redRobe

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

  It couldn’t be better. Not for Axl anyway who watched as Clone yanked roughly on the reins of his horse and galloped back the way they’d all come. A minute or so later he vanished behind a low bank of scrub and Axl was left alone with the Tibetan boy, who was now looking more nervous than ever.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Rinpoche

  ‘Ride,’ the boy demanded, scowling at Axl.

  No way. Axl was going to negotiate his way out of this one. Only when Axl smiled and shook his head, Tukten lifted the heavy revolver with both hands, fingers of his left hand steadying those of the right, just like you saw on NVPD/Live.

  The long barrel shook so badly it looked like the boy was running a fever.

  Fear did that to you. Fucked up the adrenal levels without damping down neural feedback. Not that understanding this was any consolation to Axl who sat right in the path of any bullet. The kid was frightened and the kid was armed, no one had to tell Axl that this wasn’t a good mixture.

  From the wrong end of the revolver it looked like the thing packed a 250 grain, conical bullet, soft lead with no jacketing. Which gave the revolver a muzzle velocity of 900 feet per second. More than adequate. And mechanically the gun looked so simple there was little chance it was going to jam any time soon.

  But what worried Axl most wasn’t the revolver’s .45 calibre or its muzzle velocity, it was the amount of shake Tukten was giving to the barrel. Rock solid told you the guy with his finger round the trigger was either a psycho or had done it before, probably often. Rank amateurs Axl identified by the dangerous level of hand-jive their fear imparted to the barrel. The ones in between presented no problem to anyone, being slower, less clued-up and a lot less mean than they’d like to believe.

  ‘Point it somewhere else,’ Axl suggested, and kicked his mare into reluctant action, heading back towards Cocheforet. It looked like good advice wasted. The bullet didn’t come, but then nor did Tukten. And Axl turned to find the Tibetan boy holding the revolver with straight arms, as far away from his own body as possible. The barrel still shook as if Tukten was running a come-down but the revolver was very definitely pointed straight at Axl.

  Taking him across the plateau wasn’t the boy’s job after all, Axl realised with shock. He’d misread Clone’s unspoken instructions completely. Tukten was meant to kill him and dump his body for wolf feed. Sure, the kid was frightened by the charnel ground but not as scared as he was at the thought of having to shoot someone.

  Big casino, little casino. It was a virginity that no one got back.

  Axl swung round the head of his mare and rode slowly back towards the trembling boy who looked, for one flustered moment, as if he was about to try to get his own mount to back up. Instead, he gripped the revolver tighter, knuckles whitening around its crude wooden grip.

  If Axl had ever needed his Colt now was the time. Or maybe not. The boy would have been dead already.

  ‘Stay back,’ Tukten demanded.

  Axl didn’t. He kicked his heels softly into the mare’s flanks and pushed her forward a few paces, his eye firmly on the boy’s face. Looking into someone’s face as you killed them was difficult enough when killing was what you did as the day job and Tukten wasn’t yet angry enough to pull the trigger out of anything except fear. At least, Axl hoped he wasn’t.

  ‘Come on,’ Axl told Tukten, ‘give me the gun.’

  The boy tightened his grip, eyes widening.

  ‘We’ll ride back together,’ Axl said hastily reining in his horse, but Tukten wasn’t listening. The connection was gone.

  When the shot came its blast sent a black cloud of Egyptian vultures spiralling skyward but Axl was too busy dropping sideways from his spooked mare and rolling behind the nearest boulder to notice. And it took him until his ears stopped ringing to realise he hadn’t been injured.

  ‘Fucking terrific,’ said a voice behind him and a silver monkey crashed into the dirt, a jagged hole torn in one wing. ‘Can’t leave you alone for a minute.’

  As Axl watched the hole mended itself, closing up from the edges like liquid mercury coming together. It didn’t take a genius to know that the Colt was back on line, sort of ...

  ‘You trying to get yourself shot, eh?’ Rinpoche demanded. ‘And what were you going to do if I didn’t turn up? Frighten him to death with your fucking face?’

  The monkey paused, took a look at the black cavity where Axl’s missing eye had been and twisted its lips into a rueful grin, thin lips sliding back to show gold canines. ‘Been picking fights you can’t win?’

  Yeah, thought Axl, mostly with life, but he didn’t admit that to the monkey. Instead he gazed pointedly at the raw skid mark its landing had carved into the plateau grass.

  ‘Fucking air density’s fucked,’ the monkey said furiously, tripping over one of its own wings as it stood up. ‘You any idea how badly this check-the-real-altitude, then add-ten-thousand-feet-to-get-virtual-altitude shit fucks up basic aerodynamics?’

  Axl shook his head.

  ‘Didn’t think so,’ said Rinpoche. ‘It’s a fucking miracle anyone can get a sodding helicopter to move in these conditions ...' The monkey looked over at the terrified boy. ‘What’s with Mowgli?’

  ‘He’s scared.’

  ‘He should try dropping through the upper atmosphere of this place. Wind like a cosmic fart. Not to mention more fucking hardware up there than there are HondaGlydes on the Beltway…’

  ‘Security?’

  ‘Plus CySat, C3N, TimeWarner. Simple peasants fanning the homestead, brave hunters, furry little bears scooping fish from crystal streams. This place is a fucking goldmine ...' The silver monkey turned its attention to wings which spread across the ground behind it.

  ‘Lose those for a start,’ Rinpoche said crossly and both immediately shrank, thickening as they did. ‘The wings are a given,’ it told Axl with a sigh, ‘coded into the animus, but there are style choices.’ The monkey shut its eyes, which looked horribly like real rubies, and ran some permutations. Gold scales, bronze feathers so perfect they looked real, wings of transparent glass, the monkey rejected them all without even opening its eyes.

  ‘Small,’ Axl told it, ‘something basic…’

  ‘Basic!’ Rinpoche glared at Axl and did a quick pirouette on the damp grass, showing off jewels that ran like exposed vertebrae down its spine. ‘Does this look fucking basic?’ All the same it let its wings stabilise to two bat-like sails that opened and closed around hollow silver spars. The downy skin between the thin spars was niello black.

  Axl forgotten, Rinpoche ambled over to Tukten and yanked his foot, tugging the slack-mouthed boy off his pony. It took the revolver from Tukten’s unprotesting hands.

  ‘Move and you join them.’ The silver monkey jerked one small thumb towards the corpses. ‘Okay?’

  Tukten nodded.

  ‘Piece of shit,’ said Rinpoche, but it was talking about the revolver not the boy. ‘Even for this place.’ It snapped out the cylinder to check the machining, then snapped the cylinder back into place and spun it hard, counting off the few brief seconds it took for the five chambers to come to a halt. Still scowling, the monkey flipped the gun forwards over its trigger finger and sighted along the barrel.

  ‘I’ve seen kids make better toys.’

  Without pausing, the monkey passed its hands swiftly over the revolver, its fingers moving faster and faster until they blurred. Which was the point Axl realised they really had disappeared, into a steel-grey smoke of freeform nanetics.

  Somewhere inside that cloud a metal matrix so thin it was invisible to the human eye was holding the ex-revolver in place while subatomic assemblers crawled over its surface like dust mites, breaking millions of molecular bonds as Rinpoche rebuilt the weapon from the ground up. Growing the parts it needed rather than cutting them down from steel blanks, the way a semiAI or a human would. It reworked the metal too, rebalancing the carbon content of the barrel and cylinder, folding the steel like filo into thousands of invisible Tole
do layers.

  It would have preferred to work in ceramic but was making do with the source materials at hand, that way was quicker. When Rinpoche passed the revolver back to Axl the only thing about it that was the same was the overall shape. Form fits the function and the silver monkey might not like the inevitable side effects of Samuel Colt’s ingenuity but it had no problems with the man’s original sense of aesthetics.

  Axl tossed the remade revolver from hand to hand, spun it once round his trigger finger and then flipped out the cylinder. Everything fitted flush, like it had been machined by an anally-repressed semiAI to dangerously minimal tolerances. Smiling, Axl tapped the cylinder back into place and watched it spin.

  ‘Yeah,’ said the winged monkey, ‘very pretty. Now about those housekeeping routines for you ...' It grabbed Axl’s skull and, before Axl could pull free, warmth bathed his face. ‘Not carrying credit chips are you? Good… They’d only be wiped.’

  Ruby-red irises peered deep into Axl’s synthetic eye. ‘Okay,’ said the animal. ‘The good news is there’s more spare hardware inside your head than suits in a sushi bar. The bad news is that eye’s about to fail.’

  ‘Remake it,’ Axl suggested heavily.

  ‘Can’t,’ said Rinpoche, then changed its mind. ‘Well, I could, obviously, but it’s a sealed unit and pretty cheap at that. Why fuck around with an emulation when we’ve got more spares than Bodies’r Us… ?’

  Unfurling its wings, the monkey twisted its head as if getting rid of a nasty crick in its neck and kicked off from the ground, pinions spreading as black wings caught and rode the bitter wind.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Axl shouted after it and Rinpoche grinned.

  ‘Shopping.’

  * * * *

  They were exactly what he thought they were, unfortunately for Axl.

  Cupped in the palm of the monkey’s hand lay two eyes, slippery with mucus and trailing fat sticky skeins of optic nerve. Blood coated the animal’s fingers and little slivers of flesh were trapped beneath its glass nails.

  ‘Farm fresh,’ it told Axl grinning. ‘Thought we’d have had to improvise until I ran into monks carrying a teenage lama. He was almost dead anyway.’

  ‘You killed him?’ Axl tried not to sound shocked.

  ‘Me? Rinpoche? Kill a priest?’ The monkey grinned. ‘How stupid do you think I am? I waited.’

  Neither of them talked after that. Axl because he couldn’t with his face gripped in the monkey’s paws. The AI, which had once been the Colt and was now a silver monkey templated from Tsongkhapa's memory of a Bon myth, because it couldn’t spare processing power to run the necessary vocal sub-routines. Besides, it didn’t see the need to talk. The man had blacked out as soon as fingers were dipped into his orbital socket to scoop out the RedCross eye.

  Rinpoche worked fast. Admittedly not as fast or as flashily as when it had remade the revolver because this time it was working with living tissue and besides who was there to impress? Axl’s brain had toggled consciousness to standby and the blank-faced boy was too deep in shock to pay attention to anything.

  The new eye was 20/20. Undamaged cornea, a clear perfectly-shaped lens and an ideal ratio of rod to cone cells lining the retina. So good it could have been grown to order. It also had an iris of unnaturally intense brown, as bright and shiny as the speckled shell on a newly-opened horse chestnut.

  All Rinpoche had to do was amend the eye for infrared and a couple of colours the human eye couldn’t usually see.

  Having grafted the optic nerves and reattached Axl’s rectus muscles, the silver monkey adjusted a tiny dip-switch that fed off the optic nerve further up the line, popped the new eyeball into its waiting socket and began to concentrate on the ruined pit that was Axl’s other eye.

  Smoke flowed from its fingers as assemblers broke free from the hand to reassemble in the wounded hollow of Axl’s eye socket. Scar tissue was cut back to raw flesh beneath and then the nanites began to rebuild, matching and shaping to a mirror image of what Rinpoche had memorised from the socket of Axl’s other eye.

  Work done, the silver monkey grafted and stitched, not with thread but molecular chains, amending proteins to regrow muscle fibre and extend the optic nerve.

  ‘Okay,’ said the monkey. ‘Almost done.’ Fingers danced over Axl’s face and it was like watching torture in reverse, scar tissue and bruises disappearing beneath the silver monkey’s touch.

  ‘Now let’s get you back to Buttfuck, Hicksville. . .’ Rinpoche walked across to where Tukten was sat blank-faced by his pony, and crouched down in front of the boy, looking for some sign of intelligent life.

  ‘Well… life, anyway,’ the monkey said sourly to itself as Tukten blinked and gaped at the silver animal sat in front of him. ‘Wait until he wakes up and then get him back to Cocheforet, understand? I’m relying on you.’ Metal fingers that could have cracked stone reached out and gripped the boy’s jaw lightly in one hand.

  ‘Just don’t let me down.’

  Chapter Thirty

  Enter the Tag Team

  Fuck-wit.

  Either the sound system was faulty or Rinpoche had amused himself by intentionally degrading the hardware until the backing track inside Axl’s head sounded as tacky as some kid’s home-grown deck. Every high note was tinny and the bass muffled down to the consistency of wet flannel.

  He recognised the track all the same, a heavily remixed WarChild cut from fruity loops of temple gong instead of dry snare. And if it was Rinpoche’s idea of a joke, Axl didn’t care—it still stank.

  Though not as much as Rinpoche’s other little retro augmentation.

  The timecode was white, digital primitive and running backwards. The tiny almost transparent numerals floated on the edge of Axl’s vision, at the top left of his left eye, somewhere about 10 o’clock.

  The read-out didn’t click from 000.00.00 to 187.59.59 until Axl shook himself awake and it’d counted back to 187.54.00 before Axl even noticed them. He was too busy coping with reality in 3-D, colour and surround sound.

  SS St Bernadote/Sept-21/13.00. Slot allocated for take-off. Time remaining to allocated slot. . . Axl only realised he been reading the departure authorisation for the Nuncio’s cruiser when the words scrolling down his sight vanished leaving him staring at a worried looking Tukten.

  * * * *

  Now the numbers were dim inside his head-low night setting-and read 183.38.39. And while Axl recognised a timecode when he saw one, he was trying hard not to think what else the digits might be counting down. Just in case it was something important like his own life.

  Only, given the four UN conscripts strung across the track leading into Cocheforet, there was a chance Axl might not even last that long. They held snubPup Brownings, hip high, supported by neoprene slings twisted casually round their right arms, thumbs brushing each user-verification chip and fingers wrapped round waiting triggers.

  No diodes were lit to confirm that safety catches were off or squat magazines were loaded, but that was because duct tape had been wrapped round zytel butts, blocking them off. All four men had their visors down and Axl had no doubt that they’d been watching him on infrared the whole way in ...

  The backbeat in his head upped tempo, bpms tied to his heartbeat, then slowed as Axl caught and hog-tied his irritation. The R3 reMix coming together clean, the sound system having kicked back to top quality once it had run that tattered, tacky WarChild intro. Now he had brushes dusting over a single snare like blown dust.

  Read, Reconnoitre and get it Right

  Fifty paces beyond the picket, three more conscripts and a Tibetan girl were sprawled on damp grass next to a dead goat, passing a giant spliff between them, while next to a hurricane lamp a fourth soldier fussed over a Braun portable grill that refused to ignite.

  Axl didn’t recognise the Tibetan girl, but that meant nothing. He’d barely been in Cocheforet time enough to learn more than half a dozen names. She was laughing, except the laughter didn’t reach her eyes. She didn’t
mean it. In situations like this people never did, but they kept smiling just in case it might make a difference.

  Axl knew all about it, he’d been on both ends of that equation and neither left a good taste in his mouth.

  One huge hand gripped the girl’s wrists and still managed to keep a spliff between two fat fingers, while the conscript’s other hand fumbled at the bottom of her grey felt skirt trying to find its hem. No matter how hard she laughed and wriggled that hand was going to find its way between her legs eventually. Just as Axl knew he was going to let the matter ride.

  The alternative was putting a bullet through the back of the big man’s head and splattering his shit-for-brains all over the girl beneath, but that meant getting killed in return and Axl wasn’t prepared for that. So instead Axl grabbed the reins of Tukten’s pony and kicked his own mare into a trot, dragging Tukten behind him as he headed towards the conscripts blocking his path.

  All of them were dressed in cheap PaxForce combats, cut from die kind of chameleon cloth that did its best to blend in with the background but was always a second or two behind. Over the jump-suits they wore heat-retaining kevlar flak jackets topped with polymer helmets featuring roll-down NBC masks and tiny built-in geek mikes. Boron patches were spot epoxied onto the transparent flaks above the heart. They wore shoulder armour too, running Tsunami software that could flip from soft to hard at the merest suggestion of a blow.

  The jump-suits might be cheap but both helmet and flaks cost more than most PaxForce conscripts got paid in a year. Which wasn’t hard given the UN sourced its troops through an offshore broker called DecSec, who leased regular conscripts from Mauritania, Kazakhstan or Peru depending on the type of mission.

  In theory the lessee countries got paid by the UN but in practice the IMF usually wrote the payment off against outstanding debt.