‘Going somewhere?’
Axl nodded. ‘Yeah, things to do…’
‘. . . people to kill. Aren’t you bit too old for all that Black Jack shit?’ Colonel Emilio smiled sadly and his smile was every bit as supercilious as Axl had expected.
‘It was just a kid’s program, for God’s sake. Cheap American v’Actors laid over a Jap backbone. It wasn’t even good. Or didn’t you notice no one bothered to made a second series?’
No, Axl could truly say he hadn’t noticed that.
‘I killed defMoma,’ Axl said, more for something to say. He was watching the Colonel’s trigger finger go white at the knuckle. Watching that happen saved having to stare into the black nothingness of the kreigsmarine’s barrel. Undoubtedly there was some way to turn this situation, Axl just couldn’t remember what it was. Black Jack would have known, except Black Jack hadn’t made it to a second series.
‘Alone, friendless, disgraced…’ Colonel Emilio smiled at Axl. ‘You do know the Cardinal’s finished, don’t you?’
So everyone kept telling him. Axl felt he should have been glad. Maybe. Less than three hours left to get himself to the Nuncio’s cruiser and apparently he didn’t need to anymore.
‘Still, life isn’t all bad,’ said Colonel Emilio. ‘You killed my troops.’ The Colonel didn’t sound too disappointed. ‘And I get to kill you. And you didn’t even know what this was all about.’
‘But you’re going to tell me anyway…’
Colonel Emilio shrugged. ‘What’s the point… The rest of us are doing realpolitik and you’re still running scripts from a kid’s novela. I should have had you killed in La Medicina before this all started.’
Axl nodded. ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘you should have done.’ He was staring past Colonel Emilio at a shiny object picking its way laboriously over twigs and splintered branches towards the Colonel’s heel. Maybe that whole Alessi retro-chrome shtick. hadn’t been the design disaster he’d originally thought.
Chapter Forty-Seven
Down Through Zero
The gyrobike ate up the road like Axl was in some advertisement for nanetic shaving dust, penis transplants, sperm-freezing facilities… Something typically macho but tender.
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.