“You must genuinely try to kill or injure me. If I think you haven’t,” he kept his face straight, partly out of a liking for deadpan remarks and partly an effect of the Idmask, “Rafiq will do something worse than I ever could. Sue you for material non performance of contract.”
A couple of them smiled briefly, then it began.
A lot was written, some of it pretentious, about martial arts being a mirror for life. Anwar’s fighting style, however, exactly mirrored his life. It was cautious, measured, contained. He liked counterattack. He liked to come out of safety, strike, and return to safety—a pattern which characterized all his missions, and all his relationships such as they were. His maxim was to do nothing risky or unexpected—at least, by Consultancy standards, though to ordinary opponents he was frightening, inhumanly fast, and strong. Like most of The Dead, when he fought he stayed silent.
Original martial arts moves were transformed by The Dead into moves that were impossible for anyone without enhancements. Over the years The Dead had given these moves new names, often ironic or obscure, sometimes obscene. Like The Penumbra for Shadowless Kick, The Circumnavigator for Roundhouse Kick, The Flying Fuck for Heart Kite. And others, for which no previous equivalent move existed: The Verb, The Compliment, The Gratuity, The Abseiling Pope.
Unusually, the six opponents Anwar had drawn were all armed: a katana, a quarterstaff (Anwar’s own favourite weapon), various knives, even a flail. He circled among them.
His first instinct was to analyse them, to assess what they were; and it was wrong. His first instinct should have been to attack and disable them, because whatever they were, he outmatched them.
To any observer, he was a blur while they moved normally. To himself, seen through his own ramped-up senses, he moved normally while they were stationary or wading through treacle, expressions of shock at what he could do forming like geological processes on their faces, exclamations at his speed and strength oozing out of their mouths in low bass notes. But he’d only been starting cautiously, waiting to assess and counterattack.
Use speed first, his enhancement maxims told him. With speed, everything else is possible. The other “S” categories— strength, stamina, even skill—are secondary. But he didn’t follow the maxims. His speed was actually quite good, approaching that of the highest-performing Consultants, but his instinct was always to step back and take stock; it was why his rating was merely average. Still, it was enough to leave his opponents aghast.
He dodged the katana and knife-blades and quarterstaff by hundredths of an inch, which his retinal headups could measure and display if he wanted while he was still in motion. He didn’t want; he’d assessed their weapons skills to his satisfaction. The other weapon, the flail, was hardly worth his attention: fearsome to look at and dangerous if it connected, but slow and clumsy and telegraphed.
His private nickname for such opponents was Meatslabs, and it was always like this when he fought them. He could see, hear, smell, touch, and taste their inadequacy. And their shock, when he decided to let the one with the flail land a blow.Theflailwasasix-footclusterofsegmentedblackmetal whips, glistening like a tangle of liquorice. He let it land without apparently noticing. A good tactic: it set them wondering what he must be made of, inside. But it wouldn’t have impressed Levin or the others.
He tried some cautious counterattacks. His hands and feet, fingertips and toes (he fought barefoot) flickered out at nerve clusters and pressure points. Not yet to touch, but to see how well they defended. Quietly, carefully, he was assembling a kinetic dossier on each of them.
But he still couldn’t take full advantage. Something went wrong. One of his opponents, the one with the quarterstaff, suffered a broken collarbone: Anwar had mistimed a fingertip touch to a nerve-centre, and had to turn it at the last moment into a shuto strike to avoid killing him. The other five were on Anwar immediately, fired up by what he had done, and he wasted seconds adjusting to the new dynamic—slowing down to assess it, rather than using it to his own advantage. Then his speed reasserted itself, and he did to them what he’d failed to do to their colleague with the quarterstaff: landed precise fingertip touches to nerve centres and pressure points, enough to disable and immobilise, but no more. He finished them in thirty-six seconds.
There were nineteen Consultants. Fourteen took part in this Tournament. The other five were on, or recovering from,active missions. Of the fourteen, only Anwar suffered the indignity of injuring rather than disabling an opponent. It was a notable Tournament. The previous record was twenty seconds, broken first by Miles Levin (nineteen seconds) and then by Chulo Asika (seventeen). Asika’s display even outshone Levin’s. Asika, in the real world, designed and built theatre sets.
Anwar’s time was tenth out of fourteen. Even without his mistake, it would probably have been no better than seventh. Levin came up to him afterwards and clapped him on the shoulder. “I’m Miles ahead of you, Anwar,” he said, as usual.
Levin was full of such remarks. Anwar privately nicknamed them Levin’s Levities. He often thought of good rejoinders, but only when it was too late. At Fallingwater, for instance, he could have said, “Don’t look so preoccupied. You don’t have the attention span.” He thought, How can two people so dissimilar develop a friendship? He smiled, as he knew Levin would do every time he asked himself the same question. The question contained the answer.
But he couldn’t distance himself from the mistake. He’d been replaying it obsessively for days. It mortified him.
3
The door opened, apparently automatically, into a large reception room. Levin walked in, immediately killing his shock and smiling a greeting at those inside.
His shock was caused by the room: a replica of the reception at Fallingwater. They know what I am. He parked the thought, and concentrated on the eight men waiting in the reception. They hadn’t surprised him at all.
Their suits were immaculate, almost as expensive as his. He could tell, by the drape of the jackets and trousers, where guns and knives and other weapons were variously stowed in shoulder and ankle holsters, forearm and wrist implants. He could tell by details of stance and mannerism where they had served: SAS, Green Berets, Spetsnaz, and so on. At least three of them looked vaguely like Marek. Not their build, just their faces.
Eight. Normally this would not have been outside his competence—any one of The Dead would be certain of taking six such people, and almost certain of taking eight. But they had an ease about them. They knew, as well as he did, that he could defeat them. But their ease suggested they had something else.
Among his enhancements was a sensitivity to changes in ambient air pressure, replicating that of seabirds and spiders.
It worked, but it didn’t help him.
He felt a shift in the air behind him, and realised that the eight were a diversion for the ninth man, who shot him quickly with a tranquiliser gun, then disappeared. He caught a glimpse of him: stocky, dark-haired. About mid-forties? Running to fat? No, he was seeing Mareks everywhere, and it didn’t matter because something else was happening which was impossible: the tranquiliser was actually working. It was a new compound, and slid easily past his molecular defences, which were designed to be infallible. He felt it taking hold of his motor functions. His molecular defences gathered and regrouped, then collapsed utterly.