Q & A - Keith R. A. DeCandido [4]
What Beverly did know about martial arts related mostly to the injuries people tended to incur while practicing them. Worf’s recent return to the ship had meant a resumption of his Mok’bara classes and a concomitant rise in muscle strains and tears, bone bruises, and the occasional fracture, and it looked like Leybenzon was getting into the act as well.
When Leybenzon reached thirty, he stopped counting. Each of the students—who, Beverly realized, were all members of the security detail—stood stock-still, left arm extended from the final punch.
“Reset,” Leybenzon then said, and they all crossed their arms in front of their faces while pulling their right foot in toward their left. After half a second, they lowered their arms below their belt and settled into a stance that looked a lot like the traditional military “at ease” pose.
“Front-leaning stance, downward parry,” Leybenzon said. “Go!”
At that, all the students stepped back with their right foot and used their left arm to parry downward, their right arm pulling in so their fist was at their right hip. All stood in what Beverly assumed to be the front-leaning stance Leybenzon had called for: left leg bent, knee directly over foot, with the right leg unbent and at an angle. It didn’t look especially comfortable to Beverly, but it was a stance that would build strength in the leg muscles.
Leybenzon was pacing now. Sweat gleamed on his high forehead, his close-cropped brown hair having receded almost to the top of his crown. His hazel eyes peered out at the security personnel past a bulbous nose that sat over a thick mustache. “Step in,” Leybenzon said. “Downward parry, middle inside block, middle outside block, upper block, then middle inside block/downward parry twice. One!”
All of them angled the front foot, then stepped forward so they were in the same front-leaning stance, but with the right foot forward. They each did a sequence of blocks that Beverly assumed corresponded to the five blocks Leybenzon called out. While they all did the initial downward parry in relative unison, they were not simultaneous in their execution of this combination. Stolovitzky, Kapsis, and de Lange were ahead of the others, perhaps not surprisingly, and Campagna, Balidemaj, and Chao were keeping up fairly well. Others were lagging behind, and some—particularly those in the back row—weren’t executing the blocks properly.
“Two!”
They did it again. Two in the back row utterly lost it, finally just giving up and setting their hands in position for the last of the blocks so they were ready for the next set.
“Faster! Three!”
By now they were close to the middle of the floor, only a few meters from where Beverly was standing. She moved back a bit to play it safe.
“Four!” After a second, and before most of them were done, “Five, finish!”
Leybenzon shook his head. “Pathetic. If you had been with me at Chin’toka, we would have lost the planet again. Okay. Turn around!”
They each set up for the downward parry again, twisted around, and did the parry with their backs to Beverly.
This time Leybenzon went from one to five much faster. The entire back row—front row, now—was struggling.
Shaking his head some more, Leybenzon said, “Reset.”
Again, they all went to the “at ease” position, facing forward.
“I see the next few months will be difficult. These are simple combinations, ones that children can do. I am shuddering at what might happen if we have to enter combat. Okay. Down stomach!”
They all fell to the floor on their stomachs, ready to do push-ups.
“Thirty push-ups,” Leybenzon said. “Begin.”
Beverly took this opportunity to approach the security chief. “Excuse me, Lieutenant?”
“Now is not a good time,” Leybenzon said without even turning to look at Beverly. He walked toward the back row and pushed down on the shoulders of one of the people who’d been struggling with the combinations—Beverly was pretty sure it was Vogel.
“I don’t think