The Musashi Flex Read Free

his pubic hair—if a cool found it, he would have to be getting very personal. And if somebody dropped him, they’d spend a while looking for it, a small revenge from the final chill.
    For just a moment, as he looked at the strip, Mourn considered leaving it with the body. He wasn’t worried about getting rid of the corpse—Jakarta was a violent city, dozens of homicides every day, and the local cools weren’t going to search real hard for whoever had tanked an offworlder that nobody was going to file a report on. The cools would look at Harnett and figure it out when they saw the knife, the armor weave, the other weapons he surely had hidden on him. Yes, dueling was illegal, but Fuck it, they would say. Just another dead Flex asshole and good fucking riddance! None of his DNA to connect him to Harnett, if he stayed careful.
    Someday, if he stayed in the game, it would be him lying dead in some dank alley like this. That was how it went if you walked the Musashi Flex. You either retired, went to jail, or wound up dead.
    He stuck the tag into his pocket, wiped the blood from his blades, sheathed them, then turned and walked away. He’d dump the steels and the sheath into the ultrasonic cleaner he had in his hotel room, to rid them of any Harnett’s DNA, just to be sure.
    The air seemed fresher now, sweeter, and the tropical warmth was not as oppressive as it had been. Fights to the death did that. Life was briefly, a little sweeter. He was still tired, though.

2
    Ellis Mtumbo Shaw was not a happy man.
    He sat in the richly appointed office of his company’s headquarters in Chim City, on Tatsu, the main world of the Haradali System, staring at Martin Snow Owl’s sculpture Two Wrestlers . It was the original, of course, one-quarter life-sized, carved from a single, two-hundred-kilo chunk of black opal unearthed decades ago in the Cody Brothers’ Marissa #3 Opal Mine, on Thompson’s Gazelle. Shaw considered it priceless, though his insurance company, being somewhat more pragmatic, valued it at 12 million stads, plus or minus a little. Normally just looking at it put him in a good mood. The opal itself was full of fire, with wide harlequin and Chinese-writing patterns, brilliant, multicolored flashes across the spectrum, reds, greens, blues, yellows. Hell, it was worth 6 million uncarved as a doorstop. With Snow Owl’s magnificent work, it was, and would be, forever one of a kind. More than one museum had offered him a fat credit cube and told him to deduct the amount he wanted. He had just laughed at them.
    Today, however, the piece was not enough to lift his spirits. Another group of the fucking rock apes had died, five of them, all within hours of each other. Dammit!
    The formula had been working, otherwise. Theoretical reaction times should have been at .65, myoconduction enhanced proportionately, and there had been no reason for significant loss of fine motor control at full speed. It would have been amazing—
    —except for killing all the patients. The pathologists were at it now, but Shaw already knew what they would find. The apes had cooked in their own juices, the fucking HRE—the hypothalamic regulator enzyme—that was a big factor, and it was off, every fucking time, it was off—
    “Sir?”
    Shaw waded back from his sea of impotent rage and looked at the door to the office. It was Cervo, his head of security and primary bodyguard.
    When Shaw spoke, his voice was cool, a vat of liquid helium, betraying none of his anger. One did not let the help see how one was feeling, a lesson first pounded into him at his father’s knee. “Yes?”
    “The Tomodachians are here.” Despite his size—Cervo was a heavy-gravity mue, two meters tall and 120 kilos heavy—his voice was soft and not much more than whisper.
    Shaw nodded. “Of course. Send them in.”
    Shaw had a secretary and a personal assistant, of course, but anybody he didn’t personally know had to get past Cervo.
    The medico-research group from