redRobe

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.

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.

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.