“Let’s try that again,” you offer, tensing.
“Sure.” He rocks slightly on the balls of his feet, and for an instant you have the surreal sense that he’s not holding a sword at all—it’s a cricket bat, and he’s got it the wrong way up.
“Your mother wears army boots!”
You’re not sure that’s the right thing to say to a late fifteenth-century main battle tank, but he takes it in the spirit you intended—and more importantly, he spots you changing guard, lowering the point of your sword. And he goes for you immediately, nothing subtle about it, just a diagonal swing, pivoting forward so he can slice a steak off you.
Of course, this is just what you expected when you twisted your wrist. You dip your point and grab your blade with your left hand, blocking him with a
Unlike a modern main battle talk, the old-fashioned version can fall on its arse.
“Ouch! Dammit. Point to you, my lady.”
“That’s your brachial artery right there,” you comment, taking a deep breath as you watch the bright gouts of virtual blood draining from him.
You take a step back, and your enemy does likewise as soon as he’s picked himself up. Both of you let your blades droop. “How did you know about the army boots?” he asks.
“Oh. I thought maybe you knew her.” There’s disappointment in his voice, but the sealed helm opposite doesn’t give anything away.
“No, sorry.” Your heart’s still pounding from the stress of the moment—thirty seconds of combat feels like thirty minutes in the gym or three hours slaving over a hot spreadsheet—but a certain guilty curiosity takes over. “Was she a Goth or a hippy?”
“Neither: She was in the army.” His foot comes forward, and his sword comes up and twitches oddly, and before you can shift feet, it thumps you on the shoulder hard enough to let you know you’ve been disarmed— literally, if there was a cutting edge on these things. “Ahem, I mean, she was
“I know who they are,” you snap, taking two steps back and raising one hand to rub your collar-bone, which is not as well padded as it ought to be and consequently smarts like crazy. “And in a minute I want you to show me what you just did there.”
You retire to the pews at the left of the aisle, sheathing your sword and stripping your headgear as Eric and Matthew take your place, joking about something obscure and work-related. You drop out of haptic space and without your eyewear continually repainting him in armour, Mike reverts to his workaday appearance, a biker with a borg head transplant. Then he strips off the battered Nokia GameCrown to reveal a sweaty brown ponytail and midthirties face, and shakes his head, presumably at seeing you as yourself for the first time in an hour, rather than a femme fatale with farthingales and a falchion. (And that’s not so flattering, is it? Because you may not be overweight, but let’s face it, dear, people mistake you for a librarian. And while you work with books, you’re not exactly involved in publishing.) “I was wondering if I could have a word of your advice, Elaine,” he says as he slouches onto the unforgiving bench seat.
“What, a technical issue?” You raise a damp eyebrow. Mike’s been doing this stuff years longer than you have, since before AR and OLARP games began to show, practically since back in the Stone Age when you either did dress-up re-enactment or actual martial arts (and never the twain shall meet); and aside from your oiled-canine reflexes, he’s basically just plain better than you’ll ever be. “I suppose…”
“It’s not about that,” he says, sounding uncertain. The penny drops, just as he goes on to say: “It’s about the car insurance.”
You get this from time to time, although there are blessings to be counted: It’s not like you’re a lawyer or a doctor or something. “I don’t work that end of the business,” you remind him.
“Yeah, I know that. But you know Sally was in a shunt on the M25 last week?” (Sally is Mike’s wife: a bottle- blonde middle-management type who tolerates his night out with the lads once a week with an air of mild, weary contempt. You suppose they must see something in each other, but…) “We got this bill for the recovery truck and repairs, then the other driver’s claiming private medical expenses, and the thing is, she swears there was another car involved, that didn’t stop.”
You’ve got a sinking feeling that you know what’s coming, but you can’t just leave Mike dangling so you restrict yourself to a noncommittal “Hmm?”
Eric and Matthew are poised on the floor in front of you, almost motionless, knees and elbows occasionally flexing slightly. None of the chatter you and Mike go in for. A couple of the others are working out, warming up in the vestry, and you can hear Jo’s boom box thudding out an obscure Belgian industrial stream as they grunt and groan about another day at the office. “She was driving along in the slow lane near junction nineteen, heading towards Heathrow, behind the guy she tail-ended. Doing about ninety, there weren’t any trucks about, but traffic was heavy. Anyway, she says a white Optare van overtook them both, pulled in front of the Beemer, and braked, and by the time she was on the hard shoulder there was no sign of it.”
“Hmm.” You carefully put your sword down, then nudge it under the bench where nobody will trip over it. “You haven’t said ‘swoop and squat’ yet, but that’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“What’s the damage?”
“Well, Sally’s carrying six points on her license and she had that car-park smash last year. She’ll lose her no- claims discount, which’ll cost us about eight hundred extra when we renew the insurance.”
“Ouch.” Your bruised clavicle throbs in sympathy. Driving’s an expensive pastime even before you factor in diesel at 5 a litre, speed cameras every quarter of a kilometre on all the A-roads, and insurance companies trying to rape the motorists to recoup their losses on the flood-plain property slump. “Who are you with?”
“Nationwide.”
Well, that’s a relief—an old-fashioned mutual society, instead of a pay-by-credit-card web server owned by Nocturnal Aviation Associates Dot Com (motto: “We fly by night”) out of the back of a cybercafe in Lagos. “That’s good news. What’s the Beemer trying to dun you for?”
“Sixteen thousand in repairs—listen, it’s not a current model, Sally said she thought it was about ten years old—two thousand for roadside recovery, and, you’re going to love this, nine thousand in fees for orthopaedic treatment. They’re claiming whiplash injury.”
“I see. Nearly thirty grand?” You shake your head. Mike’s right, that’s nearly an order of magnitude over the odds for a simple tailend shunt on a motorway at rush hour. Even at ninety kilometres per hour. And whiplash —“Listen, all BMWs have been fitted with head restraints since forever, and they’ve had side-impact and frontal air bags for at least two decades. That kind of claim means they’re talking surgery, which means time off work, so they’re gearing up to hit you with a loss-of-earnings. I expect they’ll try to drop another thirty grand on the bill in a month or two.”
Mike’s face was sweaty to begin with: Now it’s turning the colour of the votive candles they’d be burning if this was still a functioning church. “But we’ve got a ten per cent excess…”
“Right. So you’ve got to make sure the other guy doesn’t get his hands on it, don’t you? You’re right about it sounding like a swoop and squat, and that medical claim is a classic. Medical confidentiality is a great blind for snipers, but we can poke a hole in it if there’s a fraud investigation in train. Now, Nationwide still have some human folks on the web in the Customer Retention and Abuse groups, and what you need to do is to get this escalated off the call-centre ladder until a human being sees it, then you need to hammer away.”
“But how do I…?”
You start checking off points on your fingertips. “You start by getting Sally to offer them her car’s black-box
