The Musashi Flex

by Steve Perry

  “You see how it is going to go,” he said. “Give me your tag now, I’ll let you live.” He was feeling perhaps a little more kindly toward her than he would have a man, after his pleasant and erotically promising encounter with Azul earlier in the evening. It would be almost a shame to waste this woman by killing her. Maybe if he didn’t kill her, they could pass the time doing something else afterward?

  What would it be like to have sex while on Reflex?

  That thought made him chuckle. Would give a whole new meaning to the old joke about whem-bim-thank-you-fem. He’d probably feel like an electronic vibrator to her—

  “No,” she said.

  She knew she couldn’t beat him, she had to know after what he had just demonstrated, and yet she was willing to keep fighting. Brave.

  Foolish, but brave.

  He’d stick her again, shallow, go for the thigh this time, give her one more chance.

  He blurred in as he had before, his knife aimed low—

  —and she surprised him.

  She cut straight down in front of her own thigh, a short slice. Her blade was half a meter away from any part of him, what was she doing?

  He was moving so fast he didn’t realize it in time. She had figured out where he was going to stick her, and she was moving in anticipation of his attack, not aiming for where his arm was, but for where she guessed it was going to be by the time her cut got there.

  He was moving too fast stop his own attack, too much inertia. His point touched her thigh as her edge caught his forearm. When he snatched his hand back, her very sharp blade raked a long and shallow cut along his arm, over the radius, from midarm all the way to his wrist—

  Damn!

  He jumped backward.

  The cut was nothing. Bloody, but not deep enough to cause any loss of function, no big vessels hit. A little orthostat glue, maybe a staple or two, he’d be good as new.

  It impressed him, though. She had realized she couldn’t match him, he was too fast, so she moved before he did, hoping he couldn’t adjust in time, and she’d guessed right.

  He saluted her with his knife, touching it to his forehead, even though he was pissed off about the cut.

  “Good move, but it’s not enough, sister. Give up your tag, walk away.”

  “That’s your blood running down your arm and splattering on the ground, brother. Give up yours and walk away.”

  She sounded calm. Maybe she really thought she had a chance. Time to show her.

  He leaped in, faked a stab at her face, moving slow enough so she could see it and raise her hand for the block, keeping her blade low to cover her belly and groin—

  When her blocking hand was at the level of her chin, and her knife was covering her low line, he pulled his knife back a hair. There was an opening between her empty hand and knife big enough to drive a freight hauler. He put the blade into her throat and cut hard to his left, severing her right carotid artery. He danced back.

  Too bad she hadn’t given up. Not his fault, he’d offered her two chances. Still, it was a pity—they wouldn’t be sharing a bed together this night. Nor any other night.

  All he had to do was wait.

  Two minutes later, he had her tag and was on his way to where Cervo was with the flitter. He had learned a valuable lesson from the dead woman. There was a way to get a jump on somebody who was a lot faster than you. Fortunately, all it had cost him was a nasty cut on his arm.

  He wouldn’t make that mistake again.

  20

  Back at his house, Shaw shooed the medico out and called for Cervo. Something had been bothering him, just outside his ken, and while the medic had worked on his arm, he recalled what it was.

  “Tell me about that operative we lost,” Shaw said. “Following Randall’s man. What happened?”

  If Cervo wondered why the subject had come up now, it didn’t show on his face. “Somebody blasted her in the face with a shotgun. It happened in an alley near the port. She knew she was in trouble because the cools found her spring pistol out and next to the body, fresh prints and her DNA on it. She saw it coming, pulled her weapon, but she didn’t get off a dart.”

  “They have anything else?”

  “No. Zipple on anything linking the killing to anybody.”

  “Could it have been random? Street robbery gone bad?”

  Cervo shook his head. “Unlikely. Our op was good. She wouldn’t have put herself at risk without reason, and she was adept enough so your basic alley mugger shouldn’t have been able to sneak up on her and take her out. Way I figure it, she was working, she ran into somebody better than she was, which almost has to mean a pro. She was on the job and following another operative. Too coincidental to think she got strong-armed by a drugged-out cutpurse.”

  “I don’t like this. How can we find out more?”

  “How bad do you want to know?” Cervo asked.

  Shaw frowned. “Meaning?”

  “If our agent was killed by Randall’s op, finding out for sure involves certain risks. If we approach the man and buy him and he stays bought, that’s the best thing, but we have no guarantees that he won’t turn around and lay it out for Randall to earn another fat bonus. You have to decide if you want the PR to know we did that.”

  Despite his size and look, in his area of expertise, Cervo was no man’s fool. Shaw nodded. “Okay. Go on.”

  “If we grab him and extract the information from him, we have to eliminate him to avoid that same risk.” Very matter-of-fact, as if the man was talking about there being fog in the city this morning. Well. Given that he had killed people himself, it was not such an awful option as all that. You could get squashed by a van while crossing the street.

  “Yes.”

  “This is assuming that he chilled our op. And that doesn’t really make any sense that I can see. We have our people, Randall has his, everybody knows this. What would be the point in one of his killing one of ours?”

  Shaw said, “Because ours discovered something that Newman really doesn’t want us to know.”

  “Possibly.” Cervo conceded the point.

  “Best-case, worse-case scenario?” Shaw asked.

  “Best case: We grab their man, squeeze him, find out what he knows. Tap him out, and we know what—if anything—they wanted to hide bad enough to chop our operative. We get a jump on the opposition. Leave a herring so they think their man spaced on his own, they don’t know we did it.

  “Worst case: We grab their man, squeeze him, and he doesn’t have a clue what we are talking about. We still have to kill him, and they replace the known op with one we don’t know, and we still don’t get the prize. Doesn’t cost us much, but it’s not a win. And if our team steps on a bar of soap or something, or a convention of cools just happens to be passing by and grabs them, then we have to do some fast singing and dancing to make the problem go away. I don’t mind spending your money to do it, but it could leave a trail to our door for a smart hound to track. What they don’t know won’t hurt us.”

  Shaw considered it. Sub-rosa field ops weren’t cheap, not the good ones, but it wasn’t as if he was going to miss a meal to pay for a new one—or a thousand new ones, if that was necessary. Newman would be in the same ship—he could replace his missing pawn without batting an eyelash.

  “Collect him,” Shaw said. “At the very least, he was in the vicinity when our woman went down. He might not have done it, but maybe he knows who did. If she saw something she wasn’t supposed to see, there’s a good chance he saw it, too. I want to know what it was.”

  Cervo nodded. “I’ll put our alpha team on it.”

  “Do we have anything less than alpha teams, Cervo? Do I pay for betas or omegas?”

  The bigger man grinned. Small and tight, but a smile nonetheless. Those were infrequent, and Shaw liked it that he could provoke Cervo into one now and again.

  Once he was gone, Shaw repressed the urge to rub at the synthetic flesh on his forearm. The cut under it didn’t itch or throb—the ch
em in the medicated patch stopped that. And the medico had matched his skin tone pretty well, too—if you didn’t look closely, you might not even notice the bandage. A few days, the wound would be healed, the swarms of bioengineered bacteria and viruses would have done their job, and you’d have to know he’d been sliced to see any trace of it—no keloids would ridge up under Shaw’s own pharmaceutical-grade synthetic flesh, no sir.

  He glanced at the pulsing time sig on the office wall. It had been an interesting night. Azul, then the woman he’d fought. He smiled.

  Life was good.

  Mourn watched Sola walk to the fresher, enjoying the view of her naked backside. She was a beautiful woman, made more appealing because she was smart and ambitious. He would enjoy her as long as it lasted, though he didn’t expect it to continue. Once she had what she wanted, she’d move on, and he wouldn’t be able to complain—they had some idea of who each other was when they decided to take it to a sexual level. There was a built-in limit.

  She was back in a few moments, and she took a couple of quick steps and leaped onto the bed like a diver doing a belly flop. He smiled at that. The exuberance of youth. Nothing like it.

  “Well, sir, that was fun,” she said.

  “What, peeing?”

  She laughed. “Yeah. That’s what I meant. Peeing.”

  For a moment, neither spoke, and Mourn felt a tug on his emotions. He really liked her. More than he should.

  “So, M. Combat Master, what are we going to do today. Go watch the grass grow? Or do you plan to teach me some more of this fighting dance you’re working on?”

  “Neither,” he said. “There’s a place I know about that you might find interesting.”

  “Lead on.”

  It took three hours in a rented flitter to reach the park. Even from a distance, it was impressive.

  “Jesu, what kind of trees are those? They must be a hundred meters tall!”

  “Called Methusalahs, named after a planet in a pulsar binary system in M4, I think, most ancient world anybody has ever found. The bigger trees are nearly five thousand years old.”

  Mourn piloted the flitter to a halt in the parking area half a klick from the start of the forest ring. He and Sola alighted and joined a line of walkers heading toward the trees. There were a hundred other flitters and a dozen chartertrans buses in the lot.

  As they drew nearer the park, the huge size of the trees really became impressive. The Methusalahs were evergreens, kin to sumwins and fir, cone-shaped and pointed at the top, widest nearer the ground. The lowest branches of the canopy were thirty meters up, and the tallest of the trees was indeed more than a hundred meters from the needle-covered ground. Nothing grew under the dark shade save for Methusalah saplings and small ferns, and not a lot of either of those.

  “The dead needles are acidic,” he told her. “Kill just about any kind of plant trying to grow, and most animals that might try to eat them. Bark is poisonous to most pests, too.”

  There were many wide paths leading into the forest, and the widest and most used led to the biggest tree. Mourn and Sola followed other visitors along this trail, which was merely earth, but packed into plastcretelike density by the footsteps of all the trekkers.

  The air was heavy with the scent of the needles, a sharp, piney, citrus smell. Methusalahs bore a reddish, flaky bark, brighter in color where the outer layer had peeled away, and the live needles were a dark blue-green, ten or twelve centimeters long. Some of them had seed cones, some didn’t. Aside from the paths, the dead brown needles covered the ground knee deep on a small child. The largest fifty or so trees had names, and the biggest of all, called God’s Umbrella by the locals, was thirty meters around and a hundred and twenty-six meters tall.

  Standing at the base of that tree and looking up made you feel very tiny.

  “Jesu damn,” Sola said, her voice quiet.

  “It gets better,” Mourn said. “Come on.”

  He took her hand and led her on a meandering path away from the tree. The path wound along for another klick or so, then up a long and gradual rise. When they got to the top of the hill, he turned to watch her reaction.

  Her eyes went wide at the sight, and he remembered the first time he had seen it himself, at the age of ten.

  The Pit was three thousand meters deep in the middle, and thirty kilometers across, a more or less perfect circle, looked as if somebody had taken a giant scoop to the land, leaving a hemispherical hole softened and worn smooth around the edges by eons of time and weather.

  It didn’t take her more than a few seconds to realize what it was:

  “It’s a meteor crater,” she said. “This isn’t a hill, it’s the splash lip of the crater.” Her voice was still full of awe.

  “About ten million years ago, a big something fell from the sky and hit here,” he said. “Scientists say it probably was a comet, and it wiped out most of the plant and animal life locally when it landed—there would have been a big blast, and a lot of dust in the atmosphere, enough for an impact winter that changed life all over the planet. Hot enough to fuse most of the ground along the crater wall into a kind of very hard glass. They say there was some kind of residual radiation that lasted a long time, and that the Methusalah forest was a mutation that came from it. The only place the trees grow is the rim of the crater. They’ve found fossilized Methusalah wood going back at least eight million years.”

  She was held by the sight. “This is amazing. How come I’ve never heard of it before?”

  “The locals try to keep it low buzz. Nobody here wants millions of tourists dropping round like they do at the Grand Canyon or the Deep Rift. It’s not advertised, either here or offworld. I’d never heard of it, except from childhood friends who had seen it, until my parents brought me here as a boy. Not like it’s some kind of state secret—there are offworlders who know about it and find their way here—but it is downplayed. ‘The Methusalah Forest? Oh, yar, some old woods on an impact crater rim, I’ve been there, no major deal. You want to flit five hundred klicks to the middle of nowhere to look at a hole in the ground and some trees?’

  “Plus, it’s not exactly a tourist planet anyhow. As you have pointed out to me several dozen times, watching cows make meadow muffins isn’t the most interesting of activities.”

  “I still can’t believe somebody hasn’t done an entcom on this.”

  “They have. Pictures don’t do it justice. You’d need a real big holoproj image to give you the feel.”

  “I can see why. It’s—it’s . . .”

  “Yeah, it is.”

  She turned to him. “Thank you for bringing me here, Mourn. Really.”

  “So, how, uh, grateful are you? One of the big trees that died has been hollowed out, and there’s a public fresher in it.”

  She smiled. “You keep telling me what an old man you are, how you are ready to retire, and yet you seem to have plenty of energy in that arena.”

  “Blame yourself, fem. You call, I but answer.”

  “Well. I do need to go pee. Which way is this fresher?”

  “Let me show you.”

  The door’s chime rang, and Azul went to open the portal.

  “Fem Azul,” Shaw said. “Are you ready for dinner?”

  She smiled at him. She moved closer to where he stood in her doorway, leaned forward, and kissed him on the lips, probing a little with her tongue. He returned the kiss with passion.

  After a moment of increasing heat, she leaned back. “What say we skip dinner and get right to the dessert? Unless you are really hungry?”

  He smiled. “I’m sure we can find something to eat here that will satisfy us.”

  The trip to the bed involved a rapid removal of clothes, made easier in her case, since she had dressed with that goal in mind, and it took only three motions to go from clad to nude. They fell on the bed, he on his back, and she swung one leg over and settled down on him, already wet and ready. He slid into her smoothly to his base as she sat up on his crotch. She squee
zed him with very fit muscles she kept toned for this very purpose.

  “Oh,” he said. “Very nice!”

  She rode him, and he was quick, his first orgasm coming in less than a minute. She squeezed him until he stopped throbbing, then rolled off and lay next to him.

  “Too fast,” he said. “Sorry.”

  “You’ll make it up to me.”

  He laughed. “Oh, yes, I will.”

  He moved down her body and began to use his lips and tongue on her mons, moving deeper, and he was good enough so that her first orgasm didn’t take much longer than his. Ah. It had been too long.

  As they lay facing each other and resting up for more of the same, she stroked his shoulder.

  “I checked you out. I know who you are.”

  “I would hope you did,” he said. “When?”

  “Before we had dinner that first night.”

  “Ah.”

  She could see that pleased him. If what she said was true, she’d known how rich he was when she’d turned him away from her bed before. Which should mean that his huge fortune didn’t matter that much to her. And the truth was, it didn’t matter, not to Azul the operative nor to Azul the artist. For the op, it was a job, for the artist, it was the man himself. Had it been Azul on her own, playing neither part? The money wouldn’t have mattered to her, either.

  She saw the synthetic flesh patch on his arm. “What happened?” She touched the bandage with one finger.

  “That? A woman cut me.”

  “Really? By accident?”

  “On purpose. She had a large knife. You recall telling me about your brother? Well, as it happens, I have begun to play the same game he did.”

  Azul the op knew this. Azul the artist would not. And the next question could have come from either of them:

  “What happened to her? The woman who cut you?”

  “I killed her,” he said.

  Here was another crux. The artist could be repelled by this, taken aback that she was pronging a killer. Or she could be excited by it. Given that she had a brother who had been a ranked player, she would have more experience with such stories.