Jon Grimwood - redRobe

Taking him across the plateau wasn’t the boy’s job after all, Axl realised with shock. He’d misread Clone’s unspoken instructions completely. Tukten was meant to kill him and dump his body for wolf feed. Sure, the kid was frightened by the charnel ground but not as scared as he was at the thought of having to shoot someone.

Big casino, little casino. It was a virginity that no one got back.

Axl swung round the head of his mare and rode slowly back towards the trembling boy who looked, for one flustered moment, as if he was about to try to get his own mount to back up. Instead, he gripped the revolver tighter, knuckles whitening around its crude wooden grip.

If Axl had ever needed his Colt now was the time. Or maybe not. The boy would have been dead already.

‘Stay back,’ Tukten demanded.

Axl didn’t. He kicked his heels softly into the mare’s flanks and pushed her forward a few paces, his eye firmly on the boy’s face. Looking into someone’s face as you killed them was difficult enough when killing was what you did as the day job and Tukten wasn’t yet angry enough to pull the trigger out of anything except fear. At least, Axl hoped he wasn’t.

‘Come on,’ Axl told Tukten, ‘give me the gun.’

The boy tightened his grip, eyes widening.

‘We’ll ride back together,’ Axl said hastily reining in his horse, but Tukten wasn’t listening. The connection was gone.

When the shot came its blast sent a black cloud of Egyptian vultures spiralling skyward but Axl was too busy dropping sideways from his spooked mare and rolling behind the nearest boulder to notice. And it took him until his ears stopped ringing to realise he hadn’t been injured.

‘Fucking terrific,’ said a voice behind him and a silver monkey crashed into the dirt, a jagged hole torn in one wing. ‘Can’t leave you alone for a minute.’

As Axl watched the hole mended itself, closing up from the edges like liquid mercury coming together. It didn’t take a genius to know that the Colt was back on line, sort of ...

‘You trying to get yourself shot, eh?’ Rinpoche demanded. ‘And what were you going to do if I didn’t turn up? Frighten him to death with your fucking face?’

The monkey paused, took a look at the black cavity where Axl’s missing eye had been and twisted its lips into a rueful grin, thin lips sliding back to show gold canines. ‘Been picking fights you can’t win?’

Yeah, thought Axl, mostly with life, but he didn’t admit that to the monkey. Instead he gazed pointedly at the raw skid mark its landing had carved into the plateau grass.

‘Fucking air density’s fucked,’ the monkey said furiously, tripping over one of its own wings as it stood up. ‘You any idea how badly this check-the-real-altitude, then add-ten-thousand-feet-to-get-virtual-altitude shit fucks up basic aerodynamics?’

Axl shook his head.

‘Didn’t think so,’ said Rinpoche. ‘It’s a fucking miracle anyone can get a sodding helicopter to move in these conditions ...' The monkey looked over at the terrified boy. ‘What’s with Mowgli?’

‘He’s scared.’

‘He should try dropping through the upper atmosphere of this place. Wind like a cosmic fart. Not to mention more fucking hardware up there than there are HondaGlydes on the Beltway…’

‘Security?’

‘Plus CySat, C3N, TimeWarner. Simple peasants fanning the homestead, brave hunters, furry little bears scooping fish from crystal streams. This place is a fucking goldmine ...' The silver monkey turned its attention to wings which spread across the ground behind it.

‘Lose those for a start,’ Rinpoche said crossly and both immediately shrank, thickening as they did. ‘The wings are a given,’ it told Axl with a sigh, ‘coded into the animus, but there are style choices.’ The monkey shut its eyes, which looked horribly like real rubies, and ran some permutations. Gold scales, bronze feathers so perfect they looked real, wings of transparent glass, the monkey rejected them all without even opening its eyes.

‘Small,’ Axl told it, ‘something basic…’

‘Basic!’ Rinpoche glared at Axl and did a quick pirouette on the damp grass, showing off jewels that ran like exposed vertebrae down its spine. ‘Does this look fucking basic?’ All the same it let its wings stabilise to two bat-like sails that opened and closed around hollow silver spars. The downy skin between the thin spars was niello black.

Axl forgotten, Rinpoche ambled over to Tukten and yanked his foot, tugging the slack-mouthed boy off his pony. It took the revolver from Tukten’s unprotesting hands.

‘Move and you join them.’ The silver monkey jerked one small thumb towards the corpses. ‘Okay?’

Tukten nodded.

‘Piece of shit,’ said Rinpoche, but it was talking about the revolver not the boy. ‘Even for this place.’ It snapped out the cylinder to check the machining, then snapped the cylinder back into place and spun it hard, counting off the few brief seconds it took for the five chambers to come to a halt. Still scowling, the monkey flipped the gun forwards over its trigger finger and sighted along the barrel.

‘I’ve seen kids make better toys.’

Without pausing, the monkey passed its hands swiftly over the revolver, its fingers moving faster and faster until they blurred. Which was the point Axl realised they really had disappeared, into a steel-grey smoke of freeform nanetics.

Somewhere inside that cloud a metal matrix so thin it was invisible to the human eye was holding the ex-revolver in place while subatomic assemblers crawled over its surface like dust mites, breaking millions of molecular bonds as Rinpoche rebuilt the weapon from the ground up. Growing the parts it needed rather than cutting them down from steel blanks, the way a semiAI or a human would. It reworked the metal too, rebalancing the carbon content of the barrel and cylinder, folding the steel like filo into thousands of invisible Toledo layers.

It would have preferred to work in ceramic but was making do with the source materials at hand, that way was quicker. When Rinpoche passed the revolver back to Axl the only thing about it that was the same was the overall shape. Form fits the function and the silver monkey might not like the inevitable side effects of Samuel Colt’s ingenuity but it had no problems with the man’s original sense of aesthetics.

Axl tossed the remade revolver from hand to hand, spun it once round his trigger finger and then flipped out the cylinder. Everything fitted flush, like it had been machined by an anally-repressed semiAI to dangerously minimal tolerances. Smiling, Axl tapped the cylinder back into place and watched it spin.

‘Yeah,’ said the winged monkey, ‘very pretty. Now about those housekeeping routines for you ...' It grabbed Axl’s skull and, before Axl could pull free, warmth bathed his face. ‘Not carrying credit chips are you? Good… They’d only be wiped.’

Ruby-red irises peered deep into Axl’s synthetic eye. ‘Okay,’ said the animal. ‘The good news is there’s more spare hardware inside your head than suits in a sushi bar. The bad news is that eye’s about to fail.’

‘Remake it,’ Axl suggested heavily.

‘Can’t,’ said Rinpoche, then changed its mind. ‘Well, I could, obviously, but it’s a sealed unit and pretty cheap at that. Why fuck around with an emulation when we’ve got more spares than Bodies’r Us… ?’

Unfurling its wings, the monkey twisted its head as if getting rid of a nasty crick in its neck and kicked off from the ground, pinions spreading as black wings caught and rode the bitter wind.

‘Where are you going?’ Axl shouted after it and Rinpoche grinned.

‘Shopping.’

They were exactly what he thought they were, unfortunately for Axl.