by Steve Perry
It was dark, though the streets were well lit, and she felt conspicuous in her disguise, but nobody paid her any mind that she could tell.
She saw Norse leave his cube and head for the bus stop.
She fell in behind him, far enough back so as not to draw his attention.
There were a few people on the walks, shift-changers going or coming.
She had thought about it long and hard and decided that any kind of righteous announcement, about who she was and why he was about to die, was a bad idea. The walls had ears and eyes, and it didn’t matter that he knew because he wasn’t going to remember it anyway.
She was ten meters back, and the bus kiosk was half a block ahead.
She pulled the hammer from under her sweater, took a deep breath, and sprinted.
The aug kicked her natural adrenaline surge even higher.
At the last moment, he sensed or heard her coming and started to turn, but too late. She smashed his skull with the hammer just over his left ear, felt the bone give and the hammer sink in.
He collapsed, jittering, and she stopped, dropped, and hit him again, five times, all to the head.
Each strike punched through the bone.
By this time, some of the pedestrians and cyclists had seen the attack and somebody would be calling the police.
She came up, put the hammer into her pocket, and took off, her new speed giving her feet wings.
Nobody moved to stop her.
She ran, found the alley she knew was there, turned into it. Ran, cleared the end, made another turn. Ran faster.
There was a small park with a dead zone, no camera, and under a thick bush, she changed clothes, removed the skin mask, and tucked the hammer away in the backpack.
She got back to the trike and climbed onto it, headed for the Grange Street Ferry Terminal.
She caught the next hydrofoil ferry heading for Wool Bay. It was ninety kilometers, an hour-and-a-half trip.
Halfway across and running at speed on the foils, she leaned out over the lower deck rail, used the hammer to weight the skinmask and gloves, and dropped them into St. Vincent Bay.
When the ferry landed, she dumped the rest of her disguise into a recycle bin.
She caught the morning maglev to Victor Harbor, then took the maglev from there to Port Augusta, and finally, the pubtrans bus home.
The StatNet news the next day listed the killing of Roxby Norse in Adelaide. The police had no motive, nor any suspects. Eyewitnesses could add little. One of them indicated that the man who had done it seemed to move really fast, but nobody got a good look at him. There was a partial recording from the bus kiosk, but it was blurry and useless.
And Jo didn’t feel helpless after that...
She went to her quarters, stripped, stretched, and put on her tights and slippers. Time to go run in the rain ...
~ * ~
TWENTY-THREE
Kay enjoyed the storm. It blocked the sun, cooled the air, yet was warm enough so it was not unpleasant, a giant shower. Running and climbing helped her to work off her frustration at not finding the Rel.
Prey that did not behave as such was disturbing on a visceral level.
Back at the perimeter of the base, the skies still dumping steadily, with strong wind gusts, she became aware of another running in the rain.
The rain washed away scents, and the heavy clouds dimmed the light, but there was no mistaking the other: Jo.
The woman was aware of Kay. She angled in her direction, slowed her run.
“Great day,” Jo said.
Kay nodded. “Good weather for play.”
“Want to dance?” Jo said.
“Yes.”
“I have to warn you—Formentara has given me a new toy. Proprioceptivity enhancement.”
Kay whickered. “Perhaps that will help make it more of a challenge for me.”
Jo grinned.
They were five meters apart, on muddy ground. The footing would be inconstant. If Jo had a way to better augment her balance, that would offer her an advantage; then again, Kay’s feet were clawed, which gave her a better grip.
Jo turned slightly and edged to her right.
Kay mirrored the pose and motion.
When the two fems played, each had strengths that could give her the match:
Jo had more formal training as a fighter.
Kay was slightly quicker.
Jo’s reach was greater.
Kay was more agile.
Both could see deeper into the red and violet than most humans, and both had better hearing and olfactory functions, though the rain would dampen their senses about equally. Of course, at contact range, eyes, ears, and noses were less important than positional sensitivity.
Jo stole a half step toward her.
Kay settled into a lower stance.
In their early matches, Kay had won; the first eight times, she had prevailed. As Jo had gotten more experienced in dealing with Vastalimi tactics, she had taken a few matches. Then, it was every fourth time. Then, one in three. Recently, her skills had improved to the point where Jo could prevail 40 percent of the time.
Four of ten was better than any human had a right to expect in a one-on-one with someone of Kay’s species. Jo was the most adept human opponent Kay had ever played with, and likely as adept as any human who had faced a Vastalimi anywhere. Which was impressive, but still less than her goal.
Any mistake by either was usually the match-ender; both had learned to capitalize on errors, forced or accidental.
In the beginning, Jo could be drawn into traps. Now, she was more wary and apt to offer traps of her own.
Of course, it was but play—claws sheathed, and Jo did not use bioweapons, nor knives or zapwands.
Kay still had the edge, but it was not that much sharper.
Jo slid another half meter closer, switched her feet into an angled left lead.
Kay unfocused her gaze, alert for any giveaway motion. She dropped her stance a bit more. Lower was better in a clinch. Legs bent to spring gave the potential of a farther and higher leap.
Vastalimi usually caught their prey from the side or behind, by bounding for it and launching themselves into a grab. A million years of that was hard to overcome. Of course, they fought each other, the Vastalimi, and thus knew how to deal with an attack rather than fleeing prey, but leaping was part of that, too.
Jo had learned this and devised ways to counter it.
Jo switched her leads again, stealing another half step. It was simple but effective against one who had not seen it: Lean forward, then as you lean back, slide your foot ahead. Your body appeared to stay in the same space, but you were closer.
Kay had seen the trick and was not fooled. She waited.
At four meters, the woman was well within Kay’s standing-jump range, and just a hair outside her own. But a leap, once committed to, took a relatively long time to arrive. Velocity was limited to ground speed at launch. An alert opponent had plenty of time to get out of the way or set up a counter. The first time Jo had stepped in and thrown a long sidekick when Kay had flown at her from a distance had been a surprise. Vastalimi were agile, but unlike creatures with long and heavy tails, they could not change direction in midair. She had managed to tuck and twist, so that the kick caught a raised thigh instead of her belly, but it had been enough to off-balance her landing and allow Jo to follow up effectively.
She hadn’t made that mistake again.
No, the way to victory now lay in gaining position and being able to get an attack off faster than it could be defended, or to set up a second or third move to follow it equally fast. This was why pure defense was the path to a loss. You could block ninety-nine of a hundred attacks but if you failed on the hundredth, you lost—
Jo cross-stepped to her left, offering what seemed to be a weak position.
Kay whickered. “Really? Have I gone blind?”
Jo grinned.
Kay switched leads, allowing her hands to drift back i
nto defensive position a little slower, leaving her highline open.
“Yeah, I’m not buying that one,” Jo said.
Lightning sizzled, and the instant blast of thunder made it right there—
Jo attacked, churned through the mud, her augmented speed turning her into a wet blur as she used the light and sound for a distraction. She fired a right punch high—
—Kay dodged to her left, shot her right hand out in a stop-block punch—
—Jo snapped her right knee up wide, aiming for Kay’s thigh. She slid over the muddy ground on her left foot as if she were skiing, no loss of balance—
—Kay barely avoided the knee strike by a spin away, and she slipped while doing it, took a heartbeat to regain her own balance—
—Jo dropped her raised knee and pivoted on both feet, but her momentum kept her skidding past a hair—
—Kay crouched low, the squat almost touching her buttocks to the ground, and leaped, hands leading for a low tackle—
—Jo sprang up and forward, tucked into a ball, and threw a forward somersault over Kay—
—Kay turned her dive into a shoulder roll. Splashed mud and water, bounced up in a 180, sank to her ankles in a boggier patch—
—Jo landed the flip, right leg leading, and stepped out of it, pivoted on the balls of her feet, turned to face Kay, five meters between them—
“Halt!” somebody yelled. “Identify yourself!”
Kay came out of her crouch, saw Jo do the same.
An unsuited sentry.
“Captain Sims and Kluthfem,” Jo called. “At ease.”
“I need a password, Captain.”
The sentry, a hard-faced human with his weapon pointing between the two of them, was ten meters away, backlit by the lights of the main structure in the compound. Likely that Jo or Kay could get to him and take him down before he could do anything useful, and if he knew who they were, he knew that, but he was one of theirs, and this was his job.
“The password is ‘Boogie-woogie.’”
The sentry lowered his weapon. “Sorry, ma’am,” he said.
“Not at all,” Jo said. “We forgot where we were, our fault. Good job.”
The sentry nodded.
Jo looked at Kay. “A draw?”
“Draw. Tell Formentara the new augmentation is most impressive. I thought you would fall when you threw that knee.”
“Me, too,” Jo said. “Amazed me I stayed up.”
“It will be interesting to see how it works on firmer footing.”
“I’m looking forward to that. What say we get dry, and I buy you a drink?”
“I am open to that.”
~ * ~
Gramps said, “We’ve intercepted another com, Rags.”
Cutter looked up at the man in the doorway.
“Should be up on your screen. Oral, no visual, but you need to listen to it.”
Cutter saw the pulsing com-dot on his computer’s holoproj. He said, “Play on-screen com recording.”
“—can’t talk long, they are coming back, but I am alive, Father, and—”
The voice stopped.
“That’s it,” Gramps said.
“How did we come by it?”
“Rama sent it to the Rajah about five minutes ago, according to the Rajah’s security, along with a barely polite frothing-at-the-mouth demand for the Rajah to get his ass in gear and get his armies on the march.”
Cutter leaned back in his form-chair. “Is it her?”
“Formentara says it is, but with reservations. Zhe’s on hir way over.”
“Reservations?”
“Voxmatch uses twenty-six points for a perfect mesh. Realistically speaking, anything above nineteen points is good enough for a positive ID and you almost never get a perfect mesh. The message is a twenty-three.”
“So we believe it is her.”
“Yes, but—”
Formentara arrived at that moment and moved past Gramps into Cutter’s office. Zhe said, “It is her voice, but she didn’t send that message.”
“Explain.”
“We have access to more than a hundred hours of recordings featuring Indira. So a baseline is easy to establish. The kidnappers would know that. This snippet of monologue is her saying those words, no question, but they weren’t spoken in that order.”
He raised an eyebrow.
“It’s a mash,” Formentara said.
Cutter looked at hir expectantly.
“A construct. Listen to this.” Zhe tapped a command into the small handheld.
Cutter’s computer’s speakers cut in:
“—can’t talk long, they are coming back, but I am alive, Father, and—”
“Sounds about the same to me,” Cutter said.
“Not about the same, it is exactly the same,” zhe said. “Voxmatch puts it as a twenty-six when compared to the first message. That never happens.
“The second one is a mash I put together using a computer-cull to give me the set of words that matched my query. I linked them together in order, ran it through a smoother to fix the cadences so they’d be more like they would be in that sentence’s order. A word at the end of a normal sentence usually gets a different emphasis than it would at the beginning or middle, and if you move it, it sounds wrong.”
Cutter nodded. “Okay.”
“My mash is a perfect match. Couldn’t happen that way coincidentally. Somebody did the same thing I did.”
“So it is a faked message.”
“Absolutely.”
Cutter considered it. “The question then is, who? Somebody trying to fool Rama? Or Rama trying to fool the Rajah?”
“There’s something else,” Formentara said. “There’s a carrier sig under the message, part of which is a com unit’s hardware hash. I ran the number, and it’s IDed as one of the units Indira had, which is reportedly missing.”
Cutter thought about that for a moment. “So whoever is responsible for the message has the com unit Indira probably had with her when she was taken.”
“Or access to the hash number and enough sense to append it, to convince us she sent the message,” Gramps put in.
“Gets even more interesting,” zhe said. “The backwalk on the sig shows its origin in the southern reach of the Asana Forest.”
“That seems sloppy,” Gramps said. “The other messages were bounced all to hell and gone, no way to trace them. Why wouldn’t this one be?”
Cutter said, “Refresh my memory: The Asana Forest is where ... ?”
“Southern Balaji.”
Of fucking course it is.
“Looks like Rama is going to get his war,” Gramps said.
“Why fake the message if they have her?” Cutter wondered aloud. “Why not just have her parrot whatever they tell her to say?”
“Maybe she isn’t in any condition to talk,” Formentara said.
Cutter sighed. Always a possibility—that the victim was dead before they ever arrived. It had happened before, not much you could do with that, save maybe recover the body. A small and cold victory.
Cutter’s com announced an incoming call.
“The Rajah?” Gramps said.
“Yes. I’ll go talk to him. And then maybe we need to have another word with Rama. Call the team in. We are probably going to have to hurry.”
~ * ~
TWENTY-FOUR
Kay got the call as she finished grooming her fur, combing out undercoat shed and tangles. She wasn’t particularly vain about her appearance, but there were basic minimum standards a Vastalimi would adhere to when it was possible to do so. You might not have time to groom in combat for days, but there was no excuse for not doing it sitting idle, waiting for something—for anything—to happen ...
She opened the com, said: “I am here.”
“Is this the Vastalimi?” came the voice.
A female Rel, she didn’t doubt. “It is. Speak.”
“I am told you wish to talk to me.”
