by Steve Perry
Shrimp darted by Khadaji quickly, at a run. If Khadaji was going to take off, it would have to be now. He grinned, and stopped moving suddenly. No. He didn’t need the money, but he had to know that he could win against real opponents rather than computer simulations, no matter how sophisticated the machine. A loss here was worth serious and real injury, maybe even death. Despite the latest in medical gear standing by, Maze gamers had been known to die.
Slice made the first move. He squared his stance into a riding horse variant and looked at Khadaji over his left shoulder and raised fist. Since he was a big man and powerful, Khadaji figured him for a strength attack, maybe a kick—
It came. Slice cross-stepped and threw a sidekick, his heel aiming for Khadaji’s groin. Well. At least he had sense enough not to kick high, like some holoproj artist. Khadaji sidestepped and used both hands to increase the speed of Slice’s thrust. It overbalanced the man’s weight on his ground foot and Slice fell heavily onto his side—
Brow leaped in, trying to catch Khadaji off guard. Brow shot a stiffened hand at Khadaji’s throat, his fingers bunched into a spear—
Khadaji spun away from the strike. He grinned as he found himself following the pattern of steps Pen had made him learn so many years ago. He had time to remember the numbers, seventy-one and two, then he extended his own hands and caught Brow’s wrist. Continuing his turn, Khadaji levered Brow into a fall and the man became an eighty-five kilo missile with a bone-tipped warhead—landing right onto Slice as the first man tired to scramble up. There was a clunk! of Brow’s skull hitting Slice’s face. Slice was down again and unconscious; Brow was stunned. Khadaji spun on the balls of his feet to face Shrimp, who aborted his own attack and came to a stop. Shrimp regarded Slice and Brow, then looked back at Khadaji, whose stance was neutral and relaxed.
“Truce?” Shrimp said. “You and I, we can finish them and work together. There are maybe six or eight others left. After that…”
“No,” Khadaji said. “I play alone.”
Shrimp appeared to be weighing his chances of fighting or running. Behind him, Khadaji heard Brow groan, then collapse. A telemetric scanner whined from above The Maze, and Khadaji knew both men were out of the game. A medical din would be coming for them soon.
Abruptly, Shrimp decided. He turned and ran.
Six or eight left, he’d said. Khadaji had figured more, so he must have missed a couple of the telemetric signals, that was bad. Unless Shrimp had been wrong. But he’d looked shrewd, that one, and Khadaji wondered again what skill had kept him in the game this far. They were three days into The Maze, a holoprojic construct built especially for such things. If only eight or ten players remained, it would likely be over soon. Some were no doubt hiding, hoping the others would take each other out, but they would have to emerge sooner or later. There was a time limit of a week; if more than one person remained on the field by then, the game was voided. It was not enough merely to survive; one had to survive alone…
Khadaji found himself walking down a wide street flanked by holoprojic buildings programmed to look like a heavy industrial district. Plenty of places to hide, doorways, alleys, refuse containers.
Suddenly there was a blur of motion half a block ahead. Khadaji slid behind the cover of a metal container and cautiously stuck his head around the edge to see what was happening.
It was a skirmish. A tall woman with dusky skin faced a shorter man built like a powerlifter. They circled, hands held in defensive postures.
Khadaji cautiously moved closer, keeping to the shadowy doorways, being careful not to allow his attention on the fighters distract his check for hidden players. He stopped twenty meters away from the pair and watched.
Unless the woman was very skilled, Khadaji would put his money on the powerlifter. The man moved well and was obviously very strong. If he managed to close with the woman, she would be in trouble.
The two feinted a few times, the woman giving ground. The powerlifter might be certain he could take her, but he was not stupid; that the woman had managed to survive where so many others had not was obviously in his mind.
Eventually, the powerlifter backed the woman into a corner, between a grimy wall and a rack of heavy machinery. He gathered himself, and lunged at her, hands open wide to grab her—
The woman was skilled. She threw half a dozen punches and kicks, sharp and powerful attacks. She scored; the powerlifter was hurt, but he kept coming. He locked his arms around her and lifted her free of the ground in a bear hug—
She continued to lance at him, but he ducked his head into her and kept squeezing. She was a wasp, stinging a gorilla. Khadaji heard ribs snap—
The woman put the tip of her little finger into her mouth and bit down, hard. Khadaji frowned. What—?
She pulled her finger from her mouth and spat the tip of it into her palm, then turned her hand over and slapped it onto the top of the powerlifter’s head. There was cracking sound and the powerlifter suddenly collapsed, releasing the woman.
A telemetric siren began to scream and the voice of a medical din blared at the combatants in a metallic clang: “Ordnance foul! Ordnance foul! Ordnance foul!”
The woman turned to run, but was quickly surrounded by four dins waving prods. While the medical din continued to repeat the foul charge, Khadaji turned and hurried away. All the commotion was as apt to drive players away as draw them. The woman had cheated, she had somehow gotten a weapon past the scanners. Must have been some organic explosive charge, Khadaji figured, shaped to blast hard enough to fry a human or mutant brain. The powerlifter was likely dead; the woman would be disqualified and penalized. Two more players gone.
Feeding stations were prime places for attacks. Khadaji had avoided them as much as possible for that reason. He waited until “night,” watched a station for at least an hour before moving on it, and was in and out quickly. Many of the players were taken at meal times as they sauntered into some carefully-set trap placed by expert hunters. Like water holes in some primitive jungle, the feeding stations in The Maze were dangerous, no less so because all the users were predators and prey.
Khadaji was on the roof of a structure overlooking one of the ten stations. It was near midnight and he had been lying there for nearly two hours, watching and listening. Normally, he would have moved in long before, but something had made a noise thirty minutes into his watch, and he had not yet been able to pinpoint the source. He was hungry and thirsty, but this only made his hypnotically trained senses sharper. He hoped.
Just as he was preparing to give up the watch as an overcautious worry, a man appeared from a pile of refuse cans and cat-footed toward the food dispensers. Ah, there had been something. Funny, it had seemed to come from a closer source, but sounds did strange things in such surroundings. He watched the man.
As the figure reached a spot two meters from the dispensers, there was a flurry of additional motion. A second man appeared—Khadaji couldn’t tell where from, exactly—and a short fight ensued. The second man was vicious; he clubbed the first from behind with his hands locked together, hitting him repeatedly at the base of the skull. After the man was down, the attacker continued to hit him, until the drone of the robot dins bringing medical gear grew close.
On the roof, Khadaji suddenly felt sick. This game wasn’t only a game. Sure, the man would likely survive his assault; sure, he had known the risks, had wanted the money enough to take them. But it was like watching two animals—
A voice took over the night. “According to the rules of The Maze Game, we are required to inform you that two contestants remain at an elapsed time of five days, nine hours, forty minutes, twelve seconds.”
Khadaji took a deep breath. His sumito, his art of personal control, allowed him much leeway, and he didn’t do what the attacker below had done. He turned the force of an attack upon itself, he defended, using the energy of another against himself. Or herself. But in the now-quiet darkness, he shook his head.
Am I any better than that man
down there? Isn’t violence violence, no matter how it is wrapped with clever rationalization? The others have destroyed each other for money and I have a higher goal: freedom from the yoke of the Confederation. But at what price? These players were all people, with families, and friends and lives they wished to live, weren’t they?
Gods, is what I’m doing right? Can I really justify it?
Khadaji watched as the dins removed the downed man. The winner of the fight moved into a patch of pale blue light cast by the food dispensers. Khadaji recognized him: Shrimp.
Is what I’m doing right? Even at such cost? Once I was certain, I had that knowledge, now I am not so sure, not so sure at all. But I spent a big portion of my life so far working toward it. Can I quit now?
No. No, he decided, you can’t. It might cost you personally, but if you reach your goal, it will be worth it. It has to be worth it.
“You might as well come out,” Khadaji said. “I know where you are and there are only two of us left, now.” He stood facing the dispensers, five meters back.
After a moment, Shrimp appeared. This time, Khadaji saw his hiding place, a cleverly built arrangement which folded against the wall. At night, in the dark, it would be hard to see until one was nearly upon it.
“I thought you might make it,” Shrimp said. “I’ve seen that stuff you did before. Some kind of religious fighting style, isn’t it? I didn’t think anybody as good as you are at it would be interested in playing in The Maze, though.”
“I’m not, really,” Khadaji said. “I’ve got other reasons. I don’t need the money.”
“Oh? Why not default then, and let me have it?” Shrimp edged a hair closer to Khadaji.
“I would. Except I don’t think you deserve it.”
“Ah, but I do deserve it, you see. I’ve won this game before. Came in second twice. It isn’t the money.”
Khadaji nodded. “You like it. The hurting. The fighting.”
Shrimp moved to his right, so the light fell more upon him. “Oh, yeah. You have to, to win.”
Khadaji shook his head. “No, you don’t. If you’ve got enough reason, you can hate it and win.”
Shrimp held his hands up in front of his chest and brought them slowly together. “You jest, friend. You might fool somebody else with the philosophical rat shit, but it’s just you and me and we know what we are, don’t we?” He brought his hands together suddenly and began a finger weave. Shrimp’s fingers danced in the pale light, knotting and unknotting in intricate and complex patterns designed to draw a watcher into them. It was a variation on classical kuji-kiri called Neshomezoygn, and he was very good. But Khadaji had first seen the organomechanical hypnosis years ago, when Pen had used it to beat him in their first encounter; he had learned how to use it—and avoid being taken by it since. Now he knew too how Shrimp had survived The Maze. But it wasn’t going to be enough, this time.
Khadaji stepped in toward the other man.
A moment later, there was a new winner of The Maze Game. And a new loser. As Khadaji stared at the unconscious form of the man he’d thought of as Shrimp, he knew the winner and loser were, in fact, the same. But at least he knew also that he was as ready as he was likely to be to begin the next step in his plan.
The thrum of the dins surrounded him as he stood there nodding slowly to himself. Yes. He was ready.
Chapter Nineteen
HE ARRANGED FOR competent people to take care of his business and money. That was easy enough, since he already had most of them in place. Then Khadaji took passage on a ship and was bent through half a galaxy to a world with enough strategic importance to rate recent occupation by ten thousand members of the Confederation ground forces.
Fourteen years after and billions of kilometers away from the Slaughter on Maro, Emile Antoon Khadaji arrived on Greaves.
The old man’s name was Hinton, and aside from his age and the fact that he owned the pub, he had a kind of cackle which reminded Khadaji of Kamus. Hinton was tired. He had run the rec-chem operation for thirty local years and whatever joy it might have once held for him had long since fled. Khadaji’s agents had supplied him with information about Hinton and the Jade Flower, as well as three similar operations, so it was no surprise to Khadaji.
Of the places carefully investigated, the Jade Flower was first choice. The only problem he saw in buying it was the price. Not that he couldn’t afford it—ninety million standards would buy most of the town—but he had to be careful to offer enough and not too much. The old boy might wonder about that, and what Khadaji didn’t want at this stage was any suspicion from anybody. But, since Khadaji knew precisely what the pub was worth, he had an advantage.
They sat in Hinton’s office, the old man behind a plastic desk and Khadaji in a worn form-chair which kept slipping a gear and poking him in the left buttock.
“My partners and I are willing to offer a hundred and fifty kay,” Khadaji said. That was low, by fifteen percent. The place was worth st172,500, according to Khadaji’s people.
“Not a chance,” Hinton said. “I might accept two hundred, but I’d be cheating myself.”
Khadaji kept a straight face. “Well. I might be able to get my partners to go to a hundred and sixty.”
“And let an old man starve? Shee-it.”
Khadaji would have paid ten times what the place was worth, but it was important the old man not think so. After a few minutes of bargaining, and a fake call to his “partners,” Khadaji allowed himself to be talked up to a final price of 190,000 stads. He was pleased, the old man was pleased, and the Jade Flower was Khadaji’s.
The detail man from the chem distribution outfit was surprised, but didn’t let that temper his greed.
“Full spectrum? How deep are we talking here?” Khadaji allowed himself a small grin. “I’m planning on a good business. We already have military on-limits status and I—my partners and I—plan to go full day and night cycle.”
The man nodded, and Khadaji could almost see his mind adding up his percentage of the new order. According to Hinton’s records, the Jade Flower was a break-even proposition most of the time. With a full-spectrum order for rec-chem, the detail man’s commission would jump considerably. He smiled broadly, and waved his portable transducer at the holoproj. “Well, I suggest a basic order along these lines…”
Khadaji smiled and nodded. The man was adding twenty percent to what was really needed. Khadaji let him finish, then cut the order by ten percent. That showed he wasn’t a fool, but still allowed the detail man enough skim to make him happy.
“Lemme see I got this right,” the constructor said. “You wanna buy the round tables with a quad set of stools, but you wanna have ‘em bolted to the floor?”
“That’s right,” Khadaji said. They stood in the center of the Jade Flower’s octagon room, amidst the bulky long tables Hinton was currently using.
The constructor nodded. “No problem. What—ah—you gonna do with the—old furnishings?”
“I thought I’d sell them.”
“I—ah—can make you an offer.”
Khadaji raised an eyebrow.
The constructor looked at him for a moment, then named a figure which was half the value of the old tables and benches. Khadaji nodded in return, then made a counteroffer. In the end, he allowed the constructor to take the old furniture for enough so the man would make a nice profit when he resold them.
He didn’t fire any of the people Hinton had working for him; he didn’t want any ex-employees causing problems. With the expanded scope of operations, more help would be needed. Khadaji contacted an employment service with his needs.
Anjue Yesmar Levart was a thin, dark, intense native of Spandle. He used his hands when he spoke, weaving, a picture around his words. Khadaji detected in Anjue the qualities he wanted in a doorman. He seemed quick, had a good memory and ten years of experience. Khadaji ran six of the constructor’s helpers past each applicant for the job, and Anjue recalled all their names after one introduction. M
ore, Anjue remember what they were wearing before he saw them again. And he was polite but not obsequious. Khadaji hired him and gave him leave to hire his own assistant.
Hiring a head pubtender was relatively easy. With his own background, Khadaji knew which questions to ask. Of the first half dozen applicants the agency sent over, only one knew the ingredients to Shin’s Kiss. Samar “Butch” Beavens knew not only a Shin’s Kiss, but also every drink Khadaji asked about, and obviously a lot more he didn’t know. Khadaji gave him the job and told him to hire assistants as needed. Butch would take care of selecting prostitutes, as well.
The man was burly, but not too bright. He stared at Khadaji. They were alone in the octagon, in the middle of the newly-installed round tables and stools. Khadaji repeated it. “I want you to pick up a stool. Be careful, they are bolted to the floor.”
The man digested that, shrugged, and stepped to the stool nearest him. He leaned over and gripped the stool, bending at the waist. He took a deep breath and gathered himself—
“Hold it,” Khadaji said. “That’s enough.”
“Huh?”
“I’ll contact the agency and they’ll let you know.”
It took a while for that to filter through, but finally the man nodded and turned to leave. Khadaji tapped a key and crossed the man’s name from the computer’s file. Anybody who used his lower back in lifting, as he’d been about to do, didn’t know the right way to utilize his muscles. Besides, he hadn’t walked like a man who knew how to move well. Khadaji had Anjue bring in the next one.
The next applicant came across the floor as if he owned it. He moved in balance, a point in his favor. Khadaji looked at the file and saw that the man called himself Sleel. According to the application, he had several years training in tahrae, a form of jujitsu.