, head jerking as he locked it all together in his head. Everyone in the bar was silent, except for the two fighters... and Fixx, who was providing the backing track, whether they like it, or not. Even Jude was quiet, leaning against her own bar, a half-drunk tube of Electric Soup standing forgotten at her elbow.
It was time to thread in that third beat, Fixx decided. Inside his head, a graphic score was building up, so complex it looked purely random. Not that anything was ever completely random, or pure come to
that. Not in this life...
“You, shithead, shut the fuck—”
Shiori never did get to finish her sentence, because the second she started speaking the clone’s arm whipped down in a blur, the free end of his nanchuku whistling in towards her skull. By all the laws of physics the result should have been like hitting a soft-boiled egg with a hammer. But instead of throwing herself backward and letting the nanchuku drive white cranial splinters deep into the jelly of her cortex, Shiori stepped right into the blow, blade flicking up to the right to halt beside her head. She didn’t even flinch when the wire wrapped itself down the left side of her face and round the back of her skull, the nanchuku’s handle swinging in on itself to clang hard against her upright blade.
No one had time to marvel because the woman was already on the move, her blade severing the nanchuku’s wire then sweeping down and back up in a single stroke that caught the clone in the groin and opened out his front from pubis to breastbone. Still moving, Shiori pivoted her blade in mid-air and swept its razor-like edge across the clone’s throat, cutting a blood-fringed grin below his jaw.
Gurgling more wetly than ever, the suited man stepped forward and slipped on his own guts, falling to his knees. Lack of understanding was written across his shocked face, more powerful even than the agony that pulled his lips back into an animal snarl.
Shrugging, Shiori put her blade to the gash in his throat and slammed the sword’s handle with the flat of her free hand, severing the man’s spinal chord. It was her one kindness, though she doubted he knew that. In all probability he’d already passed understanding anything.
“Neat,” said Fixx, clambering to his feet. He kicked the first clone once in the gut for luck and went to meet his saviour. The other clone was where Shiori left him, gutted open on the bar floor, but victory wasn’t enough to make her happy, not nearly. She shot Fixx the glare a snotty mongoose gives a third-rate cobra and started stalking towards him, only it didn’t look like she wanted to shake hands.
“Hey, wait.” Fixx sounded worried, which was fair enough, he was... Anyone faced with a furious kunoichi wielding a naked sword had a right to be worried, in Fixx’s opinion.
“You won,” he said desperately, backing away. “What’s your problem?” It turned out her problem was him.
“Shithead.” She punched Fixx hard with her left hand. Since her right held the sword, Fixx was glad for small mercies. And her accent might sound quaint but there was no mistaking the anger in her voice. To make doubly sure Fixx got the point, the Japanese woman grabbed him by the front of his shirt and hurled him into a wall. Adobe cracked and behind it ‘creteblocks echoed hollowly.
Had he lain there, she’d probably just have kicked him and left it at that. But Fixx had other ideas. He always had other ideas, that had long been part of his problem.
Time to fight back, Fixx decided. And as her slender hand reached down to yank him off the floor, Fixx went slack and as Shiori stumbled under his unexpected weight, he jabbed his left hand in under her ribs hard, servo-motors running full tilt as his metal fingers punched into her liver.
Brown eyes widened first with pain, then shock. But as Fixx pulled back his hand to punch again, Shiori was already busy controlling her pain. And before Fixx could land a finishing blow, the Japanese woman beat him to it, whipping her hand down, driving the hilt of her sword into the nerves of his shoulder, freezing his metal arm mid-movement. A blow to the shoulder, a blow to the face. He hit the ground, flat on his back.
Any normal person would have given up but Fixx never had been normal, even he admitted that. And besides, he was drunk on Electric Soup, with his aggression levels wired to fuck, and she was still groggy. In reply, Fixx kicked up with the sole of his foot, his heel catching Shiori hard between the legs. Men weren’t the only ones to have nerve endings there, Fixx reminded himself as he watched her body go rigid with shock.
Scrambling up, Fixx stepped away from her and dropped into a fighter’s crouch, pulling reflexes out of memory. The only problem was that it was the memory of a series he’d been in briefly, maybe twenty years before. When it came to the real thing he was so far out of his depth he didn’t even know he was swimming. Fixx was still thinking that one through when the razor-edged blade vanished from the Japanese woman’s hand. Not got sheathed or folded away like some oversized biente neube. The blade just shrank before his eyes like a candle flame denied oxygen.
She was back in control and what little advantage Fixx’s low blow had given him was gone, that much was obvious. Shiori feinted and Fixx jumped back, then back again as she kept coming. Two hands reached for his throat and threw Fixx backwards, into the wall behind him. Adobe shattered, polycrete blocks splintered and Fixx found himself on his back on a grit-strewn floor. Around him was a dark, dusty cupboard, three walls of bare ‘creteblock and one of steel. The small room stank of damp, the air thick with microspore thrown up when Fixx landed in the dirt.
There were other smells as well, sweet putrefaction and something low-level and sour like escaped gas, but Fixx didn’t have time to consider them. The Japanese girl was standing over him, raising her heel to stamp down on his chest. Rolling sideways, Fixx desperately hooked up his knee and caught the girl behind her ankle. For a second she staggered, and that gave Fixx time enough to clamber painfully to his feet, facing her.
He was tired, breath dragging noisily through his throat, but the tiredness was worse in his head than in his lactic-laden, oxygen-starved muscles. And worst of all, he was empty. The song he’d been weaving was gone, broken beyond repair into fragments of memory by her punches. All gone. Pulling the sound back together would take as long as starting the track afresh.
Not that he could be bothered. Blood still ran from his gashed head, falling in slo/mo into the dirt to congeal into pointless, meaningless Rorschach blots. And what was he meant to see in them anyway, what was he ever meant to have seen?
His wasted life?
His missing love?
LizAlec was a sweet kid... Actually scratch that, Lady Elizabeth Alexandra Fabio was a brittle, spoilt little brat, though she was still good to have around... All the same, Fixx was beginning to wonder what he was doing standing in a bar in Fracture, with a female ninja about to take his throat out. And try as he might, he couldn’t come up with a good answer. Actually, he couldn’t come up with any real answer at all.
“I’m going to kill you,” the Japanese girl said between gasps. The blade was growing in her hand again, only this time Fixx could see that it came from a bracelet around her right wrist, metal flowing through her grip to recreate the razor-edged sword.
Fixx shrugged. “So get the fuck on with it,” he said and turned his back on her. No more than a second passed between turning his back and walking away, but all the while he could feel that cold edge waiting to cut. When it didn’t, Fixx forced one leg in front of the other until he reached the shattered wall, ducking through it to reach the bar. Without looking back he pulled a Soup tube from Jude’s Braun icebox.
“Honey, you had enough.”
Yeah, Fixx thought, looking at the tall woman who’d materialized at his elbow, her cheap cotton dress still not properly buttoned over heavy breasts: he’d had way more than enough.
“Thought you were going to die out there...”
Fixx nodded. Yeah, so did he. And the grip that instinct was meant to keep on survival was less than he’d imagined, less than he’d expected.
The Japanese girl was back in the bar now, her face turned ostentatiously away from Fixx. But she was watching him all the same, catching his reflection in the polished polyglass dome of the Cadillac jukebox.
“Here.” Jude slammed a first-aid box in front of him and pulled out a small stapler. Taking a half full bottle of Stoli out of an icebox, she tipped what was left of its contents down the side of his face and then wiped at the crusted blood with an old bar towel.
“Hey, you...” Jude’s fingers closed on his jerking head, holding it immobile a
s she cleaned up the cut. “Keep still.” It was all Fixx could do not to shout with pain, but he couldn’t, not with Jude and the Japanese girl listening.
“Okay, here goes.” Jude pinched together the gash on Fixx’s temple and stapled it fast, before he had time to protest.
It took four staples to close the gash and then Jude was done. The instant skin she stuck in strips across the gash, instead of along it as the manufacturers recommended. He didn’t ask her why, though Fixx knew without looking in a glass that he was going to need a skin graft when he got home. Always assuming the Reich left him a home to return to.
“You?” Jude asked the Japanese woman, who shook her head. “Suit yourself.” Jude turned back to Fixx, slipped her first-aid box under the bar and came up holding the tattered Kodak of LizAlec. She looked at Fixx, long and slow, and then she glanced down at the piece of card in her hand, pale blue eyes gazing at LizAlec’s intense face staring back.
“You like the girl?”
Fixx nodded.
“You fuck her?”
They looked at each other and Fixx remembered Jude kneeling over him, her hips pushing down hard as she bit her own bottom lip in concentration. He shook his head.
“You tried?”
Fixx thought about answering. But there was a lot of shit swirling around in his head that couldn’t stand too good a look. Why the fuck else did Jude think he spent as much time as he could going AWOL inside his head, skipping reality’s bail bonds?
In the end he just shrugged.
Jude nodded, half to herself. “That girl was real afraid.” She jerked her chin at the dead clone sliced open on her bar floor. “You think that shit was what scared her?”
No, Fixx didn’t. “Fresh hatched,” he said, having thought about it. “Couldn’t even talk properly yet...” But why the fuck ask him? Fixx wondered crossly. He didn’t know what the fuck had scared LizAlec, who the fuck was after her, and he certainly didn’t know where the fuck she was.
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