The Musashi Flex

by Steve Perry

  Servo opened the flitter’s door as Shaw approached. Shaw nodded at his bodyguard and stepped into the flitter.

  Sooner or later, there would be a fight with witnesses, maybe even recorded. He wanted people to see him as skilled. If you had more relative time than your opponent, then you should be able to choose techniques that would showcase your ability. It was not only important to be good, you needed to look good . . .

  “Sir?”

  “To the ship,” Shaw said. “Who is the closest and lowest on our list?”

  Servo said, “Barnes d’Fleet, Ninety-Eight, is on Mti, in Ndama System. Teel Cotta ToDJonCam, Ninety-Six, is on Nazo, in Nazo. Mti is three day’s transit, Nazo is eight days.”

  Shaw nodded. D’Fleet was closer, JonCam lower. Was it worth the extra five days’ travel for two ranks?

  No, he decided.

  “Call the ship, tell Carter we’re going to Mti.”

  “Sir.”

  Shaw leaned back in his seat. If there was game to go with the name, then he would have it. If not, at least he would have the name. Richest man in the galaxy. Best fighter. After that? Well, he’d just have to see, wouldn’t he . . . ?

  He’d have to do this one quickly. The annual art show was coming up soon, and he wanted to get back in time for that. Fremaux had some new stuff, and there might be some other artists he’d find interesting.

  There were perhaps 350 people in a grand ballroom that would easily hold twice that many. The walls were hung with paintings, there were pedestals here and there bearing sculptures, freestanding mechanicals, and carefully placed lighting to showcase the art. Very nicely done, Azul thought.

  She drifted around the ballroom, sipping good champagne from a tall thincris flute, into her persona as an artist looking at other artists’ works. Her newly learned critical abilities came into play. Some of what was displayed here was good, some of it was great, and some of it was simply pretentious and awful. Much of what demanded the highest prices was, in fact, the worst art. Money covered a multitude of sins.

  Several times men or women had attempted to strike up a conversation with her. She was fairly stunning herself: She wore a black orthoskin suit that fit her like paint, matching slippers, and nothing else. The suit had a faint dusting of pulse-dust, so that under the right lighting, she shimmered with a barely perceptible rainbow glitter. Sexy, but tasteful, everything covered but revealed. Subtle was good.

  As far as Luna Azul the artist was concerned, there was no such person as M. Ellis Shaw. She was a professional here to take in the work of other professionals, that was her mind-set, and thus her moves fit it naturally.

  Eventually, she wound her way through the crowd to the paintings of the artist that Shaw collected. These were watercolors or something that looked enough like them to fool her, and very dynamic. Athletes, most of the subjects, in motion. A woman runner leaning at the tape just ahead of the other racers; a weightlifter under an impossibly large barbell, halfway up from a squat; a dancer just leaving the floor in a leap that you could almost see would soar to a great height. She nodded. The artist, one Fremaux Fremaux, had a nice touch with color, a mastery of human anatomy, and an eye for composition. His prices were not low, but neither were they at the top of the scale compared to other painters in this show. She knew from her research that he was relatively young, only forty T.S. or so, and with continued practice, could someday be a master painter. These were things she might have painted herself, in her persona, so she tried to appreciate them suitably.

  “Which is your favorite?” came a deep male voice from behind her.

  That would be Shaw.

  She did not turn to look at him, but continued looking at the paintings. “The dancer,” she said. “He’s captured the potential. You can see how she is going to rise, how she will unfold, and even how she will settle.”

  “You have an artist’s eye yourself.”

  Now she did turn to look at him. He was tall, dark-skinned, handsome, and fit. He radiated a power not evident in his holographs. He was in a smartly cut formal suit, the drape of the jacket perfect, the cling of the trousers precise, the dress slippers expensive but simple. A man comfortable in his demeanor, with no need to show off his riches, just as she had figured from her research.

  “I hope so,” she said. She gave him a polite, but uninterested smile. She had brushed off other people who had wanted to talk, and she was not going to show any particular interest in him, either. She turned back to the water-colors.

  She could almost feel his amusement at being dismissed. Obviously she didn’t know who he was.

  “I take it thus that you are an artist?”

  “I like to think I am.”

  “Would any of your work be on display, Fem . . . ?”

  “No. I’ve only been on-planet for a short time. Nothing of mine is here.” She ignored his attempt to coax forth her name.

  “Are you any good?”

  This was a challenge, and her persona would not allow such to slide by. She turned back to look at him. “Am I as good as this artist? Maybe. There are works here that I would not claim to match. Others that I find . . . less than inspiring.”

  He laughed. “Isn’t that always the case?”

  “So it seems. Please excuse me, sir, I came to see, not to, ah . . . visit.”

  He smiled broadly and gave her a slow nod. “Enjoy yourself, F. Azul.”

  She frowned. “How did you know my name?”

  He tapped his ear, indicating the hidden com-button.

  “But—who told you, sir?”

  “I am a man with some connections,” he said. “I have people in my employ who are paid well to know everything I need to know. Ellis Mtumbo Shaw, at your service.”

  She pretended not to recognize his name. “An artist yourself?”

  That got another laugh. “Of a kind, perhaps, but not one with these skills.” He waved one hand to encompass the ballroom. “I am in business.”

  She shrugged, flashed the polite smile. Business did not interest her.

  “I should like to see your artwork, F. Azul.”

  “I am sure that a man with connections can find my catalog easily enough.”

  “I expect that you are right. Are you staying on our world long?”

  “Maybe. I have a couple of paintings I want to finish before I leave. A week or three. However long it takes.”

  “Perhaps we’ll meet again,” he said. He raised his glass to her, then turned and sauntered away. People watched him, some of whom were surely security, some because of his looks, his grace, some for his wealth.

  Inwardly, Azul smiled. That had gone as well as she could have hoped. She would bet her last stad that she would be hearing from Ellis Shaw again. And soon . . .

  Mourn was in bed just drifting off to sleep when the door to his room slid open. It was quiet—first-class doors didn’t squeak—but he was fully awake before the door was fully open.

  Sola stood in the doorway, and the faint backlight of the room behind her spilled around her form bright enough to show that she was naked.

  She didn’t say anything.

  Mourn said, “Come on in.”

  She did, the door sliding quietly shut behind her.

  He sat up on the bed as she approached, opened his right arm to gather her in. She sat next to him, slid in close.

  “You sure you want to do this?”

  “I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t,” she said. She smiled, then leaned in to kiss him.

  It had been a while since he’d been with a woman. She smelled clean and fresh, she was passionate, and she felt good pressed against his nude body. He was quick the first time, but slower the second, and she still called to him, yin to his yang. Her orgasm came just a hair before his third, he hadn’t gone for three in ten years. She shuddered for what seemed a long time, milking him with a velvet pulse, strong at first, but one that gradually ebbed.

  “Wow,” she said.

  “Yeah.”

&nb
sp; Side by side, she propped herself on her elbow and looked at him. “I’ve been wanting to do that since you first showed up in my hotel room in Spain,” she said.

  “I know. Me, too.”

  “Why didn’t you make a move?”

  “It wouldn’t have meant as much then as now.”

  “That’s important to you?”

  “Yes.”

  She reached out with her free hand to rub lightly at his chest. “You have a lot of scars. You could have had them revised.”

  “What would be the point? Mostly nobody sees them but me and assorted medicos, and if somebody else does, they don’t care. Or sometimes the scars make it better for them.”

  She nodded. “What now?”

  “You want more?”

  She laughed. “No, I meant generally.”

  “If we are going to finish your documentary, we probably need to get to a place where Weems or his hirelings either can’t find us, or can’t get to us if they do.”

  “You know a place?”

  “Yeah. We can talk, work out, and if you are interested, play this game some more.”

  “I’m interested.”

  He smiled.

  “Can I stay? Sleep with you?”

  “Sure.”

  She lay back and relaxed.

  It had been a while since he had allowed that, too. Sex was one thing, sharing your space afterward was something else. But he liked her, truly. She wasn’t a child, but she was still young enough so that the galaxy was her oyster. There was a fine energy in being with somebody who felt that way.

  As he drifted off to sleep, the thoughts he’d been having lately about fighting arose. There was something just outside his grasp, something very important. The more he reached for it, though, the more it eluded him. He had to let it go. Maybe it would come back, maybe not. But it was important, he knew . . .

  Sleep claimed him and pulled him deep. He did not dream.

  When he awoke six hours later, she was still asleep next to him. He got up to go pee, and she stirred a little, but stayed asleep.

  She was so young and so beautiful, smart, too, and the sex had been good. He smiled. He could get used to having her around.

  Careful, Mourn. This could turn into some heavy baggage, maybe too heavy to carry . . .

  17

  The Bruna System Hub station was crowded, hundreds of people milling back and forth, changing from starliner lighters to system hoppers, to be ferried out to other starliners, or to local planets. The place smelled of unwashed bodies—a lot of starships carried steerage passengers, and the cheap beds didn’t always allow easy access to even the sonic showers, whose best efforts at cleaning didn’t get close to soap and hot water. Too many people in the hub probably hadn’t bathed in days, and the station’s overworked scrubbers couldn’t keep up with the odor. You tuned it out after a while, but a first whiff, it was potent.

  “Farbis?”

  “Yes.” There were four organic worlds in the system—Farbis, Pentr’ado, Lagomustardo, and Muta Kato, plus one large wheelworld, Malgrand Luno. The latter was where Mourn and Sola were headed, to catch a local boxcar down the gravity well.

  “Never been there,” she said. She searched her memory, he could see her hunting for it. “Agro world?”

  He nodded. “Much of the temperate zones.”

  “Why there? Don’t think Weems will look for you on a farm?”

  “That. Plus I know it—or I used to. I was born there, spent my first eighteen years on the planet.”

  She blinked. “You were a farmer?”

  He smiled at the wonder in her voice.

  “I have trouble picturing you driving a harvester among the rows of cottonwood or giant corn.”

  “Everybody has to be born somewhere.”

  “So how does one go from being a farmer to a fighter?”

  He glanced at the ship schedule holoproj floating above them. The transport to the wheelworld station wasn’t due for boarding for another hour. There was a food kiosk just ahead. “Let’s get something to eat. I’ll tell you a story.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “On cam?”

  “If you want.”

  The day after Lazlo Mourn turned twelve was the day his life changed direction. Up until then, he hadn’t thought much about what he was going to do when he grew up. He and Ma and Da worked on a giant communal farm in the NorthWest Quarter, living in a prefab that was old when his father was born. Both sets of his grandparents, along with a dozen aunts and uncles and twenty or thirty cousins, all lived in the Quarter, too, as had their parents and grandparents. The NWQ co-op covered 270,000 acres, dotted by four villages full of others who worked it. The main crops were export cereal grains—wheat, rice, oats, giant corn—but they also grew legumes, beans, peas, and root vegetables, and had several herds of milkers from which they made cheese and butter and yogurt. The work was hard, even for children, but it was simple, and Mourn had assumed he would continue to live in his village, eventually meet a girl, get married, raise a family of his own. That was how it went.

  Normally, on their twelfth birthday, children went to town and registered as citizens. It could be done from the village, of course, but the tradition was, you went with your da or ma to the Confederation Center, had your holo made, your retinal patterns, fingerprints, and your DNA scoped, and got your first ID cube, which was really a kinda squashed square that looked more like a mint than a cube. Some places, they liked the implants, but on Farbis, most people just got cubes. If you didn’t have a reader for a transfer, it was hard to lend your implant to somebody who needed to borrow a few stads from your account. Then again, an implant didn’t get lost . . .

  From then on, you were no longer just a child, but a citizen, even though you didn’t get full rights for another six T.S. years.

  But on his birthday, there had been an accident at Wheat Storage Four. One of the silos collapsed. That wasn’t supposed to happen, the extruded everlast-plast structure was supposed to be rated for twice what it could hold, but somehow, a crack developed, and the weight of all that grain, piled sixteen stories high, had blown the base out and spewed however many hundred tons of grain across the surrounding plastcrete like a volcano blasting apart.

  Nobody had been caught in the tsunami of wheat except a couple of trailers and a flitter, but the damaged silo fell over, and it came down on the computer/communications shack and crushed it like somebody stomping a size twelve down hard on a jik egg. The ten people inside, six men and four women, had been squashed into the wreckage.

  Lazlo had been out with his father in an inspection flitter, checking on the giant corn seedlings in Sprout Nineteen, when the call came. They had planned to make a quick pass, then Da was going to take him to town for his registration. But Da was in the Emergency Corps—pretty much every grown man was, and he was a supervisor, so those plans got canceled, and there was no time to drop his son off. He cranked the fans up to full and leaned the flitter hard toward WS-4.

  The place was pretty much in chaos when they got there, and by the time it all got sorted out, it was well after midnight.

  Nobody in the shack survived, but they had to dig them all out to be sure, and it was a big fucking mess, the whole area knee deep in wheat. Of course, Lazlo had known the people who’d died, though none of them were relatives.

  The cleanup crews took over, and Da and Lazlo went home to bed. In all the excitement, he’d pretty much forgotten all about registering.

  But the next morning, Ma got him up early and told him they were going to town.

  Not that “town” was much more than the village. It was bigger, of course, they had a boxcar port, some shops and pubs and things, plus the government offices, local and Confed. But there were maybe ten thousand people in Ship City, while his own village had half that many.

  Ma parked the flitter in a public lot and they got out and headed for Registration. The day was cool for spring, but the sun was shining, and the smells of town were different tha
n the village. More machinery lube, hydrocarbon dross, a lot less crop stink. It was exciting, Lazlo felt as if he had to pee, and his belly was fluttery. You didn’t get to register but once, after all. Everything seemed much sharper than usual—the sights, sounds, smells, everything.

  They had just crossed the street behind a four-trailer grain carrier, a forty-wheeler loaded to the canvas, and gotten to the sidewalk when Lazlo’s short life took a sudden turn.

  He heard the music first. At the time, he didn’t consciously mark it for what it was—somebody playing solo finger-style guitar—he didn’t realize that until later. Of course, he had heard music before, it wasn’t as if the co-op didn’t have entcom, and there were people who got together in groups to play. He had a cousin who was a pretty good keyboardist, and an uncle who played rumblestik. And he had heard guitars, though not quite like this one. The song was bright, melodic, and catchy. But of a moment, there was a crash, as if a door was slammed open, and the music stopped.

  To their left, a surge of people flowed out into the street, coming from a building with neon and pulse-paint signs that ID’ed it as a pub. There was a score of folks, at least, mostly men, a few women, and at the center of the collection’s attention was a short and compact man in lube-stained freight hauler’s blue coveralls with the sleeves cut short to reveal thick and muscular arms. On one shoulder he had a tat that Lazlo couldn’t quite make out, something that looked like a long sickle or a knife.

  It was obvious that the short man in blues had done something to piss people off, and it looked as if he were about to get his ass seriously kicked, because there were at least six men moving in on him as if they wanted to plant him head down in the plastcrete.