The Musashi Flex (36 page)

Weems brought the cane around and laid his other palm on it, holding it with both hands, pointed at Mourn’s right eye, like a
katana
fighter. He waggled it a bit, to loosen his hands and shoulders.

Weems had some fancy one-handed moves with the carbon-fiber stick. Mourn had seen vids of the champion doing them in combat demos, but that wasn’t likely to happen here. Weems was confident, but he was also cautious. Mourn had come up too fast for it to be luck. He had beaten men who had given Weems trouble. He had something new. At their level, the first man to make a mistake would pay dearly for it. They both knew that.

Weems edged toward him, centimetering forward, right foot leading, knees bent, cane still aimed at Mourn’s face.

Mourn turned a hair, angling himself. Weems could cover a lot of arc with his stick. He could stab or cut with it, striking from the head to the ankle. His first move, he’d expect Mourn to dodge or block. He’d give up the second move, too. But the third move—

Weems came in, fast, and swung the stick in an overhead cut at Mourn’s head. He was expecting Mourn to back away, to go left or right, or to hold his ground and block with one of his knives.

Mourn stepped in, using the sixth step of his new dance—

Weems shifted the downward strike, twisting the cane in an arc to his right and down, aiming to shatter Mourn’s left knee—

Mourn kept going in, but angled away to Weems’s left, the tenth step—

Weems reversed the cane, up, over, and around, to catch Mourn on the opposite side, aiming for the temple—

Mourn reversed and cheated the tenth step to the left, skating as much as stepping, raising his left blade to hook the incoming cane as he moved to meet it, and dropping his right blade for a low line strike at Weems’s ribs—

The cane hit the little knife, and the shock vibrated Mourn to his teeth, but the block held. The slash with the second knife went in, caught a rib, dug a furrow through it, the muscle between it and the next rib, and scored that rib before Mourn retracted it.

He took two steps to the right as Weems shifted the cane and managed to catch him across the thigh with the end. It hurt, but did no damage.

Weems glanced down, saw his wound. It was bleeding but Mourn knew it hadn’t done any real damage. Not physically.

But: Nobody had gotten past that cane to lay a blade on Weems in a couple of years. That had to be a shock.

“I hurt myself worse with beard depil,” Weems said. He circled to his left.

Mourn turned, but didn’t back up. “You ought to buy a better brand. Or maybe grow a beard.”

“I’m going to pound you like a demon drummer on crank, sucker.”

“Anytime you’re ready,
Primero
.”

Weems gathered himself to attack. Mourn watched the man’s nostrils. When they widened a hair, as he inhaled, Mourn leaped, timing his move to the other man’s breath. It was an old trick, though he had used it recently, and probably nobody had tried it on Weems in a long time.

Weems brought the stick around, but Mourn had timed his move so that he caught it on his left side. It rocked him, it hurt, probably broke a rib, but that didn’t matter, because he snapped his raised left arm down and trapped the cane. Just for a second, but that was all he needed. Weems twisted and turned for the disengage, to free the stick, using both hands. Mourn followed the tug in, dropped to his knee, cut with his right
kerambit,
and sliced a deep gash across Weems’s left thigh. He continued the motion, diving, doing a shoulder roll, and coming up with a half turn, so that he faced Weems—

He didn’t have long to set himself; Weems charged in, full-bore straight on, determined to finish him with a hard attack and lots of momentum.

Mourn did the v-step he had practiced as part of the pattern, angling out but toward Weems. If he had backed up or gone in, Weems would have run over him.

Weems tried to adjust, but he was moving too fast—

Mourn cut, right high, left low, right high—

Weems should have dropped the cane and blocked, using both hands, but he didn’t. He held onto the weapon that had brought him so far and used that, swinging it one-handed.

He was very good and he was fast. He blocked the first cut, deflected the second—

—but he missed the third.

The short and curved steel snagged Weems’s right eye, buried itself in the socket, and gave Mourn a handle. Weems’s momentum kept his body going forward, but his head stopped. Mourn twisted and finished his step in, did a foot drag and, using the handle in Weems’s head as an opposite lever, slammed him down onto his back. Mourn dropped, and smashed the back spine of the second blade into Weems’s forehead, just above the knife jammed into the man’s eye.

Then he let go of the one stuck into Weems and slashed the tendons of the man’s wrist with the other knife. When Weems’s hand opened, Mourn grabbed the cane and jerked it free. Before Weems could move, Mourn used the cane, twice to the head, then to one knee. Bone cracked and broke with every strike.

Z. B. Weems might survive, but he wasn’t going to be walking away from this.

The best fighter in the Musashi Flex had just lost.

However arcane the scoring system was, when you beat
Primero,
you
became Primero
. There was nowhere higher to go.

And now, Mourn knew for sure that he had come up with one hell of a martial art. And that was more important even than winning. He had created something of real value.

He reached for the com he carried, to call the medicos for Weems. If they showed up in the next fifteen or twenty minutes, Weems had a good shot at surviving.

Oh, yeah, and the tag. He wanted to collect that. Maybe it wasn’t as important as it had been once, but if you went to meet the best and you won? Might as well take the win.

After he took the tag from Weems’s boot, he hurried away.

He didn’t want to keep Cayne waiting.

“He beat Weems?” Shaw couldn’t quite wrap his mind around that.

“Yes, sir,” Cervo said. “Weems is in a docbox at the local MCU being pumped full of chem, cut up some. Medico wasn’t talking past that, but he was in the Healy overnight. Got to figure it was bad.”

“He beat Weems,” Shaw said again. Who the fuck
was
this guy?

Shaw said, “Where am I?”

“Ninth.”

“Find him. Do it fast.”

“Sir.”

Cervo left, and Shaw paced, thinking. Well, it wasn’t in the script he’d constructed, he hadn’t thought anybody could beat Weems, but it didn’t really matter who it was, did it? Whoever held the title was the guy to beat, that was the important thing.

Azul came in. “Something?”

“Mourn just beat Weems.”

She nodded. “So you go up against Mourn.”

“As soon as Cervo can find him.” He paused. “What about your situation?”

“I did some checking. My control, Pachel, said he didn’t know what Randall wanted me to do for him. Far as I can tell, that’s true. I was supplied with a background, clothes, and supplies, but I never told anybody what they were for. A bright op might be able to make the connection—if they know what kind of art you like, but otherwise, I don’t think so. They’ll start looking for me here and in Chim City. They don’t find me, they’ll spread out on Tatsu, and the rest of the Haradali System. But it’s a big galaxy, and I won’t look like I did, plus my scans won’t match what they have in their records. Even if they know I rascaled the files? They won’t have the right data.”

“I’ve been thinking about moving my corporate headquarters,” he said. “The weather in Chim City’s been lousy. In fact, I don’t much like the weather anywhere in Haradali, come to that.”

She smiled. “You’d do that?”

“Why not? I can. I can run things from anywhere I want.”

“And where is that?”

“Anywhere you are,” he said.

They both smiled.

“Soon as I take care of this one little thing,” he said.

She frowned.

“What?”

“This Mourn guy worries me.”

“You’ve seen me move. Nobody can match me.”

“But he has something—something he didn’t used to have. To jump from the Teens and high digits into the top spot after having lived there for so long? That’s not how the game works, is it?”

“It doesn’t matter what he has. It won’t be enough. My juju will beat his.”

She didn’t say anything, but he could feel her doubt.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “Start thinking about places you’d like to live.”

“Boss?”

Shaw looked up.

“I got him.”

“That fast?”

“He’s in the com directory.”

Shaw smiled. “Let’s make a call, shall we?”

 
“So, you’re the man who knocked off Weems. I heard it was pretty bad. He die?”

They were at a public park in a quiet section of the city. The grass was a deep green, bordered by a ring of evergreen trees, the sun shining. A great day to achieve your dream.

“No. Got a new eye and some cosmetic work, some bones glued, but he’ll survive.”

Shaw shrugged. Weems didn’t matter anymore, he was history.

“What’s your trick, M. Mourn? I tried to get footage of you, but it wasn’t to be had.”

“No trick,” Mourn said. “I put some things together is all.”

“New way of moving?”

“I don’t think so. Different attitude. I didn’t create it, I just discovered it. It was always there.”

Shaw moved a little closer, but still outside Mourn’s immediate attack range. Mourn had gone for bare. With Shaw’s speed, he could go in from three or four steps away faster than Mourn could stop him. “It won’t be enough.”

“You could be right.” He circled to his left, angled at about forty-five degrees toward Shaw. “I’ve seen your record. Impressive.”

“I’m a few seconds from what I’ve wanted my whole life.”

Mourn smiled.

“Something funny about that?”

“No. Until day before yesterday, I could have said the very same thing myself.”

“Can’t say you sound all that happy about it. Not all you hoped it would be?”

“Not really. You might find out in a minute.”

“Oh, I will, you can bank on it.”

Shaw felt the Reflex dancing him, wanting to sprint, to
move
! He had it all, now. That conversation with Azul rolled around in his head. She was something, the partner he had never even known he had wanted. Smart, beautiful, brave—a woman who would risk her life to protect him, who had done so. Had met his enemy and taken him out. He had her. And in a few seconds, he would reach the top of his personal mountain.

Life could not get any better than this. It just couldn’t.

Mourn stepped back and came up from his crouch. “How important is this to you? Being
Primero
?”

“You have to ask? I couldn’t begin to tell you.”

“You can have it.”

“What?”

“We can go call the showrunners, and I’ll give you the win. I’m going to retire anyhow.”

“No!”

“No? But I thought you wanted this more than anything?”

“I want to
earn
it!”

Mourn shook his head. “Fairly? But you can’t, can you?”

Shaw glared at him. “What are you talking about? The runners have called all my matches fair.”

“But they weren’t, were they? I talked to a couple of the guys you beat. I know what your trick is. You’ve kicked your speed up. Given your background, I’d guess it was chemically augmented, some kind of metabolic enhancer, with something the runners haven’t seen before, so they haven’t banned it yet. Probably you can beat me anyhow, so why bother?”

“Why would
you
give up what you worked
your
whole life to get?”

Mourn laughed. “Because it doesn’t really matter. Along the way, other things got to be more important. I got where I wanted to go. I thought it was the top of the galaxy. It’s not even the summit of a foothill. I have seen the view. It’s not so hot. I don’t need to stay here. It’s yours, and welcome to it.”

“No. I don’t want you to give it to me. I want to take it for myself.”

“What if you can’t? What if you can’t beat me? You want to risk it? Word gets around, somebody will pass it along to the showrunners pretty soon. Somebody will complain, and when enough of them do, you’ll get called in for a chem scan. They might not know what it is, but they’ll see something, and they’ll forbid it. You don’t get where you want to go soon, you won’t get there. I am your last chance. You aren’t good enough without the crutch.”

“But I can beat you now!” Shaw said. He felt a red rage, joined to the Reflex. And a realization that Mourn was probably right. Time was running out. This might indeed be his last chance.

“Come on, then. Show me what you got, rich man. Cheater.”

The insult stung. The rage blew through his controls. Shaw leaped—

 
Mourn had never seen a man move as fast as Shaw did. If he’d been inside a step and a half, Mourn wouldn’t have gotten his hands up in time. As it was, he barely did. If his position hadn’t covered his lines, he wouldn’t have had time to block. Shaw essentially ran into Mourn’s hands, literally hitting his body against Mourn’s fists. The speed was enough to make it a pretty good impact without Mourn doing any extension at all.

It wasn’t as if the man was a blur—Mourn could see his motions—but his own moves weren’t going to be able to keep up. If Shaw moved first in close, Mourn’s reactions were going to be too slow.

Shaw bounced back, cursing, still moving at that inhuman speed.

Mourn backed a couple quick steps away, to give himself more time to react. If ever there was going to be a test of position, this was it. He had to read Shaw’s attack the instant it was launched, then ignore it, hurrying to get himself set, or he’d never make it. He had to be enough ahead of Shaw to make up for the man’s incredible quickness, and he had to have distance to do it. Most of what he had been discovering went in or angled to one side. Here, if he didn’t give himself room—