The Musashi Flex (16 page)

“How
do
you get better?” Mourn said, repeating her question. He smiled, something he found himself doing more of when she was around. He said, “You know who Hébert Braun was?”

“Of course.”

He waited a second, and she rightly took this for a challenge to demonstrate her knowledge. She said, “He held the number one position for two years. Had sixty-one matches while he was king of the hill, thirty-nine bare, twenty-two armed,
all
of which he won, retiring undefeated, if not uninjured, let me see, fourteen years past. He went to Mtu, where he got into politics, was elected to the planetary senate and served two terms. He retired from that four years ago. He owns a chain of pubs on Mwanamamke and Mtu, and he lives in a palatial estate on the Green Moon—Rangi ya Majani Mwezi.”

“Good to see that you do your research,” he said.

She didn’t smile. “I take my work seriously.”

“So do Flexers, if they manage to get ranked. Anyway, there’s a story about Braun. The way he supposedly trained was to find the worst quarry or asteroid miner’s pub he could, which if you know rock jocks, is apt to be a real hellhole. He’d walk to the bar, then in a loud voice announce that all the men on his left were pedophiles, and all those on his right were motherfuckers. Then he’d fight his way to the door.”

Now she did smile. “That’s a good story.”

He walked to the weight bench and stretched out on his back. Said, “One hundred kilos.”

The hum of the pressor field didn’t change, but the bare bar on the rack it controlled was now effectively a lot heavier. He reached up, grabbed the bar, lifted it from the rack and lowered it to his chest. It was a warm-up weight, and he could continue talking as he benched it. He didn’t lift real heavy anymore. He had all the muscle he needed, he just needed to keep it toned and flexible.

“Yeah, it’s a great story, but it’s pure
deeli
bird kark. Braun was tougher than a meter-thick wall of denscris. In his day, he was the best one-on-one fighter in the galaxy, no question, maybe the best ever. The first time he walked into a rock jock pub and said what he was supposed to have said? He’d have been dead before he got to the words ‘on my left.’”

“The best fighter in the galaxy? Really?”

He lowered the weight, raised it, trying for smoothness rather than speed. Plyometrics was a different workout.

“No one man is a stand-up army. Hard as he was, skilled as he was, he wasn’t invulnerable. Against a score of unarmed and unorganized fighters, yeah, he
could
probably carve a path to the exit. Once you get past four or five, opponents just get in each other’s way. When you fight the ten thousand, you do it one at a time—but you do each one real quick.”

He finished the fifteenth rep, racked the bar, and said, “Field off.”

He sat up, wiped sweat from his face, look directly at her.

“In a pub full of strong, violent, proud men who make their livings pounding rock, probably at least half of whom will be armed, somebody will pull a blade or a slap-cap or a dart gun when you insult him, and that changes things.

“We have homilies by the barrel in the Flex. The weapons players like to say, ‘You can butter your bread with your finger, but, why would you?’ Or, ‘You’re not an ape, use a tool.’

“Facing a knife takes away your first five years of training bare. A slap-cap does the same thing. Maybe if you are ten years into it, you have a chance. That’s if you are looking right at him when he pulls it. A man with a needler or dart pistol or an illegal, overamped tightbeam hand wand three meters away and behind you? If he has a clue what he is doing, he’ll kill you before you turn around, even if you’ve got a weapon of your own.

“
You
shot Weems, remember, and you aren’t even a player.”

“So what are you saying here, Mourn?”

He stood, headed for the hyperextension chair. She followed him.

“What I’m saying is, the meanest, baddest, toughest fighter who ever walked breathes the same air as the rest of us. Skill and training count for a lot, but they don’t make you invincible. The fight might be to the death, but there are rules. It’s one player at a time against another player. They agree to the venue, the kinds of weapons, they both have some idea of what they are doing and what they are up against. A duel isn’t self-defense, and it isn’t war. It is what it is.”

She said, “Ah. The first question the brain strainers and face readers ask a player when he reports the results of a fight.”

“Yes. ‘Was it a fair match?’ Meaning, did you adhere to the rules? If not, you don’t get the win, and if the showrunners decide you cheated sufficiently much, they can punish you severely, on the spot. And they’ll know if you are lying. You lie, you can die.”

They reached the rack and he climbed up on it, put his heels under the support and leaned forward. His hipbones pressed into the padding. He bent at the waist until his head almost touched the spongy floor, then used the muscles of his low back and buttocks slowly to raise the weight of his upper body until his back was straight. He kept his arms folded across his chest.

“You’re saying that you fight like you train,” she said.

He nodded as he lowered his face back toward the floor. “Yes. There are plenty of martial arts that teach dealing with multiple opponents, some of them actually work, and you can learn that if you want—there may come a time when you need that knowledge. And you can learn a lot by training under experts who can show you things you don’t know. But the way you get better as a duelist is to fight people who are your equal or your superior as duelists. It doesn’t matter if you can kick multiple butts in a fighting class or a pub brawl. It’s what you do in an alley when the guy standing in front of you understands who and what you are, is willing to come at you anyway, and knows as much about kicking ass as you do. Now and then, you’ll surprise a player close to your rank with something he hasn’t seen, but there are only so many ways to efficiently move when push comes to shove, and the guy you’re fighting will have seen as many of them as you have. A technique a thousand years old will sometimes work as well as it did the first time somebody threw it; but, of course, you won’t know until you try.”

She didn’t say anything until after he finished his set of hyperextensions, fifteen reps. When he climbed out of the rack, she said, “For a man who isn’t interested in talking about all this, you sure talk a lot.”

He laughed.
Touché
. “You asked,” he said.

“Yes. And I am getting it all cammed and recorded.”

“Good.”

“So, how do you get better?”

“You study the best fighting systems from the best teachers—martial arts have been around as long as mankind—and some are simply better than others. That’s not a popular view in polite culture, you might offend somebody by saying so, but it’s the truth. You train. You practice.”

“And that’s it?”

He laughed. “You can learn enough technique to defend yourself against most people in most circumstances in an hour, maybe less.”

She raised an interviewer’s eyebrow.

“It’s true. A handful of moves, drilled until you can do them in your sleep, and they’ll buy you a pass nine times out of ten if somebody takes a swing at you. You have to practice them, and you have to do it against people who won’t just stand there and
let
you do them; but if you are willing to put the time in, those moves will see you through almost every time.

“Learning how to face a first-rate opponent in a blood-and-bones or to-the-death, that’s a different story. A foot crooked, balance off a hair, a quarter-second hesitation at the wrong moment, these things will cost you when you face an expert. A real expert, not somebody who gets a black pin or teacher certificate in some strip kiosk
dojo
or
kwoon
set up for kids outside a casino, and who has never been hit hard enough to know what it feels like. A fighter, not a dancer.

“Once you have the tools, you use them. Try them out against fighters who are good. You have to develop your sensitivity. Lose, you go back to the training hall. Win, you go back to the training hall—you’re never done. But if you start winning, you move up to the next level when you fight again.

“If you are gifted—fast, strong, eyes full of fire—and you study hard, train right, pick your fights carefully, you can get the basics in five or six years, enough to make it into the threes or twos—that’s the two or three hundred rankings.

“The top pros have all been at it for at least ten or fifteen years, some of them longer.”

Like me,
he thought.
Too long
.

“The
silat
you saw me use against Weems? It’s one of the better arts from Earth—got weapons, boxing, grappling, and it is deceptive, a cheating art. Even if the guy against you is very good, you can sometimes still sucker him—sometimes. But it takes a long while to get good at it.”

The gym had an ultrasonic shower. He headed toward it. She followed him.

“So that’s it? You just learn a trick, then practice it until you can do it real well?”

He laughed. “Fem, you just described how life works in general, didn’t you? Do it well enough, there’s no limits to what you can accomplish. But there’s another trick—what you do needs to have a set of consistent principles, things that you do every time you crank it up. There needs to be an underlying method to your madness.”

“Meaning?”

“You can’t just learn if-he-does-that, then I-always-do-this, because you might not be able to get to that weapon in time, or he might not come at you exactly as you’ve been trained. So basing your tricks on a more general principle gives you options. You could always block and counter, for instance. Or you could always take a certain stance, or always step back and counter. I haven’t found those to be especially valid, but that’s me.”

She nodded, as if she understood.

“Might want to shut your recorder off,” he said. “I’m about to get naked.”

“This’ll be running on the adult entcom channels, I am sure,” she said. “Go ahead and strip, it’ll add a little spice. I saw you go into the Healy, you don’t have anything I haven’t seen before.”

He grinned.

As he started to remove his sweaty clothes, she said, “If there aren’t any limits, if you don’t think about losing, and if you train as hard as you do, how is it that you knew Weems was going to beat you?”

He started to pop off a stock response about Weems being the best, but stopped. A brief . . .
something
flitted through his mind, a startling thought:

She’s right. You
knew
you couldn’t beat Weems; you lost before you ever moved. You know the old saying: The fight isn’t under your glove, it’s under your hat . . .

“Mourn?”

He shook himself free of the surprising revelation. “What?”

“Where’d you go? You just blanked out there.”

He sighed. “Getting senile, I guess. My mind wandered. Sorry.”

“Where?”

“Where?”

“Where did your mind wander?” She had a bright, expectant look. Like a gator watching a small animal moving toward his pond. Or a shark about to bite a careless swimmer.

He looked at her as if seeing her for the first time. She was good at this. He said, “Just a stray thought about fighting. Something you just said.”

“Give.”

“Turn that off, first.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s something I don’t want anybody else to think about if they haven’t already. Something I can use.”

“It’s off,” she said, touching a control. “What is it?”

“A way to get better, maybe,” he said. “You game?”

“Me?”

“I’ll need a student. You need to learn how to defend yourself anyhow. We might be able to teach each other something.”

It was different than Shaw had expected.

He’d found his first opponent practically in his own backyard, on Haradali’s other world, Wu. Wu was in the same orbit as Tatsu, but on the opposite point of the ellipse. A few hours in his personal yacht, he and Cervo were there. One of Cervo’s ops tracked the man down, and Shaw had taken the Reflex, waited until it had kicked in, and braced the guy. They found a warehouse with nobody home and went inside. The place smelled like stale burlap, and was dusty, but it had plenty of room to move around in, and was well lit from a series of big skylights open to the sun.

Shaw circled to his left, deliberately moving slow, watching the hulk across from him. The man’s name—at least insofar as the Flex was concerned—was Marlowe Wong. He was big—a head taller and twenty kilos heavier than Shaw—and his face looked like an airless moon after an asteroid shower. He was ranked 106th as a player, and Shaw figured that was due to a high pain threshold. He had hit Wong a few times, full-power shots to the body, and the man had just grunted and kept coming.

M. Wong was a mouth-breather, and noisy about it.

Shaw stopped. Watched the bigger man gather himself for a charge, then launch it. There was no threat in it, he could take a nap before he got there,
Jesu damn
—

Shaw v-stepped to his right and threw a low, underhand punch, elbow tight to his body, pivoting to get his hip into it—

The force of the hit was enough to deflect the bigger man, and he felt muscle tear and a rib crack under the strike.

Wong shook it off, turned, and swung a back fist that would have knocked over a tree had it connected—

Shaw ducked, and did a quick one-two-three to the broken rib, hard punches, they
had
to hurt!

Wong bellowed like some kind of angry beefalo and lunged for a grab.

It wouldn’t do to grapple with a guy this big and strong. They went to the ground, Shaw’s speed advantage was gone. Shaw spun away, out of range.

A stick or a blade would have taken away much of what the man had. But since Shaw had been the challenger, Wong had the right to choose it bare or armed, and he had gone for bare. Easy to see why, now.