redRobe

Chapter Sixteen Cabin Service

Axl remembered screaming at the darkness, but the darkness didn’t answer him. Then he slept, only to wake and start screaming again. Until his howls faded back into the kinder darkness of sleep…

Snapping awake, Axl tried to open his eyes and remembered too late that he didn’t have any. What he did have was a pain in his temples that defied description and blobs of sick stuck to his stubbled chin where an over-full vomitsac had ruptured part of its seal. Only what was left of the bag’s one-way valve was stopping its entire contents from floating off around the cabin.

He would have screamed again but he didn’t have the energy and recent experience suggested he try a different approach.

It wasn’t the same shuttle, but obviously Axl didn’t know that. He’d been swapped at Planetside Arrivals, ferried in a coffin from the Shuttle PS 1308 to a sleek purple Boeing Cruiser with discreet gold livery and a triple-hatted papal cartouche set into the door. None of the ground staff was remotely surprised when a coffin was transferred from the Shuttle to the Nuncio’s cruiser. Not when they knew the Papal Nuncio was on his way to Samsara. Being buried on Samsara was this year’s big thing, and last year’s and most probably next year’s as well.

‘Oh, so you’re awake.’ The voice made a bad job of trying to sound friendly.

Axl grunted.

‘Tea or coffee?’

‘Painkillers,’ demanded Axl.

The stewardess ignored him and offered Perrier or hot chocolate as alternatives. Rules said no requests were to be refused outright.

Axl, however, hadn’t been trained to the same level of social skills. ‘Painkillers are what I want. And if you don’t get me painkillers,’ he said slowly, so there could be no danger of the machine not understanding, ‘I’m going to rip you off the armrest and personally take your chips out through your arse…’ To reinforce his point, Axl shot out his hand and grabbed metal.

He could have told the semiAI when it released his arm restraints that this was a bad idea, but he’d been unconscious at the time. And the semiAI overseeing his private cabin at the back of the Nuncio’s ship didn’t seem to be listening to him anyway.

Quite who, at Boeing, had thought it would be a great idea to kit out each seat with its own ten-inch-high, overpneumatic, underdressed sprite able to summon bar trolleys and tea or coffee machines to order, Axl didn’t know. But judging from the diaphanous costume under his fingers and the improbable length of the legs now kicking against his wrist, he figured them for some Japanese throwback. Women, of course, were assigned male attendants, though dom, fem and neuter were always available on request.

‘I don’t carry painkillers, sir,’ said the stewardess through gritted teeth. If nothing else, her voice programming was a masterpiece.

‘Then make some,’ Axl suggested. He wasn’t stupid enough to believe the coffee, wine and food usually served before take-off was actually real. At least not really real, merely molecularly perfect. There had to be a bank of limited-function Drexie boxes someone on board.

‘I’m afraid we don’t have those facilities,’ said a childlike voice that was new. And, childlike or not, this time the voice carried a little more authority. It added, ‘sir,’ to the sentence as an afterthought.

Cabin chief, Axl decided.

‘That true?’ Axl asked the stewardess and squeezed.

The sprite kept discreetly silent, which didn’t improve Axl’s temper at all.

‘Look,’ he said furiously. ‘I feel like shit, okay?’

There was a second’s silence when Axl was sure the cabin chief wanted to tell him he looked like shit too, but didn’t. Instead it contented itself with suggesting he let go of the stewardess.

‘No fucking way. Not until I get some painkillers.’

‘I’m afraid that’s not. . .’

Axl tightened his grip on the sprite and it yelped, high and strange, like a small dog that someone had accidentally stepped on.

‘All right,’ said the cabin chief hastily. ‘Let’s not get upset.’

‘Upset!’ Tears began to well up in the corners of Axl’s ruined eyes, except he wasn’t sure if it was from pain, fury or laughter. ‘Get me some fucking painkillers or I’ll squeeze this little doll in half and then I’ll start on you.’

That got through to the cabin chief.

Human body with semiAI intelligence, Axl decided sourly. Something pretty, blond and prepubital knowing the Vatican. Haute-design. The wetware running off what was left of its cortex, its intelligence running as a subset of the ship’s AI. Take the cabin chief away from the ship and its body would corpse.

GenoTypz had taken about six weeks to come up with that simple modification, which was as long as it took them to lose five cabin chiefs to suits who couldn’t be bothered to do their own shopping.

‘What happens if I crush the sprite?’ Axl demanded. In his hand the air stewardess kicked harder

‘I’m sure you won’t,’ said the cabin chief, but his voice didn’t sound very certain.

‘But if I do?’

‘Then we bill you.’ The cabin chief paused and added petulantly, ‘And believe me, it won’t come cheap.’

‘Bill who?’ Axl demanded as he tightened his fingers. A sliver of bioChip, a simplified intelligence and some fancy nanetics might be all that made up the sprite but he didn’t actually want to wreck the thing, though she was too busy trying to bite his wrist to notice that. ‘Who gets billed?’

The cabin chief’s eyes flicked briefly out of focus as he ran a seek and logged in to the ship’s bioAI, overrode client confidentiality on the basis of emergency (as defined by ASA), backtracked through a small travel agent in Zurich, a shell company in newVenice and finally a Panamanian orbital before coming up with a name.

‘Carlotta Villa,’ he said firmly. ‘She bought your ticket.”

As if he didn’t already know.

‘She. . .’ Axl’s laugh was as grim as the darkness surrounding him and as unsteady as the slow, painful thud in his head, which felt like an out-of-balance engine but was only blood beating through his tortured arteries and veins. ‘Check Villa Carlotta. Go on, do it…’

The cabin chief blinked as the AI it was logged into ran a check and immediately wished it hadn’t. Villa Carlotta wasn’t a who, it was a what. . . The kind of what any sensible AI didn’t want to know about.

‘Look,’ Axl said speaking straight to the ship itself. ‘You can give me analgesics or I can rip your toys to pieces. You’re not going to arrest me, return me or bill me. And who’s going to know, anyway?’ Pain had reduced his voice to a low growl, and it was obvious that he meant it.

Seconds later, Axl felt the telltale cold of a pre-spray and then a subdermal syringe blasted twenty-five millilitres of co-prAxlmol into his neck. Sleep roared in but not before the pain peeled suddenly away and in that fractured moment of lucidity Axl had time to wonder about the onset gravity.

Pulling herself out the man’s slowly relaxing fingers, the air stewardess folded away like a complex flower going into reverse, back into the arm of his seat.