In five minutes Axl would have exactly five hours before the SS St Bernadotte lifted off from Vajrayana and dropped through the first of the lock gates on its trip out into the big black. In thirty minutes the flowers out in the big black would open to catch and reflect the sun and Axl would be too late to spring anything, never mind a one-grunt ambush.
Colonel Emilio’s conscripts were waiting below him. Not camped-out-on-the-forest below but directly, spit-and-it’ll-mess-up-their-precious-hair below. From what Axl could tell, half of the conscripts were on this side of the road, the others across the road, also hidden. All any one of them had to do was look up and they’d see Axl glued to a rock face above, doing his best imitation of oversized gecko. Only they wouldn’t look up, at least Axl sure as hell hoped not.
They’d be watching that path down from the slopes, wired up with infrared, waiting for him to lead the others straight into a killing zone. Well, he had a couple of reasons why it wasn’t going to happen and the main one had a zytel butt and was cradled in his arms like a baby.
By the time Kate heard gunfire PaxForce would be excised, foreclosed, out of the loop. And if not there wouldn’t be much Axl could do about it because he’d be dead. He was doing Kate a favour she hadn’t asked for and would probably never even acknowledge to anyone. But hell, that was life.
The conscripts might be so ignorant, underpaid and brain-fried they didn’t know their arse from their neighbour’s elbow but the Colonel would report in on Mai’s significance, if he hadn’t already, that much was guaranteed. A little legalistic sleight of hand and WorldBank would be reclassifying the kid as Joan’s clone and pulling her in for trial. Kate too, accessory before the fact. . .
Extraditing would be difficult, with luck. Taking her off Samsara now before the feeds got fed was a much softer option. That’s what he’d have done if he was the Colonel. And Axl, as the Colonel, didn’t even want to think about he’d do to Kate. And if the Colonel didn’t, CySat would if she got returned for trial. It was humiliation and rape whichever way you looked at it, on screen or off, or both.
Blocks of wood banged slowly together echoed inside Axl’s mind. No more than a basic click track. Somewhere far below it was melody, fractured like glass and soft as the footfall of rats in a dusty attic. WarChild, obviously. No gruff Latino voice was looped over the top but that was okay, Axl could do the rap from memory.
Read, Reconnoitre and—get dead or—get it Right.
The toughened twine he’d originally brought along to tie up Mai had cut raw strips into the centre of his palms. The rope was too thin to get a good grip and besides his hands were slick with sweat. Shaking, too.
Fear did that. Always.
Axl didn’t do fear, either, but recently his body seemed to have forgotten that.
‘More light,’ Rinpoche said and Tukten pushed another branch into the fire, then tossed two smaller ones on top, watched as sparks danced up into the pre-dawn.
‘Beads,’ demanded Rinpoche, then remembered he was already holding them. Small and lifeless, they looked as insignificant as bits from a child’s necklace. They looked liked… small hard-spheres, really, which is what they were.
Rinpoche took the soulcatcher beads in his hands, thin lips pulling back over sharp canines as he stuffed them in like candy. And that was it. The silver monkey sucked hard, feeling memories slip between his teeth, releasing the sweetness of Joan seeing Kate for the first time, the sour taste of being a lonely child watching mist fill a deserted plaza, the angry slap of a teacher, the firm grip of a US president as she shook hands, the mew of a kitten trapped in a box hedge. Sex, darkness, death, love, power…
Mai was already empty of dreams, her own and Joan’s taken from her head by Rinpoche who’d simply put his hands to her temples and kept them there until nothing was left to come screaming out of the dark.
Now holding Mai’s hands Rinpoche fought to assimilate, making and breaking connections, getting it right less often than he got it wrong and had to start over again. Half the lamas in Samsara fugued as Rinpoche conscripted Tsongkhapa to distribute what had been Joan’s senses into the lucid dreams of others before Rinpoche finally began to pull it back into a whole.
All this for something as transient as a single flawed identity, no wonder Tsongkhapa was amused.
‘I’m me, aren’t I?’ It was Mai talking but the voice was way too knowing for Mai.
Kate burst into tears.
‘Oh for fuck’s sake…’ It was Mai this time, staring at Kate in exasperation. ‘I’d thought you’d be glad to get her back.’
‘I am,’ Kate protested.
Chapter Forty-Six
Ammo Check/Check Ammo
The tiny sliver of basalt broke free from beneath his foot and Axl froze, flat to the rock face, the reptilian part of his brain kicking in with a reflex that pre-dated humanity. No one shot at him. In fact, none of the conscripts even looked up. They were busy watching a fire burn fiercely in the distance, near the flat stone that stood for a cairn making the final stretch of the path down from the high-plateau’s foothills
Axl had been hanging above them for ten minutes longer than was wise. So he was now running late even by his own ludicrous timescale. He would have shrugged but he was kind of occupied counting heads. Four conscripts in each slit trench, all armed with squat Brownings like the model Axl carried and both their trenches were strung round with chameleon net, the kind that diffused heat and filtered out static. Not that Axl or anyone still up on that ridge had thermal imaging glasses any more than they carried comScanners.
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.