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 to 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.