by Steve Perry
Azul hid behind the bin and breathed deeply several times to catch her breath. She needed to do more aerobics—that little sprint shouldn’t have cost her that much effort.
After half a minute, she heard the follower’s footsteps coming down the driveway. From her boot, Azul removed a onetime shot tube. It was not much more than a big firecracker—a charge of compressed gas behind a wad and a couple dozen expoxy-boron pellets set in semiperm gel, with the barrel only six or seven centimeters long. The whole thing was made of spun carbon fiber, and the outside was coated in something that wouldn’t take fingerprints or hold DNA residue. It wouldn’t pass an HO scanner, but it would slip past metal detectors. It was a throwaway weapon, useful for close range. Outside of five or six meters, hitting a target would be iffy—the thing had no sights, and you pointed it like you would your finger, squeezed it in the right spot, and it went off.
Azul didn’t particularly want to use it, but she was glad she had it. It might facilitate a conversation.
If the tail had any smarts, she’d be wary approaching the trash bin.
Azul stood on a thin rim that formed a lip that ran around the bottom of the bin. If the watcher bent down and looked under the thing, she wouldn’t see anybody’s legs.
She assumed the watcher would look—Azul would have—and she also assumed that not seeing anybody hiding there wouldn’t be enough to convince the watcher by itself.
The footsteps slowed. Stopped close by.
Azul edged along the back of the bin toward the far end.
She heard another couple of tentative steps away from that end. Azul got there, stepped down. She took a deep breath and made sure of her grip on the shot tube, then stepped out of concealment.
The watcher was looking the other way, but the movement caught her attention, and she spun quickly toward Azul.
“Who sent you?” Azul asked.
The woman jerked, surprised, and clawed for something in her back pocket.
Crap—!
Azul squeezed the shot tube. There was a loud whump! as the gas charge went off. The gel held together for a couple meters, then the shot started to spread. It was still clumped into a pattern no bigger than Azul’s hand when it hit the watcher square in the face.
The woman’s own weapon fell from her grip and clattered onto the plastcrete. A spring gun, Azul saw, as deadly as the shot tube in the right hands.
Not the watcher’s hands, though.
Azul looked up and down the driveway. Nobody in sight. Shit.
There was little point in searching the body—the watcher was certainly good enough so she wouldn’t have a folded note in her pocket with her employer’s name on it and directions to his home—and being seen with a corpse was not the way to start a new assignment—especially when you had caused the death. Still, you never knew.
She pulled a pair of thinskin gloves from her pocket.
Aside from the gun, the dead woman had a credit cube and an ID. That was all. The cube held two hundred stads. Azul tucked it into her pocket—she would lose it as soon as she could, but she might as well make it look like robbery.
The ID bore the name “Kat Brant” and a local address, but Azul guessed that one or both of these bits of data were probably false. She took that, too—no point in doing the cools’ work for them.
She’d wanted her alive, to find out who’d sent her. There hadn’t been any real choice, not once the woman had gone for her gun; but if she was dead, well, that would also serve. Sorry, fem.
At least Kat there wouldn’t be carrying any descriptions back to her masters.
The game was back on.
Mourn liked to break his workout into three or four chunks, rather than one long session. He would practice an hour in the morning, another hour or two in the afternoon, and if he had the energy, an hour before he went to sleep. He had been doing this for so many years that it had long ago ceased to be a matter of discipline. It was what he did, a part of the biz, training, and while there was only so much you could manage by yourself, you had to do it if you wanted to stay reasonably sharp. Every player of rank he knew trained every day. If he missed a day for any reason, it felt really weird.
One of the first things he did when he got to a city of any size was find a martial arts kiosk to get supplies—bag gloves, bandages, unguents, odds and ends. Mourn moved light, no more than he could carry. When he stepped off a ship or a boxcar, he had a travel bag and his guitar, that was it. When you had stads, you bought what you needed along the way and left it behind when you departed. In his game, you had to be ready to move at a moment’s notice—you never carried anything you couldn’t leave behind. Although he would hate to lose another guitar, better that than some of the options.
Mourn did a series of stretches and plyometrics to warm up, some shadowboxing and kicking. Then he went through the silat forms he had learned, eighteen short dances called djurus. The djurus contained in them all the fighting moves one could efficiently make with one’s upper body, so he had been taught. There were separate exercises for the lower body, using various geometric platforms—straight line, triangle, square, cross pattern—and he did those, too.
Sufficiently loose after forty-five minutes, he lit Bob’s power and waited for the gyros to get enough spin.
The standard martial arts fighting/training dummy was old-tech—a sodium borohydride fuel cell that powered bio-electric motor-driven arms and legs made up of rods and pistons, all covered with a biogel and skin that mimicked human flesh. It was kept balanced by a trio of heavy and high-speed gyroscopes, and could kick, punch, knee, elbow, or head-butt. You could program it for specific attacks or set it on random mode. The basic models had sensors and software sufficient to tell you how hard a strike was when you tagged the dummy. The dummies ran about a thousand standards each, which was spendy, but most of the time, except the ones he cut up too bad practicing bladework, Mourn was able to sell them back for half or three-quarters what he paid, so it wasn’t that bad a deal, and it was just part of operating expenses.
For some reason, somewhere back in the mists of history, the training dummies had come to be known as Bobs.
This unit was controlled by a covered panel in the middle of the back, or by voice-activation.
“Hey there, Bob. What say we spar? Random single or double attacks, full power, full spectrum.”
Bob said, “Acknowledged.” Then, “Up yours, punk ass.”
Mourn grinned. This Bob was one of the vox-equipped models that would offer taunts, to simulate an opponent who tried to rattle you. Mourn was long past the days when anything anybody might say would do that to him. “Bob, Bob. You are so crude.”
Bob said, “Your mother sucks mue dick. Your sister eats large animal turds.”
Mourn laughed. Somebody must have had fun programming this chip.
Bob bent his knees, the hydraulics whining slightly, then stepped in, not the most graceful of moves, but quick enough, and fired a straight punch at Mourn’s throat.
Mourn did a stop-kick to the groin, angled out, slammed a hammer fist into Bob’s temple, and did a fast sapu, a sweep, on Bob’s right ankle.
The gyroscopes kept the dummy upright, but a small ting! from Bob’s computer told Mourn that he had done the sweep with sufficient force to have taken a normal man down. While he could have programmed the unit’s balancers so that Bob would have toppled from the sweep, he preferred not to—Bob weighed nearly 150 kilograms, couldn’t get up on his own without a crabbing, complicated process that took a while, and lifting him to his feet got old real fast. You had to shut off the gyros, lock the legs, haul him up, then restart him. Life was too short.
Bob shuffled around in a turn to face Mourn again. “My grand mam hits harder than that, elbow-sucker. I am going to fornicate you up the rectal orifice.”
Mourn laughed. “Oh, Bob. You are so bad.”
After thirty minutes of sparring with the dummy, Mourn headed for the shower. Another ten minutes of the hot water
cleaned away the sweat and relaxed his tired muscles. He stood under the blowers until he was dry, put on a robe, and went to practice his guitar.
His guitar travel case was of spun polycarb fiber, strong as titanium but considerably lighter. The ad for it on commercial entcom showed four large men sitting on it without producing a dent. Inside, there was a small compartment for accoutrements—picks, an electronic tuner, a silk cleaning cloth, and enough plush lining to protect the passenger.
He thumbed the lock open and carefully removed the antique instrument.
The guitar itself was an unamplified hollow-body classic a couple of hundred years old. Named after the maker—Bogdanovich—it had been designed for players of classical or flamenco-style music, and was sans electronics. The back and sides were made of wood, black walnut, the front of red cedar, and the head and neck were of Spanish cedar, with an ebony fretboard. Over the years, the instrument, which hadn’t been that expensive to start, given what a concert-level guitar had cost in those days, had developed a rich, warm, full tone, and was now worth probably fifteen times its original cost. For what it was worth, you could get a nice flitter or a so-so house.
The guitar was his most prized possession, the third instrument he had owned. He had started out with an electronic, Stratocaster-style, and that had been adequate for the simple-chord pop music he could play. Later, he had found a cutaway classic that also allowed him to reach twenty frets, and he began learning to play blues and lead. The second guitar had been a honey, a carbon-fiber hollow-body with electronic pickups, and a very fast action. It was a handmade piece, produced by a woman who used the name Jade Blue, on Spandle, in Mu. He would still be playing the Blue, if he hadn’t had to bolt to escape the cools on Tembo after a match in which a citizen bystander had accidentally been killed. Mourn hadn’t chilled the guy, his opponent had, when the cit had stepped in and tried to stop the fight. You couldn’t blame the player the way it went down, but local cools took a squinty-eyed view of Flexers taking out their cits, and getting offworld fast was the only alternative to being arrested.
Somewhere on Tembo, some cool was probably still playing that guitar.
He had come across the Bogdanovich shortly after he lost the Blue, in a music shop in Star City on Alpha Point. A long way from home for the instrument. How had it made the trip? Who had brought it, how long ago? It was expensive, but after strumming one E-chord, he was sold. Given his life, money didn’t matter much.
Because the classic style had only twelve frets you could comfortably use without contorting your hand, Mourn had found himself getting into that kind of music. He did pieces arranged by Segovia, Parkening, John Williams, Django Byers, and El McMeen. He could still do twelve-bar blues and high-on-the-neck pop, but since he didn’t play with anybody else, lead wasn’t as useful without a rhythm machine to pick against anyway. And it wasn’t as if there was a lack of repertoire for classical music . . .
He sat in a straight-backed chair with his left foot on a fifteen-centimeter-high rest. In classical-style playing, the guitar was propped on the left leg, the neck angled up, and the thumb of the fret hand always stayed behind the neck. Notes were generally plucked and not strummed. Because he trained in the fighting arts using his fists every day, long fingernails on his right hand were out; they dug into his palm, so he used carbon-fiber finger and thumb picks, skeletonized jobs worn like thimbles. Not as purist as his own nails, but the sound was not too far off.
Mourn tuned the instrument, strummed a few chords, and started his practice with Pachelbel’s Canon in D. After that, he ran through a couple of Bach pieces—he liked Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring and the Lute Suite IV Prelude—then some Harrison—S. Yates’s transcription of Here Comes the Sun, segueing right into an intricate tremolo work by Fernando Sor.
He didn’t fool himself into believing he was a great musician. While he could probably earn money with his playing in some club or pub, he did it because it was relaxing. When you made your living by dueling, sitting and quietly playing music by yourself was restorative.
Done with the Sor piece, hands warmed up as good as they were going to get, he finished the practice set with Jeff Carter’s Etude for Venus, the most difficult guitar work he could play. It had a lot of minor sevenths and ninths, and required very fast changes up and down the neck. Even with the flat-wound-coated-gold bass strings, the low E and A still squeaked when he did the long run at the end, going from the twelfth to the first fret and back doing triplets. He shook his head. He’d been working on that piece for three months, and while most people he had heard play it also squeaked the low strings somewhere on the final sliding chords, there were some who didn’t. If they could do it silently, he could—assuming he lived long enough.
When he was done, an hour had slipped by. He wiped the guitar’s fingerboard and neck with the silk, put the instrument away, and locked the case. Food. Food would be good. He had trained his body and calmed his spirit. Supper would work. And then bed.
It was something of a spartan existence, but it suited him well enough.
When it turned out that Stefano Bashnik was the spy, Shaw had felt mixed emotions. Bashnik was top-grade, one of a handful of biomedical specialists who could run at speed, and losing him would be a pain. He was the number two man on the project, nobody but Renoir ahead of him, and the most hands-on of the senior players. Which was the shits. Men of Bashnik’s caliber were hard to find, and usually sufficiently self-aware that they knew what they were worth. It wasn’t as if Shaw couldn’t afford a new team member, just that he’d have to find him, interview him, convince him that he should leave whatever important project he was currently working—and the really good ones all already had important work to do—and then wait as he was brought up to speed.
On the other hand, Bashnik was young, a fitness buff, and while not a fighter per se, had played contact sports along the way.
It was indeed an ill wind that blew no good.
It was late, they were alone in the training hall, and Cervo had taken care, which included jiggering with security cams, to make sure no one had seen him bring Bashnik here.
Shaw, who was dressed as if he were going to work out with Baba, smiled.
Bashnik returned the smile. “All right,” he said. “So you know. Listen, it wasn’t personal. You might just want to let it slide—we’re close to a breakthrough, you know. Kicking me off the project will only slow things down. I know how close this is to your heart.”
“You have balls, Stefano, I’ll give you that. You are a spy, feeding the Confed rep the details of a protocol I really wanted to keep a secret, and you think I should just . . . let it slide? Dock your bonus a little, maybe?”
“It’s a thought.”
“What did our friendly planetary rep give you to betray me?”
“Head of the new Confed Military Research Laboratory on Earth.”
“Nice plum.”
He shrugged. “So I’m fired, right? Fine. You’re the one who loses, M. Shaw. Me, I go off to my nice new job now instead of later. Doesn’t bother me.”
Shaw smiled again. “Well, not exactly. I’m afraid you won’t be spacing to Earth to work for the Confed.”
“I have a written contract with M. Randall saying otherwise.”
Now Shaw laughed. “Stefano, Stefano. You don’t think a man with my weight can squash such a deal without raising a sweat? All I’d have to do is tell my good friend Newman Randall that I will cut the Confed a little slack on any of fifty chems they buy from me wholesale, a point or two on some of those would save the military ten, twelve million stads. You think he wouldn’t invoke the MPA and zero out your contract in a heartbeat for that?”
Bashnik frowned. “You would do that?”
Shaw shook his head. “No, I won’t. But I could. You’re a brilliant scientist, but not very smart in the ways of business and politics. I could also use my influence and money to make sure you never get a job any more complex than washing test tubes, if I so de
sired. It might cost a small fortune, but hey, I have a large fortune—a million here, a million there, if it falls out of my pocket, it isn’t worth my time to bend over and pick it up. I could ruin your life forever and get up smiling about it every day.”
“But you aren’t going to do that, either,” Bashnik said. He began to look worried.
“Nope. All I am going to do is terminate you.”
“I don’t understand.”
They were two meters apart. Shaw took a lazy step and slapped Bashnik, a nice swat that caught the younger man on the left ear. It didn’t knock him down, but it did rock him. He grabbed at his head and backed away. “What the fuck are you doing?”
“Just what I said, Stefano. No more. No less.”
The man’s eyes went wide as, finally, he understood.
Terminate.
Shaw had six cams recording. He looked forward to seeing the show later, but for now, he wanted to enjoy the feeling of the experience.
Bashnik cursed loudly.
The thrill that Shaw felt was almost orgasmic.
Afterward, Cervo cleaned up and delivered some news: They’d lost one of their ops, one assigned to cover one of Randall’s people. She hadn’t reported in, and the cools had found her body in an alley—she’d been shot to death.
What was dear old Randall up to? Best to find out, Shaw knew. Knowledge was not only power, it was survival at this level.
7
Sola was about to pee herself she was so excited. Weems! Weems was here, on Earth!
When she’d gotten the tip, it had seemed a gift from God.
She had never seen the man in person, only in a couple of short and fuzzy clips, but she had no doubt that she would know him when she found him. And she would find him—he was on the same planet, for God’s sake! How much better could it get than that? She would pay whatever it cost, if she had to sell herself on the street to get the stads, she would run him down. This was the chance of a lifetime—she might never get another shot at the number one, numero uno, namaba moja player. Even a short interview or some nonfighting footage of Weems would make her documentary!
