Jon Grimwood - redRobe

Been there, felt that. . .

Axl casually reversed the revolver and held it handle first to the silent woman: standing there until she finally reached over and took the weapon from his grip.

‘Well,’ he said, as he lent hard into the muzzle of the revolver, ‘you going to shoot me…’

How else was he going to get that bloody timecode to stop?

The problem, Axl decided watching Kate’s haunted face was that she really didn’t know whether she was going to or not. Kate had been running on empty for so long she didn’t even know it. And she needed another decision to make about as much as she needed the gun Axl had put in her shaking hand.

Saying he’d been there was glib, but it was also true.

She stared at him in the night-time darkness of a small ‘fugee village in a high valley on the edge of an immeasurably large hollowed-out wheel at some Lagrange off the edge of Earth. While around the outer rim of that wheel spun strips of prayer cloth that streamed out through the void, endlessly chanting.

She had a gun pointed at his gut finger tightening on the trigger, and all he wanted from her was an apology. How stupid was that… His thoughts were shredded, fractured like glass. Added to which he was cold, his spine hurt and his thighs were raw from a whole day in the saddle.

‘Look,’ said Axl as a clicktrack fed back in, thin as a baby’s heartbeat. ‘Do you want to shoot me or not?’

The silver monkey wasn’t keen to leave, claiming it was now Axl’s bodyguard. But it went after Axl threatened to rip its wings out at the shoulder if it didn’t take itself elsewhere. Both Axl and Rinpoche knew he couldn’t make good on that threat, but the silver monkey went anyway, sucking at its teeth in disgust as it clambered onto a PaxForce 4track to give itself a better take-off.

The night was getting late in more ways than one. And the wind that ripped down the narrow valley brought them cordite and the sound of shooting as drunken conscripts lit the dark sky with tracer. A wooden house was being noisily demolished for kindling. Off behind the village, a woman’s scream got chopped off, abruptly.

And behind it all, the heavy beat of some kid knitting up Tokyo Techno, all looped snare-fills and Korg samples stolen from ad jingles for products so old no one remembered what they were. The deck was UN-issue. But then it had long been accepted that you couldn’t go to war without a decent soundtrack. Though Axl still thought it was cheap not to provide the kids with their own inbuilt sound systems.

You got better results that way, too—and it didn’t upset the neighbours.

Rinpoche didn’t go far, of course. Just high enough to hang out of sight in the darkness, not so far it let Axl out of sound range. Both Axl and the silver monkey knew that was how it was going to be. Kate didn’t, but shock had wound her so tight she couldn’t have watched her words even if she’d known.

Shock at seeing Axl remade. Shock at getting herself trapped in that inn. But most of all, her face was sucked hollow by the shock of suddenly thinking she knew where the memory beads were, then discovering Clone was wrong and she didn’t.

‘I could have killed you, you moron.’ Fury coated each word with acid.

Axl shrugged like he didn’t care. Actually, he didn’t but that wasn’t why he shrugged. He still hadn’t forgiven Kate for Mai or what she’d said.

‘I saved your life,’ said Axl, ‘back there in the Inn…’

‘Did I ask you to interfere?’

‘No,’ Axl’s words were matter of fact. ‘You thought I was dead.’

Kate looked up at that. Face suddenly still. She’d told Clone to take Axl across the plateau. She hadn’t wondered too hard about whether he’d actually do it.

‘ Tae kwon do isn’t enough,’ said Axl. ‘You get into a stand-up, knock-down with PaxForce and you’ve lost before it starts. Mai might have fronted them out, but you ... If I hadn’t got you out of there, you might not have ended up dead but you’d have wished you were.

‘You owe me,’ Axl said, when Kate glared at him. ‘Deal with it.’

‘Yes,’ said Kate, ‘I will.’ She didn’t sound at all convinced.

In fact, she sounded worried and scared. Somewhere up the side of that valley, in a shambling monastery was an underage Japanese whore who’d fuck anyone to get away from the woman stood in front of him, even the PaxForce.

It made Axl want to know why.

‘Why didn’t you send Mai to look for the beads?’ Axl asked, though he already knew the answer. Because Mai would have run away. That’s what all of the kid’s night trips to Cocheforet were about. And that other stuff in Kate’s bedroom. Axl wasn’t stupid enough to think Mai had been at all interested in him. Okay, maybe he had been at the time, but not afterwards. Kate was holding Mai at Escondido against her will and the kid wanted out.

‘She your servant?’ Axl asked. The reformistas didn’t believe in servitude.

‘No,’ Kate said coldly, ‘she’s not indentured.’

‘But she’s not free, is she?’

The shake of the woman’s head was so small as to be almost imperceptible. She made no attempt to hide the fact that the truth tasted bitter. Her eyes were hollow, unblinking. Her chin jutted forward but her cheeks were sunken with increasing worry and lack of sleep. She looked older and much less certain than she had twenty-four hours before.

What Axl didn’t know about REM sleep, alpha-states and conscious dreaming hadn’t yet been discovered. He knew when someone was staying awake because going to sleep was worse. And he could spot all the signals in her face, like someone had erected a neon sign above her head saying ‘Empty’

Unwelcome thoughts guttered behind her dark eyes like candle flame, as ready to go out as to flare… Kate needed those memory beads, and yet there was no clone readied to take Joan’s memories. No shrine already formatted and waiting; there couldn’t be, because Cocheforet had no power. That much Axl knew.

Which meant Mai was the key.

Joan might have suddenly gone on CySat to declare herself Pope of the hollow people, but she was still CEO of UnitedVatican, whether she had liked it or not. And until recently UnitedVatican’s core statement had included the fact that clones were without souls.

Joan couldn’t have ordered herself a clone anymore than she could have announced a sudden conversion to Islam. Some things just couldn’t be done, not even by a Pope. Although not understanding that point was regarded by the reformistas as Joan’s greatest strength.

‘I’ll see you back to the house,’ Axl told her as he slid one hand under a reluctant elbow. All it would take to cripple her was a quick and dirty thumb jab into a nerve running up the inside of her arm. And from the way Kate stared ahead it was obvious she knew that. ‘We can talk on the way...'

They didn’t, though. Barefoot and frozen, Kate just stamped on through the drizzle, her feet squelching in the mud. And by the time they’d reached the bridge Axl realised that if he didn’t break her silence it wasn’t going to get broken... So he stopped dead and let go of her arm.

‘Just listen,’ he said.

For a moment it looked as if Kate would storm ahead but she stopped herself, still not looking at Axl. In another world and another time, in someone else’s story, he would have been less than zero to her. At most a peon in the lower reaches of what ever multinational she would have inherited.

But this was Axl’s story and whether she liked that or not he was standing beside her in the darkness. And what he wanted from her was an apology. The problem was, Axl realised, an apology for what? For hitting Mai, a kinderwhore he only thought he knew because he saw too much of himself in the kid? For not trusting him? She was right not to ...