Jon Grimwood - redRobe

Habit then, or the conscripts didn’t have any dumb net.

The five-year-old kid who’d inherited the patent on chameleon netting from her grandfather had a house in Texas wrapped round with so much of the stuff that even her bodyguards had trouble refinding the place if they dropped out to get a beer. That was the urban myth, anyway.

Behind the netted-up trenches, dug into separate foxholes were a corporal and defMoma. The corporal was muttering into a throat mike, hands doing a ragged dance as he stressed and re-stressed some point to his unseen listener. Whoever was on the other end didn’t seem to like what they were hearing.

defMoma was glued into a tiny romReader, trodes wired up to her temples and a pair of floating-focus CK wraparounds masking her podgy face. If she wasn’t deep in some dyke N/Simthen Axl didn’t know what she was doing. Samsara didn’t do newsfeeds. Hell, even Vajrayana didn’t have a decent backbone.

Officially, media fasting was part of the UN-agreed ‘fugee rehabilitation process. Like simple living, no powered vehicles and one-way tickets only. Unofficially, Tsongkhapa flatly refused to waste processing capacity cross-monitoring 17,889 newsfeeds on the indisputable grounds that most were crap, few added to the total sum of human knowledge and lucid dreaming was better for you anyway.

The Colonel wasn’t visible, but Axl intended to work on the basis that the man was dug-in further back and probably on the other end of that conversation the corporal was having. If he was wrong, then tough.

Axl grinned sourly. And if he didn’t shift his ass off that rock face soonish he wouldn’t be doing any dreaming, lucid or not. Daylight would see to that. Besides, there was nothing wrong with the snubPup’s two clips, just with the fact he only had two of them.

Less than three hundred dumb-fuck bullets to take out eight grunts and three brass dug into slits set into a forest full of maturing oaklings that would take whole clips to chop off at the waist.

As his old sergeant would have said, tough call…

LockMart’s finest smart munitions could tap dance round any object not soft, warm and sentient. Even semi-smart, self steering could nudge themselves a couple of degrees in either direction. But straight dumb ceramics… Enough already.

Bass got buried under heavy synth as Axl’s shoulders tightened. And when electric fiddle screamed in over the top Axl knew his body was ready, even if he wasn’t.

This was the plan.

Axl kicked off hard from the rock face.

And fell.

Guitar howled. Pain flamed in both hands as the sisal cut fresh track marks into his palms, the rope ripping under one arm and across his back until he tightened his grip and gravity slammed him back into the rock face. Kicking off again, Axl let the burning rope explode through his hands like fire and then it was gone and he was really falling, straight onto a conscript.

Axl snapped the boy’s neck in a crash of drums, boots ripping down both sides of the conscript’s fucked-up head to shatter breastbone on either side and rupture third and fourth vertebrae in a wet chord change of compacting bone. Breaking his fall by landing on some grunt’s head was sheer luck, no matter how slick it looked.

The other three conscripts in the slit never stood a chance as Axl emptied his first clip in a single staccato four-second burst. Ceramics scythed through already-mangled flesh, snare drumming into the damp earth at the other end of the trench. No one did vocals, there wasn’t time. Axl was bathed in blood, faeces and minced flesh as it splattered back to where he crouched on the floor of the trench.

Back to a single base line. Then that inevitable drum roll.

Ammo check.

Wiping flesh out of his eyes, Axl slammed the second clip into his snubPup, ripped free two clips from the leg of what had been a grunt, then scrabbled in the leg’s blood-filled knee pockets, finding grenades.

Three grenades, static or crawling, retroAlessi. Featuring recessed legs and those clean chrome lines so fashionable ten years back, about the time some idiot at Harvard uploaded a paper on Art and the Aesthetics of Corporate Violence. The first one was even part primed, red diode primly blinking. It was also just smart enough to be irritating.

But not as annoying as the clips getting wasted in the other trench as conscripts fired in all directions, blasting scars in a dozen trees. Kids the lot of them, poor bastards. Not even properly trained.

‘One second,’ Axl told the grenade, snapping off a protective cover.

‘Two?’

‘One.’

He yanked the pin viciously, lobbed the grenade towards the foxhole behind him and hit the bottom of his own slurry pit in one easy move, face-first into the contents of someone else’s stomach.

The little shit grenade still counted off two seconds before exploding. Not that it made much difference. Zero seconds after it landed in his dugout the corporal was beyond bagging.

Somewhere a mood layer fed in behind the bass line. It wasn’t hard to get back in the swing of things.

Grabbing grenade number two, Axl got it to promise a three-second count, counted off one himself and threw the apple hard enough to arc up over the road.

Chord crashing backwards out of his trench, Axl had dumb fucks locking the other slit down and blind before his grenade fragged in a neatly controlled airburst between the slit and defMom’a’s foxhole. Sliced sushi.

What Axl had going for him… Hell, the only thing he had going for him was the chameleon net screening off the trench he’d just been in. Somewhere back in those trees the Colonel would know his shit had hit the proverbial, but not yet how. Another flip and roll took Axl to the edge of defMoma’s foxhole and he dropped into it, breech ratcheted back and diodes doing the walk/don’t walk dance.

‘You.’ defMoma was slumped at the bottom of her foxhole, staring at an arm twisted awkwardly in front of her. White bone glistened through a long gash in pink flesh and blood dripped from one ear. Other than that she was untouched. Axl’s second grenade had fragged at least five paces in front of her foxhole, half filling it with earth, and it was only mischance that a sliver of chrome had opened her arm all the way from wrist to elbow, leaving red edges where the flesh used to meet.

She had her semi-smart hiPower holstered on a green webbing belt but her gun hand was useless. ‘I surrender,’ the woman said flatly and the music in Axl’s head went into a holding loop.

‘Surprise me.’ Axl sat back against the edge of the foxhole, SnubPup on his knees, muzzle towards her gut. Digging casually into a pouch pocket for his last grenade, he snapped off the plastic cover and activated what passed for its intelligence.

‘Okay,’ said Axl, ‘this is where you sit still, understand?’

The fat sergeant looked at the flecks of flesh matted into Axl’s hair and the blood painted in splashes across his face and nodded. Yeah, she understood.

‘I’m going to take out three threads,’ Axl told the grenade. ‘And then we’ll go over to voice mode for detonation. So you can do a better job of helping me.’

‘That’s not advisable.’

Axl sighed. ‘I’m going to do it anyway,’ he said, ‘so I’d be really grateful if you didn’t do anything stupid. But first ...' Axl glanced at defMoma, head cocked to one side. ‘I need your sulphate…’ The fat woman didn’t move.

‘Alternately,’ said Axl, ‘I can defuse the grenade with these.’ He held up both hands, showing defMoma the rapid shakes that softened his fingertips to a snare-drum blur. ‘Your choice.’

Axl caught the sealed packet she tossed him, ripping out the corner with his teeth and pushing his tongue through the gap, chemical cunnilingus.