Black Steel Read Online Free PDF Page A

exhaled a short breath, inhaled again, and gave the vanquished a short nod of respect. She spun the sword in a circle, all wrist action, and snapped the point at the floor, slinging the blood. She moved to where the white wooden sheath lay. She kneeled next to the sheath, sat on tier heels seiza again and picked up the sheath without looking at it, turning it so that the convex curve was away from her hip. She brought the sword's spine across her belly and touched the metal just above the guard to the mouth of the sheath and slid the back edge of the blade along the opening, left thumb and forefinger pinching the steel lightly to remove any remaining traces of imaginary blood. When the point reached the opening, she pivoted the sword on it and slowly pushed the weapon home, until the catch on the hilt locked it into place. The mating of steel and wood accomplished, she replaced the sheathed sword on the floor, inclined her head in a bow, and was done.
    Kildee Wu blinked, as if coming from a trance. She had danced the dance flawlessly, but she did not consciously recall any of the moves. Of a moment, she had reached for her weapon; the next thing she knew, she was back in seiza, finished. That was how it should be. Thought was too slow when it came to the iai; moves had to be nearly as automatic as reflex. As a meditation it could be no less. Iai was the sword, do the way, and it had been her life for twenty of her thirty-five T.S. years.
    She picked up the sword and went to the shower.
    With the sword placed carefully into its rack, Wu stripped and tossed her silks into the washer. She padded toward the shower, stopping briefly in front of the mirror. She smiled at her image, a smile that seemed a bit crooked to her. She was hardly an imposing figure. Her black hair was cut short, her features more or less Oriental, and she was barely a hundred and fifty-two centimeters tall. Fifty kilos, tight, hips a bit wider than she would like, breasts small and mostly formed from underlying pectoral muscle. Her arms were developed enough so that the veins showed in her biceps, and she figured her body fat was maybe nine or ten percent. "Sthenic," that's what her ex-lover the medic had called her. He said it meant "healthy-looking," and she could live with that.
    Yep, and a good; healthy, sweaty body it was now. Her own smell overcame the barn-straw scent of the dressing room. Best she get cleaned up and into fresh silks before her first kendo class arrived. Sensei Wu needed to look neat for the paying customers. During the dance, she was other, but now, she was simply Kildee Wu, a woman who needed a shower.
    Bligh fell and the swordsman dashed past her toward Sleel. At the port, he hadn't been working; here, he had a job to do, a client to protect, and he didn't fuck around this time. He pointed his left spetsdod at the running man-better angle on that side-and snapped off two shots.
    One dart for each eye.
    The guy could have been wearing lenses; that was possible, given how prepared the woman at the port had been. But even so, he'd damn well have to blink when the darts got there; that was reflexive, and it would take a hell of a lot of specific training to get around that one. At the very least it was going to slow him down considerably.
    The swordsman screamed. He jerked his arms up over his face, still maintaining his grip on the black sword, then collapsed as the trank took him. He slid two meters to an unconscious halt.
    Well. Not wearing lenses, Sleel saw.
    They could grow him new eyes, assuming he lived that long. Probably not gonna happen, given how the other sword players had been rigged to self-destruct. Too bad.
    Sleel moved toward the door, alert for another attacker, but saw none. Somehow that figured.
    The matador squatted next to the fallen cool. The floor was awash in blood, the big artery still spewing it out, but slowing the flow as the heart finished the last of it. A few liters of it went a long way when spilled on