redRobe

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

  She didn’t deny it.

  ‘Well,’ said Axl, ‘they won’t be able to ...'

  Blue eyes locked onto his, hard and spiteful. Lips thinned. ‘If I were you,’ defMoma said, ‘I wouldn’t place too much faith in tired old men. They die.’

  Axl shot her. What he’d had in mind was something clever involving the grenade holding her prisoner here while he made his excuses, but it just happened. . . And by the time he realised what a fuck-wit idea shooting her was, the fat woman’s heart had a third ventricle and blood was spreading across her vest. The soundtrack had gone silent.

  It was the drugs, Axl told himself as a back beat started up again. Too much sulphate, not enough sleep. Or maybe it was just post-traumatic irony. defMoma certainly looked liked she couldn’t believe anyone could be stupid enough to do what he’d done.

  Check ammo.

  Full clip in his Browning. Three fulls velcroed to his leg and now he had her hiPower too. More than enough to check out what was alive in the other slit and kill it.

  Axl drum-rolled out of defMoma’s foxhole. Common sense said approach the second slit trench silently from the back, but Axl wasn’t doing common sense. Besides they’d already been fragged. And they were kids, scared and under-trained. Been there, survived that. Axl ratcheted back the breech on his SnubPup and…

  Stood.

  Like anyone could be that stupid and not be on camera. He went through his first clip without even realising his finger was on the trigger, hit silence and reloaded without being aware he’d done that, either. The second clip lasted the brief seconds it took him to scramble through the gaping hole he’d just gunned in the camoNet.

  160, 180, 200… The bpm were pushing hardcore, meth jungle even. In the trench up ahead a woman stood, snubPup rising, and Axl lifted the top off her skull without even thinking about it. He hosed out the trench with the rest of his clip, finishing off a grunt already wounded by his earlier grenade, splinters of bone stripping leaves from oaks as the grunt’s head vanished as cleanly as if Axl had taken it off at the neck with a chainsaw.

  Tempo change. Scratch violin chopping out a warning.

  Four, plus one, plus three. Two left.

  Behind him.

  Axl hit the ground ahead of the empty snubPup that swung butt-first towards his skull, rolled sideways and came up onto his knees rough and fast, reversing his Pup and swinging it hard by its barrel straight into a conscript’s knee, Babe Ruth style.

  The grunt crumpled, eyes bulging and mouth wide, too shocked to scream. Instinctively, Axl put an elbow in his throat, silencing him anyway. Strapped to his ankle, the grunt had one of those quick-release glass blades, undetectable by ninety-nine percent of all airport scanners so Axl borrowed it.

  The knife bit into flesh under the conscript’s ear opening a wide bubbling grin. All Axl needed to do to make it a necktie was reach in and yank his tongue out through the slit. Not his style. Instead he put the blade into the kid’s heart and closed his large brown eyes after he fell.

  ‘Borja.’

  Sudden silence. Not even a click track or heartbeat.

  Skin crawled across Axl’s back, hairs rising on his neck. And then he got a low tom-tom line, part goan/partVou that kicked at his stomach and shrivelled his mind into a fetal ball. Someone had just called time.

  Axl knew that when he turned round the Colonel’s salt and pepper hair would still be brushed neatly back from a face that was handsome, despite too much food and not enough exercise. And beneath that full moustache the mouth would be grim but smug. Also, the man would have a gun, something expensive and it would be pointed straight at Axl’s head.

  Axl was right on all the points, especially the last. The gun was a lovingly retrofitted 1896 Broomhandle Mauser 7.63 machine pistol. The only other kreigsmarine Axl had seen was in a Potsdam museum, but that version wasn’t converted for ceramics.

  ‘Going somewhere?’

  Axl nodded. ‘Yeah, things to do…’

  ‘. . . people to kill. Aren’t you bit too old for all that Black Jack shit?’ Colonel Emilio smiled sadly and his smile was every bit as supercilious as Axl had expected.

  ‘It was just a kid’s program, for God’s sake. Cheap American v’Actors laid over a Jap backbone. It wasn’t even good. Or didn’t you notice no one bothered to made a second series?’

  No, Axl could truly say he hadn’t noticed that.

  ‘I killed defMoma,’ Axl said, more for something to say. He was watching the Colonel’s trigger finger go white at the knuckle. Watching that happen saved having to stare into the black nothingness of the kreigsmarine’s barrel. Undoubtedly there was some way to turn this situation, Axl just couldn’t remember what it was. Black Jack would have known, except Black Jack hadn’t made it to a second series.

  ‘Alone, friendless, disgraced…’ Colonel Emilio smiled at Axl. ‘You do know the Cardinal’s finished, don’t you?’

  So everyone kept telling him. Axl felt he should have been glad. Maybe. Less than three hours left to get himself to the Nuncio’s cruiser and apparently he didn’t need to anymore.

  ‘Still, life isn’t all bad,’ said Colonel Emilio. ‘You killed my troops.’ The Colonel didn’t sound too disappointed. ‘And I get to kill you. And you didn’t even know what this was all about.’

  ‘But you’re going to tell me anyway…’

  Colonel Emilio shrugged. ‘What’s the point… The rest of us are doing realpolitik and you’re still running scripts from a kid’s novela. I should have had you killed in La Medicina before this all started.’

  Axl nodded. ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘you should have done.’ He was staring past Colonel Emilio at a shiny object picking its way laboriously over twigs and splintered branches towards the Colonel’s heel. Maybe that whole Alessi retro-chrome shtick. hadn’t been the design disaster he’d originally thought.

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Down Through Zero

  The gyrobike ate up the road like Axl was in some advertisement for nanetic shaving dust, penis transplants, sperm-freezing facilities… Something typically macho but tender.

  Gualagara’s The White Condor ran as backing track, Axl wasn’t big on reworked Dutch trance but he figured it was the Ludwig Van/Tierra del Fuego mix. Light and breezy like the new countryside.

  Each tight curve came up to meet him in an easy blur of hedgerow and overhanging oaks, the straights opening out to zip past on either side. The curves getting less tight and the straights longer each klick the Honda got closer to Vajrayana.

  ‘00.09.59,’ read the Seiko timecode. It had been flashing deeper red, in ten minute bites, for the last fifty minutes. Had Axl had enough time, he’d have stopped and found some way to disconnect it. But the city was at least thirty minutes away and the airport was beyond.

  Axl was going to make that cruiser. Without Kate, without Mai, but at least with himself. Some things you just did, no matter how stupid they appeared to others… He’d broken up one marriage procession, terrified more horses than he dared to remember and only just managed not to leave himself as a smear along the road when he flipped out of a curve and almost went under the wooden wheels of a cart.

  Dutch to Deutsch, the trance choon changed gear and Axl instinctively blipped his throttle, grinning like a lunatic.

  Up ahead brick, wood and stone waterfalled down a high slope, the Potala. Only Vajrayana’s famed palace was clearly visible this distance from the city, as impressive as being face-on to a glacier.

  Vast windows that looked tiny were cut into walls that plummeted hundreds of feet before anchoring to granite below. Inside one of those rooms sat the Dalai Lama and behind the lower, windowless stretch of wall resided Tsongkhapa. At least, that was what half Samsara thought. The rest, including Rinpoche, believed Tsongkhapa was incorporate.

  ‘Everywhere and nowhere,’ insisted Rinpoche. And it wasn’t until Axl was approaching the city he worked out that what the silver monkey had been talking about was widely distributed, infinitel
y parallel computing. Except that the rules of quantum processing meant most of the bit shuffling didn’t actually take place in a sense anyone could understand. At least not in any place that actually existed.

  All possible states just were, simultaneously.

  No wonder the Dalai Lamas had always been such fans.

  Lights flashed. Axl got a sudden drum fill. ‘00.00.00.’ read the pulsing eye implant.

  ‘Tell me about it.’ Axl throttled back to flip into corner, flip out again and blip his accelerator. He was riding the Honda on dumb. The last thing he wanted was some military semiAI trying to second-guess what he had in mind, or just deciding Axl shouldn’t be on the bike anyway.

  Which, of course, he shouldn’t. The gyro was strictly PaxForce issue. And quite probably the reason Axl hadn’t been stopped was the large UN/PF hologram that lit bright above his front and rear mudguard. Though the little recognition chip tucked inside the pocket of his mud, blood and vomit-encrusted cargo pants might also have had something to do with it.

  According to the chip, the man burning off other traffic on the road into Vajrayana was Colonel Emilio, personal envoy of the Emperor of Mexico. Which wasn’t actually true. The real Colonel Emilio was face down in an oak wood with a ceramic through his brain. At least Axl hoped to hell he was, if only on humanitarian grounds, because the alternative was the guy was alive and legless.

  Axl patted his trouser pocket. There were three morphine crawlers clinging to his own leg, dug in by their claws. Another five were still asleep in the pocket.

  * * * *

  Axl had watched as the grenade clawed its way up the side of a rotting branch and tumbled over the top to roll so close to the Colonel Emilio’s boot that had he stepped backward the Colonel would have tripped on it. Giving grenades canine-based smarts made sense, no cat would have been that loyal.

  Or that stupid.

  ‘Explode,’ Axl said simply and the grenade did. One tube only, yet the casing fragged exactly, a femtosecond burst of laser unzipping precisely defined-molecular chains along two horizontal and two shorter vertical axes just ahead of the bioSemtex exploding.

  One second Colonel Emilio had feet, the next he didn’t. Only confused and half-blind with flash, Axl didn’t notice that at first, he was too busy trying to crawl across wet forest floor towards the Colonel’s dropped Mauser.

  Voco’der and theramin. It was as well the WarChild theme loaded direct inside his head, because Axl was too deafened to hear anything happen in the world outside. At first Axl wasn’t sure why he wasn’t moving faster, but then he glanced back and saw that a path of glistening bone below his knee was encrusted caddis-like with grit and dead leaves. Shrapnel had lifted a flap of flesh from his leg as cleanly as any butcher with a cleaver.

  White noise roared in on a wave of sour adrenaline, dying away as Axl slowly realised that getting to the Mauser wasn’t a race he could lose. Not with a slack-jawed Colonel Emilio still sitting where he’d landed, holding one of his own boots with his foot still inside. He was looking bemused, as if he’d never seen either of them before.

  After he’d lifted the Colonel’s identity chip, found six Hondas hidden under netting and crippled them all except the one he wanted, Axl broken open a packet of undertakers and sprinkled them into the f/holes and slits. And then he kicked the gyrobike to life and circled back between the trees to return the Mauser to the Colonel. Leaving it within crawling distance.

  ‘Shoot yourself,’ suggested Axl. ‘You know it’s what everyone wants.’

  * * * *

  The timecode now read -00.19.59 and flashed neon bright. And the ragged Elektrika mix feeding his aural nerves was wound so tight there was nowhere left for its step-fed chord changes to go…

  Axl didn’t need the special effects, he knew he was late.

  Minutes later, tourists scattered in a fruit market built under the walls of a monastery as Axl slid into a skid turn on damp cobbles and gunned the Honda between two stalls, grabbing a green pear on his way past.

  The bpm plummeted, temple bells echoed over chanting. Without needing a cue, he’d hit the human touch.

  The pear was hard and unripe like the soil that produced it, blistered across its belly from grubs eating its skin, but the skin wasn’t polymer and no Monsanto trademark ran down the inside of its core. The pear tasted sour and slightly woody, but Axl finished it anyway. There were people watching.

  Weird as it might seem, he was going to miss Samsara. Seasons happened. Whichever way you looked at it, the place had USPs other destinations couldn’t imagine. You didn’t have to be rich to get in for a start. Though even the Dalai Lama would have trouble keeping the metaNational out once the atmosphere thickened and the temperature got hiked. Unless, of course, Tsongkhapa kept the place like it was. Axl could go for that. . .

  Up ahead the market street split, two narrow lanes leading into shadow. Axl flipped right at random. No reason. Gunning the Honda, he ripped up the middle of a long incline steep enough to have pedestrians hunched forward as they walked. The walls either side were high and bare, windows beginning two floors above street level. The only breaks were sunken doorways that the peds stumbled back into as Axl raced past them.

  And then the narrow street ended. Chopped off abruptly by a white wall at least five-feet thick if the depth of the open arch cut into it was anything to go by.

  ‘-00.29.59,’ read his timecode, but he’d been trying to ignore it since the readout flipped over to black fluoro, nine minutes, fifty-nine seconds ago.

  Each tread in the stairway ahead dipped in the middle from centuries of constant use, except that was impossible and the steps had to have been cut or grown that way.

  Axl could go on, or go back and try to find another route. For once instinct, conditioning and the backing track weren’t feeding him any clues. Twin halogens lit automatically as Axl nudged the Honda through the arch, then blipped the throttle again until the gyrobike began to climb, monoshocks eating up the concussion of each step.

  Under-trained conscripts, yeah. Dubious ethics, ditto doubled. You could say what you like about PaxForce, but they did source the best kit. Back in the jungle that had been one of the reasons Axl made a point of stealing it whenever possible.

  Axl grinned sourly. He was shattered, his limbic system was in neuropeptide free fall, his mind trying to hang onto dopamine like it was some brat refusing to give up a dummy.

  Chances were Axl was going to need a new leg, or at least a splice from the knee down. And when those morphine crawlers shrivelled up and died he was going to be in such pain he hadn’t felt anything like it, at least not since last time.

  And yet...

  Axl blipped the Honda’s throttle and bounced up over the last step, landed heavily and felt ABS and gyro cut in a split second after the back wheel started to slide on marble. He was upright and roaring down a darkened corridor before he’d even had time to worry about hitting the ground. Above him filigreed lamps hung on long brass chains from a high ceiling. Tapestries smothered both walls, flicking by so fast that Axl could get no sense of what they showed, only that red and gold predominated.

  The steady thud of his engine should have roared off the walls but it was missing, swallowed to a low thud by the tapestries. Inside his head an African Sanctus soared into high chant and steady drums. That made no sense to Axl either. He just assumed the sound system he was running had nothing else suitable.

  Every hundred paces a wild-eyed man or woman would appear, blue skinned with lips pulled back to show curved tusks that sprouted from a heavy bottom jaw. The figures were elaborately carved and painted. Bon was what Tukten called them back in the village, and for all Axl knew that was what people called them here too.

  And wherever here was they employed monks to open doors for gyrobikes. At least, that’s how it looked to Axl. Just as he began to hit his brakes—the wooden door embossed with an eight-spoked wheel rushing towards him too fast to ignore any longer—an old man in orange robes st
ood up from a three-legged stool to push half the door open just enough for Axl to ride through into freefall.

  And he was juddering down a long flight of stone steps in a whine of synth and self-adjusting gyro, daylight blinding his eyes before he realised with shock that the monk had nodded to him.

  The back of the Potala stood stark and quietly magnificent behind Axl. If not so awe-inspiring as when seen from the front then still impressive enough. But it was the sign to the airport that crashed chords and wrote a manic grin across Axl’s tired face.

  -00.37.00. No one could say it wasn’t pushing the envelope, but as yet the envelope wasn’t ripped in two. Or the readout wouldn’t have been happening because the SS St Bernadotte would have gone. That was how Axl read things anyway.

  At the cargo gates to the airport was a human guard. Not just a token human, but the kind that actually flicked switches to lower a section of sonic fence. And as Axl came racing up, the man hit the switch and waved. Without thinking, Axl flipped a return wave and then he was past the perimeter, racing towards a vast yurt, constructed from a single transparent vat-grown sheet of goat’s skin held taut by chromed metal guys as thick as a child’s wrist.

  The yurt was Samsara’s Departure Hall and beyond it Axl saw the Nuncio’s cruiser, already cleared for take-off, a group of saffron-robed lamas standing around it and staring in his direction.

  Whatever Axl had been expecting, this wasn’t it. One of the monks waved frantically and Axl realised that whatever the hell else was expected of him, neither sneaking or blasting his way aboard the austere, purple-lacquered cruiser was part of the menu. The Boeing had exclusive written all over it, from the near silence of its engines as they fired up to the elongated slow-glass bubble sat atop its nose like a freshwater pearl.

  ‘Borja,’ Axl said as he slid the Honda to a halt and dropped it where it stopped, back wheel still spinning. ‘Axl Borja.’ The Swiss Guard at the base of the moving walkway actually stepped back and saluted.