by Steve Perry
After almost five years, Khadaji had accomplished two things: he became known in the smuggling trade as No-Face, because no one knew who he was; and he became rich. In a galaxy where a man who was worth five million stads was someone of importance, Khadaji was as important as a dozen men. Only, nobody knew it—or him. When he met anybody not connected to his legal work, he went skin-masked; the computer worm he constructed was of such complexity that it was highly unlikely anybody could ever follow its tortuous convolutions to him from any part of his enterprises. His profile was so low as to be nearly flat, he was obsessive about keeping his identity secret. Nobody even suspected he existed, save as a well-paid flunky for a nondescript corporation; a faceless member of the business community. He had contacts of a certain kind, however, enough money to be powerful, and he had the beginnings of a plan.
Chapter Seventeen
THERE WERE six human-occupied worlds in the Shin System and Renault was the least developed of the six. It was the fifth planet out from the primary G called Shin, one of the many worlds which fit the narrow slot that allowed humans to walk about and free-breathe. The gravity was a hair greater than standard single-gee, and the air a bit richer in oxygen. There were three continents, a decent axial-tilt, and something under nine million people and assorted mues living there. The main local industries were forestry and farming; primary exports to the galactic markets consisted of refined metals, although in no great amount.
Renault was another of the sidestream worlds, of little importance to the Confederation and its machinations. There was a small military outpost of a hundred troops; assignment to it was considered a form of punishment for any soldier with ambition.
Simplex-by-the-Sea was a village on the southwestern coast of the smallest continent. The summers were hot, the winters mild and the primary industries were fishing and tourism. Civilization had brushed its technology-carrying hand past the village, but only a few seeds had fallen upon the small town. The fishing fleet had full bio-gear for locating the schools, but they still used nets; the library was nailed into the off world cast, but the scanners were antiques and subject to local weather and breakdowns. It was a place as far from Confed interest as any, and therefore perfect for Khadaji’s plan.
He spent a month in the summer sunshine of Simplex-by-the-Sea and when he left, Khadaji owned a building which had once been a school for the children of the town. The last students to use the building were old enough to be grandparents; there were few children left in the village and those who were were linked to edcom at home.
Of course, the residents of Simplex-by-the-Sea, if asked, would have denied knowledge of anyone named Emile Antoon Khadaji; nor would they be able to identify the face of the man who bought the old school; for they had not seen it, in truth. But his money was good and there seemed to be plenty of it. In this town, everybody knew what everybody else did and talk was as common as the smell of fish and gulls, but one did not offend an outsider willing to spend money and maybe create jobs. The Man Who Bought the School was a hot topic after he left, but only in town. Best not to spread things too far and maybe wipe the transact, eh?
Four teams of Khadaji’s agents were sent to Renault. Supplies were brought, licenses obtained—sometimes with bribes, sometimes not—and workers hired. When possible, local people were given jobs and paid much higher rates than were the union standard. The Man Who Bought the School was very popular in Simplex-by-the-sea.
Khadaji sat in his office on Bocca. He was surrounded by hand waxed persimmon wood paneling, and the most sophisticated holoproj/comp terminal available sat on a desk of carved giant briar. A free agent didn’t deserve such an office, so Khadaji had arranged to be “promoted” to a vice presidential job. He had circulated the rumor in the company that he was being kicked uplevels for inefficiency in the field, which made him someone to avoid in company political circles. Once he had the image of a loser, the other workers let him alone, just as he intended. He was getting better at manipulating people, he realized. Sometimes that bothered him, his ability to do that.
Khadaji said, “Juete,” and the holoproj screen flashed the file before he could lean back in the form-chair. He smiled. She had claimed her last month’s funding on Vishnu, the pleasure moon orbiting Shiva, in the Tau System. Five thousand stads were made available for her to draw each month, and the trust would last until she died. Juete would never have to work or worry about taking care of herself again. He had never actually said it was from him, but he had given Juete what—in his mind—was a strong clue as to who sent her five kay stads each month. On the original deposit, he had appended a closing salutation which read: “I understand better, now. Love, Older.”
It was from a conversation they’d had early in their relationship, when she’d tried to warn him, in her own way, that she did what was necessary to take care of herself. He hadn’t really understood then when she told him that with age came experience, more important than wisdom. Now he did.
Juete was never stupid; she realized immediately where the stads came from. Early on, a taped message arrived at the office of the bank administering the trust and was eventually forwarded to Khadaji’s attention. It was simple enough: “Thank you, Emile. It is you, isn’t it? I see that you really did love me. If you should feel the need, I would enjoy seeing you again, to show my gratitude.”
He had smiled when he’d heard the message. It contributed a small warmth to his day, even if he were less naïve now than he had been when he’d met Juete. Maybe she really meant it, a pleasant thought. Or, said the cynical voice he’d developed in dealing with crooked officials and the smuggler’s underground, maybe she just wanted to possess the entire goose and not just the monthly golden egg.
Well. It didn’t matter. His gesture had been for him as well as for her. If she had been less truthful about telling him her needs, she could have held him forever. Truth deserved rewarding, even if it were sometimes unpleasant. Besides, if he hadn’t left, he wouldn’t be in a position to be generous.
“Sir?” It was the appointment voice of his comp.
“Yes?”
“Your workout is scheduled in fifteen minutes.”
“Ah. So it is. Thank you.”
“You are quite welcome, sir.”
Khadaji stood and stretched, listening to his joints pop, feeling the play of muscle in his back and shoulders. Things were coming along nicely, but it wouldn’t do for him to get out of shape. His life would depend on his conditioning.
Until the games comp was switched on, the warehouse was simply a large, empty rectangle: a stress-plastic frame and rockfoam covered building surrounding empty air. But when the computer was activated, the holographic projections made the inside of the warehouse anything it was programmed to be. A desert or a forest or a city street would spring into existence at the sound of a coded word, and the projections would look and feel almost real, courtesy of captive energies whose workings Khadaji could only partially understand. The projections could be peopled with holoproj simulacrums, also programmed to behave as required. The machinery for generating the illusions cost over two million standards; to his knowledge, Khadaji had the only such device outside of military or police operations. Such toys were considered illegal for normal game parlors.
He opened the case he carried and removed the pair of spetsdods. Methodically, he molded each of the weapons onto its proper hand, then snapped loaded magazines into place. He waved each arm experimentally, adjusting for the slight change in weight. It was an automatic ritual now: The dartguns made his hands feel normal; without them, he felt bare. He walked to the center of the warehouse, to a neutral spot which would not become part of a wall or a tree when the comp was activated. The terrain patterns were randomized—he never knew which the computer would assemble for him. Nor did he know how many spectral-but-solid opponents the magnetic/viral bubbles would deploy.
He felt a tenseness in his back and shoulders, and he took a deep breath and exhaled, allowing the muscles
to relax. Early on, he had warmed up before each session, stretching and doing kata. He’d stopped that; in a real-life situation, he might not have a chance to limber up and get ready.
He took another deep breath. “Go,” he said.
Reality altered. The empty warehouse became a tropical rainforest with a snap, with no blur into apparent solidity. Thick-leaved trees and squat bushes surrounded him, phantom insects shot by emitting Doppler hums. Birds called from the tops of the trees.
Khadaji dropped flat to the soft humus of the small clearing and began to crawl rapidly toward the nearest bush. That was a lesson he’d learned early playing these games. He’d been “shot” several times for standing around while trying to get his bearings in the new “world.”
The jungle was noisy, but none of the sounds were those of men. No shots tore the air, no voices called for Khadaji to solidify, no detectors began screaming stridently. He grinned. Good.
He began to work his way through the bush, moving cautiously in a half-crouch, alert for any sign of trouble. Fifteen minutes later, he smelled the faint tang of gunlube. He wet a finger and held it up in the air. The wind was from that direction. He moved.
There were three troopers in a cleared area. One man leaned against a tree, smoking a flickstick. A woman sat on the ground, cleaning her carbine. The third man stood watch. The last man was the dangerous one, Khadaji knew that. He was a constant face, one the computer used in almost every simulation, and he was fast. To approximate real soldiers, the comp produced human figures with a full range of reflexes. Constant Face there sweeping the brush with his shifty gaze was the fastest of them all, superhuman in his speed, even quicker than a bacteria-augmented man. That made it unfair, but Khadaji was glad of it. If he could take Face, he should be able to take any real soldier in a one-on-one.
This was three-on-one, however, and a different matter. The theory said it was simple enough: Shoot Face with one weapon, hit the leaning man with the second and the woman would be simple; after all, her weapon was down. Face was the one to worry about.
Khadaji held very still, using the ninja-freeze techniques he’d learned. With his body control training in sumito, he could lock himself into non-motion for hours, but the ninja-freeze was even better. One practiced invisibility instead of simply being still. There was a subtle but definite difference which was not fully explained. The most common theory was that the psychological stance of being invisible helped avoid detection by anyone who might be emphatically receptive—another unproven idea.
Khadaji was waiting for Face to turn away, so he could shoot him in the back. There was no room for heroics or fair play in Khadaji’s plan, the odds were already stacked in favor of the other side. Face was fast enough so he might be able to get off a shot before the simulated Spasm hit him; Khadaji didn’t want to give him a target.
Finally, Face took a couple of steps and turned to look away from Khadaji’s position. Leaner still leaned; the woman had her carbine only partially reassembled. Khadaji extended his arms, balancing carefully on his elbows, and fired each spetsdod once.
Leaner doubled up fast, but Face did manage a half-spin before he knotted. He triggered a short blast of his weapon at Khadaji’s position, but it was too high. If he’d been standing, the holographic shots would have tagged him. Khadaji grinned and scrambled up to finish the woman as Face dropped onto the damp ground in a fetal curl.
The woman was gone. Where—? How—?
She came from behind a tree in a dive. Khadaji swung his left spetsdod to cover her. She hit the ground in a shoulder roll and came up facing him, five meters away. An easy shot. He fired at her solar plexus—and at the same instant, saw she held something in her hand. She threw whatever it was at him, hard.
Damn! He jumped to his right and started to sprint. It could be a proximity shrap—!
A bell chimed, a clear and insistent tone Khadaji had grown to hate. He looked down and saw a throwing steel buried in his chest. The stainless steel bar looked very real, even though he knew it was only a computer-generated image like all the rest.
Ah, damn! She got him! “Cancel it,” he said, disgusted.
The throwing steel vanished abruptly, along with all of the other unreal paraphernalia produced by his two-million-stad toy. Khadaji stood alone in a bare and empty warehouse. He sighed, and shook his head. Over-confidence, that was what had done it. He’d underestimated the woman, in his concern over Face. It was a bad error; had this been real, he would be dead.
“Let’s have a percentage, to date,” he said. “And for the last ten sessions.”
The computer’s voice was bland. “Total run, seventy-eight-point-eight-six percent survival. Sessions two hundred six to two hundred sixteen, inclusive, ninety percent.”
“Thanks.” He was getting better, certainly. Only one “death” in the last ten runs, he’d gotten through nine out of ten, which wasn’t bad in most things. It wasn’t good enough, he knew. In real life, the game would be lost if he won all but one. There was no second place winner in a combat shoot, it was a pass/fail situation.
Well. He could practice his forms now and work on his unarmed combat before another run. He peeled the spetsdods away and set them aside, and began to stretch. And think.
Revolution versus evolution. The gun versus the instruction tape. Force versus peaceful means. It was no simple choice, not merely a black-or-white decision. Few things were clear-cut and this was not one of them, in his mind. To offer himself as an example of determined resistance for others to follow was one way to undermine the grasp of the Confed. To deliberately create an heroic figure to inspire and agitate by attacking with the means he despised was something he thought much about. Oh, he could rationalize it to himself by saying he was actually defending, that the Confed by its very nature forfeited its rights, in essence attacking all free people first. One was allowed to defend against attackers in Khadaji’s objectivistic philosophy. The nonviolence of the strong allowed one to protect oneself as long as one did not initiate anything. That was reasonable.
Khadaji slid slowly down into a split, working the muscles of his legs. Despite his practice, he still could not completely stretch it out; his groin stayed clear of the floor by a good three centimeters.
Rationalization was not enough, though. He didn’t feel sufficiently righteous to accept the ends-justifies-the-means easily, and the simulated troopers he was blasting had no families, friends, hopes or dreams. Real soldiers had those things. He knew. He had been a trooper. Therefore the end to justify those kinds of means had to be worthwhile, really important. Simple revolution was not enough, it left too much to chance, too many holes which would have too many people all too willing to plug them with systems worse than the Confed. So, there had to be more. And that’s where it got tricky.
He bent over and tried to put his chest on the floor, still holding the split. Close.
He thought about the school he’d bought on Renault. Yes. Very tricky, indeed. So much could go wrong.
He finished the stretches and stood, then went through the six katas of sumito. It took almost an hour, but he felt much better when he was done. He retrieved the spetsdods and molded them into place.
“Go,” he said.
The sand was green and black, and a wind stirred the desert around him. He spun quickly, looking for enemies. He didn’t see any immediately, but he knew they were out there.
Waiting.
In time, his percentages of winning against the simulacrums peaked. He would, Khadaji knew, grow better still, but only by small degrees, measured in bits perhaps discernable only in theoretical, rather than practical terms. As good as the simulator was, it did lack certain things, not the least of which was real risk. To fight against the machine was one thing, to fight against living, breathing opponents was another. He considered where he could get such experience. There was the Musashi Flex, a loosely-organized band of modern ronins who travelled around challenging each other; he could try that. Or, there was
The Maze. Such a thing was risky, but it offered a real test. Injury was likely, death a possibility in the game known as The Maze; if he could survive that, maybe he would be ready.
Maybe.
Chapter Eighteen
KHADAJI WATCHED THE three men as they moved to circle him. Two of them were larger than he, one considerably smaller. The larger men were similar only in size: One had a jagged slice on his face, probably done by a sharpened fingernail; the second had a single, thick bar of black hair where normal eyebrows would be. The last man, the shrimp, didn’t seem to have much going for him. Khadaji didn’t let the third man’s size fool him, though; since he was still in the game, he had to have something.
Slice edged closer, looking for an opening. Brow glanced at Slice’s back, but apparently decided to honor the pact, at least until Khadaji was out of the way. Shrimp was trying to get behind Khadaji, but failing, since Khadaji kept stepping slowly backward. Fortunately, this portion of The Maze was mostly empty streets, with nothing to trip a man not looking where he stepped.
Slice hurried his steps, trying to come within his own range without entering Khadaji’s defensive sphere. He was taller and so should have the reach advantage.
Khadaji considered running. After all, he didn’t know how many participants were left and three-to-one odds weren’t the best. There was no rule again alliances, even though the intent of the game was all-against-all. If Slice, Brow and Shrimp managed to eliminate the competition, they would have to turn against one another—there was only one winner allowed.
Brow moved closer. Khadaji kept his gaze unfocused and allowed his peripheral vision to warn him. He shifted back a hair faster, not allowing Brow to move close enough to attack without losing his center. These three were all expert in one or more martial arts, they wouldn’t make any rash moves, no attack unless they were certain of success. Too much was at stake. A hundred entrants at ten thousand stads each, winner take all—the winner being the last man or woman standing—or breathing.