In this, in practice, they knew themselves well-matched. Why rob themselves of the benefits of practicing all-out, with real danger to hone the edge? Each felt that if she or he could not prevent themselves suffering serious harm, they so deserved to suffer.
“Or is this more of your damnedcompassion ?” she demanded, voice husky with scorn. “If so, then look well and see how false it is, now and always: if you do not go all out against me, how can I practice for the real thing?”
She was near him now, touch range. And flowed forward like a striking snake, blade licking out to lash across his belly and side.
Steel sang upon steel. His own blade was a mere ten centimeters long, with a broad single-edged right- triangular blade. It was actually his back-up; when in the field, even in the cockpit of White Lily, he bore a thirty- centimeter blade, clipped and sharpened halfway down the back from the point, as much short sword or machete as fighting dagger: a classic Bowie. It weighed a full kilogram—a brutal mass for knife to be wielded by a normal human. While he could wield the monsteralmost as fast as he could his bare fist, he believed that speed beat all in a knife fight. And in any event, he claimed, his Bowie was such a potent weapon there was hardly anypoint to practicing with it.
Like her he held his knife tip-downward from his hand. He barely had to pivot his arm at the elbow to block her strike. At the same time, grinning like a handsome gargoyle, he turned about his body’s center line and took his sister with a pistoning palm-heel strike on the sternum, between her small but full breasts.
She flew backward all the way to the wall. The long ice-white queue in which she wore her hair slapped the padding a beat after her body did, with as loud a sound.
He knew better than to snag her braid, did Aleks. She left it loose by design—as a lure to the unwary. Like all her muscles, those of her neck were like a BattleMech’s myomer bundles, and she was agile as an interstellar gymnast; anybody thinking to break her neck or otherwise control her only found themselves stuck to her, to their severe if not fatal dismay. It was a particularly poor move in a knife fight, since her riposte when her hair was grabbed was to reel herself in close and stab like a snake striking: about a dozen shots to the softest available target. Even with her holdout knife—pretty much the same her sibkin used—she could unstitch somebody’s guts in about the time it took them to gasp in horrified surprise.
“It is natural to take pity upon such a tiny little girl as you,” Aleks said. “Even one so tricky.”
She laughed. “Surat.”
She pushed herself away from the wall and advanced again, this time stalking like a killer cat, keeping all her inconsequential weight upon her planted foot while extending the other, not transferring any until the leading sole laid flat on the floor before her. She circled toward his left, away from his stubby blade.
“You think to anger me,” she said. “Good tactics, brother dear—so long as you forget all the practice we both have had in swallowing our rage!”
She darted to her right, his left. He lunged forward with speed scarcely less blinding than hers for all he outmassed her cleanly two to one. His arm streaked toward her face in what was more than anything a straight punch—but aimed to lay open her cheek with the blade trailing from his huge dark fist.
Her own move had been a feint. As he committed himself to his charge she turned and simply jumpedat him. Her left arm extended, elbow slightly bent, fingers of her open hand extended to touch an imaginary plane extended from her body’s center line; the outside of her arm struck the inside of his knife arm just above the elbow, too far for a wrist roll to cut her with his short weapon. At the same time she wrapped both legs about his narrow waist, kissed him quickly on the lips, and sliced his cheek above the high prominent bone with a quick, vicious cut.
At once Malvina launched herself into a back flip. It would land her outside reach of a retaliatory strike, and him with his weight still on his heels, to keep himself from falling backwards when she struck him.
But her sibkin’s neuromusculature was as Clan-bred as her own, his training as brutally Clan-intensive. Even off-balance he managed to lash out. The tip of his blade flicked lightly across the swell of her left buttock, slicing silvery synthel fabric and white skin.
She landed on her bare feet, harder than intended, staggered back several steps to regain her own balance. “Damn you!” she yelped. “Thatstung. ”
He laughed. “You will remember me when next you sit in the cockpit of the Black Rose,” he said. Which would be for the invasion of Chaffee, after the jump for which their fleets now recharged using their solar sails, here in Whittington system. In a matter of days thedesant would at last land in force upon its first true objective.
Malvina circled to Aleks’ left again, weaving her hands before her with her fighting blade laid against the inside of her slim white forearm. The pulse in her wrist made the blade jump just at the edge of visibility.
Aleks gave the weapon no more than a cursory glance. Malvina’s sinuous motions intended to render it difficult for her opponent to calculate a way past her defenses, or know when or from what angle she would launch a strike. It was also meant literally to hypnotize a foe; if an opponent made the mistake of watching her hands too long, especially her knife hand, she would program him, with surprising quickness, to anticipate her patterns even though they appeared random. Then she would strike from an unforeseen angle.
It was a killer technique—again, literally. Aleks had seen it work in duels. To prevent it working onhim —since he knew from bitter experience that foreknowledge would not protect him if he allowed himself to watch her hands—he kept his eyes in soft focus, intent upon her shoulders. They were a far better indicator of imminent action anyway, though Malvina was expert at avoiding telegraphing of any sort.
“I am glad you showed some spirit,” she said, smiling. “I had begun to fear your famous compassion was getting the better of you.”
His brown eyes narrowed slightly and his nostrils flared. That was a cheap shot. Aleks had shed more tears after Porrima than the single one he allowed himself in the doomed suburb where Magnus died. Not even he, renowned, feared, admired as he was, dared weep openly in front of Clanners. Except Malvina, holding his head to her breast in bed in her quarters aboard her own flag JumpShipBlack Dalliance . In her arms he let go entirely of his iron self-control and the tears flowed like waterfalls. Not for the first time; but for the first time in years.
He also knew, quite well, she was trying to provoke him. An angry fighter makes mistakes. All combat at all levels of scale, from interstellar wars to tete-a-tete duels such as this one, hinged ultimately on who made the fewer, or less telling, mistakes. And no fighting more than knife fighting, where the slightest cut, like the slice on his cheek or the one he had given his sibkin on her backside, would given enough time bleed a combatant to the point of fatal weakness.
So he laughed. It was his most effective defense against the world.
Annoyed, or seeming so, she essayed a cut for his left forearm. The knife fighter’s mortal sin, each knew, was obsessing on the kill shot: there are very few knife strokes that willinstantly incapacitate a foe. Each had witnessed many fights in which a combatant had been mortally wounded by an enemy to whom she had already dealt her own deathblow.
Steel rang again as Aleks blocked effortlessly with his knife. “You think I took pity on you, then?”
It was her turn to frown. And then laugh, like a silver bell. “I know how much you loved the tales of knights, of Europe and Japan, when we were children in the sibko together,” she said. “The lore of medieval chivalry andbushido still clog your head—even though both were largely made up of whole cloth in the nineteenth century.”
He would only laugh. “Whenever they were invented, those tales speak to me,” he acknowledged. He was circling to keep facing her, taking advantage of his far longer stride to force her to move more quickly to make sure it was not she who was outflanked. His own hands he kept extended toward the plane of his center line, left hand high and open, knife hand at about navel level and very slightly refused.
“They fit so wonderfully well with the Kerenskys’ vision: of a warrior’s duty to care for and shield the weak. Which is, after all, the engine that drives this great Crusade of ours: to save the childlike peoples of the Inner Sphere from themselves, and their leaders’ selfishness and venality. Do not the tales of knightly chivalry andsamurai honor accord better with our ways than the Mongols you were so taken by?”
Again they exchanged a flurry of cuts. The clash of blades was tinkling music. Neither was marked again.
“The Mongols triumphed against great odds,” she said. She herself seemed to be fighting from downhill; his strength and, of much greater importance, reach were far greater than hers. To have a chance of victory, therefore, she had to either snipe from outside, slice him well and bleed him until his reactions slowed, or get inside his long arms.
