The Musashi Flex (23 page)

He returned the smile. He hadn’t fought a match armed yet, and while he could have chosen weapons that would have given him great advantage because of his speed, he had wanted to make it more exciting, so he carried a folding knife with a blade about as long as his thumb, single-edged with an upangled
tanto
-style point. Not much more than a penknife, really, normally suitable for cutting twine or slicing a piece of fruit, not one most would take for a dueling weapon. Handmade and expensive, of course, not something that would fall apart after one stab, but small by knife fighters’ standards.

She didn’t smile when she saw his little knife. Smart of her.

A slap-cap, a Newton-bleak unidirectional shaped charge worn like a ring, would have probably been the best impact weapon for him. A slap to the chest would blow out a man’s pump, one to the spine would crush bone and the spinal column and paralyze instantly, to the head, the brain would turn to mush. With his speed, he could dart in and make such a hit before most people had a chance to realize just how fast he was. A two-second fight, bam! end of match.

But where was the fun in that? It was about winning, of course, but it was also about at least a chance of risk; otherwise, why bother? He wanted to have to work for it a little. So far, that hadn’t been the case. His matches had been walkovers, his speed simply too much for his opponents to deal with, and all three of his previous fights had been disappointing. By giving himself a self-imposed handicap, maybe he could spice things up a bit.

He was, maybe not so oddly, feeling a little horny. If Luna Azul had let him stay with her, he might not have met this woman whom he would soon be piercing with an altogether different weapon . . .

He smiled at the thought.

The woman circled to her right, keeping the knife in front of her.

He’d have to go around the blade, block it, or do a pass; otherwise, he could spit himself on her point, since she didn’t even have to move it, only hold it in his way. She wouldn’t be fast enough to track him with a stab or slash, and if she stepped back, he could just follow her in, no problem.

“My name is Ellis Mtumbo Shaw,” he said. “I’m ranked Eighty-First.”

She nodded, crouched lower behind her knife. “I’m guessing you know who I am and my rank.” Not a question.

“Yes. Any last words?”

She chuckled. “Come and try, sucker. We’ll see who has last words.”

He went in, glorying in his ability. He could see her eyes start to widen as she realized nobody could move as fast as he was, as she understood she couldn’t get away—

He stuck his free hand out for the block, to open the way for his thrust. He didn’t want to kill her on the first pass, only to sting her enough so she could feel it, but not so hard as to put her down—

She cut at him, but so slow. He blocked the stab, rocked to the side a hair, punched her in the left shoulder with his knife, driving the blade in no more than a couple of centimeters, then jerked it out and jumped to his own right, to stop two meters away.

“Fuck!” she said, the fear filling her voice. She slashed wildly, but he was way outside her range.

“You see how it is going to go,” he said. “Give me your tag now, I’ll let you live.” He was feeling perhaps a little more kindly toward her than he would have a man, after his pleasant and erotically promising encounter with Azul earlier in the evening. It would be almost a shame to waste this woman by killing her. Maybe if he didn’t kill her, they could pass the time doing something else afterward?

What would it be like to have sex while on Reflex?

That thought made him chuckle. Would give a whole new meaning to the old joke about whem-bim-thank-you-fem. He’d probably feel like an electronic vibrator to her—

“No,” she said.

She knew she couldn’t beat him, she
had
to know after what he had just demonstrated, and yet she was willing to keep fighting. Brave.

Foolish, but brave.

He’d stick her again, shallow, go for the thigh this time, give her one more chance.

He blurred in as he had before, his knife aimed low—

—and she surprised him.

She cut straight down in front of her own thigh, a short slice. Her blade was half a meter away from any part of him, what was she doing?

He was moving so fast he didn’t realize it in time. She had figured out where he was going to stick her, and she was moving in anticipation of his attack, not aiming for where his arm was, but for where she guessed it was
going to be
by the time her cut got there.

He was moving too fast stop his own attack, too much inertia. His point touched her thigh as her edge caught his forearm. When he snatched his hand back, her very sharp blade raked a long and shallow cut along his arm, over the radius, from midarm all the way to his wrist—

He jumped backward.

The cut was nothing. Bloody, but not deep enough to cause any loss of function, no big vessels hit. A little orthostat glue, maybe a staple or two, he’d be good as new.

It impressed him, though. She had realized she couldn’t match him, he was too fast, so she moved before he did, hoping he couldn’t adjust in time, and she’d guessed right.

He saluted her with his knife, touching it to his forehead, even though he was pissed off about the cut.

“Good move, but it’s not enough, sister. Give up your tag, walk away.”

“That’s your blood running down your arm and splattering on the ground, brother. Give up
yours
and walk away.”

She sounded calm. Maybe she really thought she had a chance. Time to show her.

He leaped in, faked a stab at her face, moving slow enough so she could see it and raise her hand for the block, keeping her blade low to cover her belly and groin—

When her blocking hand was at the level of her chin, and her knife was covering her low line, he pulled his knife back a hair. There was an opening between her empty hand and knife big enough to drive a freight hauler. He put the blade into her throat and cut hard to his left, severing her right carotid artery. He danced back.

Too bad she hadn’t given up. Not his fault, he’d offered her two chances. Still, it was a pity—they wouldn’t be sharing a bed together this night. Nor any other night.

All he had to do was wait.

Two minutes later, he had her tag and was on his way to where Cervo was with the flitter. He had learned a valuable lesson from the dead woman. There was a way to get a jump on somebody who was a lot faster than you. Fortunately, all it had cost him was a nasty cut on his arm.

He wouldn’t make that mistake again.

Back at his house, Shaw shooed the medico out and called for Cervo. Something had been bothering him, just outside his ken, and while the medic had worked on his arm, he recalled what it was.

“Tell me about that operative we lost,” Shaw said. “Following Randall’s man. What happened?”

If Cervo wondered why the subject had come up now, it didn’t show on his face. “Somebody blasted her in the face with a shotgun. It happened in an alley near the port. She knew she was in trouble because the cools found her spring pistol out and next to the body, fresh prints and her DNA on it. She saw it coming, pulled her weapon, but she didn’t get off a dart.”

“They have anything else?”

“No. Zipple on anything linking the killing to anybody.”

“Could it have been random? Street robbery gone bad?”

Cervo shook his head. “Unlikely. Our op was good. She wouldn’t have put herself at risk without reason, and she was adept enough so your basic alley mugger shouldn’t have been able to sneak up on her and take her out. Way I figure it, she was working, she ran into somebody better than she was, which almost has to mean a pro. She was on the job and following another operative. Too coincidental to think she got strong-armed by a drugged-out cutpurse.”

“I don’t like this. How can we find out more?”

“How bad do you want to know?” Cervo asked.

Shaw frowned. “Meaning?”

“If our agent was killed by Randall’s op, finding out for sure involves certain risks. If we approach the man and buy him and he stays bought, that’s the best thing, but we have no guarantees that he won’t turn around and lay it out for Randall to earn another fat bonus. You have to decide if you want the PR to know we did that.”

Despite his size and look, in his area of expertise, Cervo was no man’s fool. Shaw nodded. “Okay. Go on.”

“If we grab him and extract the information from him, we have to eliminate him to avoid that same risk.” Very matter-of-fact, as if the man was talking about there being fog in the city this morning. Well. Given that he had killed people himself, it was not such an awful option as all that. You could get squashed by a van while crossing the street.

“Yes.”

“This is assuming that he chilled our op. And that doesn’t really make any sense that I can see. We have our people, Randall has his, everybody knows this. What would be the point in one of his killing one of ours?”

Shaw said, “Because ours discovered something that Newman really doesn’t want us to know.”

“Possibly.” Cervo conceded the point.

“Best-case, worse-case scenario?” Shaw asked.

“Best case: We grab their man, squeeze him, find out what he knows. Tap him out, and we know what—if anything—they wanted to hide bad enough to chop our operative. We get a jump on the opposition. Leave a herring so they think their man spaced on his own, they don’t know we did it.

“Worst case: We grab their man, squeeze him, and he doesn’t have a clue what we are talking about. We still have to kill him, and they replace the known op with one we don’t know, and we still don’t get the prize. Doesn’t cost us much, but it’s not a win. And if our team steps on a bar of soap or something, or a convention of cools just happens to be passing by and grabs them, then we have to do some fast singing and dancing to make the problem go away. I don’t mind spending your money to do it, but it could leave a trail to our door for a smart hound to track. What they don’t know won’t hurt us.”

Shaw considered it. Sub-rosa field ops weren’t cheap, not the good ones, but it wasn’t as if he was going to miss a meal to pay for a new one—or a thousand new ones, if that was necessary. Newman would be in the same ship—he could replace his missing pawn without batting an eyelash.

“Collect him,” Shaw said. “At the very least, he was in the vicinity when our woman went down. He might not have done it, but maybe he knows who did. If she saw something she wasn’t supposed to see, there’s a good chance he saw it, too. I want to know what it was.”

Cervo nodded. “I’ll put our alpha team on it.”

“Do we have anything less than alpha teams, Cervo? Do I pay for betas or omegas?”

The bigger man grinned. Small and tight, but a smile nonetheless. Those were infrequent, and Shaw liked it that he could provoke Cervo into one now and again.

Once he was gone, Shaw repressed the urge to rub at the synthetic flesh on his forearm. The cut under it didn’t itch or throb—the chem in the medicated patch stopped that. And the medico had matched his skin tone pretty well, too—if you didn’t look closely, you might not even notice the bandage. A few days, the wound would be healed, the swarms of bioengineered bacteria and viruses would have done their job, and you’d have to know he’d been sliced to see any trace of it—no keloids would ridge up under Shaw’s own pharmaceutical-grade synthetic flesh, no sir.

He glanced at the pulsing time sig on the office wall. It had been an interesting night. Azul, then the woman he’d fought. He smiled.

Life was good.

 
Mourn watched Sola walk to the fresher, enjoying the view of her naked backside. She was a beautiful woman, made more appealing because she was smart and ambitious. He would enjoy her as long as it lasted, though he didn’t expect it to continue. Once she had what she wanted, she’d move on, and he wouldn’t be able to complain—they had some idea of who each other was when they decided to take it to a sexual level. There was a built-in limit.

She was back in a few moments, and she took a couple of quick steps and leaped onto the bed like a diver doing a belly flop. He smiled at that. The exuberance of youth. Nothing like it.

“Well, sir,
that
was fun,” she said.

“What, peeing?”

She laughed. “Yeah. That’s what I meant. Peeing.”

For a moment, neither spoke, and Mourn felt a tug on his emotions. He really liked her. More than he should.

“So, M. Combat Master, what are we going to do today. Go watch the grass grow? Or do you plan to teach me some more of this fighting dance you’re working on?”

“Neither,” he said. “There’s a place I know about that you might find interesting.”

“Lead on.”

 
It took three hours in a rented flitter to reach the park. Even from a distance, it was impressive.

“Jesu, what kind of trees are those? They must be a hundred meters tall!”

“Called Methusalahs, named after a planet in a pulsar binary system in M4, I think, most ancient world anybody has ever found. The bigger trees are nearly five thousand years old.”

Mourn piloted the flitter to a halt in the parking area half a klick from the start of the forest ring. He and Sola alighted and joined a line of walkers heading toward the trees. There were a hundred other flitters and a dozen chartertrans buses in the lot.

As they drew nearer the park, the huge size of the trees really became impressive. The Methusalahs were evergreens, kin to sumwins and fir, cone-shaped and pointed at the top, widest nearer the ground. The lowest branches of the canopy were thirty meters up, and the tallest of the trees was indeed more than a hundred meters from the needle-covered ground. Nothing grew under the dark shade save for Methusalah saplings and small ferns, and not a lot of either of those.