Jon Grimwood - redRobe

Even laminated carbon-fibre can only take so much. The front shock buckled as the Honda hit the bottom of the slope, the wheel itself snapping with a loud crack. The droids back in Okinawa had bonded that too, either that or the rim was run through with some kind of internal mesh of neatly woven polymer strings. Instead of exploding into shrapnel, the wheel collapsed on itself.

Axl still went arse over tit into the cold river but as he scrambled out again the revolver already gripped in his hand, without Axl even remembering how it got there.

‘Freeze.’

The conscript, who still looked about twelve and scared shitless pulled a knife anyway, so Axl opened a gash across his temple with the revolver, pistol-whipping the boy to his knees. Life was getting messy—and about to get messier.

The soldiers were maybe 250 yards away, their ordered line and fast walk rapidly turning into a jagged run.

‘You,’ Axl said frantically, putting his gun to the head of the naked girl and tightening his finger on the trigger. ‘You’re under arrest ... Do you understand?’ Mai didn’t even look at him. She was too busy staring at the boy on his knees. It was Tukten, the sullen-faced brat from the Inn. Not a conscript at all.

Lowering his revolver, Axl grabbed Mai’s red jacket from the grass and flung it round her narrow shoulders, her instinct kicking in enough make Mai shuffle her arms through its sleeves. The kid scrambled into her thong without being told and yanked a black cotton skirt up round her waist, her eyes never leaving Tukten.

‘I’m arresting you,’ Axl’s words were rapid but precise. Somewhere up there Tsongkhapa would have a vidSat data banking sight and sound. And if there wasn’t then Axl knew he could rely on Rinpoche to do the job for him. No one would be able to say this arrest hadn’t been made properly.

‘. . . in the name of the Cardinal and on behalf of WorldBank. Under a mandate authorised by the United Nations.’ The resolution number meant nothing to her but Axl reeled it off anyway, down to the relevant sets and subsets. It was only when the gabble of formal phrases was finished and Mai stammered out her question that Axl realised that the kid had no idea why…

‘You’ve got the Pope in your head.’ Axl went for an answer that was short rather than strictly true, it was quicker.

‘No.’ The way Mai looked at Axl wasn’t much of a novelty, because ex-lovers of his had been looking at Axl like that for as long as he could remember. But then dealing with the kid’s outrage suddenly took second place to keeping himself alive, as an approaching conscript flipped out a spring-loaded cosh and Axl got fed a ragged Strat-high warning riff.

‘You’re dead…’ The weighted cosh slammed towards Axl’s skull in an effortless, practised arc. The man was seriously unhappy. So was defMoma who was racing up behind the conscript. She’d been planning to get there first.

Axl hit the dirt ahead of contact, taking the landing on his left shoulder and drawing up his right leg, going into a half foetal. Trick number one was never break a fall with your hand unless you want your wrist shattered. Number two is don’t wait to make that kick, don’t aim, don’t look—just do it.

Bass lines collided.

Axl’s blow dislocated the man’s knee, the sole of his boot tearing open the joint and rupturing its synovial capsule. The conscript went down sideways because that’s what happens if someone kicks out your legs. And the man’s howl of pain lasted as long as it took Axl to chop him viciously across the throat with the edge of his hand.

After that he just gurgled.

When Axl came back up onto his knees, the gun he was holding was the conscript’s snubPup and its zytel butt riffed straight up between defMoma’s legs, hard as hell and twice as nasty. The big woman screamed and bent double, which was a bad mistake because Axl’s second blow caught her in the gut, showering him with her breakfast.

And then the rifle’s safety was off, Axl was knelt astride her hips and the red dot of his laser sight was busy wrecking cells at the back of one of defMoma’s eyes. Been there, done that, watched the atrocity…

‘You’re mumbling…’It was Mai and she looked afraid.

Too bad. With his new gun to defMoma’s face, Axl rifled the patch pocket on her T-shirt, ready to toss its contents onto the mud. Somewhere the bitch had to have PaxForce issue meth, cooking sulphate, anything. Even paraDerm would do. But the pocket was empty so, gun still to her head, Axl rolled the juddering woman onto her front to try the arse pockets at the back.

Chocolate, melted with body heat and squashed beyond use, a used packet of Coag and ditto eczma cream, two PaxForce-issue laminates, one giving her name as Martyna ‘defMoma’ Labowsky, the other a card to be read out to suspects before their arrest. And finally, sweet fucking success, a tatty vacuum-sealed foil sachet tucked into the bottom of her pocket, date stamped and closed with a strip of tamper Tell running across the top. UN-issue cooking sulphate, the world’s best-loved currency. Grey crystals were bouncing off the back of his throat before the sachet was even properly open.

‘Crack each crystal between your teeth and suck it soft with saliva,’ suggested the packet but Axl ignored it. That was only if you wanted to slowburn and he didn’t, definitely not. Axl wanted the full white light/white heat.

Glass-hard neon notes wrote themselves round every bewildered conscript, round Mai’s red jacket, even round the valley lop like some filter effect had kicked in. Which was exactly what had happened inside Axl’s head.

‘This woman is under arrest,’ Axl told the milling conscripts and his voice was firm, without the slightest tremor. You could say what you liked about PaxForce but they cooked only the best sulphate.

The way it was meant to go was they’d all nod, convinced by the authority of his words and Mai and Axl would get out of there, fast. . . Taking Tukten too, if Mai insisted. And that’s the way it would have worked if Colonel Emilio hadn’t ridden up on some prancing stallion, looking like he was leading a parade in the Plaza de Armas.

‘Good,’ he said, spotting Mai. ‘We’ll take over now.’

Quite how Axl’s new snubPup ended up pointed at the Colonel’s stomach Axl couldn’t remember. And to give Colonel Emilio credit he didn’t flinch or try to shuffle his horse away from Axl’s aim, even though the tightness in his face said he knew just how messy a gut wound could be. If not from experience, then in theory at least. Even staff colleges covered that stuff.

‘Three days,’ Axl reminded him. ‘And if internal bleeding doesn’t off you, then blood poisoning will. Of course, if one of you had remembered a combat stretcher ...'

There wasn’t much a Matsui couldn’t do, from basic blood replenishment to shutting down everything except vital functions before putting the body into suspension. But defMoma hadn’t come out expecting resistance, which showed what she knew. Axl spat, and grinned inside as Colonel Emilio repressed a shudder.

Not surprisingly the man didn’t want to die and Axl didn’t want the grief that went with slotting a UN officer, so they compromised. Colonel Emilio casually gathered up his reins and backed slowly away as if the situation didn’t exist.

To an outsider it probably looked as if the Colonel was leading a group back to the village, and that group just happened to include Tukten and a shaking Mai. Just as Axl happened to be there, with a zytel-handled snubPup that coincidentally was pointing at Colonel Emilio’s back.

After twenty minutes passed, Axl got bored with shadowing the Colonel and fell back to check on the conscript. He was unconscious and breathing through a self-cutting tracheagate fired into his throat below his crushed larynx. Axl felt nothing but surface guilt about taking him down. All the same… somewhere in the back of Axl’s head there was real guilt, looping away like thin monophonic synth, at what he’d done to Tukten.