Jon Grimwood - redRobe

‘Yeah,’ Axl said. ‘And all she did was strip him naked, tie string round his balls and wire him to a generator.’

defMoma exploded right on cue. The crack of a detonating firework, twisted loops. Steely bass gone harder. Rough-cut drums, echoed out.

Party time. Blocking the sergeant’s punch easily, Axl hesitated and shocked himself by not killing her. Slotting her out was as simple as chopping the edge of his right hand to her larynx, but instead Axl grabbed the sergeant’s left wrist and pivoted himself under it, taking the wrist up behind her back as he simultaneously kicked her leg, hard and fast. She went down onto her knees in a crunch of guitar as Axl twisted her arm up behind her.

The woman could stop struggling or she could listen to her own elbow rupture. As choices went it was simple.

‘Drop it.’

Axl heard the words first and then felt the kiss of a cold muzzle against the side of his head. Inside it, the soundtrack went down to a two-drum heart beat.

‘Well hey,’ said the voice in his skull, ‘there’s always a critic’ Axl grinned and grinned again. That was what the Colt always used to say back in the days when it was just some gun with an amorality problem.

The Colonel had his arm outstretched, stubby fingers wrapped round the ivory handle of a tarted up paxForce-issue hiPower. Axl didn’t like anti-environmental posturing used as a position-statement and didn’t like the fact the man probably had a case full of fancy guns, but it wasn’t the ivory that really fucked him off, it was the look in Colonel Emilio’s eyes that said, ‘Nailed you.’

Twisting the fat sergeant’s left arm even harder wasn’t the brightest response but it was satisfying. Pain hissed between the woman’s lips and when Axl tightened his grip again she gave up trying to bite back the pain.

‘Let her go,’ Colonel Emilio ground the Colt muzzle harder into Axl’s left temple. ‘Now.’

‘Do that again,’ Axl said softly, ‘and it’ll be your fucking arm that gets broken.’ He was getting stripped-back bass now, low and skeletal. More space than sound.

‘Release her,’ the Colonel said firmly and Axl heard an abrupt click as he jacked back the slide on his gun. Dust to dust, dross to dross… There had to be worse ways to go than being slotted by some sanctimonious WorldBank arsewipe but Axl couldn’t think of any.

Of course, he could just have stopped twisting the fat woman’s wrist but Axl couldn’t get his head round that, either. And as the bass line kept time over the heartbeat, Axl got that feeling he was missing something obvious, yet again.

‘ Hey, shit for brains…’

The monkey wasn’t looking at Axl, he was staring pointedly at Colonel Emilio’s gun. Colt hiPower, ivory handle, .38, single clip, no laser sight and probably only semiAI.

Probably only semi… Sweet Jesus.

Snapping one fist sideways into the Colonel’s groin, Axl flipped his attention back to the sergeant, broke her forearm with an easy twist and ground the jagged ends against each other until she screamed. And he kept grinding broken end against broken end until she pissed herself too.

Colonel Emilio pulled the trigger. Only the pre-sectioned flechette that should have scrambled Axl’s brains stayed exactly where it was, correctly ratcheted into the chamber but untouched by a firing pin as dead as the already-moving Axl should have been.

The gun that Axl rammed under the Colonel’s jaw had no electronics, no little data packets for Rinpoche to scramble, just an old-fashioned arrangement involving trigger, hammer and tempered steel spring.

The slug wouldn’t frag into razor-edged shards designed to pulp his brain, it wasn’t even jacketed with depleted uranium. It would just pass straight through, punching his memories and most of his brain out through a fist-sized hole in the top of his skull. Still, it was enough. And what Axl wanted more than anything was to pull that trigger.

‘Next time,’ Axl promised, stepping back.

‘There won’t be a next time,’ said the Colonel, rubbing his jaw. Then he turned to his troops. ‘Get the lieutenant packed in ice,’ he barked. ‘And you can leave those two here. I’m sure this bitch will want to bury them.’ Not even bothering to watch as the conscripts scrambled fast for ropes and stretchers, the Colonel stalked over to the bitch in question.

‘This man isn’t a real refugee,’ he told Kate coldly. ‘His name isn’t Jack Black, Black Jack or any permutation. He’s a convicted murderer. His name is…’

‘Axl Borja,’ Kate said calmly. ‘Yes, I know.’

Which was probably the one response Colonel Emilio hadn’t been expecting.

Behind the Colonel, conscripts kept on loading momaDef s corpse onto a gurney and Axl watched them tighten the straps. Clone and the bald man with the slit-open stomach sprawled on the rocks, eyes open to the sky. Some medic was tending to the sergeant, though he took his time about it and claimed to be carrying no anaesthetic. Sergeant defMoma didn’t believe him and Axl wasn’t surprised, he didn’t either. But Axl wasn’t really paying attention to any of that. He was busy listening to the exchange between Kate and the Colonel.

‘And I suppose you know he’s here to betray you,’ said Colonel Emilio. ‘This man was sent by the Cardinal to hunt you down… Don’t you understand that?’ His voice was furious.

That was when Kate looked at Axl. A slow gaze through dark eyes that let him see deep into her head and beyond, to a child walking long lonely corridors filled with marble. Kate shook her head.

‘I don’t believe you,’ Kate told the Colonel and turned on her heel, conversation over. Axl had never seen anything quite so magnificent or so unbelievably stupid.

Early-morning mist filled Cocheforet valley like froth on coffee, filtering out the village and its stream to leave only the tips of nearby trees and the towering wall of the valley rising out of a vast sea of smoke-like white.

Temple bells chimed, too beautiful to be real. Beneath them dub dub, space voices and softbeats ran together, like a stream.

Axl’s timecode changed hue everytime he looked from froth to sky, grey out of white reversing to white out of grey. 126.48.59, the seconds counting off so fast they span uselessly

Somewhere down there under that mist were the bodies of Clone and the other man, buried by Louis beneath squat stone cairns. The lieutenant’s corpse had been carried away by PaxForce, to be loaded into a Matsui freezer coffin and shipped home. Kate Mercarderes didn’t care what happened to the lieutenant, but she’d spent the night crying in Axl’s arms, while Axl brushed away her tears and nodded as Kate insisted furiously that she was the kind of person who never cried.

And somewhere high in the grey dawn sky Rinpoche was riding thermals. Axl knew that for a fact, because he was being shown the long strip of Cocheforet’s valley curling up at both ends inside the vast hollow circle of Samsara.

Of course the froth-filled valley might have been a dream, but in Axl’s experience not even the most lucid dream happened while he had his eyes open and was softly stroking the hair of a woman he wanted so hard it hurt. Besides, if this was a dream she’d have wanted him back instead of hesitating on the edge, but it was life.

One second, Axl’s sight had been blinded by Kate’s hair spread fan-like across his face, and the next he could see the high plateau spread out far below him, small like a map but still bigger than he’d ever imagined.

What it meant he didn’t know. But Rinpoche was definitely telling him something without putting words to it, because what Axl got was silence and a sense of someone watching Cocheforet from an altitude so high it was almost airless.