Down on deck 4 Finn showed up at the gym he hadn’t visited since his second morning aboard. There was West Texas, grim-faced, punishing herself on the lat press. And yes, there was Tucker, seated at the weight bench, flanked by his two rat-faced buddies.
Tucker watched Finn’s approach, his eyes narrowing. He set his weights down with an ostentatious hfff and wiped his hands off on his pants and stood. “Well, look who’s here. The pacifist SEAL.” He barked a few times. Ratface 1 and Ratface 2 hyuk-hyuk-hyuked.
“The thing I said about fighting, not seeing the point?” said Finn. “I changed my mind.”
His right arm shot out like an adder’s strike.
Tucker rocked back on his legs, grabbing at his throat and gagging for air.
Finn had a philosophy about fighting. He preferred not to; mostly it was a waste of time and energy. But when a fight became necessary, the only way to do it was to win, and quickly.
In Finn’s book there were three types of fight.
The fight to kill. That was the simplest and easiest. The fight to avoid being killed or prevent someone else from being killed. That one you accomplished by putting the other combatant out of commission, not necessarily permanently, just for the purposes of the moment. Still, the general rule in a type 2 fight was to inflict, if not lethal damage, then at least damage sufficient to ensure that the immediate danger was extinguished. Nobody was more dangerous than a committed and only partially disabled combatant.
And then there was the third type: the fight to make a point.
Which was what Finn was looking at right now.
“Hey!” A full two seconds had elapsed from the instant of impact, but Ratface 1 was just now reacting, a look of outrage and fury so exaggerated it was almost comical. Apparently he was winding up to execute some sort of counter. Not so Ratface 2, who was still frozen in place, stunned disbelief on his face.
Typically the goal in a type 3 fight was to cause more psychological than physical pain. In a word, to humiliate. Since there was seldom any real danger involved, there was rarely need for serious physical damage.
Regardless of the specific goal, though—to kill, to avoid being killed, or to humiliate—it was always best accomplished immediately. Less wasted energy, more certainty, and you retained the advantage of surprise. The fights in movies, stretched out for suspense and entertainment purposes, were pure horseshit. In a real fight the outcome was usually determined within the first ten seconds of action.
Ten at most.
This one took about half that.
Tucker had reeled back two steps, retching and coughing but not fully out of the game, which impressed Finn. There was something to be said for the inertia of sheer bulk.
Finn half turned toward Ratface 1 and punched the point of his left elbow into Ratty’s left temple, then launched off his left foot and delivered a left-hand palm strike to Tucker’s nose.
The nose is one of the more sensitive human extremities, even in a less than super-sensitive guy like this one, and smashing its delicate cartilage up against the nose bone is quite painful, as Tucker would have been able to attest if his brain were not currently distracted by firing on all sorts of normally unused cylinders. The nose also houses a dense matrix of tiny blood vessels, a number of them right then in the process of rupturing. All in all, a nose strike like the one Finn had just executed could be relied upon to make the eyes tear up to the point of shutting down vision.
Finn turned his face sharply a few degrees in the direction of Ratface 2, who responded by promptly sitting down on the deck.
Ratface 1 had slumped back against the nearest machine, a leg press.
Tucker was on his knees, a supplicant weeping before the unfamiliar god of defeat.
Finn turned to the stunned scattering of gym patrons watching this all go down and lifted both hands in the air, open palms forward, in the universal sign language for It’s all good, fighting’s over. Nobody moved.
West Texas watched him curiously.
Tucker let out a low moan.
Finn sat down against a bulkhead and waited.