And then Jude forgot about taking her second gulp as the first clone swivelled Jude’s double-barrelled stungun once, fast-forward round his trigger finger cowboy style, and blasted the Japanese woman. Bottles exploded and ears popped as sound bounced in waves from whitewashed walls like sonic ricochet. Only, when everyone looked, the ballerina wasn’t there any more. Instead there was just an ugly pile of shattered glass from the table behind her and a fat man on his knees, blood oozing slowly from one ear.
Mekuramashi, Fixx thought admiringly. He’d read about it, even coded it as a cheat into his sims, but he’d never seen mekuramashi in action. The art of distraction.
She was across the room now, balanced on her toes, blade still parallel to the floor, except this time she was crouched on top of a bottle-strewn table. All around her the table’s occupants had frozen, shocked into sudden protective silence.
The clone standing over Fixx lifted his Colt, finger tightening round the trigger, thumb flicking the laser sights into action. And as a tiny diode lit to say the automatic was sighted in, Fixx grinned. The one thing you could say for prosthetic limbs was they meant never having to worry about muscles wasting...
His kick caught the clone on the side of his knee, popping its joint in a single tear of gristle. And then Fixx’s metal fingers closed around the fallen clone’s hand, crushing it against the handle of the Colt. Bones inside the hand cracked like twigs then twisted as ball-joints ruptured between palm and fingers, needle-like splinters of metacarpal pushing out through the clone’s skin as Fixx shifted his grip, found the man’s fingers and ground them to bloody pulp.
Fixx couldn’t remember how long it had been since he’d last enjoyed himself so much. Twisting the Colt out of the clone’s bleeding hand, he rammed it into the shrieking open mouth. The clone stopped screaming.
Up on the table, the Japanese woman looked irritated. Brief annoyance twisted her lips into a sneer. Though Fixx didn’t know if he or the clone was the target for her contempt. She flipped sideways off the table top, somersaulting over her own blade to land neatly on a deserted patch of floor.
She wasn’t drawing fire away from the crowded table: Fixx could see from the hard certainty in her eyes that the woman didn’t give a fuck about civilians. Why would she? As Fixx always said, “There are no innocent bystanders. What were they doing there in the first place...?”
The woman was clearing herself space to move, the fifteen or so people in the bar falling back, away from the woman and away from the stungun. When the gun fired again, she flipped neatly away from the sonic wave, covering her ears to shield herself from the blast. That she could do both in one-sixthG said she’d been trained for off-planet work, probably in a lowG or free-fall dojo. And what that suggested, Fixx wasn’t too sure. Serious money, maybe.
The essence of Kamui-style was to clear the mind of every distraction: to concentrate only on matching, meeting and defeating each blow. Except Shiori was using basic Kamui mixed with West Coast Two Skies...
The stungun was useless now, both barrels already blown. Which left the suited man with the automatic, inconveniently tucked inside his shoulder holster, or with Jude’s moby which was still clutched in his left hand. That might be enough against a bushido blade — if you were very, very good — but Fixx wouldn’t want to bet on it, not if it was his life. Instead he concentrated on stuffing the barrel of his Colt further down the first clone’s gurgling throat. Give the clone long enough, he’d learn to swallow the whole gun.
“Who sent you?” It was the girl, her words soft, sweetly lilting. The moby-holding clone said nothing, but his head twitched as he hesitated between trying to free the other clone or going after the Japanese woman. He was the bio-equivalent of a point-and-kill missile, good for hitting one target, not made to amend code on the fly.
“Who sent you?”
Shiori needed to know. Reporting back information like that was usually worth a little extra, whoever her client was. But Shiori never got a chance to claim a bonus, because instead of answering the clone flipped up his hand and released the moby, its tiny electric harpoon dragging out a hair-thin strand of molywire in its wake.
Observation and perception are two separate things: so said Miyamoto Mushasi. And Shiori knew the Water Scroll by heart. Knew the whole of Five Rings, come to that.
She moved so fast that no one saw it happen. One second she was standing watching the dart race towards her heart, the next she’d spun sideways — matador-style — to let the dart flick by and bury itself in the adobe wall beyond, electricity flickering like blue fire along the molywire.
The woman smiled and flicked her blade in a lazy double circle, its razor-sharp tip tracing an effortless figure of eight through the air. She didn’t even blink when the clone dropped the moby in disgust and finessed a narrow steel cylinder out of nowhere, yanking it apart to reveal two short metal handles joined by a thin chain.
Learn to see everything accurately, said the sixth number in the Earth Scroll. And she did, not consciously but clearly, deep down in the reptilian basement of her brain. Her dark eyes never faltered.
Both ballerina and clone were dancing now, moving round each other in cold silence. One end, then the other of the clone’s nanchuku flowed in an arc and then flicked twice across his front in a blinding figure of eight. Hachiji-Gaeshi.
Flipping one handle over his shoulder, he caught it behind his back and whipped the handle out towards the woman, into a circle, and then caught it under his arm. Waki-Basami. Flick and catch, turning his body as he did so, building a flowing protective shield of shining steel.
He was good, Fixx realized, watching the clone hold the Japanese ballerina at bay. It had to be more than just basic neural programming that moved the nanchuku with such ease. And judging from the corpse-white hue to the clone’s skin and the liquid gurgle of his voice, the man hadn’t been hatched more than a week.
Upper position, lower position, middle position... Right-hand guard, left-hand guard. Shiori ran through all five without even knowing she had. Acting not by thought but on instinct, the blade an extension of her arm, her mind as sharp as its fractalled edge.
Neither had yet come close to touching the other: the tip of the silver sword never quite crossing the seamless arc of the nanchuku, the swirling steel handles never extending their arc far enough to clash with the blade.
It was a ballet of beautiful, complex physics; of laws of conservation of angular rotation. But the silent regulars didn’t see it like that. They just saw a thin Japanese woman flick her sword from side to side while the suited man in front of her spun complex webs of flashing metal.
She didn’t even seem to be watching the nanchuku. In fact, as far as Fixx could tell, her eyes never once moved from the clone’s sullen, sweating face. She just made move and counter-move. It was Zen-fucking-perfect, a deadly poetry that went way beyond simple motion...
Without realizing it, Fixx began to put the lethal ballet to music, wrapping their motion around with swirls of sound. Battered, clinically concussed, wired on cheap amphetamines, Fixx was still grinning fit to burst as he threw in a backbeat and mixed in some temple drums somewhere inside his head. One hand kept the barrel of his Colt stuffed deep into the throat of the clone lying bitter-eyed beside him, the other began to tap out a ridiculously complex click track.
The rhythm tapped out by his right fingers got ever more ornate as Fixx tried to thread a second fractured backbeat into the mix, heel clicking against the ground, head jerking as he locked it all together in his head. Everyone in the bar was silent, except for the two fighters... and Fixx, who was providing the backing track, whether they like it, or not. Even Jude was quiet, leaning against her own bar, a half-drunk tube of Electric Soup standing forgotten at her elbow.