Jon Grimwood - redRobe

‘All right,’ said the cabin chief hastily. ‘Let’s not get upset.’

‘Upset!’ Tears began to well up in the corners of Axl’s ruined eyes, except he wasn’t sure if it was from pain, fury or laughter. ‘Get me some fucking painkillers or I’ll squeeze this little doll in half and then I’ll start on you.’

That got through to the cabin chief.

Human body with semiAI intelligence, Axl decided sourly. Something pretty, blond and prepubital knowing the Vatican. Haute-design. The wetware running off what was left of its cortex, its intelligence running as a subset of the ship’s AI. Take the cabin chief away from the ship and its body would corpse.

GenoTypz had taken about six weeks to come up with that simple modification, which was as long as it took them to lose five cabin chiefs to suits who couldn’t be bothered to do their own shopping.

‘What happens if I crush the sprite?’ Axl demanded. In his hand the air stewardess kicked harder

‘I’m sure you won’t,’ said the cabin chief, but his voice didn’t sound very certain.

‘But if I do?’

‘Then we bill you.’ The cabin chief paused and added petulantly, ‘And believe me, it won’t come cheap.’

‘Bill who?’ Axl demanded as he tightened his fingers. A sliver of bioChip, a simplified intelligence and some fancy nanetics might be all that made up the sprite but he didn’t actually want to wreck the thing, though she was too busy trying to bite his wrist to notice that. ‘Who gets billed?’

The cabin chief’s eyes flicked briefly out of focus as he ran a seek and logged in to the ship’s bioAI, overrode client confidentiality on the basis of emergency (as defined by ASA), backtracked through a small travel agent in Zurich, a shell company in newVenice and finally a Panamanian orbital before coming up with a name.

‘Carlotta Villa,’ he said firmly. ‘She bought your ticket.”

As if he didn’t already know.

‘ She. . .’ Axl’s laugh was as grim as the darkness surrounding him and as unsteady as the slow, painful thud in his head, which felt like an out-of-balance engine but was only blood beating through his tortured arteries and veins. ‘Check Villa Carlotta. Go on, do it…’

The cabin chief blinked as the AI it was logged into ran a check and immediately wished it hadn’t. Villa Carlotta wasn’t a who, it was a what. . . The kind of what any sensible AI didn’t want to know about.

‘Look,’ Axl said speaking straight to the ship itself. ‘You can give me analgesics or I can rip your toys to pieces. You’re not going to arrest me, return me or bill me. And who’s going to know, anyway?’ Pain had reduced his voice to a low growl, and it was obvious that he meant it.

Seconds later, Axl felt the telltale cold of a pre-spray and then a subdermal syringe blasted twenty-five millilitres of co-prAxlmol into his neck. Sleep roared in but not before the pain peeled suddenly away and in that fractured moment of lucidity Axl had time to wonder about the onset gravity.

Pulling herself out the man’s slowly relaxing fingers, the air stewardess folded away like a complex flower going into reverse, back into the arm of his seat.

A week after Axl was carried unconscious from his audience with the Cardinal, a duty guard watched a small but overweight priest struggle up a steep flight of stone stairs towards the sea-facing terrace of the Villa Carlotta, carrying a leather bag in his arms. The sun was only just dipping into the horizon and every surface still shimmered with heat, even the flat silver expanse of ocean. A few boats hung on its beaten surface but they were static and desultory, dragging fat anchor chutes as the fishermen waited for nightfall. Then hurricane lamps would be lit and work would begin again as the hidden shoals swam up towards the light and their death.

The little priest was climbing the sea stairs because he’d been forced to cut through the gardens… The hours of audience were over and he’d been refused entrance at the front door.

Father Moritz was both hot and tired. Sweat had glued his soutane to his back. And the hours he’d spent travelling on a train from Mexico City had done little to improve his temper. He was so tired he could no longer say how tired he was. But that was lack of sleep not the journey. The journey had just irritated him. The tiredness ate at his mind like a parasite.

Two men walked behind Father Moritz. They were the Cardinal’s guards. Dressed in black silk suits and clerical collars, but definitely guards. Their suits were lightweight and Italian, cut loose under the left arm, to allow room for H&K .38s. The wrapround sunglasses featured self-adjusting lenses that could instantly throw up a floating-focus overlay of information. It would have been simpler, neater and altogether less fuss for both men to use replacement eyes to route incoming data direct, but the Cardinal was a traditionalist.

Rich to be sure, CEO of two metaNationals, major shareholder in CySat/nV and sole proxy for the Catholic Church in Mexico ... all of which made him a traditionalist almost by definition.

Father Moritz smiled. Rome might have run a reverse-takeover on the Church of Christ Geneticist, but that didn’t mean the Vatican or her representatives approved of all the genetic, medical and surgical patents they’d acquired. Merger, of course, wasn’t a word the Cardinal would use in relation to Church affairs; ecumenical was. But it meant the same, and what it meant was that Vatican shares had their biggest rise on the Dow Jones for as long as anyone could remember.

So why was Declan so worried?

‘Moritz.’ At the top of the steep stairs a tall man stood smiling as the fat little priest struggled his way up the last few steps.

‘Your Excellency,’ the man tried to kneel to kiss the ring but got no closer than dipping a knee before he was stopped by the Cardinal.

‘Don’t. You’ll never get up again…’

The little priest tried not to scowl and the tall man laughed, loudly. Grabbing a glass of white wine from a wooden tray balanced nearby on the balustrade, he thrust it at his visitor.

‘Drink it and take a seat,’ said the Cardinal.

Father Moritz opened his mouth and the Cardinal held up his hand, the setting sun glinting from the blood-red cornelian in his ring. ‘Whatever brings you to Villa Carlotta can wait,’ he said firmly.

Father Moritz and the Cardinal went back a long way, definitely longer than either of them would admit. No one was left alive to know how long, the Cardinal thought sadly, though there was nothing sinister in the fact. On his side, his people lived longer than most and the little fat man in front of him was germ-cell wired for longevity. It was the least his parents could have done for a child cocooned so tight by money that anything in the world he wanted was his, except poverty.

Quite apart from patents inherited by Moritz’s father, his great-grandmother had owned the gameSoft company LearningCurve GmB. She was on ice, pending revival, while Dad now functioned as the houseAI of his family’s mansion outside Seattle. It was years since he’d been home.

The first thirty years in the life of Moritz Alvarez y Gates had been spent trying to spend money faster than it accumulated. To that end, most of China’s collection of Imperial mutton-fat jade got stacked up on the shelves in his New York condo, he bought the original of Da Vinci’s smiling girl and he still hit thirty tired, bemused and unquestionably richer in real terms than when he started.

The money was spending him faster than he could spend it. At thirty-three, the age at which Alexander the Great died having conquered the known world, he was too frightened most days to leave his room.