As his old sergeant would have said, tough call…
LockMart’s finest smart munitions could tap dance round any object not soft, warm and sentient. Even semi-smart, self steering could nudge themselves a couple of degrees in either direction. But straight dumb ceramics… Enough already.
Bass got buried under heavy synth as Axl’s shoulders tightened. And when electric fiddle screamed in over the top Axl knew his body was ready, even if he wasn’t.
This was the plan.
Axl kicked off hard from the rock face.
And fell.
Guitar howled. Pain flamed in both hands as the sisal cut fresh track marks into his palms, the rope ripping under one arm and across his back until he tightened his grip and gravity slammed him back into the rock face. Kicking off again, Axl let the burning rope explode through his hands like fire and then it was gone and he was really falling, straight onto a conscript.
Axl snapped the boy’s neck in a crash of drums, boots ripping down both sides of the conscript’s fucked-up head to shatter breastbone on either side and rupture third and fourth vertebrae in a wet chord change of compacting bone. Breaking his fall by landing on some grunt’s head was sheer luck, no matter how slick it looked.
The other three conscripts in the slit never stood a chance as Axl emptied his first clip in a single staccato four-second burst. Ceramics scythed through already-mangled flesh, snare drumming into the damp earth at the other end of the trench. No one did vocals, there wasn’t time. Axl was bathed in blood, faeces and minced flesh as it splattered back to where he crouched on the floor of the trench.
Back to a single base line. Then that inevitable drum roll.
Ammo check.
Wiping flesh out of his eyes, Axl slammed the second clip into his snubPup, ripped free two clips from the leg of what had been a grunt, then scrabbled in the leg’s blood-filled knee pockets, finding grenades.
Three grenades, static or crawling, retroAlessi. Featuring recessed legs and those clean chrome lines so fashionable ten years back, about the time some idiot at Harvard uploaded a paper on Art and the Aesthetics of Corporate Violence. The first one was even part primed, red diode primly blinking. It was also just smart enough to be irritating.
But not as annoying as the clips getting wasted in the other trench as conscripts fired in all directions, blasting scars in a dozen trees. Kids the lot of them, poor bastards. Not even properly trained.
‘One second,’ Axl told the grenade, snapping off a protective cover.
‘Two?’
‘One.’
He yanked the pin viciously, lobbed the grenade towards the foxhole behind him and hit the bottom of his own slurry pit in one easy move, face-first into the contents of someone else’s stomach.
The little shit grenade still counted off two seconds before exploding. Not that it made much difference. Zero seconds after it landed in his dugout the corporal was beyond bagging.
Somewhere a mood layer fed in behind the bass line. It wasn’t hard to get back in the swing of things.
Grabbing grenade number two, Axl got it to promise a three-second count, counted off one himself and threw the apple hard enough to arc up over the road.
Chord crashing backwards out of his trench, Axl had dumb fucks locking the other slit down and blind before his grenade fragged in a neatly controlled airburst between the slit and defMom’a’s foxhole. Sliced sushi.
What Axl had going for him… Hell, the only thing he had going for him was the chameleon net screening off the trench he’d just been in. Somewhere back in those trees the Colonel would know his shit had hit the proverbial, but not yet how. Another flip and roll took Axl to the edge of defMoma’s foxhole and he dropped into it, breech ratcheted back and diodes doing the walk/don’t walk dance.
‘You.’ defMoma was slumped at the bottom of her foxhole, staring at an arm twisted awkwardly in front of her. White bone glistened through a long gash in pink flesh and blood dripped from one ear. Other than that she was untouched. Axl’s second grenade had fragged at least five paces in front of her foxhole, half filling it with earth, and it was only mischance that a sliver of chrome had opened her arm all the way from wrist to elbow, leaving red edges where the flesh used to meet.
She had her semi-smart hiPower holstered on a green webbing belt but her gun hand was useless. ‘I surrender,’ the woman said flatly and the music in Axl’s head went into a holding loop.
‘Surprise me.’ Axl sat back against the edge of the foxhole, SnubPup on his knees, muzzle towards her gut. Digging casually into a pouch pocket for his last grenade, he snapped off the plastic cover and activated what passed for its intelligence.
‘Okay,’ said Axl, ‘this is where you sit still, understand?’
The fat sergeant looked at the flecks of flesh matted into Axl’s hair and the blood painted in splashes across his face and nodded. Yeah, she understood.
‘I’m going to take out three threads,’ Axl told the grenade. ‘And then we’ll go over to voice mode for detonation. So you can do a better job of helping me.’
‘That’s not advisable.’
Axl sighed. ‘I’m going to do it anyway,’ he said, ‘so I’d be really grateful if you didn’t do anything stupid. But first ...' Axl glanced at defMoma, head cocked to one side. ‘I need your sulphate…’ The fat woman didn’t move.
‘Alternately,’ said Axl, ‘I can defuse the grenade with these.’ He held up both hands, showing defMoma the rapid shakes that softened his fingertips to a snare-drum blur. ‘Your choice.’
Axl caught the sealed packet she tossed him, ripping out the corner with his teeth and pushing his tongue through the gap, chemical cunnilingus.
‘Better, much.’ Axl twisted the grenade’s base free from its chrome outer shell. Four little sticks of bioSemtex sat there on the base, oily and glistening, each wired to the intelligence with a spider’s trace of optic fibre.
‘I’m disconnecting the first one,’ said Axl and yanked the connection, hard and fast. He didn’t bother to tell the apple he was about to remove the other two tubes, the intelligence would be expecting it.
Soon done. Axl screwed the grenade shut and tossed the three dead tubes out onto the grass. He now had a grenade that could kill defMoma without killing him.
‘We could use this as a suppository…’ Axl told her. He’d seen that done, more than once, and so had she from the look on her face. Kolonics was a strictly equal-opportunities atrocity: the last time he’d watched it happen a Brazilian major paid the price for upsetting his own NCOs. There’d been barely enough left to scrape off the bunker walls.
‘. . . but you’re going to incubate it instead.’ He waited while she shifted her vast buttocks and sat on the grenade. ‘And we’re going to keep this short.
‘So,’ Axl said, ‘What is this really about?’
defMoma stayed silent, but only because she was trying to work out what to say. There wasn’t much hope in her face, but it wasn’t all despair. Somewhere inside the woman was telling herself this was survivable. She was wrong.
'I'll tell you what I think,’ Axl said, cutting in just as she was about to speak. ‘This isn’t about Joan. It’s about the Cardinal. WorldBank are trying to take him down.’
She didn’t deny it.
‘Well,’ said Axl, ‘they won’t be able to ...'
Blue eyes locked onto his, hard and spiteful. Lips thinned. ‘If I were you,’ defMoma said, ‘I wouldn’t place too much faith in tired old men. They die.’
Axl shot her. What he’d had in mind was something clever involving the grenade holding her prisoner here while he made his excuses, but it just happened. . . And by the time he realised what a fuck-wit idea shooting her was, the fat woman’s heart had a third ventricle and blood was spreading across her vest. The soundtrack had gone silent.