On Broken Wings

by Francis Porretto

  He stepped into the ring at the opposed side, bowed in Louis's fashion, and said, "Check."

  She bowed, murmured "Check," and they approached one another, crouching.

  She decided to let him have the early initiative. He probed her defenses first high, with whirling side kicks she deflected easily, then low, with leg hooks and low-line thrusts at her knees that required more subtlety to elude without conceding space or balance. She contented herself with efficient evasions, restraining the urge to counterpunch until she had seen more of his style.

  He sought to lock stares with her. She refused to look into his face, concentrated on his shoulders and hips as Louis had taught her. He was a practiced and natural fighter, and could much more easily do without his eyes than she.

  When he came at her overhand, expecting to overwhelm her with a drop kick from above, she surprised him by darting forward and snapping a kick into his lower back. He staggered, stumbled, and caught himself before she could follow up on her momentary advantage. The first blow had been dealt and received; the lust of battle was fully upon them both.

  They began to gyrate more rapidly, each seeking to disorient the other, to gain a purchase on the other's movements, and to evade the other's thrusts and hooking maneuvers. The contest had shifted into high gear.

  She exulted. All her energy poured into the deadly dance. Even though it was her first serious encounter, and was against an opponent Louis had venerated, she could feel nothing but mastery and pride.

  He taught me well.

  Loughlin's style was much like Louis's, but devoid of the impish humor she had loved in her mentor. She thought she could sense flaws in it. He matched her spin for spin, thrust for thrust, sweep for sweep, but his transitions were infinitesimally jagged. He seemed to need an instant more to decide on each attack and parry than she did, and the momentary slackenings showed as lapses from kinetic smoothness.

  Could it be a gambit? Some kind of counter-counterpunching strategy?

  She pressed him hard, and the initiative passed to her. She oscillated between vertical and horizontal techniques, mixing sallies on the high, middle and low planes as randomly as possible. He kept her at bay with increasing difficulty, essaying fewer and fewer offensive moves of his own.

  She seemed to hear Louis's voice in her head: "Friction is the ultimate enemy. If conditions change out from under you while you're deciding what to do next, you'll lose a step. If it happens again, you'll lose your orientation. If you can't stop it in time and resynchronize with events, you'll lose your life."

  In the midst of a cartwheel scythe that he eluded by twisting away to her right, she plunged to her belly and feinted swinging her legs at his ankles. He tried to abort; she did abort. In the instant that he stood frozen, she shot both hands at his shins. She pulled at one, pushed at the other, and he was down on his back.

  He had to try to roll away, in one direction or the other. She guessed lucky and was on his back before he could somersault to his feet. She threw a chokehold around his neck and bore down, riding out his frenzied bucking.

  Ninety seconds later, he was unconscious. She wasn't far from it herself; she had held nothing back.

  She lifted him by the waist and flipped him over. His breathing seemed normal. She left him where he lay, retrieved her pumps and put them back on. Drained by the contest, she staggered across the loam, unable to correct for the way her heels sank into the earth. When he regained consciousness, he rose to a sitting position and blinked. She watched with arms folded.

  "Well?" she said.

  "Well what?"

  Her anger returned at full force.

  "Want to see me do it again with my pumps on? I promise I won't hurt you."

  He said nothing.

  "Louis thought a lot of you. He must have, to think you could teach me anything he couldn't. But just what subject was he thinking of, Mr. Loughlin? Because if I just saw your best, he could have taken you on his worst day without breaking a sweat."

  He shook his head, eyes rolling and momentarily unfocused.

  "I know that. Don't you think the man who trained him would know that? And he told me plainly that you were better than he was."

  Shock lanced through her. "So you knew all the time."

  He nodded. "Yes, I knew all the time. Let's go back inside."

  He rose and turned toward the trailer. She snapped, "Just a moment," and he stopped and faced her again.

  "How did Louis address you?"

  "He called me Malcolm." He tried to smile. It didn't work.

  "Then that'll do for me as well. My name is Christine. Not 'girl.' And Malcolm, I meant what I said in there. Think what you like about Louis, but say none of it while I'm around, or I swear to God I'll have your throat out. Got it?"

  The false-looking grin vanished. "It was only a test, you know."

  "I don't give a shit. I'll see you next Saturday at eight AM sharp. Be ready."

  She brushed past him and headed back toward her car.

  ====

  Chapter 36

  Tiny had to remind himself about fifty times that one of the men appraising him as if he were a side of beef was the highest ranking policeman in the county. Both of them were bigger than he was, not to mention armed.

  Shit, I hate dressing like this.

  He was lucky to have found a suit in his size in time for the interview. That didn't mean he had to enjoy wearing it.

  "Think he'll blend in, bro?" Even when he spoke softly, Ray Lawrence's basso rumble seemed to shake the walls of his office.

  "Looks like it." Ernest Lawrence looked Tiny up and down one more time, then reached out and grasped Tiny's chin, turning his head first to one side, then to the other. It took all of Tiny's negligible self-control not to swat the man's hand away and leap for his throat.

  Got to play along. Asshole's got me by the short hairs, for now. We don't have to settle up today.

  Ernest Lawrence, owner of Lawrence Security Patrols, was the second most frightening individual Tiny had ever met. The police chief's brother was two inches taller than Tiny, about thirty pounds heavier and solid muscle. His steel blue suit had been tailored to his impressive figure. He wore a nine millimeter Browning in a hip holster, belted over his jacket. He made a point of looking at you as if you were a piece of meat and he was trying to decide whether you should be grilled, fried, or eaten raw. It worked.

  Tiny knew to step lightly around these two. Yet he could have told them about a creature even more frightening than they, a diminutive man who had tossed Tiny his life after killing two of his best Butchers, and then turned away as if nothing had occurred. There was a strange comfort in that.

  Wonder what the little shit is doing now? Not that I'm gonna break my ass to find out.

  He cleared his throat. "Are you gentlemen planning to tell me what you'd like me to do for you?"

  The Lawrence brothers glanced at one another and chuckled. Ernest Lawrence patted Tiny on the cheek.

  "Sales call, boy. A sales call. You're gonna pay attention, take notes and all while I pitch my services to one of the pillars of the Onteora business community. Think you can handle that?"

  I'm gonna be muscle for a shakedown.

  "Shouldn't be too hard. But why me? You don't have anyone on your payroll who knows shorthand?"

  Ray Lawrence chuckled again and turned away. Ernest Lawrence lowered his brows and displayed his teeth.

  "I'm not interested in your shorthand, boy. More like your short arm." Ernest Lawrence unsnapped his holster flap and drew his Browning. He spent a few seconds pretending to inspect it. "Drop your pants."

  Fulminating, Tiny complied. Lawrence motioned with his gun, indicating that Tiny's briefs were to come off as well. They did.

  "Get it up, boy. Show me how well you're fixed."

  Ernest Lawrence did not know how close he came to dancing with the Devil in that moment. Had his brother not been standing alongside him, Tiny would have charged him despite the gun he
held. Instead, the head Butcher put his hand on his organ and did as he'd been told.

  Ernest's eyebrows went up in mock surprise and grudging approval. "Think he'll leave the right impression, bro?"

  Ray Lawrence glanced at Tiny's erection and shrugged.

  "Not bad."

  "Wanna do it yourself?" Ernest Lawrence bared his teeth.

  "Not for what you pay. Go get it done."

  Ernest Lawrence gestured again with the gun. Tiny pulled his pants up.

  ***

  Terry Arkham had been struggling with a single problem for two weeks. He'd written whole operating systems in less time than that. Analysis had failed. Trial and error had failed. Inspiration refused to come out and play. It was beginning to get to him.

  Most software engineers start with large egos. Nearly all of them fatten over time. Arkham had been a software engineer for thirty years, all of which had been spent at Onteora Aviation, where the competition was a notch below par. The experience had left him with a stratospheric opinion of himself. He would defer to God, but only on a bad day.

  The money's on the line on this one, Terry me boy.

  The hell of it was that it was for a feasibility study. That made it important. If it had been normal cost-plus development, he could have dragged it out for as long as he liked, with the willing connivance of the whole front office. But with proof of concept on the line and no development contract forthcoming until the proof had been delivered, he had to make it work, or else.

  He sat back from his monitor and ran his fingers through the fringe of intractable hair he still retained. The bleeding program violated its address limits whenever it pleased. Yet he couldn't make it happen reliably, which meant that his debugging depended on getting a lucky break. Lucky breaks are difficult to schedule.

  I just can't look at it anymore. If I could step back from it for a while, I'd see it better. But there isn't time.

  He didn't want to admit defeat, but every time he tried to address the problem, his eyes glazed over and his ego scurried for cover. It had taken too many bites out of him in too short a time, and what he needed most was to escape it. Without further consideration he pulled his short, rotund frame out of his chair and wandered out into the cubicle jungle in search of a distraction, anything at all to take his mind off his frustration for a few minutes. What he found was Rolf Svenson.

  "Yo, Sven. How're they hangin'?"

  The other team leader shrugged. "A few degrees left of center. And you?"

  "Ready to chew girders and spit rivets. The run-time signature manager keeps popping its cork -- except when I put a breakpoint into it."

  Svenson's answering laugh was not of humor or derision, but of sympathy. "I've been there. You want someone to go over it with?"

  Arkham bristled. He had twelve years' seniority on Svenson, and there was no doubt in his mind which of them was the better man. Before he said anything unfortunate, his better judgment reasserted itself.

  "Sure, why not? Find the problem and I'll buy you lunch."

  Svenson snorted. "God, no, not at the places where you eat! Come on down to my boat and we'll make it scream Uncle."

  They made themselves comfortable in Svenson's cubicle. Arkham brought the program up on the display. He was two-thirds of the way through his narration of the design when a soft voice from behind them broke his flow.

  "Rolf, did you want me to put the -- oh, sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt."

  Arkham turned to blast the intruder and stopped with his mouth hanging open. The damnedest young stunner in a white suit and high heels stood looking down at them from the cubicle entrance.

  Svenson turned toward her and waved her closer. "It's okay, Chris. Terry, have you met Miss Christine D'Alessandro yet? Chris, this is Terry Arkham. He's my opposite number on the Tactical development team."

  Arkham stood, straining to keep his gut sucked in as he offered the vision his hand. She took it and shook it. With her heels, she towered over him by six inches or more. From the corner of his eye, he could see Svenson grin.

  "Welcome to OA...Chris?"

  She nodded. "Chris is fine. And thank you, Terry."

  He turned toward Svenson. "New aide?"

  Svenson's grin faded. "New software engineer. And quite a good one, too. Make room, champ." He looked at the young woman again. "Would you care to give us a little help with this, Chris?"

  "Hey, wait a minute!"

  Svenson gestured patience at him. "Chris is here by way of Louis Redmond, Terry. She's quite likely to be able to help. Come on over and take a gander, Chris." He rose from his chair and motioned for her to take it.

  The young woman moved into Svenson's chair and peered at the code on the screen. "So what's the deal?"

  Svenson looked at Arkham without expression. "Would you mind giving Chris the fifty-cent tour, Terry? Or should I do it myself?"

  Restraining himself from becoming a sputtering fool by a hair's breadth, Arkham complied.

  ***

  "So you get the fault about equally often from the insertion and the retrieval routines?"

  Arkham nodded. "Yes, I said that."

  Svenson was keeping his mouth clamped shut.

  The young woman pursed her lips. "Condition of the heap afterward?"

  "No visible corruption, plenty of RAM left over."

  "Hm, I should have guessed. The heap couldn't be involved in a fault at retrieval time...wait, where did the tree management routines come from?"

  Arkham shrugged. "They came with the compiler, as part of the run time package. Problem can't be in there, toots. Too many people are using them."

  A hint of displeasure entered her expression.

  "There are problems and problems, Bubba. Do you know what kind of implementation those routines use?"

  Arkham pulled himself up straight. "What the hell are you talking about? It's a straight binary-tree access method. Either it works or it doesn't."

  She shook her head. "Wrong. If it's a recursive implementation, and your entries were inserted in sorted order, it could be gobbling your stack. These symptoms are consistent with that. Do you know that it isn't?"

  Arkham's face began to fill with blood. "I know that the same damn collection of routines has been in active use in this shop for twelve years, and no one else has ever had the slightest problem with them! So why don't you get your ass out of here and go finish high school instead of wasting any more of my time?"

  She scowled at him and faced the screen. The code that had driven him to the brink of violence seemed not to disturb her at all.

  Well, she hasn't been wrestling with it for two solid weeks.

  She put her hands to the keyboard and began to type. Arkham leaned forward to watch as lines of code flowed onto the screen in stately succession. He noticed then that her beauty was not perfect. Under her makeup, which was heavier than he'd realized, he could make out a crisscross network of ridgelines, almost certainly scar tissue, that covered the side of her face.

  Probably got those for mouthing off to some other guy.

  "Good thing the language allows us to override an external procedure name with an internal one, or this would be a hell of a lot more work." She kept typing as she spoke. "Louis showed me a completely nonrecursive implementation of these operations about...about two months ago." She lapsed into silence.

  Ten minutes and two hundred lines of code later, she built the revised program without errors. Success on the first try didn't seem to surprise her.

  "Okay, what's the name of the test set?" she said.

  Forty-five minutes later, after thirty separate test runs, Arkham had to admit that she'd done it. She didn't gloat or celebrate. She didn't even smile. She merely rose from Svenson's chair and wished them both a good night before heading out to wherever. When her footsteps were no longer audible, Rolf Svenson started to giggle.

  "You son of a bitch. How long has she been here?"

  "Let's see, Friday will make it three weeks." Svenson was
indecently pleased with himself.

  "Redmond trained her?"

  Svenson nodded, eyes still alight with mirth. "Louis Redmond trained her. Gonna buy me lunch, Terry?"

  If I can find someplace that serves hemlock, pal.

  "Sure, why not? How come Morrison bestowed her on you and not me? I've been shorthanded way longer than you, and lots worse."

  "Who knows? Maybe he didn't trust her all the way. Doesn't matter, champ. She's mine until I say otherwise, and I'm in no hurry to say otherwise." Svenson threw a pointed glance at the wall clock. "Quittin' time, Terry. You can take the evening off, you know."

  "Yeah, I guess so. Thanks, Sven." Arkham rose, grinned weakly, and headed back to his own cubicle. His mind seethed with conflicting emotions, but relief was not the least of them. He would be able to go home tonight. It would have been a lot nicer if there were someone to go home to.

  How the hell does Svenson stand it, having her around? She's a walking advertisement for sex, and he's been alone as long as I have.

  Not that that's a problem I'd mind having.

  Terry Arkham had decided what his objective for the next few weeks would be.

  ***

  It was about midnight when Tiny eased open the front door of the Butcher barracks and slipped inside. The building was dark. The sound of a half-dozen snoring riders rose to greet him.

  He moved with what stealth remained to him through the large, open area where most of his men slept, and slipped into the sergeant's quarters at the back, which had long been his personal refuge. When the door had closed behind him, he stripped off his new suit and shirt in a frenzy of haste, not caring whether he ripped seams or buttons in the process. He wadded the damp, stained garments and threw them as far from him as he could manage before slumping onto his bunk, leaning so far forward that his head dangled between his knees.

  What's wrong with me?

  He had killed many times before. He knew that the taking of a life could not have reduced him to this state.

  He had expected to be used as muscle on the "sales call." Yet Ernest Lawrence had permitted him no weapons at all. The Lawrence sideboy that had accompanied them was, like Lawrence, larger than he. Lawrence seemed to have quite a supply of oversized button-men at his disposal.