Jon Grimwood - redRobe

Axl ignored it, as Mai knew he would.

‘You know,’ said momaDef as she dropped her hand, ‘I could use a good fighter.’ There was a tightness round her eyes, but no other sign that she’d noticed him reject her greeting.

Yeah, thought Axl clocking the wolf sticker held in her hand, like the pope needs a Koran. He glanced at the heavy woman sat on the floor glaring at him.

‘That’s defMoma,’ said momaDef. ‘Working for me she gets the pick of everything—women, money, food, boys, bodyparts…’ momaDef’s smile held as she spun out the list, waiting to see which one would punch the buttons of the man in front of her.

But so far as momaDef could tell none of them did. Or if one did, the man hid it well because she saw no flicker of hunger in his face, no spark of recognition that flared his nostrils

‘I work alone,’ said Axl.

‘Not when we’re in the area, you don’t,’ momaDef said flatly, dark eyes hard behind her wire-rimmed spectacles.

‘I work better that way.’ Axl nodded to himself, as if the woman had never spoken. ‘Fewer accidents.’ He glanced again at defMoma sat on the stable floor. Injured and furious, but still alive. You could say that for WarChild. He might not know which fork to use but he knew when not to kill. Which was more than most professionals. That it was more than every amateur in existence went without saying.

So why wasn’t he more proud of it?

Backed up, stacked up like sins that he filed away in his cortex and left to gather neural dust was the answer, but Axl didn’t intend to go there. Not now, not ever. Problem was, Axl realised, these days half his mind was taken up with ‘no entry’ signs.

‘Look,’ said Axl, ‘I’m going to be around a while. So I think you should go now and leave the horses. Before someone really gets hurt. . .’

The thin bald guy sat cross-legged on a stone altar staring at the sky. The Colt could swear to fuck that the Colt was what the monk was looking at, only the man’s eyes were closed and he seemed to have stopped breathing.

Except he had to have air in his lungs or he wouldn’t be able to manage that low chant which slid between his lips in wisps of warm breath, dissolving into the frozen air. It was the people round him who weren’t breathing, but that was because they were definitely dead. The last time the Colt had seen bodies that ripped had been in Ecuador, after the IMF sent in a team to re-educate a bunch of corporate VPs about capital investment. They’d done that classic remove-the-hands-from-the-arms, the-feet-from-the-legs routine too, only the suits had definitely been alive at the time.

The other problem with the man being able to look at the Colt was the fact the Colt wasn’t so much invisible as not actually in existence, at least not physically…

Up until a few seconds ago the Colt had been skimming the Big Black. Solar winds howling around the Legrange point where the Colt hung. In fact, it hadn’t really been the Colt that hung there, because the gun was piggybacking a derelict soHo—solar and heliospheric observatory.

The sun-facing side of the Sat blistered with a heat to rival Mexico’s hottest desert while the shadow side was colder than the bleakest Antarctic midwinter, but the soHo didn’t know that because it was too fucking stupid. So dumb in fact that it didn’t even realise the Colt was there. All in all, it was about level with a jellyfish which meant the soHo ran no discernable intelligence but did have a certain pre-coding of instinct that kept it facing the sun, both its target and its source of power.

Next, all the Colt had to do was work up a code-exchange between the soHo and Samsara and his journey would be done, for which many thanks. Bit streaming was fine if you were one of those semi house-trained, limited delinquency AIs that Japanese teenagers found so amusing. But the Colt couldn’t see the attraction.

The Colt had been sentient only in disparate random bursts as every bit of himself caught up with the rest, if that made sense. Which it didn’t, but that didn’t matter, because the Colt was rerunning the fractal equation that confirmed this was what had happened. Somehow it found the non-interfaced crudeness of raw code comforting.

So far its trip had been confined to piggybacking soHos and third-world military comSats, the kind jacked into orbit so generals could say, ‘Hey we’ve got one too ...'

There were a lot of those.

Common sense said the safest way for the Colt to reach Samsara was to get spun round with bleeding-edge fooler loops and stashed in some diplomatic pouch heading for the Papal Nuncio, except the Cardinal wouldn’t take the risk.

‘I mean,’ the Colt thought crossly, ‘how hard could that have been?’

And if direct delivery in a diplomatic pouch was out then what was wrong with normal luggage? Not those canvas sacks ‘fugees got given to hold their few pitiful possessions but the Gucci kind, the leather kind with the reinforced brass edges and recessed wheels. Shit, Vajrayana was thick with B-list politicians ordered by their mandelsons to find some fuzzy warm photo opportunity. Any one of them could have got the Colt into Samsara, without even knowing it.

But no, the Dalai Lama said no guns on Samsara and the Cardinal wasn’t prepared to go against that. The Colt had been given the diplomatic incident talk, the ecumenical respect talk. Shit, it had even had the one on national sovereignty versus realpolitik.

Which was how it found itself clung to a soHo trying to make a jump that just didn’t seem to be happening. The Colt might be self-functioning but every send received no response and every command was swallowed. If there was a closer approximation of living death then the Colt didn’t know it.

‘ Bardo,’ said a deep voice.

‘You what?’

‘Bardooo.’ Long and low, the rolling word resonated like a bell echoing off the walls of a vast cave. As tri-D sound effects went it was pretty neat, the Colt had to admit it.

‘You are between states,’ said the voice, ‘between existences. That is the condition of life, that it begins and ends and begins again…’

‘Reincarnation, for machines? Get real.’

The voice sighed theatrically. A sound like cold wind rushing through a rock cleft. Infrasound, pretty neat. The Colt ran a diagnostic subroutine, well masked and way back inside itself. Had there been air not vacuum, that sigh would have been resonating at eighteen cycles a second, the frequency at which human eyeballs sympathetically vibrate to create phantoms at the edge of vision and human flesh kicks in with shivering, breathlessness and outright fear.

The sound waves were real, not real in a way that humans could have heard because what the Colt was being fed was raw code. But the code translated to a classic standing wave.

‘Think of a candle,’ said the voice.

The Colt did. Soft wax cylinder, inflammable central wick. Used regularly by the rich and the very poor, otherwise used for holidays and festivals. It tried to pull up historical data on the artefact then remembered it hadn’t been able to carry its data banks with it.

‘Rebirth is not the same candle recreated. Just the old wick’s dying flame used to ignite the next candle in an unseen line… You understand?’

‘No I fucking don’t.’ If the Colt had been wired to a voice chip its voice would have laughed, darkly. Instead it just sneered inside. ‘I understand nothing.’

There was a deep silence, but though silence was usually a state of absence it was somehow warmer than the rolling voice had been. At the end of the silence came another question, but this time the meaning wasn’t wrapped round with fractal SFX, it was clean.