by Steve Perry
Flitters and haulers hit warning horns, but nobody in the crowd paid any attention, and the vehicles fanned or rolled to stops. With traffic stopped, everybody focused on the men in the street.
Ma grabbed Lazlo’s shoulder and tried to steer him away, but he didn’t move. He was almost as big as she was, and he wanted to see this.
“Lazlo—”
“A second, Ma.”
The hauler dropped into a fighting crouch.
Jesu, he’s gonna get his dick knocked in the dirt!
The first attacker got within range and swung a wide, hard, looping punch at the hauler’s head. The puncher was big, twenty centimeters taller and probably fifteen kilos heavier, and if he hit, that would be the game. Lazlo had seen enough fights in the village or fields to know that a big fist to the head usually ended the dust-up pretty quick, and the bigger guy almost always won, too—
The hauler ducked the punch, moved in so fast Lazlo couldn’t really tell what he did, and the bigger man flew backward and slammed into two men behind him and all three of them went down—
And then the guy just danced into the others, not waiting for them, attacking the other five men as if they were nothing, as if he had all the time in the world.
It would be ten years before Lazlo had the wherewithal to reconstruct what he saw that day. It was no more than a learned skill, what the hauler did, but on that spring morning in Ship City, the twelve-year-old version of Lazlo Mourn saw what appeared to be magic. Those six men might as well have been carved from stone. None of them laid a serious hand or foot on the hauler. Time slowed to a crawl for them, but it sped up for the man facing them.
Lazlo couldn’t believe what he was seeing.
It took but a few seconds before it was done, and when it was over, it was . . . astonishing.
The hauler stood alone in the street. Six men lay around him, and the rest of the crowd had hauled ass to the sidewalk, fast. You could almost smell their fear from where Lazlo and his ma stood.
Two of the people on the walk, a man and a woman, began walking away in a hurry as a siren announced that the local cools were en route and closing. The couple passed by Lazlo and his mother.
“Lazlo!” his mother said. “Come on! The authorities will be looking for witnesses! You’ll not get registered! Let’s go!”
He nodded and allowed himself to be hurried along.
The man and woman who’d passed them were only a meter or two ahead on the walk. The woman said, “Who the prong was that guy? How could a hauler do that?”
And the man laughed, and said, “He’s not a hauler, he’s a dueler. Musashi Flex player. Tattoo right there on his shoulder. Stupid. Their own fault, messin’ with a man like that.”
Lazlo had never heard of the Musashi Flex; but at that moment, he realized that he wasn’t going to spend his life on this world, working the farms. He had just seen something amazing, and however the man had managed it, Lazlo was going to learn how to do it, too. Such power, to be able to move like that. Such power . . .
Sola shut the recorder off. “Wow.”
Her food—such that it was—sat congealing on her plate. This was not the background she would have picked for Mourn. A kid attracted to the Flex by a street fight in some back-rocket farm town. Great stuff. She could do it as a voice-over while she ran CG images of a re-creation. The entcom audience would eat it up.
“And you haven’t been back since you left?”
“Nope.”
“Twenty-five years.”
“Twenty-seven.”
“Your parents still alive?”
“No. My father died in a flitter accident a few years ago, a repellor blew, he crashed into a field. My mother apparently developed malignant silicosis and passed away six months after he did.”
“You kept track of them?”
He shook his head. “Not really. I thought about going to visit them last year. I did a records check then, that’s what it said.”
She didn’t say anything, but she knew he got the unasked question.
He said, “It wasn’t an amicable parting. My parents couldn’t understand how I could even consider the idea of leaving the farm. None of our family ever had before. And the idea of becoming a professional fighter? We had big and loud disagreements about my future. Said things that couldn’t be taken back. I was young and full of myself, I had no patience for what they wanted. Day I reached my majority, I took off.”
She nodded. She could understand that. Her father thought the idea of her becoming a reporter was insane. She was supposed to be a medico, as he was, as her grandfather and her uncles were. Writing tales for entcom? That was no kind of life for a proper-caste woman . . .
“So, you’re going home.”
He shrugged. “Not exactly. I figured we’d go to one of the other farms, where we wouldn’t run into anybody who might know me. We’ll use alternate IDs, lie low, pretend to be a couple on their honeymoon. I’m a farmer from the next world over, you’re an office worker.”
“You think you can pull that off?”
“You never forget the smell of wheat dust,” he said. “I can pass for a farmer.”
She nodded. A little quiet time would let her work on the documentary. There were worse ways to spend your time.
18
They could have taken a transport directly from the port to their destination, a country inn in the farming community three hundred klicks away, but Sola wanted to buy some clothes.
“I’m a bride,” she said, holding on to his arm. “I should have some newlywed weeds.”
He had smiled. “I suppose that’s the least a good groom can do.”
So they caught a local into the city, a fair-sized town called Juneallo, the local province capital that also catered to the port trade. They stopped in several shops, and Sola purchased a few items.
Mourn didn’t like to shop, particularly. If he wanted something, he knew what it was. He would go and find it and buy it. If the first pair of slippers he tried on fit well, he bought those—no need to try on sixteen pairs, then wind up buying the first set, was there?
Sola laughed at him.
As they were leaving the last shop and heading back toward the transport station, they came out into a crowded street.
“A political rally,” Sola said.
Mourn nodded. Half the crowd, maybe five hundred people, carried signs, the garish and bright pulse-paint throbbing out their candidate’s name and their earnest slogans: SHAKE UP THE SYSTEM! DOWN WITH FASCISM! FREEDOM NOW! ELECT PREBENDARY JOSLIN!
“Let’s go,” he said. “This way.”
“Don’t you want to mingle with the people? Get a feel for the electorate? Participate in democracy?”
He caught her hand and started up the sidewalk, away from the rally.
“What’s the hurry, Mourn? These things can be a lot of fun.”
He kept moving. “This one won’t be.”
“How you figure that?”
“You see the cools over there? See that short man in the gray coverall and jump boots?”
He nodded at the line of police officers past the demonstrators. There were sixty or so of the cools. Their dark blue uniforms were almost black where they showed in the gaps of the not-quite-matching dark spidersilk armor plate and helmets and boots they all wore. Some of them started to put their thick, clear lexan face shields down. The civilian stood out.
“Yeah?”
“Hundred to one says he’s Confed, sent to break this up, and the local police have their marching orders. You’ll see the shockstiks come out in a minute, and they’ll wade into the crowd and start breaking heads. We don’t want to be here when that goes down.”
“You aren’t serious,” she said.
“Serious as a ruptured air lock in deep vacuum.”
They were a couple hundred meters away from the main part of the crowd, which had begun to spill from the sidewalk into the street.
“They just started blocking traffic,”
he said. “That’s all the excuse the cools need.” He kept moving. The crowd flowed into the street as more people joined it.
Five hundred civilians and only a few dozen cools, but a mob was only as bright and focused as its leaders, and this one, he thought, didn’t look very collected.
A deep and loud amplified voice said, “Attention! This is the police. You are creating a street hazard. This group has violated its permit. You must disperse immediately!”
Sola stopped, and Mourn either had to stop or jerk her off her feet, so he halted. They should be safe enough here—he didn’t see any cools behind them who might cut off a possible retreat.
“One more warning is all they’ll get,” he said.
She looked at him.
“I’ve seen this before. If they left now, they’d be okay, but they won’t. They never do.”
“You are in violation of a lawful police order,” came the augmented voice. “If you do not disperse immediately, you will be subject to arrest.”
The crowd seemed to pause and mill about. A few people began to walk away, but the majority held their ground. They were, by God, citizens, weren’t they? Not doing anything wrong. The police were blowing smoke, right?
When the cools moved, they did so in a hurry. No slow line advancing to push the people back. They looked like a pack of starving wolves going after sheep. Shockstiks and riot batons rose and fell at speed, smashing whatever they hit. You could hear the first impacts this far away, before the mob found its collective voice and drowned out the strikes with terrified screams.
Now the sheep tried to run, but the predators were all around them. If each cool could club three or four demonstrators, the work of a few seconds, then half of the crowd would go down in a hurry.
Some of them got past the line, scrambling in full flight up the street toward where Sola and Mourn stood. The cools didn’t pursue the ones lucky enough to escape; they continued to work on those trapped in the ragged corral.
“Jesu damn, Mourn—!”
He nodded, watching the beating with a professional’s gaze. Some of the cools were just whaling away, no real technique, bashing at anything in range; some of them had more skill, they were targeting collarbones—those broke easily, then you could hardly lift your arm to protect your head, which was the next target.
A few showed real expertise—they worked the body in combinations—a jab to the solar plexus or an underhand shot to the groin, and when the target bent over in pain, a smash to the back of the head or spine that flattened the target facedown on the plastcrete. Very efficient.
“Fuck!” She looked at him, and he read her face.
“I might be able to take the clubs away from a few, but you don’t resist a riot squad—you either scram or you get bashed—if you fight back, they kill you. We can’t stop it. Come on. We’ll get run over if we stay here.”
Once they were a klick or so away, listening to the sirens fade, he saw how much she was shaking. “Take slow and deep breaths.”
“That wasn’t right,” she said, her voice ragged. “If they had wanted to break up the crowd, they could have used puke gas or tensmus bombs!”
“If all they’d wanted to do was break up the crowd, yes. That wasn’t the point.”
“How can they do that?”
“You weren’t born yesterday. The Confederation does whatever it wants to do. You can’t stop the rain by holding your hand up and wishing it would quit.”
“But it was a peaceful rally!”
“And somebody didn’t like what it stood for. Or maybe somebody thought the prebendary running for office was an irritant. Why doesn’t matter. A message got sent. You get free expression as long as it doesn’t cross a line. When it does, you pay for it, and it isn’t cheap.” He nodded back at the direction from which they had come.
“It isn’t right.”
He shrugged. “No. But that’s how things are. Once upon a time, the Confederation had a real purpose—to explore, discover, and settle new worlds, to be prepared to defend us if we ran into some nasty aliens who wanted to fry us.
“We’ve found most of the habitable worlds within easy reach and put down settlers. Aside from some artifacts of the Zonn, a race that appears to have been long gone when humans were still living in trees, we haven’t run into anybody with any kind of intelligence to challenge humans. So the Confed has gotten fat and lazy, and now what it does best is perpetuate itself.
“The three-hundred-kilo rock ape sleeps wherever he wants—especially if there are tens of thousands of him and they are heavily armed. That’s how things are.”
“I don’t need a fucking lecture!”
“Yes, you do.”
She didn’t say anything for a while after that. And what was there to say? She knew what he said was true. Nobody had to like it, but there was no getting around it. With the Confed, you went along to get along. If you stood in its path, you got stepped on.
A smart man would move out of the way. Saved you a lot of trouble doing that.
A few days after the art show, Azul’s com chimed. She was having lunch at a Perenesian restaurant, enjoying a dish of stir-fried shrimp and green crab with enough fireweed laced through it to cause tears and to clear her sinuses. Not bad for a planet light-years away from the source of both the crab and the spice.
She’d had CI make several calls from various “friends,” just in case anybody checked her communcations records, but she knew who it was before she tapped the ear inset com to life—there was no need to check the caller ID sig.
“Yes?”
“Fem Azul. Ellis Shaw.”
“Ah, M. Shaw. The . . . businessman.”
He chuckled. “The same. I was wondering—do you have any works in progress that will be finished soon?”
“I have—but I also have twelve or fifteen paintings in my catalog that are still available for sale.”
“Well, that’s not so, F. Azul. All of your finished paintings seem to have been purchased.”
“Really? I spoke to my agent last evening, and such was not the case.”
“That was last evening. As of 1100 this morning, that is no longer the case.”
“And you know this . . . how?”
“I bought them.”
It was not hard to put surprise into her voice. “All of them?”
“Indeed.”
“Your business must be doing well, sir.”
“I get by. I like your work.”
The fifteen paintings in question had been priced from twelve to twenty-five thousand standards each, and the total retail cost would be about a quarter of a million stads. Not even a drop in Shaw’s ocean-sized bucket. Still, it was an impressive gesture: She had figured he would buy one or two, not all of them.
Too bad she wouldn’t get the stads herself.
She smiled. “I can see that.” This was the time for her to be intrigued, impressed, or both, and what artist could brush off a man who had just purchased all of her available output? “Perhaps we could arrange for you to view my work in progress, M. Shaw.”
“Please, call me Ellis. And I would love to see what you have.”
She smiled. No missing the double entendre in that comment.
Well on the way to another victory for Operative Azul, it seemed.
“Let me check my schedule and get back to you.”
“You have my private number in your ID log,” he said. “I’ll wait to hear from you.”
Shaw smiled at the com as he waved it off. He hadn’t gotten the idea that Luna Azul was that impressed by great wealth, but buying all of her paintings and drawings? That had been a clever stroke, no question. And she was as intriguing to him as she had probably found his action to be. He did like the work—it wasn’t fantastic, but it did call to him, both in subject and in execution. She was beautiful, though beauty alone was not something he had trouble obtaining. She found him attractive, he was pretty sure, but had not fallen all over herself to make a connection at the
show, which was good. A nice blend of talent and personality. Rare enough to be treasured.
Cervo had done a full background check on her, and she seemed to be what she appeared: a young, beautiful, up-and-still-rising artist. And she had a brother who had been a Flex player, so one might expect her to have an interest in that, as well. Somebody worth exploring a little further, at least. A man in his position could have all manner of women. There were those who would sleep with him because of his wealth and power, eager to warm their hands at his rich fire. He could have exquisite company, paid for or not, women who were experts in the art of sex, but the ones who didn’t know who he was, or didn’t care if they did? Those were more fun. Like the medico, whom he’d paid, but who would have slept with him for free . . .
Buying her collective works? That was a cheap enough trick, and it made things easier. He’d used a cutout, so there wasn’t a direct link to him, a thing he often did. People thought Ellis Shaw was interested in an artist? Prices went up. He could afford anybody’s work, but why spend money he didn’t have to spend?
Even if she wasn’t awed by his money, even if she suspected he had bought the art just to get her to consider him in a good light, it was a smart enough move that the doing of it would make her stop and think. That a man would spend a quarter of a million stads to do that? How could she not find him intriguing?
He smiled again. It was good to be rich and powerful. It was better to be smart—a smart man could always become wealthy; a wealthy man could not always become smart . . .
He was looking forward to their encounter. It should be most amusing . . .
19
The fifth time Mourn stepped in and slapped her on the face, Sola was really starting to get pissed off. He wasn’t hitting her hard, just taps, not even enough to sting, but no matter how she tried to block, it didn’t seem to help. He got her no matter what.
The sixth time, she didn’t try to block or parry—she took three fast steps to her right.