The Musashi Flex

by Steve Perry

  No, more likely with somebody like Harnett, it would be: Mourn? Nah, he wasn’t shit. Way past it, an easy kill.

  It might have been a good strategy if Mourn had held but the one blade. But as Mourn switched his hand position, reversing them to cover high and low line, he palmed the second kerambit into his other hand, covering it with the angle of his body.

  Harnett lunged, stabbed, and when Mourn went for the slice and block, to “defang the snake,” Harnett did a neat border shift, tossing the dagger from his right to his left—

  —Mourn cut the right arm, snagged the point in the armored sleeve, and Harnett grinned—

  —but as Harnett caught the dagger for the true strike, Mourn stepped in and punched with the second kerambit. The move was called “the helpful waiter” stance, because it looked rather like a waiter holding a serving tray balanced on one hand, palm held up and at throat level.

  The little blade bit into Harnett’s neck, just under his chin below his ear. Right where the carotid artery pulsed within a millimeter or two of the skin.

  The talon snicked through the great vessel, hardly slowing, and Mourn did a short follow-through, then swung his fist back and used the thick ring to smash into Harnett’s temple.

  Harnett stumbled, shock and surprise painting his face. He went down. Blood spewed from his neck, pulsing in great gouts.

  Mourn backed off quickly. A wounded killer was a danger.

  Harnett came back to his feet. He brought both hands to his wound, still holding the knife, but the blood coursed between his fingers, leaving his face dead pale. It wouldn’t be long before he bled out enough to lose consciousness. Even with immediate medical attention, it would be iffy if he survived, and there weren’t any medicos around. Mourn prepared himself for a final desperate lunge, but Harnett didn’t have enough left.

  “What—?” he managed.

  Mourn turned his hands around, palms forward, to show both kerambits.

  The great sin of youth was to be so full of your own ability you couldn’t see another’s. Mourn had been there, and had been lucky enough to survive his own stupidity.

  “Shit,” Harnett said. His voice was barely a whisper. “You cheated!”

  “No. You didn’t pay enough attention.” He didn’t say he was sorry. He wasn’t. When a man came at you with a blade, it was his karma if he ate your steel instead. That was how the game was played.

  The younger man stood there for another few heartbeats, then his eyes clouded, and he collapsed.

  The tag, a thumbnail-sized carbon-fiber computer-chip embed bearing a holographic image of a samurai sword, was stuck to the inside of the dead man’s boot, between the insole and the outer, which was where most players who hadn’t been hassled too much by cools kept them. Mourn usually wore his clipped to his pubic hair—if a cool found it, he would have to be getting very personal. And if somebody dropped him, they’d spend a while looking for it, a small revenge from the final chill.

  For just a moment, as he looked at the strip, Mourn considered leaving it with the body. He wasn’t worried about getting rid of the corpse—Jakarta was a violent city, dozens of homicides every day, and the local cools weren’t going to search real hard for whoever had tanked an offworlder that nobody was going to file a report on. The cools would look at Harnett and figure it out when they saw the knife, the armor weave, the other weapons he surely had hidden on him. Yes, dueling was illegal, but Fuck it, they would say. Just another dead Flex asshole and good fucking riddance! None of his DNA to connect him to Harnett, if he stayed careful.

  Someday, if he stayed in the game, it would be him lying dead in some dank alley like this. That was how it went if you walked the Musashi Flex. You either retired, went to jail, or wound up dead.

  He stuck the tag into his pocket, wiped the blood from his blades, sheathed them, then turned and walked away. He’d dump the steels and the sheath into the ultrasonic cleaner he had in his hotel room, to rid them of any Harnett’s DNA, just to be sure.

  The air seemed fresher now, sweeter, and the tropical warmth was not as oppressive as it had been. Fights to the death did that. Life was briefly, a little sweeter. He was still tired, though.

  2

  Ellis Mtumbo Shaw was not a happy man.

  He sat in the richly appointed office of his company’s headquarters in Chim City, on Tatsu, the main world of the Haradali System, staring at Martin Snow Owl’s sculpture Two Wrestlers. It was the original, of course, one-quarter life-sized, carved from a single, two-hundred-kilo chunk of black opal unearthed decades ago in the Cody Brothers’ Marissa #3 Opal Mine, on Thompson’s Gazelle. Shaw considered it priceless, though his insurance company, being somewhat more pragmatic, valued it at 12 million stads, plus or minus a little. Normally just looking at it put him in a good mood. The opal itself was full of fire, with wide harlequin and Chinese-writing patterns, brilliant, multicolored flashes across the spectrum, reds, greens, blues, yellows. Hell, it was worth 6 million uncarved as a doorstop. With Snow Owl’s magnificent work, it was, and would be, forever one of a kind. More than one museum had offered him a fat credit cube and told him to deduct the amount he wanted. He had just laughed at them.

  Today, however, the piece was not enough to lift his spirits. Another group of the fucking rock apes had died, five of them, all within hours of each other. Dammit!

  The formula had been working, otherwise. Theoretical reaction times should have been at .65, myoconduction enhanced proportionately, and there had been no reason for significant loss of fine motor control at full speed. It would have been amazing—

  —except for killing all the patients. The pathologists were at it now, but Shaw already knew what they would find. The apes had cooked in their own juices, the fucking HRE—the hypothalamic regulator enzyme—that was a big factor, and it was off, every fucking time, it was off—

  “Sir?”

  Shaw waded back from his sea of impotent rage and looked at the door to the office. It was Cervo, his head of security and primary bodyguard.

  When Shaw spoke, his voice was cool, a vat of liquid helium, betraying none of his anger. One did not let the help see how one was feeling, a lesson first pounded into him at his father’s knee. “Yes?”

  “The Tomodachians are here.” Despite his size—Cervo was a heavy-gravity mue, two meters tall and 120 kilos heavy—his voice was soft and not much more than whisper.

  Shaw nodded. “Of course. Send them in.”

  Shaw had a secretary and a personal assistant, of course, but anybody he didn’t personally know had to get past Cervo.

  The medico-research group from Tomodachi, in the nearby Shin System, were on a different track than Shaw. They were trying recom DNA, piggybacking viral packets on common gut bacteria. It didn’t work yet, but in the long term, it might, and if it did, it would have some advantages over his company’s method. Bacteria could be trained like tiny dogs to do all kinds of things, not the least of which would be to self-replicate for a predetermined time. You could tailor a strain to keep delivering its payload for days, weeks, months—even years, then have it hayflick out. Of course, you had to charge enough for that to make it worthwhile; and you had to build in a fail-safe to keep some clever competitor from taking it apart to see how it worked, but those were minor problems.

  Shaw was content to let the Tomodachians play with the biologicals until they solved the larger issues. Meanwhile, he would continue to fund them. When you owned 51 percent of ShawPharm Inc., the largest pharmaceutical company in the galaxy, with branch offices on forty of the fifty-some planets and many of the more substantial wheelworlds, money was not a worry. The contingent from Tomodachi had come to report on their progress, and they’d have their hands out when they finished. He could give them half a billion without having to call the accountants, but they’d only ask for a few million; they really had no idea how valuable their work would be when it finally got to market. Of course, that might take five years, but no matter. As long as he could keep
all his options covered.

  If you could make something go away by throwing money at it, it wasn’t really much of a problem. Too bad hormones and glands couldn’t be bought off so damned easily . . .

  The meeting ran longer than Shaw had expected and now he had to hurry—Baba Ngumi absolutely did not like to be kept waiting. If Shaw was even a minute late—sometimes even if he was on time—the old man could just decide to up and leave, and if he did, nothing could coax him back for today’s lesson. As rich as he was, Shaw’s stads were, past the agreed-upon fee, worthless as far as Baba was concerned. That he could have bought the man ten thousand times over, gifted him with more money than the gross national product of some countries to do nothing but teach Shaw for an hour a day, meant exactly nothing to Baba. And no excuse was acceptable—you either wanted to train enough to get there, or you did not.

  Shaw had rearranged his workday around his Kifo Mokono instruction. His life, actually. He practiced on his own for an hour in the mornings, two hours in the evenings, plus the hour five days a week of private lessons, those last determined by Baba’s schedule, which was capricious at best. If Shaw did not drop whatever he was doing for the time upon which Baba decided the stars or planets or whatever were right, then he was out of luck. The old man was a mystic—cranky, and inconsistent, among other less cheerful virtues. But Baba was the galaxy’s foremost expert in the little-known martial art of Kifo Mokono—“Death’s Hand”—and if you wanted to learn it from him, you did it on his terms. End of discussion.

  As he hurried across the compound to the private skuli he had built for his training, Shaw already knew that the art was not going to be the magic carpet he had hoped. It offered a lot, and he would stay with it for a while longer, but it wasn’t going to take him where he truly wanted to go. For he had a secret desire, one he had never told to anybody: He wanted to be a player in the Musashi Flex, that loose agglomeration of close-combat artists who traveled the stellar systems fighting duels with each other. More, he wanted not only to be ranked, he wanted to be the best player of them all.

  He wanted to be the deadliest man in the known galaxy.

  He smiled at himself. There was a good reason he had never told anybody this desire. They would surely mark him as mad. You are a fucking billionaire a score of times over, and you want to risk getting your head bashed in or your body sliced into bloody ribbons by some psychotic killer? Can we get a psychiatrist over here, stat?

  The problem was that he wasn’t a natural. Yes, he had trained so that he was better than good. He had rank in four arts before he had come to Baba Ngumi, but at the top levels, the fighters had something more than training. They had some kind of innate . . . something—talent, drive, whatever—that made them more than the sum of their fighting arts. He had seen the best, and they all possessed it, whatever it was. And Shaw knew that this spirit, be it ki, or prana, or tenaga dalam or whatever, was not part of his makeup. He could beat nine out of ten men or mues he was apt to meet on any street on any planet, he was good, but he was not great, and that was what it took to be a Top Player in the Flex.

  Greatness. Whatever it might be called, you had it or you did not, and if you didn’t, you could not buy it. That had been a hard lesson, one he had fought against learning for fifteen years. He was young, only forty T.S. He was in outstanding physical condition. He was smart and he was rich and he wanted it, God, he wanted it! He had believed he could not be denied. He could afford the best teachers, and he had never failed at anything he had truly desired. Business, women, whatever, he set his sights on a goal and he, by Jesu, achieved it! Always had, no matter what the odds against it; always would—so he had thought. He had never had reason to think otherwise. He’d really believed that.

  He had paid some of the best Flexers to come and spar with him, offered them small fortunes to do it. Men who were ranked in the Teens had come to his private school. Beat me and double your fee, he had told them.

  They had all left twice as wealthy as they’d expected. All of them.

  It had been painful. Physically, to be sure, but bones could be glued, torn tissues mended. What had hurt more was learning that he was not going to be able to defeat the Top Players no matter how much training he had. No matter how much he wanted it. Training and desire weren’t enough. He needed something they had that he didn’t. And it wasn’t for sale.

  There had been a time of despair.

  But because he was smart and rich, he came to realize he had other options. There was a way to give himself an edge. If he couldn’t do it one way, he could do it another. And if the fucking rock apes would stop dying, he would get it . . .

  Baba was waiting when he got to the skuli. Just standing there, not doing anything, staring at a blank wall. He was a short, wizened, dark-skinned man pushing eighty-five; if you saw him in a market or at a restaurant, you would not have a clue that he had once been among the deadliest fighting men alive, retired at his peak—Third, amazing for a man his size—and that he still was more dangerous than a bagful of Mtuan vipers. Appearances were deceiving—if you believed this little old fellow was innocuous and thought to push him around, you would regret it—assuming he let you live to do so.

  Without turning to look at him, Baba said, “Position One.”

  Baba did not believe in warming up or stretching. If you had a scheduled duel, yes, you could do that, but if you were attacked suddenly, if you saw a situation coming that was only a matter of seconds away, then you had better be ready to deal with it immediately. You would not be able to hold up your hand to an attacker bent on smashing your face and say, Hold up there, fellowman, I need to loosen up first, okay?

  Knives? Oh, but I left my knife at home—wait right here, I’ll go fetch it . . . Shaw had to smile at the thought.

  “Something is funny?” Baba said. Given that his back was still turned to Shaw and he couldn’t possibly see Shaw’s face, this was, despite the number of times similar things had happened, still amazing.

  “No, Baba.”

  “Then do not break your concentration. Position One.”

  Shaw nodded. “Yes, Baba.”

  Shaw slid his feet into the pose, right forward, left back, parallel and square with his shoulders, knees slightly bent. He kept his back straight, circled his hands so that his left was low, in front of his groin, and his right just under his chin, both clenched into tight fists. He took a deep breath, expelled half of it slowly, and began the dance with an imaginary opponent. Later, Baba would have him hammer the hydraulic bag, the wooden man, and dance through the small forest of hanging bleakballs. And if it went well, maybe Baba would show him a new combination. But he had best concentrate on his form, first. If he messed that up, Baba would walk away, and that would be that.

  As much as he respected the old man, he also hated him. Once he had learned what Baba had to teach him, Shaw was fairly certain he was going to have the old bastard killed. Not only would that keep anybody else from learning Baba’s tricks, it would be personally most satisfying . . .

  3

  In the run-down section of Madrid the locals impolitely called Ciudad de las Putas, Cayne Sola crouched behind a recycling bin where the two fighters couldn’t see her. The bin was heaped full of scrap plastic, mostly clotted food containers and beer bottles gone alcoholically fragrant in the summer sun. Not the most pleasant combination of odors, though she had smelled worse. She was, as usual, a little excited and a little afraid, but not so much so that she wasn’t doing her job. The two men were only ten or twelve meters away, the holoproj pen-cam she had quik-stik-mounted on the bin’s rim fed its narrowcast digital sig to the loup mounted on the left lens of her shades, and she had a fairly good view. Even if they happened to see the cam, they likely wouldn’t mark it for what it was.

  The cam, with one of the new photomutable-gel lenses, was voxax-controlled by a wireless patch mike on her throat. The whole system had cost her three months’ pay. She subvocalized the words “medium-wide angle,” an
d got a better shot.

  The larger of the two men was very big, pushing two meters and probably over a hundred kilos; despite that, his moves were lithe, almost snakelike, as he circled his hands up and down, back and forth, forming and re-forming strange, hypnotic gestures that looked to her almost as if they were some kind of sign language.

  The smaller man, who was exceedingly fair, nearly an albino in his paleness, though he had jet hair and eyebrows, laughed, and said, “You don’t really think that old kuji-kiri weave is going to work on me, do you, Al?”

  “Who knows? You could be almost as stupid as you look.”

  She had always found that part interesting—that these guys knew each other well enough to joke, but that they would fight until one or the other was too injured to go on. Or was dead.

  Pale chuckled and circled to his left, his right side forward. Snake—that would be Al—moved an equal amount to his left, keeping the distance between them identical, not quite close enough to cover with one jump. It was an exacting dance, the intricacies of which Sola was only beginning to be able to see, even after almost two months of investigation. It was like watching chess or maybe Go between two masters; each step, no matter how small, had meaning. A misplaced foot, and the response would be fast and maybe deadly.

  Snake shuffled forward a hair, then back.

  Pale held his ground, his hands raised in front of his chest. Neither man had weapons. She was glad of that. They bled enough when it was fists and boots and elbows; with weapons, it was much worse.

  Sola looked at the blinking diode on the loup’s heads-up display. Still green, so the batteries were good for at least another hour, way more than enough time. It wouldn’t do to run out of power in the middle of recording—that had happened during a duel on Mtu last month, and she’d missed some spectacular footage. She wasn’t going to be able to ask those guys for a reshoot, since one of them was dead and the other had gone straight to a medical center to be glued back together. Too bad for them, but she was more concerned for what she’d lost.