The Ramal Extraction (30 page)

Singh was eager, though Wink thought he probably didn’t have a clue what he was getting into.

“Do you like your knife?”

Singh looked at Wink as if he had grown a second head. “
Like
it? My
chhuri
? It is part of me. May as well ask me if I like my
hand
.”

Wink grinned. The people here were members of a knife culture—at least in the military and police; they all carried those forearm-length slightly curved knives Singh had just named
chhuri
. The rank and file had plain-looking ones in Kydex or leather sheaths mounted on their belts; the high-ranked sported bejeweled versions.

Wink said, “Are there prohibitions regarding your knife? May I examine it?”

“No prohibitions, it is a working tool. Of course you may.”

Singh pulled the knife from its scabbard with a whisper of steel on the formed plastic. Singh did a little twirl using two fingers and positioned the handle toward him.

Wink took the knife.

It was about thirty-five centimeters long, nearly two-thirds of that blade, with the cutting edge on a slightly convex curve, just under two fingers wide, tapering to a sharp point, like a scimitar. The handle was a rich, chocolate, chatoyant wood, half-round, bonded and riveted to a full tang, butt slightly knobbed. The handle was polished but
bore slight nicks and dents; the blade was a polished steel without maker marks. It felt like an old weapon.

“This
chhuri
was made by my great-uncle for my grandfather. It was blooded by my grandfather when he served in the Army, at the Siege of Kapil. My father carried it when he was in the Rajah’s Rangers, though he never needed to use it in war. I am given to understand that he once fought a man who insulted my mother and opened him from neck to crotch though he survived. My father gave it to me on my seventeenth birthday, as is customary in our family. If I have sons or daughters, it will pass to the eldest when they are of age.”

“A fine weapon,” Wink said. He did a spin, reversed his grip, and offered it back to Singh, who raised an eyebrow at the manipulation. “You have skill with a knife even though you are a medic?”

Wink grinned. “I’m a
surgeon
. Before they let us play with the lasers and plasmas, we learned how to handle steel and obsidian and sapphire scalpels. You know the worst person to get into a knife fight with? A surgeon.”

“Or a butcher,” Gunny put in.

“There’s a difference?” Gramps said.

“Fuck you both very much.” He turned back to Singh. “Though I have to admit, they have a point. Knowing where to cut is almost as important as having the wherewithal to make the cut. And the tool is vital, as well. Surgeons and butchers both have that.”

Casually, Wink reached behind his right hip and came out with his belt knife.

Singh took a reflexive step backward.

The knife, from a Terran master bladesmith named Pippin, was a spear-point design he and the maker had collaborated upon. The blade was short, wide, and thick—only ten centimeters long, but nearly three centimeters wide, and a full six millimeters thick. It was single-edged, made from random damascus, composed of four different kinds of tool
steel: three layers of this, four of that, three each of these, then folded and hammered five times, until there were 416 layers. The metal had been acid-etched to showcase the folded pattern, making the steel a dark gray, almost black.

This kind of forging made for a strong and pliable metal, and the temper gave it a hardness that would take and hold a razor-sharp edge. The handle was fat and round in cross section, longer than the blade, a deep, rich red of stabilized maple-wood burl that was both functional and attractive. The guard was a sculpted oval, the same steel as the blade. The knife felt good in his hand, it was easy to manipulate, perfectly balanced, and exactly the knife he wanted for close encounters of the deadly kind.

“You’re probably wondering why it’s so stubby,” Wink said. “And why I wouldn’t use something shaped more like a scalpel.”

If that was what he was wondering, Singh didn’t say anything.

“Scalpels are designed to cut and leave as little tissue damage as possible. This thing can reach all the major arteries on humans and most other intelligent species, and the thick blade leaves a big channel for bleeding out. Shorter is easier to carry, less likely to break, and, like medicine, you want to use the minimum amount necessary to do the job. The best knife is the one you have, not the one at home in a drawer.”

Singh touched the handle of his resheathed blade and smiled.

“Sure, if you are in uniform, but what if you have to go to somewhere that won’t allow a visibly strapped knife? Hard to hide something as long as your foot under a thin tunic. This, I can stick into a back pocket or under a shirttail, though I usually wear it in a leather sheath. Rare-earth magnets hold the knife securely, and there’s a safety strap if I feel like tumbling.

“Of course, if you are in a duel with another knife fighter,
bigger is better, unless you are nose to nose, but if you can stab him in the back, that’s a lot smarter and safer.

“This knife fits my hand exactly as I want it to. It lets me put the point, edge, or the butt where I need it to go.”

“The butt?”

“Sometimes you want somebody down and out but not dead. Saves wear and tear on your hands.”

Singh nodded. “Ah.”

“I’m not telling you to get rid of your knife,” Wink said. “I’m saying you would be better served with the ability to use more than one size or shape. Sometimes shorter is better. We’ll work with that.”

“I bet you tell that to all the women you are with,” Gunny said.

“Well, which is better, Gunny—to touch the bottom of the well or the sides?”

“Both,” she said.

Wink laughed. To Singh, he said, “Suppose that you lose your knife. Or that it breaks. Then what do you do?”

“We have been trained in bare hand-to-hand fighting.”

Wink nodded. “Which among us do you think you might best defeat that way?”

Singh looked around. “I do not wish to offer any insult,” he finally said.

Wink said, “Oh, we’re hard to insult, don’t worry about it. Who?”

“Captain Demonde.”

Gunny’s laugh was the loudest, but not the only one, and there were a few choice comments from the others, too.

“You wound me, son,” Gramps said. He put his right hand over his heart.

More laughter.

When it died down, Wink said, “Why’d you pick him?”

“He is the oldest and least fit-looking. I would expect him to be slower, to have less stamina.”

“Reasonable criteria. Jo and Kay would eat you alive, no
contest. Gunny is harder than a bag of rocks and death on two legs, armed or bare; and I’m something of an exercise fanatic myself, plus I know all the best spots to hit you.

“Okay, show us something. Spar with Gramps a little, demo us what your system can do. No blood or broken bones or anything, just a few friendly taps or throws.”

Singh nodded. He stepped out onto the practice floor and started to unstrap his knife belt.

Gramps pulled a dart pistol, tapped a control with his thumb, and shot Singh in the thigh.

“Ow—!”

Gramps pointed the pistol’s barrel at the ceiling and blew imaginary smoke from the muzzle. “Just a stinger, no juice in it,” he said. “But if it had been venom, you’d be deader’n last year’s news.”

“You cheated!”

“Hell yes, I did. I learned a long time ago, better you learn to fight smarter, not harder.”

“If you had not had the pistol—”

“Then I’d have used some other tool. Knife, stick, a chair, whatever. Fighting fair gets you killed unless the other guy also fights fair and you are better than him
and
lucky. First rule: Don’t do it.

“But just to keep the demo going…”

Gramps tossed his pistol to Gunny, who snatched it one-handed from the air without looking at it.

He stepped up closer to Singh, stopping a couple meters away. “Okay, let’s see what you got.”

Singh said, “Wait. Why would you be loading only stingers in your pistol?”

Gramps looked at the others, then back at Singh. He smiled. “Because I knew you’d pick me for the demo.”

“How?”

“Because
I
would have picked me, too. So would everybody else here.”

Singh shifted his feet into a front stance and raised his arms, fists loosely doubled.

“Twenty years ago, I’d have already decked you while you settled into that dueling stance. But I’m a little slower than I used to be.”

“A
little
slower?” Gunny said.

He turned his head away from Singh to look at her. “That’s a good thing, Chocolatte. Don’t want anything going off prematurely, do I?”

Singh, probably thinking Gramps was distracted, charged—

He leaped, fired a fast one-two punch at Gramps’s face—

Only Gramps sidestepped, stuck his foot out, and caught Singh’s ankle, turning the charge into a fall—

Singh turned the fall into a half-assed roll, but by the time he’d come back to his feet, Gramps was right there, and he kicked the back of Singh’s left knee. The kid collapsed on that side, and Gramps threw his arm around Singh’s neck into a carotid hold. He squeezed—

One…

Singh struggled, pulled on Gramps’s forearm with both hands, a mistake. He tried to poke Gramps in the eye with his fingers extended, but Gramps had his head turned away.

Two…

Singh squirmed, twisted, tried to get out of the hold—

Three…

Singh’s body started to sag. He gave a last effort to turn his head to the side—

Four…

Singh’s eyes rolled up—

Five…

Gramps let him down easy onto the floor and stepped back a couple of meters.

The blood made its way back into Singh’s brain. He opened his eyes. Frowned. Sat up.

Gramps said, “You were right. I’m the least among us
when it comes to fighting, slower and older. But why I am still here is that I know that, and compensate for it.

“Old and treacherous beats young and strong every time.”

“I will remember.”

“Good. Let me show you how you could have gotten out of that carotid hold…”

There was beating the bushes, then there was beating the bush…

It had been a good day. He’d shown the kid Singh that he wasn’t so old he couldn’t keep up.

And he’d shown a good-looking woman the same thing. In a different way…

Gramps watched Lareece pad across the thick rug, admiring her bare and firm ass. Particularly attractive in the natural moonlight shining through the cleared ceiling panels.

If the optics were good enough, maybe somebody monitoring a spysat overflying twenty thousand klicks up was enjoying the view, too…

A thing of beauty is a joy forever,
he thought.
And what is more beautiful than a statuesque naked woman with whom you have just made mad, passionate love?

She opened the bar’s chiller. “You want any more of this champagne?”

“I’m good.”

“For an old soldier who plays political smashball, yeah, you are pretty good.”

He chuckled.

She topped her flute off with sparkling gold. The bubbles were tiny, and that was supposed to mean it was good stuff. Given it had cost him 120 noodle a bottle, he didn’t need to measure the size of the bubbles to know that. He could charge the two bottles to the expense account, but probably he wouldn’t. Nobody needed to know what he was drinking and how much it cost, and it was definitely worth it.

She returned the bottle to the chiller and headed back to the bed.

If the view was great from behind, it was every bit as good from the front. She was forty, fit, and in this light, could easily pass for twenty-five. Carpet matched the drapes, too.

She set her flute on the bedside table and slid across the red silk sheet to sit cross-legged next to him. “Well, that was fun. Want to go again?”

“Sure. You lean back, let me unlimber my magic tongue—”

“Oh, no, I don’t think I could manage another one of those right now. I had something a little harder in mind.”

“My age, you have to learn how to do it smarter, not harder.”

She laughed. “Well. I do have something else for you, though.”

“Do tell.”

“It’s more in the realm of business.”

“What a shame.”

She shook her head. “You know, you have this patter down pretty well. Lots of practice, I expect.”

“Well, actually, I’m more of a natural. Would you believe I was a virgin when I met you?” He kept a straight face as he said it.

That cracked her up.

When she was done laughing, she said, “That was wonderful. I haven’t had so much fun in years. Um. Okay, here’s
what I found out. There is a fabric company in a small village, Dera, at the north end of the Rajaja Forest, near the border with Pahal. They make Surakarta Batik, a high-end material, used mostly in ceremonial dress clothing—robes, sarongs, capes. The owner of the weavery is a high-caste rich woman named Udiva.

“On the day the Rajah’s daughter was kidnapped and the news got out, the Ramali stock market dropped 350 points. Lot of people lost a lot of money, but Udiva sold short and made more than ten million on the overnight turnaround on half a dozen different stocks.”

Gramps nodded. “And this was unusual?”

“Very. Udiva’s portfolio is conservative, mostly bonds, and she leaves it to her broker; however, on that day, she personally handled the transactions, buying and selling things she had never dabbled in before.”

“Insider trading?”

“Had to be. The stocks that went down? She shorted them no more than a few hours before the drop. As nearly as I can tell, nobody in the country made as much on the market that day as she did. Somehow, I missed it before, but it checks out.”

“Well, well. Somebody told her the market was going to take a nosedive—and that had to be somebody who knew
why
it was going to drop.”

“That’s what I would bet. Listen, I wouldn’t presume to tell you how to go about your business—save how it concerns our activities right here in this bed—but you might want to have a word with Fem Udiva.”