The Musashi Flex (20 page)

She nodded. “What now?”

“You want more?”

She laughed. “No, I meant generally.”

“If we are going to finish your documentary, we probably need to get to a place where Weems or his hirelings either can’t find us, or can’t get to us if they do.”

“You know a place?”

“Yeah. We can talk, work out, and if you are interested, play this game some more.”

“I’m interested.”

He smiled.

“Can I stay? Sleep with you?”

“Sure.”

She lay back and relaxed.

It had been a while since he had allowed that, too. Sex was one thing, sharing your space afterward was something else. But he liked her, truly. She wasn’t a child, but she was still young enough so that the galaxy was her oyster. There was a fine energy in being with somebody who felt that way.

As he drifted off to sleep, the thoughts he’d been having lately about fighting arose. There was something just outside his grasp, something very important. The more he reached for it, though, the more it eluded him. He had to let it go. Maybe it would come back, maybe not. But it was important, he knew . . .

Sleep claimed him and pulled him deep. He did not dream.

When he awoke six hours later, she was still asleep next to him. He got up to go pee, and she stirred a little, but stayed asleep.

She was so young and so beautiful, smart, too, and the sex had been good. He smiled. He could get used to having her around.

The Bruna System Hub station was crowded, hundreds of people milling back and forth, changing from starliner lighters to system hoppers, to be ferried out to other starliners, or to local planets. The place smelled of unwashed bodies—a lot of starships carried steerage passengers, and the cheap beds didn’t always allow easy access to even the sonic showers, whose best efforts at cleaning didn’t get close to soap and hot water. Too many people in the hub probably hadn’t bathed in days, and the station’s overworked scrubbers couldn’t keep up with the odor. You tuned it out after a while, but a first whiff, it was potent.

“Farbis?”

“Yes.” There were four organic worlds in the system—Farbis, Pentr’ado, Lagomustardo, and Muta Kato, plus one large wheelworld, Malgrand Luno. The latter was where Mourn and Sola were headed, to catch a local boxcar down the gravity well.

“Never been there,” she said. She searched her memory, he could see her hunting for it. “Agro world?”

He nodded. “Much of the temperate zones.”

“Why there? Don’t think Weems will look for you on a farm?”

“That. Plus I know it—or I used to. I was born there, spent my first eighteen years on the planet.”

She blinked. “You were a
farmer
?”

He smiled at the wonder in her voice.

“I have trouble picturing you driving a harvester among the rows of cottonwood or giant corn.”

“Everybody has to be born somewhere.”

“So how does one go from being a farmer to a fighter?”

He glanced at the ship schedule holoproj floating above them. The transport to the wheelworld station wasn’t due for boarding for another hour. There was a food kiosk just ahead. “Let’s get something to eat. I’ll tell you a story.”

She raised an eyebrow. “On cam?”

“If you want.”

 
The day after Lazlo Mourn turned twelve was the day his life changed direction. Up until then, he hadn’t thought much about what he was going to do when he grew up. He and Ma and Da worked on a giant communal farm in the NorthWest Quarter, living in a prefab that was old when his father was born. Both sets of his grandparents, along with a dozen aunts and uncles and twenty or thirty cousins, all lived in the Quarter, too, as had
their
parents and grandparents. The NWQ co-op covered 270,000 acres, dotted by four villages full of others who worked it. The main crops were export cereal grains—wheat, rice, oats, giant corn—but they also grew legumes, beans, peas, and root vegetables, and had several herds of milkers from which they made cheese and butter and yogurt. The work was hard, even for children, but it was simple, and Mourn had assumed he would continue to live in his village, eventually meet a girl, get married, raise a family of his own. That was how it went.

Normally, on their twelfth birthday, children went to town and registered as citizens. It could be done from the village, of course, but the tradition was, you went with your da or ma to the Confederation Center, had your holo made, your retinal patterns, fingerprints, and your DNA scoped, and got your first ID cube, which was really a kinda squashed square that looked more like a mint than a cube. Some places, they liked the implants, but on Farbis, most people just got cubes. If you didn’t have a reader for a transfer, it was hard to lend your implant to somebody who needed to borrow a few stads from your account. Then again, an implant didn’t get lost . . .

From then on, you were no longer just a child, but a citizen, even though you didn’t get full rights for another six T.S. years.

But on
his
birthday, there had been an accident at Wheat Storage Four. One of the silos collapsed. That wasn’t supposed to happen, the extruded everlast-plast structure was supposed to be rated for twice what it could hold, but somehow, a crack developed, and the weight of all that grain, piled sixteen stories high, had blown the base out and spewed however many hundred tons of grain across the surrounding plastcrete like a volcano blasting apart.

Nobody had been caught in the tsunami of wheat except a couple of trailers and a flitter, but the damaged silo fell over, and it came down on the computer/communications shack and crushed it like somebody stomping a size twelve down hard on a jik egg. The ten people inside, six men and four women, had been squashed into the wreckage.

Lazlo had been out with his father in an inspection flitter, checking on the giant corn seedlings in Sprout Nineteen, when the call came. They had planned to make a quick pass, then Da was going to take him to town for his registration. But Da was in the Emergency Corps—pretty much every grown man was, and he was a supervisor, so those plans got canceled, and there was no time to drop his son off. He cranked the fans up to full and leaned the flitter hard toward WS-4.

The place was pretty much in chaos when they got there, and by the time it all got sorted out, it was well after midnight.

Nobody in the shack survived, but they had to dig them all out to be sure, and it was a big fucking mess, the whole area knee deep in wheat. Of course, Lazlo had known the people who’d died, though none of them were relatives.

The cleanup crews took over, and Da and Lazlo went home to bed. In all the excitement, he’d pretty much forgotten all about registering.

But the next morning, Ma got him up early and told him they were going to town.

Not that “town” was much more than the village. It was bigger, of course, they had a boxcar port, some shops and pubs and things, plus the government offices, local and Confed. But there were maybe ten thousand people in Ship City, while his own village had half that many.

Ma parked the flitter in a public lot and they got out and headed for Registration. The day was cool for spring, but the sun was shining, and the smells of town were different than the village. More machinery lube, hydrocarbon dross, a lot less crop stink. It was exciting, Lazlo felt as if he had to pee, and his belly was fluttery. You didn’t get to register but once, after all. Everything seemed much sharper than usual—the sights, sounds, smells, everything.

They had just crossed the street behind a four-trailer grain carrier, a forty-wheeler loaded to the canvas, and gotten to the sidewalk when Lazlo’s short life took a sudden turn.

He heard the music first. At the time, he didn’t consciously mark it for what it was—somebody playing solo finger-style guitar—he didn’t realize that until later. Of course, he had heard music before, it wasn’t as if the co-op didn’t have entcom, and there were people who got together in groups to play. He had a cousin who was a pretty good keyboardist, and an uncle who played rumblestik. And he had heard guitars, though not quite like this one. The song was bright, melodic, and catchy. But of a moment, there was a crash, as if a door was slammed open, and the music stopped.

To their left, a surge of people flowed out into the street, coming from a building with neon and pulse-paint signs that ID’ed it as a pub. There was a score of folks, at least, mostly men, a few women, and at the center of the collection’s attention was a short and compact man in lube-stained freight hauler’s blue coveralls with the sleeves cut short to reveal thick and muscular arms. On one shoulder he had a tat that Lazlo couldn’t quite make out, something that looked like a long sickle or a knife.

It was obvious that the short man in blues had done something to piss people off, and it looked as if he were about to get his ass seriously kicked, because there were at least six men moving in on him as if they wanted to plant him head down in the plastcrete.

Flitters and haulers hit warning horns, but nobody in the crowd paid any attention, and the vehicles fanned or rolled to stops. With traffic stopped, everybody focused on the men in the street.

Ma grabbed Lazlo’s shoulder and tried to steer him away, but he didn’t move. He was almost as big as she was, and he wanted to see this.

“Lazlo—”

“A second, Ma.”

The hauler dropped into a fighting crouch.

The first attacker got within range and swung a wide, hard, looping punch at the hauler’s head. The puncher was big, twenty centimeters taller and probably fifteen kilos heavier, and if he hit, that would be the game. Lazlo had seen enough fights in the village or fields to know that a big fist to the head usually ended the dust-up pretty quick, and the bigger guy almost always won, too—

The hauler ducked the punch, moved in so fast Lazlo couldn’t really tell what he did, and the bigger man
flew
backward and slammed into two men behind him and all three of them went down—

And then the guy just
danced
into the others, not waiting for them, attacking the other five men as if they were nothing, as if he had all the time in the world.

It would be ten years before Lazlo had the wherewithal to reconstruct what he saw that day. It was no more than a learned skill, what the hauler did, but on that spring morning in Ship City, the twelve-year-old version of Lazlo Mourn saw what appeared to be magic. Those six men might as well have been carved from stone. None of them laid a serious hand or foot on the hauler. Time slowed to a crawl for them, but it sped up for the man facing them.

Lazlo couldn’t believe what he was seeing.

It took but a few seconds before it was done, and when it was over, it was . . .
astonishing
.

The hauler stood alone in the street. Six men lay around him, and the rest of the crowd had hauled ass to the sidewalk, fast. You could almost smell their fear from where Lazlo and his ma stood.

Two of the people on the walk, a man and a woman, began walking away in a hurry as a siren announced that the local cools were en route and closing. The couple passed by Lazlo and his mother.

“Lazlo!” his mother said. “Come on! The authorities will be looking for witnesses! You’ll not get registered! Let’s go!”

He nodded and allowed himself to be hurried along.

The man and woman who’d passed them were only a meter or two ahead on the walk. The woman said, “Who the prong was that guy? How could a hauler
do
that?”

And the man laughed, and said, “He’s not a hauler, he’s a dueler. Musashi Flex player. Tattoo right there on his shoulder. Stupid. Their own fault, messin’ with a man like that.”

Lazlo had never heard of the Musashi Flex; but at that moment, he realized that he wasn’t going to spend his life on this world, working the farms. He had just seen something amazing, and however the man had managed it, Lazlo was going to learn how to do it, too. Such power, to be able to move like that. Such power . . .

 
Sola shut the recorder off. “Wow.”

Her food—such that it was—sat congealing on her plate. This was not the background she would have picked for Mourn. A kid attracted to the Flex by a street fight in some back-rocket farm town. Great stuff. She could do it as a voice-over while she ran CG images of a re-creation. The entcom audience would eat it up.

“And you haven’t been back since you left?”

“Nope.”

“Twenty-five years.”

“Twenty-seven.”

“Your parents still alive?”

“No. My father died in a flitter accident a few years ago, a repellor blew, he crashed into a field. My mother apparently developed malignant silicosis and passed away six months after he did.”

“You kept track of them?”

He shook his head. “Not really. I thought about going to visit them last year. I did a records check then, that’s what it said.”

She didn’t say anything, but she knew he got the unasked question.

He said, “It wasn’t an amicable parting. My parents couldn’t understand how I could even consider the idea of leaving the farm. None of our family ever had before. And the idea of becoming a professional
fighter
? We had big and loud disagreements about my future. Said things that couldn’t be taken back. I was young and full of myself, I had no patience for what they wanted. Day I reached my majority, I took off.”

She nodded. She could understand that. Her father thought the idea of her becoming a reporter was insane. She was supposed to be a medico, as he was, as her grandfather and her uncles were. Writing tales for entcom? That was no kind of life for a proper-caste woman . . .

“So, you’re going home.”