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if he got into fights every day. But better to have too much ammo than too little.
The creator of the esoteric fighting style had been a cripple called Sera, so named either because he was wise as an owl, of had a hoarse voice, depending on which definition of the Indonesian word sera, you liked. According to the various oral histories and subsequent letters and books, Sera had been born with a clubfoot and missing part of one arm. Such handicaps would not seem to lend themselves to the development of expert fighting abilities. Nonetheless, that had apparently been the case. Evidently the man had been an extremely nasty fighter, and not a man to be sneered at, however gimpy he might have been.
The origins of the art and its first practitioner were somewhat mysterious. Michaels had poked around, trying to research it, because he was curious, and had run into half a dozen dead ends.
He shifted from djuru seven, coming up from the full squat and upward thrust to an attacker’s face that ended it, to eight, moving on the triangle, or tiga. Later, he would practice the footwork on the sliwa, or square pattern.
He had worked up a good sweat; it rolled down his chest and back. He’d always thought it interesting he could get so much work out of stepping around a triangle or square that was less than two feet long on each side.
Djuru eight was essentially a blending of three previous < djurus-four, six, and three-and since it was the last one i he had learned, once he finished it he repeated it and ' started going backwards toward the first one. That was how you did the exercises, up and back on one side, then up and back on the other, so that each djuru got at least four reps, two on the right, two on the left.
Pak, or Bapak-those meant sir, or most honorable older sir, more or less-Sera's date of birth was unknown. He'd been listed as having been born as early as 1795 a.d.; however, this seemed unlikely, given the
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lineage of students, and Sera was probably born a century later, in the 1820s or maybe even the s. Current practitioners could not even agree on the |'s real name. The ones Michaels came up with were Hisak and H. Muhroji.
didn't know any more about Sera than Michaels >
Ithough the exact dates weren’t known, it was prob- sometime before the turn of the 20th century that i met the man who was to become his senior student, ss of a fighter named Djoet, who was supposedly around 1860, and died in the late 1930s. Djoet sub- ntly helped Sera formalize the system, adjusting it aple with sound limbs. Djoet was reportedly trained filat Kilat, Kun Tao, and probably Tjimande. lichaels made it back to the first djuru. He stopped, bbed a towel, and wiped the perspiration from his face
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and head. The problem with the short haircut he liked was that it didn’t soak up as much moisture. He had thought about wearing a headband, but decided that looked a little too yuppie-ish for him.
He glanced at the clock over the gym’s door. The day was winding down, and he had managed to lose a fair amount of the tension he had soaked up testifying before the senate committee. Not all of it, but some. Another twenty or thirty minutes of practicing his forms would help more, he decided. Picturing some of the more obnoxious senators on the receiving end of his punches and elbows probably was bad karma, but that helped, too. Imagining the “Urk!” a fat politician would blurt as Michaels buried his fist in the man’s belly was certainly politically incorrect, but also very satisfying …
Net Force Supply Warehouse Quantico, Virginia
“So is this a great toy, or what?” Julio said.
Howard looked at the device. “It looks like a miniature version of Robby the Robot somebody stepped on.”
And indeed, it did. A scaled-down version of the movie robot, the device was squatty, maybe eighteen-inches tall, and had a clear bullet-resistant Lexan half-dome atop the cone-shaped body, complete with a pair of articulated arms and tanklike treads. It was very wide at the base and narrowing toward the top.
“We call her ‘Claire,’ ” Julio said. “Your basic self- contained radio-controlled mobile reconnaissance and surveillance unit, the main feature of which is optical and auditory gear, including state-of-the-art CLAIR equipment -that standing for Circular-Looking-A-class InfraRed sensors. Aside from the regular cams, she can see heat sigs in the dark, has a fuzzy-logic come-back circuit so she won’t bump into things and can find her way home
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KC fails, and little waldo arms for picking up things : under her microscope, should the need arrive.” shook his head. “Uh-huh. What did this beast H”
; sir, there’s the beauty of it. Nothing. Not a dime.” ‘ did you manage that? Tell me we aren’t running robot here, Lieutenant. Something you won in a |game with your RA buddies?”
wound me, sir, to suggest such a thing.” 1 butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth, either. Give.” here is a test model, from CamCanada, up in x They specialize in making devices to inspect the of big pipelines, checking weld integrity, hunting like that, but they are looking to get into the I and military market. This is one of three prototypes : off for tests. The Mounties have one, one went sultan somewhere in the Middle East, and we ; third. We test it out under field conditions, write and for our trouble, we get one of the first i when they go into full production, absolutely free Well. Except for the maintenance contract, of e. But that’s nothing.” ^resting.”
i picked up a remote and pushed a button. The little ^whirred.
t does all the usual forward, back, left, and right stuff, : POV cam shows an image right here on the hand- IDigital images and sound, and instant capture of info own wireless modem and DVD burner, which are here somewhere. Those can be plugged into just : any computer for study and analysis.” I held the remote so Howard could see it. “Everything afed out the wazoo, structural components are from titanium or aircraft aluminum, and you Uy set off a stick of dynamite ten feet away t hurting it. Got a gyroscope for balance, low center avity, and she’s very stable.” s brought the robot close enough to them so he could
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kick it. His combat boot drove it back a few feet, but it whirred and stayed upright. He touched a control. “This shuts off the gyroscope. Watch.”
He moved to the little device, which was slightly shorter than knee-high, and managed, with some effort, to shove it over onto its side with his foot.
The robot whined, and a rubber-tipped metal rod extruded from the robot’s side and shoved it back upright.
“Automatic righting system,” he said. “She can pick herself right up and keep on going. A byproduct of BattleBot technology, I’m told.”
He picked up another remote and pushed a button. The windowless warehouse got very dark.
Howard saw the remote control’s screen light up, and the false-color IR images of himself and Julio, looking like two washed-out ghosts, appeared on the screen.
“Lieutenant, I believe you just turned me into a Caucasian.”
Julio chuckled. The false-color computer-augmented image tinted Howard’s skin slightly darker, but no more man a redhead’s tan might be.
“Only with the lights off, sir.”
< He switched the lights back on. "But wait, here's the really fun thing," he said. He touched another button, and the robot hissed like a giant lizard, leaped two feet into the air, flew about four feet forward, and came down. It clunked when it landed, but not hard enough to knock anything loose.