The Musashi Flex Read Online Free Page B

offer.
    Take it, Al, Sola thought. I don’t need footage of another guy getting beat to a bloody mess, I got plenty of that already. Show some class, that’ll look good on the holoproj nets —
    “Tell you what, take the deal, and you can have first turn with the girl hiding behind the bin. She looks like she’s got plenty enough juice for me when an old crip like you gets done.”
    Sola went cold, as if a bucket of liquid nitrogen had splashed on her. Shit!
    She didn’t hesitate. She grabbed her cam, broke the quik-stik loose from the bin, and ran, terrified.
    Behind her, she heard loud laughter. From both men.
    Shame blended with her terror. The bastards! She wanted to go back and give them each a blast from the hand wand she had tucked into her back pocket. Let them wake up with nasty fucking headaches in half an hour to regret having frightened her that way. But she was angry, not stupid. Flexers who fought unarmed did so from choice, not necessity. They certainly carried more weapons than she did, and were unquestionably better with them. Both of the men were bigger and stronger than she, and she had no desire to wake up in an alley naked and sore, her body abused and her valuable cam and gear gone. They could do that without a second thought, use her and steal her stuff. She knew about men, violent men. Local authorities wouldn’t have much sympathy for a loco woman who wandered around the City of Whores alone, spying on duelists. Got robbed and raped? Siento. Too bad.
    Fuck. She hated being afraid, but she wasn’t suicidal. She would go back to her hotel, dump today’s footage into the editing comp, fiddle with it a little. It was getting pretty warm out here anyway, and the local custom of siesta didn’t sound so bad . . .
     
The raw recording was good, but nothing spectacular. She reviewed it on the loup as she walked toward her hotel. Well. That didn’t matter so much by itself. She had lots of medium-level fighter stuff to go with it. Hours and hours and hours, maybe sixty, sixty-five all total. All she really needed was a climax, something really righteous to point it all toward. A crux.
    The gods must have been listening. She was crossing a new retroplaza with a high-tech shopping kiosk surrounding it when she saw Lazlo Mourn coming out of a shoe store.
    She knew it was him, she didn’t need to check her records, she could ID all the current—as of three days past, anyway—Top Twenty Players by sight; she knew their bios, their match histories, everything that was available on the ed- and entcom nets about them. So far, she hadn’t seen any of them fight, though she had just missed one between Orleans Plinck and Monroe Rouge on the frontier world Greaves, in Orm System, three weeks earlier. A chance to see Top Five Players clash, and she had gotten there too late. By two fucking minutes.
    There had been witnesses, a couple of Confed troopers who happened to be passing by, and she interviewed them, got some pix, but they weren’t much help. Plinck, who was ranked Third, and Rouge, Fifth, had taken all of five seconds from start to finish. The Confed troopers, two wet-bottom conscripts just out of basic on their first tour, couldn’t begin to tell her how it had happened. One second, the two were squared off, maybe two, three meters apart, the next thing they saw, Rouge was down and unconscious or dead, and Plinck was searching him for his tag. They had been blurs to the Confed watchers, despite whatever basic fighting skills they had gotten in training.
    Damn!
    That was as close as she had come to the best working. But Lazlo Mourn was consistently in and out of the Top Twenty. His current rank, as of, let’s see, two days ago, was . . . Eleventh? She’d have to check that to be sure, but it wouldn’t be a place or more away in either direction. Could be Twelfth. Maybe even Tenth.
    This was a blast of good luck, like a cool breeze on a hot day. Mourn, here. He might not have anything going at the