The stungun was useless now, both barrels already blown. Which left the suited man with the automatic, inconveniently tucked inside his shoulder holster, or with Jude’s moby which was still clutched in his left hand. That might be enough against a bushido blade — if you were very, very good — but Fixx wouldn’t want to bet on it, not if it was his life. Instead he concentrated on stuffing the barrel of his Colt further down the first clone’s gurgling throat. Give the clone long enough, he’d learn to swallow the whole gun.
“Who sent you?” It was the girl, her words soft, sweetly lilting. The moby-holding clone said nothing, but his head twitched as he hesitated between trying to free the other clone or going after the Japanese woman. He was the bio-equivalent of a point-and-kill missile, good for hitting one target, not made to amend code on the fly.
“Who sent you?”
Shiori needed to know. Reporting back information like that was usually worth a little extra, whoever her client was. But Shiori never got a chance to claim a bonus, because instead of answering the clone flipped up his hand and released the moby, its tiny electric harpoon dragging out a hair-thin strand of molywire in its wake.
Observation and perception are two separate things: so said Miyamoto Mushasi. And Shiori knew the Water Scroll by heart. Knew the whole of Five Rings, come to that.
She moved so fast that no one saw it happen. One second she was standing watching the dart race towards her heart, the next she’d spun sideways — matador-style — to let the dart flick by and bury itself in the adobe wall beyond, electricity flickering like blue fire along the molywire.
The woman smiled and flicked her blade in a lazy double circle, its razor-sharp tip tracing an effortless figure of eight through the air. She didn’t even blink when the clone dropped the moby in disgust and finessed a narrow steel cylinder out of nowhere, yanking it apart to reveal two short metal handles joined by a thin chain.
Learn to see everything accurately, said the sixth number in the Earth Scroll. And she did, not consciously but clearly, deep down in the reptilian basement of her brain. Her dark eyes never faltered.
Both ballerina and clone were dancing now, moving round each other in cold silence. One end, then the other of the clone’s nanchuku flowed in an arc and then flicked twice across his front in a blinding figure of eight. Hachiji-Gaeshi.
Flipping one handle over his shoulder, he caught it behind his back and whipped the handle out towards the woman, into a circle, and then caught it under his arm. Waki-Basami. Flick and catch, turning his body as he did so, building a flowing protective shield of shining steel.
He was good, Fixx realized, watching the clone hold the Japanese ballerina at bay. It had to be more than just basic neural programming that moved the nanchuku with such ease. And judging from the corpse-white hue to the clone’s skin and the liquid gurgle of his voice, the man hadn’t been hatched more than a week.
Upper position, lower position, middle position... Right-hand guard, left-hand guard. Shiori ran through all five without even knowing she had. Acting not by thought but on instinct, the blade an extension of her arm, her mind as sharp as its fractalled edge.
Neither had yet come close to touching the other: the tip of the silver sword never quite crossing the seamless arc of the nanchuku, the swirling steel handles never extending their arc far enough to clash with the blade.
It was a ballet of beautiful, complex physics; of laws of conservation of angular rotation. But the silent regulars didn’t see it like that. They just saw a thin Japanese woman flick her sword from side to side while the suited man in front of her spun complex webs of flashing metal.
She didn’t even seem to be watching the nanchuku. In fact, as far as Fixx could tell, her eyes never once moved from the clone’s sullen, sweating face. She just made move and counter-move. It was Zen-fucking-perfect, a deadly poetry that went way beyond simple motion...
Without realizing it, Fixx began to put the lethal ballet to music, wrapping their motion around with swirls of sound. Battered, clinically concussed, wired on cheap amphetamines, Fixx was still grinning fit to burst as he threw in a backbeat and mixed in some temple drums somewhere inside his head. One hand kept the barrel of his Colt stuffed deep into the throat of the clone lying bitter-eyed beside him, the other began to tap out a ridiculously complex click track.
The rhythm tapped out by his right fingers got ever more ornate as Fixx tried to thread a second fractured backbeat into the mix, heel clicking against the ground, head jerking as he locked it all together in his head. Everyone in the bar was silent, except for the two fighters... and Fixx, who was providing the backing track, whether they like it, or not. Even Jude was quiet, leaning against her own bar, a half-drunk tube of Electric Soup standing forgotten at her elbow.
It was time to thread in that third beat, Fixx decided. Inside his head, a graphic score was building up, so complex it looked purely random. Not that anything was ever completely random, or pure come to that. Not in this life...
“You, shithead, shut the fuck—”
Shiori never did get to finish her sentence, because the second she started speaking the clone’s arm whipped down in a blur, the free end of his nanchuku whistling in towards her skull. By all the laws of physics the result should have been like hitting a soft-boiled egg with a hammer. But instead of throwing herself backward and letting the nanchuku drive white cranial splinters deep into the jelly of her cortex, Shiori stepped right into the blow, blade flicking up to the right to halt beside her head. She didn’t even flinch when the wire wrapped itself down the left side of her face and round the back of her skull, the nanchuku’s handle swinging in on itself to clang hard against her upright blade.
No one had time to marvel because the woman was already on the move, her blade severing the nanchuku’s wire then sweeping down and back up in a single stroke that caught the clone in the groin and opened out his front from pubis to breastbone. Still moving, Shiori pivoted her blade in mid-air and swept its razor-like edge across the clone’s throat, cutting a blood-fringed grin below his jaw.
Gurgling more wetly than ever, the suited man stepped forward and slipped on his own guts, falling to his knees. Lack of understanding was written across his shocked face, more powerful even than the agony that pulled his lips back into an animal snarl.
Shrugging, Shiori put her blade to the gash in his throat and slammed the sword’s handle with the flat of her free hand, severing the man’s spinal chord. It was her one kindness, though she doubted he knew that. In all probability he’d already passed understanding anything.
“Neat,” said Fixx, clambering to his feet. He kicked the first clone once in the gut for luck and went to meet his saviour. The other clone was where Shiori left him, gutted open on the bar floor, but victory wasn’t enough to make her happy, not nearly. She shot Fixx the glare a snotty mongoose gives a third-rate cobra and started stalking towards him, only it didn’t look like she wanted to shake hands.
“Hey, wait.” Fixx sounded worried, which was fair enough, he was... Anyone faced with a furious kunoichi wielding a naked sword had a right to be worried, in Fixx’s opinion.
“You won,” he said desperately, backing away. “What’s your problem?” It turned out her problem was him.
“Shithead.” She punched Fixx hard with her left hand. Since her right held the sword, Fixx was glad for small mercies. And her accent might sound quaint but there was no mistaking the anger in her voice. To make doubly sure Fixx got the point, the Japanese woman grabbed him by the front of his shirt and hurled him into a wall. Adobe cracked and behind it ‘creteblocks echoed hollowly.