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caring very much. His body seen through goggles remained perfectly black, and
he continued to strike and strike, through crosses, thrusts, and chops.
He finished the first section with the right and left shoulder rams to the
straight leg, the front-and-reverse two-leg thrust to the jaw, and the
standing clothesline blocks. There had been no glows yet. It was a good day,
toktru. His body remained black all through throws, locks, chokes, disarms,
short blades, long blades, slug throwers, and beam pistols. Jak burned down
his last black attacking figure, drawing a neat
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John Barnes - The Duke of Uranium line that would have severed the right arm
if he had faced a real opponent with a real maser. The score a personal
record popped up on his helmet, and he pushed the goggles up and took off his
helmet. He knelt and let his focus and calm settle deeply, preparing for the
second phase, random sparring against the machine, in which it would try to
break his concentration. When he felt empty and clear, he reached for the
helmet.
He had just touched it when a cord dropped around his neck and tightened,
digging into his windpipe and squeezing his carotids so that the dark poured
in from all sides toward the center of Jak's field of vision.
His concentration was singing-on today, and although this attack called for
action, it did not matter. No start or twitch disturbed his focus. Ignoring
the cord for an instant, he reached behind, found pant cuffs, gripped and
arched, and backflipped out of his kneeling position, hard work even in the .2
gravity. As they flipped through the air and Jak gained slack in the cord, his
attacker tried to put knees against the small of Jak's back, to maintain
leverage.
Jak used that motion to twist away, escaping toward the attacker's feet. He
slammed the back of his head into his opponent's crotch as he pulled him over
his head. The grip on the cord relaxed for an instant, and
Jak got another grip, on his opponent's armpits, and pulled him forward and
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off as if he were fighting his way out of a frenzied sweater.
The attacker lost one end of the cord, and though it dragged and burned, it
flew off Jak's neck. He avoided gasping, and instead expelled his trapped air
in a ki-ai
! as he kicked where the attacker's head should have been, trying to fly
backward to get a moment for a good breath. But as Jak kicked, the attacker's
foot supped up the inside of Jak's thigh, using it to guide in until the ball
of the opponent's foot slammed into
Jak's armored cup.
A bell rang.
Jak went limp for an instant, calmed himself, took that long-delayed breath,
then stood and bowed. "So now it's 2030 to 1489 overall."
Sib laughed. "Still obsessed with the score, eh? But most of my wins happened
when you were twelve years old and just starting to do this." He held up his
hand and spoke into his purse. "What's the score between Jak and me over the
last two years, and what do the stats look like in general?"
"477 to 434 across the last two years," the purse said. "Across the last year,
231 to 226. It is projected that within one year, at present rates of change,
Jak Jinnaka will surpass you in probability of success. In about eleven years
at present rates of change, Jak will surpass you overall."
'Thank you, off," Sib said. "You see, Jak? All a matter of patience. Now we
need to get you fed fast enough so you'll have time to get all prettied up for
your concert. Let me just okay the food delivery and they should be ready to
vac it over. As it happens, I noticed that you went to the Old China Cafe for
your
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John Barnes - The Duke of Uranium after-school meal, so rather than Chinese
I'm having Lunar Greek delivered baked hamster with bechamel on glutles, with
mango pastry for dessert if you can manage to force that down."
It was Jak's favorite takeout, and they both knew it. "I guess I'll have to.
Wouldn't want to hurt your feelings."
They had all agreed to meet up at the Genorma Ferry Station, to catch the
gripliner over to Centrifuge together; the four of them would take a private
compartment together. Jak was the first to arrive, which was typical. He
waited in the vast, echoing lobby. Most of the time gripliners ran nearly
empty; there were just a few peak-time trips that filled up. Thus most of the
time the big space wasn't needed for arriving or departing crowds, and it
merely looked like a very large and unattractive abandoned shopping mall with
an unusual ceiling display. In the great vaulted ceiling, divided into
thousands of meter-wide windows, the eight cables that connected Genorma
Station on the Hive with Amroneg Station on the Ring formed silvery lines
cutting through the stars; the cables ran to just outside the windows, for the
gripliner airlocks were positioned in an octagon around the lobby. As Jak
watched, a gripliner was just arriving, a silver cylinder the size of three
gymnasiums sliding down the bright line of the linducer cable like a drop of
mercury on a wire, as it lost the very last of its speed before slipping into
the airlock to dock.
Jak wandered aimlessly around the central shopping area, shuttered now because
it was still some hours until First Shift would be getting up and going to
work. As he made one trip or another around the cluster of cafes, newsstands,
and office supply stores, Dujuv would turn up.
Glancing at his reflection in the shop windows as he passed, Jak thought he
was doing a superior job of being conspicuous in a good way his clothes for
the evening were the very model of clash-splash-and- [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]