The Musashi Flex (26 page)

No, he decided, what he needed to do was alter his position.

Lower, he decided. If he dropped his center so that his knees were deeply bent on the twentieth step, then the twenty-first . . .

Ah, yes, that would do it . . .

He considered what the twenty-second step should be. He had to decide from which direction a potential attack would be coming, either from a single opponent, or multiples. Obviously, you couldn’t cover every angle with every move, but if the attack was coming from straight ahead, then a lateral shift would work, and if it was coming from a second opponent to the left or right, then a diagonal back step either way . . .

Mourn considered it. As long as he covered all the possible combinations that were likely to arise, he’d be fine. Once you knew which way to move efficiently, it was just a matter of selecting the proper tool to do the job. All you had to do was mix and match. The real trick was in keeping to a set of principles that would allow enough flexibility to shift on the fly.

He had already covered basic punch-comes-kick-comes-knife-comes attacks from virtually any point on the circle, devised counters, and also built a set of attacks he could do that would short-circuit those. If you could get a beat ahead, you could win most fights.

He still had to deal with longer weapons—sticks, staves, maybe even swords—but those shouldn’t take too much alteration if the basic positions were solid, it was more a matter of distance.

All right. What was the twenty-second step going to be?

 
Sola watched Mourn as he went through his dance, and marveled again at how fluid he was as he moved. The turns and twists, changing levels, going up and down, leaning this way and that? It required a dexterity she didn’t have. She could do the first few steps, up to about ten or eleven, without falling down some of the time, but some of the moves after that were still beyond her. When she didn’t
forget
them. Mourn had said he was going to put down some kind of markers, chalking footprints or something, to help in learning the pattern, and maybe that would help.

He was an intriguing man, Mourn. Exciting in ways, very comfortable in other ways. He was an adept enough lover—she had been with men who had been more sexually driven, able to go all night, providing and having multiple orgasms—but with him, once or twice was enough. She liked cuddling with him afterward, liked sleeping next to him. He had a solid feel, and Jesu knew she felt protected with him in the bed next to her. He was funny, smart, deadlier than a vat of nerve poison, and she liked him. She was pretty sure he liked her, too, and not just for sex. Hard to tell; she got the idea he didn’t get a lot of practice in anything other than short connections. Being close to somebody for this long was unusual for her, too. Her job had kept her moving most of her adult life; there wasn’t much chance of establishing a relationship with a civilian. And she hadn’t met anybody among the rovers in her biz, the reporters she kept running into from world to world, system to system, that she had been drawn to particularly. Oh, sure, she’d bedded a few. Mostly men, a couple of women, but those had been slap-and-tickle, that-was-nice-let’s-do-it-again-sometime kinds of encounters. Ambitious people in her field intersected, but you didn’t need heavy baggage when you had to hop a liner for points spinward at a moment’s notice and you might not get back for a month or a year—or ever.

This thing with Mourn? It wouldn’t last, of course. She’d get her documentary material, then they’d go their separate ways. She’d put her stuff together and, with a little bit of luck, would be working the producer’s circuit and getting ever higher into the lucrative end of the biz. Once you crossed into primecast intersystem with something for which you got writing, directing,
and
producing credits, even a documentary, you were looking at real money. Everybody in her biz knew the story of Takaki Seehm, a poor historian who borrowed enough to do a half hour throwaway on the Zonn for a local edcom net.

Core Systems Broadcasting had picked the little program up, deals were made, and the throwaway had turned into a six-episode educational series, two hours per. It was an instant hit. The edu boards of twenty-odd systems had made the series
required
viewing for 11 billion history students, and Seehm had, at twenty-four, gotten 6 percent of first-run net, 3 percent of the second, third, and fourth runs, one point thereafter. They were still showing the
Zonn
Chronicles
to the kiddies more than a decade later, hundreds of runs in some of the markets, plus outright sales for local copies, and Seehm’s piece of the back end was supposed to have been worth over 120 million stads to her—
so far
.

Despite what Mourn had said about leaving the old arguments behind, of letting it all go and moving on with her life, Sola could still imagine her father’s face if she had a sale like that. She’d want to record his reaction, so she could watch it over and over.

Yeah. Okay. She had an agenda.

Mourn would tinker with this stuff he was creating, and either use it in the Flex or set up a school somewhere and teach it. If Weems didn’t hunt him down and kill him first. Mourn’s path and hers, currently parallel and next to each other, would diverge, and that would be that. Enjoy it while it lasts, sweetheart, and wave bye-bye when the tide takes you.

Odd how thinking that bothered her. Made her frown, just a little.

And why should it? She was young, on the way up, and she was going to be somebody to reckon with, sooner rather than later.

Mourn was fifteen years older than she was, working his way toward retirement, and his best days were, according to his own lights, behind him. She was a journalist, he was a fighter. Aside from her documentary on the Flex they didn’t have that much in common.

Well, okay, she
really
did like sleeping with him. And he was funny and wry and full of stories about things she found interesting. But still, it wasn’t going to be anything permanent. No future there.

She knew this. Yet there was that frown that kept wanting to form.

Well, fuck it. She could buy a lot of smiles with a couple million standards, thank you, very much.

Mourn looked up and saw her. He waved her over.

“Ready to work out?”

No, not really, but it was interesting, this thing he’d come up with, and at the worst, it would help her make a better show. At best, she might be able to use the stuff to protect herself, and that would be something worth having.

“Always,” she said.

“I have no idea what you just did,” Sola said.

Mourn smiled. “I know the feeling.”

“I’ll never be able to learn this.”

“Sure, you can. It just takes a little time in grade.”

“Yeah, uh-huh.”

He looked at her, remembering. “Back when I was young and stupid, only a couple of years away from home, I found myself on Raft, in Omicron. I’d heard about this mixed martial arts system, a bunch of different styles all working out together, coming up with an eclectic blend. I spaced there in steerage, got a job making enough to survive on, and signed up.”

“Is this going to be a long story? Can I sit down?”

He laughed. “Not long. You’ll just stiffen up if you sit. Walk around, stay loose.”

“Yeah, right.”

“So what happened was, the teachers would work group sessions, with students from four or five different styles trying to pick up bits of their stuff.

“It was supposed to be an open and free exchange, but like everything else, there were always the politics and social order that had to be taken into account.”

He shook his head at the memory. “Get a bunch of fighters together, a lot of whom are convinced that what they already know is better than what they are learning, the egos tend to get in the way. Guy’s spent five or six years studying a style, he relies on that, and if somebody shows him a new trick that goes against what he knows, he tends to smirk a little at it, even if he doesn’t say anything.”

“Sounds just like the news biz,” she said. “My way is the best way.”

“Exactly. Anyway, one of the teachers was a local who specialized in a short-sword system—blades were forearm length, more like long knives than real swords. Broad, thick, single-edged, steel-basket handguards, like that. Called Espadita, which meant ‘short sword,’ ‘little sword,’ something like that.

“The Maestro was very good, I could tell, even though he didn’t show off. He would demonstrate a technique, then indicate how you could adjust it so that it would work with or against a smaller knife or a longer sword. He was probably twenty years older than I was at the time, which would have made him forty or so, and of course, I thought he was ancient. The real serious stuff he kept for his senior students—but he gave us some decent basics.

“One night after his session, the last class that evening, we were changing clothes, packing our workout bags. I went into the office to debit my cube for next month’s tuition. There were three or four other students in there, and the Maestro.

“One of the students, a tall, swarthy boy about my age who was a fairly serious Zhee-koondoh player, walked over to stand in front of the instructor. He had a practice knife stuck into his belt behind his back. He said, ‘Maestro, what would you do if I did
this
?’ whereupon he jerked the wooden blade from his belt and stabbed the teacher in the belly with it.”

“Jesu. How smart was that?”

Mourn shook his head again. “Extremely stupid. But the student was cocky, he was sure his primary art was superior to this old guy waving his funny knives around in his funny patterns, and he wanted to show everybody he was right. His art put a big premium on being the first to strike, and he figured that poking the teacher in the gut would gain him some status.”

“Did it?”

“It didn’t go quite as he intended. The knife never made it to its target.”

Interested now, she said, “What happened?”

“I was standing two meters away, looking right at them. One second, the student jammed the practice knife at Maestro’s abdomen, the next second, the knife clattered on the floor and the student slammed into a file cabinet all the way across the room, hard enough to shake the office. If the cabinet hadn’t been propped against the wall, I believe he would have knocked it down.

“Maestro hurried to the student, took him by one arm, and brushed his chest off with his other hand. He said, ‘Are you okay? Sorry.’ He sounded genuinely apologetic, as if he were worried he had hurt the fool.”

“Christo.”

“Yep. At the time, I couldn’t begin to tell you what Maestro did. I saw a couple of his senior students who’d also caught the action, and they smiled at each other, as if they knew, but as far as I was concerned, it was like that first fight I saw at twelve. Might as well have been magic: Knife comes, attacker smacks into wall across the room, bam!

“It was maybe six or eight years later when I was practicing another art that I that I figured it out. We were doing a pass and disarm, and suddenly it popped into my head what the teacher must have done.”

“You are saying I’ll get it eventually.”

“If you stay with it. Only so many ways to move efficiently, remember.”

She nodded. “So what happened to the student. The teacher throw him out of the class?”

“No. Guy quit his primary art and became one of Maestro’s best students—never missed a class long as I was there.”

“Really?”

“If you have a skill and surprise, you use both against somebody, and he brushes you aside like a bothersome insect? You have any brains, you have to be impressed.”

She sighed. “All right. I’m going to take your word for it. Show me the move again.”

He grinned at her. He did like this woman. A lot.

 
Shaw and Azul were having lunch at the restaurant he had bought to impress her, and once again, the food was superb.

Just before he had gotten here, Cervo had told Shaw that he had located two more potential Flex matches. Neither of the fighters was on-planet, and in fact, neither was in-system. The closer of the two was, fortunately, ranked lower than the other, Sixty-Eighth, as compared to Seventy-First, but would still require four days’ transit time each way—and that by personal starship. A scheduled liner would take ten days each way. So he was about to be gone from this world for a minimum of eight days if he took his yacht, and that assuming he found his match quickly once he got where he was going. But a win—and of course he
would
win—would very likely put him within two matches of the Top Fifty.

Oddly, he found that the idea of being away from Azul for more than a week was not all that pleasant a prospect.

Over dessert, which was some sort of sugary cookie wrapped around a frozen cream, Shaw brought up the subject of his pending departure.

“I’ve found a Flexer I want to challenge,” he said, “but he’s in the Centuri System, on Mason, so I’ll be gone for a few days. A week, at least, maybe longer.”

Azul took a bite of her dessert, made a satisfied expression as she tasted it. “Ah. Wonderful stuff.” She looked at him. “Well, I have enjoyed our time together, Ellis, truly I have.”

“A week is not forever, Luna.”

“No, but my current paintings are almost done. I’ve been neglecting them since we’ve been seeing each other—not complaining, you understand, it was a choice I made willingly and would make again—but if you are gone, then I’ll turn my attention back to them.”

“So?”

“So, they won’t take much time to finish. A few days. Once I’m done, I’ll need to start a new project. There are some MuscleDancers in Rakkaus, a port city on the Holy World Koji, I have a mind to see and paint—they are reputed to have incredible control of their bodies.”

“You are saying you’ll be gone when I return?”

She smiled. “Likely so, yes.”