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well in the top ranks, either. In hand-to-hand combat, just like it did with knives, size mattered. The toughest competitors tended to be in the light heavyweight class—big and strong enough to deliver power, not too big to move well. A featherweight might be fast, but his—or her—skill had to be extraordinary to keep up with somebody who was thirty or forty kilos heavier and much stronger. At the highest levels, every body was well trained. There had been some little guys who were that good, so their skill could overcome the size disparity, couple of them fems, but only a relative handful. The odds were against it. Last time he’d looked, of the current Top Twenty players, thirteen were light heavies; there were four heavies, an ultraheavy, a middleweight, and only one lightweight. Two of the light heavies were women, one of them an HG mue. The lightweight, Tak Houghton Clar Besser, of Mti, was a master of weapons, and had cut his way into Eighteenth, last time Mourn checked.
    As the woman made her way to the bus’s exit, he shook his head. No. She didn’t have the look of a player. She was young, reasonably fit, had red hair trimmed short, wore middle-class clothes—a loose green silk shirt over snug pants, flexsoles, and had a big carry bag on a shoulder strap. Attractive enough, midtwenties or so. He saw what he took to be the somewhat-disguised outline of a hand wand tucked into a back pocket, so she was armed, but a lot of cits carried in the big cities on the old worlds, even if it was against local laws. The thinking went that it was better to have explain your illegal weapon to the cools than it was for them to have to tell your family you were dead.
    She didn’t move like a fighter, though.
    A fan, maybe? There were plenty of those floating around, and more than a few had wanted to lie next to him. People who got off on what they thought was the danger of being with a player. Star-fuckers. He had bedded a few of those. Not any lately. It seemed to be more trouble than it was worth.
    A lot of his life seemed more trouble than it was worth lately.
    He sighed. Maybe he really should give serious consideration to retiring. Start a little school, train the wanna-bes, get drunk now and then, maybe find a comfortable woman . . .
    She alighted from the bus and started walking back the way the vehicle had come, a tight anger in her moves. No, he decided, she wasn’t a fan who wanted to swap fluids. You don’t get invited into a man’s bed if you take great pains to keep him from seeing you, now do you?
    There were other possibilities: A thief, stalking him? A relative, bent on vengeance for somebody he had taken out along the way?
    He made it a point to look like everybody else, no flashy jewelry, no expensive clothes, nothing to draw attention to himself. Just Art Average on his way from nowhere to no place special. Not a target for the Confed, the cools, nor the bents.
    Not an op, not a player, not a fan or a thief, he decided. Maybe somebody’s sib or kin or spouse, come to pay him back for her loss. But not a real threat if so, now that he had marked her. And, somehow, the wounded spouse didn’t feel right, either.
    Did he really care enough to worry about it?
    He directed the hack driver to the curb, paid him with a couple of hardcurry coins, and stepped out onto the sidewalk. He watched the woman walk away and decided: Yes, he did care—at least enough to tail her and find out who she was. It had been a while since anything had made him really curious.
     
Shaw would have spent a few minutes in the spa, with the mint-scented hot water swirling over his tired body, stuck a pain patch on his deltoid, and gone to bed after his lesson with Baba. The old man had thumped the hell out of him today, and he was physically spent and sore, but he couldn’t relax yet. His secretary called to tell him that the Confederation Planet Representative, Newman Randall, was waiting in his office, and you didn’t just tell