Jon Grimwood - redRobe

‘So when did you find out?’ Kate asked. She sat back on her heels and casually scratched the inside of one thigh, then blushed when she caught him watching. ‘You going to tell me or not?’

He did.

Eighteen weeks of womb time was what he got. That’s what they told him at the home anyway. Enough to produce tentative REM and thumb sucking, but leave him the wrong side of the survivability line. That was how long it took the kid to get her shit together enough to book a clinic. The clinic was a charity job, obviously enough. Cash wasn’t something she had a lot of, they’d told him that too. Made sure he knew freebase came first and getting rid of him came second. The home wanted him to know how lucky he was good people had come along.

When did he find out? Sweet Jesus.

‘I always knew,’ Axl said flatly. ‘Sometimes it just meant less.’

‘You want to expand on that?’

It was Axl’s turn to sigh. Grabbed from the disposal bin of an abortion clinic by a right-to-lifer hit team and grown to term in a Matsui artificial womb. Paraded as a toddler before judges, women who lunch, elderly patrons as an example of what their charity could achieve. Shit happened and mostly, it seemed to Kate, shit had been happening to the man in front of her. It was like someone just smashed a dam that held back a life’s worth of backed-up emotions. And then she realised with a shiver that someone had and it had been her.

He was still talking, telling her how he’d been sat stealing time from a public smartbook in the annex of the NY library on 42nd, using ‘trades to pop frames almost faster than his brain could render. Worthless shit all of it, the kind of stuff all eleven-year-old boys, not just street kids hide behind ‘trodes to skim. Some animal fuck sites, Taiwanese pissing schoolgirls, cheats for getting the 6 million volt nanchuku in Mishima, the usual stuff... A bit of bomb making, some half-arsed chemical formulae for a kitchen-sink version of BetterThanlce.

There was no site that toggled his memory, nothing meaningful like hitting on some dumb schmuck Fight For Life site, skimming the mugshots and thinking shit, that’s me ... He just remembered being six and getting shown a lump of purple flesh the size of his fist, with frog-like legs and arms. Whatever it was in the glass case, it looked very dead.

‘You know what the blonde-haired matron said to me?’ Axl asked Kate.

Kate didn’t and she didn’t even want to guess.

‘You’ve got a sister to look after.’ Next time Axl saw his sister five months had gone by. She was still small and still purple but more-obviously alive.

In between they’d grafted her to a synthetic placenta and stitched the placenta into the pre-stretched uterus of a mother for Jesus. When that failed they fell back on a rubber womb, growing her in a nutrient and oxygen-rich solution of transparent gel.

‘But she was still one up on me,’ Axl said with a bleak smile. ‘I was picked up as an afterthought. When some God’s Fist commando grabbed a bucket on her way out, having slapped. a .45 through the head of an intern, nurse and receptionist at the clinic…’

He stopped briefly, listening to a noise in the distance but didn’t really pay it the attention he should have done. He was still too busy talking.

‘You ever get really cross as a kid,’ Axl asked, ‘so cross you say you didn’t ask to be born?’

Kate nodded.

‘Well, my mother didn’t ask for me to be born either. But the home still wanted me to demand the clinic release details so I could track her down.’ Axl shrugged. ‘Hi, you remember that walk-in, hobble-out abortion you had ten years ago… Well, the clinic got hit by Fight-for-Lifers that evening and I was the pile of slop at the bottom of the bucket. Yeah, I'm pleased to meet you too…’

‘Enough,’ said Kate. ‘Stop it.’ She was crying, the surface skim of water on her eyes magnifying pupils until it felt like she looked right into Axl’s head. Which wasn’t where anyone should be allowed to go.

‘Yeah, enough already.’ Axl stood up. Suddenly alert as a crimson-horned pheasant crashed into the air further down the path. Fear ate worm-like at his brain and it was nothing as wasteful as a memory: more of a dampened reflex, something hardwired. Guitar chords splintered, fast as panic.

‘Down,’ Axl slammed the crouching woman flat. Kate didn’t get to protest because Axl was already kneeling over her, with one knee up and one down, finding his balance as he thumbed back the hammer of his revolver and sighted in on somebody crashing through the bushes.

Black-powder exploded. Axl’s first bullet slamming into the trunk of a stunted oak, stripping away bark to reveal splintered, glistening wood beneath. Beautifully balanced it might have been but the revolver still fired slightly wide.

Which was just as well. Otherwise Mai would have been dead instead of just scared, shaking and white-hot furious. And then things would have been really fucked. How badly fucked, no one quite knew, not back then.

Axl was still sighting for his second shot when Mai came to an abrupt halt, staring open-mouthed at the revolver. Very slowly, Axl lowered the hammer.

‘You fuck-wit.'

Axl nodded. Agreeing with her could only save time.

‘You want to kill me?’

Axl shook his head. If Mai was shaken then so was he. Slamming random shots into the undergrowth wasn’t his style. Come to that, it wasn’t any style at all.

‘They’ve got Clone,’ Mai gasped, holding tight to a tree trunk, jagged breath ripping her throat like broken glass.

‘Who’s got ...' Kate asked but Axl already knew.

‘The soldiers’ said Mai.

Not PaxForce, IMF troops, or WorldBank, but the soldiers. The mute, dumb cry of civilians everywhere.

‘Where is he?’

‘In the square…’

Axl realised she meant that patch of mud with the water pump in front of the Inn. And then he asked her the difficult one, not that the question really needed asking. It was going to be some variation on tell me.

‘What are they doing?’

Mai’s answer locked in her throat. Whatever choice the Colonel had made it was enough to widen her eyes and tug down the corners of her childish mouth.

‘The box has got a handle…’

Moscow telephone. ‘They’ve got him wired for sound,’ Axl told Kate, then realised she had no idea what he was talking about. ‘A hand-cranked electrical generator.’

‘He’s dumb,’ she protested.

‘They’ll have a cat.’ Matsui cats came in a box the size of a Lucky Strike packet, with no moving parts, no user skill necessary. They were entirely waterproof and shockproof. All you do is run the box across a casualty’s skull to get a down and dirty snapshot of their brain in action.

That was what the battlefield CATscan was designed to do anyway, but its main use turned out to be something else entirely. All the tiny screen ever showed up was a flare of purple and pink wrapped across the mottled folds of a small, dirt-grey walnut, but it was usually enough.

At least it was for any soldier who wanted a crude checksum that the person being questioned was telling the truth.

Wireframes had Clone stripped naked and nailed to a rattan chair taken from the Inn. She’d also taken Leon’s cart and ripped off its back and sides so everyone could see where Clone sat shivering on the raised chair. Someone had kicked out the chair’s seat before nailing Clone in place. The sergeant probably, she looked like someone who enjoyed her work.

Axl didn’t need to check the rest, because it was already obvious what he’d find. From the stinking mound of shit under the chair where Clone had voided his bowels to wires running from his nipples, testicles or anus. Axl had seen it before. Whatever grunts might boast drunkenly in the franchised brothels of The Last Boer, imagination wasn’t something PaxForce conscripts majored in. Even the heavy roof nails pinning his feet to the wooden cart were a cliché. Something they’d seen done on a newsfeed.