Black Steel (7 page)

"Hee-yah!"

"Hidari-men," Kildee ordered, advancing to the next attack, the oblique cut at the left temple.

The students obeyed.

Teaching was not about money, though she charged steep rates. That was more to keep the idly curious away. No, teaching was about finding the perfect student, and with the perfect student, the teacher would become both sensei and student herself, for a perfect student taught as much as he learned. This basic kendo class was little more than a filter, a net, in which she hoped to catch the perfect student. There were several who had come close, but the fish she wanted had not yet swum into her dojo.

Ah, well. She could be patient. Many teachers waited fifty years for the right one. Her school had been open for a mere eight years. No time at all.

"Hee-yah!" Came the clack of the bamboo on the men.

"Again," she said. There was something amiss, some out-of-synch move, or perhaps it was just in a student's intent. She focused her attention yet sharper, probing as she watched the two lines. Twelve of them, seven men and five women, moving relatively well, even the newcomers. What was it she sensed?

Some flaw in the energies, something beyond normal perceptions.

The black bogu armor squeaked on the students as they cut and kiaied. A good attack; all the shinai clacked as one. "Good," she said. But the nagging problem was still there despite the precision. On the left, definitely. Toward the other end. Had to be one of the last two students.

Wu moved toward them, unable to pin the feeling down.

"Again. "

Shuffle, cut! Kiai. Clack.

The tall red-haired woman Shanti, face hidden under the helmet, moved with grace; she had been training for almost two years. The shorter figure on the end, Ells, had only been training for a few weeks, but he moved almost equally well. He had, he said, some background in other arts; those skills seemed to transfer to kendo.

Her instructor's eye was not good enough.

Wu took a deep breath and when she allowed it to escape, she sent her intellectual controller with it.

Zanshin, that sense of total awareness, claimed her. It was not a state entered into lightly, nor was it easy to achieve. Its intent was to become one with the sword, one with the cosmos, one with all, and normally reaching it was reserved for perfect formal kata or actual battle. It was like a precious and rare liquor at this stage of Wu's development, to be sipped sparingly and savored with great care. A true master could slip in and out of zanshin at will, but Wu was years away from that; she still had to work at it.

Ells. It was Ells.

Precisely what it was she couldn't say. Zanshin was not telepathy or even empathy, but there was something. It was in the way he held his weapon. Was there something wrong with his shinai? Or perhaps he was injured and splinting against pain? Something definitely on his mind.

"Hold," Wu said.

Obediently the students froze.

"Ells?"

"Are you all right?"

"I'm fine."

Something false in his reply. A faint finger of danger tapped Wu's solar plexus lightly.

"The rest of you continue. Move to migi-men."

The students squared themselves for the attack. Ells's partner would fence with the air, conjuring his own vision of an opponent.

To Ells, Wu said, "Over here."

She walked past him and toward the far end of the dojo. It did not matter that her back was to him; the zanshin wrapped her in its awareness so that every step he took, every breath, every rustle gave her ears his position; the pressure of the air transmitted the feeling of his relationship to her. She felt the heat of his body, the essence of his ki.

So when he attacked she felt him coming.

Wu sidestepped easily as Ells lunged and cut down with his shinai; she twirled and whipped her own split bamboo blade around in a horizontal cut that caught Ells at the base of his skull. The bamboo was light and meant to give when it hit, but the back of his helmet was open, since kendo did not allow such strikes. The force of her cut was enough to send Ells sprawling facedown upon the floor.

One of the other students said, "Holy fuck!"

He's gone mad, she thought. If he had hit her, it would have done little damage, even though she wasn't wearing her men. What was the point?

Ells rolled, but his bogu made it awkward, and as he staggered to his feet, trying to raise his shinai, Wu moved in, put the tip of her weapon to the padding over his throat and pushed him backward until he hit the wall.

He dropped his shinai and raised his hands. He was suddenly full of fear; Wu could feel that as the zanshin continued to flow through her.

She lowered her sword. What in the hell-?

Her heightened awareness blasted at her: Danger!

Ells sprang at her, a springblade knife in his hand, produced from under his bogu. He thrust for her eye, a killing attack.

Full kendo armor covers most of the upper body, the head and neck from the front, the shoulders and the hands and wrists. But there are gaps where the chest and stomach protector, the tare, is pared away to allow the arms free movement. When an attacker raises his arms for a cut, the axillae are exposed.

Wu shifted and pivoted and drove her shinai into Ells's right armpit as hard as she could.

The point of a shinai is dull and rounded, covered with a thick leather cap that holds the four springy "blades" of the split bamboo together at the end. The padding and flexibility of the shinai normally make it unlikely to inflict damage; it is designed to deliver full-power strikes without causing damage. It is not a deadly weapon as is the sword it represents.

Such was the power of Wu's strike that the shinai bent, shattered, and the jagged ends of two of the pieces slid between Ells's third and fourth ribs and deep into his flesh.

Ells tumbled, literally knocked sideways off his feet. He slammed into the floor, tried to come up, but was unable to rise.

Wu's students stood staring at her and Ells in amazement.

Surely, Wu thought, their wonder was no less than her own.

Chapter SEVEN

THE BOXCAR DROPPED toward the surface of Mtu from high orbit, heading toward the port in northeastern Ua Ngumi. Not where Sleel wanted to go, but the main port at Bandari was currently experiencing the effects of a Force Three tropical cyclone, with winds gusting as high as two hundred and thirty-five kilometers per hour. They didn't give them cute names on Mtu, only numbers; this was the ninth hurricane of the season and the biggest.

Even the lumpy boxcar would be hard pressed in such winds, so all traffic from offworld was going to Mende, almost eight hundred klicks away from the border of The Brambles. The big whirlies would beat themselves to exhaustion on the plateaus and mountains of Ua Ngumi long before reaching the border, and only the dregs of rain would wash down upon the precisely planted trees, doing them little harm.

Even if the storms could somehow manage to hang together long enough to get that far, the deep-rooted and flexible trees would hardly suffer. They had been designed to be hardy, and probably would not lose more than a few leaves in the worst winds.

Sleel leaned back in the cushioned seat and flicked on the holoproj image picked up by the boxcar's external cameras.

It had been twenty years since he'd been here, but it didn't look any different from this high up. He couldn't see the briar patch from this glide path, but there were other land- and seamarks he recognized. The Cape of Misery, looking like a smashed thumb off the coast of Churaland; the warm, reddish waters of the Damu Sea current where. it met the cooler blue of the Samawati Ocean. The Hook-and-Eye of the Jino Mountains, free of cloud. Twenty years, half his life, and it came back as if no time at all had elapsed since he'd last made planetfall here.

Welcome home, Sleel.

Damn.

Next to him, Reason said, "Last time I visited here was probably thirty-five years back."

"A theft?"

"Yes. One of the dozen or so perfect jobs I ever did. There was a rare document, a paper letter written by Abraham Lincoln, at the museum in Jangwa City."

"The old capital, on the edge of the Great Desert," Sleel said. "Who's Abraham Lincoln?"

"Pre-space politician or king of some kind, as I recall. Gave women the vote or somelike. I had a collector who fancied such things, so I got it for him."

"Just like that."

He chuckled. "Well, no, it wasn't quite that easy, but I was hot in those days. I'd just built the second generation of my electronic suppressors-"

"Reason's can opener," Sleel put it.

"Not my name for it, but yes. The museum's security was pretty good, but they didn't really expect anybody to put out major energies to steal the letter. You could only ransom it, or sell it to a collector willing to hide it-it was hardly something you could take to the neighborhood pawnshop. So I got in and out without working up a big sweat."

Sleel nodded. "And what makes it àperfect job'?"

"They had the thing sealed inside a polarized thincris container full of inert gas so the paper wouldn't decompose any more than it already had. I had one of my ops pix it and then had a duplicate made of the case and letter. A very good duplicate. When I took the real one, I left the fake."

Sleel got it. "You mean they never even knew the real letter was gone?"

"Far as I know, they're still showing the copy around."

Sleel laughed. A perfect theft, sure enough, if nobody knew it happened.

The boxcar attendant approached them. Sleel watched the man carefully, but he only wanted to deliver a message to Reason. He passed the thin wafer of the White Radio text to the old man, smiled, and went on his way.

"That from Earth?"

"Yes."

Sleel had okayed the transaction, since they were traveling under their own names and not trying to hide.

More bait for their unseen enemy.

Reason slipped the wafer into the seatback reader in front of him. The holoproj lit up, white words on a blue background. "Ah. Apparently Officer Bligh survived the attack. She is recovering inside a Healy at the, local medical center."

Sleel shook his head. "So I see. We can zip all over the galaxy, we got tech gear that would have made us demigods a few hundred years ago on Earth, and here we are getting attacked by guys with fucking swords. Iron Age stuff. It's unreal. "

It was Reason's turn to nod. "Yes."

Sleel leaned back as the boxcar started a slow turn to the right. There was nothing else helpful in the message from Earth. Well. He had some contacts. People who waved swords in this age were likely to show up in certain places.

The Musashi Flex was one. Maybe it was time to give Dirisha a call. Just for information, of course, not for help.

During the early days of Mtu's settlement, an old-style maglev train system had been extensively used.

The feeder lines were mostly gone, but the main tracks were still in place and still used, mostly for moving cargo though there were also a few passenger trains working. The trains had been designed to run at high speeds and the wind didn't bother them, even a hurricane wasn't much of an impediment. A falling tree large enough to overcome the low-powered repel fields installed to keep odds and ends off the tracks would be a major problem, but crews were employed to make certain such things did not end up crossing the path of the trains.

As Reason and Sleel entered their private compartment, the older man said, "So what if the crew misses a tree blown over by the winds?"

"We hit it at four hundred klicks an hour and it does some damage. "

"Pleasant thought. It doesn't worry you?"

"Nope. I worked as a safety tech two summers when I was a teener. We never missed one. Anything big enough to get through the field is real visible. If the sensors don't spot it-and they never missed one when I was working-a din or a human will eyeball it. If the track doesn't read clear before the train starts its run, it doesn't leave. It falls during the run, the train slows down so somebody can remove the problem."

"All well and good," Reason said, "but what happens if something blows over onto the track right in front of the train?"

"What happens if you get hit by a meteorite crossing the street? Life is full of risk."

"Odd, coming from a professional bodyguard."

He grinned. "I don't do earthquakes or tsunamis either."

After they were seated it was only a few minutes before the train lifted and began its run. The trip would take less than two hours to reach the border of The Brambles. That was as far as the train went. People who had business past that would have to find other ways to travel-assuming they could pass the entrance strictures.

Sleel felt a flutter in his belly, as if something alive there were suddenly made unhappy. Getting into The Brambles wouldn't be a problem; his status as a matador alone would probably pass him, plus he was a native, plus his parents were who they were. That didn't worry him.

Seeing his parents again after twenty years, though, that was something else, even though he was pretty certain he had chosen to come back here for that as much as anything. There were lots of places to hole up and see trouble coming, but none of them would let him show his parents what he had become. Sure, he wore the orthoskins of a hired guard, but there was more to him than met the eye. Much more.

Not enough to satisfy himself, of course, but maybe enough to satisfy his parents. It was the "maybe"

that made him nervous.

A little voice laughed inside his head. Hell, Sleel, they probably haven't even noticed you're gone yet.

How about you just shut the fuck up, okay? That's not funny.

Oh, but it is!

Kildee Wu had to think and to look at the situation before the local medics arrived to take her attacker away. So she hadn't yet called the medics--or the cools, even though the attack had been intended to do her deadly harm. The shinai Ells had used was more than it seemed at first glance. The bamboo slats, normally sanded so that they would be smooth and not catch on an opponent's bogu, had instead been cut in such a way as to leave sharp edges. And something darker than the pale bamboo glistened on the edges, something that had a dank smell when held close to an inquiring nose. Chem, she guessed, and whether it was deadly or not was hard to say, but, given Ells's try with the knife after he lost his shinai, she would bet it was poison dabbed on the sharpened edges. One of her advanced students was a medic with access to scanning gear; she could have him analyze it for her.