redRobe

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

  ‘Tell Rinpoche I want to do a deal with Tsongkhapa.’

  ‘You want what. . . ?’

  ‘Tsongkhapa,’ Axl stressed, ignoring Kate for a second, ‘you got that?’

  Mai had and within seconds so had Rinpoche… The silver monkey didn’t so much drop as plummet. Not quite as fast as Mai’s hand had hit the dirt but still swift.

  Big beats crashed in Axl’s head. One second there was blackness, then the silver monkey was landing, wings thrown wide and grown vast, its very own instant parachute.

  Axl grinned and Rinpoche grinned back, wings already shrinking.

  ‘So,’ it said, folding the now small wings neatly across its back, ‘you looking for extra muscle?’

  ‘No, I’m changing the deal.’

  ‘There is no deal,’ said Rinpoche.

  ‘As of now there is,’ said Axl. ‘Or there will be. And it’s got to hold for Tsongkhapa too. Not just you.’

  ‘No problem.’ The silver monkey shuffled its feet. ‘Hermetic hierarchy’s hard to explain. Total autonomy within rigid limits, bit of an oxymoron really.’ Rinpoche looked embarrassed, ‘Soft intelligences have such a hang up on free will.’

  Axl wondered what soft… then realised he was. You show me your guilt, I’ll show you mine.

  Digging his fingers into the inside pocket of his coat, Axl found the broken soulcatcher. It was wrapped in the anti-static cloth his biohazard chips had been in. ‘Here,’ Axl put the small bundle in the silver monkey’s paw and watched as Rinpoche carefully unfolded the cloth, holding the matrix of wires, feather and beads up to the firelight so they glistened with an oily sheen.

  ‘You want her mended before you take her back?’ Rinpoche’s voice was flat, uninflected.

  ‘No,’ Axl shook his head. ‘I let her go and her safety becomes Tsongkhapa’s responsibility. That’s the deal.’

  ‘Done.’ Sharp canines sliced the web of wire criss-crossing the soulcatcher and Rinpoche caught the remaining beads as they dropped into its hand.

  ‘You wanna get Mai’s opinion before you fuck with her head?’ Tukten demanded pushing ahead of the others.

  ‘Mai doesn’t have an opinion,’ said the silver monkey, ‘she’s got three of the fuckers… None currently compatible.’

  ‘Do it,’ said Axl. He glanced at Kate, but it was Rinpoche he was talking to. ‘She doesn’t need to take responsibility, I will…’ Axl sighed, picked up his snubPup from where it rested in the mud at his feet and stood. He didn’t say it’s time I took responsibility for something, he didn’t need to.

  The last thing Axl did before slipping away from the fire was pull the revolver from where it was stuck into his belt at the back and put it on the damp grass where Ketzia, Louis and Tukten had been sitting.

  Rinpoche didn’t need it. Nor would Mai if Axl’s guess was accurate. The silver monkey wouldn’t just follow her like a shadow, he would become her shadow—whether the kid liked it or not. Kate wouldn’t touch the gun even if she did find it, but Tukten would and Axl’s money was on Tukten to guard Mai for all he was worth. Always assuming Rinpoche let the boy get a look in ...

  * * * *

  In five minutes Axl would have exactly five hours before the SS St Bernadotte lifted off from Vajrayana and dropped through the first of the lock gates on its trip out into the big black. In thirty minutes the flowers out in the big black would open to catch and reflect the sun and Axl would be too late to spring anything, never mind a one-grunt ambush.

  Colonel Emilio’s conscripts were waiting below him. Not camped-out-on-the-forest below but directly, spit-and-it’ll-mess-up-their-precious-hair below. From what Axl could tell, half of the conscripts were on this side of the road, the others across the road, also hidden. All any one of them had to do was look up and they’d see Axl glued to a rock face above, doing his best imitation of oversized gecko. Only they wouldn’t look up, at least Axl sure as hell hoped not.

  They’d be watching that path down from the slopes, wired up with infrared, waiting for him to lead the others straight into a killing zone. Well, he had a couple of reasons why it wasn’t going to happen and the main one had a zytel butt and was cradled in his arms like a baby.

  By the time Kate heard gunfire PaxForce would be excised, foreclosed, out of the loop. And if not there wouldn’t be much Axl could do about it because he’d be dead. He was doing Kate a favour she hadn’t asked for and would probably never even acknowledge to anyone. But hell, that was life.

  The conscripts might be so ignorant, underpaid and brain-fried they didn’t know their arse from their neighbour’s elbow but the Colonel would report in on Mai’s significance, if he hadn’t already, that much was guaranteed. A little legalistic sleight of hand and WorldBank would be reclassifying the kid as Joan’s clone and pulling her in for trial. Kate too, accessory before the fact. . .

  Extraditing would be difficult, with luck. Taking her off Samsara now before the feeds got fed was a much softer option. That’s what he’d have done if he was the Colonel. And Axl, as the Colonel, didn’t even want to think about he’d do to Kate. And if the Colonel didn’t, CySat would if she got returned for trial. It was humiliation and rape whichever way you looked at it, on screen or off, or both.

  Blocks of wood banged slowly together echoed inside Axl’s mind. No more than a basic click track. Somewhere far below it was melody, fractured like glass and soft as the footfall of rats in a dusty attic. WarChild, obviously. No gruff Latino voice was looped over the top but that was okay, Axl could do the rap from memory.

  Read, Reconnoitre and—get dead or—get it Right.

  The toughened twine he’d originally brought along to tie up Mai had cut raw strips into the centre of his palms. The rope was too thin to get a good grip and besides his hands were slick with sweat. Shaking, too.

  Fear did that. Always.

  Axl didn’t do fear, either, but recently his body seemed to have forgotten that.

  * * * *

  ‘More light,’ Rinpoche said and Tukten pushed another branch into the fire, then tossed two smaller ones on top, watched as sparks danced up into the pre-dawn.

  ‘Beads,’ demanded Rinpoche, then remembered he was already holding them. Small and lifeless, they looked as insignificant as bits from a child’s necklace. They looked liked… small hard-spheres, really, which is what they were.

  Rinpoche took the soulcatcher beads in his hands, thin lips pulling back over sharp canines as he stuffed them in like candy. And that was it. The silver monkey sucked hard, feeling memories slip between his teeth, releasing the sweetness of Joan seeing Kate for the first time, the sour taste of being a lonely child watching mist fill a deserted plaza, the angry slap of a teacher, the firm grip of a US president as she shook hands, the mew of a kitten trapped in a box hedge. Sex, darkness, death, love, power…

  Mai was already empty of dreams, her own and Joan’s taken from her head by Rinpoche who’d simply put his hands to her temples and kept them there until nothing was left to come screaming out of the dark.

  Now holding Mai’s hands Rinpoche fought to assimilate, making and breaking connections, getting it right less often than he got it wrong and had to start over again. Half the lamas in Samsara fugued as Rinpoche conscripted Tsongkhapa to distribute what had been Joan’s senses into the lucid dreams of others before Rinpoche finally began to pull it back into a whole.

  All this for something as transient as a single flawed identity, no wonder Tsongkhapa was amused.

  ‘I’m me, aren’t I?’ It was Mai talking but the voice was way too knowing for Mai.

  Kate burst into tears.

  ‘Oh for fuck’s sake…’ It was Mai this time, staring at Kate in exasperation. ‘I’d thought you’d be glad to get her back.’

  ‘I am,’ Kate protested.

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Ammo Check/Check Ammo

  The tiny sliver of basalt broke free from beneath his foot and Axl froze, flat to the rock face, the reptilian part of his brain kicki
ng in with a reflex that pre-dated humanity. No one shot at him. In fact, none of the conscripts even looked up. They were busy watching a fire burn fiercely in the distance, near the flat stone that stood for a cairn making the final stretch of the path down from the high-plateau’s foothills

  Axl had been hanging above them for ten minutes longer than was wise. So he was now running late even by his own ludicrous timescale. He would have shrugged but he was kind of occupied counting heads. Four conscripts in each slit trench, all armed with squat Brownings like the model Axl carried and both their trenches were strung round with chameleon net, the kind that diffused heat and filtered out static. Not that Axl or anyone still up on that ridge had thermal imaging glasses any more than they carried comScanners.

  Habit then, or the conscripts didn’t have any dumb net.

  The five-year-old kid who’d inherited the patent on chameleon netting from her grandfather had a house in Texas wrapped round with so much of the stuff that even her bodyguards had trouble refinding the place if they dropped out to get a beer. That was the urban myth, anyway.

  Behind the netted-up trenches, dug into separate foxholes were a corporal and defMoma. The corporal was muttering into a throat mike, hands doing a ragged dance as he stressed and re-stressed some point to his unseen listener. Whoever was on the other end didn’t seem to like what they were hearing.

  defMoma was glued into a tiny romReader, trodes wired up to her temples and a pair of floating-focus CK wraparounds masking her podgy face. If she wasn’t deep in some dyke N/Simthen Axl didn’t know what she was doing. Samsara didn’t do newsfeeds. Hell, even Vajrayana didn’t have a decent backbone.

  Officially, media fasting was part of the UN-agreed ‘fugee rehabilitation process. Like simple living, no powered vehicles and one-way tickets only. Unofficially, Tsongkhapa flatly refused to waste processing capacity cross-monitoring 17,889 newsfeeds on the indisputable grounds that most were crap, few added to the total sum of human knowledge and lucid dreaming was better for you anyway.

  The Colonel wasn’t visible, but Axl intended to work on the basis that the man was dug-in further back and probably on the other end of that conversation the corporal was having. If he was wrong, then tough.

  Axl grinned sourly. And if he didn’t shift his ass off that rock face soonish he wouldn’t be doing any dreaming, lucid or not. Daylight would see to that. Besides, there was nothing wrong with the snubPup’s two clips, just with the fact he only had two of them.

  Less than three hundred dumb-fuck bullets to take out eight grunts and three brass dug into slits set into a forest full of maturing oaklings that would take whole clips to chop off at the waist.

  As his old sergeant would have said, tough call…

  LockMart’s finest smart munitions could tap dance round any object not soft, warm and sentient. Even semi-smart, self steering could nudge themselves a couple of degrees in either direction. But straight dumb ceramics… Enough already.

  Bass got buried under heavy synth as Axl’s shoulders tightened. And when electric fiddle screamed in over the top Axl knew his body was ready, even if he wasn’t.

  This was the plan.

  Axl kicked off hard from the rock face.

  And fell.

  Guitar howled. Pain flamed in both hands as the sisal cut fresh track marks into his palms, the rope ripping under one arm and across his back until he tightened his grip and gravity slammed him back into the rock face. Kicking off again, Axl let the burning rope explode through his hands like fire and then it was gone and he was really falling, straight onto a conscript.

  Axl snapped the boy’s neck in a crash of drums, boots ripping down both sides of the conscript’s fucked-up head to shatter breastbone on either side and rupture third and fourth vertebrae in a wet chord change of compacting bone. Breaking his fall by landing on some grunt’s head was sheer luck, no matter how slick it looked.

  The other three conscripts in the slit never stood a chance as Axl emptied his first clip in a single staccato four-second burst. Ceramics scythed through already-mangled flesh, snare drumming into the damp earth at the other end of the trench. No one did vocals, there wasn’t time. Axl was bathed in blood, faeces and minced flesh as it splattered back to where he crouched on the floor of the trench.

  Back to a single base line. Then that inevitable drum roll.

  Ammo check.

  Wiping flesh out of his eyes, Axl slammed the second clip into his snubPup, ripped free two clips from the leg of what had been a grunt, then scrabbled in the leg’s blood-filled knee pockets, finding grenades.

  Three grenades, static or crawling, retroAlessi. Featuring recessed legs and those clean chrome lines so fashionable ten years back, about the time some idiot at Harvard uploaded a paper on Art and the Aesthetics of Corporate Violence. The first one was even part primed, red diode primly blinking. It was also just smart enough to be irritating.

  But not as annoying as the clips getting wasted in the other trench as conscripts fired in all directions, blasting scars in a dozen trees. Kids the lot of them, poor bastards. Not even properly trained.

  ‘One second,’ Axl told the grenade, snapping off a protective cover.

  ‘Two?’

  ‘One.’

  He yanked the pin viciously, lobbed the grenade towards the foxhole behind him and hit the bottom of his own slurry pit in one easy move, face-first into the contents of someone else’s stomach.

  The little shit grenade still counted off two seconds before exploding. Not that it made much difference. Zero seconds after it landed in his dugout the corporal was beyond bagging.

  Somewhere a mood layer fed in behind the bass line. It wasn’t hard to get back in the swing of things.

  Grabbing grenade number two, Axl got it to promise a three-second count, counted off one himself and threw the apple hard enough to arc up over the road.

  Chord crashing backwards out of his trench, Axl had dumb fucks locking the other slit down and blind before his grenade fragged in a neatly controlled airburst between the slit and defMom’a’s foxhole. Sliced sushi.

  What Axl had going for him… Hell, the only thing he had going for him was the chameleon net screening off the trench he’d just been in. Somewhere back in those trees the Colonel would know his shit had hit the proverbial, but not yet how. Another flip and roll took Axl to the edge of defMoma’s foxhole and he dropped into it, breech ratcheted back and diodes doing the walk/don’t walk dance.

  ‘You.’ defMoma was slumped at the bottom of her foxhole, staring at an arm twisted awkwardly in front of her. White bone glistened through a long gash in pink flesh and blood dripped from one ear. Other than that she was untouched. Axl’s second grenade had fragged at least five paces in front of her foxhole, half filling it with earth, and it was only mischance that a sliver of chrome had opened her arm all the way from wrist to elbow, leaving red edges where the flesh used to meet.

  She had her semi-smart hiPower holstered on a green webbing belt but her gun hand was useless. ‘I surrender,’ the woman said flatly and the music in Axl’s head went into a holding loop.

  ‘Surprise me.’ Axl sat back against the edge of the foxhole, SnubPup on his knees, muzzle towards her gut. Digging casually into a pouch pocket for his last grenade, he snapped off the plastic cover and activated what passed for its intelligence.

  ‘Okay,’ said Axl, ‘this is where you sit still, understand?’

  The fat sergeant looked at the flecks of flesh matted into Axl’s hair and the blood painted in splashes across his face and nodded. Yeah, she understood.

  ‘I’m going to take out three threads,’ Axl told the grenade. ‘And then we’ll go over to voice mode for detonation. So you can do a better job of helping me.’

  ‘That’s not advisable.’

  Axl sighed. ‘I’m going to do it anyway,’ he said, ‘so I’d be really grateful if you didn’t do anything stupid. But first ...' Axl glanced at defMoma, head cocked to one side. ‘I need your sulphate…’
The fat woman didn’t move.

  ‘Alternately,’ said Axl, ‘I can defuse the grenade with these.’ He held up both hands, showing defMoma the rapid shakes that softened his fingertips to a snare-drum blur. ‘Your choice.’

  Axl caught the sealed packet she tossed him, ripping out the corner with his teeth and pushing his tongue through the gap, chemical cunnilingus.

  ‘Better, much.’ Axl twisted the grenade’s base free from its chrome outer shell. Four little sticks of bioSemtex sat there on the base, oily and glistening, each wired to the intelligence with a spider’s trace of optic fibre.

  ‘I’m disconnecting the first one,’ said Axl and yanked the connection, hard and fast. He didn’t bother to tell the apple he was about to remove the other two tubes, the intelligence would be expecting it.

  Soon done. Axl screwed the grenade shut and tossed the three dead tubes out onto the grass. He now had a grenade that could kill defMoma without killing him.

  ‘We could use this as a suppository…’ Axl told her. He’d seen that done, more than once, and so had she from the look on her face. Kolonics was a strictly equal-opportunities atrocity: the last time he’d watched it happen a Brazilian major paid the price for upsetting his own NCOs. There’d been barely enough left to scrape off the bunker walls.

  ‘. . . but you’re going to incubate it instead.’ He waited while she shifted her vast buttocks and sat on the grenade. ‘And we’re going to keep this short.

  ‘So,’ Axl said, ‘What is this really about?’

  defMoma stayed silent, but only because she was trying to work out what to say. There wasn’t much hope in her face, but it wasn’t all despair. Somewhere inside the woman was telling herself this was survivable. She was wrong.

  'I'll tell you what I think,’ Axl said, cutting in just as she was about to speak. ‘This isn’t about Joan. It’s about the Cardinal. WorldBank are trying to take him down.’