Jon Grimwood - redRobe

Cupped in the palm of the monkey’s hand lay two eyes, slippery with mucus and trailing fat sticky skeins of optic nerve. Blood coated the animal’s fingers and little slivers of flesh were trapped beneath its glass nails.

‘Farm fresh,’ it told Axl grinning. ‘Thought we’d have had to improvise until I ran into monks carrying a teenage lama. He was almost dead anyway.’

‘You killed him?’ Axl tried not to sound shocked.

‘Me? Rinpoche? Kill a priest?’ The monkey grinned. ‘How stupid do you think I am? I waited.’

Neither of them talked after that. Axl because he couldn’t with his face gripped in the monkey’s paws. The AI, which had once been the Colt and was now a silver monkey templated from Tsongkhapa's memory of a Bon myth, because it couldn’t spare processing power to run the necessary vocal sub-routines. Besides, it didn’t see the need to talk. The man had blacked out as soon as fingers were dipped into his orbital socket to scoop out the RedCross eye.

Rinpoche worked fast. Admittedly not as fast or as flashily as when it had remade the revolver because this time it was working with living tissue and besides who was there to impress? Axl’s brain had toggled consciousness to standby and the blank-faced boy was too deep in shock to pay attention to anything.

The new eye was 20/20. Undamaged cornea, a clear perfectly-shaped lens and an ideal ratio of rod to cone cells lining the retina. So good it could have been grown to order. It also had an iris of unnaturally intense brown, as bright and shiny as the speckled shell on a newly-opened horse chestnut.

All Rinpoche had to do was amend the eye for infrared and a couple of colours the human eye couldn’t usually see.

Having grafted the optic nerves and reattached Axl’s rectus muscles, the silver monkey adjusted a tiny dip-switch that fed off the optic nerve further up the line, popped the new eyeball into its waiting socket and began to concentrate on the ruined pit that was Axl’s other eye.

Smoke flowed from its fingers as assemblers broke free from the hand to reassemble in the wounded hollow of Axl’s eye socket. Scar tissue was cut back to raw flesh beneath and then the nanites began to rebuild, matching and shaping to a mirror image of what Rinpoche had memorised from the socket of Axl’s other eye.

Work done, the silver monkey grafted and stitched, not with thread but molecular chains, amending proteins to regrow muscle fibre and extend the optic nerve.

‘Okay,’ said the monkey. ‘Almost done.’ Fingers danced over Axl’s face and it was like watching torture in reverse, scar tissue and bruises disappearing beneath the silver monkey’s touch.

‘Now let’s get you back to Buttfuck, Hicksville. . .’ Rinpoche walked across to where Tukten was sat blank-faced by his pony, and crouched down in front of the boy, looking for some sign of intelligent life.

‘Well… life, anyway,’ the monkey said sourly to itself as Tukten blinked and gaped at the silver animal sat in front of him. ‘Wait until he wakes up and then get him back to Cocheforet, understand? I’m relying on you.’ Metal fingers that could have cracked stone reached out and gripped the boy’s jaw lightly in one hand.

‘Just don’t let me down.’

Fuck-wit.

Either the sound system was faulty or Rinpoche had amused himself by intentionally degrading the hardware until the backing track inside Axl’s head sounded as tacky as some kid’s home-grown deck. Every high note was tinny and the bass muffled down to the consistency of wet flannel.

He recognised the track all the same, a heavily remixed WarChild cut from fruity loops of temple gong instead of dry snare. And if it was Rinpoche’s idea of a joke, Axl didn’t care—it still stank.

Though not as much as Rinpoche’s other little retro augmentation.

The timecode was white, digital primitive and running backwards. The tiny almost transparent numerals floated on the edge of Axl’s vision, at the top left of his left eye, somewhere about 10 o’clock.

The read-out didn’t click from 000.00.00 to 187.59.59 until Axl shook himself awake and it’d counted back to 187.54.00 before Axl even noticed them. He was too busy coping with reality in 3-D, colour and surround sound.

SS St Bernadote/Sept-21/13.00. Slot allocated for take-off. Time remaining to allocated slot. . . Axl only realised he been reading the departure authorisation for the Nuncio’s cruiser when the words scrolling down his sight vanished leaving him staring at a worried looking Tukten.

Now the numbers were dim inside his head-low night setting-and read 183.38.39. And while Axl recognised a timecode when he saw one, he was trying hard not to think what else the digits might be counting down. Just in case it was something important like his own life.

Only, given the four UN conscripts strung across the track leading into Cocheforet, there was a chance Axl might not even last that long. They held snubPup Brownings, hip high, supported by neoprene slings twisted casually round their right arms, thumbs brushing each user-verification chip and fingers wrapped round waiting triggers.

No diodes were lit to confirm that safety catches were off or squat magazines were loaded, but that was because duct tape had been wrapped round zytel butts, blocking them off. All four men had their visors down and Axl had no doubt that they’d been watching him on infrared the whole way in ...

The backbeat in his head upped tempo, bpms tied to his heartbeat, then slowed as Axl caught and hog-tied his irritation. The R3 reMix coming together clean, the sound system having kicked back to top quality once it had run that tattered, tacky WarChild intro. Now he had brushes dusting over a single snare like blown dust.

Read, Reconnoitre and get it Right

Fifty paces beyond the picket, three more conscripts and a Tibetan girl were sprawled on damp grass next to a dead goat, passing a giant spliff between them, while next to a hurricane lamp a fourth soldier fussed over a Braun portable grill that refused to ignite.

Axl didn’t recognise the Tibetan girl, but that meant nothing. He’d barely been in Cocheforet time enough to learn more than half a dozen names. She was laughing, except the laughter didn’t reach her eyes. She didn’t mean it. In situations like this people never did, but they kept smiling just in case it might make a difference.

Axl knew all about it, he’d been on both ends of that equation and neither left a good taste in his mouth.

One huge hand gripped the girl’s wrists and still managed to keep a spliff between two fat fingers, while the conscript’s other hand fumbled at the bottom of her grey felt skirt trying to find its hem. No matter how hard she laughed and wriggled that hand was going to find its way between her legs eventually. Just as Axl knew he was going to let the matter ride.

The alternative was putting a bullet through the back of the big man’s head and splattering his shit-for-brains all over the girl beneath, but that meant getting killed in return and Axl wasn’t prepared for that. So instead Axl grabbed the reins of Tukten’s pony and kicked his own mare into a trot, dragging Tukten behind him as he headed towards the conscripts blocking his path.

All of them were dressed in cheap PaxForce combats, cut from die kind of chameleon cloth that did its best to blend in with the background but was always a second or two behind. Over the jump-suits they wore heat-retaining kevlar flak jackets topped with polymer helmets featuring roll-down NBC masks and tiny built-in geek mikes. Boron patches were spot epoxied onto the transparent flaks above the heart. They wore shoulder armour too, running Tsunami software that could flip from soft to hard at the merest suggestion of a blow.