redRobe

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

  ‘Three days,’ Axl reminded him. ‘And if internal bleeding doesn’t off you, then blood poisoning will. Of course, if one of you had remembered a combat stretcher ...'

  There wasn’t much a Matsui couldn’t do, from basic blood replenishment to shutting down everything except vital functions before putting the body into suspension. But defMoma hadn’t come out expecting resistance, which showed what she knew. Axl spat, and grinned inside as Colonel Emilio repressed a shudder.

  Not surprisingly the man didn’t want to die and Axl didn’t want the grief that went with slotting a UN officer, so they compromised. Colonel Emilio casually gathered up his reins and backed slowly away as if the situation didn’t exist.

  To an outsider it probably looked as if the Colonel was leading a group back to the village, and that group just happened to include Tukten and a shaking Mai. Just as Axl happened to be there, with a zytel-handled snubPup that coincidentally was pointing at Colonel Emilio’s back.

  After twenty minutes passed, Axl got bored with shadowing the Colonel and fell back to check on the conscript. He was unconscious and breathing through a self-cutting tracheagate fired into his throat below his crushed larynx. Axl felt nothing but surface guilt about taking him down. All the same… somewhere in the back of Axl’s head there was real guilt, looping away like thin monophonic synth, at what he’d done to Tukten.

  Axl sighed. He could pretend he just hadn’t recognised the boy who’d ridden out with Clone from Cocheforet when he had been their prisoner. Or he could admit that he hadn’t wanted to recognise the Tibetan boy.

  Which was less stupid? Axl didn’t know. The thin notes continued, climbing higher, but going precisely nowhere.

  That was the way they trooped into Cocheforet, the hoofs of the Colonel’s horse splashing freckles of mud onto a thin crowd of Tibetan and ‘fugee kids who’d gathered behind him as he rode towards the Inn.

  Adults watched from open doorways or from the safety of upstairs windows. None of them came out onto the muddy street except for Kate who stood alone on open ground in front of the Inn, her arms folded and face furious.

  ‘You can’t arrest Mai,’ Kate protested.

  Colonel Emilio looked down at the woman blocking his way and smiled. Soon the man would have a double chin to go with his heavy jowls and neat salt and pepper moustache, but for the moment most women still counted him as handsome and the Colonel knew it.

  ‘I can’t?’ Fussily he pushed back a streak of greying hair that had flopped forward. Only a sudden twist of his thin mouth revealed that he’d just started to enjoy himself.

  ‘No,’ said Kate fiercely. ‘You can’t.’

  ‘I haven’t…’ Colonel Emilio said. Hope flared in Kate’s eyes, so palpable that even those watching from the windows could see it.

  ‘. . . though, I must admit,’ added the Colonel, ‘I did intend to.’

  ‘But you haven’t?’ Kate said it like she couldn’t quite believe it.

  ‘No,’ said Colonel Emilio, signalling to his troops to move away from Axl, ‘he has.’ And the man pointed smugly to where Axl stood at the back, near Tukten.

  Chapter Forty-One

  Ashes on Diamonds

  Kate refused to look at Axl, even when she put the bowl of tsampa on the table in front of him and carefully, silently put a narrow bronze spoon beside it. And not just because it had taken Axl sticking a gun to Louis’s head to get Kate to give him the soulcatcher back.

  ‘Why do this to yourself?’ Axl asked. She hadn’t answered his other questions either last night or so far this morning, and had turned away when he tried to talk about Mai so Axl wasn’t quite sure why he expected her to answer this one, but she did.

  ‘Because Louis refused.’

  No one needed to tell Axl what that meant. Obedient little Louis had been with Kate since she was born. Louis had watched her grow up and gone into exile with her on the inside of some half-arsed stone bicycle wheel. He refused her nothing.

  But he wouldn’t serve Axl breakfast. And nor it seemed would anyone else at Escondido except Kate. So now she was putting a wooden bowl of buttered tea beside his plate while he sat there feeling sick, and not just because nearly three weeks of life on Samsara had left him hating the tea’s oil-slick taste and the acid etch of tannin it left behind his teeth. But if Kate could bring herself to serve him food then, tiredness or not, he could eat it—and in silence if necessary—while she watched.

  The lack of a door slamming or even closing softly behind him showed that Kate remained in the room. What there wasn’t, was any sense of the woman’s presence. Where she stood was empty space, colder than the dawn chill that sucked what little heat Escondido possessed out through the dining room’s open window.

  Axl had opened it and Kate had done nothing but shiver slightly and then force her body not even to do that. She wasn’t going to close the window and nothing would have brought her to ask him to do so. Kate was teaching herself to live with the ice core that was growing like cancer inside her.

  Logged somewhere in Tsongkhapa’s memory would be a grab of the sequence where Kate had to be dragged off Axl, screaming and still trying to rip open his face. And before Ketzia pulled her away, Kate managed to land one good blow. A vicious punch that had Axl spitting bits of broken back tooth into the mud.

  Even the Peruvian conscripts cheered. Only Mai still looked blank as if she really couldn’t believe what was happening to her. And it was only late yesterday evening, after he’d padlocked both Mai and himself into her room, that Axl realised the Japanese kid thought it was all a mistake. She had no memory of being implanted with Joan’s dreams. And if it hadn’t been for Axl's bleak expression, Mai would have kept on believing he was lying, or deluded or both.

  Instead, Mai now knew that everyone she had met on Samsara who’d offered to help intended to betray her, if not in one way then in another. She was an object to all of them, to be sold, bought or traded.

  She was upstairs in her room now, lying fully dressed on her bed and staring at the ceiling. Which was what she’d been doing all night. Axl knew that for a fact, most of his night had been spent trying to stay awake as he sat guard on his prisoner. Quite who’d ended up most tired was hard to say.

  Just once, when the sulphate had burned out to a dull headache, Axl had blanked for about five minutes; but when consciousness snapped back in, his gun was still in his hand and Mai was still there, staring at her darkened ceiling with eyes that he recognised. There been a kid in New York who used to watch the night go past like that, but that wasn’t a memory Axl planned to crack open.

  Axl asked, turning round to look at Kate.

  ‘Is Mai ready?’ He meant was Mai packed.

  ‘Ready for what?’ Kate shot back. ‘To be tortured, raped… Why don’t you tell her what you’ve got planned and I’ll ask her?’ Her words were as sharp as whip cracks and as loud.

  Axl winced. Combat readiness had never been a problem, but Axl hated loud. Those kind of shouting arguments left him knotted up inside, his mouth sour with rising vomit like some drunk. He pretended it was training; speak softly, carry a big gun… But it was an emotional cowardice that the dregs of life in that home had enamelled to the inside of his mind.

  In Manhattan one broad daylight afternoon in April, he’d put a blade into the guts of an Italian grandfather rather than shout back. It was on the corner of 12th and Sixth, outside a derelict Mongolian Bar-B-Q.

  A small-time Don had promised the new owners his men would rid the place of vermin before they arrived, and Axl was one of the rats. His knife went into the man’s gut because at ten Axl was too short to reach his heart.

  ‘I wasn’t the one who purchased some kid to use as a memory dump,’ Axl said coldly

  Kate flushed. ‘It wasn’t a memory dump,’

  ‘No,’ said Axl bitterly, ‘just dreams, that’s different, isn’t it?’ He yawned, though only half of it was pretence.

  ‘At least I didn’t lie my way in here.’
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  ‘It’s me or Emilio,’ said Axl. ‘You want me to give her to PaxForce?’ Axl would die rather then let that happen, probably literally, but Kate wasn’t to know that.

  ‘Could they be any worse?’

  Jesus fuck. ‘Could it’. . .’

  That was the point when anger became irrelevant, at least to Axl. Just a cheap adrenaline high that was helping him keep awake. If Kate didn’t know the difference between PaxForce and what he was doing ...

  ‘And where did you find her?’ Axl asked, voice hard.

  Kate opened her mouth to shout, then paused.

  ‘Did Mai volunteer?’ Axl said into Kate’s sudden silence. ‘Or maybe she’s getting paid to babysit your lover’s bad dreams?’ Without giving Kate a chance to answer, Axl picked his revolver off the table and pushed it into the back of his belt. Then he reached out for the snubPup he’d taken from defMoma and no one in paxForce had dared to demand back.

  ‘Well…’ he asked Kate. ‘Did she volunteer?’ Like we both don’t know the answer to that, Axl thought bitterly. ‘You took someone off the streets. Me, I’m just putting them back.’

  ‘She’ll be killed,’ Kate said.

  ‘No,’ said Axl as he pushed back his chair and slung the snubPup’s neoprene sling over one shoulder, ‘the Cardinal’s not like that.’ Others were, though… Axl was about to wonder where that thought had come from when Kate’s face twisted into a sneer. But what started out as bitter laugh ended up a swallowed sob.

  ‘Not like that. . . ?’

  She didn’t say anymore and she didn’t need to. No one had been able to explain why Cardinal Santo Ducque had let Joan walk out alone into a crowd of feral children, without her guards. Although that hadn’t stopped everyone from CySat to the Emperor Maximillia herself from speculating.

  If Axl had to guess why the Cardinal had failed to keep Joan II safe, he’d guess it was because Joan didn’t want to be safe. She hadn’t come to Mexico to hide behind a fortified fence in the Sasrario in Day Effé or at the Villa Carlotta ...

  The Cardinal was as powerful as any other metaNational CEO of a regional fief. Maybe more, at least he could play the moral dimension when realekonomik failed. But not even control of a yearly income bigger than the GDP of most subSahal national debts could change the fact that Joan was his boss.

  Manoeuvering was one thing, full-on rebellion was not the Cardinal’s way. And the old bastard wasn’t stupid enough to try. Losing battles was the fastest way to lose authority. And nothing on earth would made the Cardinal fight a war he already knew was lost before it began.

  Joan however… Axl remembered the marble steps, the absolute certain acceptance that death was coming. Her enemies might have chosen how but she’d chosen where.

  ‘Look,’ Axl’s voice was flat, hard. He held up one hand. Most truths were better left unsaid—that was his view anyway—and the reasoning behind Joan’s death was one of them. But if Kate wanted facts she was going to get them.

  ‘She went there to die,’ said Axl; ‘I know, I’ve been inside her head.’

  Kate froze, mid-breath. One hand still clasping a chair, knuckles going white where they gripped the wood of the chair back. What had been anger changed to shock as questions backed up, log-jamming each other in their need to get asked and spilled over into the only question Kate really wanted answering.

  ‘Why?’

  Axl shrugged. ‘Maybe she’d got bored.’

  And maybe he was just being a bastard for the sake of it. Joan had known she was going to die, though, and an elite SWAT team from the Cardinal’s Guard couldn’t have saved her…

  Nor, once that shot was fired, could an automated combat stretcher or an immediate airlift to the nearest hospital, had either been possible. Curare acted too fast. The kill was a professional job, well done. . . Cranks were ingenious and fanatics, well, fanatical but that hit had been organised, orchestrated.

  ‘Face it,’ said Axl, ‘if Joan died it was because she didn’t want to be saved.’

  It was only will-power that stopped Kate slapping him but Axl stepped back anyway, to let her sweep past him, head erect and back ramrod stiff as she walked through the open door and headed for the main stairs that led towards Mai’s room.

  Axl wished he could say what hit him most was the fall of Kate’s long dark hair or the proud way she kept her shoulders pulled back, but it wasn’t. What took him by the throat was the shape of those perfect breasts beneath her shirt and the fact her tears were entirely silent.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Exit the Tag Team

  Colonel Emilio, defMoma, the Peruvian kids with big eyes and bigger guns all vanished during the night while Axl sat guard on Mai, taking their Honda GyroBykes with then. Behind them, PaxForce left firepits that still smoked, stinking outdoor latrines and SERIOUS tagged in gloPaint on a dozen already-decrepit buildings.

  And everyone in Cocheforet was ecstatic about their leaving except for Axl, who didn’t know whether to be worried or just plain relieved.

  Now Axl had left Cocheforet too and both the village and valley were half a day behind him. For Axl that was life’s one small blessing. Nothing could make him go back to that Inn or the jumble of crude shacks slung along a track that went precisely nowhere. Leon, his customers, the snot-nosed, dirty-arsed Tibetan children, all had lined up in silence early that morning to watch Axl and Mai ride through, followed after by Kate, Ketzia and Tukten. Of those last three only Kate and Ketzia had horses. At the back of the small group traipsed Louis, looking close to tears again. Hatred for Axl rose from the small crowd like steam.

  Even the strays dogs had fallen silent.

  Not one of that crowd wouldn’t have knocked Axl from his horse given even a fifth of a chance. But the Browning snubPup that rested across his saddle had reduced even Leon to the status of a sullen spectator.

  Maybe they’d intended to attack and lost their nerve or maybe the villagers had never got beyond thinking about it but all they did was spit and mutter. One stone hurled accurately or the steel edge of a spade swung into the small of his back would have been enough. Riots had been born from less. But they were ‘fugees, Axl reminded himself. Helpless, hopeless ... It was hard to know who held the other in most contempt.

  Kate wasn’t riding to keep Mai company, she’d told Axl. She was going to Vajrayana to lodge a formal complaint. Those were the words she used. Axl wasn’t surprised. Most of the women he’d fucked would have told him they intended to have his head, but Kate had a complaint to lodge.

  Axl shrugged. Let her lodge it. And if Kate, Louis and Ketzia held him responsible for all that had happened, let them. He wasn’t afraid of the machete that dangled unsheathed from Ketzia’s hip, of Kate’s cold disdain or Louis’s open hatred.

  As for Tukten, he was glued to Mai’s side, jogging beside the saddle of her shaggy pony as if he’d finally found his place in life. Besides, not even Tsongkhapa would go against a properly conducted arrest. Axl had been given a job to do and finally he’d done it. Everything else had been killing time.

  He had nothing to regret, so what gave with the sparsely-layered acid trance that rolled into his head like mist from the steep slope around him… ? Axl didn’t know. But no matter where he looked or what he thought, he couldn’t shift it.

  Kicking his mare forward, Axl kept climbing towards a deep split in the rock face, the reins to Mai’s mountain pony wrapped tight round his wrist. He hadn’t bothered to ask how a village that the night before could only produce one pony, and that in the face of a gun, had suddenly found two extra animals for Kate and Ketzia. The answer was too obvious. Axl was an outsider. And everyone who wasn’t from Cocheforet was an enemy.

  It didn’t seem worth pointing out to Kate how lightly her precious village had got off. There were safety zones back on earth where no buildings still stood, where every child had been found binned and bagged in a corner, their throats cut.

  No men in Cocheforet had been forced at gunpoint to sodomise th
eir daughters, no mothers had to choose between biting off the testicles of their fathers or their sons. Not one person had been disembowelled, buried alive or hosed with gel from an unlit flame gun and then forced to light a match. There were no body pits for outside observers to dig up and divide the number of toes by five to reach a tally of the dead.

  Axl was as angry as he was shattered. Just how angry he found it hard to admit. The problem was, it wasn’t really with them.

  Hoofs slid as Axl’s mount hit a stream flowing so shallow across rock as to be almost unseen. The landscape was cold and quiet and all the rock near the summit was black. At noon, an eerie mist had rolled down the scree-strewn mountain side and promptly vanished after filling everyone’s lungs with wet air. And by afternoon Axl’s spine ached and the inside of his thighs burnt from where they chaffed against his damp saddle. More worryingly, the countdown inside his eye had hit 96.00.00 and promptly changed colour, from white to pink. Now Axl was ignoring it as he intended to ignore it the next time it jacked itself up a colour code.

  Five miles every hour would have been excellent progress, if only they could have managed it. Most times their speed was closer to four or even three, no faster than a human walk. Except no human could have climbed that path without stops the way the ponies did. Either they were a truly resilient mountain breed or germline mods had been made back up the line to allow increased oxygen absorption. Though, God knew, it felt like if the air got any thinner it would disappear altogether.

  Axl didn’t know what kind of preNatal zipcoding Samsara allowed or required, but the Red Cross had to be doing some kind of germline splicing on ‘fugees to help preborns adapt.

  Kate sat white-faced with fatigue and winced everytime her horse stumbled, which was every second step. Ketzia and Tukten just scowled. As for Louis, Axl couldn’t see him, the little priest was too far behind. Mai was the only one who seemed unconcerned. But that wasn’t a good sign, at least Axl didn’t think so. Since being told she had Joan’s nightmares backed up on the wrong side of her unconscious, Mai had taken to talking to herself, as if in conversation with what little of her real self was left.