Over the last half-decade, Eloise had recommended him to quite a few of her other acquaintances, as well. Not all of them. Kevin was just as good as the original recommendation had suggested. In fact, he was probably even better. He was less concerned about specific “schools” or pure forms than he was with what worked. He referred to his personal style as “street brawler steroids,” and it damned well did work. And from Eloise’s perspective, what made him especially good was that he understood that each student’s style had to work for her, he suited his teaching to the size and strength of his student, and he obviously liked women… and kept those big, strong, highly skilled hands of his utterly impersonal when he worked with one of them.
The reason she hadn’t recommended him to all of her acquaintances was that she strongly suspected—no, “suspect” was too weak a word, she admitted—that he was associated with the Citizens’ Rights Union. He was about the farthest thing she could imagine from a fanatic, which sometimes made her wonder how he could support all of the CRU’s actions. Blowing up Legislaturalists in their offices or Internal Security posts, or ambushing a squad of Mental Hygiene Police on a public slidewalk, was one thing. Eloise actually found herself tempted sometimes to stand up and cheer when something like that happened. But the pure terror attacks, like the one on a private school whose sole offense had been that it was patronized primarily by Legislaturalist families… those were something else. The official reports in the faxes said the bomb had killed three children and injured six, but rumors floating around the InfoSys said the casualties had been at least three times that much, and probably even higher.
Personally, Eloise didn’t care whether the true number was three dead, or nine, or nineteen. They were kids, just like her students. So they were the kids of Legislaturalists, of the people responsible for the absence of opportunities available to her kids. So what? They hadn’t chosen their parents, and the thought of someone killing kids—anybody’s kids—just to make a political statement turned her stomach. So how did Kevin justify an association with people like that?
But that was between him and his own conscience. She didn’t know what might have driven him into the CRU in the first place, and she wasn’t going to condemn him for it. No, the reason she hadn’t sent some of her friends to him for training was that she refused to put them into contact with a potential CRU recruiter. Those friends were bitter enough they were probably looking for someone who could recruit them, and Eloise wouldn’t be the person who found them that someone.
Even if he had become one of her closest personal friends.
And even if she did sometimes wish…
“Kevin, I don’t want to start right out killing somebody if that isn’t what it takes,” she countered now. It was a familiar argument.
“Two thirds of the time, all you’ll have to do is show fight,” came the equally familiar response. “The kind of scum who’d pick on a single woman tend to back off quick when that happens. But sometimes it comes down to kill or be killed, with no other option. I don’t like that any more than you do, but it’s still true. And it’s also true that the more lethal the fight you’re ready to show, the quicker somebody who might back off goes ahead and finds reverse. And let’s be honest, Eloise, you’re not a big woman. You don’t have the physical size to intimidate the ones who might not be as fast to take the hint. Especially not if they equate ‘threat’ with ‘weapon,’ not training and attitude. You know—the really, really terminally stupid ones like Cal?”
“Kevin, you’re terrible!” Eloise laughed. “Cal’s been perfectly nice to me since I broke his finger.”
“And he never would’ve jabbed it in your face that way if he wasn’t twenty centimeters taller than you and really, really terminally stupid,” Kevin retorted. “And, yeah, I know he was drunk and you’d just turned him down for the evening. But that’s part of my point, Eloise. Someday you may run into someone else—someone with something in mind a hell of a lot worse than Cal could ever think of—who’s too dusted, or glittered, or hazed, or just plain drunk to think about what a trained person your size could do to them.” He shook his head. “And then there’s the minor fact that you’re one of the best-looking women I know. Hell, that I’ve ever known!” He shook his head again, his expression sober. “You draw the eye, and not just because of your coloring. That’s why Cal hit on you in the first place. He was only getting a little… too happy, maybe, but your looks make you more of a target for predators than most, and you know it.”
“Of course I do,” she replied, and her tone was as sober as his expression. “I’m not going to hide who I am, though. And I won’t let that kind of ‘predator’ dictate the way I live my life, either!”
“Shouldn’t have to,” he growled. “And I wish to hell you didn’t have to worry about it. If the frigging police would just do their jobs—or if just one of our beloved city or provincal administrators would make them do their jobs—you might not have to, and I’d be out of work. But they don’t, they won’t, and I like you too damned much to let you become one more example of why the hell they should!”
Eloise blinked at the genuine anger, the rage, simmering just under the surface of that last sentence. His brown eyes were dark, burning with an inner fury, and a small, still corner of her understood in that moment just how terrifying Kevin Usher could truly be. She wondered who he’d “liked too much” and who’d become “one more example”? Perhaps that was why he could be part of the CRU despite its too-frequent excesses.
“And in support of my theory,” he went on after a heartbeat, his tone much lighter as if he’d deliberately stepped back from the abyss of anger, “I should point out that even at his drunkest, Cal’s never gotten all touchy-feeley with me!”
“The mind boggles,” Eloise protested. “Not only that, but the stomach turns!” She raised both hands in a pushing away gesture and shuddered theatrically at the image that conjured up. “I can’t say for certain, but I’m pretty sure Cal’s about as hetero as they come, Kevin. And let’s be fair here. You’re not exactly the best example of eye candy he could find. You’re what I believe the bad novelists call, um… rugged looking.”
“Gee, thanks.” He grimaced. “‘Beat-up,’ don’t you mean?”
“Of course, but I like you far too much to ever actually say it,” she assured him earnestly.
“You’re so kind to me,” he said. “But my point, as you understood perfectly well, is that unlike you, I’m ten centimeters taller than he is. The one thing even I can’t teach you is height, and the sad truth is that just like physical size is often a deterrent all by itself, its absence is like blood in the water for some people.”
She nodded more seriously. In fact, Kevin was understating their size differential. She stood barely a hundred and sixty centimeters and tipped the scale at a scant fifty-five kilos. Kevin, on the other hand, was almost a hundred and ninety-four centimeters tall and weighed well over twice as much as she, all of it bone and muscle. His biceps were as thick as her thighs and his shoulders were more than twice as broad as hers. Coupled with his scarred knuckles and the sort of “rugged” face that resulted from frequent applications of someone else’s knuckles when he’d been growing up, he radiated the sort of elemental fearsomeness that could make anyone back down. In fact, he looked like the sort of fellow who routinely tore chance-met strangers into tiny pieces for stepping on his toe. Which he wasn’t. In fact, she suspected that very few people even imagined how thoroughly at odds with the inward man that outward appearance truly was.
Except for the toughness of course. And not that she doubted for a moment that Kevin Usher could become anyone’s worst nightmare if he chose to.
He just wouldn’t choose to without a very good reason.
She thought.
“I hear what you’re saying,” she told him now. “But I try to see trouble before it sees me. It’s a lot easier to avoid when you do. And—like I say, Kev—I don’t want to start out in a lethal-force confronta
tion if I don’t have to. That’s why I carry the baton.”
“And very useful it is,” he conceded.
Eloise favored a standard, length-configurable police baton with enhanced inertia-loading. It collapsed to fifteen centimeters but could be extended to ninety in fifteen-centimeter increments, and its deactivated length was small enough to fit the cloth scabbard Dorothée Tremont, one of her student’s parents, sewed into the left thigh of every pair of pants she bought. Dorothée removed the liner of her left hip pocket at the same time, so that she could access the baton instantly… and she practiced regularly to do just that. She hadn’t needed Kevin to tell her speed of response was the first and most important single element of self-defense. Used properly, that baton was highly effective—as the police had demonstrated often enough by breaking heads with batons just like it—and she’d carried it since she was a girl. In fact, she’d given Estelle one just like it for her eleventh birthday.
“The only problem I have with it,” Kevin continued, “is that people don’t think of it as a lethal weapon. Some of them, especially if there’s more than one—and you know what kind of gangers roam some of Duquesne’s floors—may figure they can take the damage, or—better yet, that one of their buddies can take the damage—until they get it away from you. If they’re right, I guarantee you they’ll end up using it on you just as a setting-up exercise. Even if they’re wrong, you could get hurt bad demonstrating that to them. And I don’t want you getting hurt at all.”
“So what would you recommend instead?” she half-sighed. “I know I’m not going to shut you up until you tell me.”
“Nope,” he agreed with a toothy, much more cheerful grin. “And, since you’ve been so kind—and so prudent—as to ask, here’s what I had in mind.”
He reached into his trouser pocket and produced a twelve-centimeter cylinder, about four centimeters in diameter, and Eloise’s eyes darkened as she recognized the vibro blade hilt.
“I don’t know, Kev…” she began.
“Hear me out, first,” he said, holding it up.
She looked at him for a moment, then nodded, and he pressed the activation button. The “blade” itself was invisible, of course. In fact, it wasn’t even generated until the user pressed the contoured button in the grip and brought it fully online. But the high-pitched, unmistakable whine all such blades were legally required to emit whenever activated was even louder than most. The three-centimeter pop-out quillons deployed the instant the blade came live, preventing the user’s own hand from accidentally amputating itself by slipping down into the cutting plane. The blade was supposed to make that impossible by shutting down the instant the user’s grip on the activation button loosened, but that didn’t always happen the way it was supposed to.
“This is a Martinez Industries Model 7,” he told her. “Out-of-the-box, it’s configurable to fifteen or thirty centimeters, and it’s officially rated as a Class Three weapon, which makes it carry-legal. More importantly, the instant somebody hears it, they know you’re carrying something a lot more dangerous than just a baton. And no one but an idiot’s going to grab this puppy to disarm you!”
“I imagine not,” she said, staring at it. “And what did you mean about out-of-the-box?”
“I mean I’ve… tinkered with it a bit,” he said. “Trick a Marine armorer taught me. You can boost its max length all the way to ninety centimeters for about twenty-five minutes. Burns out completely after that but it kicks ass while it lasts, and most people won’t expect the extra length. Won’t see it, either, unless they have a really close encounter with it. Makes a hell of a close-quarters weapon, Eloise.”
“I’m sure it would,” she said in a faintly appalled tone. “I wouldn’t know how to go about using it, though.”
“Oh, bullshit!” Kevin deactivated the blade and tossed the hilt to her. “You and I spar with that baton of yours for fifteen minutes every time you come over here. This thing’s weight is almost identical to the baton’s—one reason I picked it for you—and I’ve worked you with both hands for over four years now. You’re trying to tell me you don’t think you could swing this sucker effectively?”
“Well…”
“What I thought,” he grunted as she turned the hilt in both hands, staring down at it. “Now, you listen to me for a minute, Eloise. I’m not saying you have to start right out in slice-and-dice mode. To be honest, I wouldn’t be suggesting this to you if I figured there was any chance in hell that’d be your default setting! But the fact that you’re a southpaw’s going to surprise eighty, ninety percent of the people you might run into just to start with, and after four years with me, you’re frigging well ambidextrous with that baton.
“So, the way I see it, let’s say you do get into a confrontation you can’t avoid. I know you, and you’re not going to be the instigator, but it could still happen. So say it does. Now what do you do? Baton in left hand, extended and ready for business. If they back off, well and good. They don’t back off, maybe the baton’s all you need, in which case that’s all you use. But in the meantime, the right hand’s filled with that thing,” he pointed at the vibro hilt in her hands, “and if you need it, it comes up ready for business in a heartbeat. Two or three of them, maybe you bring it up sooner, let ’em hear it sing while they… rethink their position. But, trust me, two arguments in favor of rethinking are a hell of a lot better than one.”
* * *
“I’m really getting worried about The Terraces and the Eighth Floor, Aristide,” Eloise said quietly, later that month, as Alphonse Cardot closed his tablet and headed for his room. “And I don’t like what I heard about that incident down on Hundred and Ten last night.”
“I don’t either,” Floor Manager Aristide Cardot replied. His expression was grim, and Eloise knew he wouldn’t have admitted anything of the sort to just anyone.
As the manager of Two Hundred, Aristide was effectively the mayor of a city of close to ten thousand. Over a million people lived in Duquesne Tower’s hundred and thirty residential floors. The other seventy-five floors were taken up with engineering offices and equipment, power systems, water and waste disposal systems, and commercial space, including three major fabrication facilities, at least eighty shopping malls—eleven of them sprawling over at least a hundred square meters of floor space—and thousands of cubic meters housing the ever expanding sprawl of the PRH’s innumerable bureaucratic entities.
Aristide was an essential cog in that enormous mechanism, but he was only a cog. All he could do was the best he could do, and Eloise felt remarkably secure on the Two Hundred. There wasn’t much he could do about the services which depended upon outside sources, and interruptions in power and plumbing—even ventilation, occasionally—had become increasingly frequent, despite his best efforts. But both he and Commissioner Cesar Juneau, who commanded the Floor Two Hundred Police, took their responsibilities seriously. When services went down, Aristide moved heaven and earth to get them back up again. And if Juneau’s patrolmen and patrolwomen expected occasional “gifts” from the tenants—and weren’t above a little discreet shakedown if those gifts weren’t forthcoming—they were nowhere near so blatant about selling “protection” as the force on Eighth Floor. And they took their public safety duties seriously. They had a remarkably short way with the sort of youth gangs who terrorized Eighth and The Terraces. And they weren’t especially shy about delivering summary punishment tailored to fit the crime rather than relying on the overburdened and apathetic courts, either.
It was unfortunate that the attitude of the Eighth Floor force seemed to be spreading upward, but it had a long way to go before it hit Two Hundred.
“I guess what I hate most about it is that we have to go past the other floors to get home,” she said. “Once I get above One Hundred I start relaxing, but those lower floors, especially Fifty and Eight…” She shook her head. “Every time I get into the lift car below Hundred, I worry about who I may end up sharing it with.”
“Cesar
and I are trying to keep an eye on it,” Aristide told her, “but there’s only so much we can do from up here. Rembert down on Hundred is trying to work with us on it, too, and we’re trying to beef up the Lift Shaft Police patrols. But those are trans-floor. We don’t have jurisdiction, once we get past the lift car door. Even if we did, every floor manager and commissioner’s way too strapped for manpower to do anything like that, even if we pooled our resources. And I hate to say it, but the Duquesne LSP’s in even worse shape than we are. We’ve requested more shaft cops and better monitoring systems for the lifts from the Department of Public Safety, too, of course.” He rolled his eyes—something else he wouldn’t have done with just anyone—and puffed his cheeks. “I’ve been assured we’ll receive them as soon as possible. It’s all a matter of priorities, they say.”
And Duquesne Tower’s priority is somewhere south of zero, Eloise filled in mentally.
“Well, at least I’ve got my ‘little friend’ with me,” she said out loud, and Aristide waved both hands in an averting gesture.
“Don’t talk to me about that!” he scolded with a smile. “I’m not supposed to know about it, and I’m just as happy that way.”
“Oh, of course,” Eloise agreed with a smile. “I can’t imagine what I was thinking to bring up a subject like that! I apologize.”
“And well you should,” he admonished her. “However, speaking hypothetically, if I knew what you were talking about—which I don’t, of course—I’d probably approve wholeheartedly.”
“Yes, I think you probably would.” She smiled again, thinking it was just as well for his peace of mind that he didn’t know about Kevin’s recent gift, and patted him on the arm. “And on that note, it’s time I was going. I need to get groundside before Estelle starts home.”
Infinite Stars Page 78