The Musashi Flex (33 page)

“Well, if my information is correct, you have a little over a week to get ready. Assuming he can knock over a few folks who might get in his way, which he can certainly do.” He looked at Sola. “You be sure and record it, luv, and you can show it to me after we hold Mourn’s wake.”

The idea of Mourn being dead did not go down well at all.

“We don’t have to stay,” she said to Mourn.

Kiley laughed. “You survive, you want to hang on to this one. Damned if she doesn’t
care
about you. Count your blessings. While you can.”

Mourn’s first fight was only a day after he and Kiley had talked. He could have avoided it, but having decided he was going to stick around for Weems’s arrival, he thought
Fuck it
and put his real name into the local com directory. Anybody wanted to talk to him, all they had to do was call.

He was in the kitchen in the rented cottage, preparing lunch, Cayne behind him at the table, staring through the window.

She didn’t say anything out loud, but he felt it from her.

“You don’t want me to do this, do you?”

“I’m not the person to tell you what you can or can’t do, Mourn.”

“You are afraid for me.”

“Is that so awful?”

“No, I appreciate it. But you know the story about the viper?”

“Refresh my memory.”

“A viper got caught in a snowstorm. Being cold-blooded, this was a death sentence. A man passing by saw the snake. The viper said, ‘Please, sir, pick me up and warm me against your body, else I’ll freeze to death.’

“The man said, ‘No fool I! You’ll bite me and I will die!’

“‘No, I promise I won’t! Please!’

“So the man collected the snake and put him in his pocket. After a while, the viper warmed, and then he bit the man through his shirt.

“‘Viper! You have poisoned me! You lied!’

“And the snake said—”

“‘You knew what I was when you picked me up,’” Sola finished.

Mourn smiled. “Are you planning on coming along and recording the fight?”

“Yes.”

“And if I start to lose, will you stop recording?”

“I take your point, Mourn. We are what we are. You fight. I record. Those are our roles.”

“For now, yes.” He shrugged. “Who knows what later will bring?”

The fight was against Wim Diversela, an HG mue who was one of the best heavyweights in the game. He was ranked Ninth. Even though Mourn was one rank higher at Tenth, Diversela challenged—and let it be known he was doing it for a warm-up—he wasn’t interested in cutting Mourn to pieces with his bowie-knife variant, a Texas toothpick, so he’d appreciate it, even though Mourn was the challenged party, if they could do it bare. Diversela expected that he would beat Mourn and that the match would help ready him for lower numbers—maybe not Weems himself, but somebody in the Top Five. You wanted to keep your edge, you had to work it against skilled players as much as possible.

Mourn understood this and was happy to oblige.

They met behind Mourn’s cottage.

The match took four seconds—Diversela charged, Mourn moved and tripped him, and caught him with a kick on the back of the head on his way to the ground. It was the fastest match he’d ever had in all his years in the Flex.

“Jesu, Mourn,” Cayne said, “I hardly had time to turn my cam on!” But she was relieved, he could see that.

Truth was, he was a bit relieved himself. Beating Cluster, that could have been luck. Winning a second fight made what he had seem more real.

Cayne, on the other hand, was definitely turning into more baggage than he would have guessed. Still, it didn’t feel
all
that heavy. Just not something he was used to having.

Mourn didn’t figure the match would do much for his ranking, and he was right. He and Diversela swapped places, that was it.

Still, Ninth was the highest he had ever been.

Three days later, Ali Muhammed Mather, ranked Fifth, arrived on-planet. What the hell, Mourn figured, in for a demi-, in for a stad. He called Mather. Mather was hoping for Weems, but Weems wasn’t there yet, and if he declined, he might lose a place or two, and while it didn’t really matter in the Ten vis-à-vis who you could challenge, his ego didn’t want the knock. Mather agreed. He also chose bare.

That match took, by Cayne’s count, nineteen seconds, and that only because Mather had a pain threshold high enough to keep hobbling around with a broken ankle. It took a second sweep-and-stomp that broke the other ankle to keep him down.

At that level, you generally took the place of the man you beat, so Mourn moved to Fifth.

By now, word had gotten around. Orleans Plinck had retired at Third, and Besimi Besimi, a Vishnuan, of all things, had moved into that spot. He came to see what Mourn had.

This fight, also bare, took longer. Besimi, a light heavy, was cautious, and he kept trying to bait Mourn into an attack, so he could counter. Mourn wasn’t going to give the man anything to work with, so they spent four or five minutes circling and feinting, nobody offering any real threats.

Besimi’s patience was shorter than Mourn’s. He finally thought he had an open head shot, and he took it. It was a trap. The forty-seventh step worked perfectly, and Besimi hit the ground hard enough to knock out both his air and his consciousness.

Just like that, Mourn had risen and defeated three of the Top Players, without working up a sweat on any of them.

It was awfully hard not to be overconfident. He knew better, but even so, either he’d encountered three top fighters when they were all having really bad days, or he had come up with something worth having.

Once the art he was working on got out, once people saw it and began to understand it, there would be countermeasures devised against it. That was inevitable. But for somebody who had never seen it before, somebody who expected Mourn to fight as his old recordings might indicate, the surprise had, thus far anyway, proven to be overwhelming. Such things had happened before, many times in many places. Two foreign cultures came together, they didn’t know what arts the other had devised, and some nasty and painful surprises came out of the meetings. Eventually, once you understood what your enemy had, you could figure out a way around it; but “eventually” was the key term. Eventually, everybody died, and eventually, the universe would spin down; it was what you did until your time came that mattered.

Mourn and Cayne lay in bed after making love, and she said, “So, how does it feel to be Third, Mourn? Two men away from the top? You excited?”

He considered it for a moment before he spoke. “Not really,” he said. “How weird is that?” And that was the truth of it. He wasn’t excited. He was more interested in testing what he had built than in the ranking he had achieved. Doing it right, win or lose.

“Goals change, Mourn. You grow, and things don’t seem as important as they once were.”

Out of the mouths of babes. Yeah. He was beginning to see that.

He wasn’t sure that he liked it. You get to the top of the mountain you’ve been climbing most of your life and once there, you decide you don’t like the view?

How crappy was that?

He wasn’t at the top yet, and he still might not get there, but he was close enough that it didn’t seem like such a long haul. And the view? Better than at the base, but . . . not really all that special . . .

 
“Who the fuck is Lazlo Mourn?” Shaw was irritated, and the question was rhetorical—he was alone when he said it.

This guy, had to be five or six years older than Shaw, came out of nowhere after having bounced around in the low Twenties and high Teens forever. A solid fighter, better than a lot, but nothing to make the Top Ten lose any sleep until lately, when he started to tear through them like a needler punching holes in tissue paper! How?

Could it be that Mourn had some kind of chemical aid, too?

Could it be? And if so, was it better than the one Shaw had?

No, that was not possible. Shaw knew his field. He was at the cutting edge and everybody else was far behind. Nobody could have come up with Reflex on his own without leaving a wide trail, and he had people looking all the time. It was something else. Some new trick, and it had to be pretty good for Mourn to have beaten the players he’d defeated.

It would be nice to know what the trick was.

A rumor had it, somebody had recorded Mourn’s recent fights—a documentarian, from what Shaw’s agents could determine, but nobody seemed able to find her to make an offer for her footage. Nobody had a name or location for her, only that she had been there and caught the fights.

It was vexing. But
Primero
was coming, and Shaw had improved his own position among the contenders so he was only two fights away from being able to challenge anybody in the Top Ten. Win those, and it didn’t matter about this Mourn asshole. No matter what skill he had, he couldn’t beat Shaw’s speed.

“Cervo!”

The big man appeared as if by magic.

“Yes?”

“Find out who the woman is who has recorded the fights between Lazlo Mourn and the guys he beat this past week. Pay her whatever she wants for the footage.”

“Okay.”

“And where is my next opponent?”

“He’ll be arriving here tomorrow.”

“Good.”

He was rising fast, faster than he’d hoped. By the time Weems got here, he’d be almost ready. Another match, two, and he could challenge
Primero
. Getting so close he could almost taste it . . .

 
When the op bumped into her on the street at the outdoor market and passed her the info ball, Azul felt a sudden premonition grip her in its cold fingers. The woman was good—she was a short, round, young-mother type, complete with two preteen girls in tow. The children looked to be about nine and seven or so. Nobody would look at her and think “Aha, a sub-rosa operative!”

The day was warm and sunny, the smells of sugarbread frying and harmonic incense crystals sharp, and the walla of the shoppers attending the vendors soft and nonthreatening.

The exchange was quick, and the four bodyguards shadowing her wouldn’t have caught it if they’d been five meters away, much less half the block to the front and back of her.

“Oops, sorry,” the op said.

“My fault entirely,” Azul said. “Have a good day.”

“You, too.” The woman smiled and said, “Come on, girls, Dads is waiting!”

With the warm steel marble palmed and hidden, the bright and happy day took a nasty turn, and her sense of danger grew.

How had they
found
her?

Shaw would have filed a flight plan for his yacht, and they had moved into a very large dwelling near the edge of town, a walled estate. Shaw had rented or leased it—for all she knew, it already belonged to him, or he could have bought it on the spot. Billionaires tended to shine like no-vas wherever they went unless they were making great efforts to keep their light hidden. But Shaw
was
trying to maintain a low profile, because when he went out to fight in the Flex matches, he didn’t want a crowd. So while he wasn’t wearing a skinmask and skulking about after dark, he also wasn’t advertising who he was.

Of course the Confed could have tracked him. He could have a bug on his ship, a WR transmitter that would allow somebody to home in on it from light-years away. But even so, tracking the ship was not the same as tracking
her
. If an op was able to casually walk up and deliver a message as the woman had just done, that meant something else. The Confed would have to have a team of agents tailing her—they’d need more than one—and she’d have long since spotted the woman with the little girls, had that been the woman’s primary role. She had been keeping a sharp eye tuned for the shadows Shaw had on her and she hadn’t seen anybody else. Even the best around had to be in line of sight most of the time, and she would have picked them up. She knew the moves, and she’d used them.

The second, and more likely, possibility was that she was bugged. No need to keep contact if there was some kind of caster in her clothes. She hadn’t been running her confounder, which was the top-of-the-line model with a built-in wide-spectrum radio scanner, and even if she had, there might be new bioelectronic transmitters that a confounder wouldn’t shut down. She’d heard rumors that CI had developed some that used viral-molecular biologicals that generated IR or microwave sigs instead of common radio bands, and produced enough power to run forever from ordinary motions.

There were ways to check it, and as soon as she could find a place where she’d be unobserved, she would do just that.

She went into a public fresher. It was one of those cutesy places using one-way plastic. Mirrored from without, but you could see through the walls from inside. She put a coin into the booth’s slot once she was inside and closed the stall’s door.

She lit the confounder, thumbed the scanner on, and let the computer run the scan. It took ten seconds for the device to latch on to the sig, flashing a red dot in the air a centimeter over the confounder. The field strength meter narrowed it, and drew her a schematic:

It was in the heel of her left slipper.

She pulled the slipper off and looked at it closely.

Nothing to see.

She remembered when she had bought the shoes. It was during her setup for the artist persona, part of an order that had been shipped to her. Of course.

Her first reaction was that it was CI who was behind it. It was always wheels within wheels in the biz, nobody trusted anybody, and in their place, maybe she’d do the same thing.

But maybe it wasn’t CI. It could be PR Randall. He knew who she was, and he had contacted her directly once before. Maybe he was keeping tabs on her.

Or maybe it was Shaw. He knew who she was, too. Could be he’d borrowed the slipper, had it reheeled with the bug, stuck it back into her closet.