The Man Who Never Missed (16 page)

“Light cannons are fine, they’ll blind you, especially at night, just like a photon flare. Problem there is, they’re not so good in bright sunshine, and you can wear polarizing contacts which will pretty much kill the effect.”

Red handed Khadaji a spetsdod. “Put it on the back of your hand—this is a right-side model—you peel the backing on the flesh and mold it, like this.”

Khadaji wiggled his fingers experimentally. The weapon was very comfortable, light enough so he hardly noticed it was there. The barrel protruded just past the tip of his index finger.

“It’s not loaded,” Red said, “but you always check that for yourself, don’t take anybody’s word for it. Right there is where the magazine goes.”

Khadaji checked the slot. It was empty. Red handed him a plastic rectangle about the length of Khadaji’s little finger, but only half as thick. “It holds up to fifteen rounds, depending on what kind of dart you load. The power—compressed gas—is built into the magazine. This is stinger ammo—dull-nosed darts without chem. You know you’re hit if you get shot by one, but all it does is sting a little; no damage unless it hits an eye or something. Load it with the white end up.”

Khadaji obediently snapped the magazine into place. “That’s the eject button next to the magazine. Try it.” Khadaji touched the button and the magazine snapped out and fell onto the floor of the shooting range. Red bent to retrieve it. “You can reload in about three seconds.” He returned the magazine and Khadaji reloaded the weapon.

Khadaji dropped his hand next to his thigh and wiggled the fingers again. He had read about how to fire the weapon, there was a chem-sensitive trigger on the end of the barrel which would only react to certain kinds of epidermal tissue, specifically that of a fingernail. There was no safety, unless you wore a fingertip cover.

Red punched in a command on the range computer and a holoproj image lit up three or four meters out. A big man with a knife raised over his head running in place toward them. Khadaji laughed.

“Go ahead, shoot him,” Red ordered.

Khadaji nodded and snapped his hand up—and shot himself in the foot.

“Ah, shit! shit, shit, SHIT!”

Red leaned back against the stall support and laughed until tears flowed. “Felt that, did you?”

“Goddammit, that hurt!” Khadaji refrained from hopping around and holding his foot—barely.

“I forgot to mention that the firing mechanism is very sensitive.”

“You fishfucker,” Khadaji said, glaring at him.

“Ah, ah. You’ll remember it better now than if I’d just told you. You see why I always keep my index finger curled in now, don’t you?”

“I see.”

“How’s your foot?”

“I’ll live.”

“Good. Let’s try it again, only take it a little slower, what say?”

It was unlike any weapon Khadaji had ever used in the military. First, the shooting was “instinctive”—it was point-firing, there were no sights, no way to aim. You pointed your finger at the target and that’s where your missile went. Which was what made it so fast, your target was never any further away in time than jabbing a finger at it.

A crazed woman waving a hand wand ran on a treadmill at him. Khadaji pointed his finger at her. A chime rang and a diode lit on the control panel. A hit.

“Where were you aiming?” Red looked at the board. “At the woman,” Khadaji said dryly. “Where at the woman? Her face? Chest? Left nipple?” “Her chest.”

“You missed, then. You hit her too low, almost at the navel.”

“So? I hit her, didn’t I?”

“Not good enough,” Red said. “You ever hear the story of the archers?”

“What’s an archer?”

“Bow shooter. Slings an aluminum shaft about a meter long using the power of a primitive spring—” “I know what a bow is,” Khadaji interrupted. “Yeah, well there was a contest and the best three archers in the state were shooting for a prize. The state’s ruler had a big holoproj of a fish hung for a target and the archers were set back a good distance, fifty or a hundred meters. So they shot, and one guy won. After the contest, the ruler called the three archers in one at a time and asked each archer what he’d been aiming at. The first guy said, ‘I was aiming at the fish.’ Second guy said, ‘I was aiming at the middle of the fish.’ The third shooter said, ‘I was aiming at the fish’s eye.’ You want to guess which archer won?” “Obviously the third archer,” Khadaji said. “Right. Because you only get as accurate as you try for.” He waved his right hand, showing Khadaji his own spetsdod. “These things have a range of about fifty meters, but are only effective for maybe half that. Combat range for a spetsdod is five to seven meters, that’s where you’ll do most of your shooting. You got somebody wearing a vest or padded ‘skins, your only target might be a hand or neck.” Red stopped talking and bent to pick up an empty magazine from the floor. He held it in the same hand as his spetsdod, then casually flipped it into the air downrange.

As Khadaji watched, Red jabbed his finger toward the tumbling magazine and fired. It jumped away suddenly at a right angle to its former flight.

“Always aim for the fish’s eye, kid. You might not hit it, but you’ll be more likely to hit the fish somewhere.”

Getting a license for his own spetsdod was easy enough. Khadaji used his own name—in all the billions of people in the galaxy, there had to be thousands with his name—and only lied about background. He’d been a citizen and student on Bocca for four standard years and he had stayed mostly within local laws. The permit was appended to his tag and the spetsdod became a part of his hand. Red had a left-side model he made Khadaji practice with, sometimes requiring him to use both at the same time. Khadaji put in an hour in the range daily, firing off several hundred darts each session. At first, the improvement in his speed and accuracy was radical; after a few months, the improvements came in tiny bits—a half-centimeter closer here, nine hits instead of eight there. In three months, Khadaji could hit a tossed magazine six times out of ten.

In six months, he could hit the magazine nine times out of every ten tosses. He could hit a man-sized target at combat ranges a hundred times in a row with no misses, and he could do it standing, sitting or rolling.

In nine months, Khadaji regularly outshot Red, using either or both hands. He practiced in varied lighting, wearing heavy and awkward clothing, sometimes blindfolded, shooting at generated sounds from the targets. He still missed his targets occasionally, but he took each miss as a personal affront, striving for perfection. The motions of the spetsdod became almost instinctive, a learned reflex which seemed as natural to him as walking.

“Ready?”

Khadaji nodded, feeling relaxed. He wore spetsdods on both hands and he held his arms crossed over his chest.

Red stood to Khadaji’s left, unmoving. With a sudden jerk, he tossed a handful of empty magazines into the air. Four of the small plastic rectangles glittered in the hard light of the firing range as they tumbled through the air.

Khadaji moved, both arms swinging out, his index fingers stabbing at the small targets, the spetsdods coughing. He fired four times; there were four hits.

Khadaji grinned. It was easy. He still wasn’t sure what he was going to do, but he knew one thing for certain: He was good enough at this, now.

Khadaji was off-duty, so he sat at a table with Red, sipping on his latest experimental drink, champagne. It was really quite good, provided he didn’t drink enough to get a headache. Three glasses seemed to be the limit.

“So, what happens now?” Red asked. “You’re better than anybody I’ve ever seen, either with your hands or that.” He pointed at the spetsdod. “Nothing else I can teach you.”

“I’ve got something to do,” Khadaji said. “This is only a part of it.”

“I thought so.”

He didn’t ask the obvious question, and Khadaji didn’t volunteer. He liked that about Red; the man never pried. Still, Khadaji felt a curiosity about his teacher. “What about you? What did I interrupt?”

Red sipped at his drink. “Not much. I’ve done a lot of things, mostly dancing around the edges of legality. Body-guarding, some… courier work, freelance odd jobs. Never could find a place interesting enough to settle for more than a few months. You’ve been interesting, so I’ve stayed around here, but now that I’m done, I think maybe I’ll take off. Lot of galaxy I haven’t seen yet.”

“No family?”

“Not to speak of. I was married a couple of times, they didn’t work out. I have a daughter I’ve never seen, she’d be her late-teens. Geneva, her name is. I’d like her to have more than the stads I send, but I don’t have a lot to offer. Only thing I was ever really good at is what I do.”

Khadaji nodded. This was the most he’d learned about Red in all the months he’d known the man. Impulsively, he decided to say something he hadn’t planned to say. If anybody could be trusted, it was Red. “Listen, if things go the way I want them to, I might be in a good place in a few years; maybe a place you might want share with your daughter. I’ll have a permanent mail code established here, under the name ‘Spit Enterprises’.” Khadaji smiled “Drop a pulse my way every year or two and let me know where I can find you.”

Red grinned. “I was never much for corresponding, kid, but, sure, why the hell not? I can see some kind of fire in you. I dunno what it is, exactly, but something potent. I’ll keep in touch.”

Chapter Sixteen

KHADAJI SAT IN one of the two thousand booths which made up the main university library, staring at the holoproj image generated by the computer. He knew that if he intended to offer any kind of opposition to the Confederation, it would have to be done from a position of strength. He had a strong body, and certain skill with that body, and now, with a spetsdod. But more was needed, he had to have some kind of power base.

Power, he’d learned from his study of politics, could come from several sources. It could be military, it could be political, or religious, or it could be money. Often the different kinds were intertwined.

Khadaji touched a control and the heat-sensitive device caused the holoproj to blur as the computer searched for the chosen subject.

Military was out. He’d have to be a Sector Marshal to command any forces strong enough to rise against the Confed and his chances of that were less than those of a snowball in a supernova. Politics would offer no easy access to power, either. It would take too long—assuming he could manage to work his way into an effective political organization. Religion was simply not in the question; he had no bent in that direction at all.

Which left money. It was easier to get rich than it was to get famous, there were a lot of ways to earn standards.

Of course, the trick was to make the money quickly. Within, say, five to ten years. That eliminated most honest work. Starting at the bottom of some corporate lift and rising slowly through the ranks would take some considerable amount of time, even if he had some particular skill in a given field. Which he didn’t, really. He was fairly well educated in some areas, but it was mostly academically oriented. And pubtenders didn’t die rich.

There were, of course, faster ways to make money honestly. ‘Find a need and fill it’ was the creed of hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs throughout history. If one had the proper kind of drive and luck, one could join the ranks of the self-made millionaires.

But the fastest way to make big stads was much simpler. Do it illegally. As always, it seemed that finding illegal needs and filling them paid the best. There were drugs which were frowned upon here which could be bought legally there; it was then merely a matter of figuring a safe way to transport the chemicals from here to there. Likewise, there were proscribed weapons, banned holos, illicit sexual devices and a myriad number of things and ideas which were worth a lot to someone able to provide them.

Of course, there were risks involved with such endeavors. Lock-time and brain-diddle weren’t pleasant thoughts; neither was being killed by a criminal element which disliked competition. And there were moral issues. Could Khadaji live with himself were he involved in slavery or life-destroying chemicals?

Of course, laws weren’t always just. Some rules outlawed a thing because it was intrinsically bad: child molestation, say. Other rules made harmless activities crimes only because someone wished them to be so. Take cohabitation on a religious holiday. On some worlds, it was legal on one day, illegal the next, and on the third, okay once again. Khadaji could see no moral dilemma there.

The holoproj cleared. The title of the text was: “A Statistical Analysis and Comparison of Activities Violating Major Planetary Laws Involving Crimes Against Property, Indexed by Stellar System.”

Khadaji shook his head. The work was, apparently, an ongoing project for graduate-level students, constantly being revised. According to the computer, the file, if printed out, would fill 25,973 pages. As he watched, the number was raised by a hundred. Then another seventy. Even at full augenblick speedscan, it would take some time to read it all. He would skim, Khadaji decided, and hit only the highest of the high points. He had no intention of spending the rest of his life trying to read a file which was growing so fast he couldn’t keep pace with new additions…

He bought two travel cases that were identical, from a retail outlet which sold thousands of such cases each year. He wore thinskin gloves when handling the cases, so he left no prints or secretions. One case he filled with ordinary items of travel; clothes, toiletries, novel and travel tapes. The second case was filled much the same, but also had several hundred doses of mescabyn hidden in a tape reader. Mescabyn was a mild and harmless hallucinogen, and legal. At least it was legal on Bocca. On the planet’s nearest neighbor (and the only other occupied body in the Faust System), Ago’s Moon, the chem was illegal, as were most drugs. If he could get it to the right people, the mescabyn would be worth five hundred times what he had paid for it.

Travel between Bocca and Ago’s Moon was easily accomplished and hardly regulated. Naturally, there were smugglers, but inspection of luggage was usually done only on a spot basis. Khadaji bought a fake tag which identified the bearer as Reachardo Hollee and used it to buy a one-way passage to Ago’s Moon. He checked the travel case containing the mescabyn through under the new name and had the claim number imprinted on the tag. Immediately, he booked passage on the same commuter ship under his own name, checking the second case. He was quick enough, and the second claim number was sequential to the first. Step one.