Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Epigraph
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
High praise for the Matador series, Steve Perry’s stories of intrigue and honor, including . . .
The Man Who Never Missed, The 97th Step,
The Albino Knife, Matadora, Black Steel,
The Machiavelli Interface, and Brother Death
“A crackling good story. I enjoyed it immensely!”
—Chris Claremont
“Heroic . . . Perry builds his protagonist into a mythical figure without losing his human dimension. It’s refreshing.”
—Newsday
“Perry provides plenty of action [and] expertise about weapons and combat.” —Booklist
“Noteworthy.” —The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
“Another sci-fi winner . . . cleanly written . . . the story accelerates smoothly at an adventurous clip, bristling with martial arts feats and as many pop-out weapons as a Swiss army knife.” —The Oregonian
“Plenty of blood, guts, and wild fight scenes.” —VOYA
“Excellent reading.” —Science Fiction Review
“Action and adventure flow cleanly from Perry’s pen.”
—Pulp and Celluloid
Books by Steve Perry
THE TULAREMIA GAMBIT
CIVIL WAR SECRET AGENT
THE MAN WHO NEVER
MISSED
MATADORA
THE MACHIAVELLI
INTERFACE
THE 97TH STEP
THE ALBINO KNIFE
BLACK STEEL
BROTHER DEATH
THE OMEGA CAGE
(with Michael Reaves)
THE MUSASHI FLEX
CONAN THE FEARLESS
CONAN THE DEFIANT
CONAN THE INDOMITABLE
CONAN THE FREE LANCE
CONAN THE FORMIDABLE
ALIENS: EARTH HIVE
ALIENS: NIGHTMARE
ASYLUM
SPINDOC
THE FOREVER TRUG
STELLAR RANGERS
STELLAR RANGERS: LONE
STAR
THE MASK
MEN IN BLACK
LEONARD NIMOY’S
PRIMORTALS
STAR WARS: SHADOWS OF
THE EMPIRE
THE TRINITY VECTOR
THE DIGITAL EFFECT
WINDOWPANE
TRIBES: EINSTEIN’S
HAMMER
Books by Steve Perry
With Tom Clancy and Steve
Pieczenik
NET FORCE
NET FORCE: HIDDEN
AGENDAS
NET FORCE: NIGHT MOVES
NET FORCE: BREAKING
POINT
NET FORCE: POINT OF
IMPACT
NET FORCE: CYBERNATION
With Tom Clancy,
Steve Pieczenik, and
Larry Segriff
NET FORCE: STATE OF WAR
NET FORCE: CHANGING OF
THE GUARD
NET FORCE: SPRINGBOARD
With Michael Reaves
SWORD OF THE SAMURAI
HELLSTAR
DOME
THONG THE BARBARIAN
MEETS THE CYCLE SLUTS
OF SATURN
STAR WARS: BATTLE
SURGEONS
STAR WARS: JEDI HEALER
With Stephani Dañelle
Perry
ALIENS: THE FEMALE WAR
ALIENS VERSUS PREDATOR:
PREY
With Gary Braunbeck
ISAAC ASIMOV’S I-BOTS:
TIME WAS
With Dal Perry
TITAN AE
THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
Published by the Penguin Group
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
THE MUSASHI FLEX
An Ace Book / published by arrangement with the author
PRINTING HISTORY
Ace edition / January 2006
Copyright © 2006 by Steve Perry.
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eISBN : 978-0-441-01361-6
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This book is for Dianne, as they all have been and
if I am fortunate enough to keep writing them, ever will be;
For the grandsons: Zach, Brett, Cy, and Dex;
And for the Eclectics, who have a point,
but who also miss a larger one:
Now and then, deep and narrow beats
wide and shallow all to hell and gone—
and you ignore this at your peril.
SP
Acknowledgments
&n
bsp; I’d like to thank Maha Guru Stevan Plinck, who is, in my opinion, the world’s best player and teacher of the esoteric Javanese fighting art Pukulan Pentjak Silat Sera. Guru Plinck is a kind and gentle man, which is good, because of that which he is capable. I owe him much for taking me on as a student, and for the nine years I’ve been privileged to study with him. (A special thanks goes to writer and martial artist Steven Barnes for introducing me to Guru. When I started writing about the 97 Steps, I thought I was making it all up, until I discovered that silat had beaten me to it.)
Thanks to: Ginjer Buchanan, at Penguin/Ace, for all the years of help as my excellent editor, and to Jean Naggar and the good folks at her agency for making it possible for me to pay the rent.
Thanks to: Master Shiva Ki, who made the kerambits, and Chas Clements, who did the leather for them. Men of character, both.
Thanks to: Todd and Tiel, for the read—and the Swahili.
Martial arts are a lifelong journey for some, and I am happy to count myself among those long on the path. I hope my readers find my latest foray into this arena interesting. It’s all pure fiction, of course—but it’s all true, nonetheless.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
—EDMUND BURKE
When you know who you are, you know what to do.
—GEORGE EMERY
Batur arek uring enggeus.
(When they get ready, we are already done.)
—SUDANESE FIGHTING PROVERB
1
Death came for him from the shadows, as it had so many times before. This time, his would-be killer bore a dagger. Lazlo Mourn recognized not only the type, he knew who had made it. The distinctive layered-damascus steel was the giveaway: Angel’s Wings, created by a smith who was well regarded by Flex players for knives that were virtually unbreakable; high-carbon stain-free plexsteel cryonically tempered in liquid nitrogen. You could bend one those blades ninety degrees without snapping it, and it would spring back, good as new. That was a blade worth having.
He wondered how old man Kiley the knifemaker was these days? Was he still living on Koji, the Holy World? That might seem an odd place for a man who made killing weapons, but not if you had turned smithing into a religion as Kiley had. In one of his deposit vaults, Mourn had two of the old man’s knives. They were worth half again each what he had paid for them, and they had not been cheap. He expected to be using them again—assuming he lived to do so.
He was mildly amused at himself for wandering off on such a flight of fancy while looking at a man who planned to kill him.
Amused, not afraid.
He could remember exactly when it had happened. During a duel with slap-caps four years ago he had realized that losing—and dying—were not as important as doing his technique properly.
How far gone was that? Better focus here, Mourn.
He breathed in through his nose, using the Ayurvedic method. This alley was, save for the two of them, deserted, just another of the tens of thousands of building gaps like it all over Jakarta. The afternoon was hot, tropically so. The air had a faintly rancid, spoiled-fruit odor, as might be made by some small bit of garbage fallen unseen behind a bin to rot in the cloying heat.
The man with the dagger was short, wide, and muscular but not so much so that he couldn’t move well. His hair was cropped tight in a spacer’s buzz, and while sparkle-dyed a hideous, almost pustulant, glittery yellow, had dark roots. He was maybe twenty-five, and of course, Mourn knew him. It was Harnett, and ranked probably around Twentieth, Twenty-First or so, that due to his work with short-edged weaponry. You got more points for weapons. So his challenge would be legit; he was within Mourn’s cohort.
Harnett wore stretch leathers and flexsoles, and to suffer the leather in this heat almost surely meant spidersilk armor was part of the weave. He was young, skilled, and quick—and he knew it. But he was not well seasoned yet, despite his rank. Mostly, Harnett had been lucky. Some had it, some didn’t. Luck could take you places, but She could never be trusted to stay in your bed once you got there.
“Hello, Mourn. Fancy meeting you here.” He waved the knife like a pointer.
Mourn shook his head. Jesu. He’d probably been working on his delivery of that line for days.
Mourn was taller, probably weighed about the same, and was at least twenty years older. And ranked higher—though there were never guarantees in a knife fight.
Of a moment, despite the yogic breathing, he felt tired.
“Harnett. You sure you want to play it this way?” He nodded at the dagger. Technically, it was Mourn’s choice—he was the challenged party—but if the man wanted to slice, it was all the same to him.
“Unless you just want to, you know, hand over your tag?”
Mourn smiled. At this level, nobody gave up their tag.
He uncrowed the flap of the paddle-holster tucked under the belt on his left side, a sheath of pebbled gray curlnose leather. The case, custom-designed by a grizzled old artist named Clements, was a nice piece of art in itself, made to look like a transponder case. Had to be disguised, since what was in it was illegal in this city. He slipped his forefinger into the rings of the twin kerambits.
He pulled the two short knives free but held them together in his left hand as if they were one thick blade, points down and edges forward in what knifers called the ice-pick grip. The kerambits were claw-shaped single-edge weapons whose curved inner edges were only about the length of his crooked little finger. The other end of the all-steel knife bore a ring that would allow it to be worn like a brass knuckle. It was a slashing weapon rather than a stabbing one, though the thick and heavy ring also allowed striking. Like Harnett’s blade, these were layered pattern-weld steel, done by a local artisan named Shiva, and had not been cheap. You never stinted on your weapons; you always bought the best you could afford. He had been practicing with these every day for the last year or so, and he was quite comfortable with the little knives.
Held the way he had them, the two should, from Harnett’s viewpoint, look like one.
Harnett grinned. In a knife fight, size mattered, his dagger was easily four times as long, and would cut going and coming. If he had been smart, he would have wondered: Why did a fighter like Lazlo Mourn, at least six or eight ranks higher than he was, feel that he needed nothing larger than a little hook blade?
If he had been smart, Harnett wouldn’t have followed Mourn into this alley.
Harnett edged in, but was still more than three meters away. He lowered himself slowly into a knife fighter’s crouch, blade leading in a saber grip.
Mourn turned his body so that he was angled at maybe fifty degrees to Harnett, his left leg forward, his right leg back, feet just under a meter apart. He held the knives low, by his groin, his other hand by his face.
Mourn had mostly been on Earth for more than a year, training under a little old man named Setarko, who was a master of one of the pentjak silat variants called Tjindak. Silat was a weapons-based system, which meant that the unarmed moves were derived from those with blades, and not the other way around. Mourn had been pretty quiet while he trained, only a few challenges, most of those offworld, and the ones he’d fought here had been unarmed. The way the Flex ranking system worked, as long as he was minimally active and he didn’t lose, he wouldn’t drop off the map.
Harnett wasn’t local. He might not know about the blades and the system that taught their use.
Silat wasn’t Mourn’s only art, of course; he had trained in others, from Teräs Kasi—“steel hands”—to combat Changa grappling, to the bonebreak system of Maumivu Matunda—“the Fruit of Pain.” He was still in pretty good condition at a hair over forty-five years T.S., but he wasn’t getting any younger. You could count the number of top-rated Flex players past his age on your fingers—with one left over to scratch your nose.
He had considered retiring. He could open a school. Lots of players would seek him out to see if they could learn what had kept
him alive for twenty-five years against some of the best in the galaxy. Once, he had been full of fire, striving to reach the top of the Flex. Now? The game was week-old bread. You could still eat it, but it was dry and hard, and there was no real taste left to it. He was tired, he was old, he should quit.
Whatever happened here, this kid wasn’t going to go much farther up the ranks. He just didn’t have enough fire. Luck was not infinite.
Harnett stole a half step closer.
Mourn waited. Attack had its advantages, but first to move ran the risk of being first to err.
Harnett darted in, threw a quick slash, and jumped back. A feint, to check his reaction more than actually to do damage, but Mourn swiped at the attacking arm, deliberately slow, knives still held together as one.
Yeah, the kid was fast, but that was not nearly as dangerous as smart. Fast you could deal with.
Harnett circled, shifted his weapon from hand to hand, showing off. He jumped in and slashed again.
Mourn sidestepped, easily avoiding the attack, but he didn’t follow up as Harnett retreated.
Harnett circled in the opposite direction.
Mourn stayed where he was.
Harnett must have figured he had what he needed. He switched grips from saber to ice pick, and began to bounce forward and backward, getting almost within range, but not quite, going up and down, slapping his body with his free hand, his moves increasingly jerky.
Ah. Peepah-style, a tribal art developed in prisons for assassinations. It looked something like kuntao, maybe even a little like silat. Peepah was a hodgepodge, but not dangerous if you knew what it was—and if you had a blade of your own, it was nothing—no real principles in it, only technique.
Harnett got ready to make his run, and Mourn figured he knew how it would play out. He must have figured he could give Mourn his arm, take the cut, even if it punched through the armored leather sleeve, and gut him before Mourn could recover. A little orthostat glue and the arm would be good as new, only a small bragging scar to show for it. Yar, that’s the one I took when I sent Mourn over. He was pretty good for an old guy, you know?