The Musashi Flex (10 page)

Not that Mourn intended to challenge Weems. He was too good. Mourn had seen the recordings, he knew the stats. With a blade against a blade, maybe
ai-uchi,
mutual slaying, was possible, but that wasn’t high on his list of ways to end a match. With a blade against that solid and heavy carbon-fiber cane Weems favored, Weems would win. He was a magician with that stick and hook. Bare? That was tricky. Weems was fast, and the new art Mourn had been studying gave him a positional advantage, wherein speed could be somewhat negated. But Mourn wasn’t deep enough in it yet; he had the basics, especially with the short knives, but the basics weren’t going to be enough to take out a man like Weems. Of course, he had other arts, but so did Number One, and he had beaten fighters who had beaten Mourn, and decisively. No, he wasn’t quite ready to go head-to-head with Weems, bare or armed, not without a cheat, and of course, that would make it pointless.

That would be the first question the showrunners asked—it was
always
the first question they asked, and if you couldn’t answer it correctly—and the stress analyzers and face readers and the brain strainers used were damned hard to beat—then you didn’t get the victory. If you cheated, you were subject to immediate expulsion from the Flex. And if you killed or even seriously injured the other player using a cheat? The showrunners could zap you right there and then for
making
it an unfair contest. No judge, no appeal, game, set, match, and final chill. Those were the rules you agreed to when you entered the game. If you didn’t play by the rules, there was no point.

Cheats were for self-defense situations when some wazoo street gang that didn’t know better tried to mug you. Them you could chill, at least as far as the Flex showrunners were concerned—you had to take your chances with local and Confed law on your own. When you faced another player in a challenge, you played it straight, by the numbers, or you didn’t stay in the game. Or alive.

Below, the city of New Orleans grew in size as the ship fell.

He wasn’t going to challenge Weems. He was just going to check him out. It was the prudent thing to do.

 
“We got a live one!” the medico Bevins said over the comlink.

It took a second for Shaw to comprehend it. “Excuse me?”

“Barry. Barry made it past the cutoff!”

Shaw was on his feet and heading for his office door before the tech spoke another word. He could be at the lab in five minutes if he took the tram, less than that if he ran.

He ran. Didn’t take the elevator, but ran down the stairs, out the exit, and across the compound, sprinting. Cervo would be behind him, even though they were in the protected compound.

“Barry” was one of the latest batch of rock apes. The term was not technically correct—the test animals were not apes, though once upon a time their ancestors had lived in a rocky environment. What they were in fact was a kind of creature more akin to lemurs, if somewhat larger, whose immune systems were a lot closer to humans than anything but H-DNA chimpanzees or revised bushmonks, both of which were hard to come by out here. That one of the animals had survived might be the breakthrough they had been hoping for.

The lab’s door recognized and admitted him fast enough to keep him from smacking his nose into the denscris. Bevins, the Medico Team Leader, waited in the first positive-pressure room two locks in. Bevins wore sterile skins and held a second set. Shaw stripped to underwear and slipped into the skins. The white material covered everything from the head to the feet, and would protect the lab and its animals—and the people wearing the suits—from cross-contamination.

Shaw followed Bevins through the next pressure room, the vacuum room, and finally, was blasted by an eye-smiting actinic sterilizing light at the entrance to the main animal lab.

In the huge room, there were six people—four men, two women—working the monitors and the Healy, a medical coffin that could diagnose and repair most common human and mue illnesses and injuries. Barry was in a living-room-sized denscris cage, perched on a rock. The inside of the cage was as close to the animal’s natural environment as possible, complete with sterilized plants and insects, and while the workers could see him, the view wall was one-way—Barry couldn’t see them.

Barry was picking at his dinner, some kind of shellfish, and eating it with great relish. A viewer would think him healthy enough, and save for the small casters on his chest and head, he was unadorned.

“How long?” Shaw said.

“One hour and sixteen—no, seventeen minutes, mark, beyond Beatrice.”

Shaw nodded. Beatrice had been the longest surviving of the apes thus far, the last to die on the previous rotation.

“Hour and a quarter is hardly conclusive,” Shaw said.

“Look at him. He’s happier than a dung beetle in curlnose crap.” Bevins waved at the bank of monitors. “All systems are normal—no hypothalmic inversion, no motor or CNS neuron shorts, cardiac system okay, blood pressure dead-on normal. Beatrice was falling apart six hours before she arrested. If Barry feels even a little bad, the best tools medical science has can’t tell it.”

Shaw allowed himself to feel a small thrill of victory.

“What did you do?”

Bevins went off on a technical lark, most of which Shaw tuned out as he watched the rock ape chew up river crawdaddy and spit out bits of the shell.

“—decided that the hormone regulator might respond to R-Enzyme if we used the viral-molecular fuser to blend them. It was a last-minute decision, and there was some argument as to whether or not we would go with it, but I decided it was worth the risk.”

Bevins cast a quick glance at one of the women techs, Dr. Tenae, and Shaw made a mental note of that. Tenae was the risk-taker, Bevins the conservative, so it must have been her idea. Bevins was going to take credit for it, of course, but Shaw would see that Tenae was suitably rewarded—if Barry didn’t suddenly take a header off that rock and croak on them.

An alarm of some kind went off, a strident ringing.

“What is that?” Shaw felt his bowels twist.
Come on, Barry! Don’t you fucking
die
on me!

Bevins frowned. “I don’t know. Everything looks fine—”

“That’s a security alarm,” one of the other medicos said. “Nothing we’re doing in here.”

“Director Shaw?” came an amplified voice.

“Yes?”

“Sir, there’s some kind of robot trying to get into the lab. It keeps bumping against the door.”

For a heartbeat, Shaw drew a blank. Then he smiled. Ah. His vouch. He had forgotten all about it in his hurry to get here. The medical robot was lit, and it followed him. He must have gotten ahead of it on his run down the stairs.

He tried to reach into his pocket for the remote to deactivate the medical robot, then remembered he was wearing skins. “Nothing to worry about,” Shaw said. “Tell Cervo to deactivate it, he has the code. Shut the door alarm off.”

The noise stopped.

Shaw looked at Bevins. “Keep me informed. If Barry so much as sneezes, I want to know about it immediately—”

“Jesu, damn!” somebody said. “Did you see that?”

Shaw jerked his attention away from Bevins. “What?”

“Watch the holoproj to your left, sir,” one of the monitor techs said. “I’ll replay it.”

Barry appeared in a small scale, floating over the ’proj. His arm flicked out, fast, and then he went back to picking at the crawfish.

“What am I looking at, Tech?”

“Sorry, M. Shaw, let me enlarge it and slow it down.”

The image of Barry blinked, then reappeared, life-size. An insect buzzed around the ape’s head, flying in a much-slowed-down spiral. Barry’s arm came up in slomo. He pinched two fingers, caught the insect, crushed it, released it, and before the dead bug hit the rock, Barry had returned to his meal.

Rock apes couldn’t move that fast. Not naturally.

Shaw grinned.
Yes!

Finding the place where Weems was staying had been easy enough for Sola. He had a gated hotel cube near the river on the eastern edge of the old Casino District, past the floating city of faux-paddle wheel gaming houses that had sucked in people looking to lose their money for hundreds of years. The cubicle was on Dauphine Street, near the intersection with Mandeville, part of a new, high-tech renovation that gleamed like a dull mirror under the semitropical sun. It didn’t look as if it belonged there, the renovation, among the older structures. It looked like a stainless-steel cancer.

Four hours after she had arrived, as she stood in the warm shade of some leafy tree she didn’t recognize, Sola realized that bagging Z. B. might not be quite so simple. Apparently this section of the city was a mecca for tourists. To the west and slightly south were the French Quarter—Vieux Carré—Jackson Square, and all kinds of historical this, that, and the other that caused a fitful stream of outlanders clad in colorful, silly clothes and sporting expensive cams to mill back and forth among the sites like some kind of vapid herd animals.

The town here smelled of mold and fish, and the river, while probably much cleaner than it had been in centuries, was not a place you’d want to swim. The water was muddy, the flow was fast, and, so she had read in the hotel handout, was only still here through the grace of the local Army Corps of Engineers. Apparently the Mississippi would rather go to the Gulf of Mexico by jumping the levees men had constructed down its length and pouring itself into the nearby Atchafalaya River, which would have left New Orleans high and dry. Well, drier, at least. There was still the big lake, Poncho-something, to the north. And high wasn’t really an option, since the place was so low and flat and the water table so close to the surface they couldn’t even bury the dead back when that was in vogue—they’d had to entomb them above the ground. Apparently the first settlers here had tried planting coffins, only to see them bob to the surface after the first hard rain, of which there was plenty.

Sola shook her head. She knew what Weems looked like, in theory. He could be disguised, of course, but she had his ear patterns and somatotype logged into her spotter scope, and the instrument was good enough to give her a dimension check, height, weight, morphologics, so—in theory—she could get past a simple skinmask. Unless he bothered to change his ears and wear padding to alter the look of his somatotype, she should be able to get a match if she saw somebody who looked like him.

But as another batch of lookielookies shuffled past her, the problem represented itself yet again. When you had a hundred people on foot coming or going every few minutes, it was a bitch to try and scope all the ones who might be her target.

Sooner or later, she’d probably spot him. She had snapped still holos of everybody who had entered or left the building so far and none of them were him. But she had to pee, she was getting hungry, and she was cooking in the summer heat and humidity despite the tree’s shade, sweat soaking into her clothes, making her sticky and stinky.

Ah, the exciting, glamorous life of a documentarian. Nothing like it.

If she left to attend to her distractions, that would be the moment Weems came or went. If she stayed put, then, of course, so would he. That was how it always worked. No justice in the galaxy. She had been around long enough to learn that. Timing was all.

At that thought, some deity apparently decided that she deserved a favor: From out of the locked steel gate ambled Z. B. Weems, easily identifiable from her images of him, nothing more to disguise him than a pair of dark glasses, and those probably for the purposes of eye protection rather than deception. He was fit, dressed for the weather in shorts, flexsoles, and a thinskin top, and looked just like thirty other men in sight at the moment. Blink, and he’d vanish.

There was a scar or a good facsimile of one on the outside of his right knee, visible across the street, which certainly would convince anybody not a medic that he needed the thin gray cane he carried. The cane had a rounded crook at the grip, with a black silicone cap on the other end, nothing fancy. It just looked functional. Something a man who maybe couldn’t afford a regrow to repair a torn ligament might use until his fortunes improved.

Sola made sure she looked in another direction, quickly. She was aslant to him, and far enough away that he might not notice her at all on the crowded street, but that was not a chance she was going to take, not after her last couple of encounters with Flexers. This one wasn’t going to spot her, no way.

She started walking, blended with a group of tourists, and watched Weems peripherally. As luck had it, he turned and headed up the sidewalk in the same direction. He touched the cane’s tip down often enough so it appeared he needed its support. A good beginning, saving her from having to turn around or cross the street.

Her cam was inside her handbag, the gel lens peering through a tiny opening, and she subvocalized her commands to the instrument. The heads-up on the inside of her own polarized glasses showed a mob. She ordered the cam to stabilize and zoom, centered it on Weems, and started recording. It wasn’t action stuff, but it was good background, and with him filling the frame, it was a sequence she could use under opening credits. At the very least, she would have footage of him more current than anything anybody else had. She was already ahead of the game.

Mentally, she started writing the voice-over: “Meet Zachary Bretton Weems, out for a stroll in the picturesque terran city of New Orleans. He looks just like any other tourist, maybe a bit less fit than most with his walking stick, and you’d never guess to look at him that he is the deadliest man in the galaxy,
the
champion player of the Musashi Flex, that loose agglomeration of duelists who fight for fame and sometimes money . . .”