The Musashi Flex (14 page)

He had at least two more hours before he could exit the medical unit, maybe longer, and since he was awake and couldn’t move, thinking was his main option.

Since the reason he found himself in one of these bastards was usually the same, the first order of business was generally performance review.

Mourn replayed the fight with Weems.

First, he ran through his general impressions. What stood out, of course, were the strikes that Weems had gotten in, the bone-breakers being hard to forget even had he wanted to do so. What could he have done better to stop those?

Next, he went over relative positions during the exchanges, distances, angles, trying to imagine what it would have looked like from behind, above, Weems’s point of view.

Then, he considered his own attacks, those that had landed, those that hadn’t, and ways he might have better launched them.

He could have spent some time berating himself for his stupidity by challenging Weems in the first place, but done was done, and there was no sense in wasting energy on that, he couldn’t undo it.

All in all, he hadn’t done badly. Yes, he had lost, but he had known going in that he was going to lose. Weems was the best fighter out there, everybody knew it, and nobody knew it better than a highly ranked player such as Mourn. No dishonor in losing to a superior artist.

What could he have done to make it go his way?

After replaying it half a dozen times, Mourn knew the answer to that: Nothing.

Given the tools he had, which were not inconsiderable, he’d still never had a real chance of winning against a man of Weems’s caliber, not unless
Primero
made a big error. At his level, players didn’t make big errors. Yes, he had gotten a couple of good licks in, done some damage against the best player out there. He had marked him enough so he would remember it, and there was some small pride to be taken from that, but the end had never really been in doubt—and both he and Weems had known it.

Mourn sighed, realized he wasn’t breathing properly and getting enough oxy. He concentrated on that for a few seconds until his heart rate dropped back to normal, around fifty beats per minute.

All right.

He looked at the clock. His review had taken only thirty minutes. He had time to kill.

He considered the woman who had probably saved his life, but there wasn’t much point in trying to dissect that—he needed to talk to her again before he had enough information to think about her properly.

So he might as well work out. The painkillers were somato-specifics, they weren’t making his mind fuzzy, and doing a mental workout, while not as good as doing one physically, was better than nothing. He’d start with the eighteen
djurus
from
silat,
first with blades, then bare, at slow speed, then fast, which would take an hour or so. After that, he’d see what else called to him.

 
Sola lay on one of the bunks and looked around the cabin. It was a large room, three meters by three meters, with a walk-in fresher that held a water shower, toilet, and sink. Business class, and a lot nicer than how she usually did vac travel, in the coach dorms. In the dorms, you had a narrow bunk, and your privacy, such as it was, consisted of a curtain-oval that nearly touched the edges of the bunk when pulled shut. Flop an arm out while lying asleep and you’d likely hit the passenger snoring next to you. Need to pee in the middle of the night, and you had to wend your way among the beds to the public fresher and hope nobody was in there with a long novel they wanted to finish . . .

Mourn had told her they could have gotten first-class accommodations, but that such travel attracted too much attention. Low profile was the way to go. Authorities kept better track of people who could afford first-class galactic travel than they did the rabble. Rich people could be trouble, they knew their money gave them certain privileges and that sometimes made them demanding. The Confed had been getting altogether too self-important of late, he’d said, and the brisk military walk it had once used when spacing out to civilize the galaxy had turned into a swagger. He didn’t want them swaggering into his room in the middle of the night asking questions he’d rather not answer. He lived at the outskirts of civilization, and broke enough laws on a regular basis that he was hardly a model citizen. But even a junkyard dog knows better than to bark loud enough for the wolves to hear him.

She had liked that conversation. She’d find a place for it in her show, no question. One had to accommodate the Confed—it was everywhere, all the time.

She had already reviewed the footage she had shot of the fight between Weems and Mourn, gone over it three times, and that few seconds alone was enough to make her documentary. The top-rated player going up against the tenth-rated, and with the added drama of her own participation—real, first-person, I’m-part-of-the-story journalism? Sheeit, it was a free kick, no goalkeep, an easy score. It needed to be good, of course, it needed to be fucking great, so that when it aired, it would knock the pants off the audience and the critics alike; but it was going to air, that she didn’t doubt.

To get rich and win big awards? That would show her father, yes, indeed, it would.

She had squirted a copy of all her existing footage into the ship’s computer, paid a storage fee, and a copy of the Weems/Mourn fight was on its way, via White Radio, to the Guild Archives on the wheelworld of Alpha Sub. She wasn’t going to lose this by having some yahoo rip her cam or computer with their copies, no fucking way.

She looked at her chrono. The old lady medic would be letting Mourn out in another hour or so. There was no hurry, but she stood and headed for the fresher. A quick shower—the only kind allowed even in business class, she suspected—and she’d get dressed and go see how Mourn was doing. The man had saved her, at the least, from a beating, probably from a rape, as well. She’d never have gotten that hand wand out of her pocket without Weems—the bastard!—thumping her. She owed Mourn, in more ways than one. He had taken a hard ride for her, she had recorded it, and the footage she had gotten was the core of her project. Was that lucky, or what?

Besides, she liked the guy. He had a manner about him.

 
“Everything okay?” Shaw asked.

“As far as I can tell,” Dr. Tenae said. She waved her hands at the diagnoster and the holographic reader translated her gestures into rest-mode command. “You can get dressed.”

He grinned at her. “Do you have a familiar name you like?” He asked.

“Lissie.”

Sitting naked on her exam table, he felt himself stirring, and certainly that would be evident to her. He said, “Lissie. I like it. Let me ask you a question: Would you have sex with me for a million stads?”

She smiled and shook her head, as if she couldn’t believe the question.

“I’m serious.”

There was a short pause. “Yes, I would.”

“Computer, transfer one million standards from my personal account into Dr. Tenae’s personal account.”

“One million standards transferred,” the computer said.

He waved at the exam table. “Join me?”

Tenae raised an eyebrow. “Right here and now? And payment in advance?”

“No time like the present, and we’ve got this nice padded table and all. And I’m sure you will be worth it.”

“That’s true. I am,” she said.

She removed her clothes, efficiently and with only a trace of suggestiveness, enough to cause his attention to spring to full alertness. Under the clothes, she was built well, wide hips, lush breasts, thick, glossy, black pubic hair. She looked better naked than he had expected. That hadn’t really mattered. It was her mind that had attracted him, her spirit. Good looks were a bonus, but not necessary in this case.

She stepped out of her panties, moved toward him, bent, and took him into her mouth.

Ah, yes . . .

Half an hour later, after they had taken turns bringing each other to two orgasms each, they lay side by side on the exam table, looking at each other. He laughed.

“Did I miss the joke?”

“Well, yes. After you told me you thought my taking the Reflex was a stupid idea, and I put that million into a post-death account for you, I decided I was going to give it to you anyway. So you see, the money was really already yours when I offered it to you to play lingam-and-yoni. I conned you.”

She laughed, a soft and low sound.

“Pretty funny, huh?”

She gave him a bright smile. “Oh, that’s not what I’m laughing at.”

“No?”

“No.”

“What, then?”

“Well, you see, I would have pronged you for free.”

He propped himself up on his elbow. “You would have.”

She looked up at him. “You’re a good-looking man. Fit, smart, brave, ambitious, rich. Even a little foolish. Attraction to such alpha males is hardwired into a woman’s genes, just as a young and shapely female form calls to men—to normal heteros, anyway. So you see, you could have saved yourself a million stads and had me for free. Who conned whom?”

He laughed again, a deep, really amused one this time. “Hell, that’s worth the million right there.”

“You can get another helping, if you want. On the house.”

“I think I’ll take you up on that.” He reached for her.

Once she’d made her decision—to become an artist—Azul posted her request to Confed Intelligence through a secure pipe. Field-ops had a lot of latitude in such matters, but the request would have to be approved by the head of Operations. It was pretty much a dupe seal deal, but it would take a little time for the programmers to get the request and set up the background and history. And longer for some on-call artists to create her portfolio. She had been fairly specific in what she wanted: She needed to be a painter, working primarily in acrylics, and the kinds of pictures her alter ego would create would be of a certain heroic-socialist stripe. She knew that M. Shaw had many of those in his collection, even if CI did not.

Meanwhile, Azul could do a little more on her own. If she was going to be an artist, she probably ought to know the lingo.

She called up an art program and started to read.

She didn’t have an eidetic memory, but she tended to absorb and be able to recall most of what she wanted to remember. For several hours, she scanned art history and appreciation files, specific techniques for specific styles of drawing and painting.

After a few hours, she stopped. No point in exhausting herself, it would be a few days or maybe even weeks before she could move into a direct-contact situation.

Another round of education needed to be on the Flex, following the biography of her player brother. She’d let CI pick somebody and link her to him, they had such data at hand, so she didn’t have to worry about that until they got back to her.

Why she needed a brother who was a Flex player? None of their business. All they had to do was come up with him.

The hotel suite she’d rented was large and expensive—she’d need that later, and it came with a big soak tub, into which Azul was about to step. If she couldn’t get away from the job, at least she could relax a little while she was doing it . . .

The hot water enveloped her, fragrant vapors rising, and she instantly felt better. The tub’s motors stirred the water gently, enough to relax her muscles without being obtrusive.
Ah.

Being a high-level Confed operative had some advantages. A woman from her background, raised poor as dirt, would have had to do a lot of work to earn the money needed to stay in places like this. Life wasn’t so bad.

 
Mourn and Sola walked through the biggest of the ship’s four gardens, a pocket-park that, with clever design, managed at times to make it look as if you were nowhere near civilization, much less on a giant starship. This particular park’s theme was tropical, and there was even a program that offered regularly scheduled rains, complete with lightning flashes and muted thunder. It had been but a few minutes since the last such artificial rain, and the greenery was still wet and glistening under the high overhead spotlight that pretended to be a sun. Amazing how good the illusion was, with just a little suspension of disbelief on your part.

“How are you feeling?” she asked.

“Better.”

“You were injured more than you let on.”

“I’ve been hurt worse. You learn to deal with it.”

“I want to thank you again, for what you did on Earth.”

He shrugged. “You returned the favor and then some. Weems probably wouldn’t have killed you. He might have chilled me, he was pissed off enough.”

The recorded sounds of tropical birds played over them. A turning of the path revealed a small stream under a narrow bridge. A couple coming from the other direction waited for Mourn and Sola to cross, smiled at them—until they saw his still unfaded bruises. He had some
dit da jow
and
balour
in his travel bag; he’d have to use the liniments to help those contusions along. With all that modern medical science had achieved, the centuries-old martial arts remedies for healing bruises still worked as well as anything.

“So, where are we in regard to you helping with my project?” she asked.

He thought about it for a few seconds. Then he said, “Do you know where the Flex’s name came from?”

She said, “I know it was called that after some kind of swordplayer from ancient times on Earth. Southeast Asian tap?”

He nodded. “Yes. Let me give you the lecture. Musashi was Nipponese, Nippon being a country of small islands. He was born in the late 1500s, C.E. time scale. The family names back then were long and convoluted, but the short version was Miyamoto Musashi—the last name actually being the name of the province where he was from.”

She nodded. He saw her make sure her recorder was collecting it, said, “Go on.”

“His father was a professional soldier—they were called
samurai
—who was in the employ of the lord of the local castle. Apparently his wife was highly placed, maybe even the daughter of the local ruler, though that is speculation. The times and country were tumultuous and violent. The father seems to have left the picture when the boy was around seven T.S., and whether he was killed in battle or just took off is unclear. An uncle on the mother’s side of the family more or less raised him, and Musashi learned the arts of stick and sword fighting from him and other
samurai
.