Reiji feinted an attack and the hammer moved to intercept. He exploited the opening and changed the angle of his attack, digging Kai deep into the giant’s abdomen and dragging it through to cause the most damage. The remaining hammer fell from the giant’s grasp and he collapsed to his knees.
The huge man opened his mouth to say something, but Reiji gave him no chance for last words. With a single fluid motion he cut the man’s head form his shoulders and then flicked the excess blood away from his blade with a sharp chiburi. He wiped the blade clean on the slain man’s pants and placed it back in its sheath. Looking around him he saw no sign of the other two men who had fallen to the train. It was possible they’d seen Reiji cut their giant down and then fled, or that they had fled long before that. Who was to say they had even landed on the train? They might very well be climbing out of the trench some hundreds of meters back.
Reiji thought for a moment and then turned to retrieve Meyer’s head.
SURVEILLANCE. Obvious at that. A group of five men trying to blend in with their surroundings and keep their weapons out of sight. They were failing on both counts. Large, scarred men, wearing large black jackets. They looked like bounty hunters, even if they weren’t. But if they weren’t, then what were they doing there?
They hadn’t moved much in the past few hours save to go into a nearby doorway to take a piss or trade smokes.
Reiji watched them from the shadowed mouth of an alley. Dirty, but clean enough to eat off of the ground compared to what he’d seen in Meyer’s neighborhood. One of the reasons he’d chosen to live in this area. Clean enough to avoid contracting disease, inexpensive, and full of nooks and crannies for him to hide in if he needed to.
The same alley he’d first met Brie in. Named after a foul smelling and even worse tasting cheese or some shit like that, he mused. She’d been alright though. As far as hookers went. A face that only a mother could love, but a body seemingly carved out of the wet dreams of the Gods. She was a decent broad on top of that as well. The proverbial whore with a heart of gold.
He’d felt no shame in being one of her regular customers. Reiji had considered it community service. He put money back into the local economy and got laid on a regular basis. If he wasn’t getting laid on the regular, he was angry. When he was angry, men died. Others profited from his consorting with whores, and got to keep on living. A win-win in his book.
The whore with a heart of gold…worth its weight in gold at least at an organ harvesting center. She’d disappeared fast when her bounty came up. Something about stabbing an off duty Cent-Sec officer during pre-business haggling. He’d wanted to pay significantly less than her going rate.
The way Reiji had heard it, he tried to take it for free and wound up with a knife sticking out of one of his shoulder blades. Good on Brie if that was what actually happened. When he’d heard about it, Reiji had looked up the bounty on her head.
He debated with himself for several minutes if it was worth it to bring her in and collect. In the end, he’d decided that the bounty wasn’t enough to put any time or effort into it. Nonetheless she’d disappeared shortly afterwards.
Maybe she’d been smart enough to get the fuck out of town, he thought. Or maybe she was dead.
Reiji leaned out of the dark alley and looked towards the observation team once more. The men were clearly watching and waiting for Reiji. Three days later, the bounty on Meyer remained unclaimed. The stasis bag containing the man’s head had been stashed in a safe place. The stasis field had died and now Meyer’s mortal remains would be getting ripe. Reiji hoped there was enough DNA left intact to identify him, or they might try to refuse his pay.
But collecting was the least of his worries right now.
After leaping from the train and making his way back to civilization, or what passed for it on Lexington, Reiji had found that all of his personal accounts had been locked down. Even the accounts he had opened under other names and identities. Someone had found them all and frozen them, leaving him without access to his own damned money.
He could think of a half dozen men who might have sufficient motivation to do such a thing. But none of them had the balls as far as Reiji was concerned. And none of them knew about his back-up identities. Something larger than one man deciding to take him to war was at work here. But he couldn’t nail down exactly who, or what it was.
So he had been cut off from the vast majority of his resources, but he wasn’t helpless. Reiji had always kept a sizable stash of credits on a hard drive hidden in his apartment, and several smaller stashes spread out in other hiding places. Not enough to cover his bounty, but enough to feed him and keep him out of view until he could figure out what was happening. He’d made sure to stop by one of them before heading back to his place.
Reiji had seen another group of men the day before, as he’d made a quick pass-by to scope things out. His address wasn’t public knowledge. The place he stayed in was occupied under an assumed name and always paid for with funds from a dummy account. But it wouldn’t have been very difficult for a decent bounty hunter to find. He assumed there had been men watching it since shortly after the announcement of the bounty on his head. He’d been lucky there hadn’t been an ambush waiting for him when he’d left to track down Meyer.
A few credits put in the right hands and there were rumors about his whereabouts circulating in the vicinity of most of the agencies that kept a stable of hunters. Rumors that would invariably turn out to be false, but might draw some attention away from where he wanted to be. As he watched, his investment paid off. One of the men watching his apartment building pulled a large satellite phone from his jacket. Such a thing was worth a virtual fortune on Lexington. Either he was very well off or worked for someone who was.
The man spoke into the phone, nodding as he did so while Reiji watched. He turned to the others and said something, motioning with his hands. Together they stood and jogged off, still trying to conceal the weapons hidden in their jackets. Still failing.
Reiji very rarely tried to hide his weapons. It wasn’t exactly legal to carry a blade, but a scant few in Cent-Sec cared enough about it to say or do anything. Those men had far more important things to deal with than thugs playing at street samurai or white knight of the block. Most of them also knew that the hunters were part of the structure keeping them in power. Keeping them safe. If you fucked with Cent-Sec, and Cent-Sec couldn’t find you to put you in the ground, then a hunter took your head.
Beyond that, people stayed out of his way if they saw him coming with the long sword slung over his shoulder or the smaller version he sometimes worked with hanging on his waist. Even more so if he carried both weapons in the open. They knew something bad was about to happen, and it would be much better for them if they weren’t there when it occurred.
The shape of the weapons seemed to speak to the primordial within man. After having been the bleeding edge of the weapon maker’s art for thousands of years, it seemed to have found its way into humankind’s DNA.
He automatically reached down and touched Kai’s handle. A response to thinking about the weapon. He shifted his grip to a more comfortable spot. Ready to draw the blade and cut, even though there appeared to be no need.
When the group of men were out of view, Reiji crossed the street. Quickly, but not quick enough to draw unwanted attention. It was a sure thing that at least some of his neighbors had heard about the bounty, and a few of them might even be stupid enough to try and collect. Being wounded in an unnecessary fight struck him as less than optimal, so he tried to avoid the situation altogether.
Across the street and into the opposite alley, and then up the fire escape. Halfway up, he moved from the fire escape and out onto the red bricks of the wall. He had worked handholds and toeholds into the face over the passing years, giving himself an exit and entry route in emergencies that wouldn’t be obvious to a casual observer.
As he moved out onto the wall, Reiji could hear his neighbors going about their business
in their own units, the paper-thin walls doing little to stifle the sounds. Someone spoke loudly, just short of shouting. His muffled voice sounding like “Pass the fucking ball!” as it came through the wall. Somewhere a woman moaned in the throes of passion.
Something about it reminded him of Brie, the missing hooker. Had she been the one who groaned and moaned like that? Or had it been another? Was she back from the dead, or did she simply sound like other women when doing the deed?
Of course, none of that mattered. If Brie was back, then Reiji would give her a tumble for old time’s sake. If she wasn’t, who really cared? Just another missing whore in a city with thousands, if not tens of thousands, of the same.
Thick bundles of cables bound together with plastic zip-ties snaked along the wall. Carrying data and power from the primary infrastructure and into the building, spreading to each unit within. The building was old enough to have been built for compatibility with broadcast power, having no need for the wiring.
But over the years the broadcast power systems had begun to fail. Despite the technical know-how to repair the systems, the advanced refined materials were lacking. All of Lexington had been slowly crawling backwards in time as far as technology was concerned. Inexorably moving towards the stone ages.
Some claimed it had only been a few decades since Lexington had been left behind. Others claimed centuries. Reiji suspected the higher count numbers were closer to correct. Cent-Com wasn’t saying and tried to pretend that they had no idea what anyone who asked was talking about.
We are, and always have been, the only legitimate government to hold power on Lexington. All media and data claiming otherwise is purely fictional.
In contrast, Reiji had seen enough with his own eyes to know that at one point in time Lexington had been connected to the rest of humanity, spread throughout the stars shining above at night. But, like in children’s stories, that had been a long time ago in a seemingly faraway place.
Since then, well, the world had been left behind.
Lexington was grimly clinging to what technology it could over the years. But it was a losing fight. The infrastructure had never been brought up to snuff and colonists dumped here in numbers far too great for the resource base to support an advanced society.
Reiji wondered how long it would be until the last of the solar panels on the building’s roof finally died. They would be entirely dependent upon connections to the coal-fired power plants to provide basic electricity. Connections that were notoriously untrustworthy running from plants that were dependent upon a supply that was frequently interrupted by savages living in the wild places between cities and raiders trying to make a quick credit or two in ransom.
Rolling black-outs were frequent. Especially during the peak summer months when temperatures were unbearably hot for twelve hours a day.
Holding tight to the wall, Reiji paused outside of the window leading into his bedroom. He pulled himself flat against the wall and slowed his breathing, straining to hear if there was any noise coming from inside. He counted to one hundred, stretching his senses as far as they would go.
Nothing.
He moved to the window and gently pushed it open. It slid silently, giving no sign that he was entering. Reiji pushed a curtain aside and gently stepped into his dark bedroom. Polished hardwood floors met the soles of his heavy boots, but made little to no sound. On the far side of the large room a sleeping mat sat on the floor accompanied by a pile of old books.
Works of philosophy, science, and fiction were stacked there. Almost all of them had been recommended to him at one time or another. Something he had to absolutely read, he had been told.
Pretentious crap, the lot of it.
Written by men who’d never known a hard day in their lives, but still liked to wax poetic about the burden of the warrior and other nonsense. Still, he kept them, rereading them every now and then. It beat staring off into space.
Puddles of melted and resolidified candle wax stained the floor near the sleeping mat, showing his preferred method of illumination when he read. It would have been much easier to put the books on a data slate, but such things were becoming rarer and rarer by the day.
Just like all tech worthy of the name.
As he approached the sleeping mat he could see that someone had searched through it. He made the mat every time he rose from his slumber, making sure it was precisely done. Now, the covers on the mat were ruffled and stood in disarray. No matter though, he thought. There was nothing of any real value there. But he didn’t have to search far to find such.
Reiji looked to the wall above the bed. There in the wall was a small alcove precisely shaped to hold his daisho. Daito and Shoto. The matched long sword and short sword that he owned. Kai and his smaller twin. He’d heard them referred to as nodachi and wakazashi before. That was what his father and grandfathers had called them, though that struck him as just a more complicated way of saying long sword and short sword. His mother had always referred to them as swords. Her ignorance of the subtleties of each blade seemed a much simpler way to look at things.
Of all of his worldly belongings, Kai and Little Brother, as he had taken to calling the long sword and short sword, held the highest place of honor. They were his weapons, his tools in this world. The one thing that would never fail him, no matter what he might face in life.
When he went out hunting, Reiji would arm himself based on what resistance he expected to face. This time, he had only been expecting a few inexperienced men with low-quality weapons. He had been right until Meyer had fled into the gambling hall. Reiji had only taken Kai with him, leaving Little Brother behind.
And now, Little Brother, twin short sword to Kai’s long sword, nanoforged in the same foundry by the same nanosmith for the same warrior, was missing. Whoever had disturbed his bed had seen the weapon and no doubt realized its value. Such a blade was priceless. It would be worth dozens of times even the highest bounty placed on Reiji. Perhaps whoever had taken it had left, realizing that they had gotten the better part of the deal by far.
Reiji drew a deep breath and held it for several seconds. Whoever had taken his blade had signed their own death warrant. If it was the last thing he did in his life, he would find this person, man or woman, and slowly cut them to pieces. He would make them suffer so that all of Lexington would know what it meant to dare to steal from Reiji Ikeda.
The curtain moved in a slight breeze and light from outside caused shadows to dance across the far wall. Reiji drew Kai as something moved there and he took a fighting stance. There was a moment of tension as he tried to move so as to blend in with the shadows of the room. If someone was there it was unlikely they hadn’t seen him. The curtain moved again and the shadows shifted and Reiji saw his foe.
The one piece of significant tech he kept in his apartment. His training dummy. Though to call it a dummy was inaccurate. It was a robot.
The training dummy was the one indulgence he had allowed himself in several years. He used it to practice his swordplay and hand to hand combat. It could be programmed to fight with scores of different styles and at multiple ranges. It stood the size and shape of the average man. It looked like it had been moving when shadows had shifted across its surface. But it remained still and in the same place Reiji had left it after his last training bout.
Knowing that such a thing could be built and programmed to fight, Reiji had often wondered why there hadn’t been armies of robots and synthetics, robots that looked like men, in the past. Or perhaps there had been and they’d been too complicated or too expensive to maintain. Maybe some sly egghead had found a way to seize control of them from their masters. Far easier to do with a machine than a flesh and blood counterpart.
Next to the training dummy there was a rack that held dulled and wooden versions of various weapons. Swords, knives, axes, clubs. All had their place in a bounty hunter’s work. There were other training methods he used, but they blended nicely with the physical challenge presented there.
The eternal training and practice with the weapons and the dummy were what Reiji credited his long career to, as well as his having stayed in one piece through the course of said career
There was no luck but for the luck he made himself.
Reiji moved silently from the bed to the doorway and into the living room beyond. Through there to the bathroom, and he would find what he had come for. He stepped into the small room and pressed a switch in the wall, flooding the bathroom with illumination. Unnecessary as he could have found the hiding place with his eyes closed. But he dared not risk damaging it in the darkness.
He looked at himself in the mirror again. I look like death took a shit on me, he thought as he stared. He wanted to take a hot shower and then go to sleep, but he had no time for such luxuries.
Reiji reached up and grabbed the edges of the mirror, pulling it away from the wall and setting it quietly on the floor. It exposed a cavity he had dug out himself, lined with a few narrow shelves. On the shelves stood two metal boxes. One contained an encrypted hard drive that held a good amount of credits. Perhaps enough to pay off his bounty, and possibly enough to last him a few months beyond that. But not much.
The other was a precious relic from the time before Lexington was left behind. A complex memory crystal that held the digitized personalities of some twenty or so of his ancestors in the male line. His father, his grandfather, and his greats stretching back twenty generations. His Ancestral Spirits.
Of course it wasn’t actually them in there. It was a program that included their personalities and memories. Digitized versions of the long dead men that would act and speak in the same manner. Think in the same way and produce output congruent with the brain-patterns of the men they were modeled on.
Reiji lifted the box reverently and put it in a padded pocket on the inside of his jacket. It would be difficult to damage the memory crystal, but not impossible. The hard drive might have been worth more financially, but the crystal was irreplaceable. To the extent of his knowledge there were no others like it on Lexington. The hard drive went into another lined pocket and Reiji put the mirror back in place before shutting off the light and heading back towards his bedroom.
The Way of Death Page 5