The Musashi Flex (7 page)

What made sense was, the watcher was connected to the reason the PR had called her here. Maybe somebody had figured out that he’d put out a sig for an undercover op, and they wanted to see who it was.

If that was the case, if she was burned before she ever got out of the fucking groundport, then she might as well turn around and get back on the next boxcar up to the orbital, because the only way she could effectively work was if nobody here knew who she was. Hard to be a sub-rosa op if you are carrying around a big flashing sign that says “Spy!” in glowing letters.

The watcher had probably attached herself to the pretty boy who had come to give Azul the info ball, and if that was the case, then the little woman who was trying to be invisible now knew who she was, and it was game over.

Azul kept walking as she considered all this, trying to look unconcerned. Abruptly, the solution to this last problem welled up in her thoughts. If there was but one watcher set to find her, if there wasn’t another one dogging her tracks, then maybe things could be . . . repaired.

First, she had to determine what the situation was, vis-à-vis being shadowed. If the woman was alone, then she had an option.

 
Mourn smiled at the encounter again as he exited the hotel. It wasn’t as if he didn’t do that fairly frequently—smile—but it was rare these days that there was any real amusement in those expressions. Long ago and far away, there had been much more of that, but not lately. He had liked Sola. The woman had nerve. Of course, she was young and ambitious, and with her beauty, that was a dangerous combination.

He spent thirty minutes making sure he wasn’t followed, including a check for hidden transmitters in his clothes. He hadn’t brushed up against anybody, nor had he felt the tap of a blowgun burr hitting him, but it was always better safe than sorry.

When he was sure he was clean, he worked his way back to his primary house. He always rented two places whenever he moved to a new city, under different names. They were usually close enough so he could walk from one to the other, and sometimes in the middle of the night, he would arise and do just that.

Caution was automatic after all the years.

The primary residence was a small single-family condo with a yard, in the suburbs of the city, with the secondary being a room in a megaplex a couple of blocks away. Whenever he could, he liked to get a place with a yard, preferably one with a tall privacy fence. He liked to train outside.

A quick transponder check of his bioelectronic telltales showed that nobody had come calling—the locked gate for the everplast fence had not been opened, unless the person who did it was an electronics genius. Once inside with the gate locked, he did a scan of the yard, in case somebody had managed to make it over the two-and-a-half-meter-high fence. Apparently nobody had. Then he checked the house. He was alone.

He went to the com. He seldom carried a personal unit, it was too easy to locate somebody who was tied into a planetary communications net. Some planets were not above bugging personal coms so that they would send out a position sig even when the thing was ostensibly turned off. Could make for a nasty surprise if somebody got globesat codes and decided to pay you an unannounced visit. Yeah, he ran below the Confed’s Doppler, at least most of the time, but it was a big dog, and if it got on your trail, you’d be hard-pressed to outrun it. Why open yourself to any more risk than you had to?

The com unit he had in the house wore a scrambler and a detector to tell him in case somebody tried to tap into it. He set it for vox-only and instructed it to access the number he had memorized. He didn’t bother to rascal his voice.

“Yeah?”

“I’m looking for Theo Popper.”

There was a pause. That would be Popper running Mourn’s voice through his ID program. “Mourn,” he said. “I thought that was you. Nice to hear from you.”

“Always my pleasure,” Mourn said.

Popper made some money as an information broker, but mostly he was a handicapper, a bookie for those who wanted to bet on Flex matches. For this reason, he kept track of ranked players who showed up in his sector.

“What can I do for you, Mourn?”

“Just checking in. Anybody in the sector I should know about?”

“Not really. Been fairly slow here on the homeworld the last few months. You’re the only Top Twenty guy still alive on-planet. Well. Except for Weems.”

“You just loved dropping that on me, didn’t you?”

Popper laughed, a rough, ragged sound caused by too many flickstiks smoked over too many years. Man always had one lit.

Z. B. Weems was the top of the heap—the Number One Ranked Player in the Musashi Flex,
El Primero
. A man who could kill with either hand—or a foot or elbow or a head butt—without bothering to resort to his favorite weapon, a plain old carbon-fiber cane. With that in hand, he pretty much could beat the crap out of everybody—at least he had so far—nobody could touch him with anything short of a firearm, and even that would be iffy if he was within ten meters when they reached for their weapon. Weems was a light heavy, but as fast as a flyweight, unnaturally fast, and as hard as a leather sack full of granite. He had been the best for more than a year, and that was impressive these days.

“I don’t suppose you want to have a go at him?” Popper said.

Mourn laughed. “You don’t suppose right. I couldn’t anyway.”

“Yeah, you could. After Harnett, you made it to Ten.”

Interesting. Among the convoluted rules of the Flex and its intricate scoring were several that laid out who could challenge whom. Basically, you could theoretically go up against anybody who was ranked lower, but you didn’t get any points unless you beat somebody who was within ten of your own rank, and even then only a few points, if you were lucky. Going the other way, you couldn’t challenge anybody in the top hundred who was more than ten ranks above you without a dispensation from the Rules Committee. As a practical matter, the RC didn’t give those out. This was to keep the high ranks from having to deal with every dim-brained kid who thought he had a hand that was better than his rank. If you tried to jump too many levels, the higher-ranked player was allowed to stop you by whatever means possible, and even if he didn’t, and you somehow won, you wouldn’t get the victory. If you were stupid enough to try, the Enforcers would chill you. That tended to keep the fool count in the game down somewhat. He’d made it to Ten once before, briefly, but that had been a couple years back.

“I’ll pass,” Mourn said.

“Too bad. I could have made some stads.”

“Really? Who’d bet on me?”

“Give high enough odds, they come,” Popper said. “Always some dweeb who’s got a system.”

“Anybody else?”

“Nobody who can challenge you. And unless Weems is bored, he probably won’t go looking for you.”

“He knows I’m here.”

“I might have mentioned it. He wasn’t impressed.”

Mourn laughed. “Thanks for the info, Popper.”

“Hey, it’s what I do. Let me know if you mean to thump somebody I might have missed.”

“I will.”

Business concluded, Mourn shut off the com and went to the yard to begin his workout.

 
Luna Azul was certain that she had but a single watcher as she left the port and began to walk. Unlike the last world she’d been on, it was warm. Different hemisphere, different season. Not unduly hot, but enough so that a brisk walk quickly caused a sweat to break. At least it wasn’t so humid that the sweat didn’t evaporate. She hated climates like that, where the perspiration soaked your clothes and kept them wet, and when it pooled in your shoes . . .

If the watcher was surprised that she didn’t catch a commercial transport, she gave no sign of it. The little woman immediately crossed the street and began a side tail, staying out of Azul’s peripheral vision. If she hadn’t known who the woman was, she would have picked her up eventually, but the tail was good enough so it might have taken a little while.

It didn’t take long to find a place she liked. A cut-through from this street to the next, not really an alley, but not really a road, either, more like a wide driveway.

Azul took the turn, and as soon as she was out of her watcher’s sight, she began a sprint. A hundred meters in, she spotted a trash bin. It was sealed, a truck-lock on it, so people too cheap to pay for haulers couldn’t dump their garbage into it. But it was also far enough from the building wall so that somebody could slip behind the heavy, dark green plastcast container, which was two meters tall and twice that wide, set upon four squat wheels.

Azul hid behind the bin and breathed deeply several times to catch her breath. She needed to do more aerobics—that little sprint shouldn’t have cost her that much effort.

After half a minute, she heard the follower’s footsteps coming down the driveway. From her boot, Azul removed a onetime shot tube. It was not much more than a big firecracker—a charge of compressed gas behind a wad and a couple dozen expoxy-boron pellets set in semiperm gel, with the barrel only six or seven centimeters long. The whole thing was made of spun carbon fiber, and the outside was coated in something that wouldn’t take fingerprints or hold DNA residue. It wouldn’t pass an HO scanner, but it would slip past metal detectors. It was a throwaway weapon, useful for close range. Outside of five or six meters, hitting a target would be iffy—the thing had no sights, and you pointed it like you would your finger, squeezed it in the right spot, and it went off.

Azul didn’t particularly want to use it, but she was glad she had it. It might facilitate a conversation.

If the tail had any smarts, she’d be wary approaching the trash bin.

Azul stood on a thin rim that formed a lip that ran around the bottom of the bin. If the watcher bent down and looked under the thing, she wouldn’t see anybody’s legs.

She assumed the watcher would look—Azul would have—and she also assumed that not seeing anybody hiding there wouldn’t be enough to convince the watcher by itself.

The footsteps slowed. Stopped close by.

Azul edged along the back of the bin toward the far end.

She heard another couple of tentative steps away from that end. Azul got there, stepped down. She took a deep breath and made sure of her grip on the shot tube, then stepped out of concealment.

The watcher was looking the other way, but the movement caught her attention, and she spun quickly toward Azul.

“Who sent you?” Azul asked.

The woman jerked, surprised, and clawed for something in her back pocket.

Crap
—
!

Azul squeezed the shot tube. There was a loud
whump!
as the gas charge went off. The gel held together for a couple meters, then the shot started to spread. It was still clumped into a pattern no bigger than Azul’s hand when it hit the watcher square in the face.

The woman’s own weapon fell from her grip and clattered onto the plastcrete. A spring gun, Azul saw, as deadly as the shot tube in the right hands.

Not the watcher’s hands, though.

Azul looked up and down the driveway. Nobody in sight.
Shit.

There was little point in searching the body—the watcher was certainly good enough so she wouldn’t have a folded note in her pocket with her employer’s name on it and directions to his home—and being seen with a corpse was not the way to start a new assignment—especially when you had caused the death. Still, you never knew.

She pulled a pair of thinskin gloves from her pocket.

Aside from the gun, the dead woman had a credit cube and an ID. That was all. The cube held two hundred stads. Azul tucked it into her pocket—she would lose it as soon as she could, but she might as well make it look like robbery.

The ID bore the name “Kat Brant” and a local address, but Azul guessed that one or both of these bits of data were probably false. She took that, too—no point in doing the cools’ work for them.

She’d wanted her alive, to find out who’d sent her. There hadn’t been any real choice, not once the woman had gone for her gun; but if she was dead, well, that would also serve. Sorry, fem.

At least Kat there wouldn’t be carrying any descriptions back to her masters.

The game was back on.

 
Mourn liked to break his workout into three or four chunks, rather than one long session. He would practice an hour in the morning, another hour or two in the afternoon, and if he had the energy, an hour before he went to sleep. He had been doing this for so many years that it had long ago ceased to be a matter of discipline. It was what he did, a part of the biz, training, and while there was only so much you could manage by yourself, you had to do it if you wanted to stay reasonably sharp. Every player of rank he knew trained every day. If he missed a day for any reason, it felt really weird.

One of the first things he did when he got to a city of any size was find a martial arts kiosk to get supplies—bag gloves, bandages, unguents, odds and ends. Mourn moved light, no more than he could carry. When he stepped off a ship or a boxcar, he had a travel bag and his guitar, that was it. When you had stads, you bought what you needed along the way and left it behind when you departed. In his game, you had to be ready to move at a moment’s notice—you never carried anything you couldn’t leave behind. Although he would hate to lose another guitar, better that than some of the options.

Mourn did a series of stretches and plyometrics to warm up, some shadowboxing and kicking. Then he went through the
silat
forms he had learned, eighteen short dances called
djurus
. The
djurus
contained in them all the fighting moves one could efficiently make with one’s upper body, so he had been taught. There were separate exercises for the lower body, using various geometric platforms—straight line, triangle, square, cross pattern—and he did those, too.