‘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.
Axl sighed. He could pretend he just hadn’t recognised the boy who’d ridden out with Clone from Cocheforet when he had been their prisoner. Or he could admit that he hadn’t wanted to recognise the Tibetan boy.
Which was less stupid? Axl didn’t know. The thin notes continued, climbing higher, but going precisely nowhere.
That was the way they trooped into Cocheforet, the hoofs of the Colonel’s horse splashing freckles of mud onto a thin crowd of Tibetan and ‘fugee kids who’d gathered behind him as he rode towards the Inn.
Adults watched from open doorways or from the safety of upstairs windows. None of them came out onto the muddy street except for Kate who stood alone on open ground in front of the Inn, her arms folded and face furious.
‘You can’t arrest Mai,’ Kate protested.
Colonel Emilio looked down at the woman blocking his way and smiled. Soon the man would have a double chin to go with his heavy jowls and neat salt and pepper moustache, but for the moment most women still counted him as handsome and the Colonel knew it.
‘I can’t?’ Fussily he pushed back a streak of greying hair that had flopped forward. Only a sudden twist of his thin mouth revealed that he’d just started to enjoy himself.
‘No,’ said Kate fiercely. ‘You can’t.’
‘I haven’t…’ Colonel Emilio said. Hope flared in Kate’s eyes, so palpable that even those watching from the windows could see it.
‘. . . though, I must admit,’ added the Colonel, ‘I did intend to.’
‘But you haven’t?’ Kate said it like she couldn’t quite believe it.
‘No,’ said Colonel Emilio, signalling to his troops to move away from Axl, ‘he has.’ And the man pointed smugly to where Axl stood at the back, near Tukten.
Chapter Forty-One
Ashes on Diamonds
Kate refused to look at Axl, even when she put the bowl of tsampa on the table in front of him and carefully, silently put a narrow bronze spoon beside it. And not just because it had taken Axl sticking a gun to Louis’s head to get Kate to give him the soulcatcher back.