The Musashi Flex

by Steve Perry

  Azul walked to the full-length holomirror and stripped. She turned and examined herself critically. She was tight, lean, and fit—she worked hard enough at it so she should be. Her hair, dyed a pale blond for her prior assignment, was long and could use a trim. She would have the dye removed, allowing her normal dark brunette and slightly curly locks to return to a more natural state. She could change her eye color with droptacs, but the blue-gray of her own eyes went well enough with the dark hair. Nothing else needed any particular attention. She would start to think of herself as beautiful, and with a little care in her makeup and dress, would become that. M. Shaw might be rich, good-looking, and powerful, but he was a heterosexual male. Whatever he might be, he was about to become Luna Azul’s prey . . .

  Again, they were on a starliner, and this time, the only accommodations available on short notice were first class. So they had a monster of a suite, including two bedrooms. It cost what Sola made in a good year. When she sold her documentary, she could get used to traveling this way. Intended to do so . . .

  Leaving in a hurry was a good idea, given that Mourn had killed people who were not Flexers back there. Yes, it was legally self-defense, but as he had pointed out, spending time in the local jail while it all got sorted out wasn’t real appealing.

  She had been recording again, getting his thoughts on that fatal encounter, realizing how little she really knew about such things. She had thought she’d known more than she did, the reporter’s conceit.

  She had seen, but until that encounter with Weems, she had never participated. Those four would-be assassins? That was scarier still.

  And now it was Mourn, asking her: Had she ever been in a fight before? Following up on his idea of teaching her.

  She shook her head, remembering the two players she had recorded on Earth, just before she had seen Mourn for the first time. How she had felt when they had started talking about using her for sex, that icy fear that had frosted her to her bones.

  She said, “I’ve watched a lot of fights, but I don’t know how to do it myself.”

  “You have the hand wand,” he said. “Use it much?”

  “Just that once, on Weems.”

  He nodded. “It’s not as easy as they make it look in the entcoms, is it? Several things get balled up together—when you perceive real danger to yourself, you get that whole spectrum of fight-or-flight reactions, like we were talking about earlier. It’s hardwired stuff, goes back before the first men. You can dull it with drugs, beta-blockers and such, but you can’t get rid of it. So the first thing is, you have to learn how to deal with what the syndrome brings to the table and how to use it to help you. You need to know.”

  “All right.”

  The suite had a central room that would have seemed big in a planet-based house. Mourn started moving the furniture—not much, a double seat, small table, a chair, all of which were crowed to the floor, in case of a gravity failure—to give them more space.

  Once he’d cleared the area, he said, “Okay, here’s the deal. You have your wand where?”

  “Back pocket.”

  “You practice drawing it in a hurry?”

  She shook her head. “Not really.”

  He nodded, serious. “That’s the first thing you have to change. If you are going to carry a weapon and depend on it, you have to be able to get to it in time to do you any good. Inside six or seven meters, if you wait until you see me move, I can get to you and break your neck before you can pull that wand, even if you have it in a belt sheath. If you have to dig around in your pocket looking for it, I can cover more ground than that.” He backed away until he was across the room from her, six or eight meters away. “From this far away, if I go for you, you’ll never get your weapon out in time to stop me.”

  “You’re kidding,” she said.

  “A demonstration,” he said.

  Sola frowned. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

  “Two things. First, a hand wand on stun isn’t going to permanently hurt me. Second, you won’t get off a pulse anyhow.”

  He seemed so confident. Well, of course, he would be. He was among the top fighters in the known galaxy. Lack of confidence wasn’t going to be a problem for him. But he was all the way across the room. She could get her wand out, surely? She had managed to shoot the number one ranked Flex player in the galaxy, hadn’t she?

  “All right—” she began.

  He leaped, and she froze. Frantically, she jammed her hand into her pocket, touched the wand—

  —and he tapped her lightly on the body, just under her sternum.

  Her heart was pounding, her breath held, and panic enveloped her like a heavy coat of ice.

  He took two steps back. She started to breathe again, but quickly and without any depth.

  He said, “If I’d had a knife in my hand, you’d be bleeding from a heart wound. See how you feel? Your heart is racing, your breathing is shallow, and you feel as if you need to find a fresher to pee, right? And when you saw me move, you couldn’t see anything else but me, and even though you don’t remember it, you couldn’t hear anything else. I was the threat, and everything you had was focused on me.”

  Dumbly, she nodded, not trusting herself to speak.

  “My move was unexpected, and you froze for just an instant, too. That’s a built-in protective behavior. Don’t move, maybe the predator won’t see you—most of them see movement better than if you are real still. Not everybody does that, but if you do, that’s part of your wiring.”

  Her mouth was dry, as if she had tried to swallow a bowlful of hot sand. She could only nod again. How could he know exactly how she felt?

  “That’s the pattern. You can’t control it once it kicks it, it comes out of the hindbrain and was there before people learned how to use tools, or weapons, or language.”

  “Then I’m going to die if I’m ever really threatened,” she said, finally able to manage speech.

  “Not if you work on it.”

  “But you said it can’t be controlled.”

  “No, I said you can’t control it once it kicks in. What you can do is keep it from kicking in. Suppose I back off, and run in that direction, away from you toward the picture wall? Watch—”

  He did a short and fast sprint toward the wall. Stopped when he got there. He turned toward her. “Not the same as when I charged you, is it?”

  “Not the same.”

  “Because you didn’t perceive a danger. I wasn’t a threat. Take out your wand.”

  She did so.

  “Set it to the minimum charge. Got it? Okay, now shoot me. Go ahead.”

  Still feeling the echo of her fear and on some level pissed at him for making her feel that way, she pointed the tube at him and pressed the recessed firing stud.

  Mourn collapsed unconscious on the floor. For some reason, this surprised her.

  “Jesu, Mourn!”

  She ran to him.

  She was wiping his face with a wet cloth ten minutes later when he woke up. He looked at her, managed a weak smile.

  “Are you okay? I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry. What if I were a rapist and serial killer? Got a headache, but I’m fine.” He sat up, and came to his feet. “So, now you know your wand works. You just knocked one of the Flex’s toughest players on his ass with it set on minimum. Second one—you did Weems, too. If you ratchet it up to max, or even midrange, there’s nobody human it won’t drop.”

  She nodded.

  “So, if I back off across the room again and you already have the wand in your hand and ready to shoot, you know you can stop me.”

  “Yes.”

  “Because you just saw it work.”

  “Right.”

  “So, no reason to be afraid. No threat.”

  “In theory.”

  He smiled. “A few practice runs, the theory will be real enough, though I’m not inclined to be the dummy anymore today. Maybe we’ll pick up a spatter-spray practice wand later.”

  �
�But I’d still never get the wand out in time.”

  “Right. And that’s the other part. The fastest draw is to have the weapon in your hand when trouble arises. As soon as you think you might be at risk, you get the wand ready to work. There’s not a man alive who can cover seven meters against a drawn and aimed weapon before you can trigger it. One step, zap, end of attack.”

  She took a deep breath, less ragged now, and let it out. “You are saying that I can short-circuit the hard wiring.”

  “Yes. If you pay attention, if you see any possible threat, if you are prepared to deal with it, should it come to pass, you can stay a step ahead of the lizard-brain reflexes. Heat works, but cool is better.”

  “And what if I don’t have a hand wand? Or the charge is depleted?”

  He smiled again. “Ah, well, that’s a whole other bag of tricks. If you don’t have a wand, or a stick, or a knife, you have to use the tools you do have. I’ll show you some of those ways—but after I use a derm for this headache . . .”

  Sola smiled. She was sorry he had a headache, but she felt as if she had learned something important, and that felt pretty good.

  Mourn had taught slower students than Sola, men and women who had gone on to become pretty good fighters. But his method was usually similar. There were so many misconceptions a new student had, more when they had some experience, because they had learned the wrong way and had to go back and undo that before they could begin to go forward.

  Teaching was good. You had to go back over basics, things you hadn’t thought about in a long time, you’d been doing them so long, and when you did that, sometimes a new ray of sunlight would lance down and illuminate something you hadn’t seen in quite that light before.

  He’d been having some odd thoughts lately, and if not exactly new, they were at least somewhat tangential to his norm.

  Some of what kept coming up had to do with a shift in perspective. Some of it had to do with ideas that seemed, on the face of them, counterintuitive.

  Most martial arts Mourn had learned taught you to stay away from an incoming knife. A razor-sharp blade was dangerous, even in the hands of the untrained, and a mistake cost blood. Running away fast was the smartest response. But if you couldn’t get outside of effective range fast enough, then what?

  Some of the arts he’d played with, like silat, taught that going in against a knife was sometimes the safest move you had. Like the two-bullet experiment or the walk versus run thing, at first glance, it seemed obvious that backing away was the smart money bet, and that going in was suicide. But things were not always as they first appeared.

  Take a slugthrower, put it into a rest so it can’t move, and aim it dead level. Hold up another bullet so that it is the same height as the muzzle. Fire the gun and drop the bullet at the same instant.

  Which round hits the ground first?

  When Mourn had heard this the first time, he’d thought the answer easy: the bullet you dropped.

  He was wrong: They both hit the ground at the same time.

  Gravity is a constant in the scenario, it’s working on the chambered round even as it sits there, and since the fired bullet and the dropped one start at the same level and are the same size and weight, they hit the dirt together. Even though the fired one will travel farther, it is falling exactly as fast as the other one, unless it reaches escape velocity, which bullets from ordinary weapons don’t do on an Earth-sized world.

  Mourn was no physicist, but he’d had this explained to him by somebody who was, and he believed it.

  The other one he liked was the walk versus run. Run a couple klicks. Then walk the same distance slowly. Which one burns more calories?

  They both burn the same amount. Work is force through a distance. If you burn ten calories a minute running and it takes you six minutes to run the two klicks, it’s sixty calories. If you burn a mere three calories a minute walking, but it takes you twenty minutes, it’s still sixty calories. Running might benefit your heart and lungs more, because of the aerobic effect, if you are going several kilometers, long enough for it to kick in; but it won’t burn any more fat than walking the same distance.

  At their hearts, martial arts were all about motion. In the simplest instance, if somebody came at you with mayhem in mind and you weren’t where they expected to connect with you when they got there—you moved out, in, sideways, wherever—then you had the advantage. If you devised a system of motions that would allow you always to be somewhere else when an attacker charged, and you were able to capitalize on your position before he or she could recover, you’d win the exchange. One battle did not a war necessarily make, and certainly any motion would have to account for all kinds of variables—distance, size, local gravity, terrain, and so forth—but if you could get to the most efficient way of moving at a particular instant, you’d have something there . . .

  A lot of fighters Mourn had met over the years had come up with combinations of arts, or created their own, using others for a base. Sometimes these were better, sometimes not. The temptation was to take an old established fighting system and throw out everything that you saw as useless, keeping only the best moves. Some systems, this was a mistake—what you thought was a worthless move might have real value down the line when you were able to see the system as a whole. Monostylists got to the top just as often as eclectics; it depended on the style and the player.

  Mourn had a sudden memory. He laughed.

  Sola looked at him. “Do I look that funny?”

  He shook his head. “No, I was thinking of something else. I used to be in a fighting class, and every time the teacher would show us a move, we had a guy who would say, ‘But Instru’isto, where is the power in that?’”

  “And this is funny because . . . ?”

  “All moves don’t rely on power to be effective. Hit a hundred-kilo bodybuilder in the chest with your fist, you’ll probably break your hand. Poke him in the eye with your finger, you get a much better result. Precision in this instance is better than power.”

  “But how easy is it to do that? Poke a hundred-kilo bodybuilder in the eye?”

  “That’s the trick, all right. There are a lot of guys out there who think they can do it, but the map is not the territory.”

  He looked at her. “Bend your knees and drop your weight a little more,” he said. “You want your center of gravity lower than your opponent’s if he’s coming in fast . . .”

  Mourn watched her and considered the idea of counter-intuitiveness. There was definitely something there he needed to explore.

  16

  “Was it a fair match?”

  Here was the question for which Shaw had been preparing, and when it came, he was ready—it merely had to be framed in his own mind correctly: If by fair fight, you mean, did I break any of the established rules for the Flex? Was it a fair match by those regulations?

  With that thought held firmly, he said, “Yes.”

  The two showrunners, a man and a woman, never took their gazes from Shaw; each of them had one hand out of sight, in a pocket, under a jacket, and Shaw knew that in those hidden hands were gripped weapons. Even if they were only stunners, he knew he would wake up dead if they used them.

  People who lied and knew they lied gave themselves away—there were microexpressions that flitted across one’s features, and vox patterns that changed to reveal a specific kind of stress. Beating the sensors at the hands of an expert was close to impossible.

  If the tech told the runners that Shaw was lying, and even if he’d had Reflex coursing in his system—which he didn’t—it would be iffy that he could have done much before they shot. And even if he avoided being cooked, and managed to get away, he’d still be a dead man—it would only be a matter of when another Flex showrunner could get a sight on him. Aside from which, the point was to stay in the game, not be on the run.

  The tech running the stress scanner and face reader said, “Clean.”

  Shaw felt himself relax.

  “Congrat
ulations, M. Shaw. You are now ranked”—the tech looked at the little instrument he held, waved his thumb over a sensor and watched the holoprojic image—“One Hundred and Six. You may challenge any player ranked Ninety-Six or higher, and the list, updated frequently, can be found at the infostat log available on every planet and all major wheelworlds, available to your coded query.”

  “Thank you,” Shaw said.

  “Our job,” the tech said. So far, neither of the showrunners had spoken a word.

  Shaw nodded at them as he stood and headed for the door. This was a low-rent office in a seedy area of town, and likely as not after a day or two, would be abandoned. Showrunners tried to stay a step head of the local LEOs—better that the cools didn’t gather up any more information than they already had. If Shaw stuck around on this world and waited for another challenge, he probably wouldn’t be coming here for the tag transfer, and probably wouldn’t see this trio again in any event. Showrunners and techs moved around, so as not to present targets for the local cools themselves.

  Somebody could challenge Shaw, now that he was near the Top Hundred. He had hoped to climb a bit higher, and had merely taken over the slot of the man he’d beaten, but he wasn’t going to wait for challenges. He had agents out looking for the ten ranks above him, and the ten above them, and the next ten, all the way to the top. Any or all of those might change, but with any luck, he could move to within challenge range of the Top Ten fighters with another eight or ten fights, depending on the arcane scoring system. His next victory would almost certainly put him into the Hundred, and after that, it was just a matter of going for the highest rank allowed, assuming he could find them. He might have to zigzag a little, but with the kind of money he had at his call, if a player was to be found, Shaw’s agents would find him.

  Servo stood waiting by the flitter, and Shaw ambled that way, feeling a mix of emotions. One the one hand, he had gotten into the system and past the showrunners, which were good things. On the other hand, the relative ease with which he had done so made the feats somehow not as . . . joyous as he had hoped. Of course, Marlowe hadn’t even been among the Hundred, and Shaw knew that the lower the number, the more adept the player. He had trained with men who’d been in the Teens—and had been soundly beaten by them—and with his new edge, he was certain he could beat any of those players now. He did have some skill; without that, he’d hardly be able to compete, no matter how fast he was; still, it wasn’t just that he wanted to be Primero, he wanted it to be an accomplishment of which he could be justly proud. He wanted to be the best, but he wanted it to mean something. He wanted to have to work a little . . .