The Musashi Flex (25 page)

That was nothing compared to what Cayne was offering.

Cayne didn’t want to upset her parents. But she also knew that their lives were not going to be hers. Knew it to the depths of her being. Either they were going to be disappointed or she was; they had chosen
their
lives, she was going to choose
hers
.

“You don’t understand. I want to travel, to see the galaxy.”

“You can do that as a doctor! I have attended conferences on a dozen planets, we have all taken vacations on other worlds!”

Her temper flared. “No! I don’t want to have a few hours off from a conference on lung rot to hurry to some tourist gape, or spend two weeks a year trying to relax from fifty weeks caring for patients! It’s not me, Baba!”

“You are
seventeen years old,
you have no
notion
of what you want!”

“I know what I
don’t
want! I don’t to be stuck on some galactic hind-arm smiling all day at people who are sick or injured or dying until I become one of them!”

It only got worse after that. They both said things that couldn’t be taken back, hateful words that burned and cut and crumbled whatever relationship there was until there was no bridge left between them. Her father had stomped out, declaring that as long as she lived under his roof, she would do as he damn well said. And she had yelled after him that she wouldn’t be living under his roof any longer than it took to pack her clothes.

So much for the plan and their grudging acceptance.

In the end, she had stayed until she was eighteen, her mother trying all the while to patch things up and bring her back to the family’s path. But there had been slammed doors that couldn’t ever be opened again. It didn’t matter to Cayne. Her course was set, and wherever it might lead, however she might fail or succeed, it would be under her own direction, and not there . . .

 
The giant crop circles passed underneath the flitter as she finished her story. In the distance, a rain cell gathered into thunderheads, soon to offer water to the grains below.

“Sounds familiar,” Mourn said.

“Doesn’t it?” Sola said. “After a few years on the lanes talking to people, interviewing them, I realized that my story—and yours—aren’t unique, not even unusual. Maybe one person in five or six has a similar tale. Gave the parents a good-bye wave and hit the road for their grand adventure.”

“And has that been what it was for you? A grand adventure?”

“I’ve had my moments,” she said, smiling. “I’d prefer to be a little further along my chosen path than I am, but I’m still making progress. Still better than the alternative.”

“Let me guess. Someday, you plan to space back home and wave your success in your father’s face,” he said. “Pound him over the head with your credit balance.” It didn’t come out as a question.

“Pretty much.”

“I wanted to do that, too, once upon a time. First week I hit the Teens as a player, I got a couple of nice contracts, some sponsors. I wasn’t exactly rich, but all of a moment, I was making maybe three times as much a year as my father ever would in any year of his working life. I could have made him eat his words about never amounting to anything.”

“But you didn’t. Why not?”

He considered it for a second. “Because by the time I got there, it didn’t matter. I’d been my own man for fifteen years, earning my way, enjoying my life, no regrets. Wouldn’t have been any point to it.”

She raised an eyebrow at him.

He continued: “Year before I left this world, I had an arm-wrestling match with my da. We used to do that a lot. As a kid, he could easily beat me, but sometimes he let me win. Once I got to be about sixteen, he had to work harder, and the matches were for real. By then, I had been lifting weights and doing exercises for a couple years to build myself up for the Flex when I got there. I had also begun learning how to box and wrestle with some of the locals, and I was almost as big as I am now and no weakling. He could still beat me, though. He was proud of his strength, but he was getting older, and he wasn’t working out as much as he once had.

“Just before I turned eighteen, we had a match. There came a point during it when I knew I had him, I could win, no doubt about it. Knowing I could was enough for me, I didn’t have to do it. It was important for me to know; it didn’t matter so much to me that he knew it.”

“You let him win?”

“It seemed right, for all the years when he pretended that I had beaten him. My father wasn’t a bad man, he was just who he was, and that was limited to a world I didn’t want to be part of anymore. Later, we had more harsh words, and I left with both of us angry. I might have been able to go back and smooth it over, but I never did. I regret that. Even though I hadn’t seen him in more than a decade, when I found out he was dead, it was a shock. Once you realize your father can die, it changes things, even if you are in a job where you see a fair number of dead folks.”

She nodded, and Mourn felt as if she were doing so unconsciously.

“You’ve been your own woman making your way in the galaxy for what, eight, ten years? You don’t have to prove anything to anybody, you
know
.”

“Yes. I do know. But he won’t want to see it.”

“Maybe not. Or maybe you might be surprised. Not as if you have anything to lose, right?”

She looked doubtful. “Maybe.”

When Shaw left Azul’s hotel suite, he felt pretty damned good. Nothing quite like great sex with a beautiful, intelligent, and artistic woman who knew exactly what to do to take the edge off your physical tension.

The usual contingent of bodyguards lurked about, disguised as hotel staff and patrons. He took the private lift to the rooftop parking level. When the door opened, Cervo stood there. Shaw smiled, but Cervo’s expression remained blank. He had a puritanical streak, Cervo did. He never joked about sex. Never talked about it at all, come to that.

“Something?”

“We have collected Randall’s op.”

“Ah. And have you questioned him yet?”

“No, sir. I thought you’d want to be there to hear anything he has to say.”

“Good thought. Well. I’m refreshed and relaxed. No time like the present. Let’s go.”

Randall’s agent, whose name, Cervo said, was Belaire Cayliss, was being held at the compound in a room where no cams were installed.

The flight took all of five minutes. Cervo and Shaw went directly to the room.

Cayliss knew who Shaw and Cervo were, of course, and when he saw them his eyes widened, either in fear or surprise. Maybe both.

“M. Cayliss,” Shaw said. He waved for Cervo to go and stand behind the man, who sat in a plain plastic chair in front of a bare plastic table. Shaw pulled the chair from the opposite side of the table, and sat. “Let’s not waste each other’s time,” he said. “You know who I am, I know who and what you are. You have information I want. We need to come to an arrangement by which you will tell me what I want to know.”

Cayliss blinked. He was quite the good-looking young man, if your taste ran that way. Tall, well built, a face that would be considered handsome by most.

“So the only question is, how
much
will it take for you to become
my
agent instead of PR Randall’s man?”

Shaw could almost see the wheels turning in Cayliss’s mind. He had been kidnapped and was probably worried about not getting out of the situation alive. Selling out put a happier spin on things.

While he was mulling this over, Shaw said, “I’m a very rich fellow, as you know. What say we just say a million stads, and you take your money and space for a planet far away from here, never to return?”

Cayliss relaxed a bit. Now it had come to dickering, and he understood this well enough. “A million is not that much for giving up my career and worrying that the Confed might be coming up on me from behind for the rest of my life. M. Randall has a lot of friends in high places and a long memory.”

“True. Give me a number.”

“Five million.”

Shaw grinned. “What is it you think you know that is worth five million standards?”

Cayliss shook his head. “I don’t have a pronging clue, sir, but if we are talking about
any
number of millions, then you must think it’s pretty important.”

“Two million,” Shaw said.

“Four.”

“Three.”

Cayliss considered it. You could bank three million stads and live very comfortably off the interest forever without touching the principal. And certainly a sub-rosa field op would have another identity hidden away he could assume, just in case he had to leave town in a hurry.

“All right. Three million. But how do I know you’ll pay me once you get the information?”

Shaw glanced up at Cervo, who produced a bank encoder. Cervo touched a number, then a record button. There was a small
beep!
as the device coded a credit cube. The cube was as wide as the tip of a man’s thumb and half as thick. Servo handed the cube to Cayliss, who squeezed all four corners of it simultaneously with his fingertips and the tips of his thumbs. A small holoprojic image lit over the cube, showing a cash-value notation and the number GS 3,000,000, along with a Bank Galactica imprint holograph. It looked real, because it
was
real.

“So now you are a millionaire, M. Cayliss.”

Nothing like haggling your way from maybe dying to three million stads to put a smile on a man’s face. “What do you want to know?”

“One of my operatives was killed in an alley near the port recently. She was following you. Did you do it?”

Cayliss shook his head. “No.”

“Cervo, the date?”

The big man rumbled it off.

Shaw said, “Why were you at the port that day?”

“I was working courier. I had an info ball to deliver. A woman arriving at the port from offworld, I don’t know from where.”

“Who was she?”

“I don’t know. I had a temp-holo of her, but I’d never seen her before, and my control didn’t give me a name.”

“You know what was on the ball?”

“No. It was coded.”

Shaw smiled. “You tried to see?”

The man shrugged. “Never know what might be important. But I couldn’t open the file.”

“Tell me about this woman.”

“I only saw her for a few seconds to make the pass. Average height, maybe twenty-eight or thirty years old, plain-looking, blond hair, worn moderately long. Nothing special about her clothes, not carrying a travel case. I passed her the ball. We didn’t speak. I cycled out. If your agent was following me, she was damned good, because I looked for a tail when I left, and I didn’t spot her.”

Shaw considered the information.

“What kind of work do you normally do for Newman?”

“Courier, surveillance, cam-set and collection, bug-sweeps, whatever he needs. Nothing heavy, nothing wet. If somebody on one of our teams killed your op, I didn’t hear a whisper about it.”

Shaw nodded. “Well. I guess we’re done, then. Cervo, take the man to wherever he wants to go.” He flicked a look at the bodyguard.

Cayliss started to stand, smiling. He was young, free, and now rich. Life looked pretty good to him at the moment.

Cervo wrapped one thick arm around the man’s neck and braced it from behind with the other arm in a triangle choke.

Cayliss struggled, but after fifteen seconds, he was unconscious—the blood had been shut off to his brain. A knockout artery choke generally wasn’t fatal. But if you continued to keep the air from the brain after the victim passed out, for three or four minutes? That would kill them.

The man dangled from Cervo’s grip as if he weighed nothing. Shaw had already left the room by the time M. Cayliss was no longer among the living. The corpse would be fed to the recyclers, and the credit cube would be deposited back into the secret slush account from which Cervo had drawn it before the grinders finished reducing the dead man to parts beyond recognition.

Amazing what a cube worth a few million in a man’s hand would do to convince him you were his friend and meant him no harm.

So his old pal Newman had passed some kind of information to somebody. They still didn’t know who had killed their agent, and whatever the Confed’s PR had sent on that info ball to whoever it was was as much a mystery as it was before they’d questioned the dead op.

Well. Some days that was how it went.

He could have Cervo do a scan of port cams on that date, but tens of thousands of people passed through the gates every day, and for all they knew, the mystery woman could have turned back around and gotten on the next boxcar uplifting for orbit.

No, probably she had not done that. What if the dead woman assigned to follow the late Cayliss had switched her surveillance from him—to the blonde? That might explain her demise. Maybe she got spotted and taken out. In which case, it was likely that the blonde was more than passing adept as an undercover agent herself. Blond. Average. Plain. Didn’t sound like anybody he knew.

She could have come here for a thousand reasons, and all but one unconnected to Shaw in any way, but he needed to know. Just as knowledge was power, a lack of it was a weakness.

He’d have Cervo do some more checking. The port cams, passenger registration for single women arriving, like that. Maybe they could turn up something.

 
Mourn went through the pattern of steps he had established again, for the fourth time in thirty minutes since he had warmed up. It was more tiring than it should be, he thought, after what was only half an hour’s effort.

He could do fifteen steps pretty well. The logical sixteenth step was a little tricky, but he could manage it okay. The next five were increasingly difficult, so that at the twenty-first step, he was almost always off-balance to the point where he nearly fell.

He reached the twenty-first step, and once again, his center of gravity was too far over his lead foot. He had to step out of it, and that was the wrong direction to be doing that. How best to correct that? Angle away?