The Musashi Flex

by Steve Perry

  It was vexing. But Primero was coming, and Shaw had improved his own position among the contenders so he was only two fights away from being able to challenge anybody in the Top Ten. Win those, and it didn’t matter about this Mourn asshole. No matter what skill he had, he couldn’t beat Shaw’s speed.

  “Cervo!”

  The big man appeared as if by magic.

  “Yes?”

  “Find out who the woman is who has recorded the fights between Lazlo Mourn and the guys he beat this past week. Pay her whatever she wants for the footage.”

  “Okay.”

  “And where is my next opponent?”

  “He’ll be arriving here tomorrow.”

  “Good.”

  He was rising fast, faster than he’d hoped. By the time Weems got here, he’d be almost ready. Another match, two, and he could challenge Primero. Getting so close he could almost taste it . . .

  When the op bumped into her on the street at the outdoor market and passed her the info ball, Azul felt a sudden premonition grip her in its cold fingers. The woman was good—she was a short, round, young-mother type, complete with two preteen girls in tow. The children looked to be about nine and seven or so. Nobody would look at her and think “Aha, a sub-rosa operative!”

  The day was warm and sunny, the smells of sugarbread frying and harmonic incense crystals sharp, and the walla of the shoppers attending the vendors soft and nonthreatening.

  The exchange was quick, and the four bodyguards shadowing her wouldn’t have caught it if they’d been five meters away, much less half the block to the front and back of her.

  “Oops, sorry,” the op said.

  “My fault entirely,” Azul said. “Have a good day.”

  “You, too.” The woman smiled and said, “Come on, girls, Dads is waiting!”

  With the warm steel marble palmed and hidden, the bright and happy day took a nasty turn, and her sense of danger grew.

  How had they found her?

  Shaw would have filed a flight plan for his yacht, and they had moved into a very large dwelling near the edge of town, a walled estate. Shaw had rented or leased it—for all she knew, it already belonged to him, or he could have bought it on the spot. Billionaires tended to shine like no-vas wherever they went unless they were making great efforts to keep their light hidden. But Shaw was trying to maintain a low profile, because when he went out to fight in the Flex matches, he didn’t want a crowd. So while he wasn’t wearing a skinmask and skulking about after dark, he also wasn’t advertising who he was.

  Of course the Confed could have tracked him. He could have a bug on his ship, a WR transmitter that would allow somebody to home in on it from light-years away. But even so, tracking the ship was not the same as tracking her. If an op was able to casually walk up and deliver a message as the woman had just done, that meant something else. The Confed would have to have a team of agents tailing her—they’d need more than one—and she’d have long since spotted the woman with the little girls, had that been the woman’s primary role. She had been keeping a sharp eye tuned for the shadows Shaw had on her and she hadn’t seen anybody else. Even the best around had to be in line of sight most of the time, and she would have picked them up. She knew the moves, and she’d used them.

  The second, and more likely, possibility was that she was bugged. No need to keep contact if there was some kind of caster in her clothes. She hadn’t been running her confounder, which was the top-of-the-line model with a built-in wide-spectrum radio scanner, and even if she had, there might be new bioelectronic transmitters that a confounder wouldn’t shut down. She’d heard rumors that CI had developed some that used viral-molecular biologicals that generated IR or microwave sigs instead of common radio bands, and produced enough power to run forever from ordinary motions.

  There were ways to check it, and as soon as she could find a place where she’d be unobserved, she would do just that.

  She went into a public fresher. It was one of those cutesy places using one-way plastic. Mirrored from without, but you could see through the walls from inside. She put a coin into the booth’s slot once she was inside and closed the stall’s door.

  She lit the confounder, thumbed the scanner on, and let the computer run the scan. It took ten seconds for the device to latch on to the sig, flashing a red dot in the air a centimeter over the confounder. The field strength meter narrowed it, and drew her a schematic:

  It was in the heel of her left slipper.

  She pulled the slipper off and looked at it closely.

  Nothing to see.

  She remembered when she had bought the shoes. It was during her setup for the artist persona, part of an order that had been shipped to her. Of course.

  Her first reaction was that it was CI who was behind it. It was always wheels within wheels in the biz, nobody trusted anybody, and in their place, maybe she’d do the same thing.

  But maybe it wasn’t CI. It could be PR Randall. He knew who she was, and he had contacted her directly once before. Maybe he was keeping tabs on her.

  Or maybe it was Shaw. He knew who she was, too. Could be he’d borrowed the slipper, had it reheeled with the bug, stuck it back into her closet.

  Azul put the slipper back on. Better the tracer you knew than the one you didn’t; she could always run the confounder or lose the shoe. What the confounder could spot, it could shut down.

  Unless, of course, the caster she’d found was one they expected her to find, and there was another one not so easily detected?

  Wheels and wheels, cogs and gears.

  None of the options were happy news. The immediate purpose of a bug was to be able to find the person upon whom you had implanted the device. The reason why you might want to do that? That was the more important question.

  Who needed to keep such close tabs on her?

  The answer to that question was in the little steel info ball tucked into her pocket. She needed a reader. She had one in her room at the mansion, but she didn’t want to use that instrument.

  Time to find an electronics kiosk, she decided. And maybe buy a nice new gadget for Shaw while she was there.

  30

  “Mourn? You might want to take a look at this.”

  Mourn was about to go outside to train, although he had to confess that his heart wasn’t in it: A thundershower had drifted over them, and a steady rain pounded on the roof, punctuated now and then by flashes of lightning and subsequent thunder. He turned around. Cayne sat at the desk, the three-dimensional holoproj lit over the computer’s console.

  “What’s up?” He ambled that way. The rain was probably warm enough, and one needed to practice in varying conditions, but still, no need to hurry . . .

  “Look at the stats here on one E. M. Shaw.”

  Mourn glanced at them. His eyebrows went up.

  “Yeah, interesting, huh? I did some background on him, and this is the fun part—the guy is a billionaire. He’s the Shaw in ShawPharm Corp.”

  “Jesu.” And while that was interesting, it wasn’t nearly as interesting to Mourn as the man’s record as a player. A couple years down in the high Hundreds, up, down, no real movement, and then all of a sudden, he’s riding a Bender ship straight up at FTL speed, into the Teens—in a matter of a few weeks. Something not right about that.

  “What’s a billionaire doing playing the Flex? And, all of a sudden, doing it so well?”

  Cayne nodded. “That’s the real question, isn’t it? Probably a good idea for you to find out, since, as you can see from his last couple of matches, he’s here in town, and at his current position, of Eleventh, he could drop by.”

  Mourn shrugged. Whatever the guy had, he couldn’t do anything about it. All he could work on was himself. He had ninety-six steps in his art now. He had gone over and over it, and that seemed to be the number he needed. Any conceivable attack and defense sequence he could come up with, some combination of those moves would cover it. Might be somebody who’d leap up in the air and bark like
a dog while slapping himself on the head as an attack, and he didn’t have anything specifically for that, but, then again, he didn’t really think he needed anything for that.

  Ninety-six steps, that seemed to be the sum of it all.

  And while the rain hadn’t slackened any, he wasn’t going to get any more skilled with his new art standing here looking at the holoproj. Time to go work out . . .

  The electronics kiosk had, despite this being a holy world and theoretically not as concerned with such things, the latest technology on sale. As Azul was examining various toys, it was easy to slip the info ball into one and arrange it so nobody could see what it revealed.

  Which was another address, in a neighboring city a few kilometers to the east of Shtotsanto. No names, but Azul was pretty sure who the sender was. It would be interesting to see if PR Randall had come all the way here just to have a chat.

  She removed the recording, felt the marble heat up as it destroyed its contents. She bought the reader, along with a couple of other items. Just in case the reader had some kind of spyware in it, it was going to go away at the earliest opportunity.

  Hmm. Now, she had to lose her shadows, get a vehicle, and go see who had sent the message. None of these ought to be particularly difficult.

  She bought a new pair of slippers at a shop next door and left her old ones in the trash can outside, just to be safe. Probably it was Randall’s bug, but “probably” could get you killed.

  A few minutes in a crowded mall was enough to shake her surveillance team. It wasn’t that hard to lose a tail if they didn’t want you to spot them. It was when they didn’t care if you knew they were there that it was tricky—they could stick closer that way.

  A hack ride to a flitter-rental place, a phony ID and credit tab, and she was in the air and headed for Three Rivers, which, she learned from the rental flitter’s nav-comp, was a small and scenic retreat about half an hour away, on the western edge of an inland sea shaped like a bean that was almost a thousand kilometers long by six hundred wide at the midpoint. This little ocean, the Somber Sea, was home to a number of species of colorful fish, aquatic mammals, and seafaring birds, including the very dangerous diamond-head slasher, which swam in large schools, looked like a cross between a tiger shark and a manta ray, and would eat virtually anything that was unfortunate enough to swim into its path. Boaters were warned not to swim in waters where the churning of diamond-heads could be seen during feeding frenzies.

  What kind of idiot would swim where predators were in a feeding frenzy? The nav-comp was silent on that point, but Azul figured it was another kind of person that the gene pool was probably better off without. Swim, fool, and get what you deserve.

  Three Rivers, she also found out, had been named not for the local geology, but instead for branches of religion that had come to exist together in harmony there. Population was about twenty-five thousand, and the average income was fairly high, so it was a place where people with money hung out. There were four four-star restaurants, a four-star hotel, and assorted recreational activities . . .

  The flitter’s computer directed her to a rustic but large building a little ways out of the town. There was a recent-model luxury sport flitter parked near the house, with the top down. Azul spiraled her ride in and landed next to the sportster.

  She approached the house, and decided that, once upon a time, it had been a hunting or fishing lodge. Might still be.

  She climbed a short flight of steps to a broad, wooden porch. The place had large windows, but they were opaqued a dark and smoky gray.

  The front door opened at her approach, rattling a little in its track as it slid back.

  She walked inside, her hand in her jacket pocket, the little spring gun assembled from innocuous parts gripped and ready to fire. She didn’t expect she would need it, but it was better to have it than not.

  There was a large room, dressed with distressed and probably natural leather couches and chairs, a giant fireplace against one wall. Heads of various game animals adorned the walls, and stuffed and mounted fishes hung here and there.

  A hunting and fishing lodge. How baroque.

  She noted a hall to her left, turned and headed down it. At the end of the hall was an open door.

  The room was more of the same, smaller, with a large desk made of some striking and attractive striated wood, edges all gently rounded, gleaming dully under what looked to be a thick coat of wax. Another fireplace was inset into the wall to her right, a set of heavy-looking steel fire-tending tools racked upon a stone apron in front of the grate: a shovel, brush, tongs, and a poker.

  Burning wood for heat was apparently a serious business around these parts.

  Behind the desk, peeling the last bits of a skinmask from his face, sat Planetary Representative Newman Randall. No real surprise there.

  “Ah. My spy. You’ve seen to your appearance, quite lovely, you are. Come in, sit.” He waved at an overstuffed leather chair in front of the desk.

  Azul sat, removing her hand from her pocket and smiling at the PR. The smile stopped before it got to her eyes.

  Randall finished picking the synthflesh from the tip of his nose and dropped it upon the desktop. “Nasty stuff,” he said. “Never comes off quite as easily as they say. I expect you’ve worn these a time or two.”

  “A time or two, yes.”

  “Still, a mask is much less cumbersome than having to drag one’s bodyguards around, and much less likely to draw attention, which the Confed frowns upon if you visit the Holy World. Incognito is the order of the day.”

  Azul said nothing, waiting. It wasn’t long in coming.

  “So, tell me about the Reflex.”

  No point in taking the long and slow route, since he already had flown most of it. She said, “While he is on the drug, Shaw is the fastest human you’ve ever seen. He can run circles around a champion sprinter, can pound the best fighters into the ground in the blink of an eye. It’s incredible to watch. I’ve seen it half a dozen times.”

  “Side effects?”

  “Makes him tired and dehydrates him. Nothing else I can tell to look at. Both are easily fixed. A good night’s sleep, electrolyte fluids, he shows no other signs of stress or wear.”

  “Excellent. Duration?”

  “Varies a little. Hour, hour and a half. I don’t know if that’s dosage related or not—I’m not sure how he takes it.”

  Randall nodded. “I’m sure our scientists can tweak that, come up with longer half-life. Easier to add or subtract once you have the basic model.”

  She shrugged. Chemistry was not her area of expertise.

  “Well, this is what I needed to know. He’s sitting on it, dragging his feet, but that’s about to change.” He reached for a comset lying on the desk.

  “What are you going to do?”

  He looked at her as if she were a puppy that had just peed on an expensive rug. “Do? I’m going to have CI move in and take it over, of course. Production, supplies, whatever he has on it. It’s too valuable to risk losing. What do you care?”

  “I don’t care about CI. But if you eminent-domain the drug, that will get out. Somebody always talks.”

  “So . . . ?”

  “The showrunners for the Musashi Flex always have an ear to the ground for this kind of chem. They’ll make it illegal there.”

  “And . . . ?”

  “Shaw won’t be able to use it anymore.”

  “And . . . ?”

  “That will . . . disappoint him.”

  Randall laughed. “Life is full of disappointments, fem. Do you think I am going to risk losing a major potential weapon in the Confed’s arsenal because it might disappoint M. Shaw? Hurt his feelings? He’s a big boy. He’ll get over it.”

  She shook her head. “I’ve gotten to know him. Winning the Flex is a big thing for him. A major focus.”

  “Well, that’s tough, isn’t it? He’ll have to come up with some other game to play. He can afford to buy himself a new toy. Whatever
he wants.” He smiled at her and picked up the com.

  She pulled the spring pistol from her pocket smoothly, pointed it, and squeezed the firing stud. The titanium-boron dart, designed to pop out angled, sharp-edged, and flexible whirling ribs that would increase its diameter by a factor of six on impact, hit him in the left eye before he could blink, then screwed a channel bigger around than her thumb through his brain until it was stopped by the back of his skull. A great close-range weapon, if you could place the dart properly.

  PR Randall was pretty much brain-dead before he had time to be surprised.

  But Azul had plenty of time for that emotion. She hadn’t known she was going to pull the pistol until she fired it.

  Oh, shit, girl! What did you just do?

  31

  The rain was pretty warm, but even so, Mourn was drenched, and his clothes were binding as he moved. He had just decided he was going to shuck them and finish his workout naked when he looked up and saw Cayne appear in the doorway. She walked out into the yard, and the rain started to soak into her hair and clothes. She looked as if she’d just seen a ghost.

  “Cayne?”

  She walked to within a meter. She was holding a com. She handed it to him without a word.

  He felt his breath catch as he took the com from her. He didn’t need to ask. He held it to his ear.

  “Hello, Weems,” he said.

  32

  Done was done, there was no way to take it back, and now the problem was how to slow the inevitable pursuit. And it would come, the only question was, when?

  Even if Randall had told no one he was coming to meet her—which she didn’t believe—any CI op-supervisor worth his boots would make the connection soon enough. Azul was on Koji, Randall had come to Koji. She was working for him. All this was a matter of Confed record. He had come here incognito, and why else if not to take an ears-only report from his spy?