Jon Grimwood - redRobe

Gualagara’s The White Condor ran as backing track, Axl wasn’t big on reworked Dutch trance but he figured it was the Ludwig Van/Tierra del Fuego mix. Light and breezy like the new countryside.

Each tight curve came up to meet him in an easy blur of hedgerow and overhanging oaks, the straights opening out to zip past on either side. The curves getting less tight and the straights longer each klick the Honda got closer to Vajrayana.

‘00.09.59,’ read the Seiko timecode. It had been flashing deeper red, in ten minute bites, for the last fifty minutes. Had Axl had enough time, he’d have stopped and found some way to disconnect it. But the city was at least thirty minutes away and the airport was beyond.

Axl was going to make that cruiser. Without Kate, without Mai, but at least with himself. Some things you just did, no matter how stupid they appeared to others… He’d broken up one marriage procession, terrified more horses than he dared to remember and only just managed not to leave himself as a smear along the road when he flipped out of a curve and almost went under the wooden wheels of a cart.

Dutch to Deutsch, the trance choon changed gear and Axl instinctively blipped his throttle, grinning like a lunatic.

Up ahead brick, wood and stone waterfalled down a high slope, the Potala. Only Vajrayana’s famed palace was clearly visible this distance from the city, as impressive as being face-on to a glacier.

Vast windows that looked tiny were cut into walls that plummeted hundreds of feet before anchoring to granite below. Inside one of those rooms sat the Dalai Lama and behind the lower, windowless stretch of wall resided Tsongkhapa. At least, that was what half Samsara thought. The rest, including Rinpoche, believed Tsongkhapa was incorporate.

‘Everywhere and nowhere,’ insisted Rinpoche. And it wasn’t until Axl was approaching the city he worked out that what the silver monkey had been talking about was widely distributed, infinitely parallel computing. Except that the rules of quantum processing meant most of the bit shuffling didn’t actually take place in a sense anyone could understand. At least not in any place that actually existed.

All possible states just were, simultaneously.

No wonder the Dalai Lamas had always been such fans.

Lights flashed. Axl got a sudden drum fill. ‘00.00.00.’ read the pulsing eye implant.

‘Tell me about it.’ Axl throttled back to flip into corner, flip out again and blip his accelerator. He was riding the Honda on dumb. The last thing he wanted was some military semiAI trying to second-guess what he had in mind, or just deciding Axl shouldn’t be on the bike anyway.

Which, of course, he shouldn’t. The gyro was strictly PaxForce issue. And quite probably the reason Axl hadn’t been stopped was the large UN/PF hologram that lit bright above his front and rear mudguard. Though the little recognition chip tucked inside the pocket of his mud, blood and vomit-encrusted cargo pants might also have had something to do with it.

According to the chip, the man burning off other traffic on the road into Vajrayana was Colonel Emilio, personal envoy of the Emperor of Mexico. Which wasn’t actually true. The real Colonel Emilio was face down in an oak wood with a ceramic through his brain. At least Axl hoped to hell he was, if only on humanitarian grounds, because the alternative was the guy was alive and legless.

Axl patted his trouser pocket. There were three morphine crawlers clinging to his own leg, dug in by their claws. Another five were still asleep in the pocket.

Axl had watched as the grenade clawed its way up the side of a rotting branch and tumbled over the top to roll so close to the Colonel Emilio’s boot that had he stepped backward the Colonel would have tripped on it. Giving grenades canine-based smarts made sense, no cat would have been that loyal.

Or that stupid.

‘Explode,’ Axl said simply and the grenade did. One tube only, yet the casing fragged exactly, a femtosecond burst of laser unzipping precisely defined-molecular chains along two horizontal and two shorter vertical axes just ahead of the bioSemtex exploding.

One second Colonel Emilio had feet, the next he didn’t. Only confused and half-blind with flash, Axl didn’t notice that at first, he was too busy trying to crawl across wet forest floor towards the Colonel’s dropped Mauser.

Voco’der and theramin. It was as well the WarChild theme loaded direct inside his head, because Axl was too deafened to hear anything happen in the world outside. At first Axl wasn’t sure why he wasn’t moving faster, but then he glanced back and saw that a path of glistening bone below his knee was encrusted caddis-like with grit and dead leaves. Shrapnel had lifted a flap of flesh from his leg as cleanly as any butcher with a cleaver.

White noise roared in on a wave of sour adrenaline, dying away as Axl slowly realised that getting to the Mauser wasn’t a race he could lose. Not with a slack-jawed Colonel Emilio still sitting where he’d landed, holding one of his own boots with his foot still inside. He was looking bemused, as if he’d never seen either of them before.

After he’d lifted the Colonel’s identity chip, found six Hondas hidden under netting and crippled them all except the one he wanted, Axl broken open a packet of undertakers and sprinkled them into the f/holes and slits. And then he kicked the gyrobike to life and circled back between the trees to return the Mauser to the Colonel. Leaving it within crawling distance.

‘Shoot yourself,’ suggested Axl. ‘You know it’s what everyone wants.’

The timecode now read -00.19.59 and flashed neon bright. And the ragged Elektrika mix feeding his aural nerves was wound so tight there was nowhere left for its step-fed chord changes to go…

Axl didn’t need the special effects, he knew he was late.

Minutes later, tourists scattered in a fruit market built under the walls of a monastery as Axl slid into a skid turn on damp cobbles and gunned the Honda between two stalls, grabbing a green pear on his way past.

The bpm plummeted, temple bells echoed over chanting. Without needing a cue, he’d hit the human touch.

The pear was hard and unripe like the soil that produced it, blistered across its belly from grubs eating its skin, but the skin wasn’t polymer and no Monsanto trademark ran down the inside of its core. The pear tasted sour and slightly woody, but Axl finished it anyway. There were people watching.

Weird as it might seem, he was going to miss Samsara. Seasons happened. Whichever way you looked at it, the place had USPs other destinations couldn’t imagine. You didn’t have to be rich to get in for a start. Though even the Dalai Lama would have trouble keeping the metaNational out once the atmosphere thickened and the temperature got hiked. Unless, of course, Tsongkhapa kept the place like it was. Axl could go for that. . .

Up ahead the market street split, two narrow lanes leading into shadow. Axl flipped right at random. No reason. Gunning the Honda, he ripped up the middle of a long incline steep enough to have pedestrians hunched forward as they walked. The walls either side were high and bare, windows beginning two floors above street level. The only breaks were sunken doorways that the peds stumbled back into as Axl raced past them.

And then the narrow street ended. Chopped off abruptly by a white wall at least five-feet thick if the depth of the open arch cut into it was anything to go by.

‘-00.29.59,’ read his timecode, but he’d been trying to ignore it since the readout flipped over to black fluoro, nine minutes, fifty-nine seconds ago.

Each tread in the stairway ahead dipped in the middle from centuries of constant use, except that was impossible and the steps had to have been cut or grown that way.