Read The Musashi Flex for Free Online

electronic eavesdroppers and voxaxed the comm’s ear implant.
    “What?” She kept it subvocal; even somebody sitting in the hack next to her would have had trouble hearing her.
    “Chim City, on Tatsu,” the gravelly voice of Commander Pachel said without preamble. “An op will meet you at the boxcar station with details up when you get on-planet.”
    “Fuck they will. I’m on vacation as of ten minutes ago. Send somebody else.”
    “Can’t do it. You’re the only op in the system rated for this, and it’s just the next world over. There’s an e-ticket on file at the uplift station three klicks ahead of your hack.”
    Yeah, they were tracking her. Knew to within half a meter exactly where she was.
    “I quit.”
    He laughed softly. “You can’t quit, girl. This is an A-DASH-ONE-SLASH-A directly from Wu’s PR Newman Randall Himself. All leaves are canceled, all excuses dust in the wind. You will catch the next boxcar up and hop over there and see what the Planet Rep wants, end of discussion.”
    A-1/A. As high as things ever got in her biz, though that didn’t always scan. “Does this asshole have a clue what that kind of rating means? What is it about?”
    “His family is rich enough to buy the planet you’re on, plus the one you’re going to, and burn them to warm their hands if they feel like it. It doesn’t matter if he can’t tell the difference between a top priority code and his left nut. You didn’t just fall off the vegetable hauler to town, Luna. When money calls, the Service answers. I don’t know what he wants, I don’t want to know. Go, see what it is, handle it, call me when you are done and tell me all about how clever you were fixing it. Take your vacation afterward.”
    “This sucks.”
    “Well, if it did, at least it would be useful for something. I didn’t write the game, I just move the pieces.”
    Pachel cut the connection and the com shut off.
    Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck . . .
    Wu. She’d only been there once or twice. Best she brush up on the place. She lit the com and called the Confed general information computer. “Wu,” she said. “Sixty-minute encap. Include history, politics, geography, sociology.”
    “Wu,” the computer began. “First planet settled in the Haradali System . . .”
    She leaned back and listened.

4
    From the inside of a two-passenger fuel-cell hack directly behind her bus, Mourn watched the woman discover that he wasn’t on the pubtrans vehicle. The hack’s windshield was polarized so he could see her, but it was opaque from the other side. Even if she looked this way, she wouldn’t make him.
    She was surprised and irritated that she’d lost him, he could see that much in her face and body language.
    He smiled. She wasn’t bad, but you had to be very good to walk in his tracks without being seen. There were always a few stupid players who weren’t above backshooting a high rank and trying to claim they’d beaten him fairly. They thought they could beat the stress scanners or face readers, and, of course, nobody did, but you didn’t want to be the man they assassinated for their two-minute bragging rights. There were cools and Confed intel to worry about, and other legit players. You walked in a fog, didn’t pay attention, you wouldn’t survive long.
    He was curious, though not particularly worried. The woman’s shadowing technique was good enough so he knew she had training. She could be some kind of terran or Confed agent, a local cool, maybe even private op, but somehow, it didn’t feel as if she were any of these.
    Maybe she was a player, though if she was, she wasn’t ranked in the Hundred. There were plenty of fems in the game, though only a few were in the Hundred; he knew most of the currents by sight, and most of those specialized in armed stuff. The ones who went bare tended to be fairly big and strong, they had to be. It wasn’t as if a woman couldn’t get the same skills as a man, she could, but small men didn’t fare that