The Musashi Flex (34 page)

Azul put the slipper back on. Better the tracer you knew than the one you didn’t; she could always run the confounder or lose the shoe. What the confounder could spot, it could shut down.

Unless, of course, the caster she’d found was one they expected her to find, and there was another one not so easily detected?

Wheels and wheels, cogs and gears.

None of the options were happy news. The immediate purpose of a bug was to be able to find the person upon whom you had implanted the device. The reason why you might want to do that? That was the more important question.

Who needed to keep such close tabs on her?

The answer to that question was in the little steel info ball tucked into her pocket. She needed a reader. She had one in her room at the mansion, but she didn’t want to use that instrument.

Time to find an electronics kiosk, she decided. And maybe buy a nice new gadget for Shaw while she was there.

“Mourn? You might want to take a look at this.”

Mourn was about to go outside to train, although he had to confess that his heart wasn’t in it: A thundershower had drifted over them, and a steady rain pounded on the roof, punctuated now and then by flashes of lightning and subsequent thunder. He turned around. Cayne sat at the desk, the three-dimensional holoproj lit over the computer’s console.

“What’s up?” He ambled that way. The rain was probably warm enough, and one needed to practice in varying conditions, but still, no need to hurry . . .

“Look at the stats here on one E. M. Shaw.”

Mourn glanced at them. His eyebrows went up.

“Yeah, interesting, huh? I did some background on him, and this is the fun part—the guy is a billionaire. He’s the Shaw in ShawPharm Corp.”

“Jesu.” And while that was interesting, it wasn’t nearly as interesting to Mourn as the man’s record as a player. A couple years down in the high Hundreds, up, down, no real movement, and then all of a sudden, he’s riding a Bender ship straight up at FTL speed, into the Teens—in a matter of a few weeks. Something not right about that.

“What’s a billionaire doing playing the Flex? And, all of a sudden, doing it so well?”

Cayne nodded. “That’s the real question, isn’t it? Probably a good idea for you to find out, since, as you can see from his last couple of matches, he’s here in town, and at his current position, of Eleventh, he could drop by.”

Mourn shrugged. Whatever the guy had, he couldn’t do anything about it. All he could work on was himself. He had ninety-six steps in his art now. He had gone over and over it, and that seemed to be the number he needed. Any conceivable attack and defense sequence he could come up with, some combination of those moves would cover it. Might be somebody who’d leap up in the air and bark like a dog while slapping himself on the head as an attack, and he didn’t have anything specifically for that, but, then again, he didn’t really think he needed anything for that.

Ninety-six steps, that seemed to be the sum of it all.

And while the rain hadn’t slackened any, he wasn’t going to get any more skilled with his new art standing here looking at the holoproj. Time to go work out . . .

 
The electronics kiosk had, despite this being a holy world and theoretically not as concerned with such things, the latest technology on sale. As Azul was examining various toys, it was easy to slip the info ball into one and arrange it so nobody could see what it revealed.

Which was another address, in a neighboring city a few kilometers to the east of Shtotsanto. No names, but Azul was pretty sure who the sender was. It would be interesting to see if PR Randall had come all the way here just to have a chat.

She removed the recording, felt the marble heat up as it destroyed its contents. She bought the reader, along with a couple of other items. Just in case the reader had some kind of spyware in it, it was going to go away at the earliest opportunity.

Hmm. Now, she had to lose her shadows, get a vehicle, and go see who had sent the message. None of these ought to be particularly difficult.

She bought a new pair of slippers at a shop next door and left her old ones in the trash can outside, just to be safe. Probably it was Randall’s bug, but “probably” could get you killed.

A few minutes in a crowded mall was enough to shake her surveillance team. It wasn’t that hard to lose a tail if they didn’t want you to spot them. It was when they didn’t care if you knew they were there that it was tricky—they could stick closer that way.

A hack ride to a flitter-rental place, a phony ID and credit tab, and she was in the air and headed for Three Rivers, which, she learned from the rental flitter’s nav-comp, was a small and scenic retreat about half an hour away, on the western edge of an inland sea shaped like a bean that was almost a thousand kilometers long by six hundred wide at the midpoint. This little ocean, the Somber Sea, was home to a number of species of colorful fish, aquatic mammals, and seafaring birds, including the very dangerous diamond-head slasher, which swam in large schools, looked like a cross between a tiger shark and a manta ray, and would eat virtually anything that was unfortunate enough to swim into its path. Boaters were warned not to swim in waters where the churning of diamond-heads could be seen during feeding frenzies.

What kind of idiot would swim where predators were in a feeding frenzy? The nav-comp was silent on that point, but Azul figured it was another kind of person that the gene pool was probably better off without. Swim, fool, and get what you deserve.

Three Rivers, she also found out, had been named not for the local geology, but instead for branches of religion that had come to exist together in harmony there. Population was about twenty-five thousand, and the average income was fairly high, so it was a place where people with money hung out. There were four four-star restaurants, a four-star hotel, and assorted recreational activities . . .

The flitter’s computer directed her to a rustic but large building a little ways out of the town. There was a recent-model luxury sport flitter parked near the house, with the top down. Azul spiraled her ride in and landed next to the sportster.

She approached the house, and decided that, once upon a time, it had been a hunting or fishing lodge. Might still be.

She climbed a short flight of steps to a broad, wooden porch. The place had large windows, but they were opaqued a dark and smoky gray.

The front door opened at her approach, rattling a little in its track as it slid back.

She walked inside, her hand in her jacket pocket, the little spring gun assembled from innocuous parts gripped and ready to fire. She didn’t expect she would need it, but it was better to have it than not.

There was a large room, dressed with distressed and probably natural leather couches and chairs, a giant fireplace against one wall. Heads of various game animals adorned the walls, and stuffed and mounted fishes hung here and there.

A hunting
and
fishing lodge. How baroque.

She noted a hall to her left, turned and headed down it. At the end of the hall was an open door.

The room was more of the same, smaller, with a large desk made of some striking and attractive striated wood, edges all gently rounded, gleaming dully under what looked to be a thick coat of wax. Another fireplace was inset into the wall to her right, a set of heavy-looking steel fire-tending tools racked upon a stone apron in front of the grate: a shovel, brush, tongs, and a poker.

Burning wood for heat was apparently a serious business around these parts.

Behind the desk, peeling the last bits of a skinmask from his face, sat Planetary Representative Newman Randall. No real surprise there.

“Ah. My spy. You’ve seen to your appearance, quite lovely, you are. Come in, sit.” He waved at an overstuffed leather chair in front of the desk.

Azul sat, removing her hand from her pocket and smiling at the PR. The smile stopped before it got to her eyes.

Randall finished picking the synthflesh from the tip of his nose and dropped it upon the desktop. “Nasty stuff,” he said. “Never comes off quite as easily as they say. I expect you’ve worn these a time or two.”

“A time or two, yes.”

“Still, a mask is much less cumbersome than having to drag one’s bodyguards around, and much less likely to draw attention, which the Confed frowns upon if you visit the Holy World. Incognito is the order of the day.”

Azul said nothing, waiting. It wasn’t long in coming.

“So, tell me about the Reflex.”

No point in taking the long and slow route, since he already had flown most of it. She said, “While he is on the drug, Shaw is the fastest human you’ve ever seen. He can run circles around a champion sprinter, can pound the best fighters into the ground in the blink of an eye. It’s incredible to watch. I’ve seen it half a dozen times.”

“Side effects?”

“Makes him tired and dehydrates him. Nothing else I can tell to look at. Both are easily fixed. A good night’s sleep, electrolyte fluids, he shows no other signs of stress or wear.”

“Excellent. Duration?”

“Varies a little. Hour, hour and a half. I don’t know if that’s dosage related or not—I’m not sure how he takes it.”

Randall nodded. “I’m sure our scientists can tweak that, come up with longer half-life. Easier to add or subtract once you have the basic model.”

She shrugged. Chemistry was not her area of expertise.

“Well, this is what I needed to know. He’s sitting on it, dragging his feet, but that’s about to change.” He reached for a comset lying on the desk.

“What are you going to do?”

He looked at her as if she were a puppy that had just peed on an expensive rug. “Do? I’m going to have CI move in and take it over, of course. Production, supplies, whatever he has on it. It’s too valuable to risk losing. What do you care?”

“I don’t care about CI. But if you eminent-domain the drug, that will get out. Somebody always talks.”

“So . . . ?”

“The showrunners for the Musashi Flex always have an ear to the ground for this kind of chem. They’ll make it illegal there.”

“And . . . ?”

“Shaw won’t be able to use it anymore.”

“And . . . ?”

“That will . . . disappoint him.”

Randall laughed. “Life is full of disappointments, fem. Do you think I am going to risk losing a major potential weapon in the Confed’s arsenal because it might
disappoint
M. Shaw? Hurt his
feelings
? He’s a big boy. He’ll get over it.”

She shook her head. “I’ve gotten to know him. Winning the Flex is a big thing for him. A major focus.”

“Well, that’s tough, isn’t it? He’ll have to come up with some other game to play. He can afford to buy himself a new toy. Whatever he wants.” He smiled at her and picked up the com.

She pulled the spring pistol from her pocket smoothly, pointed it, and squeezed the firing stud. The titanium-boron dart, designed to pop out angled, sharp-edged, and flexible whirling ribs that would increase its diameter by a factor of six on impact, hit him in the left eye before he could blink, then screwed a channel bigger around than her thumb through his brain until it was stopped by the back of his skull. A great close-range weapon, if you could place the dart properly.

PR Randall was pretty much brain-dead before he had time to be surprised.

But Azul had plenty of time for that emotion. She hadn’t known she was going to
pull
the pistol until she fired it.

The rain was pretty warm, but even so, Mourn was drenched, and his clothes were binding as he moved. He had just decided he was going to shuck them and finish his workout naked when he looked up and saw Cayne appear in the doorway. She walked out into the yard, and the rain started to soak into her hair and clothes. She looked as if she’d just seen a ghost.

“Cayne?”

She walked to within a meter. She was holding a com. She handed it to him without a word.

He felt his breath catch as he took the com from her. He didn’t need to ask. He held it to his ear.

“Hello, Weems,” he said.

Done was done, there was no way to take it back, and now the problem was how to slow the inevitable pursuit. And it would come, the only question was, when?

Even if Randall had told no one he was coming to meet her—which she didn’t believe—any CI op-supervisor worth his boots would make the connection soon enough. Azul was on Koji, Randall had come to Koji. She was working for him. All this was a matter of Confed record. He had come here incognito, and why else if not to take an ears-only report from his spy?

If they found his body in this lodge with a spring dart in his brain, at the very least they would want to have a long chat with operative Luna Azul. Dead PRs roiled a lot of waters that CI wouldn’t want to see disturbed. They’d need to catch the killer, fast, and even if she hadn’t done it, she’d still be a good goat for it. That was moot—they’d strain her brains, and when they got done, what was left probably wouldn’t object to whichever way they wanted to execute her. Game, set, match. Better luck next incarnation, hey?

If, on the other hand, PR Randall wasn’t found dead—if he wasn’t found at
all
?—then the investigation would start later and proceed slower. Rich men had been known to take off suddenly for all kinds of reasons: chem, fems, or midlife crises; worry over being caught for some criminal act, bad marriages, or just an urge to chuck it all and try a simpler life—all kinds of reasons caused otherwise upstanding people to vanish. First, they had to notice he was missing; then they had to try and trace his movements, and in both cases, they had to proceed with caution, because nobody would want to cause a scandal that might reflect badly on a rich and powerful man’s reputation. What if he wasn’t in any danger, but had sneaked off to experiment with illegal drugs or forbidden sex? Would you want to be the cool who brought that information to light about a man who could buy your whole planet and blow it into atomic dust if he wanted?