The Musashi Flex Read Free Page A

Tomodachi, in the nearby Shin System, were on a different track than Shaw. They were trying recom DNA, piggybacking viral packets on common gut bacteria. It didn’t work yet, but in the long term, it might, and if it did, it would have some advantages over his company’s method. Bacteria could be trained like tiny dogs to do all kinds of things, not the least of which would be to self-replicate for a predetermined time. You could tailor a strain to keep delivering its payload for days, weeks, months—even years, then have it hayflick out. Of course, you had to charge enough for that to make it worthwhile; and you had to build in a fail-safe to keep some clever competitor from taking it apart to see how it worked, but those were minor problems.
    Shaw was content to let the Tomodachians play with the biologicals until they solved the larger issues. Meanwhile, he would continue to fund them. When you owned 51 percent of ShawPharm Inc., the largest pharmaceutical company in the galaxy, with branch offices on forty of the fifty-some planets and many of the more substantial wheelworlds, money was not a worry. The contingent from Tomodachi had come to report on their progress, and they’d have their hands out when they finished. He could give them half a billion without having to call the accountants, but they’d only ask for a few million; they really had no idea how valuable their work would be when it finally got to market. Of course, that might take five years, but no matter. As long as he could keep all his options covered.
    If you could make something go away by throwing money at it, it wasn’t really much of a problem. Too bad hormones and glands couldn’t be bought off so damned easily . . .
     
The meeting ran longer than Shaw had expected and now he had to hurry—Baba Ngumi absolutely did not like to be kept waiting. If Shaw was even a minute late—sometimes even if he was on time—the old man could just decide to up and leave, and if he did, nothing could coax him back for today’s lesson. As rich as he was, Shaw’s stads were, past the agreed-upon fee, worthless as far as Baba was concerned. That he could have bought the man ten thousand times over, gifted him with more money than the gross national product of some countries to do nothing but teach Shaw for an hour a day, meant exactly nothing to Baba. And no excuse was acceptable—you either wanted to train enough to get there, or you did not.
    Shaw had rearranged his workday around his Kifo Mokono instruction. His life, actually. He practiced on his own for an hour in the mornings, two hours in the evenings, plus the hour five days a week of private lessons, those last determined by Baba’s schedule, which was capricious at best. If Shaw did not drop whatever he was doing for the time upon which Baba decided the stars or planets or whatever were right, then he was out of luck. The old man was a mystic—cranky, and inconsistent, among other less cheerful virtues. But Baba was the galaxy’s foremost expert in the little-known martial art of Kifo Mokono —“Death’s Hand”—and if you wanted to learn it from him, you did it on his terms. End of discussion.
    As he hurried across the compound to the private skuli he had built for his training, Shaw already knew that the art was not going to be the magic carpet he had hoped. It offered a lot, and he would stay with it for a while longer, but it wasn’t going to take him where he truly wanted to go. For he had a secret desire, one he had never told to anybody: He wanted to be a player in the Musashi Flex, that loose agglomeration of close-combat artists who traveled the stellar systems fighting duels with each other. More, he wanted not only to be ranked, he wanted to be the best player of them all.
    He wanted to be the deadliest man in the known galaxy.
    He smiled at himself. There was a good reason he had never told anybody this desire. They would surely mark him as mad. You are a fucking billionaire a