It was the drugs, Axl told himself as a back beat started up again. Too much sulphate, not enough sleep. Or maybe it was just post-traumatic irony. defMoma certainly looked liked she couldn’t believe anyone could be stupid enough to do what he’d done.
Check ammo.
Full clip in his Browning. Three fulls velcroed to his leg and now he had her hiPower too. More than enough to check out what was alive in the other slit and kill it.
Axl drum-rolled out of defMoma’s foxhole. Common sense said approach the second slit trench silently from the back, but Axl wasn’t doing common sense. Besides they’d already been fragged. And they were kids, scared and under-trained. Been there, survived that. Axl ratcheted back the breech on his SnubPup and…
Stood.
Like anyone could be that stupid and not be on camera. He went through his first clip without even realising his finger was on the trigger, hit silence and reloaded without being aware he’d done that, either. The second clip lasted the brief seconds it took him to scramble through the gaping hole he’d just gunned in the camoNet.
160, 180, 200… The bpm were pushing hardcore, meth jungle even. In the trench up ahead a woman stood, snubPup rising, and Axl lifted the top off her skull without even thinking about it. He hosed out the trench with the rest of his clip, finishing off a grunt already wounded by his earlier grenade, splinters of bone stripping leaves from oaks as the grunt’s head vanished as cleanly as if Axl had taken it off at the neck with a chainsaw.
Tempo change. Scratch violin chopping out a warning.
Four, plus one, plus three. Two left.
Behind him.
Axl hit the ground ahead of the empty snubPup that swung butt-first towards his skull, rolled sideways and came up onto his knees rough and fast, reversing his Pup and swinging it hard by its barrel straight into a conscript’s knee, Babe Ruth style.
The grunt crumpled, eyes bulging and mouth wide, too shocked to scream. Instinctively, Axl put an elbow in his throat, silencing him anyway. Strapped to his ankle, the grunt had one of those quick-release glass blades, undetectable by ninety-nine percent of all airport scanners so Axl borrowed it.
The knife bit into flesh under the conscript’s ear opening a wide bubbling grin. All Axl needed to do to make it a necktie was reach in and yank his tongue out through the slit. Not his style. Instead he put the blade into the kid’s heart and closed his large brown eyes after he fell.
‘Borja.’
Sudden silence. Not even a click track or heartbeat.
Skin crawled across Axl’s back, hairs rising on his neck. And then he got a low tom-tom line, part goan/partVou that kicked at his stomach and shrivelled his mind into a fetal ball. Someone had just called time.
Axl knew that when he turned round the Colonel’s salt and pepper hair would still be brushed neatly back from a face that was handsome, despite too much food and not enough exercise. And beneath that full moustache the mouth would be grim but smug. Also, the man would have a gun, something expensive and it would be pointed straight at Axl’s head.
Axl was right on all the points, especially the last. The gun was a lovingly retrofitted 1896 Broomhandle Mauser 7.63 machine pistol. The only other kreigsmarine Axl had seen was in a Potsdam museum, but that version wasn’t converted for ceramics.
‘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.