The Musashi Flex (3 page)

 
The meeting ran longer than Shaw had expected and now he had to hurry—Baba Ngumi absolutely did not like to be kept waiting. If Shaw was even a minute late—sometimes even if he was on time—the old man could just decide to up and leave, and if he did, nothing could coax him back for today’s lesson. As rich as he was, Shaw’s stads were, past the agreed-upon fee, worthless as far as Baba was concerned. That he could have bought the man ten thousand times over, gifted him with more money than the gross national product of some countries to do nothing but teach Shaw for an hour a day, meant exactly nothing to Baba. And no excuse was acceptable—you either wanted to train enough to get there, or you did not.

Shaw had rearranged his workday around his
Kifo Mokono
instruction. His life, actually. He practiced on his own for an hour in the mornings, two hours in the evenings, plus the hour five days a week of private lessons, those last determined by Baba’s schedule, which was capricious at best. If Shaw did not drop whatever he was doing for the time upon which Baba decided the stars or planets or whatever were right, then he was out of luck. The old man was a mystic—cranky, and inconsistent, among other less cheerful virtues. But Baba was the galaxy’s foremost expert in the little-known martial art of
Kifo Mokono
—“Death’s Hand”—and if you wanted to learn it from him, you did it on his terms. End of discussion.

As he hurried across the compound to the private
skuli
he had built for his training, Shaw already knew that the art was not going to be the magic carpet he had hoped. It offered a lot, and he would stay with it for a while longer, but it wasn’t going to take him where he truly wanted to go. For he had a secret desire, one he had never told to anybody: He wanted to be a player in the Musashi Flex, that loose agglomeration of close-combat artists who traveled the stellar systems fighting duels with each other. More, he wanted not only to be ranked, he wanted to be the best player of them all.

He wanted to be the deadliest man in the known galaxy.

He smiled at himself. There was a good reason he had never told anybody this desire. They would surely mark him as mad. You are a fucking billionaire a score of times over, and you want to risk getting your head bashed in or your body sliced into bloody ribbons by some psychotic killer? Can we get a psychiatrist over here, stat?

The problem was that he wasn’t a natural. Yes, he had trained so that he was better than good. He had rank in four arts before he had come to Baba Ngumi, but at the top levels, the fighters had something more than training. They had some kind of innate . . .
something
—talent, drive, whatever—that made them more than the sum of their fighting arts. He had seen the best, and they all possessed it, whatever it was. And Shaw knew that this spirit, be it
ki,
or
prana,
or
tenaga dalam
or whatever, was not part of his makeup. He could beat nine out of ten men or mues he was apt to meet on any street on any planet, he was good, but he was not
great,
and that was what it took to be a Top Player in the Flex.

Greatness. Whatever it might be called, you had it or you did not, and if you didn’t, you could not buy it. That had been a hard lesson, one he had fought against learning for fifteen years. He was young, only forty T.S. He was in outstanding physical condition. He was smart and he was rich and he
wanted
it, God, he wanted it! He had believed he could not be denied. He could afford the best teachers, and he had never failed at anything he had truly desired. Business, women, whatever, he set his sights on a goal and he, by Jesu,
achieved
it! Always had, no matter what the odds against it; always would—so he had thought. He had never had reason to think otherwise. He’d really believed that.

He had paid some of the best Flexers to come and spar with him, offered them small fortunes to do it. Men who were ranked in the Teens had come to his private school. Beat me and double your fee, he had told them.

They had all left twice as wealthy as they’d expected. All of them.

It had been painful. Physically, to be sure, but bones could be glued, torn tissues mended. What had hurt more was learning that he was not going to be able to defeat the Top Players no matter how much training he had. No matter how much he wanted it. Training and desire weren’t enough. He needed something they had that he didn’t. And it wasn’t for sale.

There had been a time of despair.

But because he was smart and rich, he came to realize he had other options. There was a way to give himself an edge. If he couldn’t do it one way, he could do it another. And if the fucking rock apes would stop dying, he would get it . . .

Baba was waiting when he got to the
skuli.
Just standing there, not doing anything, staring at a blank wall. He was a short, wizened, dark-skinned man pushing eighty-five; if you saw him in a market or at a restaurant, you would not have a clue that he had once been among the deadliest fighting men alive, retired at his peak—Third, amazing for a man his size—and that he
still
was more dangerous than a bagful of Mtuan vipers. Appearances were deceiving—if you believed this little old fellow was innocuous and thought to push him around, you would regret it—assuming he let you live to do so.

Without turning to look at him, Baba said, “Position One.”

Baba did not believe in warming up or stretching. If you had a scheduled duel, yes, you could do that, but if you were attacked suddenly, if you saw a situation coming that was only a matter of seconds away, then you had better be ready to deal with it immediately. You would not be able to hold up your hand to an attacker bent on smashing your face and say,
Hold up there, fellowman, I need to loosen up first, okay?

Knives? Oh, but I left my knife at home
—
wait right here, I’ll go fetch it . . .
Shaw had to smile at the thought.

“Something is funny?” Baba said. Given that his back was still turned to Shaw and he couldn’t possibly see Shaw’s face, this was, despite the number of times similar things had happened, still amazing.

“No, Baba.”

“Then do not break your concentration. Position One.”

Shaw nodded. “Yes, Baba.”

Shaw slid his feet into the pose, right forward, left back, parallel and square with his shoulders, knees slightly bent. He kept his back straight, circled his hands so that his left was low, in front of his groin, and his right just under his chin, both clenched into tight fists. He took a deep breath, expelled half of it slowly, and began the dance with an imaginary opponent. Later, Baba would have him hammer the hydraulic bag, the wooden man, and dance through the small forest of hanging bleakballs. And if it went well, maybe Baba would show him a new combination. But he had best concentrate on his form, first. If he messed that up, Baba would walk away, and that would be that.

As much as he respected the old man, he also hated him. Once he had learned what Baba had to teach him, Shaw was fairly certain he was going to have the old bastard killed. Not only would that keep anybody else from learning Baba’s tricks, it would be personally most satisfying . . .

In the run-down section of Madrid the locals impolitely called
Ciudad de las Putas,
Cayne Sola crouched behind a recycling bin where the two fighters couldn’t see her. The bin was heaped full of scrap plastic, mostly clotted food containers and beer bottles gone alcoholically fragrant in the summer sun. Not the most pleasant combination of odors, though she had smelled worse. She was, as usual, a little excited and a little afraid, but not so much so that she wasn’t doing her job. The two men were only ten or twelve meters away, the holoproj pen-cam she had quik-stik-mounted on the bin’s rim fed its narrowcast digital sig to the loup mounted on the left lens of her shades, and she had a fairly good view. Even if they happened to see the cam, they likely wouldn’t mark it for what it was.

The cam, with one of the new photomutable-gel lenses, was voxax-controlled by a wireless patch mike on her throat. The whole system had cost her three months’ pay. She subvocalized the words “medium-wide angle,” and got a better shot.

The larger of the two men was very big, pushing two meters and probably over a hundred kilos; despite that, his moves were lithe, almost snakelike, as he circled his hands up and down, back and forth, forming and re-forming strange, hypnotic gestures that looked to her almost as if they were some kind of sign language.

The smaller man, who was exceedingly fair, nearly an albino in his paleness, though he had jet hair and eyebrows, laughed, and said, “You don’t really think that old
kuji-kiri
weave is going to work on me, do you, Al?”

“Who knows? You could be almost as stupid as you look.”

She had always found that part interesting—that these guys knew each other well enough to joke, but that they would fight until one or the other was too injured to go on. Or was dead.

Pale chuckled and circled to his left, his right side forward. Snake—that would be Al—moved an equal amount to his left, keeping the distance between them identical, not quite close enough to cover with one jump. It was an exacting dance, the intricacies of which Sola was only beginning to be able to see, even after almost two months of investigation. It was like watching chess or maybe
Go
between two masters; each step, no matter how small, had meaning. A misplaced foot, and the response would be fast and maybe deadly.

Snake shuffled forward a hair, then back.

Pale held his ground, his hands raised in front of his chest. Neither man had weapons. She was glad of that. They bled enough when it was fists and boots and elbows; with weapons, it was much worse.

Sola looked at the blinking diode on the loup’s heads-up display. Still green, so the batteries were good for at least another hour, way more than enough time. It wouldn’t do to run out of power in the middle of recording—that had happened during a duel on Mtu last month, and she’d missed some spectacular footage. She wasn’t going to be able to ask those guys for a reshoot, since one of them was dead and the other had gone straight to a medical center to be glued back together. Too bad for them, but she was more concerned for what she’d lost.

Another few matches, and she’d have enough for the whole documentary. Yeah, it was all spec, but she was sure she could sell it—the entcom market was like a starving monster, it was always hungry for the new and different, and nobody had done an in-depth work on the Musashi Flex before—bits and pieces, sure, but nothing nearly as deep as what Sola had. A primecast hour-and-a-half, easy, and with any luck at all, she could get a miniseries, three, maybe five segs, system syndications, maybe even GalaxNet—wouldn’t
that
be something? She could write her own ticket then, direct, produce, she’d be set, and only twenty-eight T.S. years old. That would give her fucking father something to think about, seeing her name on the ’proj.

It was a nice fantasy, being rich and famous. She’d have to stop chasing it pretty soon, because she was gonna be out of stads. And if she couldn’t sell this, she was going to have to get a
job,
and
there
was a sad prospect . . .

Pale and Al, the giant snake, continued to circle, and while she had learned the moves all meant something, if not always what, a general audience wouldn’t know that much, so she’d better spice things up some.

“Two-shot, closer,” she subvocalized.

The cam’s POV snapped in tighter. What a great toy. It should be, it cost enough.

“Solarize, refield, refade to previous shot,” she said.

The color washed out to a bright monochrome, then faded back in to the same image. Yeah, she could do all this on the editing comp later, but the more you could do in-cam, the better—it saved you a lot of work when you did EFX on the fly, plus in the moment, your instincts gave you a better flow. Usually. And hell, if it didn’t work, you could always fix it later—

Al lunged, moving in very fast, and fired a punch at Pale’s face—

Pale didn’t back up, but angled to the outside of the incoming strike—

“Wider!” she said, louder than she’d intended. “Include both!”

The cam’s field expanded, to include the fighters’ feet. Yes, yes, she needed that—

Pale ducked and shot a punch under Al’s incoming fist, hit him under the armpit, hard. Sola heard something break—whether it was Al’s rib or Pale’s hand she couldn’t tell, but it was another sound she had learned to recognize, that wet snap of bone cracking—

Al grunted with pain, then dropped lower and brought his elbow down, trapping Pale’s hand against his injured ribs. With his other hand, he slapped at Pale’s ear, but continued past, shoved his hand under the man’s jaw, and wrenched his head backward—

Pale tried to step away from it, but Al hooked his left heel behind Pale’s ankle, and Pale went horizontal suddenly, falling straight back. He was going to hit the plastcrete hard—

—but no, somehow, Pale twisted and turned the fall into an angled dive, hit on one shoulder, rolled, dived again, with Al chasing him. Pale came up, spun, and was ready when Al got there. He kicked, his left boot connecting with Al’s knee. Another gristlelike
pop!
and Al wobbled to the side, turned, awkwardly, and put his weight on his good leg.

Pale stayed back. “That’s the lateral ligament, Al. Plus the rib. Time to pack it in.”

Al shook his head. “Fuck you, Timson!”

“You wish. Come on. Lose gracefully. It’s only a few points. You could maybe dance the rib, but you can’t win with that knee fucked-up.”

“You might be surprised.”

“Hell, we’d both be surprised, you more than me. Come on. It’s not like you have to give me your tag. We’ll catch a hack to a medic, and you can call it in. This is a done deal. No point in suffering any more damage, hey?”