‘You new round here?’

Axl twisted his head slightly, as if listening. And Wireframes took that for agreement.

‘Well, we run this bit of the high plateau,’ she said flatly.

You do? Mai twisted her lips in surprise, If that was true, it was the first she’d heard of it and Kate and Louis did nothing but talk boring shit about how life was in the valley.

‘Isn’t that strange,’ said Axl. ‘And there I was thinking Tsongkhapa ...'

‘Yeah, I know… No police, no army, no guns, only self-governing autonomous settlements,’ the woman recited the wheelworld litany like it was an Ad jingle. ‘Well, we’re none of those.’ She sounded pleased with herself, so much so that Mai wanted to climb down and slap the smile of her face.

‘We’re a wolf patrol.’ Wireframes spun her staff, touching a spot near the middle. Instantly, a blade slid from each end.

‘And that’s a wolf killer,’ said the large woman, nodding at the weapon. That was when Axl opened his eye and blinked in surprise. He’d just recognised the voice of Wireframes’ companion, though the last time he’d heard it the bitch had been wearing a sergeant’s uniform and he’d been tied to a chair.

Which meant that maybe the… No, the Colonel would be tucked up safe in La Medicina and, besides he had things closer to home to worry about, like a kid’s dreamcatcher with a snapped leather thong half-hidden in the straw at the sergeant’s feet.

If Wireframes saw it she’d want to know where it came from and then things would get complicated, and Axl hated it when things got complicated.

‘I think you should leave,’ Axl said, more for something to say than because he really cared. At the same time, he edged towards them both-very slowly-making sure the one thing he didn’t do was accidentally glance up at the rafters. Axl had a plan and item one was to step over that necklace and get it on their blindside.

Managing it proved easier than he expected.

‘Far enough,’ said Wireframes.

Axl shrugged, knife still loose in his fingers and dropped to one knee, ostentatiously retying the ragged lace of one sodden boot. ‘Can’t get the clothes out here,’ he said flatly and stood again, Mai’s feathered charm tucked safely in his other hand. ‘You know how it is…’

Axl yawned. He knew what was coming. They all did…

Blood pumped slowly through his arteries. His heartbeat had dropped even as he stepped forward and the other two tensed up. Cobras and Pitbulls. When the Cardinal chose his tools, he chose wisely. One out of five people have a metabolism that slows before combat. They are those who instinctively go still the way that cobras do. Viral augmentation could provide it. And the skill could be learned—hell, most of bushido was hung around passing on the skill—but it was better to be born that way. Cold in combat, detached, dysfunctional, deadly. . .

‘Now.’ Wireframes nodded and the sergeant swung her torch hard towards Axl’s head, the weighted metal tube hissing as it cut air. Except her victim wasn’t standing there any more. He was rolling in towards the sergeant to finish at her feet, coming up out of the roll hard and fast to slam his hunting knife into the gap between her heavy breasts. Not blade first, but hilt forward so the brass boss split her sternum, cracking free the lower two ribs.

Shock waves radiated into the huge woman’s heart, stopping it dead. Her pig-like eyes exploded in panic and she crumpled, heading for the dung and litter of the stable floor. That was when Axl hit her again, a punch to the gut that echoed round the stable so loud it silenced even the restless horses. Breath rasped into shocked, burning lungs and the sergeant rolled sideways and vomited—but by then Axl was already on his feet.

‘Get it taped right round your ribs,’ Axl told the woman, ‘and don’t pick any fights for a while.’

There was a dry chuckle from Wireframes and the woman took a step towards Axl, stopping dead when Axl nipped the knife round in his fingers and slid back into a Chin Mai slouch. The move was so instinctive that up in the rafters Mai knew the man didn’t even realise he’d done it.

That made him interesting and not just to Mai.

‘Neat move,’ said Wireframes.

‘I like staying alive,’ was all Axl said. He just hoped the woman knew he was being ironic. But she didn’t look the type to be big on irony. Captain, Axl reckoned, maybe even a major. Whichever it was, she was pretty pleased with herself.

‘momaDef.’ Wireframes held out her hand.

Axl ignored it, as Mai knew he would.

‘You know,’ said momaDef as she dropped her hand, ‘I could use a good fighter.’ There was a tightness round her eyes, but no other sign that she’d noticed him reject her greeting.

Yeah, thought Axl clocking the wolf sticker held in her hand, like the pope needs a Koran. He glanced at the heavy woman sat on the floor glaring at him.

‘That’s defMoma,’ said momaDef. ‘Working for me she gets the pick of everything—women, money, food, boys, bodyparts…’ momaDef’s smile held as she spun out the list, waiting to see which one would punch the buttons of the man in front of her.

But so far as momaDef could tell none of them did. Or if one did, the man hid it well because she saw no flicker of hunger in his face, no spark of recognition that flared his nostrils

‘I work alone,’ said Axl.

‘Not when we’re in the area, you don’t,’ momaDef said flatly, dark eyes hard behind her wire-rimmed spectacles.

‘I work better that way.’ Axl nodded to himself, as if the woman had never spoken. ‘Fewer accidents.’ He glanced again at defMoma sat on the stable floor. Injured and furious, but still alive. You could say that for WarChild. He might not know which fork to use but he knew when not to kill. Which was more than most professionals. That it was more than every amateur in existence went without saying.

So why wasn’t he more proud of it?

Backed up, stacked up like sins that he filed away in his cortex and left to gather neural dust was the answer, but Axl didn’t intend to go there. Not now, not ever. Problem was, Axl realised, these days half his mind was taken up with ‘no entry’ signs.

‘Look,’ said Axl, ‘I’m going to be around a while. So I think you should go now and leave the horses. Before someone really gets hurt. . .’

The thin bald guy sat cross-legged on a stone altar staring at the sky. The Colt could swear to fuck that the Colt was what the monk was looking at, only the man’s eyes were closed and he seemed to have stopped breathing.

Except he had to have air in his lungs or he wouldn’t be able to manage that low chant which slid between his lips in wisps of warm breath, dissolving into the frozen air. It was the people round him who weren’t breathing, but that was because they were definitely dead. The last time the Colt had seen bodies that ripped had been in Ecuador, after the IMF sent in a team to re-educate a bunch of corporate VPs about capital investment. They’d done that classic remove-the-hands-from-the-arms, the-feet-from-the-legs routine too, only the suits had definitely been alive at the time.

The other problem with the man being able to look at the Colt was the fact the Colt wasn’t so much invisible as not actually in existence, at least not physically…

Up until a few seconds ago the Colt had been skimming the Big Black. Solar winds howling around the Legrange point where the Colt hung. In fact, it hadn’t really been the Colt that hung there, because the gun was piggybacking a derelict soHo—solar and heliospheric observatory.

The sun-facing side of the Sat blistered with a heat to rival Mexico’s hottest desert while the shadow side was colder than the bleakest Antarctic midwinter, but the soHo didn’t know that because it was too fucking stupid. So dumb in fact that it didn’t even realise the Colt was there. All in all, it was about level with a jellyfish which meant the soHo ran no discernable intelligence but did have a certain pre-coding of instinct that kept it facing the sun, both its target and its source of power.