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  They watched him pass, their eyes hidden behind cheap copies of last season’s Spyro wraprounds. The joker in the gang crossed himself and Axl scowled even more. He’d remembered what he was trying to forget. It wasn’t the thought of a day at McDonalds that pissed him off. As if a day spent flipping burgers wasn’t bad enough, when his shift was over he had to go out and shoot somebody.

  Chapter Two

  Vote Maximillia

  Grid-locked traffic. Smog warning. Three shootings since lunch time. Same as it ever was…

  The valley was 100km long, 60km wide and 2500m above sea level. Inhabited since prehistory, its bowl now contained the world’s biggest city, Day Effé, Mexico’s capital. Axl still didn’t think in metres but he’d been around the city long enough to know just how big it was.

  From long shot, the place cried out for plaintive single-track guitar, nose flutes, even a little mindless Dutch trance. Close up, it demanded needle-sharp acid lines or electric violin, amphetamine edged. But all Axl got in his head was street noise and the arhythmic grinding of gears as vehicles lurched up the Paseo de la Contre-Reformacion.

  ‘Vote Maximillia,’ demanded a poster. The picture of Max was flyspecked and bleached almost white by the sun. All the same the poster spoke firmly, as if it couldn’t imagine that Axl might do anything else.

  Axl snorted. He didn’t vote, hadn’t voted, not in an election where the result had been a foregone conclusion even before it took place ten weeks back. Someone should tell the sign that Max won, as Imperial candidates usually did when they were the only person allowed to stand.

  The sign was midway between Glorieta Cristobal Colon and Cuauhténoc, vast statues on the paseo dedicated to the man who discovered the New World and the Aztec emperor who lost it. Colon’s plinth had priests carved around its base, Cuauhténoc’s had scenes of torture. It seemed to Axl that very little had changed.

  ‘Vote ...’ The sign began again, only to squeal as Axl kicked out and crumpled one of its tubular uprights, making the hoarding lean even further. Not an easy manoeuvre for someone parked-up on an oversized Yamaha WildStar, but Axl was happy to make the effort.

  He would have spat into the dirt like a cholo but caught himself in time.

  Once, way back, the DFPD and Axl had an understanding, when this had still been what he did for a living instead of flipping burgers any place that didn’t want his papers. And as understandings went, it had been a good one.

  He didn’t fuck up the hits, he didn’t turn tourists into Chinese takeout even by accident and he didn’t leave incriminating clues, the kind they couldn’t overlook. In return the DFPD didn’t give him grief about slotting lowlifes they’d have tagged and bagged themselves given half a chance.

  Axl sighed and checked his watch. 7.30 p.m., Friday, August 13… His blood pressure was up slightly, his neurorhythms were erratic and his heartbeat was ten over ideal. But since he wasn’t carrying betaBs he was going to have to live with it. He had no messages and he was bored with waiting.

  At least the three kids parked-up in the black Toyota bubble behind him had reruns of Blackjack Hot to watch. Sitting on his stolen Yamaha, Axl could do most of the dialogue from memory.

  ‘You going to die now…’

  ‘Yeah, right.’

  Said hard and slow. The way studios imagined people spoke on the streets, fifty years out of date and way too intelligible. Real street was jump-cut and amphetamine fast. Axl had been there…

  ‘Say goodbye Jack.’

  ‘Goodbye Jack.’

  And the gun would jump from Black Jack’s wrist holster to his hand before the villain even had time to mash the slide on some ugly, stub Skorpios.

  Bang.

  Axl hadn’t known how much the studios left out, not until he got to eleven and started killing people for himself. Putting a .38 ceramic through some jerk’s skull produced enough loosely-chopped meat to turn anyone vegetarian.

  There were no labels in the clothes Axl wore. Not that it would have made any difference, since simple thread analysis would have identified everything except the jacket as being made in Day Effé itself. Most probably by twelve-year-old ghosts in a slum sweatshop out near Tapo. But he cut the labels from habit and most of Axl’s bad habits died hard.

  Like stealing get-away vehicles and always choosing fancy ones. The fat Yamaha had been lifted thirty minutes before from in front of Thunder Road, the biker’s café on Avenida Madero. 1600 cc, 48-degree, old 8-valve pushrod unit, capable of 100kmp at just 2.4k revs per minute. What’s more the lovingly-restored V-twin was completely original, except for a turbo-charger and gyro, and a small Matsui semi-AI to handle cruise control.

  Not that the evening traffic on the ten lanes of the paseo de la CR was going anywhere. And nor would Axl until he saw the Fiat coupe he was waiting for. Leon Kachowsky was forty minutes late and unless he turned up soon Axl’s blood pressure was going to take another unwelcome hike.

  Back when, that would have been enough to kick Axl’s bass line into a jagged holding loop ready for the build. But now. . .

  Axl spat anyway.

  In theory, Axl’s every move was being watched by the vidcams bolted to road signs, bridges, the top of every tall building. Apparently there was even a fleet of low-orbit Aerospats bought cheap from the French. But this was Mexico City. Half the cameras weren’t working, and the output from those that were didn’t run basic visual recognition software. They got watched by low-paid staff who worked hard not to notice anything at all, it wasn’t worth the paperwork.

  But enough of that… The traffic on Axl’s side of the paseo was kick-starting into movement and finally he’d spotted Kachowsky’s red coupe, it was the semiAI model with bulletproof shell but the Kevlar softtop was down and the man would be driving it on manual, he was that kind of idiot.

  Blipping the bike into action reactivated the poster.

  Axl glanced again at the faded tri-D with its idealised portrait of a girl in green uniform with silver braid looped down her chest in traditional cavalry knots. A long sabre hanging uselessly from one hip.

  ‘Vote…’ the poster began and Axl kicked it, more gently this time.

  ‘Yeah, right. Keep the Austrians in Chapultepec Castle. I got it.’ He gunned the twist grip on his Yamaha and slid the 800-pound bike into a vanishing gap in the traffic, leaving the dumb-fuck poster covered with even more dust than when he found it.

  The election was gone, done, over… Sixteen-year-old Maximillia Habsburg was Emperor of Mexico. Just like every other dysfunctional, manic-depressive first-born from the family Louis Napoleon hoiked into power when he opened his purse back in 1864 and offered Mexico to Archduke Ferdinand Maximillian of Austria.

  Three years later the Mexican empire converted to a democracy, with the accession of each emperor dependent on a plebiscite. It fooled nobody, but it pacified the newly-victorious President Lincoln and-back then-Mexico spent a lot of time trying to stay on good terms with its well-armed friend north of the border.

  Five cars ahead, two lanes across and still utterly oblivious to what was about to happen sat the fat man Axl intended to kill, squeezed into the driver’s seat of a sports coupe so retro it was all leather seats, stubby tail fins and tyres fat enough to iron flat a pedestrian if they passed over one. The vehicle just begged to be wrapped round with cheese-mungous slide guitar. But-as ever-all Axl got was traffic noise.

  Angrily, Axl blipped his Yamaha between a Honda UltraGlyde and a Mack cargo drone, watching the gap he’d just closed go wide open again as fat boy flipped into the outside lane to the sound of hooting. Kachowsky wasn’t driving defensively, he was just being his usual arsehole self.

  In the seat next to him was a young blonde, long hair held by a white silk scarf and face hidden behind a lightweight smog mask. She wore a red Diorissima jacket. The scarf was House of Versace, this month’s model. The mask was the kind picked up from a street stall by people who’ve forgotten to bring their own or didn’t know they were going t
o be travelling in an open-top car. . .

  Not Kachowsky’s regular squeeze then, someone new maybe. Either that, or else the blonde was a bit on the side to the bit on the side. From what he’d heard of fat boy’s personal life that wouldn’t surprise Axl in the least.

  Ahead of him the traffic was picking up speed, gaps lengthening between cars as vehicles filtered off onto a slip road. Now was the time to make a move, before the four lanes on his side of the road could slow again.

  Axl flipped back his holster’s velcro restraining strap with his thumb, tripped a wake-up switch on the side of his Colt hiPower and pulled the gun from beneath his jacket.

  ‘Ready?’

  ‘What, you think I’m…’ Silence hit as the Colt ran a scan on Axl’s current location and jumped five years and one whole continent.

  ‘We’re fucking where?’

  ‘Mexico,’ said Axl.

  ‘You’re in trouble?’

  The gun didn’t really need the answer to that either. Thirty-nine shots, three magazines, nineteen cartridges in each-exploding ceramic, phosphex or flechette-all running parallel up the handle. Use more than two of anything and you’d already fucked up. That’s what his first sergeant used to say; mind you, she bought it on camera, both her guns empty. Took a bamboo spear under her left tit and through her heart, it made repeats on the evening news.

  ‘Hey,’ said the Colt, ‘you want to make a choice?’

  Yeah, he did. As always the Colt would want phosphex but Axl didn’t. He hit the brakes as tail lights ahead lit up red, the Yamaha slowing to a crawl. There was that girl in the passenger seat and Axl didn’t do spillage. It was going to have to be ...

  ‘Flechette.’ No smarts, no in-flight steering. Just a shiny black dart as long as a human finger, with tiny fins at the blunt end and a hair-thin strip of bioSemtex running from point to base. Axl had been trained in primitive, in darkness visible. Atrocity brought in CySat or C3N and every ten seconds of prime time upped the value of his platoon. Any geek could mix lethal nanites into a victim’s cocaine or send in an over-wired spider packed out with tiny saddlebags of toxin.

  Hell, he hadn’t done that stuff back then and he wasn’t going to start now.

  Party time.

  Gunning the throttle on his WildStar, Axl felt its fat rear tyre bite road and then he was off, V-twin never rising above a steady thud as the Yamaha’s turbocharger cut in and both exhausts lit with a fluorescent glow, heat shimmering from the afterburner like melting air.

  As kills went it started out almost perfect as Axl closed rapidly on Kachowsky’s Fiat coupe, his stolen Yamaha burning up the inside lane, wheels thudding over speed bars put there to stop him doing exactly what he was doing.

  Two cars back from Kachowsky’s fancy Fiat, Axl cut in front of a soft-top BMW, leaning hard left then right as he switched lanes and ran between the soft-top and the VW in front, then hit the WildStar’s gyro to swing him upright. He was now on the inside of the fast lane, the VW howling in protest.

  No crashing chords, though. No machine-gun guitar. Combat without a soundtrack just wasn’t the same.

  Just ahead, Kachowsky was now worried enough to be punching buttons on the dash, trying to hustle up an aerial pov to see what the fuck was going on, but he was too late. Axl pulled alongside, violet eyes locked on the skull of his target, his Colt still pointed skywards but already beginning its downward arc as Axl began to squeeze the trigger.

  ‘Stop.’ The man’s eyes were open wide with terror, which was good. That was what the fat shit was meant to feel. That was what Axl had promised to ensure he would feel.

  ‘I said stop.’ The words were howled out, but spat into existence not by Kachowsky but by the girl in the car. The coupe ignored her, she wasn’t a designated driver.

  Kachowsky wouldn’t live to see the crash that ran his car into the red Honda truck braking up ahead, that was the theory anyway. The first flechette was meant to take him in his right temple, drilling through bone to trash occipital lobe before hitting the back of his skull and splintering into shards of carbon that would reduce his cortex to minced protein. Only life didn’t turn out like that.

  As time slowed to a crawl and Axl brought the Colt down through its firing arc the blonde girl made her move. Ripping open her red jacket to grab a small package from where it was taped to bare flesh beneath her arm.

  For a split second too long, Axl was hooked by a flash of white breast and then he saw what was unfolding in her hand, a tiny H&K semi-automatic with retractable stock and barrel.

  Axl made his second mistake as she mashed the slide on her H&K. Instead of concentrating on finishing the kill, he flipped half his attention to the tiny machine gun and squeezed off his Kachowsky shot at the wrong moment. The Colt’s flechette hit the man all right, but instead of piercing bone the dart entered his cheek and tunnelled under skin like a parasite until it hit the corner of his jaw and the hair-thin core ignited, shattering the flechette into tiny shards of carbon needle.

  Kachowsky screamed, the left half of his face hanging free from the yellow sheen of skull beneath as pulped eye ran down his cheek like egg yolk. He was grabbing at his tattered cheek to try to force it back into place before he realised that half the blood now came from the needle-sharp shards of carbon skewering his fingers.

  ‘Fuck it,’ Axl said. The Colt was right. He should have chosen phosphex, cremated both Shitheads where they sat. Axl slotted his second shot cleanly through Leon Kachowsky’s right eye as he did what he should have done first time round and liquidised fat boy’s brain faster than dropping it in a MagiMix.

  And then, while the woman was still drawing bead on him, Axl put his third flechette through her throat. The nastiest shot he knew. From start to finish was three seconds, which was two seconds too long.

  Leon Kachowsky’s bodyguard was still shuddering in her leather seat - lungs spasming as her own blood began to drown her-when Kachowsky’s out-of-control coupe finally slammed into the Honda in front and put her through the windscreen, shards of glass finishing off what Axl had started.

  ‘Out of here,’ said the Colt. ‘Out of here now. You fucking hear me?’

  ‘Not yet.’ Axl stopped his bike beside the wrecked convertible and reached into his jacket pocket. The driver in the Honda truck ahead was watching him in a wing mirror but made no effort to get out. In fact, no one got out of that vehicle or any other. Wise move, Axl decided. Start involving yourself in one Mexican street hit and you’d never stop. Until the police or one of the militias decided you were getting too involved… And then they’d do the stopping for you, with boron-fibre baseball bats if you got lucky, with Brownings if you didn’t.

  ‘Fucking move,’ the Colt demanded. But Axl ignored it.

  Firing up the Fuji, Axl grabbed three shots. One of Kachowsky, one of the dead woman and one of the wrecked Fiat. Punching upload Axl bounced the files off a low-orbit commSat and threaded the packets through a replicator in Montana. Give or take a power outage, those pics would be spreading over the web in under thirty seconds. A bot waiting at the Montana site would automatically notify all relevant news groups ahead of their receiving the files, each message tailored for the group in question. The last thing Axl wanted was to be accused of spamming.

  ‘Jesus fuck. What is wrong with you?’

  Axl couldn’t answer. The silence in his head was too loud.

  ‘Cops,’ warned the Colt. ‘Get us the fuck out of here.’ It was almost screaming with rage.

  There were too. Roaring down the police lane, speed bumps obediently laying flat, came a vast DFPD Cadillac, the noise of its turbocharged V-12 engine buried beneath the suffocating wail of a siren.

  ‘And above us,’ announced the Colt and Axl looked up. Black against the evening sky like a wingless bat and hovering directly overhead was a Sikorski gunship, ex-US marine model. Someone had taken out its two linkless Brownings, but the gun mountings were still in place and the helmeted cop leaning out of the perspex bubble wa
s clutching, a loudspeaker under one arm. A very loudspeaker, the kind that stunned you into submission.

  ‘Put your gun on the ground.’ The demand was simple, unmistakeable.

  Axl started to raise his Colt.

  ‘No fucking way,’ announced the gun. ‘You think I’m going down for trying to take out a police ‘copter?’

  ‘I think you do what the fuck you’re told,’ said Axl, but he lowered the Colt all the same and turned his back to the ‘copter. Then, without giving himself time to think it through, Axl dropped the gun to the tarmac and kicked it viciously towards a group of hookers working the inside edge of the road.

  Leaning over from his bike, Axl grabbed the tiny H&K from the bloodstained lap of the blonde girl, then quickly checked Kachowsky’s jacket for good measure. Another Colt, but a cold one, inanimate and lifeless.

  Holding that gun close to his body, Axl rapidly jacked out the first clip and emptied it into his shaking hand, thrusting the simple ceramics into his chino pockets. Back still to the Sikorski, he grabbed a handful of flechettes from inside his jacket and loaded the clip, slamming it back into place. It took about two seconds. Long enough for the cop in the Sikorski to scream at him to drop any weapon, turn round and move his hands away from his body. Now.

  Axl dropped the dumb Colt, hearing it thud on the heat-softened blacktop, then realised he was still gripping the buterfly H&K, which now appeared to be pointed straight at the occupants of a nearby Saab. Inside the car, some trophy wife was going green under her immaculate Shu Uemura makeup. The small boy behind her was howling, but mostly because he wanted a better view.

  ‘Drop it,’ insisted the voice from above. ‘Drop it now…’

  Axl did. Slowly raising both hands above his head as he kept the vast Yamaha upright and stable with his knees.