The Musashi Flex Read online

  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

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada

  (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.)

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  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.)

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  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South

  Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  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.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without

  permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation

  of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  For information address: The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  eISBN : 978-0-441-01361-6

  ACE

  Ace Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  ACE and the “A” design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  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?