Chapter 22

Bermuda

Suz sat, as she often did, in the darkened observer’s gallery set high in corner of the gymnasium. No friendly games of basketball or volleyball accompanied by cheerful shouts rang about this room. An array of lethal hand weapons adorned one wall in a thousand shades of steel, black, and gray. The green-padded floors and their ever-present odor of sweat were marked with a series of circles, zones of a person’s awareness.

If one stood in the center, as Ri now did, and faced the northern circle, there was a tiny circle directly ahead. The position of least importance, partly because it was so obvious. Larger circles were ahead right and ahead left of the silent figure. Again to either side and directly behind were smaller circles.

The last had surprised her, but Levan had insisted that was where we expected attack. That heightened awareness aided the fighter in protecting against attacks from behind. It was the left rear and the right rear from which the fighter was most vulnerable and thus had the largest spaces drawn on the floor.

A squad of seven brutes were ranged about her, one each ahead and to the sides, two each on the rear quarters, and one directly behind. Levan himself stood in the eighth and smallest circle directly in front of Ri, arms crossed, casually at rest. The others had a range of knives, machetes, a length of chain, and one even had a handful of bricks.

Ri, nearly invisible due to her diminutive size, stood with a long wooden sword, its tip resting lightly on the floor. Levan nodded, and still Ri didn’t move or turn to inspect her attackers. They shuffled uncertainly until Levan nodded more emphatically. The chain and knife in the back right quarter split a little wider as they moved in.

With a back flip too fast for Suz to see clearly, Ri was between them and her sword slammed the knife-wielder a vicious blow to the side of the head. He fell to the floor like a load of cement despite his helmet.

She raised the sword straight up and the swung chain wrapped around it half a dozen times. She jerked the chain-wielder off balance toward her and then placed a leaping kick in his gut and face that knocked him off his feet in the other direction.

She dumped the chain from the end of the blade into the palm of her hand. Rolling low beneath a swung fighting staff, the chain slung around the machete man’s feet. He fell and she slashed the sword down at his throat.

Suz jerked forward in her seat fearing that she’d actually kill the man even with a blunt training sword. Instead, Ri jerked it to a halt against his neck, leaving him dead according to sparring rules rather than in reality. She jerked the sword free and plunged it behind her, catching the staff wielder in the solar plexus. A sharp rap atop his helmet and four were down. Three remained.

They came in from three points. Each time Ri leaned toward one side to single out an attacker, the tightening circle shifted to keep her at its center. No advantage in isolating them.

The tableau shifted back and forth, yet stayed in fluid balance. And then, when her back was turned, a brick flew, with unnecessary viciousness. Perhaps the guard was sick of being beaten by a little whippet of a girl. A sharp clack resounded in the gym as the sword met it and flung it aside. The shattering blow that followed actually destroyed the man’s helmet, leaving him wobbling and dizzy by the blow.

The two remaining knife wielders moved back-to-back. A defensive position for fighting in large crowds. One small girl, just turned seventeen, had made mincemeat of Levan’s best squad. It was the work of moments to send the two men to the mat wailing in pain.

Levan, who had not moved until this moment, sidled up behind her. Ri slashed back over her head, but too late. The older man had rolled low into the back of her knees. As she fell over him, he twisted and slammed her down into the mat.

The blast of air driven from Ri’s lungs could be heard all the way up to Suz’s vantage point. Ri rolled clear of Levan’s stomping kick and wrenched to her feet. Once more Levan, easily three times her age, stood calmly in his circle with his arms crossed as if he’d never moved.

Ri circled for a long moment, probing this way and that but never attacking. Twice she moved fully behind him seeking an opening. Levan never moved a muscle that Suz could see.

At long last, long after most of the others had been dragged clear to nurse their wounds against the wall, Ri stopped in the center of her circle.

She slid downward into an easy lotus and laid her wooden bokken across her lap. She leaned forward until her forehead touched the weapon. She held the kowtow until Levan grunted.

Suz wanted to applaud the performance. It had been brutal and yet beautiful, the dance upon the training mat. And the way Ri had decided to acknowledge her teacher by not attacking him unarmed.

“How, master? How do you have no holes in your defense?”

But he’d been unarmed. And Ri had just beat seven others. Suz would have attacked. And perhaps, just perhaps, she’d have been as badly beaten as the men scattered about the room.

Levan answered her only with a non-committal grunt.

She bowed her head once again. A lesson for the student to learn.

Levan acknowledged the second bow with a bob of his head before crossing to a table along the far wall. He tossed back the cloth and pulled out a pair of swords, but these were different. Even from here, Suz could see the ornamentation of the metalwork on the plain black scabbards, one long, one shorter.

He knelt before Ri. With one hand he lifted the wooden sword and tossed it lightly in his palm a few times. Then he cast it aside. It rattled against the training wall and then the room was still.

He laid the two swords between them. Ri leaned forward to gaze at them, and Suz nearly fell from her high perch to get a better look at them as well.

“These are Murasama blades. A shoto for close-in fighting and a full katana killing sword, two shaku and three sun in length. The maker and his disciples were so feared that a Japanese lord outlawed them for three centuries. The fear of their power reached near mystical proportions in the sixteenth century. This pair is believed to have last been wielded by a member of the forty-seven ronin who avenged the unjust death of their lord in 1702. It is my hope that you will keep these safe, and free of death.”

Ri bowed to the floor once again.

“When you wield these, even I would not be so foolish as to attack.”

He rose and departed from the room.

Ri remained as she was for a long time before lifting the weapons. She moved to the table and set the shorter one aside. She pulled the long sword free. It rang like struck crystal long after she set the sheath aside.

“I debated long before giving them to her.”

Suz twisted toward the whisper. Levan stood behind her, looking past at the lone fighter below, his eyes squinted in concern. She’d never heard him enter the balcony. Not even from straight behind. It left her with a shiver of fear at her own vulnerability and another in wonder that Ri could have sensed his approach.

“She appears to appreciate them.”

Levan raised his chin toward the view and Suz turned back. The men had cleared out and the training room was given over to the young woman and the ancient blade. She started through the basic steps, ones that Suz herself had mastered.

“See, she knows how to learn. This one is very smart. She very nearly beat me today. I don’t think I can afford to spar with her again if I wish to keep my reputation. I might be no more lucky than my men.”

“Were they really fighting?”

“For their very lives. I can’t let her do that again. It demoralizes the men too much. I’ll have to let them go out and beat up some old ladies to get them back on their feet.”

She turned to inspect the man. His face was impassive, but his eyes were twinkling ever so slightly. His humor was so rare that even after their years of association, it was still an uncertain thing. But surely he couldn’t be serious about that one.

At last he smiled, “I have put the whole reputation of your entire squad in doubt. Fear not, Angel-lady,” again his eyes crinkled slightly at his use of Ri’s nickname for her, “we will be most circumspect.”

She would have laughed aloud, had Levan’s attention not returned to the floor.

Ri had shifted into forms that Suz recognized, but had not even began to understand, never mind master with a wooden sword. The girl and the sword blurred into a ballet of glittering light and flowing wind.

“See how she leaves the form to follow the dictates of the blade. Unbound by rules, following instinct, she learns from the maker of the weapon.”

Suz could not appreciate the subtleties, but that beauty and instant death could so cleanly intermix, could find such a delicate balance, was a fascinating lesson. She could see why Levan was reluctant to tear back even a part of the shield kept around Japan to extract Ri’s cadre.

They embodied a form of death that would never survive on her father’s planet.

The Tancho Cadre could deal death from a place of absolute honor, without remorse, without thought. They would take ruthless right action from pure instinct. What right action awaited her?

# # #

“Um, Dad?”

Bryce Sr. looked up from his desk at the interruption.

“Your door was open, do you have a moment?”

He closed the folder on his desk and tried to categorize what Suzie might want. He realized that he lacked any data from which to even guess. She’d shown up when requested at the occasional dinners, and been a charming hostess opposite Celia, but that had been the extent of their interaction.

She wore her worn, yellow terrycloth bathrobe and some ridiculous kid’s slippers. Her long, sun-streaked hair was hanked back in an unruly ponytail. She’d never left home and Bryce had never stayed. Why couldn’t she be the one hiding out in Sweden and Bryce Jr. be the one who remained homebound?

“Sure. Come on in.”

Suzie stepped over the threshold and stopped when she saw Celia sprawled in her black leather armchair lost in yet another damned novel. He tried to read the title from across the room. He couldn’t make it out, because the cover was more about tattered clothing and bare flesh, than any words that the author may have incidentally created.

“I can come back late—”

“Don’t be so damned meek. Come on in. Don’t mind her.”

Celia shot him a foul look, her most common offering of late. “He likes to keep me where he can see me.”

Suzie shuffled up to his desk and hesitated before sitting in a chair.

“What can I do for you?”

“Have you been keeping up on the Wanderer?”

“Yes, he just left an underground movement in Stockholm. I think they were planning to overthrow my government, all six of them. I’m not terribly concerned though, they’re equally worried about getting into the Café Opera bar. Why?”

Suzie’s smile was whimsical and unreadable. He was about to ask what it meant but she spoke first.

“I mean the asteroid, though it’s nice to know Brycie’s having fun.”

“The asteroid. Sure, coming up on Pluto in a few years, headed for the sun six months later. Nowhere near to us according to the Earthshield trackers. Why? Don’t worry your pretty little head. We’re safe as can be.”

Even as he spoke he knew he was being condescending, somehow she seemed to bring out the worst in him. Though she never seemed to mind.

“I’m not worried about this one, it’s the next one that concerns me.”

He leaned forward and propped his elbows on his desk. “There’s another one? Why have you heard about it and not me?”

“Because we haven’t found it yet. It’s still too far away.”

“What?”

“How big is the Wanderer?”

Bryce was getting bored of this conversation. He let his attention drift back to the speech he was reviewing. The breeding program was shifting into law tomorrow and he was still fussing with the language he’d use to convince the Council to rubber stamp it for him with the least pain.

“Fifty kilometers or something like that.”

“Three hundred and twenty-two the long way. Over two hundred the narrow way. What if had been headed for the Earth? We couldn’t have done a thing about it.”

The same thing his experts had told him. They’d been lucky this time. Of course seen from space, the Earth was a pretty small target to hit with a cosmic peashooter. When the next one came, statistically in another ten million to fifty million years, they’d be able to take care of it.

“Okay. So?” He opened the folder partway, and kept the edge tilted so that his speech wasn’t visible to the girl, not that it mattered.

“So if we can be wiped out by a single blundering rock, wouldn’t it make sense to not be here when it arrives. Or at least for some portion of the human race not to be here, so that we can survive?”

“Maybe, but there’s no rush.” He deleted “eradicate” and replaced it with “euthanize” then changed it back. Then deleted the whole damn sentence. Suddenly the punishments that would be carried out on the Council’s families if they didn’t embrace his plan became far more ominous without a specifically named retribution.

“What if the scientists are wrong and we’re all dead on October 21st, 2091? What of your plans for a better human race then?”

He turned to face her fully. “My what?” He closed the folder again.

“I’ve watched you remove the criminal element, neatly eradicate organized religions to remove the threat of jihads. I’m sure you have more plans. What if the scientists are wrong and in two years we’re all dead. There is one pair, Bronson and Hendron, who say we’re still in desperate danger, though no one believes them. All we need is for Phobos, Ceres, Io, or some other oversized rock to get dragged off course and tossed in our direction.”

“It would be a disaster.” Celia settled into the chair next to Suzie in a single, lithe motion. “Neither Mars nor the Moon colonies are self-sustaining yet.”

A few years ago such a motion would have made his loins burn. Now he could see that she was overdoing it, trying to keep her hold on him. It was still there, but it was slipping. Another year, maybe two, and she’d have to accidentally run into something very hard.

But why was she joining in on his daughter’s side? She might be a bother, but she had a very sharp mind.

“Think about your plans for tomorrow, shot down before they have a chance to come to fruition.” Celia had never used her carefully liquid voice to sway him on policy. Now what was she up to? Two women suddenly deciding to be unpredictable at the same time. He didn’t like it one bit.

Bryce wondered if they were in cahoots, but Suzie’s expression was just a little too wide-eyed as she gazed at his wife. She was as surprised at the support as he was. And she also apparently had no idea about his breeding program announcement in the morning.

But Celia was right. He’d spent thirty-five years shaping a better, healthier Homo sapiens. Having them all die due to lack of planning was unreasonably short-sighted.

“So, we’re all in mortal danger in just two years. What should I do? Colonize the stars like some old fantasy novel?”

Suzie reached into her bathrobe pocket and, fishing out a memchip, slid it toward him across the desk.

Bryce pushed it into his virus scanner, but it reported clean.

He shoved it into his reader and a holo appeared in the middle of his desk. He glanced at the metrics. The thing was huge. Over a kilometer along the axis. Bigger than any station yet in orbit by a factor of almost ten. He leaned back and contemplated it over steepled fingers.

Five rings spinning about a central core like old wagon wheels on a single axle. Four massive ion thrusters, attached at the core, reached out beyond each wheel. Some contraption out of a kid’s toy box. Yet, the call to space and adventure hung in the air above his desk.

“But the off-center thrust—”

“The thrust is so low that there will be no appreciable sensation inside and the rings will be built to take it. Low thrust over long periods. Gets to a likely star in just over five decades.”

“Where’d you find the damn thing?” He waved a hand at it trying to look disgusted, but he couldn’t pull his eyes away. It was magnificent. Audacious. Even that stupid wench Celia studied it with glistening eyes.

“The original idea came out of an old two-dee movie. This represents three years of work by the Hanoi Engineering School at Central Launch. They say it can be done. That the stars are in reach. But we have to start it soon if we want to have it ready before the Wanderer arrives. Very soon.”

Bryce watched the rings spin through another slow turn, fully a minute to rotate once around, all in neat harmony. He glanced at his console. He’d have to rewrite his speech.