The Musashi Flex (17 page)

Well. He could pound on this sucker all day and do nothing but get tired. Time to finish it.

When Wong lumbered in the next time, Shaw broke his knee with a kick, slammed his throat with an elbow as he fell, and delivered a hammer fist right between the eyes as the man hit the ground on his back. The thug was still conscious after two head shots, damn, so he gave him two more hammer fists, as if pounding on a drum, and the light finally went dim in the man’s eyes.

Shaw stood, feeling very tired suddenly. It had taken much longer than he had expected.

Or so he thought. Later, when he looked at the recording cam he’d set up beforehand, the total elapsed time for the fight was less than he had thought:

All of eighteen seconds from start to finish.

He was disappointed. Shit. If that was all he had to do, it wasn’t gonna be nearly as much fun as he had hoped.

Well. Competition would get better as he went up the ladder.

 
Ago’s Moon was a frontier world; tourists came to see its high waterfalls, and the main industry was mining, everything from iron to bauxite to bird guano. Miners tended to be a self-sufficient bunch by and large, and big on minding their own business. Sola had been to the planet once before. While there weren’t any huge cities, it was big enough to hide on, since asking a lot of questions, whether you were Confed, a private cool, or even a reporter, tended to earn you more glares than information.

Sola and Mourn caught a boxcar from deep to the surface, a ground-effect shuttle from the island spaceport to the mainland, and an electric hack from the terminal to a house Mourn had rented during the boxcar’s drop.

It was a pleasant, balmy day, temp about two-thirds body heat, a little breeze blowing, it felt and, to judge from the foliage, looked like early fall. She recorded some footage for background, then shut the cam off. Which turned out to be a mistake.

The hack pulled away, leaving them in front of the rental house, a nice quiet neighborhood of everlast-plast buildings not too faded by sun and rain. She wasn’t really paying enough attention. It didn’t register that two men coming down the street from a few houses down and two more coming from the other way, had anything to do with each other. Not to her.

Mourn said. “Stay in the street, behind me.”

“What?”

“We have a problem.”

Sola looked again. The four men? They didn’t look particularly dangerous. They looked like miners, on their way to or from work; they wore hardskin overalls, boots, had helmets crowed to their belts, lunch boxes.

Mourn put his guitar and travel bag down, and as he did so, the four men sprinted toward them. One pulled a short stick from somewhere, sunlight glittered on a blade in another one’s hand, then they were there—

Her hand wand was in her locked travel bag. She’d never get to it. Sola backed away, into the empty street—

Mourn didn’t step back. He attacked, leaped at the nearest man—the knifer—did something so fast she couldn’t follow it, and the knife flew through the air as the man fell—

Mourn kept moving, spun into the man with the club. There was an exchange of blows, too fast! and the clubber dropped—

Cam, shit, I have to get my cam working
—

The third man moved toward Mourn, thought better of it, slowed, but Mourn went to meet him—

Jesu Christo, cam, get the fucking cam on-line
—
!

 
Three of them were down, dead or dying, when Mourn saw the fourth one’s gun come up. He had time to recognize it for what it was, a compressed-gas bullet-pusher, probably using hydroshock-expanding composites or explosive slugs. There was no place to go, no cover, the shooter was ten meters away, and he’d never get there in time to stop the first shot.

He was next to his guitar case. He grabbed it.

He yelled at Sola: “Run!” and charged the shooter. He held the case in front of him.

He was three meters away when the first round hit, and the shock and noise told him it was a popper, which was good. It wouldn’t penetrate as well as a solid or even a hollow point.

The second and third rounds smashed into the hard-shell, but he was there, and he just plowed into the guy at full speed, hit him with the guitar case, and knocked him down. He skidded to a stop, raised the case and brought it down on the man’s head, once, twice, three times, watching with interest but no regret as the man’s skull deformed under the heavy case.

After the third impact, there was no need to continue. The shooter wasn’t going anywhere or doing anything else without a direct hand from God.

Nor were the other three.

Sola came up behind him. “Mourn? You okay?”

“I thought I told you to run.”

“I did. But after you squashed him like a bug, I didn’t figure I had to keep going.” She waved at the other three. “They aren’t going to be bothering anybody, either.”

Mourn looked around for more trouble, didn’t see anybody. He knelt, checked the shooter’s pulse by touching his throat. Nope. Guy was chilled.

He laid his guitar case on the plastcrete. There were three large holes in the front. He thumbed the latches, and opened the clamshell lid, hoping for a miracle.

Apparently God had dispensed all the miracles he intended to pass out today.

The front of the Bogdanovich had a splintered, fist-sized, ragged hole in it, and the thin and ancient polish was completely shattered and spiderwebbed all over the rest of the sound board. Another round had hit the neck and chewed it in half. The third shot had gone through the lower curve on the left and eaten through the front, side, and back.

The guitar was mortally wounded.

Mourn felt a sense of grief, much more for the loss of an irreplaceable instrument than for the men he had just killed. Assassins—and that’s what they were—were a demistad a dozen—there would never be another guitar like this one.
Fuck.

Mourn stared at the ruined instrument. Even a talented luthier couldn’t fix that much damage, not and make it sound as it had before. You’d have to replace the front, back, one side, and the neck and fretboard. Basically build a new guitar.

He allowed himself another moment of grief, then closed the case and stood. “Let’s go,” he said. “Shooting brings cools, more often than not. I’ll dump this in a compactor somewhere. We need to get off-planet again.”

“I’m sorry about your guitar,” she said.

“Thank you.”

They hurried a few streets over, found a public com, called a hack. While waiting for it, he saw that she was shaking.

She needed to talk. He understood; he did, too. To blow off the pressure that still remained in him, even after taking out four men.

“It’s okay,” he said. “We’re alive. Not likely to be any more of them around. Not here, anyway.”

“Jesu damn,” she said.

He nodded. “Yeah.”

“What was that all about?”

“Weems,” he said. “Got to be. He sent them to rattle me. White Radio, lucky guess, maybe he has more like these at every stop. I underestimated his anger.”

“Wouldn’t he rather do it himself?”

“Probably. And maybe he thinks I’ll survive and give him the chance. They weren’t very good.”

“You were . . . gone, Mourn. You looked like some kind of . . . of . . .” She ran down.

“Animal?” He nodded again.

“No shit.”

He shook his shoulders, let the move carry to his arms and hands, down to his fingertips. It was an old yoga loosening exercise, co-opted by martial artists thousands of years ago.

“It’s limbic, hindbrain stuff. Around long before the overlay of all our wonderful cognition and reasoning abilities. Reflexive baring of the teeth, goose bumps to erect the hair to make you look bigger in the face of a deadly threat, hormone dump for fight or flight, all like that. The dark rage. The part of me that wants to kill whatever it is that frightened me. It’s blind, unreasoning, ungoverned. Everything subtle goes away. If a move hasn’t been done so much that it is almost a reflex, when the darkness comes, I can’t use it.”

He was definitely talking too much. Adrenaline after-effects, he knew. There was something to be said for beta-blockers, but he’d never liked the side effects—

“Remind me not to frighten you,” she said.

He shook his head. “If I had been calmer, I might have taken them all down without killing any of them. If I had been more efficient, I could have gotten to the last one before he started shooting. Thing is, the darkness doesn’t have a governor. It’s on or it’s off.”

“When you fought Weems . . . ?”

“Didn’t happen. I saw him coming, knew what to expect, had my training ready. With those four, I was surprised. I shouldn’t have been. I didn’t have time to think much about it, I just reacted. My fault, a fairly big mistake.”

“You’re telling me it’s a bad idea to sneak up and go ‘Boo!’ at you.”

He smiled. He liked that, that she could make him smile even when he was still ragged with hormones and breathing too fast. And his beloved guitar was now in thousand of tiny bits in the belly of a disposal grinder, case and all.

“Probably,” he said.

“Boy, if you could turn that off and on like a switch, you’d have something.”

He nodded. “Yes. Fighters have been trying to do that forever. Lot of them can let it out—the Viking Berserkers, the Moros, the Mtuan Zelawali—but controlling it once it is loose is something else.”

“Well, there you go. Something to work at.”

He smiled again. “You know, I could get used to having you around.”

She smiled back. “Well, of course you could. I’m a wonderful human being.”

The hack pulled into sight.

“I hope you enjoyed your visit to Ago’s Moon,” he said. “Not a good idea for us to come back here for twenty or thirty years.”

“I hear you,” she said.

Azul did some shopping, though most of her new clothes were bought offworld and the purchases back-dated by CI. She had decided that Azul the artist would be somewhat conservative in her dress—basic, nothing too frilly or outlandish. She had CI pick up several silk orthoskin suits, from simple black to dark maroon to navy blue. Some nice cloned-leather jackets, dressy trousers, shirts, the kind of thing a young artist might choose if she was more interested in letting her art make a statement than her outfits. The package needed to be attractive, but not over the top.

With her newly gained knowledge of art, she did a tour of some of the city’s galleries and familiarized herself with the local art scene, from the expensive shops that catered to the rich to the street artists who worked the tourist trade with pulse-paint caricatures done on the spot in a few minutes. She took in a display of Mtuan micromodels, tiny cities so small that you needed twenty- or thirty-power magnification to see the details. She learned about solid carbon dioxide sculptures that required pressurized freezers, or they’d just evaporate. She watched sandpainters finish mandalas that took weeks of effort, then watched them drag a finger through the fine grains, destroying them.

Some arts were more ephemeral than others.

She learned her own catalog, of paintings and drawings she had supposedly done, and received by special CI courier her latest works in progress, along with the paints, brushes, and other supplies she would have needed to create them.

One of the two mostly done projects was of a pair of ancient gladiatorial types, men who were mostly naked, sweating, bruised, and bleeding, locked into a dynamic wrestling pose. The piece came with detailed instructions on how to finish the background, which colors to use, how to mix them, how to apply them. She memorized the lesson, practiced on a blank canvas until she was satisfied, then destroyed both the practice canvas and instructions. She could stand in front of the fighters and, with somebody watching her, work on it and complete it so that her efforts would match that of the real artist who had created it.

The history of her fake brother arrived, with holographs and background details, based on a real player in the Musashi Flex. The player, CI had discovered, had been killed in a maglev train accident on Spandle, in Mu, two years past. Having no known relatives, M. Voda Clee’s body had not been claimed, and he had been cremated by the city authorities. Clee had, at his peak, been rated Thirty-One in the Flex’s ranks. High enough to be interesting, not so high that there would be a profile that could not be altered. Voda Clee bore a superficial resemblance to Azul, enough so somebody comparing images of them would not find the idea that they were related to be unbelievable, and his history had been adjusted so that his real name was Azul, and stats dovetailed so that he had a sister, Luna. A fambot released into the galactic web would make the connection, and there was no longer any information that would gainsay it—Clee’s true identity had been completely scrubbed from all records that CI had been able to find.

Azul sometimes wondered: How many people had CI remade thus? Hundreds, to be sure, maybe thousands or even tens of thousands. Kill a man, you took his body; scrub him from the records, you took everything he had ever been.

Well, that was not her worry. She had another brother now, conveniently dead, so he wouldn’t show up and spoil her game, and a point of interest to her quarry.

Next, she needed an event. Something that M. Shaw would attend at which he could happen across her. It needed to be large enough that she could blend in, small enough that he would find her without her having to make any obvious moves—public events of any note were always recorded, and a security agent going over those tapes must not see Azul doing anything that looked as if she were angling herself into Shaw’s path.

After examination, Azul found an art show that should serve. It was an annual affair, had been around for four years, was invitation-only, and Shaw had attended all of them. A dressy function, expensive work would be on display, and one of the artists that Shaw collected would have new pieces hung. He might decide to skip it this time around, that was always possible, but it was the best bet she could see.