Jon Grimwood - redRobe

Commissar in Exile from Red Tibet— rejected

‘Sweet fucking Nazarene,’ the gun dug to the bottom of its store of business cards and pulled out one it didn’t even know was there. The card was large and white, or it would have been if it were real. Hand-engraved text embossed onto a perfectly-smooth china clay surface, its gently-scalloped edges dusted with gold leaf. The Colt didn’t bother to read the ornate print, just bounced it straight at the Metropolitana’s AI without even a pretence of re-routing.

The guards stopped dead, listening to a suddenly barked order in their ear beads. They weren’t talking to each other when they spoke into the small mikes slicked to their throats, as Sábado had thought. It was the AI they were reporting in to. And just as the guards listened when the building told them where to look, so they stopped when ordered.

For a second or two they stood, eyes blinking and puzzled, ten paces from where Sábado knelt over a brown paper bag. And then they moved off again as a now-softer voice inside their heads sent them back to their little mezzanine just above the main door.

‘Welcome,’ said a soft voice from a speaker set in a nearby confessional. Its tone was cultured, almost urbane.

‘Which one of you is a Papal nuncio?’

Sábado looked at the paper bag in his hand.

‘I’m a Voudun priest,’ he said shortly. ‘Try the gun.’

‘. . . shit out of my arm.’ What began as a scream trailed off into recognisable words, hysterical with bitterness. First he’d lost his soundtrack and now his sight had been stolen. Inside Axl’s head, white noise clashed with a raging, fiery blackness as he went through fear into fury. Despair would come later. As yet, Axl was too angry to understand fully what he’d lost.

All he knew was that they’d finally come out of heavy Gee. And he only knew that because gravity had stopped trying to pulp him against the back of his fucking seat.

Axl usually left the swearing to his Colt but the gun was missing, along with his eyes. Tracks like dried yolk still ran faintly from empty sockets. Most of it had long since peeled away in dirty flakes, but enough had remained to turn the stomachs of those guards who’d dragged him from the VIP lounge at Paris Charles de Gaulle toward the boarding gate for Boeing Shuttle PS 1308, destination Planetside/Luna.

No man had been less looked at or more noticed.

Now he was safely aboard the shuttle, sat alone in a VIP cabin at the back, with only the shuttle’s AI in the control room behind him. VIPs used to sit at the front, until statisticians pointed out that as both airplanes and spacecraft crashed or burnt up from the front, the intelligent place to sit was at the back.

But the only thing Axl cared about, besides his missing sight was pain from a surgical tube plugged into a ceramic socket in his wrist. The edges were raw where they folded out over cut-away flesh and fire lanced up Axl’s arm everytime he tried to bend his fingers.

He’d still had his eyes when the Cardinal’s personal doctor had punched the implant crudely into position and since the man was an upscale surgeon in a world where most surgeons were infinitely more dextrous machines, Axl could only assume it was meant to hurt.

There was another square in the side of his skull, of crystal polymer this time, equally crude and even more visible where the Cardinal’s major domo had cropped away hair with a Braun beard trimmer to leave a leprous white patch, now scabbed round the implant’s edges with dried blood. It made him look like some cheap Tetsuo, all retro bio-augmentation, anal obsession and angst. But this wasn’t some chic tri-D cerebro games Wear from Sony and if it really was an apter, which was doubtful, Axl didn’t know why it was quite so obvious and crude.

And it wasn’t even about making a back-up file of his core personality, although Axl guessed the Cardinal was sick enough to be amused at the thought of him ending up as a bioAI, operating some fridge door. No, if all they’d wanted was to copy him they’d have used a cloneDome, a basic Matsui SQUID.

‘Give me a fucking neural block,’ Axl demanded crossly, for about the tenth time. There was fresh blood in his mouth and a sour bile was etching his tongue from the last time he’d vomited into the bag now coming loose from his mouth, but mostly he just had a migraine left over from when the weight of gravity had squashed him back into his seat as the Boeing shuttle hit five G.

On the wall in front of him, a LotusMorph he couldn’t see was explaining in very simple language how to combat the worst effects of take-off sickness. The level of language linked to gravity, so that the higher the G the simpler the talking head’s language became, as the viewer’s critical faculties crashed.

No one answered Axl’s furious demands for a painkiller.

Certainly not the automated flight attendant built into the arm of his seat. He knew it was a proper flight attendant and not some cheap tri-D imitation put there to fool steerage-class tourists into thinking they were getting the full treatment because it had suggested he do up the web of his belt when he first sat down. And then suggested it again, more firmly, touching his shoulder to reinforce the message.

The attendant ended up telling Axl to buckle up for his own safety until Colonel Emilio told it a few home truths, starting with the fact that Axl couldn’t currently see the buckle and finishing with the fact that he was a dangerous terrorist who, in the Colonel’s professional opinion, shouldn’t have been allowed to live. Never mind be sent off into comfortable exile on Planetside.

Now the flight attendant wasn’t talking to Axl at all. And being blind, Axl couldn’t check whether there was anyone else sat near by. There wasn’t and his cabin was sealed from the outside. Not with a simple electronic lock or even a square of epoxy mesh. The cabin door had been spot soldered with self-welding nickel/aluminium flashtape: the magnatron 50-atom splutter-gun stuff that hit 1600 degrees C within milliseconds and needed cutting open.

Ordering the door sealed was the last thing Colonel Emilio did before saluting his French counterpart with bad grace and stamping his way out of Departures at Charles de Gaulle, using the walkway to Local Flights and catching a low-altitude shuttle back to Benito Juarez, six klicks outside Mexico City. The Colonel knew that in the Cardinal’s eyes he’d somehow failed, he just couldn’t work out why. He also didn’t see why Axl had to go to Planetside Luna from Paris either, when Mexico had its own shuttle service.

As far as the flight attendant was concerned shuttle trips didn’t get more boring than this one. The prisoner was to be secure, adequately restrained and not sedated. Plus it had orders that the man was not to arrive physically more damaged than he already was, which cut out half the sexual services usually on offer to VIP passengers.

And the reason the flight attendant wouldn’t come through with the painkillers was that it had strict orders not to supply any medication, alcohol or recreational drugs.

Since that pretty much encompassed the other half of its reason for existing, the semiTuring had retreated into a major sulk and was endlessly speed-watching the end of Death in Space, the episode where the cabin assistant goes on trial for saving a shuttle’s gentle, intelligent and sensitive AI rather than rescuing the craft’s whining, overbearing passengers.

Fifteen minutes into take-off, as a complex cocktail of neurotransmitters began to feed through the tube in Axl’s wrist, the flyset beads in his ears stopped spitting white noise and started running a simple memory-burn program. Simple words were accompanied by images that were equally simple, but always hideous.