by Steve Perry
Shaw would have the monopoly, and nobody would even know what it was or that it even existed until he was on top. Would the matches be fair? Not really, but under the rules, technically, they would be. That was the beauty of it. When they asked, “Was it a fair match?” you could think of the technical truth and answer “Yes,” because you were using a drug, but it wasn’t banned! and not have it be a lie.
Even if they asked straight out: Are you using any prohibited substances? he could deny it. That was the beauty of it.
They couldn’t forbid it if they had never considered that it even existed.
Eventually, they would figure it out, and eventually, put Reflex on the proscribed list, because everybody would have to use it to be competitive, but until then, there would be a window. Shaw would climb in, steal the title, and climb out before it was closed. He didn’t have to stay on top forever, that wasn’t the point.
He had fully intended to take another dose and deal with Baba Ngumi, and to extract a certain vengeance on the old bastard, but Baba hadn’t shown up for his lesson yesterday, and all attempts to locate him, which included a tame police force and the best private operatives, came up empty—it was as if the old man had vanished. Such a thing was not possible in a civilized society, but for all his effort to find his teacher, Baba might as well have turned into smoke in a high wind.
It seemed awfully coincidental to Shaw that Baba would have departed just at the moment when his life was about to become forfeit. Maybe the old man had some kind of precognition, as Shaw himself had. Couldn’t discount that.
Well. No matter. He didn’t have to worry about Baba. He had enough training. Coupled with his artificially enhanced supernatural speed? He would be unbeatable.
“Sir,” came his secretary’s voice. “M. Newman Randall is here to see you. He doesn’t have an appointment.”
Shaw’s joy soured. Randall. What did he want? “Send him in.”
Shaw’s smile didn’t get above his lips, something that Randall, who had certainly had face-dance training, would have seen. He could have thought of something amusing and faked it, but it wasn’t worth the trouble.
They exchanged the usual mutterings, then Randall got to it: “So I understand that you have achieved success on your Reflex project.”
Fuck! How could he know that? The man’s spy was dead!
He didn’t need to be a face reader to know that Randall’s expression was genuine. He was amused, no question.
“Hardly,” Shaw said. “We haven’t even begun clinical trials on human subjects yet.”
“That’s not what I understand.”
“Oh, yes, we had a volunteer take the compound and it seemed to work without immediate side effects, but it is far too early to tell if that will hold for a larger sample over time.”
“Your . . . volunteer must have been pretty confident to risk his life.”
Son of a bitch knew that was he who had taken the chem! Who was it? Who was his other spy? There were only a few people who knew. Either one was a traitor, or Randall had other ways of collecting his information. As soon as the fucker left, Shaw was going to have his entire compound swept for bugs . . .
“Let’s not beat around the bush here, my friend. You have the chemical, it works, and we want it.”
“Or else?”
“Ellis, Ellis. No need to be confrontational. We are reasonable men, aren’t we?” He glanced at his ring chrono. “Ah, but look at the time. I just dropped round on my way to see the Confed Sector General, who is, as I am sure you know, staying at the Musali Game Preserve for a bit of a vacation before he spaces on to wherever he is off to next.”
He looked Shaw right in the eyes. “He is expecting me, but I told him I had to stop by and see you first.”
Shaw repressed a sigh and understood exactly what it was Randall was trying to tell him with that remark: If he didn’t make it to the CSG’s, they would come here looking. And he suspected—maybe knew—what had happened to his spy.
Well . . . shit.
Even so, Shaw was tempted. Kill the man, drop the body into one of the industrial-grade radioactive-leachers they had in the lab, grind him into atoms, even a DNA match would be impossible, somebody got that far. But—no. Not yet. He needed to find out how the man was getting his information. Then he would kill him.
“Give him my regards,” Shaw said, smiling and meaning it this time. Let Randall chew on that and wonder what it meant.
“I certainly will. Oh. Say hello to that old gentleman martial arts teacher for me, would you? A delightful fellow.”
Shaw’s smile froze. Baba? It immediately made a certain kind of sense. Baba could come and go as he pleased, and—shit! Baba was the spy! The devious bastard! Somehow, he had figured out things he shouldn’t, but it made sense. It had never crossed Shaw’s mind that Baba . . .
Shaw was outraged; even though he had planned to kill the man, it really pissed him off.
And Randall saw that, too.
“One experiment does not a trial make, Newman. Even with all the Confederation can do to pave the road, there still need to be tests, and they will take time. Otherwise, our liability would be insupportable.”
“Of course, old friend, I understand. We merely want to make sure the process begins as quickly as possible. That it might take a few months to get to the point where our own medicos are given a supply for testing is not unreasonable.”
“It could take a year or two,” Shaw tried.
“Oh, I don’t think it will. I would guess three or four months. You know it works, and you must be very confident that it has no major side effects.”
Shaw said nothing. He knew. No doubt of it. Had he guessed why Shaw had developed it? If so, had he told anyone? The CSG was expecting Randall now, but in a week or a month, six months, maybe something unfortunate might happen to him.
The PR stood. “I’ll be in touch,” he said, still smiling. And meaning it.
The asshole . . .
After Randall was gone, Shaw considered the situation. All was not lost, of course. He would still have a jump on the competition with his chemical crutch. Once it got into widespread military use, there’d be a black market, of course, and it would start showing up in the Flex, it would have to, eventually. The question was, could he get to the top before it did? He didn’t plan to stay in the game once he won. He’d retire.
If he could do it before the Confed tripped him up.
Look there, that’s Ellis Mtumbo Shaw. The billionaire who was also the number one player in the Musashi Flex, retired undefeated. They say he quit because there was nobody to challenge him, you know. Must be a helluva thing, to have all that money and to be the toughest fucker walking around on any planet in the whole galaxy. Some guys have all the luck . . .
That was worth another real smile of his own. Yes, indeed, it was . . .
13
A week later, when they were almost to Ago’s Moon, in Faust, Mourn went to work the weights. Sola tagged along to watch.
The place was one of the smaller gyms, out of the way, and empty, save for them. It was early in the ship’s day cycle, and this far into the voyage, most passengers had probably made the transition to ship time and were still asleep. She asked the question she’d obviously been considering.
“How do you get better?” Mourn said, repeating her question. He smiled, something he found himself doing more of when she was around. He said, “You know who Hébert Braun was?”
“Of course.”
He waited a second, and she rightly took this for a challenge to demonstrate her knowledge. She said, “He held the number one position for two years. Had sixty-one matches while he was king of the hill, thirty-nine bare, twenty-two armed, all of which he won, retiring undefeated, if not uninjured, let me see, fourteen years past. He went to Mtu, where he got into politics, was elected to the planetary senate and served two terms. He retired from that four years ago. He owns a chain of pubs on Mwanamamke and Mtu, and he lives in a
palatial estate on the Green Moon—Rangi ya Majani Mwezi.”
“Good to see that you do your research,” he said.
She didn’t smile. “I take my work seriously.”
“So do Flexers, if they manage to get ranked. Anyway, there’s a story about Braun. The way he supposedly trained was to find the worst quarry or asteroid miner’s pub he could, which if you know rock jocks, is apt to be a real hellhole. He’d walk to the bar, then in a loud voice announce that all the men on his left were pedophiles, and all those on his right were motherfuckers. Then he’d fight his way to the door.”
Now she did smile. “That’s a good story.”
He walked to the weight bench and stretched out on his back. Said, “One hundred kilos.”
The hum of the pressor field didn’t change, but the bare bar on the rack it controlled was now effectively a lot heavier. He reached up, grabbed the bar, lifted it from the rack and lowered it to his chest. It was a warm-up weight, and he could continue talking as he benched it. He didn’t lift real heavy anymore. He had all the muscle he needed, he just needed to keep it toned and flexible.
“Yeah, it’s a great story, but it’s pure deelibird kark. Braun was tougher than a meter-thick wall of denscris. In his day, he was the best one-on-one fighter in the galaxy, no question, maybe the best ever. The first time he walked into a rock jock pub and said what he was supposed to have said? He’d have been dead before he got to the words ‘on my left.’”
“The best fighter in the galaxy? Really?”
He lowered the weight, raised it, trying for smoothness rather than speed. Plyometrics was a different workout.
“No one man is a stand-up army. Hard as he was, skilled as he was, he wasn’t invulnerable. Against a score of unarmed and unorganized fighters, yeah, he could probably carve a path to the exit. Once you get past four or five, opponents just get in each other’s way. When you fight the ten thousand, you do it one at a time—but you do each one real quick.”
He finished the fifteenth rep, racked the bar, and said, “Field off.”
He sat up, wiped sweat from his face, look directly at her.
“In a pub full of strong, violent, proud men who make their livings pounding rock, probably at least half of whom will be armed, somebody will pull a blade or a slap-cap or a dart gun when you insult him, and that changes things.
“We have homilies by the barrel in the Flex. The weapons players like to say, ‘You can butter your bread with your finger, but, why would you?’ Or, ‘You’re not an ape, use a tool.’
“Facing a knife takes away your first five years of training bare. A slap-cap does the same thing. Maybe if you are ten years into it, you have a chance. That’s if you are looking right at him when he pulls it. A man with a needler or dart pistol or an illegal, overamped tightbeam hand wand three meters away and behind you? If he has a clue what he is doing, he’ll kill you before you turn around, even if you’ve got a weapon of your own.
“You shot Weems, remember, and you aren’t even a player.”
“So what are you saying here, Mourn?”
He stood, headed for the hyperextension chair. She followed him.
“What I’m saying is, the meanest, baddest, toughest fighter who ever walked breathes the same air as the rest of us. Skill and training count for a lot, but they don’t make you invincible. The fight might be to the death, but there are rules. It’s one player at a time against another player. They agree to the venue, the kinds of weapons, they both have some idea of what they are doing and what they are up against. A duel isn’t self-defense, and it isn’t war. It is what it is.”
She said, “Ah. The first question the brain strainers and face readers ask a player when he reports the results of a fight.”
“Yes. ‘Was it a fair match?’ Meaning, did you adhere to the rules? If not, you don’t get the win, and if the showrunners decide you cheated sufficiently much, they can punish you severely, on the spot. And they’ll know if you are lying. You lie, you can die.”
They reached the rack and he climbed up on it, put his heels under the support and leaned forward. His hipbones pressed into the padding. He bent at the waist until his head almost touched the spongy floor, then used the muscles of his low back and buttocks slowly to raise the weight of his upper body until his back was straight. He kept his arms folded across his chest.
“You’re saying that you fight like you train,” she said.
He nodded as he lowered his face back toward the floor. “Yes. There are plenty of martial arts that teach dealing with multiple opponents, some of them actually work, and you can learn that if you want—there may come a time when you need that knowledge. And you can learn a lot by training under experts who can show you things you don’t know. But the way you get better as a duelist is to fight people who are your equal or your superior as duelists. It doesn’t matter if you can kick multiple butts in a fighting class or a pub brawl. It’s what you do in an alley when the guy standing in front of you understands who and what you are, is willing to come at you anyway, and knows as much about kicking ass as you do. Now and then, you’ll surprise a player close to your rank with something he hasn’t seen, but there are only so many ways to efficiently move when push comes to shove, and the guy you’re fighting will have seen as many of them as you have. A technique a thousand years old will sometimes work as well as it did the first time somebody threw it; but, of course, you won’t know until you try.”
She didn’t say anything until after he finished his set of hyperextensions, fifteen reps. When he climbed out of the rack, she said, “For a man who isn’t interested in talking about all this, you sure talk a lot.”
He laughed. Touché. “You asked,” he said.
“Yes. And I am getting it all cammed and recorded.”
“Good.”
“So, how do you get better?”
“You study the best fighting systems from the best teachers—martial arts have been around as long as mankind—and some are simply better than others. That’s not a popular view in polite culture, you might offend somebody by saying so, but it’s the truth. You train. You practice.”
“And that’s it?”
He laughed. “You can learn enough technique to defend yourself against most people in most circumstances in an hour, maybe less.”
She raised an interviewer’s eyebrow.
“It’s true. A handful of moves, drilled until you can do them in your sleep, and they’ll buy you a pass nine times out of ten if somebody takes a swing at you. You have to practice them, and you have to do it against people who won’t just stand there and let you do them; but if you are willing to put the time in, those moves will see you through almost every time.
“Learning how to face a first-rate opponent in a blood-and-bones or to-the-death, that’s a different story. A foot crooked, balance off a hair, a quarter-second hesitation at the wrong moment, these things will cost you when you face an expert. A real expert, not somebody who gets a black pin or teacher certificate in some strip kiosk dojo or kwoon set up for kids outside a casino, and who has never been hit hard enough to know what it feels like. A fighter, not a dancer.
“Once you have the tools, you use them. Try them out against fighters who are good. You have to develop your sensitivity. Lose, you go back to the training hall. Win, you go back to the training hall—you’re never done. But if you start winning, you move up to the next level when you fight again.
“If you are gifted—fast, strong, eyes full of fire—and you study hard, train right, pick your fights carefully, you can get the basics in five or six years, enough to make it into the threes or twos—that’s the two or three hundred rankings.
“The top pros have all been at it for at least ten or fifteen years, some of them longer.”
Like me, he thought. Too long.
“The silat you saw me use against Weems? It’s one of the better arts from Earth—got weapons, boxing, grappling, and it is deceptive, a cheating art. Even if the g
uy against you is very good, you can sometimes still sucker him—sometimes. But it takes a long while to get good at it.”
The gym had an ultrasonic shower. He headed toward it. She followed him.
“So that’s it? You just learn a trick, then practice it until you can do it real well?”
He laughed. “Fem, you just described how life works in general, didn’t you? Do it well enough, there’s no limits to what you can accomplish. But there’s another trick—what you do needs to have a set of consistent principles, things that you do every time you crank it up. There needs to be an underlying method to your madness.”
“Meaning?”
“You can’t just learn if-he-does-that, then I-always-do-this, because you might not be able to get to that weapon in time, or he might not come at you exactly as you’ve been trained. So basing your tricks on a more general principle gives you options. You could always block and counter, for instance. Or you could always take a certain stance, or always step back and counter. I haven’t found those to be especially valid, but that’s me.”
She nodded, as if she understood.
“Might want to shut your recorder off,” he said. “I’m about to get naked.”
“This’ll be running on the adult entcom channels, I am sure,” she said. “Go ahead and strip, it’ll add a little spice. I saw you go into the Healy, you don’t have anything I haven’t seen before.”
He grinned.
As he started to remove his sweaty clothes, she said, “If there aren’t any limits, if you don’t think about losing, and if you train as hard as you do, how is it that you knew Weems was going to beat you?”
He started to pop off a stock response about Weems being the best, but stopped. A brief . . . something flitted through his mind, a startling thought:
She’s right. You knew you couldn’t beat Weems; you lost before you ever moved. You know the old saying: The fight isn’t under your glove, it’s under your hat . . .
