The Man Who Never Missed (18 page)

He had smiled when he’d heard the message. It contributed a small warmth to his day, even if he were less naïve now than he had been when he’d met Juete. Maybe she really meant it, a pleasant thought. Or, said the cynical voice he’d developed in dealing with crooked officials and the smuggler’s underground, maybe she just wanted to possess the entire goose and not just the monthly golden egg.

Well. It didn’t matter. His gesture had been for him as well as for her. If she had been less truthful about telling him her needs, she could have held him forever. Truth deserved rewarding, even if it were sometimes unpleasant. Besides, if he hadn’t left, he wouldn’t be in a position to be generous.

“Sir?” It was the appointment voice of his comp.

“Yes?”

“Your workout is scheduled in fifteen minutes.”

“Ah. So it is. Thank you.”

“You are quite welcome, sir.”

Khadaji stood and stretched, listening to his joints pop, feeling the play of muscle in his back and shoulders. Things were coming along nicely, but it wouldn’t do for him to get out of shape. His life would depend on his conditioning.

Until the games comp was switched on, the warehouse was simply a large, empty rectangle: a stress-plastic frame and rockfoam covered building surrounding empty air. But when the computer was activated, the holographic projections made the inside of the warehouse anything it was programmed to be. A desert or a forest or a city street would spring into existence at the sound of a coded word, and the projections would look and feel almost real, courtesy of captive energies whose workings Khadaji could only partially understand. The projections could be peopled with holoproj simulacrums, also programmed to behave as required. The machinery for generating the illusions cost over two million standards; to his knowledge, Khadaji had the only such device outside of military or police operations. Such toys were considered illegal for normal game parlors.

He opened the case he carried and removed the pair of spetsdods. Methodically, he molded each of the weapons onto its proper hand, then snapped loaded magazines into place. He waved each arm experimentally, adjusting for the slight change in weight. It was an automatic ritual now: The dartguns made his hands feel normal; without them, he felt bare. He walked to the center of the warehouse, to a neutral spot which would not become part of a wall or a tree when the comp was activated. The terrain patterns were randomized—he never knew which the computer would assemble for him. Nor did he know how many spectral-but-solid opponents the magnetic/viral bubbles would deploy.

He felt a tenseness in his back and shoulders, and he took a deep breath and exhaled, allowing the muscles to relax. Early on, he had warmed up before each session, stretching and doing kata. He’d stopped that; in a real-life situation, he might not have a chance to limber up and get ready.

He took another deep breath. “Go,” he said.

Reality altered. The empty warehouse became a tropical rainforest with a snap, with no blur into apparent solidity. Thick-leaved trees and squat bushes surrounded him, phantom insects shot by emitting Doppler hums. Birds called from the tops of the trees.

Khadaji dropped flat to the soft humus of the small clearing and began to crawl rapidly toward the nearest bush. That was a lesson he’d learned early playing these games. He’d been “shot” several times for standing around while trying to get his bearings in the new “world.”

The jungle was noisy, but none of the sounds were those of men. No shots tore the air, no voices called for Khadaji to solidify, no detectors began screaming stridently. He grinned. Good.

He began to work his way through the bush, moving cautiously in a half-crouch, alert for any sign of trouble. Fifteen minutes later, he smelled the faint tang of gunlube. He wet a finger and held it up in the air. The wind was from that direction. He moved.

There were three troopers in a cleared area. One man leaned against a tree, smoking a flickstick. A woman sat on the ground, cleaning her carbine. The third man stood watch. The last man was the dangerous one, Khadaji knew that. He was a constant face, one the computer used in almost every simulation, and he was fast. To approximate real soldiers, the comp produced human figures with a full range of reflexes. Constant Face there sweeping the brush with his shifty gaze was the fastest of them all, superhuman in his speed, even quicker than a bacteria-augmented man. That made it unfair, but Khadaji was glad of it. If he could take Face, he should be able to take any real soldier in a one-on-one.

This was three-on-one, however, and a different matter. The theory said it was simple enough: Shoot Face with one weapon, hit the leaning man with the second and the woman would be simple; after all, her weapon was down. Face was the one to worry about.

Khadaji held very still, using the ninja-freeze techniques he’d learned. With his body control training in sumito, he could lock himself into non-motion for hours, but the ninja-freeze was even better. One practiced invisibility instead of simply being still. There was a subtle but definite difference which was not fully explained. The most common theory was that the psychological stance of being invisible helped avoid detection by anyone who might be emphatically receptive—another unproven idea.

Khadaji was waiting for Face to turn away, so he could shoot him in the back. There was no room for heroics or fair play in Khadaji’s plan, the odds were already stacked in favor of the other side. Face was fast enough so he might be able to get off a shot before the simulated Spasm hit him; Khadaji didn’t want to give him a target.

Finally, Face took a couple of steps and turned to look away from Khadaji’s position. Leaner still leaned; the woman had her carbine only partially reassembled. Khadaji extended his arms, balancing carefully on his elbows, and fired each spetsdod once.

Leaner doubled up fast, but Face did manage a half-spin before he knotted. He triggered a short blast of his weapon at Khadaji’s position, but it was too high. If he’d been standing, the holographic shots would have tagged him. Khadaji grinned and scrambled up to finish the woman as Face dropped onto the damp ground in a fetal curl.

The woman was gone. Where—? How—?

She came from behind a tree in a dive. Khadaji swung his left spetsdod to cover her. She hit the ground in a shoulder roll and came up facing him, five meters away. An easy shot. He fired at her solar plexus—and at the same instant, saw she held something in her hand. She threw whatever it was at him, hard.

Damn! He jumped to his right and started to sprint. It could be a proximity shrap—!

A bell chimed, a clear and insistent tone Khadaji had grown to hate. He looked down and saw a throwing steel buried in his chest. The stainless steel bar looked very real, even though he knew it was only a computer-generated image like all the rest.

Ah, damn! She got him! “Cancel it,” he said, disgusted.

The throwing steel vanished abruptly, along with all of the other unreal paraphernalia produced by his two-million-stad toy. Khadaji stood alone in a bare and empty warehouse. He sighed, and shook his head. Over-confidence, that was what had done it. He’d underestimated the woman, in his concern over Face. It was a bad error; had this been real, he would be dead.

“Let’s have a percentage, to date,” he said. “And for the last ten sessions.”

The computer’s voice was bland. “Total run, seventy-eight-point-eight-six percent survival. Sessions two hundred six to two hundred sixteen, inclusive, ninety percent.”

“Thanks.” He was getting better, certainly. Only one “death” in the last ten runs, he’d gotten through nine out of ten, which wasn’t bad in most things. It wasn’t good enough, he knew. In real life, the game would be lost if he won all but one. There was no second place winner in a combat shoot, it was a pass/fail situation.

Well. He could practice his forms now and work on his unarmed combat before another run. He peeled the spetsdods away and set them aside, and began to stretch. And think.

Revolution versus evolution. The gun versus the instruction tape. Force versus peaceful means. It was no simple choice, not merely a black-or-white decision. Few things were clear-cut and this was not one of them, in his mind. To offer himself as an example of determined resistance for others to follow was one way to undermine the grasp of the Confed. To deliberately create an heroic figure to inspire and agitate by attacking with the means he despised was something he thought much about. Oh, he could rationalize it to himself by saying he was actually defending, that the Confed by its very nature forfeited its rights, in essence attacking all free people first. One was allowed to defend against attackers in Khadaji’s objectivistic philosophy. The nonviolence of the strong allowed one to protect oneself as long as one did not initiate anything. That was reasonable.

Khadaji slid slowly down into a split, working the muscles of his legs. Despite his practice, he still could not completely stretch it out; his groin stayed clear of the floor by a good three centimeters.

Rationalization was not enough, though. He didn’t feel sufficiently righteous to accept the ends-justifies-the-means easily, and the simulated troopers he was blasting had no families, friends, hopes or dreams. Real soldiers had those things. He knew. He had been a trooper. Therefore the end to justify those kinds of means had to be worthwhile, really important. Simple revolution was not enough, it left too much to chance, too many holes which would have too many people all too willing to plug them with systems worse than the Confed. So, there had to be more. And that’s where it got tricky.

He bent over and tried to put his chest on the floor, still holding the split. Close.

He thought about the school he’d bought on Renault. Yes. Very tricky, indeed. So much could go wrong.

He finished the stretches and stood, then went through the six katas of sumito. It took almost an hour, but he felt much better when he was done. He retrieved the spetsdods and molded them into place.

“Go,” he said.

The sand was green and black, and a wind stirred the desert around him. He spun quickly, looking for enemies. He didn’t see any immediately, but he knew they were out there.

Waiting.

In time, his percentages of winning against the simulacrums peaked. He would, Khadaji knew, grow better still, but only by small degrees, measured in bits perhaps discernable only in theoretical, rather than practical terms. As good as the simulator was, it did lack certain things, not the least of which was real risk. To fight against the machine was one thing, to fight against living, breathing opponents was another. He considered where he could get such experience. There was the Musashi Flex, a loosely-organized band of modern ronins who travelled around challenging each other; he could try that. Or, there was The Maze. Such a thing was risky, but it offered a real test. Injury was likely, death a possibility in the game known as The Maze; if he could survive that, maybe he would be ready.

Maybe.

Chapter Eighteen

KHADAJI WATCHED THE three men as they moved to circle him. Two of them were larger than he, one considerably smaller. The larger men were similar only in size: One had a jagged slice on his face, probably done by a sharpened fingernail; the second had a single, thick bar of black hair where normal eyebrows would be. The last man, the shrimp, didn’t seem to have much going for him. Khadaji didn’t let the third man’s size fool him, though; since he was still in the game, he had to have something.

Slice edged closer, looking for an opening. Brow glanced at Slice’s back, but apparently decided to honor the pact, at least until Khadaji was out of the way. Shrimp was trying to get behind Khadaji, but failing, since Khadaji kept stepping slowly backward. Fortunately, this portion of The Maze was mostly empty streets, with nothing to trip a man not looking where he stepped.

Slice hurried his steps, trying to come within his own range without entering Khadaji’s defensive sphere. He was taller and so should have the reach advantage.

Khadaji considered running. After all, he didn’t know how many participants were left and three-to-one odds weren’t the best. There was no rule again alliances, even though the intent of the game was all-against-all. If Slice, Brow and Shrimp managed to eliminate the competition, they would have to turn against one another—there was only one winner allowed.

Brow moved closer. Khadaji kept his gaze unfocused and allowed his peripheral vision to warn him. He shifted back a hair faster, not allowing Brow to move close enough to attack without losing his center. These three were all expert in one or more martial arts, they wouldn’t make any rash moves, no attack unless they were certain of success. Too much was at stake. A hundred entrants at ten thousand stads each, winner take all—the winner being the last man or woman standing—or breathing.

Shrimp darted by Khadaji quickly, at a run. If Khadaji was going to take off, it would have to be now. He grinned, and stopped moving suddenly. No. He didn’t need the money, but he had to know that he could win against real opponents rather than computer simulations, no matter how sophisticated the machine. A loss here was worth serious and real injury, maybe even death. Despite the latest in medical gear standing by, Maze gamers had been known to die.

Slice made the first move. He squared his stance into a riding horse variant and looked at Khadaji over his left shoulder and raised fist. Since he was a big man and powerful, Khadaji figured him for a strength attack, maybe a kick—

It came. Slice cross-stepped and threw a sidekick, his heel aiming for Khadaji’s groin. Well. At least he had sense enough not to kick high, like some holoproj artist. Khadaji sidestepped and used both hands to increase the speed of Slice’s thrust. It overbalanced the man’s weight on his ground foot and Slice fell heavily onto his side—

Brow leaped in, trying to catch Khadaji off guard. Brow shot a stiffened hand at Khadaji’s throat, his fingers bunched into a spear—

Khadaji spun away from the strike. He grinned as he found himself following the pattern of steps Pen had made him learn so many years ago. He had time to remember the numbers, seventy-one and two, then he extended his own hands and caught Brow’s wrist. Continuing his turn, Khadaji levered Brow into a fall and the man became an eighty-five kilo missile with a bone-tipped warhead—landing right onto Slice as the first man tired to scramble up. There was a clunk! of Brow’s skull hitting Slice’s face. Slice was down again and unconscious; Brow was stunned. Khadaji spun on the balls of his feet to face Shrimp, who aborted his own attack and came to a stop. Shrimp regarded Slice and Brow, then looked back at Khadaji, whose stance was neutral and relaxed.