by Steve Perry
If he survived the clash . . .
Cluster did crossover backsteps to his left, circling toward Mourn’s right side. Mourn turned to keep his angle, but didn’t move otherwise. The man looked like a power fighter, and likely he would come in fast and hard if he was, but you couldn’t be sure of that until you saw him make a serious move. Could be a boxer or a grappler, it was too early to tell. You had to be ready for either.
Cluster angled in and gained a little ground, then stole a full step, disguising it with hand motions to draw Mourn’s attention, and leaning back, so that his upper body seemed to stay in one place as his lead foot advanced. Nice, but it didn’t fool Mourn—he knew exactly what the man was doing, and likely he didn’t really think Mourn would be fooled so easily—not at this level.
As Cluster shifted his weight forward onto his lead foot, just a hair outside Mourn’s attack range, Mourn did a little scrunch with his feet and scooted back a few centimeters. Not much, just enough to make it necessary for Cluster to advance another quarter step if he wanted to reach his quarry in a step and a half.
A step and a half was knife-fighting distance. Any closer, and Mourn could attack; any farther away, and it would take too long for Cluster to reach him before Mourn could set for the intercept. In Mourn’s new creation, position was paramount, more important than speed or power. He’d borrowed that from silat, along with the idea of step patterns, though he had created his own.
Cluster marked the distance and nodded slightly. He sidestepped and turned, to switch from a right hand and foot lead to his left side.
So far, Cluster was reading it right and not doing anything stupid. Mourn still hadn’t marked him as a hitter or a wrestler. He could be either or both—a lot of the eclectic styles had been successful with the blend. In a one-on-one duel, with no need to worry about an enemy’s confederates, grappling and going to the ground could be a sound move. If you could get a mount, do an arm bar and break, you could end a fight fast. If you did the shoot for a single- or double-leg and missed the takedown against a skilled player who knew what to do, though, you might not get another chance. Even if you got it, somebody who knew how to grapple could lock you into his guard, and it would still be anybody’s fight . . .
Stop thinking so much, Mourn. Just relax and see what happens.
As Cluster was jockeying back and forth to try and sneak closer, Mourn helped him out: He scooted forward, to his range, which put him into Cluster’s attack distance, since Cluster was taller. As Cluster bunched his muscles for the leap, Mourn watched his nostrils. They widened a hair as the man inhaled—
Mourn continued in fast, on Cluster’s air intake, but stutter-stepped, long, then short, to retard his timing—
Cluster thought Mourn was moving faster than he really was—he set up his block, holding his ground, not backing away, but he moved too fast, because Mourn wasn’t there yet—
Mourn threw the right punch he expected to be blocked, so that he could follow up with the left hand in an open slap, and then back to the right elbow, and he was in perfect position, just like on the pattern he’d been practicing—
The retarded timing messed Cluster up. He missed the first block! A quarter of a second too slow!
Mourn hadn’t expected the punch to go through, but it wasn’t a fake, just in case. His right fist smacked into the man’s nose, and Cluster’s head rocked back as Mourn’s open left came around in a short gunslinger’s draw from the low line hip, and caught him flat against the temple, rocking him to his left, dropping fast to cover low line, as Mourn’s already-rising right elbow went to the opposite temple—
Bam, bam, bam—! Three shots, three hits.
Cluster sprawled, bonelessly. Out cold on his way to the ground.
Just like that, it was over. One of the fastest fights Mourn had ever had, one series, and done!
Son of a bitch! The new stuff worked!
Back in their rented cottage, Sola said, “You aren’t going to submit the fight?”
Mourn was watching the recording of the fight on the room’s holoproj. Even though he had been there and done it, it was amazing to watch. It looked so much faster than it had felt. He had hit it dead-on.
He paused the recording, just as his right elbow connected with Cluster’s temple. “No. He was four ranks below mine, I won’t get any real lift points for it, and I don’t want to let the showrunners know where I am. Got to figure Weems has ears in there somewhere. Winner reports, and Cluster won’t say anything, so it didn’t happen. He’s got a headache and no real injuries, a little concussion. I expect Jorjay will take good care of him.”
She shook her head. Looked at him. Heard the pure joy in his voice. “If you were any more pleased with yourself, you would pop.”
He smiled, real big. “Yeah. I confess, it’s true. I thought it would work, but you never know until the moment comes.”
“You made it look easy,” she admitted. She waved at the frozen image.
“It was easy. That’s the part that’s so funny—I could have developed this years ago, if I’d stopped to think about it. I never did. I owe it to you.”
She said, “Not really. All I did was ask a question—you took it and did something with it. Ideas are cheap. I used to get approached regularly by wanna-be entcom makers. They’d say, ‘I got this great idea—how about I tell it to you, you make the ’com, and we’ll split the money?’”
She laughed. “Most people in my biz have a trunkful of ideas they won’t live long enough to get done. It isn’t the spark, it’s what you do with it that makes it work. Be like somebody telling you, ‘Hey, Mourn? Why don’t you move better, you know, more efficiently? Then you’ll win more often, hey?’ ”
He laughed. “That’s true, as far as it goes.”
“Yeah, but a long way from A to Z.” She paused. “So what now?”
“Well, even though I don’t think Cluster is going to tell anybody he ran into us here, I’d rather not take the chance. I still have some work to do on the steps. I’d like to finish that.”
“You think you can make it good enough to beat Weems?”
He didn’t smile when he answered: “I don’t know. Maybe.”
“So, where are we going?”
“I think Koji. That somehow seems appropriate. We can leave tomorrow, I’ll book us a cabin.”
Koji. The Holy World. Where, so it was said, if you sat on a bench in the park, you’d eventually see one of everything pass by. She’d been there once a couple years back, doing a story. It was a busy world. Sometimes, the best place to hide was in the middle of a crowd.
“Come on,” he said. “Let me show you a new move.”
“Really? A man your age?”
He laughed. “No, not that kind of move. A step I figured out.”
“How many of them do you have now?”
“Seventy-four, for sure. Another five or six possibles I’m not certain about yet. I’ll need maybe sixteen, eighteen more, I figure, to cover everything.”
She nodded at him. A few minutes ago, he had been fighting a match that could have ended with him seriously injured or dead. Now? He was ready to practice, as if the match had been no big deal. Amazing man, Mourn.
They put the yacht into orbit around the world of Mason, sometimes still called Alpha Point, and took Shaw’s personal lighter down the gravity well to the surface. Azul wondered how the poor people who traveled commercial ships then got packed into boxcars like grunion for the drop were doing. She watched the lights of the world go on when they crossed the terminator and onto the nightside. Always enjoyed that view as the tiny, bright dots began to sparkle in the night . . .
The yacht’s runabout put into a private berth at the port, the local customs agents made a cursory appearance and did a less than thorough check of their identifications, and a rented flitter was already standing by to transport them to a nearby hotel. Billionaires got treated differently from the riffraff—hardly a surprise, that.
Shaw frow
ned at the need for the hotel room. The fighter he had come to find had apparently dropped from sight—his agents had lost track of him, and until they found him again, Shaw would just have to wait.
Azul wouldn’t have wanted to be the operative who had lost Shaw’s quarry; likely, that one would be looking for a new job even as she thought it. And if the man got offworld before they regained contact? All of the ops involved would be needing work, she was sure. Shaw wasn’t a man to reward failure.
Well. It didn’t matter. While she was looking forward to seeing how well Shaw actually could fight, her purposes would be served whether he did or did not. As long as she was in proximity, she could continue to work her skills on him. He had already opened up with her in ways she suspected he never had with anybody else, and she was just getting started.
The flitter put down on the roof of the hotel, and it was a very short ride in the lift to the top floor, all of which had been reserved for Shaw and his party. Cervo went off to instruct the local bodyguards. Shaw decided he needed a shower. Azul went to the hotel’s shopping kiosk on the ground floor. She wanted to buy some sexy underwear, and to replenish some cosmetics.
“Charge whatever you need to our rooms,” Shaw said.
“You think you can afford it?”
“You want the hotel? I can have it wrapped and delivered. Might be hard to get it through its own door.”
She laughed. He was funny.
At the shopping center, she wandered around and found what she wanted, including a pair of panties made from silk so fine they were almost invisible. It was not so much the material as the idea that made them exciting. She presented her cube for payment. The clerk, a tall and thin woman of fifty or so, smiled. “Find everything you needed, F. Azul?”
“Yes, thank you.”
“Have a nice visit.”
When the clerk handed her the bag with her purchases, she pressed a short-term flimsy into Azul’s palm along with the bag. The greasy feel of the quikrot sheet under her fingers was unmistakable. Azul smiled. “Is there a fresher nearby?”
“Through the front there and to your right,” the clerk said.
“Thank you.”
Trying to hurry while looking as if you were strolling was a trick, but having to pee might do that. She knew she had a pair of bodyguards assigned to watch her, a man and a woman—she had spotted them pretty quickly when she’d come off the lift. Shaw wouldn’t want anybody trying to grab his paramour. But since she had maybe ninety seconds left before the flimsy just triggered degraded into a puff of dust, she couldn’t wait to get back uplevels to her floor to read it.
In the fresher, she took a stall, shut and latched the door, and checked to make sure there weren’t any obvious cams watching her. She pulled her orthoskins down, sat on the toilet, and peed, and as she did, she unfolded the flimsy and read it.
“REPORT” was all it said.
A few seconds later, the sheet curled, dried, and fell apart. She dusted her hands into the toilet as she stood and pulled her pants back up.
Well, well. Planetary Representative Randall was apparently not a patient man. And this little demonstration made it perfectly clear that she was only a small cog in his large machine, one that he could crank as he wished. That he had a clerk installed, however temporary she might be, and a note ready to be passed would certainly be impressive to the uninitiated. Azul had more than a little experience in such matters, and knew how it could be done, but still, it did indicate a pretty good level of function to be on top of it this way. He wanted to know what she knew.
The thing was, she didn’t have anything to tell Randall yet.
There were ways, then there were ways, but the simplest and easiest was to use the conduit provided to tell him.
She left the fresher, went back to the kiosk.
“Forget something?” the clerk asked.
“Yes. I don’t know where my brain is this evening. I needed some clear droptacs, completely slipped my mind.”
“Ah, well, here you are. That it?”
She pretended to think about it. “Let me search my poor memory . . . no, I can’t find anything else rattling around.” She looked directly at the woman. “Nothing else to report, I’m afraid.”
The woman smiled. Azul smiled back at her. Message received and message answered.
She turned and left the shop.
Whatever this Reflex was that Randall wanted to know about, it must be very valuable, indeed. She’d have to figure out a way to get Shaw to tell her about it. That would be a trick, since she couldn’t just drop it into a conversation.
Well. Shaw was unfolding, it was only a matter of time until she got what she needed. Randall would just have to wait. She might not be able to paint, but she was, in her own way, an artist. Just in a different medium.
26
The starliner was fast approaching the port for download to Koji, the lone habitable planet in the Heiwa System. Sola and Mourn were in their cabin aboard the liner Athena’s Tears, occupying a small, middle-class unit that would, theoretically, draw less attention.
Lying next to him on the bed, naked and sated, Sola said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.”
“Really? Who says?”
“Some Terran philosopher, prestellar-space travel,” she said. “Socrates? Plato? Lennon? One of those.”
Mourn said, “And you bring this up why?”
“Seems appropriate, given where we are going. A lot of the folks there are doing a lot of examination. I don’t think it means picking lint out of your navel, but that if all you ever do is put one foot in front of the other and never worry about where you’ve been or where you are going, you miss things.”
“Ah. So we’re talking about goals?”
She propped herself up on one elbow and looked at him. “Yeah. And maybe more. My biggest goal when I met you was to get my documentary done, sell it, see it on the entcom net, and become rich and famous. Pretty much that was it, but when you think about it, it’s not a long-term reach. Say it takes a year, or even two or three. Then what? I’ve achieved my heart’s desire, where do I go from there?”
He said, “Another documentary. Or maybe you branch out, do fiction. Write books, maybe.”
“Yeah, I could do that, but it would be more of the same, wouldn’t it? More money, more fame, and once you get to a certain point, what is the point? You can only sleep in one bed at a time, right? Once you can afford the best food, clothes, shelter, transportation, then how is a bigger pile of money going to help?”
“Point taken. So what are you talking about? Some higher purpose?”
“Maybe. Maybe I start some kind of foundation, feed the hungry or help educate the poor.”
“Admirable activities.”
“Yeah, but again, so what? The poor and hungry will always be with us in some form. And even if I had trillions to play with, which I’m guessing won’t be the case, I can’t cure that. I’m helping folks, sure, but to what end?”
“You aren’t trying to convert me to your religion, are you?”
She laughed. “Right. Like I have one. Though that question does come up, doesn’t it? What’s it all about? Who is in charge? You ever think about such things?”
He rolled over to mirror her position. “Not much. We’re born, we live, we die. That’s how it has always been. I’m guessing it will be that way for a long time. Maybe someday we break open the secrets of time and space, skip into alternate universes where we can be pure energy, live forever, and have godlike powers, but that’s not something I can get too excited about. Nobody has come up with answers to the big questions, at least not any that can be proven. Is there a god or gods? If you have faith, that’s what you believe, but if you don’t, nobody has a titanium-clad proof that stands up. Philosophers have been arguing about what it all means for ten thousand years, and there’s never been any kind of consensus acceptable by all. A lot brighter men than I have broken their minds on the problem. Why spend your li
fe worrying about questions that can’t be answered?”
“So you don’t believe in God?”
“Not a hands-on kind. If there is one, look around—he’s doing a pisspoor job. Might go for one who set the top spinning, then went on his way.”
“Maybe that’s on purpose. Gives us something to work on.”
“Not how I would do it.”
“So you do just put one foot in front of the other?”
He sat up, crossed his legs. “Works as well as any of the others, far as I can tell.
“My life’s goal, since I first walked into a school where people took swings at each other, was to get to be Primero in the Musashi Flex. I’m forty-five and slowing down, and even with the new moves? I don’t know if I am going to get there. I aimed high, and got pretty high—in theory, as of yesterday, there are nine players between me and what I started out shooting for, and out of the thousands of people who also want the job, that’s not a bad record. I could have done a little better, but I could have done a whole lot worse.”
“But what if you had gotten there? Beat all comers, taken the title? Then what have you done?”
“Moot, isn’t it? I didn’t, so it wasn’t a bridge I had to cross. And probably won’t.”
“Humor, me, Mourn.”
He thought about it. “I’d have probably worked it until I got beaten. Maybe retired before that, I don’t know. I could have lived off endorsements the rest of my life, I expect, or saved enough from them to manage it. Could have opened a school and done pretty well.”
“Until one day you fell over dead.”
“As lives go, that’s not bad. We-all-die is how the game works for everybody, Cayne, unless you know something I don’t?”
She shook her head. “No, I don’t. And that’s part of the point. If I got my documentary up and aired, and it made me rich and famous, and I got to roll for another eighty or hundred years in luxury, so what? What would I leave behind when I went into the final chill? Would the galaxy be any better for me having been here?”