Brandy temporized. “I’ll get to that. For now, the idea is, when I push you, you start to lose your balance. You’re falling backward, so you step back to catch your balance again. Sounds easy, when you explain it. But let’s try that again, with a little difference.”
She stepped up to Mahatma, and again pushed him in the center of the chest. But this time, her foot had snaked out to ensnare his leg before he could catch his balance, and he fell backward onto the mat.
“You see it?” she asked the other recruits. “Keep the opponent from stepping backward, and he’s got no place to go. All he can do is fall.” She reached down and helped Mahatma to his feet. “Now, you try it on me.”
“All right, sarge,” said Mahatma. He reached up and pushed Brandy, putting his foot behind her. She fell down, twisting as she fell, and rolled back up to her feet almost as soon as she was down.
“That’s the second part of the lesson,” she said. “If your opponent knows how to recover, you won’t have the advantage for long. So you have to be ready to follow up right away. Now, who else would like to try it?”
This was the point at which she usually got somebody who’d had a little martial arts training as a civilian. One of the new troops-the one who’d had his hand up before, she noticed-had a smirk on his face. “OK, Slammer, your turn.”
Stammer swaggered out of the lineup, and took a stance opposite Brandy, his weight evenly balanced on the balls of his feet. He had obviously had training, and he looked to be in better than average physical condition for a recruit. Brandy suppressed a smile, then said, “Aw, let’s make it a little bit more of an even contest. I must outweigh you twenty pounds.” (It was more like fifty, but nobody had ever called her on that-not to her face.) “Here, Sergeant Escrima is more your size.”
Escrima stepped forward to take Brandy’s place, his face impassive. Now the recruit had the weight advantage-probably thirty pounds, and several inches in reach. “OK, Stammer, let’s see you try the move on Escrima.”
As Brandy had anticipated, Slammer grinned broadly and stepped up to Escrima, evidently planning on some spectacular throw instead of the simple technique she’d demonstrated. The recruit grabbed the little sergeant by one arm and began to turn so as to flip him over his hip. What happened next was hard to follow, but it ended with Slammer falling flat on his back from what seemed a considerable height, with an impressive thud. Escrima pounced on him like a hawk, one knee across a biceps, one hand on Stammer’s throat, and the other poised in a fist in front of his face.
“Third part of the lesson,” Brandy said to the other recruits, who stared in awe at their fallen comrade. “Never take an opponent for granted. You go into combat, there’s no such thing as a fair fight. No rules, no refs, no timeouts, and no points for style. Stammer tried to get fancy with Escrima, and look where it got him.”
Escrima let Slammer get up, and the recruit returned to his place in the formation, rubbing his biceps where the sergeant had kneeled on it. “OK, now you’re going to break up into pairs and try the move I showed you. Stick with the lesson, and we’ll show you all more moves as soon as everybody’s had a chance to practice this one.”
The recruits broke up into pairs, spreading around the mats and trying the technique Brandy had shown them. Inevitably, a few of them had trouble even with something this elementary-and others tried to show off, attempting more complicated moves. It was about as typical a training session as Brandy had ever seen.
Except for the Gambolts. Their feline anatomy put an entirely new twist on everything. Pushed backward, even with a leg confined, they would simply do a backfiip and land back on their feet, quicker than any human athlete. Once again, the Gambolts were simply leagues beyond their human counterparts. The other recruits had noticed by now, and there was muttering among them. When the exercise was finished, there was a distinct look of resignation on a number of the recruits’ faces.
As the training session progressed, there were more and more discouraged faces. The Gambolts made everything look easy, and the humans were rapidly coming to realize that they were outclassed by three recruits as fresh out of civilian life as they were. Normally, Brandy would have known what to do with a recruit so clearly superior. After all, a sergeant had the benefit of years of training-and a willingness to play whatever trick was needed to bring a recruit into line. A few quick falls with someone like Escrima, and even a fairly advanced martial arts student would be properly humbled.
But the Gambolts were so good, she wasn’t sure even Escrima could put them in their place. It didn’t take much foresight to see that this was going to be a real problem…
“Those Renegades are still snooping around, Captain,” said Lieutenant Rembrandt. “I’d like to find some way to get rid of them.”
“I take it they haven’t done anything we can use as grounds for barring them from the casino?” said Phule, tapping a pencil on his desk. For the second or third day in a row, the daily officer’s briefing was shaping up as a series of unsolved problems. He didn’t like that, but for the moment, the problems remained intractable.
“Not unless we do it for general obnoxiousness,” said Lieutenant Armstrong. “That’s within our rights. From what I can tell, anything a casino owner wants to do-up to and possibly including outright murder-is legal here on Lorelei. ”
“That’s one of the few benefits of the mob having made the rules for so long,” said Rembrandt, nodding. “We can bar anyone from the Fat Chance for any reason we concoct. But I don’t think we can expel them from the station unless we catch them cheating at the tables, or damaging casino property, or running some kind of credit fraud. And the Renegades have been careful not to do that.”
“Where are they staying?” asked Beeker. “Perhaps you could call in a favor from one of your fellow casino owners.”
“They’re at the Tumbling Dice,” said Rembrandt, a sour look on her face. “That’s Maxine Pruett’s home base. Not much chance of calling in a favor from her.”
“No indeed,” said Phule, glumly. “In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that she had something to do with their discovery that Chocolate Harry was here with us.” A frown came over his face. “Interesting that we’ve had so many outsiders arriving to make trouble for us all at the same time, isn’t it?”
“The Renegades, the Yakuza, and the IRS,” said Beeker. “There does appear to be a pattern there. At least, young Sushi appears to have deflected the Yakuza for the time being. And I can certify that your personal books are in excellent order-even if the revenue agents are inclined to nitpick, I am confident that you can come out of anything except the most hostile audit with a clean nose.”
“Good man, Beeker,” said Phule. “I have complete faith in you to handle that end of things. But the Chocolate Harry situation has to be taken care of. Turning his supply depot into a fortified position has kept the Renegades at bay, but the hassle factor is hurting efficiency. When somebody has to go through a security checkpoint to get a can of vacuum grease or a spare battery, they’re likely to go without-and that means some piece of equipment won’t be working right. On the other hand, if we make C.H. dismantle all his defenses, the Renegades will have an open shot at him.”
“Which brings us back to the question of how to neutralize the Renegades,” said Armstrong, scowling. He slapped his hand on the arm of his chair and said, “I say we snatch them when they’re off their guard, then find some pretext to kick them out of Lorelei. Let Maxie yell about it after they’re gone.”
“You would risk getting people hurt,” Beeker pointed out.
“We’ll be in a sad state when the Legion can’t handle a few civilian brawlers,” said Armstrong. He raised his chin, and his chest swelled. “I expect we’d deal out considerably better than we got, Captain.”
“I know our people can take care of themselves, Lieutenant,” said Phule. “But we’re in an enclosed space full of civilians, and we can’t go throwing our weight around every time we feel like it. I’ll try your approach if nothing else works, but I want to see what other options we have, first.”
“There’s another problem with that approach,” said Rembrandt. “If Maxine Pruett’s causing all this trouble, throwing the Renegades out would be only a temporary solution. She’ll find another way to harass us-and I think we can count on her to keep doing it as long as we’re here.”