The Musashi Flex (28 page)

He leaned back. She was too clever by half, this one. She couldn’t know, he had never told anybody, but she had a piece of it, somehow. Maybe it
was
artistic intuition.

“You don’t have to tell me,” she said. “It’s none of my business.”

Which was true, but she already knew about it, just not how important it was to him. What could it hurt for her to know? He was in it now, and it would come out soon enough, once he started wading through the high-ranked players and knocking them silly.

“The Flex,” he said. “I’m going to become the top player in the Musashi Flex.”

She nodded, as if the idea wasn’t the least bit silly. “Are you good enough to do it?”

“I am now.”

“You must have trained for a long time.”

“I have. More than fifteen years, three major arts, half a dozen minor ones.” He considered for a moment telling her about Reflex. No. She didn’t need to know about that.

“How far do you have to go?”

“Not far at all,” he said. “It’s just a matter of time.”

M. Cluster was waiting at the appointed place. There were two men there, but Mourn marked the fighter as soon as he saw him. Cluster was large, pushing two meters tall, and probably almost a hundred kilos, well built, dressed to move, and probably ten or twelve years younger than Mourn.

Aren’t they
all,
these days? Younger?

Cluster looked familiar, but Mourn couldn’t remember seeing him before. Man must have come up from the ranks recently, maybe while Mourn was training in Java. Happened that way sometimes. You thought you knew everybody in your shifting cohort, knew whom you could challenge, who could come looking for you, but sometimes you got a surprise.

The man with Cluster was younger still, maybe twenty-five, and handsome to the point of prettiness. The younger man seemed fit enough, to judge from the tight and paint-thin orthoskins he wore, but he didn’t stand or move like a fighter.

Boyfriend,
Mourn figured.

Cayne looked at the pair. She said, “I ran a check on Cluster. He’s been on a streak. A year ago, he was Seventy-First. Three months ago, he was Thirty-Fifth, and he’s jumped twenty-one places since, took him six fights. He must be pretty good.”

Mourn nodded. “Happens that way, sometimes. Let’s go say hello.”

They approached the two men and stopped three meters away.

“Ah, Mourn. And your lovely companion . . . ?”

“F. Sola,” Mourn said. “A documentarian doing recordings.”

Cayne waggled her cam.

“Really? I’d like a copy of the fight when we’re done, if it isn’t too much trouble?”

“Even if you lose?” she offered.

“Oh,
especially
if I lose, I’ll need to see what happened. But I won’t. Lose.”

He turned and smiled at the younger man. “This is Jorjay, my . . .
intended
. Maybe if you and I kill each other, Mourn, Jorjay and Fem Sola can
console
each other.”

Jorjay glared at Cluster. “Never going to let me forget it, are you? One time it happened, just the
once
.”

Cluster shrugged and gave the younger man a toothy, fake smile. “So you say. And of course, I believe you.”

He turned back to Mourn. “I’m Fourteenth, as of this morning, at which time you were Tenth, so everything should be in order. If you want to check first . . . ?”

Mourn shook his head. “I’ll take your word for it. I’d like to do this bare,” he said. “If you don’t mind?”

“That works for me. Hate to put blood on my new weeds.”

Mourn smiled. He was aware that Cayne had switched on her cam and was moving to the side for a better view.

“A question first?”

“If it’s not too personal,” Cluster said. He smiled back.

“How did you happen to come across me here?”

“Ah. Well. Jorjay and I came to see the crater—we were in the neighborhood and thought it would be a . . . romantic stop. I have a new toy—it’s not quite . . . legal, but it involves a piece of computer software that will scan and match faces against those stored in its memory. It’s very good, this program, it uses fifty points of match, including the ears, which almost nobody bothers to disguise. I have the images of the Top Twenty stored and whenever I can get access to a planet’s port security cams—which is actually much easier than you’d think, if you don’t mind spending a few stads—I run the recordings through the program. Hard to do that on really populated worlds with a lot of traffic, it takes forever, but on a lightly settled planet like this one without all that many visitors, I can check back as long as a few weeks. You came up, and how fortunate for me that was. I hired an investigator to find you. You weren’t trying to hide, so here I am.”

Mourn nodded. “Clever.”

“I must confess the computer program was Jorjay’s idea, and his creation. He’s a smart lad with such things.”

Jorjay smiled, revealing dimples.

He got a real smile in return from Cluster this time.

Wasn’t love wonderful?

Bad luck, but at least it wasn’t something that Weems could do to find him—unless he figured out which planet Mourn was on. He might consider wearing a skinmask to hide his features when he spaced to new worlds. And he’d have to remember to disguise his ears, too.

Mourn said, “You ready?”

“Anytime.”

“Let’s dance.”

Mourn turned to a forty-five-degree angle, bent his knees, and lowered his stance, watching the bigger man. For martial arts to really work, you needed for it to be almost reflexive, and he hadn’t been training the new steps long enough for that. He was going to have to think more than he wanted, but if he was going to try it, that was just how it would have to be. If the new stuff didn’t work, and he survived the clash, he could always revert to what he knew.

If
he survived the clash . . .

Cluster did crossover backsteps to his left, circling toward Mourn’s right side. Mourn turned to keep his angle, but didn’t move otherwise. The man looked like a power fighter, and likely he would come in fast and hard if he was, but you couldn’t be sure of that until you saw him make a serious move. Could be a boxer or a grappler, it was too early to tell. You had to be ready for either.

Cluster angled in and gained a little ground, then stole a full step, disguising it with hand motions to draw Mourn’s attention, and leaning back, so that his upper body seemed to stay in one place as his lead foot advanced. Nice, but it didn’t fool Mourn—he knew exactly what the man was doing, and likely he didn’t really think Mourn would be fooled so easily—not at this level.

As Cluster shifted his weight forward onto his lead foot, just a hair outside Mourn’s attack range, Mourn did a little scrunch with his feet and scooted back a few centimeters. Not much, just enough to make it necessary for Cluster to advance another quarter step if he wanted to reach his quarry in a step and a half.

A step and a half was knife-fighting distance. Any closer, and Mourn could attack; any farther away, and it would take too long for Cluster to reach him before Mourn could set for the intercept. In Mourn’s new creation, position was paramount, more important than speed or power. He’d borrowed that from
silat,
along with the idea of step patterns, though he had created his own.

Cluster marked the distance and nodded slightly. He sidestepped and turned, to switch from a right hand and foot lead to his left side.

So far, Cluster was reading it right and not doing anything stupid. Mourn still hadn’t marked him as a hitter or a wrestler. He could be either or both—a lot of the eclectic styles had been successful with the blend. In a one-on-one duel, with no need to worry about an enemy’s confederates, grappling and going to the ground could be a sound move. If you could get a mount, do an arm bar and break, you could end a fight fast. If you did the shoot for a single- or double-leg and missed the takedown against a skilled player who knew what to do, though, you might not get another chance. Even if you got it, somebody who knew how to grapple could lock you into his guard, and it would still be anybody’s fight . . .

Stop thinking so much, Mourn. Just relax and see what happens
.

As Cluster was jockeying back and forth to try and sneak closer, Mourn helped him out: He scooted forward, to his range, which put him into Cluster’s attack distance, since Cluster was taller. As Cluster bunched his muscles for the leap, Mourn watched his nostrils. They widened a hair as the man inhaled—

Mourn continued in fast, on Cluster’s air intake, but stutter-stepped, long, then short, to retard his timing—

Cluster thought Mourn was moving faster than he really was—he set up his block, holding his ground, not backing away, but he moved too fast, because Mourn wasn’t
there
yet—

Mourn threw the right punch he expected to be blocked, so that he could follow up with the left hand in an open slap, and then back to the right elbow, and he was in perfect position, just like on the pattern he’d been practicing—

The retarded timing messed Cluster up. He
missed the first block
! A quarter of a second too slow!

Mourn hadn’t expected the punch to go through, but it wasn’t a fake, just in case. His right fist smacked into the man’s nose, and Cluster’s head rocked back as Mourn’s open left came around in a short gunslinger’s draw from the low line hip, and caught him flat against the temple, rocking him to his left, dropping fast to cover low line, as Mourn’s already-rising right elbow went to the opposite temple—

Bam, bam,
bam
—! Three shots, three hits.

Cluster sprawled, bonelessly. Out cold on his way to the ground.

Just like that, it was over. One of the fastest fights Mourn had ever had, one series, and done!

Son of a
bitch!
The new stuff
worked!

 
Back in their rented cottage, Sola said, “You aren’t going to submit the fight?”

Mourn was watching the recording of the fight on the room’s holoproj. Even though he had been there and done it, it was amazing to watch. It looked so much faster than it had felt. He had hit it dead-on.

He paused the recording, just as his right elbow connected with Cluster’s temple. “No. He was four ranks below mine, I won’t get any real lift points for it, and I don’t want to let the showrunners know where I am. Got to figure Weems has ears in there somewhere. Winner reports, and Cluster won’t say anything, so it didn’t happen. He’s got a headache and no real injuries, a little concussion. I expect Jorjay will take good care of him.”

She shook her head. Looked at him. Heard the pure joy in his voice. “If you were any more pleased with yourself, you would pop.”

He smiled, real big. “Yeah. I confess, it’s true. I thought it would work, but you never know until the moment comes.”

“You made it look easy,” she admitted. She waved at the frozen image.

“It
was
easy. That’s the part that’s so funny—I could have developed this years ago, if I’d stopped to think about it. I never did. I owe it to you.”

She said, “Not really. All I did was ask a question—you took it and did something with it. Ideas are cheap. I used to get approached regularly by wanna-be entcom makers. They’d say, ‘I got this great idea—how about I tell it to you, you make the ’com, and we’ll split the money?’”

She laughed. “Most people in my biz have a trunkful of ideas they won’t live long enough to get done. It isn’t the spark, it’s what you do with it that makes it work. Be like somebody telling you, ‘Hey, Mourn? Why don’t you move better, you know, more efficiently? Then you’ll win more often, hey?’ ”

He laughed. “That’s true, as far as it goes.”

“Yeah, but a long way from A to Z.” She paused. “So what now?”

“Well, even though I don’t think Cluster is going to tell anybody he ran into us here, I’d rather not take the chance. I still have some work to do on the steps. I’d like to finish that.”

“You think you can make it good enough to beat Weems?”

He didn’t smile when he answered: “I don’t know. Maybe.”

“So, where are we going?”

“I think Koji. That somehow seems appropriate. We can leave tomorrow, I’ll book us a cabin.”

Koji. The Holy World. Where, so it was said, if you sat on a bench in the park, you’d eventually see one of everything pass by. She’d been there once a couple years back, doing a story. It was a busy world. Sometimes, the best place to hide was in the middle of a crowd.

“Come on,” he said. “Let me show you a new move.”

“Really? A man your age?”

He laughed. “No, not that kind of move. A step I figured out.”

“How many of them do you have now?”

“Seventy-four, for sure. Another five or six possibles I’m not certain about yet. I’ll need maybe sixteen, eighteen more, I figure, to cover everything.”

She nodded at him. A few minutes ago, he had been fighting a match that could have ended with him seriously injured or dead. Now? He was ready to practice, as if the match had been no big deal. Amazing man, Mourn.

 
They put the yacht into orbit around the world of Mason, sometimes still called Alpha Point, and took Shaw’s personal lighter down the gravity well to the surface. Azul wondered how the poor people who traveled commercial ships then got packed into boxcars like grunion for the drop were doing. She watched the lights of the world go on when they crossed the terminator and onto the nightside. Always enjoyed that view as the tiny, bright dots began to sparkle in the night . . .

The yacht’s runabout put into a private berth at the port, the local customs agents made a cursory appearance and did a less than thorough check of their identifications, and a rented flitter was already standing by to transport them to a nearby hotel. Billionaires got treated differently from the riffraff—hardly a surprise, that.