The Musashi Flex (2 page)

Mourn smiled. At this level, nobody gave up their tag.

He uncrowed the flap of the paddle-holster tucked under the belt on his left side, a sheath of pebbled gray curlnose leather. The case, custom-designed by a grizzled old artist named Clements, was a nice piece of art in itself, made to look like a transponder case. Had to be disguised, since what was in it was illegal in this city. He slipped his forefinger into the rings of the twin
kerambits
.

He pulled the two short knives free but held them together in his left hand as if they were one thick blade, points down and edges forward in what knifers called the ice-pick grip. The
kerambits
were claw-shaped single-edge weapons whose curved inner edges were only about the length of his crooked little finger. The other end of the all-steel knife bore a ring that would allow it to be worn like a brass knuckle. It was a slashing weapon rather than a stabbing one, though the thick and heavy ring also allowed striking. Like Harnett’s blade, these were layered pattern-weld steel, done by a local artisan named Shiva, and had not been cheap. You never stinted on your weapons; you always bought the best you could afford. He had been practicing with these every day for the last year or so, and he was quite comfortable with the little knives.

Held the way he had them, the two should, from Harnett’s viewpoint, look like one.

Harnett grinned. In a knife fight, size mattered, his dagger was easily four times as long, and would cut going and coming. If he had been smart, he would have wondered: Why did a fighter like Lazlo Mourn, at least six or eight ranks higher than he was, feel that he needed nothing larger than a little hook blade?

If he had been smart, Harnett wouldn’t have followed Mourn into this alley.

Harnett edged in, but was still more than three meters away. He lowered himself slowly into a knife fighter’s crouch, blade leading in a saber grip.

Mourn turned his body so that he was angled at maybe fifty degrees to Harnett, his left leg forward, his right leg back, feet just under a meter apart. He held the knives low, by his groin, his other hand by his face.

Mourn had mostly been on Earth for more than a year, training under a little old man named Setarko, who was a master of one of the
pentjak silat
variants called
Tjindak
.
Silat
was a weapons-based system, which meant that the unarmed moves were derived from those with blades, and not the other way around. Mourn had been pretty quiet while he trained, only a few challenges, most of those offworld, and the ones he’d fought here had been unarmed. The way the Flex ranking system worked, as long as he was minimally active and he didn’t lose, he wouldn’t drop off the map.

Harnett wasn’t local. He might not know about the blades and the system that taught their use.

Silat
wasn’t Mourn’s only art, of course; he had trained in others, from
Teräs Kasi
—“steel hands”—to combat
Changa
grappling, to the bonebreak system of
Maumivu Matunda
—“the Fruit of Pain.” He was still in pretty good condition at a hair over forty-five years T.S., but he wasn’t getting any younger. You could count the number of top-rated Flex players past his age on your fingers—with one left over to scratch your nose.

He had considered retiring. He could open a school. Lots of players would seek him out to see if they could learn what had kept him alive for twenty-five years against some of the best in the galaxy. Once, he had been full of fire, striving to reach the top of the Flex. Now? The game was week-old bread. You could still eat it, but it was dry and hard, and there was no real taste left to it. He was tired, he was old, he should quit.

Whatever happened here, this kid wasn’t going to go much farther up the ranks. He just didn’t have enough fire. Luck was not infinite.

Harnett stole a half step closer.

Mourn waited. Attack had its advantages, but first to move ran the risk of being first to err.

Harnett darted in, threw a quick slash, and jumped back. A feint, to check his reaction more than actually to do damage, but Mourn swiped at the attacking arm, deliberately slow, knives still held together as one.

Yeah, the kid was fast, but that was not nearly as dangerous as smart. Fast you could deal with.

Harnett circled, shifted his weapon from hand to hand, showing off. He jumped in and slashed again.

Mourn sidestepped, easily avoiding the attack, but he didn’t follow up as Harnett retreated.

Harnett circled in the opposite direction.

Mourn stayed where he was.

Harnett must have figured he had what he needed. He switched grips from saber to ice pick, and began to bounce forward and backward, getting almost within range, but not quite, going up and down, slapping his body with his free hand, his moves increasingly jerky.

Ah.
Peepah
-style, a tribal art developed in prisons for assassinations. It looked something like
kuntao,
maybe even a little like
silat
.
Peepah
was a hodgepodge, but not dangerous if you knew what it was—and if you had a blade of your own, it was nothing—no real principles in it, only technique.

Harnett got ready to make his run, and Mourn figured he knew how it would play out. He must have figured he could give Mourn his arm, take the cut, even if it punched through the armored leather sleeve, and gut him before Mourn could recover. A little orthostat glue and the arm would be good as new, only a small bragging scar to show for it.
Yar, that’s the one I took when I sent Mourn over. He was pretty good for an old guy, you know?

No, more likely with somebody like Harnett, it would be:
Mourn? Nah, he wasn’t shit. Way past it, an easy kill.

It might have been a good strategy if Mourn had held but the one blade. But as Mourn switched his hand position, reversing them to cover high and low line, he palmed the second
kerambit
into his other hand, covering it with the angle of his body.

Harnett lunged, stabbed, and when Mourn went for the slice and block, to “defang the snake,” Harnett did a neat border shift, tossing the dagger from his right to his left—

—Mourn cut the right arm, snagged the point in the armored sleeve, and Harnett grinned—

—but as Harnett caught the dagger for the true strike, Mourn stepped in and punched with the second
kerambit
. The move was called “the helpful waiter” stance, because it looked rather like a waiter holding a serving tray balanced on one hand, palm held up and at throat level.

The little blade bit into Harnett’s neck, just under his chin below his ear. Right where the carotid artery pulsed within a millimeter or two of the skin.

The talon snicked through the great vessel, hardly slowing, and Mourn did a short follow-through, then swung his fist back and used the thick ring to smash into Harnett’s temple.

Harnett stumbled, shock and surprise painting his face. He went down. Blood spewed from his neck, pulsing in great gouts.

Mourn backed off quickly. A wounded killer was a danger.

Harnett came back to his feet. He brought both hands to his wound, still holding the knife, but the blood coursed between his fingers, leaving his face dead pale. It wouldn’t be long before he bled out enough to lose consciousness. Even with immediate medical attention, it would be iffy if he survived, and there weren’t any medicos around. Mourn prepared himself for a final desperate lunge, but Harnett didn’t have enough left.

“What—?” he managed.

Mourn turned his hands around, palms forward, to show both
kerambits
.

The great sin of youth was to be so full of your own ability you couldn’t see another’s. Mourn had been there, and had been lucky enough to survive his own stupidity.

“Shit,” Harnett said. His voice was barely a whisper. “You cheated!”

“No. You didn’t pay enough attention.” He didn’t say he was sorry. He wasn’t. When a man came at you with a blade, it was his karma if he ate your steel instead. That was how the game was played.

The younger man stood there for another few heartbeats, then his eyes clouded, and he collapsed.

The tag, a thumbnail-sized carbon-fiber computer-chip embed bearing a holographic image of a samurai sword, was stuck to the inside of the dead man’s boot, between the insole and the outer, which was where most players who hadn’t been hassled too much by cools kept them. Mourn usually wore his clipped to his pubic hair—if a cool found it, he would have to be getting very personal. And if somebody dropped him, they’d spend a while looking for it, a small revenge from the final chill.

For just a moment, as he looked at the strip, Mourn considered leaving it with the body. He wasn’t worried about getting rid of the corpse—Jakarta was a violent city, dozens of homicides every day, and the local cools weren’t going to search real hard for whoever had tanked an offworlder that nobody was going to file a report on. The cools would look at Harnett and figure it out when they saw the knife, the armor weave, the other weapons he surely had hidden on him. Yes, dueling was illegal, but
Fuck it,
they would say.
Just another dead Flex asshole and good fucking riddance!
None of his DNA to connect him to Harnett, if he stayed careful.

Someday, if he stayed in the game, it would be him lying dead in some dank alley like this. That was how it went if you walked the Musashi Flex. You either retired, went to jail, or wound up dead.

He stuck the tag into his pocket, wiped the blood from his blades, sheathed them, then turned and walked away. He’d dump the steels and the sheath into the ultrasonic cleaner he had in his hotel room, to rid them of any Harnett’s DNA, just to be sure.

The air seemed fresher now, sweeter, and the tropical warmth was not as oppressive as it had been. Fights to the death did that. Life was briefly, a little sweeter. He was still tired, though.

Ellis Mtumbo Shaw was not a happy man.

He sat in the richly appointed office of his company’s headquarters in Chim City, on Tatsu, the main world of the Haradali System, staring at Martin Snow Owl’s sculpture
Two Wrestlers
. It was the original, of course, one-quarter life-sized, carved from a single, two-hundred-kilo chunk of black opal unearthed decades ago in the Cody Brothers’ Marissa #3 Opal Mine, on Thompson’s Gazelle. Shaw considered it priceless, though his insurance company, being somewhat more pragmatic, valued it at 12 million stads, plus or minus a little. Normally just looking at it put him in a good mood. The opal itself was full of fire, with wide harlequin and Chinese-writing patterns, brilliant, multicolored flashes across the spectrum, reds, greens, blues, yellows. Hell, it was worth
6
million uncarved as a doorstop. With Snow Owl’s magnificent work, it was, and would be, forever one of a kind. More than one museum had offered him a fat credit cube and told him to deduct the amount he wanted. He had just laughed at them.

Today, however, the piece was not enough to lift his spirits. Another group of the fucking rock apes had died, five of them, all within hours of each other. Dammit!

The formula had been working, otherwise. Theoretical reaction times should have been at .65, myoconduction enhanced proportionately, and there had been no reason for significant loss of fine motor control at full speed. It would have been amazing—

—except for killing all the patients. The pathologists were at it now, but Shaw already knew what they would find. The apes had cooked in their own juices, the fucking HRE—the hypothalamic regulator enzyme—that was a big factor, and it was off, every fucking time, it was off—

“Sir?”

Shaw waded back from his sea of impotent rage and looked at the door to the office. It was Cervo, his head of security and primary bodyguard.

When Shaw spoke, his voice was cool, a vat of liquid helium, betraying none of his anger. One did not let the help see how one was feeling, a lesson first pounded into him at his father’s knee. “Yes?”

“The Tomodachians are here.” Despite his size—Cervo was a heavy-gravity mue, two meters tall and 120 kilos heavy—his voice was soft and not much more than whisper.

Shaw nodded. “Of course. Send them in.”

Shaw had a secretary and a personal assistant, of course, but anybody he didn’t personally know had to get past Cervo.

The medico-research group from Tomodachi, in the nearby Shin System, were on a different track than Shaw. They were trying recom DNA, piggybacking viral packets on common gut bacteria. It didn’t work yet, but in the long term, it might, and if it did, it would have some advantages over his company’s method. Bacteria could be trained like tiny dogs to do all kinds of things, not the least of which would be to self-replicate for a predetermined time. You could tailor a strain to keep delivering its payload for days, weeks, months—even years, then have it hayflick out. Of course, you had to charge enough for that to make it worthwhile; and you had to build in a fail-safe to keep some clever competitor from taking it apart to see how it worked, but those were minor problems.

Shaw was content to let the Tomodachians play with the biologicals until they solved the larger issues. Meanwhile, he would continue to fund them. When you owned 51 percent of ShawPharm Inc., the largest pharmaceutical company in the galaxy, with branch offices on forty of the fifty-some planets and many of the more substantial wheelworlds, money was not a worry. The contingent from Tomodachi had come to report on their progress, and they’d have their hands out when they finished. He could give them half a billion without having to call the accountants, but they’d only ask for a few million; they really had no idea how valuable their work would be when it finally got to market. Of course, that might take five years, but no matter. As long as he could keep all his options covered.

If you could make something go away by throwing money at it, it wasn’t really much of a problem. Too bad hormones and glands couldn’t be bought off so damned easily . . .