The Musashi Flex (11 page)

Too sugary? Too pat? Well, that was the easy part, the writing, she could do that anytime. Once she had the visuals, the words would come. Anybody could write.

Later, she would figure out a way to approach him, get an interview, maybe even some scenes of him fighting, but she didn’t want to rush it. She was platinum at the moment, and gleaming in the sun. Best to enjoy it while she could.

Mourn didn’t know how long the woman had been following Weems. He didn’t spot her until Weems sat down at an open-air place called Cafe Du Monde and ordered coffee and one of the sweet confections the locals called beignets, but it was her, Sola, the girl from Madrid. He smiled at the memory. She was tenacious, he had to give her that. She had found out that Weems was here, and was now shadowing him. Being cautious about it, too, but that was no guarantee she hadn’t been spotted—Mourn had tagged her, and he couldn’t claim any more skill at detecting tails than her quarry.

At the moment, Mourn was across the narrow street, inside a little shop, loading a handbasket with pecan pralines, whatever the hell those were, with plenty of cover. He could barely see the two, and if they looked his way, they wouldn’t be able to see him, not enough to ID him.

He did note that Weems had his cane with him. It was hooked on the edge of the table a few centimeters away from his right hand. He had gone to the carbon fiber, so it was said, because he hated putting dings in his custom-made hickory or snakewood sticks, made for him by a master canesmith and fighter named McNeill. McNeill made the carbon-fiber jobs, too, but reportedly under protest—they were just so . . . plain and ugly. Still, while the customer wasn’t always right, when you supplied the weapons for the top-rated Flex player, it didn’t hurt your sales, so plain and ugly he wanted, plain and ugly he got.

Weems had bashed enough heads with the carbon-fiber suckers and never broken one of the canes, so the old saw about form following function seemed valid enough.

But here was the woman, who, far as he could tell, didn’t have a clue Mourn was here. Of course, she wasn’t looking for him, she was focused on Weems, that was her error. Maybe Number One hadn’t tagged her or Mourn yet. He would, eventually, no question of that. You simply could not tail somebody of his caliber for very long without being burned, not unless you did it electronically and from a distance. One person alone doing a sub-rosa surveillance had only a limited time before a hinky target would see him. Or her.

Mourn himself had no intention of staying on Weems that long.

He knew what Sola was up to, given their visit, but he didn’t know how she was going to play it, and it was a risky thing for her, though she probably didn’t know how risky. Weems liked his privacy, more than most players. He lived for the contest, and all the rest of it was, as he had been heard to say, rat feces, as far as he was concerned. He might not take kindly to being watched by a spindoc, even one who planned to make him look good. He didn’t care how he looked.

Well, it was not Mourn’s biz. He had come to check Weems out, strictly strategic and tactical stuff, that was all. He’d mark the man’s moves, try to get a sense of what he was about, and move on. Whatever happened to the woman was her problem.

Moving on meant to another world, too. He had gotten what he had come to Earth to learn, the art of
pentjak silat,
and the only way to get better at that was to go off and practice it for a couple hours a day for ten or twelve years. Along the way, he was sure to come across some other esoteric martial art that would call to him, and probably he would try to learn it.

Mourn grinned at the thought. There were some principles in
silat
he hadn’t paid much mind to that he wanted to play with a little. When he had been young and strong, able to leap into the air high enough to kick a tall man in the face—and hit him three more times with both hands on the way down—he’d gloried in his speed and power. With the state of medicine, he could easily make it to 120 or 130, more if some of the newer treatments being researched panned out, but not with the reflexes and strength he’d had when he’d been 25. The idea that position and timing could compensate for what he was losing had its appeal.

Thing was, it was hard to give up the old ways. As long as the body would do what it used to do, putting that technique aside wasn’t easy. Why would you?

Mainly because you might reach for it one day and it wouldn’t be there, and
that
would get you killed. Best learn to fight smarter and not harder, especially when you yourself were getting softer and not harder.

Or, as the saying went: Old and treacherous may not beat young and strong every time, but that’s the way the wise money bets . . .

But whatever principles he might eventually learn, they weren’t going to be in place in this town on this day, and if he caught Weems crooked, the man would beat the crap out of him.

Mourn had a romantic bent now and again, but about some things he was a realist, and fighting was one of them. You didn’t get to be
Primero
on luck, and while Mourn figured there were a couple, maybe three, possibly even as many as four people in the Top Ten he could take, or at least fight to a draw on a good day, Weems was not among them. Weems could hammer him down and be half a galaxy away before Mourn woke up inside a Healy, full of tubes and hoping nothing was permanent—and that was if Weems was feeling merciful.

It would be great to call Weems out and kick his ass.

So would being able to fly by jumping up and flapping your arms, and he had about the same chance at that as he did of taking Weems in a fair contest. Weems was the best. Mourn wasn’t even close.

No, he had pretty much what he had come for. A few days to clean up his affairs here, he’d be on his way. He could stay out of Weems’s way for that long.

He went to the checkout kiosk, pressed his credit cube against the reader, and had his purchases scanned and debited by the din running the kiosk. The din bagged the candy and heat-sealed the biodegradable plastic bag shut. No alarms went off as Mourn exited the store.

As he made his way along the walk, a transient approached him. “Spare a stad to help a hungry flo’man?”

“Here,” Mourn said. He handed him the bag of pralines. “Sell these, they should buy you a jolt of whatever juice you need. About thirty standards worth, still store-sealed.”

The man took the package, looked at the candy through the clear plastic. “I’d prefer hard curry, but I guess this is okay.”

Mourn shook his head. Amazing how many times he had met beggars who were choosers.

What the hell, it didn’t matter. He decided in that moment that he was done here, and he started looking for a hack to take him to the port. He didn’t really need to wait at all. He’d go back to Madrid, sell his workout dummy and turn in his housing docs, grab his guitar and head for deep vac. Why not?

He saw Weems get up, collect his cane, and amble away from the table.

Something in the man’s manner rang odd, and Mourn’s gut-level instinct was that Weems had spotted his tail. Whether it was himself or the woman—or both—Mourn couldn’t tell, but in that moment, he was certain
Primero
was burned.

Well,
said the
atman
voice in his mind,
so what? Didn’t you just decide you were done? Find that taxi and be gone. Whatever Weems does or doesn’t do doesn’t concern you, right?

Then he saw the woman come to her feet and head for the street, and he remembered how he had smiled when she had tried to run that “I’ll-tell-your-story” con past him. If Weems had spotted her, which, Mourn had to believe was more likely than Weems spotting
him,
then she could be in trouble. Weems’s sexual preference was, from what Mourn knew, for women, though there wasn’t a lot more than that floating around. Maybe he might decide to lure her down some empty alley for a little fun. He’d know she wasn’t a Player from the way she moved, and like a lot of Flexers, Weems didn’t have much respect for anybody who wasn’t one. Would he thump the young woman around and then prong her, just for fun? His option.

And the little voice in his head said,
Which part of “So what?” didn’t you copy, dink-brain? Somebody die and leave you in charge of rescuing women from their stupid mistakes? Because if they
did,
you are gonna be a busy, busy man from here on out.

Weems was moving off, practically strolling, and that wasn’t right either. Weems wasn’t the kind of man who ordinarily
strolled
anywhere, from what Mourn knew of him.

Mourn shook his head. That wouldn’t be right, to leave her to Weems. He could go warn her off. Tell her she’d been spotted. At least that much.

“This is perhaps, uh . . . not the, uh, wisest course of action, sir,” Bevins said.

Shaw grinned at the medico. They were in the infirmary, and Shaw was naked, sitting on the exam table, butt sunk into the biogel pad. Nice and warm, the stuff was.

“Don’t you mean, ‘This is extremely stupid’?”

Bevins looked uncomfortable but did not speak. It wouldn’t be in him to make that kind of comment to the man who held his reins.

Behind him, Dr. Tenae shook her head slowly.

“Something you wanted to add?” Shaw said.

She glanced at Bevins, then at Shaw.“‘Suicidally stupid’ would be closer to it, M. Shaw. ‘Moronically stupid.’”

Shaw laughed. He liked this woman. Ass-kissers were a demistad a dozen, people with balls—they were worth their weight in platinum.

“Barry is still alive and happy enough, isn’t he?”

“It’s only been
one
day,” Tenae said. “He could keel over tomorrow, next week, next month, next year—we don’t have any idea how this will affect him in the long term.”

“Dr. Tenae is correct,” Bevins said, sensing which way the wind was blowing here. “That the treatment did not kill the creature immediately is, of course, a major breakthrough, but hardly conclusive. We are years away from human protocols.”

“Nope, we are about five seconds away from testing it on a human being.” Shaw picked up the skinpopper, a small gun-shaped mechanical device that used highpressure compressed gas to inject medications through human or animal skin and into the muscle. Old-tech, but sometimes the old ways still worked just fine.

“Don’t do it,” Tenae said.

“Who authorizes the credit transfers around here?”

“Who the hell is going to authorize
ours
if we let you kill yourself?” she said.

Shaw laughed again. “Recorder, annotate and verify this, please. In the event of my death, Dr. Isura Tenae is to receive from my estate one million standards.”

“Annotated and verified,” said the recording computer’s deep voice.

“Happy? If I die, you get rich.”

“It’s still a bad idea,” she said. “You’re supposed to be a smart man—you
know
better!”

He smiled again. He was going to give her the money anyway, for that line. Because he wasn’t going to die.

With that, he pressed the popper’s muzzle against his thigh and squeezed the trigger. The resulting
spat!
was loud, it stung a little, and the stuff was cold, like being stabbed to the bone with a blade of solid carbon dioxide. He put the popper down and took a deep breath. “How long?”

Tenae shrugged. “We don’t have a clue. Nobody saw Barry make a fast move until several hours after the injection. But maybe he didn’t have any reason to hurry before then. You’re bigger, heavier, and a different species. We don’t even know if the stuff will work at all.”

“It’ll work,” Shaw said.

Both the medicos stared at him.

“All right. Let us hook you into the monitors—” Bevins began.

“Nope. It kills me, it will be while I am going about my business.”

Both doctors shook their heads at this.

Shaw started to dress. Tenae said, “Will you let the vouch follow you around, at least?”

“Sure. I’ve kind of gotten used to the little fellow dogging my heels.” He looked at his chronograph. “I need to get to a meeting. I’ll keep you apprised of the situation.”

As he walked away from the infirmary, the medical robot duly rolling along behind him a discreet three meters back, Shaw reflected that Bevins and Tenae probably thought he was insane. What billionaire would risk his life on an untried chem if he didn’t have to? Maybe if he were dying of some dread disease and there was only one possible cure and it
might
be fatal, sure, anybody could see that. But to inject something that could kill you just because it maybe would give you reflexes and speed faster than normal? And not even be sure of that?

Oh, yeah. Crazier than a spazhead on suckle.

But it wasn’t going to kill him. The little rock ape’s vital signs were perfect, and while it was possible that there might be some long-term side effect, Shaw didn’t believe that, either. Because he
knew
.

Sometimes he got these feelings. They were rare, had happened but four times in his life, he could remember each one vividly. There came a kind of tingling sensation in his body, as if he were being bathed in a mild electrical current. Combined with the physical effect was a sudden epiphany, a kind of
déjà verité,
a revelation of truth. It was the oddest thing. He had not read about anything quite like it in the medical literature; but each and every time it had happened, whatever it showed him, that thing always came to pass. When his mother died, when he took over as Chairman, when he
knew
a woman across the room would come over and say exactly the words she said. And now, not an hour past, with Reflex, that same certainty: The stuff was going to work. He’d bet his life on it.