by Steve Perry
Another few matches, and she’d have enough for the whole documentary. Yeah, it was all spec, but she was sure she could sell it—the entcom market was like a starving monster, it was always hungry for the new and different, and nobody had done an in-depth work on the Musashi Flex before—bits and pieces, sure, but nothing nearly as deep as what Sola had. A primecast hour-and-a-half, easy, and with any luck at all, she could get a miniseries, three, maybe five segs, system syndications, maybe even GalaxNet—wouldn’t that be something? She could write her own ticket then, direct, produce, she’d be set, and only twenty-eight T.S. years old. That would give her fucking father something to think about, seeing her name on the ’proj.
It was a nice fantasy, being rich and famous. She’d have to stop chasing it pretty soon, because she was gonna be out of stads. And if she couldn’t sell this, she was going to have to get a job, and there was a sad prospect . . .
Pale and Al, the giant snake, continued to circle, and while she had learned the moves all meant something, if not always what, a general audience wouldn’t know that much, so she’d better spice things up some.
“Two-shot, closer,” she subvocalized.
The cam’s POV snapped in tighter. What a great toy. It should be, it cost enough.
“Solarize, refield, refade to previous shot,” she said.
The color washed out to a bright monochrome, then faded back in to the same image. Yeah, she could do all this on the editing comp later, but the more you could do in-cam, the better—it saved you a lot of work when you did EFX on the fly, plus in the moment, your instincts gave you a better flow. Usually. And hell, if it didn’t work, you could always fix it later—
Al lunged, moving in very fast, and fired a punch at Pale’s face—
Pale didn’t back up, but angled to the outside of the incoming strike—
“Wider!” she said, louder than she’d intended. “Include both!”
The cam’s field expanded, to include the fighters’ feet. Yes, yes, she needed that—
Pale ducked and shot a punch under Al’s incoming fist, hit him under the armpit, hard. Sola heard something break—whether it was Al’s rib or Pale’s hand she couldn’t tell, but it was another sound she had learned to recognize, that wet snap of bone cracking—
Al grunted with pain, then dropped lower and brought his elbow down, trapping Pale’s hand against his injured ribs. With his other hand, he slapped at Pale’s ear, but continued past, shoved his hand under the man’s jaw, and wrenched his head backward—
Pale tried to step away from it, but Al hooked his left heel behind Pale’s ankle, and Pale went horizontal suddenly, falling straight back. He was going to hit the plastcrete hard—
—but no, somehow, Pale twisted and turned the fall into an angled dive, hit on one shoulder, rolled, dived again, with Al chasing him. Pale came up, spun, and was ready when Al got there. He kicked, his left boot connecting with Al’s knee. Another gristlelike pop! and Al wobbled to the side, turned, awkwardly, and put his weight on his good leg.
Pale stayed back. “That’s the lateral ligament, Al. Plus the rib. Time to pack it in.”
Al shook his head. “Fuck you, Timson!”
“You wish. Come on. Lose gracefully. It’s only a few points. You could maybe dance the rib, but you can’t win with that knee fucked-up.”
“You might be surprised.”
“Hell, we’d both be surprised, you more than me. Come on. It’s not like you have to give me your tag. We’ll catch a hack to a medic, and you can call it in. This is a done deal. No point in suffering any more damage, hey?”
Al didn’t say anything. He was apparently thinking about the offer.
Take it, Al, Sola thought. I don’t need footage of another guy getting beat to a bloody mess, I got plenty of that already. Show some class, that’ll look good on the holoproj nets—
“Tell you what, take the deal, and you can have first turn with the girl hiding behind the bin. She looks like she’s got plenty enough juice for me when an old crip like you gets done.”
Sola went cold, as if a bucket of liquid nitrogen had splashed on her. Shit!
She didn’t hesitate. She grabbed her cam, broke the quik-stik loose from the bin, and ran, terrified.
Behind her, she heard loud laughter. From both men.
Shame blended with her terror. The bastards! She wanted to go back and give them each a blast from the hand wand she had tucked into her back pocket. Let them wake up with nasty fucking headaches in half an hour to regret having frightened her that way. But she was angry, not stupid. Flexers who fought unarmed did so from choice, not necessity. They certainly carried more weapons than she did, and were unquestionably better with them. Both of the men were bigger and stronger than she, and she had no desire to wake up in an alley naked and sore, her body abused and her valuable cam and gear gone. They could do that without a second thought, use her and steal her stuff. She knew about men, violent men. Local authorities wouldn’t have much sympathy for a loco woman who wandered around the City of Whores alone, spying on duelists. Got robbed and raped? Siento. Too bad.
Fuck. She hated being afraid, but she wasn’t suicidal. She would go back to her hotel, dump today’s footage into the editing comp, fiddle with it a little. It was getting pretty warm out here anyway, and the local custom of siesta didn’t sound so bad . . .
The raw recording was good, but nothing spectacular. She reviewed it on the loup as she walked toward her hotel. Well. That didn’t matter so much by itself. She had lots of medium-level fighter stuff to go with it. Hours and hours and hours, maybe sixty, sixty-five all total. All she really needed was a climax, something really righteous to point it all toward. A crux.
The gods must have been listening. She was crossing a new retroplaza with a high-tech shopping kiosk surrounding it when she saw Lazlo Mourn coming out of a shoe store.
She knew it was him, she didn’t need to check her records, she could ID all the current—as of three days past, anyway—Top Twenty Players by sight; she knew their bios, their match histories, everything that was available on the ed- and entcom nets about them. So far, she hadn’t seen any of them fight, though she had just missed one between Orleans Plinck and Monroe Rouge on the frontier world Greaves, in Orm System, three weeks earlier. A chance to see Top Five Players clash, and she had gotten there too late. By two fucking minutes.
There had been witnesses, a couple of Confed troopers who happened to be passing by, and she interviewed them, got some pix, but they weren’t much help. Plinck, who was ranked Third, and Rouge, Fifth, had taken all of five seconds from start to finish. The Confed troopers, two wet-bottom conscripts just out of basic on their first tour, couldn’t begin to tell her how it had happened. One second, the two were squared off, maybe two, three meters apart, the next thing they saw, Rouge was down and unconscious or dead, and Plinck was searching him for his tag. They had been blurs to the Confed watchers, despite whatever basic fighting skills they had gotten in training.
Damn!
That was as close as she had come to the best working. But Lazlo Mourn was consistently in and out of the Top Twenty. His current rank, as of, let’s see, two days ago, was . . . Eleventh? She’d have to check that to be sure, but it wouldn’t be a place or more away in either direction. Could be Twelfth. Maybe even Tenth.
This was a blast of good luck, like a cool breeze on a hot day. Mourn, here. He might not have anything going at the moment, but sooner or later, he would. A few years back, Mourn had really liked to mix it up; he fought three or four times a month when he could find players worth his effort, though he had been quiet lately. If she could stay with him, she’d get a capper for the documentary, almost certainly.
She watched him pass by, a clear plastic tube with a pair of flexsoles in it under his arm. He didn’t appear to be paying any attention to his surroundings, but she knew better than that. You didn’t get to be among the most expert hand-to-hand fighters in the galaxy by sleepwalking. She woul
d have to be very careful following him, else he’d spot her pretty quick.
She had an edge. She had spent three weeks learning sub-rosa surveillance techniques from Carl “The Shadow” Denali, an expert security agent formerly with Confederation Intelligence and now in the private sector, who, it was said, could track a black gnat at midnight in a sootstorm. We’re So Glad Entertainment, for whom she had been working at the time, had paid for the course—she’d have never been able to afford it, and it had been worth it as far she had been concerned. She had gotten footage of several dirty pols using that training, crooked politicians being one of We’re So Glad’s prime exposé subjects. Fortunately, after they had parted company, Denali’s training was hers to continue using. They could take your company ID chit, but they couldn’t take what was inside your head. Not yet, anyway.
You could, Denali had taught the class, secretly tail a man who checked to see if he was being followed—if you were very careful. Sola had practiced the techniques dozens of times since she’d learned them, seeing what worked and what didn’t, and she had gotten pretty good at it, so she figured. A lot of it had to do with attitude. You had to be focused in such a way that the subject couldn’t feel you watching him. You had to be elsewhere when he looked for a tail. He looked behind himself, you needed to be across the street; he looked across the street, you needed to be in front of him; he looked in front of himself, you needed to be behind him. You had to dope out his patterns before he spotted you, and if you could, he wouldn’t know you were there.
She allowed Mourn to get twenty meters ahead, then she angled across the street to parallel him.
The first time he checks, it’ll be behind him, Denali had taught her. It’s almost instinctive. If he doesn’t see anything there that trips an alarm, next he’ll look to the sides. Then if he’s savvy, he’ll scope any pedestrians or vehicles in front of him. You need to be one shift ahead of him all the time. And the tricky part is, you need to be able to rotate it randomly, because he won’t look back, sideways, and to the front sequentially after the first time, he’ll mix it up. But a good shadow will figure out what he is going to do before he does it. It’s a skill, an art. It takes constant practice . . .
She grinned to herself. Jesu knew she had done enough of that. When you were a freelance investigative journalist in a very competitive market, you either got good at what you did or you went on the dole. So far, Sola had managed to keep from having to do that. This guy was canny, and he’d be alert, but he was just a man. Put his pants on one leg at a time like everybody else did. She could do this. She would do it—and if she pulled it off, it would help make her rep. The woman who tracks professional killers. Cayne Sola, ghost-at-large, the wraith, the invisible girl . . .
It was all in your attitude.
Yeah, well, if you are so hot, how come those two dim-bulb midthirties-ranked Flexers back in the alley spotted you, hmm?
She shook her head. A fluke. They had been so easy to tail, she had relaxed too much, that was all. Probably they had heard her when she did the cam command was all.
Uh-huh. Sure.
Okay, fine. She’d be more careful.
She moved her position several times as Mourn walked down the street. Now and then, he’d slow or stop to look into a shop window. She was certain he hadn’t spotted her.
He went into a flickstik and smoke shop a few blocks up the street, a small storefront place. She parked herself at a cafe across the road so she could look out the window, ordered a drink, paid in advance, in case she had to leave in a hurry. The smell of the city was a mix of dust and exhaust and dried herbs from the shop.
She saw Mourn in the doorway a few minutes later, and she stood to exit. Just as she did, an electric bus pulled to the curb across from her, blocking him from view.
When the vehicle left, there was no sign of her quarry.
Shit! He got on the bus!
She hurried down the street. There were enough traffic signals so the bus wouldn’t be able to get too far ahead too fast.
She looked around for a hack, but of course, there weren’t any empties in sight. Always worked that way.
At a speed somewhere between a fast walk and a slow jog, Sola managed to keep pace with the bus for two blocks. It stopped twice, people got on or off, and she didn’t mark Mourn among those leaving. As it pulled over to pick up and disgorge passengers the third time, she crossed the street and watched. She couldn’t spot Mourn through the windows on her side, nor did he appear to have alighted with the half dozen or so others who just got off.
Damn!
She ran to the bus, got on, waved her credit cube over the reader, and started down the aisle. He hadn’t seen her, and she hated to give him a chance to mark her so quick, but there was no help for it. Traffic signals or not, she couldn’t keep up with a bus on foot for much longer.
She walked all the way to the back and no two ways about it, Lazlo Mourn wasn’t here.
Well . . . fuck!
Luna Azul—a name she had invented—stood in the shadows of a warehouse in Chambee Town, on Wu, in Haradali, and watched the Confed’s Assault Team storm the building across the street. It was cold, and there had been a dusting of powdery snow earlier in the day, just enough to make everything look clean and fresh.
Beauty, before the beast arrived . . .
The CAT unit steamed in, no finesse, just raw power: Fifty troopers in full body armor, using .177 Parkers, pop-grenades, puke gas, and polarized smoke. A four-person CI team ran the op—they were not in front, but they weren’t at the back, either.
The spookeyed troops could work in near darkness, and with her own spookeyes up and running, she had no trouble seeing them hit the place.
Doors blew in, walls crumbled, and the would-be terrorists inside would be going down like weeds in front of a power mower, cut to bloody shards before they had a chance to mount any kind of defense.
Score another one for UO—undercover operative—what was that name? ah, yes, Luna Azul, of Confederation Intelligence. The cell was wiped out, and the lesson plain—conspire against the Confed and get caught, the price was exceedingly expensive—it would cost you your ass.
Why did people risk it? The Confed wasn’t the most benevolent organization, to be sure, but overall, it kept the galaxy stable, and it probably did almost as much good as harm, give or take. It damn sure was a giant, and no handful of malcons meeting in a run-down goods storehouse on some back-rocket world was going to knock the Confed down. How could they think otherwise? It’s one thing to sling a rock at a giant and catch him by surprise. It’s another thing to try throwing stones at an M-Class tank tracking you on Doppler with smart guns locked, moving in at speed. Best say a final prayer quickly, because you were about to leave this life for whatever was waiting in the next . . .
That there were fourteen people dead or dying in the wreck of a building and that she had sent the ones who’d done it? Not her problem. Once upon a time, she worried about it: The dead people had children, spouses, maybe parents who loved them, and all of that . . . went away, because of her. But those worries had eventually faded to twinges, and the twinges were few and far between. If you want to play, you have to be willing to pay. If you had small children at home, what the fuck were you doing plotting against the Confed? It wasn’t as if there was anybody with a working brain who didn’t know that treason was a mind-wipe-punishable crime. Dead or brainless in a medical kiosk, what was the difference? Probably not a lot of spouses wanted to bring the kiddies by to visit Daddy in stasis, where he was waiting to be cut up for spare parts. The dead and dying here weren’t spitting on the sidewalk or shoplifting, they were planning revolution. They knew the risks. They might not think anybody would catch them, but that was a big mistake, wasn’t it?
She pushed the spookeyes up onto her forehead and turned away, suddenly a little tired. It always had a sameness to it. People could be so fucking stupid. They deserved to be removed from the gene pool.
A few m
inutes later, Marky, the Lead Operative, came over. “It’s a done deal,” he said. “Twelve klags DOA, one more on the way there, one alive enough to maybe harvest a bit more intel from before he goes in the box. Good job, op.”
She shrugged. “What they pay me for.”
“We’ll have it clean in a few minutes. Where you off to, next?”
“Classified, LO,” she said. She gave him her professional smile.
“Of course. Sorry.”
She wanted to shake her head. These Assault Team Ops were always so stick-up-the-ass deadly serious. No jokes, all business.
And where was she going next? Vacation. She’d earned it. She’d done twenty-five ops in the last eighteen months, one for every year she’d been alive, lacking one. She had a thick bank account, and she needed a break. Maybe she’d try one of the pleasure casinos. Or do some sight-seeing on one of the scenic planets. Get herself a boytoy and hole up in some hotel with silk sheets and room service, not get out of bed for week.
Or maybe it was time try to find her brother. She had been thinking about tracing him for a long time, just never had gotten around to it. Her parents were dead, and her brother was her only blood kin in the universe—assuming he hadn’t died—and she was curious. She had been a late baby, an accident, and her brother was twenty years older than she was, two years gone from their rabbit hole of a home by the time she’d been conceived—they’d never actually seen each other. He hadn’t looked back, and she couldn’t blame him for that. Far as she knew, he didn’t know she’d ever been born.
Of course, he could be long dead like their parents, too. Did she really want to know one way or the other? If she didn’t look, she could keep thinking he was still alive out there. Mated, maybe, a couple of kids, a good job, a happy life. Wouldn’t that be something?