‘Fuck,’ Axl gunned the engine angrily, flicking the rev readout from green to red as he blipped the engine up past safety. Maybe it was the scattering goats or perhaps the wind finally changed direction to bring them the unmistakable, hysterical whine of the two-stroke but either way, the man running tail flipped round and unslung his snubPup.
Guitars screamed a warning.
A burst of speed carried Axl along the slope above the soldiers and by the time they realised he intended to get ahead of them Axl was already there, the Honda’s rev readout flashing purple with electronic pain.
Now he just had to reach Mai—and fast—because letting defMoma stumble over the top of a bank and find Mai naked, sprawled beneath some second-grade conscript was one way to guarantee that the sergeant took close personal interest in showing the girl that NCOs did it better.
In fact, the only thing that stood between defMoma just hurting Mai and actually cutting her throat was the fact that the fat woman had firm orders to arrest the girl, which would hold off the throat slitting if not much else. And Axl wasn’t about to let either happen.
Not if he could get there first. And he was going to ...
Hill/Slope/River. Axl got the flash played straight into his brain, just like he was running some top-grade satellite positioning software. A quick nudge on the handlebars, a nudge of the accelerator and the Honda X3 was rocketing down a long slope towards a bank that flipped the bike up and then dropped it all the way down to the river and Mai.
She was naked, cock-eyed tits as beautiful as he remembered them, her hips full and soft. And it was obvious from the blind panic in her unfocussed eyes that she didn’t have the faintest idea who was riding the bike falling towards her.
The conscript sitting naked nearby should have gone for a weapon but went for his trousers instead. He was still trying to yank them past his knees as Axl decided to try for a skid stop and quickly decided it was a bad idea.
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.