The Musashi Flex
Page 27
If they found his body in this lodge with a spring dart in his brain, at the very least they would want to have a long chat with operative Luna Azul. Dead PRs roiled a lot of waters that CI wouldn’t want to see disturbed. They’d need to catch the killer, fast, and even if she hadn’t done it, she’d still be a good goat for it. That was moot—they’d strain her brains, and when they got done, what was left probably wouldn’t object to whichever way they wanted to execute her. Game, set, match. Better luck next incarnation, hey?
If, on the other hand, PR Randall wasn’t found dead—if he wasn’t found at all?—then the investigation would start later and proceed slower. Rich men had been known to take off suddenly for all kinds of reasons: chem, fems, or midlife crises; worry over being caught for some criminal act, bad marriages, or just an urge to chuck it all and try a simpler life—all kinds of reasons caused otherwise upstanding people to vanish. First, they had to notice he was missing; then they had to try and trace his movements, and in both cases, they had to proceed with caution, because nobody would want to cause a scandal that might reflect badly on a rich and powerful man’s reputation. What if he wasn’t in any danger, but had sneaked off to experiment with illegal drugs or forbidden sex? Would you want to be the cool who brought that information to light about a man who could buy your whole planet and blow it into atomic dust if he wanted?
Dead was bad, but gone was less so.
There were spare bedsheets in the linen closet next to the fresher, and Azul used one of them to wrap up Randall’s corpse. It would be nice if it were dark, but waiting a couple hours for night entailed risks she didn’t want to take—he might have another appointment, or somebody could drop by unannounced.
She looked outside, didn’t see anybody. She hoisted the dead man over her shoulder and carried him to her flitter, put him into the passenger seat, folded over so he wasn’t visible.
She hadn’t touched much in the lodge. She went back in and wiped everything she had laid hands on, using a spare towel soaked with cleaning fluid, so there’d be no prints or DNA. The eye shot hadn’t produced much blood, and all of that had been soaked up by Randall’s clothes.
A final check, and she took the towel, cleaning fluid bottle, and Randall’s com unit to the flitter. She got in, cranked the fans, and lifted. Somebody might see her vehicle, but she couldn’t help that. Even if they could trace it, the ID she’d used to rent it was now as dead as Randall.
She headed out into the Somber Sea, angling away from touristy-looking beaches and pleasure sailboats that dotted the calm water near the shore.
It took forty minutes to find what she was looking for—a frothy patch of water ninety kilometers out. She dropped lower, and saw half a large fish burst from the sea and fly through the air a meter or so above the water. A large, toothy head emerged to snatch the falling remainder before it touched the water again.
That would be a diamond-head slasher, she reckoned, along with its brothers and sisters, feeding on a school of unfortunate fish.
She circled the flitter around, opened the passenger door, and shoved the late M. Newman Randall, Planetary Representative for the Confederation, out. The body fell fifty meters and hit flat in the middle of the frothing water, creating a large splash.
More churning quickly surrounded the impact spot.
Gather round, boys; dinner is served . . .
Azul pulled the flitter up to cruising-lane altitude and set the autopilot to take her back to Shtotsanto. Unlikely that enough of Randall would ever be found to identify him, but even so, all she had done was delay what was coming. A week, a month, CI was not always bright, nor fast, but as an organization, it did usually grind fine. Once you were caught in between the millstones, there was little chance you would escape intact. You had to get gone before they caught you.
Her years in the biz had given her some not-inconsiderable skills and contacts. She had identities she hadn’t used yet, some completely unknown to the Confed. She had a high hole card, too, an ex-CI programmer who’d sold her an ID worm she’d kept updated, along with a limited, but theoretically adequate, access to the Confed’s protected ID systems. If the worm worked, it would eat through her own files, leaving them intact on inspection, but subtly altering her DNA and retinal patterns in the records. If it worked, what would ID Luna Azul and all of her official incarnations would shift. As soon as she got to a galactic-linked system, she would loose the worm. By the time anybody got around to looking for her, it would be a done deal. She wouldn’t be setting off any alarms when she walked through a reader looking for her.
She knew how to run and how to disappear. With enough of a head start, she had a chance to survive.
Why had she done it? Thrown her career, and maybe her life, away? She knew the answer, even if she didn’t want to admit it: She’d gone native. Allowed herself to get involved with a civilian in the worst way. She’d put his welfare above her own. Stupid.
Now, she would have to run, and once the Confed had you on its list, you didn’t get to stop running until you died or they found you.
Well. That’s how it goes, Azul. You screw up, and you pay the price. Like the late Randall said: Tough.
“Let me get this straight,” Shaw said. “You’re a Confed spy, but you just killed the man who sicced you on me?”
They were in the largest room of the estate, just the two of them, though Cervo was outside the nearest door. Shaw sat on a couch; she stood in front of him two meters away, her hands held behind her back, almost as if she were standing in a military parade-rest pose.
Azul smiled. “Afraid so. You knew about the spy part, though, didn’t you.” It was not a question.
“If you knew that I knew, why are you still here? I could have deleted you for that.”
“In your place, I probably would have done that as soon as I found out. Why didn’t you?”
“My question first: Why did you kill Randall?”
She nodded to herself, a small gesture, almost invisible. She looked at him, took a deep breath, and relaxed a little as she let it escape. “You have no reason to believe me—I wouldn’t, in your slippers, not after all I’ve done—but the truth? He was going to screw up your chance at winning the Flex.”
Shaw didn’t speak for a few seconds as he absorbed that. “And you killed a Planetary Representative for that?”
“I would say it seemed like a good idea at the time, but that wouldn’t be true. Soon as my brain kicked in, I thought it was a crappy idea. Gets worse every time I think about it again.”
“But you did it anyway.”
“Yeah.”
He wanted to believe her. Oh, he really wanted to believe her. And, on the face of it, if she had killed Randall, he couldn’t come up with any other reason that she’d do that. Then again, everything she had told him before this moment had been pretty much a flat-out lie. So buying this would be stupid and risky and really stupid. Except—
—except that he could feel, at some deep and totally illogical level, that she really did care about him. He didn’t believe in his heart of hearts that it had all been a lie. Some part of it had been real. He had gotten to her.
Yeah. And she had gotten to him, too.
The cautious part of him screamed a warning. But that magical piece that sometimes gave him the future and the truth, that part of him that just knew things, was nodding. Of course. The woman threw away her life just to keep Randall from fucking up his chances to win the Flex.
He believed her.
What the fuck must that mean? He stared at her.
“Why didn’t you kill me, Ellis? I saw the holograph of when I arrived at the port back on your homeworld. You knew I was a spy.”
“I knew, yes. Why didn’t you run when you realized that?”
“No, it’s your turn. I answered your question. Answer mine.”
And he knew why—he didn’t want her dead. He wanted her to live, and he wanted her around. She had laid her cards on the table, what did he ha
ve to lose?
“I couldn’t do it,” he said.
“Why not? You’ve done it before.”
“Not to you,” he said, his voice almost a whisper. He came to his feet. “I could never do that to you.”
She blinked, stunned, he could see that. And her feeling was no more surprised than his at having said it. It was true.
“I need you,” he said.
He opened his arms. She came into his embrace.
Son of a bitch!
33
“You coming?” Mourn said.
Cayne shook her head. “No.”
“No?” That caught him flat-footed. “This could be the best footage you’ve gotten, Cayne. Primero against Tercero—it would make your documentary!”
She looked up at him. “I don’t want to watch it. If you lose—if you die—I couldn’t use that footage. I wouldn’t want to have it. I wouldn’t want to have seen it happen.”
“That’s a great confidence builder, fem.”
“You can joke about it, you want, but I’m not laughing.”
He saw the tears welling. They bothered him, more than he wanted to acknowledge.
“I have to do this.”
“I know you do. This is who you are. You’re the snake I came across in the snow. Go, do it. I’ll be here. If you don’t come back, I will miss you, Mourn.”
“I’ll come back.”
The tears flowed. “You promise?”
“Yes. Of course.”
They hugged, and she clung to him with such a fierce clutch that for a moment, he considered not going. Packing up and taking off. If he really quit the Flex? Weems probably wouldn’t be able to track him. Go someplace far away, new name, new face, leave it all behind . . .
And never know if what he’d uncovered could have withstood the ultimate test . . . ?
That was not who he was. Not the kind of person who would be able do that and then look himself in the mirror of a woman’s eyes and see what he wanted to see. Win or lose, he couldn’t quit until he had tested himself.
A man had to do what a man had to do. Cliché it might be, but that’s how it was.
The place Weems had picked was in the back of a public school, closed for the season, and, Mourn knew, chosen because it was the kind of place he and Weems had encountered each other when last they’d met.
There was a grassy sports field, grown or mowed short, a hundred meters behind the buildings. The rain hadn’t returned, and the sun shone through a partly cloudy sky. Warm, pleasant, nobody else around. As days to die went, it wasn’t bad.
“Weems,” Mourn said.
“You’ve come up in the galaxy, Mourn. Third? I don’t see how that’s possible. Your opponents all have sudden heart attacks?”
Mourn took a deep breath, held it for five seconds, then let it out. What he had developed and taught himself had worked against other men who had been better than he was. In this, he had the advantage—his opponent had never seen what he could now do, and he had seen Weems move. Still, this was Primero. Numero Uno. And a man who had beaten him bloody and broken the last time they’d seen each other. They both knew that.
“Gone mute?” Weems circled to his left, five meters away.
Mourn tracked him, stood his ground. “Nope. Nothing I can say to make you turn around and leave, is there?”
Weems laughed. “Oh, I can’t imagine anything that would do that. I owe you big. After I’m done, I’m going to hunt down that slit of yours and pay her back for blasting me with that wand, too. I’ll make it last a long time before I get done with her.”
Mourn smiled. “You trying scare me unconscious with trash talk?”
Weems twirled his cane. “Tools or bare, sucker?”
Mourn shrugged. “You pick. You’re not planning on me surviving it either way, are you?”
“I take it back, Mourn, you’re not entirely stupid after all. But you know how I can wave my magic wand.” He jiggled the cane.
“I know. It doesn’t matter.”
A quick frown flashed, but Weems brought the smile back up to hide it. “Really? You must have a new trick.”
“You figure? Don’t really believe that my opponents all had heart attacks?”
Weems’s face went hard. “I’ll use my stick.” He spun the cane in one hand, rolling it around his fingers like a magician doing a coin trick.
Mourn pulled the pair of kerambits from their curlnose leather sheath. He transferred one of them into his left hand.
Primero was too canny to be tricked by what had worked on Harnett.
Weems laughed again, louder this time. “That what you brought? Those little claws?”
Mourn gave him his best smile. “All I need.”
Again, the frown flitted by, staying longer this time.
Mourn should be scared, halfway to losing already, that’s what Weems would be thinking. But he didn’t look scared, and he wasn’t acting scared. Why not?
“Whistling past the graveyard, Mourn?”
“Maybe.”
Dueling had a psychological edge that could cut both ways. Weems was Primero, the best in the game, that was a major weapon to his arsenal. Anybody who came to dance with him knew this, and certainly he knew it—when you stood at the top rung, you didn’t lack confidence.
But, here Mourn was, having come from Tenth to Third in a very short time. You could ascend the list by leaps and bounds if you were at Two Hundred or even One Hundred, but once you got into the top dozen or so, things moved slower. Fighters were too evenly balanced in their skills. More than a few times, matches had ended ai-uchi—mutual slaying—because of that. Moving up as fast as Mourn had? Wading through people who’d have stomped him a few months ago with relative ease?
Koji had become very interesting to Flex players and fans. Mourn would be very high on the list of men to watch. Especially since he had been in the game so long. It wasn’t done—he was a known quantity, not some hot-hand who had blown in out of nowhere and started kicking ass. Mourn had been around, and he was what he was, so his jumping ranks like he had meant something had changed, and you had to take that into account. Failure to do so could be fatal.
And even taking that into account didn’t give you everything. Mourn was what he was—but that wasn’t what he had been the last time Weems had seen him.
That was his edge. The pattern he had discovered, all ninety-six steps’ worth. He had been practicing them three hours a day. He’d have to get around to naming the new art—assuming he survived this encounter. The steps were based on everything he had learned, with some things he had only discovered as he had started to put them together. The art was the sum of it all, old and new, and if he did it right, he could beat Weems.
Of course, if he screwed it up, he was a dead man.
He shrugged mentally. Well. Sooner or later, that was how it went for everybody. It would be a shame not to be able to pass the new stuff along—the positional aspects of it were not like anything he’d ever seen. But it wasn’t entirely up to him.
Weems brought the cane around and laid his other palm on it, holding it with both hands, pointed at Mourn’s right eye, like a katana fighter. He waggled it a bit, to loosen his hands and shoulders.
Weems had some fancy one-handed moves with the carbon-fiber stick. Mourn had seen vids of the champion doing them in combat demos, but that wasn’t likely to happen here. Weems was confident, but he was also cautious. Mourn had come up too fast for it to be luck. He had beaten men who had given Weems trouble. He had something new. At their level, the first man to make a mistake would pay dearly for it. They both knew that.
Weems edged toward him, centimetering forward, right foot leading, knees bent, cane still aimed at Mourn’s face.
Mourn turned a hair, angling himself. Weems could cover a lot of arc with his stick. He could stab or cut with it, striking from the head to the ankle. His first move, he’d expect Mourn to dodge or block. He’d give up the second move, too. But the third move—
Mourn stepped in, using the sixth step of his new dance—
Weems shifted the downward strike, twisting the cane in an arc to his right and down, aiming to shatter Mourn’s left knee—
Mourn kept going in, but angled away to Weems’s left, the tenth step—
Weems reversed the cane, up, over, and around, to catch Mourn on the opposite side, aiming for the temple—
Mourn reversed and cheated the tenth step to the left, skating as much as stepping, raising his left blade to hook the incoming cane as he moved to meet it, and dropping his right blade for a low line strike at Weems’s ribs—
The cane hit the little knife, and the shock vibrated Mourn to his teeth, but the block held. The slash with the second knife went in, caught a rib, dug a furrow through it, the muscle between it and the next rib, and scored that rib before Mourn retracted it.
He took two steps to the right as Weems shifted the cane and managed to catch him across the thigh with the end. It hurt, but did no damage.
Weems glanced down, saw his wound. It was bleeding but Mourn knew it hadn’t done any real damage. Not physically.
But: Nobody had gotten past that cane to lay a blade on Weems in a couple of years. That had to be a shock.
“I hurt myself worse with beard depil,” Weems said. He circled to his left.
Mourn turned, but didn’t back up. “You ought to buy a better brand. Or maybe grow a beard.”
“I’m going to pound you like a demon drummer on crank, sucker.”
“Anytime you’re ready, Primero.”
Weems gathered himself to attack. Mourn watched the man’s nostrils. When they widened a hair, as he inhaled, Mourn leaped, timing his move to the other man’s breath. It was an old trick, though he had used it recently, and probably nobody had tried it on Weems in a long time.
Weems brought the stick around, but Mourn had timed his move so that he caught it on his left side. It rocked him, it hurt, probably broke a rib, but that didn’t matter, because he snapped his raised left arm down and trapped the cane. Just for a second, but that was all he needed. Weems twisted and turned for the disengage, to free the stick, using both hands. Mourn followed the tug in, dropped to his knee, cut with his right kerambit, and sliced a deep gash across Weems’s left thigh. He continued the motion, diving, doing a shoulder roll, and coming up with a half turn, so that he faced Weems—