by Steve Perry
Sleel had borrowed Truck's confounder, so that a couple of the cameras and recorders would be fuzzed until after his business was accomplished. Nothing made by any man was so foolproof that some other man couldn't figure out a way around it.
Sleel himself was big on honor, but he'd been around long enough to know that not everybody else was, and only a stupid man would trust somebody who wanted to kill him. The mue might or might not think he could take Sleel, but if he had the slightest doubt and even a rudimentary brain, he would cover his bets.Just as Sleel was about to do by showing up early.
When he arrived, he activated the confounder. He only had a minute or two at most before somebody would come to check the cameras. If the eyes cleared before the guard could stir him- or herself enough to go see what the problem was, then they usually wouldn't bother. Things screwed up sometimes and only some kind of officious fool went running every time some monitor hiccupped. It was human nature to avoid unnecessary work.
In the exercise room, Sleel moved to the stacks of weight circles. These were cast ferroplastic rings that weighed less than a kilo each. Slip a pair over the ends of a barbell or dumbbell and step into the mag field, however, and the bar would weigh anything from the four or five kilos it was in realgrav up to the limits of the field, about a thousand kilos. All you had to do was adjust a dial, and you could work out without ever changing a weight, increasing or decreasing the resistance in half-kilo steps. If you took the time to set the safeties, you could hoist the barbell up over your head and drop it, and the field would sense and slow the weight's fall enough so you could get out from under it.
Sleel tucked two of the circles into his hip pockets, one on each side. The fabric sagged, but that was okay.
He set a bar loaded with two more circles up onto the benchpress rack, then bent and undid the buckles that held the bench in place. He dialed the field to maximum but did not activate it. Using yet another pair of the weights, he propped the benchpress station on them so that it was leaning slightly backward. With the light weight on the uprights it didn't much matter, but if somebody were to, say, suddenly drop a thousand kilos onto the uprights by activating the field, well, that bench was going to do what a spoon lying on the edge of a table did when you slapped it smartly—take off like a rocket with bad attitude jets.
Sleel looked around. He didn't think he'd need any of this; the mue might be a hard elbowsucker, but that didn't mean shit. Still, it was a basic exercise to make sure you didn't come up stupid when you could avoid it.
He left the exercise room, flicked the confounder off so the cameras would clear and show the room was still empty. Maybe somebody with a real good eye would notice the weight on the bench, but Sleel didn't think he'd have to worry. Anybody with that sort of talent wouldn't be playing simadam on a bank of cameras watching empty rooms in a backrocket prison.
He stood outside the door and waited.
It had taken most of the afternoon to locate the judge who had put Sleel in prison. The man had taken a short vacation and gone on the locally infamous Smoketown Pub Crawl with a busload of other tourists.
The judge, it seemed, was not averse to the pleasures of the flesh, for the Crawl consisted of a guarded run through some of Smoketown's worst pits, and included drinks, meals, guaranteed-disease-free prostitutes, and transportation both ways.Cheap thrills without any real danger.
In the night, Dirisha, Geneva and Bork headed toward Smoketown in a rented hi-mach flitter. Bork worked the controls. The local sun had gone down on this part of Thompson's Gazelle and the darkness was thick with stars and city glows both ahead and behind. It was a pretty planet after dark.
"So, what exactly do we say to this guy to get him to let Sleel out?" Bork asked.
"Whatever it takes," Geneva said. There wasa coldness in her voice that chilled Dirisha. Sometimes the brat could display a resolve that still surprised the older woman. She'd risked her life to make a point when first they'd met at Matador Villa years ago, and Dirisha sometimes wondered if she knew the blonde as well as she thought. Whatever it took, yeah, that was no problem for Dirisha, who had killed men, women and mues when she'd walked the Flex, but sweet little Geneva?
Then again, Sleel was family. Not a chromosome-brother but closer to all of them than any of their own, if Dirisha read it right. There weren't any of them who hadn't risked their asses for each other at one time or another. It had been a while, but the feelings were still there. Somebody out to kill you and yours had a way of bringing out a certain resolve, sure enough.
Smoketown was a port city, and it seemed to exist to show travelers an interesting, if not always good, time.Eateries, pubs, small casinos, trullhouses, the basic desires all there to be sampled, if you had the stads. Dirisha had grown up in a place like Smoketown, and her distaste for such had not abated much in all the time since she'd left. Her last visit to the planet of her birth—she could never bring herself to call it "home"—had ended with Geneva being blasted, and that didn't serve to endear it any, either.
"We got the itinerary?"Bork asked.
Dirisha gave him the code number and he input it into the flitter's comp.
"It's almost twenty-three," he said. "According to this read, they'd be at someplace called The Electric Eel about now." Bork manually tapped the coordinates into the system and locked the flitter into the local traffic grid.
Over his shoulder, Dirisha saw that the ETA was three minutes. She took several deep breaths to calm the sudden rush of hormone jitters. The adrenaline surged, even after all the years of training and meditating and facing down Death in all his guises. The high cortex might rule, but the lizard brain and the mammalbody were in accord otherwise and they went along but reluctantly.
Come on, Dirisha told herself, talking to a judge was not dangerous.
You lie, the lizard brain said.
You always lie.
The mue showed up, grinning, and Sleel saw from his attitude that he thought he had some kind of edge.
A weapon, maybe, or some knowledge that he could use to best his opponent. It practically poured off him, and Sleel was suddenly glad he'd set things up in the gym earlier.
Sleel triggered the confounder again. He stepped into the exercise room well before the mue arrived, moved back far enough to givehimself plenty of room, and waited.
The mue came through the door carefully, ready for an attack. He relaxed a little when he saw where Sleel was.
"Let's do it," Sleel said.
"What's the hurry, dead man? You got a later appointment?" The mue circled to his left, and Sleel automatically moved to keep the distance precise between them, circling to his left.
"Somebody will come to see why this room is offline in a couple of minutes."
The mue chuckled. "Not gonna happen, pard. Nobody is gonna come this way for a long time."
Sleel considered what the mue said. If it were true, that meant he had a friend in the shop. Given that a guard and a medex were also in the get-Sleel parade, that wasn't unbelievable. It wasn't good that there was maybe another problem that he had to look out for, but itwas good that he knew it was there.
Sleet's problems, however, were only beginning.
The mue pulled what looked to be a regulation shockstik from his coverall and held it up. The stik was the general size and shape of a cool's riot baton, a slightly flexible hard plastic conductor rod half a meter long, wired to deliver an electric charge. The stik was activated by gripping it tightly on either of the insulated ends, and from the mue's movement, it was apparent he knew exactly what he was doing with it: the stik made a popping noise as it clicked on and hummed to life. It was a double threat, since it could be used lit or not—it made a dandy club that could shatter bone without power; activated, the slightest touch of the charged section would put a muscle into a hard spasm. Rake a man's belly and he'd double up, unable to move for as long as maybe a minute. Hit a hamstring, and the heel on that leg would jam itself against the buttock above it. Any touc
h on a major muscle would make moving freely very difficult indeed.
As the grinning mue stood there waving his new toy, the medex arrived. He, too, bore a shockstik and an accompanying shitty grin.
But wait, Sleel. What's this you see?
The new guard stepped in behind the medex and it was three villains and three stun wands to complete the set.
Sleel backed up a few steps, watching the trio carefully. He stopped when he reached the benchpress rack.
"I suppose you're wondering why I called you here," Sleel said.
"To the left," the mue said to the medex. To the guard, he said, "You take the right."
Sleel managed a tight grin.Nice to know who was in charge. For just a second, he felt fear dance with cold feet somewhere inside him. Then he took a deep breath and let the fear flow out with it. Win or lose, he would go down swinging. And he fucking wasn't going to lose. Slowly, the three assassins began to move in.
The Electric Eel was a small pub, with about three dozen customers standing at the bar or seated at tables about the room. The air was heavy with flickstick smoke and its scent of burned cashews, and thickened a little with the damp-hemp smell of Leaf. It was a quiet crowd, drinking or smoking or otherwise ingesting assorted intoxicants and talking among themselves. Mirrors behind the bar made the place look larger than it was.
The tour group of seven men and two women was collected at three tables near one corner, easily identified by the pair of hulking uniformed guards who stood nearby, arms crossed and attitudes daring anybody to bother their charges all too apparent. Both guards looked as if a few sessions with a plastic surgeon's laser wouldn't do their faces any harm, Dirisha thought.
The black matadora sat at a table nearby with Bork and Geneva, sipping at chilled glasses of splash and trying to look uninterested in the tour party.
Dirisha glanced past Bork at the two guards. Both had muscle, though neither was quite as large as Bork, and doubtless both had some rudimentary expertise in one martial art or another. Probably both were armed, though no weapons were visible, just as she and Bork and Geneva had removed their weapons and tucked them away. She doubted that these two ordinarily got much of a workout on this kind of run.
"You want me to take out the guards?" Bork asked.
"No. Let's hold off a bit. You see the judge?"
Geneva said, "The gray-haired one, in the jumpsuit, two from your left end."
Dirisha nodded. "Looks better in his computer holo than he does in person, don't you think?"
"Theypaid to be brought here?" Bork put in. "Me, I'd ask for my money back, if it doesn't get any more exciting than this."
"Maybe the tender does a strip or something later," Geneva said.
Bork glanced at the man mixing drinks behind the bar.
Dirisha had noticed him when they'd arrived; he was white-haired, couldn't be a day under seventy, and she probably outweighed him by ten kilos. He looked like an ad for somebody's kindly grandfather. He moved pretty well, though, and Dirisha felt pretty certain the man had some kind of extensive training.
Walking the Flex gave you the ability to see that in somebody, and she'd bet stads the tender was notso innocuous as he attempted to appear.
"I wouldn't pay to see him naked," Bork said.
"The evening is early," Dirisha said, grinning. "Who knows what might happen before it's done? The tour might get its money's worth yet."
No sooner had she said this than the judge got up and moved toward the fresher.
"Ah.Looks as if the judge is about to pay his respects to the toilet. One of us should maybe join him there, you think?"
Bork started to rise.
"Not you, Bork. You look like a planetoid; the guard can't help but notice you if you change orbit. We need somebody who looks a bit more harmless, in case they are watching."
"That's me," Geneva said. "You're as bad as Bork; if you get up, half the men in the place will have to check to see if their testicles are in place."
"You wound me, brat."
"Come on. The way you swagger, guys'll start spitting on the floor and trying to lower their voices when you pass. It'll be an awful scene."
Geneva stood, smiled sweetly at her lover, and followed the judge into the fresher.
"I don't swagger when I walk, do I, Bork?"
"Uh, swagger?" He looked uncomfortable.
Dirisha laughed.
After a couple of moments, the judge and Geneva came out of the fresher. They had linked arms and Geneva was smiling and laughing, as though the judge had just made some witty remark. Dirisha saw the blonde squeeze the judge's arm and say something quietly to him, and it looked harmless, unless you could see the judge wince slightly and pale. He smiled and nodded as if he were having a wonderful time.
The two of them walked back to the group, where the judge smiled even more and spoke to one of the guards. The uniformed man leered and shook his head. Dirisha couldn't hear the dialog, but she could guess the gist of it: I'm going to be leaving the tour here for a while, the judge would be saying. I'll meet you at the rendezvous in the morning.
The guard's look at Geneva was admiring enough, and since she wasn't wearing her spetsdods and the thinskins she wore hid very little of her shape, he was probably thinking that the judge had managed to pull off a neat trick to come up with such a shapely twat as this one.
The guard bought it, for the judge and Geneva headed for the exit. Dirisha almost shook her head. Stupid guard was sure wasting somebody's money.
Bork and Dirisha stood and walked to the exit.
Outside, the judge was beginning to worry, and he was voicing it to Geneva when Bork and Dirisha left the pub.
"You can't do this!"
"Sure I can, I alreadydid it."
Dirisha grinned and reached into her jacket pocket for her left spetsdod. She stripped away the backing from the plastic flesh and seated the weapon on her left hand, adjusting the thing before the flesh set. She was reaching for the right-hand weapon when the two guards emerged from the pub.
Not so stupid after all, maybe, Dirisha thought.
The judge saw the guards. "H-help—!" he managed, before Geneva's nerve pinch on his arm caused him to shut off his appeal in a yelp of pain.
Dirisha thought about the best way to handle things. Bork glanced at her and she nodded at him. He moved to flatten the pair.
When they saw Bork coming, the guards stopped. Maybe they were a lot brighter than she'd given them credit for, Dirisha thought. One dug for something on his belt, under his jacket at the small of his back; the other was already swinging a stubby short-range hand wand up from where it had been hidden in a belt holster. Weapons changed things.
"Bork, down!"
The big man dropped flat instantly. Dirisha raised her left arm and the spetsdod spoke twice. Each guard caught a dart, the first one at the base of his neck, the second one on the chin. The one who had cleared his hand wand triggered it as he fell, but the pulse only patterned the dust on the walk harmlessly, forming complex geometric designs from a psychedelic dream. The patterns were destroyed when the guard fell on them. The second guard fell on top of the first one. The shocktox in the darts would keep them out for fifteen minutes.
"What say we lift?" Bork said as he came to his feet and brushed the dirt from his chest.
"Sounds good to me," Dirisha said.
"This is… this is kidnapping!"
Geneva smiled at the judge. "Very good, you get points for that. But don't forget assaulting those two.
And maybe later, even homicide. Let's go."
The four moved toward the flitter.
When Sleel had been a boy, there had been an ancient game of skill called "Wink." It was played with small plastic disks, one of which was used to propel another by pressing the edges sharply against each other over a hard surface. The one lying on the table would snap up in response to pressure from the one in a player's hand, and the object was to try to aim the snapped disk so that it landed
in a small cup some distance away.
As the three assassins moved in to kill him, Sleel reached over and flicked the switch on the benchpress field.
The bar, which weighed only a few kilos on its own, suddenly became as heavy as if ten men had leaped on it. The unsecured bench, propped as it was, did just what Sleel had intended. It popped up from the floor at an angle and spun and twisted through the air.
And slammed smack into the woman guard. She was quick; she saw it coming and managed to raise her shock-stik, but it was a futile gesture. The bench was too fast and too heavy and one of the legs hit the woman in an uppercut under the chin. Her head snapped back, her neck broke, and she collapsed bonelessly, certainly paralyzed and likely dying of massive shock.
Before the other attackers could do more than blink, Sleel pulled one of the ferroplastic circles from his pocket and slung it at the mue, figuring him to be the more dangerous of the two. At this range, he couldn't miss, and the weight was heavy enough to knock the mue senseless when it bounced off his head.
Unfortunately, Sleel had forgotten about the field. The ferroplastic started out fine, entered the still-working field, and was spun and jerked down against the floor, hard.Sounded like a hammer swung by a giant when it hit. Damn!
Sleel darted to one side as the mue jumped in, shockstik leading. No problem; he avoided the strike, spun around, and reached out to upend the mue—
Suddenly Sleel was snatched violently off his feet.
What the fuck? The medex was three meters away—!
The mue recovered from his swing and turned.
The weight, the other goddamned weight—it was still in his pocket! He was stuck to the floor like he'd been nailed there!
Sleel twisted as hard as he could. His coverall ripped and he pulled away from the weight holding him down, only he was a half second too slow. The shockstik was coming down as his head—
Sleel raised his arm. The stik hit him on the outer edge, just below the wrist. His hand clenched tight with the charge and the bone snapped under the force of the strike, but he was rolling, out of the way and toward the medex—
