EIGHT

The General nabbed him just as he worked free of the crowd and got inside the ceremonial tent. General Cripplemaker shouted into his ear against the din of ragged fanfares and drum paroxysms.

“Where the hell you been!” Axxter felt a spit fleck hit his earlobe. “You got ten minutes! Till it goes!”

“I had to go back out to -”

“What!” The general’s face was red, laced with straining blood vessels. “Speak up!”

A conga line of warriors almost pulled him away; he had to peel a hairy arm from around his waist. The line stamped and writhed through the crowd, fists pummeling into laughing faces.

Axxter leaned closer to the general. “I had to go out to my rig.” The general nodded; a section of the bandstand had collapsed, spilling the horn players into the crowd and taking the screeching top edge off the din inside the tent.

Axxter fluttered the cardboard square he held. “To get my invitation. Security – uhff – security wouldn’t let me in without it.” He rubbed the small of his back, where something round and hard, like a human head, had jarred his spine. A serious fight, with glints of steel in fists, had broken out; he stepped around to the general’s side to get out of the widening shockwave.

Fetching the invite wouldn’t have taken so long if he hadn’t had to go all the way out of the encampment to get it. When he’d woken up, in the dark, his heart had gone racing into a panic before he blinked on the clock and saw that he just had time to scramble into a clean outfit and make it to the banquet. Looking upwall, he’d seen the crowd around the guards at the entrance, besieging the great striped bulk of tent on its platform cantilevered out into space. He’d figured it would be easier to leave the motorcycle and sidecar where it was and just swing on up the transit cable on his own. A good decision, he’d realized when he’d seen the ranks of vehicles, scooter fleets to half-track howdah pavilions, piled up around the tent; the Havoc Mass had sent out invitations to all its allied tribes and several grudging but nonthreatening rivals. There wouldn’t have been room for the Norton in the tangle of wheels and cables.

Even though the sentry at the tent’s entrance recognized him, he still couldn’t get in without the little rectangle – gilt lettering on black: Nunc est bibendum, nunc pede libero mura pulsanda – in his hand. So another whole trip outside the camp, keeping his head low to avoid fists and missiles, weaseling between sweating backs and legs. He was just now getting his wind back, his good jacket torn, a suspicious-looking beige stain clotting on his boots.

Cripplemaker wrapped an arm around his shoulders and pulled him toward the center of the tent. “But you made it! Great!” Axxter flinched against the general’s roar.

There was a seat waiting for him near the central dais. Junior ranks and a few hereditary dignitaries on either side of him, the closest on the left facedown in a pool of wine dribbling off the edge of the table, one hand still locked on the handle of the jug. “You’re who?” demanded the bleary face on his right.

In the corner of the tent, the horns had climbed back onto the bandstand and were duking it out with the percussion. “Just a hired hand,” said Axxter, pacific smile, as he lifted his elbow from the wine spill. “Little graffex work here and there.”

“Yeah, yeah; great.” The other looked away, down the length of the table, and snagged another pitcher. He drank and stared heavy-lidded in front of himself, ignoring everyone else.

Axxter craned his neck, looking up toward the dais. Pretty sure he’d missed out on the food; the waiters were clearing away greasy plates with gnawed bones on them. He had no appetite, anyway: his stomach was bouncing up and down in expectation.

He could see Cripplemaker in the center of the dignitaries’ table, reseated and talking – laughing, shoulder-clapping – with the men on either side of him. They weren’t in Havoc Mass formal dress; some high mucketymucks from the major allied tribes, Axxter figured. The big guns – old, grizzled bastards with that same narrow, gunslit gaze the general had, the long stare of command and slaughter. When they laughed, it was like steel-jawed traps creaking apart to show the hair-trigger mechanisms within. Cripplemaker leaned back in his chair, drawing on a torpedo-size cigar; his gaze intercepted Axxter’s. The general’s thumbs-up sign showed through an exhaled barrage of smoke.

The alarm clock Axxter had set in the terminal trilled inside his ear, a little red dial ticking at the corner of his vision. Three minutes to showtime, and counting. The band left off their internecine combat and segued into a major-key ostinato, growing less ragged with each da capo. Waiters with cattle prods began clearing the floor in front of the dais.

A corridor formed through the crowd, bodies held back by the Havoc Mass sentries linking arms, digging into the platform surface with their heels. Behind them, the party mob, compressed into a smaller space, frothed and howled, worked up by the band modulating through minor seconds. Axxter could see one of them chewing a sentry’s ear into red gristle; an elbow to his throat sent him tumbling back under the feet of his comrades.

The horns held and vamped a half-step short of resolving the octave; the drums kicked into a double-time accelerando. The tentlights dropped, except for a single spot lancing through the dark, picking out a figure at the far end of the tunnels of faces.

They oiled him good – Axxter barely recognized the old warrior as he strode toward the center of the tent. The medestheticians, the Mass’s own or some freelancers brought in for the occasion, had pumped the old boy full of something that had straightened his spine and put a fierce glitter in his deep-set eyes. Beard washed and combed, then braided and tied with black ribbons, some of them long enough to flutter over his shoulders as he walked, planting a silver-headed staff tall as himself with each step, a contact mike at its tip to snap a bullet report over the mounting din. An embroidered cape hung to the tops of his glistening boots, concealing the armor beneath.

The band’s chord resolved as the old warrior hit the middle of the space cleared for him. He stopped and threw back his head, arm locked to thrust forward the head of the staff. He surveyed the crowd, his yellow teeth showing as he relished the collective gaze fastened on him

The horns and drums cut; miraculously, there was silence. Axxter felt his head vibrating from the battering noise, now ended. The crowd had shut up, right on cue. They were all straining to get a better view, raising themselves on tiptoe behind the armlocked fence holding them back.

00:00:30 flashed the clock at the corner of Axxter’s eye; 00:00:29, 00:00:28… His heart moved up to sync with the red light.

He looked up to the dais just as General Cripplemaker raised his hand and let it fall like a hatchet. A signal to the old warrior: Axxter swung his gaze around and saw that the bearded-and-beribboned figure had already shrugged the cloak from his shoulders, the bright cloth lying in a puddle around his boots. The air inside the tent thinned as the crowd sucked in its breath.

The warrior’s armor, the great curves of the breastplate, the wide band of the stomacher, the domes of shoulder pads and knee protectors, the brassards and jambeaus – all were blank. Shining foil, mirroring the goggling faces on all sides. An empty canvas, grafted onto the calloused flesh beneath, warmed with the blood pulsing under the skin. Waiting to come to life.

00:00:01 and – 00:00:00. The red clock exploded at the corner of Axxter’s eye.

For a second, he had the feeling that the biofoil would just stay blank. Nothing would happen. They screwed it up. The voice inside him rose, gibbering in panic. Those Small Moon assholes, they screwed it up; they didn’t send out the animation signal -

A black dot formed in the center of the old warrior’s breastplate, metastasized into a Fibonacci swirl. The crowd went aaahhh. Axxter slumped back down in his chair, his spine suddenly liquid with relief.

The dots swarmed, merged; the armor went obsidian, a black mirror. Then gray mist, banks of fog rolling back to reveal a skull-strewn battlefield. Above the landscape, the old warrior looked down at himself in childish wonderment.

Figures on the battlefield, backlight stretching their shadows out before them. A murmur went up from the crowd as they pointed out to each other old dead heroes, grizzled veterans bearing their squadron colors, the current chiefs of staff looking sage and decisive as they gazed over the crushed limbs of their adversaries and toward a distant horizon full of future glories. Behind them all stood the mythic figures of the Tin Can Brothers, the founders of the tribe, radiant in the manner of immortals.

The crowd was cheering, scrabbling against the backs of the sentries to get a better look. The old warrior grinned, raising his hands wide to gather in the appreciative noise.

Axxter looked around to the dais. The top brass, the ambassadors from the allied tribes, all were watching the graffex show unfold. He tried to catch Cripplemaker’s eye, but the general’s gaze was also locked onto the figure in the floor’s open space.

Then Cripplemaker’s expression changed. The cigar dropped from his open mouth, scattering spark and ash over the table. His face drained to gray, then blossomed with red, a blue vein jumping at his temple. On either side of him, the faces registered shock; at the far end of the dignitaries’ table, one burly emissary burst into guffawing laughter.

The crowd’s applause died, trickling into silence.

What the – Axxter rose up in his chair, looking around the tent. All eyes were fastened onto the old warrior. Something – He turned and looked in front of him.

The warrior’s glee had melted away; he gazed down at himself in bafflement. Across his breastplate, and in the smaller panels on his armored limbs, the heroes of the tribe were engaged in maniacal buggery. The stern, chiseled faces that a moment before had been looking into the future with the scalpel gaze of eagles, were now rolling their eyes and comically smacking their lips, savoring their own and each other’s shit.

The old warrior looked up, scanning across the rows of faces staring back at him. He looked as if he was about to burst into tears, just an old man now, a fool, the joke played so everyone would know.

Across the biofoil, the Tin Can Brothers’ images rolled like a hoop, their heads wedged between each other’s thighs.

Axxter felt his own head go light and vacant, the space inside the tent tilting and starting to swim around him. That’s all wrong – he wanted to stand up and shout it to the watching faces, but his legs had disconnected from his body. It’s all wrong, I didn’t do that; that’s not my stuff. He opened his mouth, but the words didn’t come out.

And at the same time, a red light blinked at the center of his vision. A priority call, INTERRUPT status plastered all over it: somebody somewhere was paying all the premiums to talk to him right now. Without even thinking, he blinked to receive.

The red light danced apart into words, no voice.

THAT’S WHAT YOU GET. And a little symbol, a servicemark, one that he could recognize right off. The skullpallete-and-brushes emblem of DeathPix.

The words stayed superimposed over the warrior and the crowd behind him for a few seconds, then faded away.

That’s what I get – he wondered about the message for a second, as if it had been delivered in some unknown language, the tongue of the Dead Centers or somewhere beyond that, the building’s eveningside maybe. Then it all became clear.

His brain wasn’t frozen still now – everything outside of him was, though: Cripplemaker and the dais full of tribal dignitaries and ambassadors, the other tables, the crowd and the fence of sentries, the old warrior, even the coprophiliac figures on the decorated armor. They were all in stopped time, or swimming through air thick as syrup, the mob climbing over the backs of the sentries a centimeter an hour, their shouts rumbling down into the infrasonic, too low to hear at all. While his brain went skittering ahead, so high and fast that it saw everything.

They knew. All along. DeathPix had; he saw that now. That he’d been horning in on their action; they’d found out – from whom? Maybe Lauren of the Small Moon order desk had scoped it out, turned him over for a bonus or maybe a little money on the side. Or someone on Cripplemaker’s staff, working off a retainer from DeathPix to keep an eye on things for them.

Then all they’d have to do is just cook up a different animating signal and lock it onto the track he’d paid for. A nice fat fee to the Consortium to grease the way, and then there’d it be. Full of nice little surprises, for him and the Havoc Mass. Something to pump their blood up, homo references being a heavy taboo among these brawny warrior types. Hitting a nerve, a lot of times – either way, it was enough to get Axxter’s head ripped off.

Dimly, through the congealed vista around him, he saw the sentries break ranks, dissolving into the mob they’d been holding back, their faces contorting with the same anger.

Shit, it could’ve been anybody, anywhere up and down the line. A corporation as big as DeathPix had its feelers everywhere, like a spider sitting at the center of its web, waiting for a twitch down the silk. He’d been a fool, exposing himself to a risk he couldn’t have even begun to calculate. Believed in luck, and how much he deserved it. That his time had come round at last. When you start thinking like that, you can convince yourself that you’re immune, you don’t have to worry.

Might not even have been turned over at all. His thoughts bounced around inside that one. Maybe it’d been a DeathPix setup from the beginning. It’d been awhile since they’d had to fuck somebody over for cutting in on them. Good management style to send a little object lesson out over the bush telegraph, remind any and all uppity freelancers of what the consequences were for client infringement. Keep ’em all on their busy little rat-runs, chasing after their two-bit hooligan accounts, and out of DeathPix’s hair. Arrange to have some fool smeared over the wall like cake frosting, word gets around.

Cripplemaker in on it? Point man for the setup? Could be, could be. A wall of faces contorted with rage moved at a glacier’s pace toward him, as he glanced round to the dais. The general was on his feet, standing on his chair in fact, his features boiling over, the blood about to spurt in twin jets from the throbbing blue snakes at his forehead. He was shouting something too, but Axxter couldn’t hear it through the bass roar filling the tent. He admired the possibility of the general’s acting ability: Cripplemaker looked genuinely outraged, jabbing a trembling finger toward him, urging on the crowd’s revenge.

All so clear now. Just how he’d been screwed over. If not in every detail, the hand behind the knife, still the glittering point of the blade sent sparks all around him. His thoughts floated above himself and the whole scene below, bobbing up against the top of the tent. He felt a laugh, a crazy bray, spreading open his jaws and battering at his teeth.

The poor fuck – the old warrior, weeping, had been bowled over by the mob’s slow tide. The angry figures nearest him were diverted, an eddy in the middle of the advancing wave, by the task of stripping the offensive armor off the old man. Foil and skin ripped, red seeping from broad patches of raw skin. Axxter felt bad about that: it wasn’t the old man’s fault. Much less so than his own. The old guy had been a pawn used to spear another pawn. He’d wind up spending a lot of time in the Mass hospital, getting new armor grafted on. Not that there would be any remedy for his senile broken heart.

The human wave hit, snapping Axxter back into real time. He toppled back in his chair as the edge of the table slammed into his stomach. The table itself rose, turning on its long axis, as the front of the mob surged against it. Axxter, knocked breathless, looked up in time to see the table come crashing down on him.

Or almost. The top edge caught against the tent fabric behind him, forming a triangular space with the platform underneath. Axxter uncurled from his knees-drawn-up egg, unlacing his fingers from the top of his head. He could hear the outraged Havoc Mass warriors foaming and scrabbling at the underside of the table, as though their black fingernails could scrape right through to him.

Jesuschristfuckingshit – the lofty, time-dilated perspective snapped away from him. On hands and knees, he listened to the shouts coming from the other side of the capsized table. The sonsabitches were going to kill him. If I’m lucky – once they got their hands on him, they had all sorts of ingenious ways to salve their wounded pride, at the expense of his flesh and nervous system. And that prickly emotion had been revved flat-out inside their breasts – being made mock of, like that, in front of the ambassadors and hangers-on from all their allied tribes – and by some little outside freelancer punk like him – they all had major payback to deal out.

The table shivered with the blows raining against it. The angle between it, the platform, and the tent wall formed a narrow tunnel; none of the crazed mob had thought yet of going around to either end, crawling in, and pulling him out. There were probably only a few more seconds before the crowd backed up enough to let the table be pulled away, exposing him.

One chance – the thought, of all those whirling through Axxter’s head, stood out – of saving his life, or at least enough little spark of it to get through the beating-plus that was going to come crashing down on him. If he could scoot down the triangular tunnel, pop out at the open end a few meters away, and make a dash up to the dignitaries’ table, get there before any of the mob spotted him and collared him with a hairy forearm around his neck… throw his arms around General Cripplemaker’s knees – then he could make a chattel declaration to the tribe. And then he’d be under their protection, or at least a little bit, enough; they couldn’t kill him, by the usual rules, though he knew they’d come as close as they could.

The plan, and the consequences – of becoming an owned thing, no longer human, an object – zipped through his mind without words.

He looked down the tunnel; he had a clear shot to the dais. Everyone on the floor seemed to have come around to join in the assault on the overturned table. What looked like the bottom half of Cripplemaker’s dress uniform, shining black trouser legs striped with red, appeared in the distance, a chair knocked over behind the standing figure.

Go! He started crawling, the heel of his hand crunching on a broken glass. Just go, for Christ’s sake -

“Uhff -” The muffled sound of blows came through the table. “Get back, ya asshole -” Somebody out there was finally taking charge. “Come on, move it back, goddammit!”

Axxter froze, staring down to the triangular opening ahead of him. And beyond; he didn’t see the chaos of tables and chairs, and the general’s legs. Something else, like looking down the wall at night, into dark without bottom.

“Get back, get back; come on, come on, move it -” The commanding voice barked, and the table creaked in response, relieved of the weight pressed against it.

The narrow tunnel lengthened and spiraled as Axxter gazed down into its depths.

Fingers appeared around the edge of the table. “Ya got it? No, over there, come on – get outta the way – okay, pull -”

The table crashed over, its legs sticking up in the air.

General Cripplemaker had climbed on top of a chair on the dais, to get a better view of the operations. The little graffex bastard was going to pay; he’d make sure of that. For making a fool out of him…

“Well?” The general shouted down to the men swarming over the table. “You got him?”

The sergeant who’d been directing the operation pulled a pair of men back by their shoulders. Down the length of the upside-down table, the rest stood back.

“Where is he?” The sergeant looked to either side and got shrugs and upraised palms in reply. “Where’d he go?” A couple of the Havoc Mass warriors pried the edge of the table up from the platform, as though the graffex might have been squashed flat underneath. The baffled sergeant looked up at the general.

Axxter could hear them, swearing and stomping around, through the platform. He swayed in open air, the big step down the wall gaping below him; he kept a white-knuckled grip on the ropes slung beneath the ceremonial tent. He’d have to move fast now, or his one slick move would have been in vain. A glance down to the cloud barrier far below brought his stomach up in his throat. He gripped the rope tighter, his ankles locked around its length farther along, and started inching himself toward the wall.

In the expanded seconds just before the Mass warriors had pulled the table back over, he’d had a vision. A peek down the line into the future. His future. After he’d made his chattel declaration to the general, and after that, when he was finally out of whatever medical facility was deemed appropriate for someone – something – who’d made himself into the tribe’s disposable property. His human status being the traditional price for hanging onto his life, breath and heartbeat being the only things his new owners wouldn’t pry out of him. In that dismal future line, once he was put back together – mostly – the tribe would’ve sold him off on a long-term, open-ended – meaning endless – labor contract to some horizontal production plant, way deep inside Cylinder’s metal skin. A long way from the rotation of sun and night, and into the perpetual glare of jittering fluorescents, the tiny slice of the visible spectrum that made everybody walking around in it look like corpses. An accurate perception, that: to get locked into one of those interior factories, with the proverbial key thrown away, was to be dead, your life over, the fun parts of it at any rate. Sleeping next to some plastics extrusion machine for four hours – or what you’d be told was four hours; no way to tell, since objects don’t own other objects, like watches or terminals – and then punching out widgets for the next twenty, over and over, until there was nothing left in your head except the platonic ideal of a widget. You might as well be a widget then; the transformation into object would be complete.

That so bad? You’d be alive, at least. And not so different from any other poor bastard pulling some gig on the horizontal, high-paying or slave labor; it was all a life where you knew that every day was going to be exactly like the one before. That was the nature of horizontal existence. It was what he’d come from, his polyethylene roots; only fitting, the closing of the arc, to go back to it.

Back to it… Those had been the only words going through his head, in the seconds when he’d been crouching on his hands and knees, staring down the dark tunnel stretching ahead of him, the hands of the Havoc Mass warriors prying back the table over his spine. Everything else, down at the bottom of that tunnel, just pictures and the sense of dead time. Back to it

Until he’d turned his head, a bright flash catching the corner of his eye, and he’d seen a thin sliver of sky, down by his left hand. He’d seen what had happened: when the table had gone flying and its edge had hit the tent behind where he’d been sitting, it had torn the stiff fabric loose from the rivets binding it to the platform. A little gap, flapping in the wind this far out from the building’s wall; he’d caught the cold air in his teeth and nostrils. Air, and a section of distant cloud, far off in space.

Air or the tunnel. The table had started to topple back, pulled by the hands on the other side.

And when it fell back, he was gone. Stuck his head out through the gap and wriggled through, the snapped rivets raking his shoulders. Not even caring what was on the other side, a handhold or not, the edge of the platform or the big step below.

There was a rope, one of the tension lines for the big tent. Luckily, as grabbing it had been all that had kept him from plunging headfirst off the platform as he came wriggling out through the gap. For a dizzy second, he goggled at the fleecy ranks of clouds far downwall, one leg dangling over the edge, his other hand gripping the sharp corner of the platform. Behind him, he heard the voices of the mob booming against the fabric. A quick glance over his shoulder, then he let the pithons out from his belt; they snapped onto the rope, sliding along its length as he rolled himself over the edge. He’d held on for a moment, then had followed the loop down underneath the platform.

A crisscross metal forest of support struts and other dangling ropes, shadows forming an abstract grid against the building’s wall. Axxter was still catching his breath – as much of it as he could force past the fright and nausea in his throat – and sorting out the thoughts whirling inside his head, when he heard a voice shouting above him

“Hey! There he is!”

He looked up and saw a face, upside down, greasy braided mustache dangling past a warrior’s forehead. Just that, meters away, the warrior’s body hidden by the platform. The warrior grinned nastily, then lifted his head, shouting back to his comrades. “He’s down here!”

Shit – Axxter let go of the rope as he grabbed another one with his free hand. The pithons whipped around and fastened on.

More shouting from above, several joining in the cry of pursuit. He stretched for and caught one of the struts running into the wall at a forty-five-degree angle. He wrapped his legs around it and inched down.

“Ya little fucker! Your ass is grass!”

Tilting back his head, he could see the warriors clambering over the edge of the platform. Their rage had simmered down to calculation and the expection of more fun to come. He was giving them more enjoyment than they’d expected; a little spirit to this one.

Sonsabitches. A glance over his shoulder, to try to work out where he was heading, had loosed his brain inside his skull, spinning sickeningly. The hinge of his tongue thickened, choking him. Bastards – fear brought out his own anger, his vision blurring with salt. He’d never been this far out before, with nothing around him, neither horizontal floor nor the building’s wall to grab onto.

A loud metallic clang jarred his ears, the noise buzzing up through his fingers where they gripped the strut. From the corner of his eye, Axxter saw one of the warriors, arm swooping around in a follow-through. The knife had zipped past his head, hit the strut, and fastened on. A black wire slid lengthening out of its haft, danced snakelike in the air for a second, then spotted the nearest of Axxter’s pithons.

The knife’s wire sliced through the pithon; Axxter felt himself fall backward until the other lines caught the slack, redistributing his weight among them. A surge of panic, his fingers clutching tighter on the strut; he opened his eyes and saw the black wire weaving back and forth, the sensor at the tip searching for another target.

It struck, darting toward another of the pithons. Axxter forgot his hold, and grabbed for it. The wire wrapped around his hand, burning across his knuckles. The sudden pain jerked his hand back, and the knife popped loose from the metal where it had lodged. A red welt striped his palm as the wire slid away, the knife’s own weight sending it flying from him, then dropping into empty space below.

He remembered where he was – the view of the knife spinning down to the clouds snapped him around, wrapping both arms around the strut, his heart pounding against the metal.

“That’s right, sweetheart.” A leering voice from above. “You just hang on tight, right there, and we’ll be down to get ya. And then – then we can all have a little party. Won’t that be fun?”

Axxter looked up to the platform’s edge. A pair of warriors had already clambered onto the first joint of the struts. The sight pushed away his acrophobia, a bigger fear supplanting that. Palms wet, he loosened his grip enough to slide down to the wall.

The pithons had the right skills built in, overriding his own clumsiness; the boot lines let go of the strut and struck holds on the wall when he was still a meter away. They dug in and contracted, pulling him within range for the belt lines – all but the one clipped by the knife, the stub now waving futilely about – to join them, anchoring him safely to the building. He could hear the warrior’s heavy boots clanging against metal above his head, and their laughter and shouts to each other, as he let go of the strut. His dead weight, palms flat against the wall, triggered the pithons’ abseil mode, the lines whipping down-wall in rotation. He picked up speed in the controlled fall, friction burning the side of his face.

A break: the sentries at the encampment’s main gate had deserted their posts. Probably when the ruckus had broken out up in the big tent, Axxter figured. Didn’t want to miss the fun. He slowed the pithons’ furious motion, braking himself against the wall; he’d already spotted the Norton where he’d left it before. A sigh of relief – the motorcycle could have been off grazing, scraping up lichen for its conversion tanks. The Mass warriors would’ve been on his ass in the few minutes it would’ve taken to whistle the machine back here.

He scrambled over the sidecar and onto the Norton’s seat, the belt pithons locking him into place. Already praying, harder than usual, as he fumbled the key into the lock and hit the ignition. The engine coughed, sputtered – agonizingly; the shouts of the warriors rang in the distance above – then caught, roaring into life. He hit the gears and punched it.

Falling straight down, faster than falling; Axxter rolled the throttle, pouring on more. The wind pulled his face back into a rigid mask, lips bloodless against his teeth. He leaned low over the handlebars, chest pressing on the gauges. Staring downwall, to the clouds far below. The speed made him giddy, the hammer of air down his throat pumping blood into his roar-filled ears. Never this fast before; he’d always been too scared before. But now – I just never got scared enough. The flash of realization banged through his skull and was gone, swirling behind him

He looked over his shoulder, sighting across his bowed spine and the Norton’s rear fender. He saw them, upwall: the Havoc Mass warriors, a posse in hot pursuit. It had probably taken them a half-minute or so to sort themselves out, leader and crew, rough strategy shouted to each other, then wheel out their fastest vehicles, then get on and dive toward the target, the throat they wanted to tear out, the limbs they wanted to spread and dance upon. Too far away to see their faces, but Axxter knew they’d be grinning.

All right, all right; just think. Think – he clamped his teeth against the battering wind, commanding his brain into gear. Figure it out

A shudder ran through the Norton’s frame, jarring his hands. The grappling lines spun in a blur from the front wheel’s hub, locking onto the transit cable, then snapping loose. Axxter turned his head toward the Watsonian. The sidecar had lifted free of the wall, airborne by a few centimeters. Its single wheel struck the metal surface every few meters, spinning through a burst of sparks.

He blinked and got a readout of velocity. The numbers in the upper left quadrant were still advancing, the final digit a dancing flicker. APPROACHING ADHESION LIMIT flashed red in the middle of his vision.

That was the least of his worries. Feedback from the grappling lines would kick in the Norton’s governor circuits before the machine could tear itself from the wall by sheer speed. As long as he could stay fast enough to outrun the machines behind him

What did they have? He closed his eyes, letting the Norton accelerate on its own, the cable guiding its faster-than-a-fall, as he tried to remember what vehicles he’d seen in the Mass encampment. Mostly attack trikes, big armored cruisers; he could outdistance those easily – they were built for combat, not racing. Big lumbering transports, personnel carriers – no problem.

And scouts. Shit – he’d almost forgotten those little whippets, Guzzis stripped down and hot-rodded. Those would be leading the pack, cutting away the distance between them and the outgunned Norton.

If they’d had them ready to go… if they’d rigged one up with a snareline or some kind of weapon… Their military value was in sheer speed, zipping into enemy terrain for a quick peek, then out again; not even any armor on them, just light and fast.

He’d have to find out what was back there, upwall from him. If he knew that – he could get a strategy worked out, an escape route. And territory – gotta know, gotta know. His thoughts whirred up toward their own limit of acceleration.

And what was in front of him – that, too. He couldn’t just go shooting down the wall forever, even if they never caught up with him. The clouds, when he hit them, would mean nothing; the big Nothing, the place that swallows up the ones who took the big step, just let go and fell. You got there soon enough that way; nobody was so wildly stupid as to pour on the gas to get there even faster. The wind had sliced inside his jacket, chilling the skin over his ribs. He tried to remember, squeezing tight his watering eyes, pulling a fuzzy map together inside his head. Downwall from the Havoc Mass encampment… anybody… some tribe not allied with the Mass, with enough balls or a mutual-aid treaty with the Grievous Amalgam… whatever it would take to pull the posse bearing down on his ass up short… if he could just get there…

That’d be perfect, if the cable the Norton was locked on led straight into something like that. Some bunch with a real gripe against the Havoc Mass, where they’d get a big laugh out of what had happened at the banquet, shelter him until he’d figured out what to do, where to go next. The wind-forced tears ran in razor-straight lines to his jaw as he gritted his teeth and wished.

Can’t fucking remember. He knew it would’ve been no good even if he had been able to; he’d been there in the Mass camp long enough that everything could have changed in this sector of the wall, tribes moved out, new ones taking their place. He’d kept his head down, working, paying no attention to the usual flow of reports and rumors that freelancers based their itineraries on. Anything left in his head from before then would be old news, useless.

He’d have to call up Ask & Receive, pay the info agency for a current-time map, the extra bite for a high-reliability depth. Even with a band of murderers riding hard behind him for his blood, the thought of shelling out that kind of request fee made him hesitate. If there was any other way -

Shit. So much for that major segment of his bank account. It’d gotten so nice and fat when General Cripplemaker had paid him his advance… Back to reality.

He looked off to the right and saw the Small Moon hanging in the sky, bright silver and waiting. Those fuckers. Thanks a lot. But at least it was there for him to bounce his call up to Ask & Receive on the toplevel. If it hadn’t been there, if it had been hidden around on the Cylinder’s other side, he’d have been screwed. No way could he have stopped the Norton, climbed off, and gone looking for a contact point to route his call through the Wire Syndicate network; not with major ugly ass-kicking bearing down on him from upwall.

Even as he blinked on Ask & Receive’s number from the directory, the digits supered over the clouds below, the thought nicked him, whether he could trust his call going through the Small Moon relay. They’d already screwed him over once, in league with DeathPix. But they probably think I’m already dead. That was a comfort. They’d figure I got my lights stomped out back at the banquet. The Small Moon Consortium wouldn’t be expecting him to be making priority calls from this far out from the Mass camp. He could slip in, get the info he needed, and out before they could dink with the relay. He blinked on the last digit and listened to it go bouncing off the reflecting satellite.

YOU WANT IT, WE GOT IT. The info agency’s face spelled the words across his vision.

“Give me audible.” That cost more, too, but there was no time to read dialogue.

“You want it -”

“Yeah, yeah; forget that.” Axxter leaned closer to the Norton’s gauges, hunching his shoulders to his ears, blocking out the rushing of the wind. “I need a map, a, uh, whatchacallit, a rolling trace, center of projection this caller. Got it?”

FEATURES? “Sorry; features?”

“Blank everything except operable transit cables and military tribes in map area. And on the latter, give me size of forces, estimated field strength, and political affiliations. I’m going to need at least eighty percent reliability depth on all that. Make it ninety.”

“It’s going to cost you.”

He authorized the dip into his account. “Just do it. Fast, okay?” The Ask & Receive face zipped away; he glanced at the bank balance in the corner of the field. It had already been slipping away from the call fee; suddenly it dipped, the digit at the front end disappearing completely. The sight hit him like a knife to the heart.

Come on, come on – Jesus H. Christ. Another look over his shoulder. In the distance upwall, the face of the pack’s lead man was just barely visible, at least in the high definition of his imagination. And the warrior’s smirking grin.

Then the map he’d paid for came up, straight snakes and a few scattered patches blotting out the pursuers. Axxter turned around and leaned into the map, studying it.

Worse than he’d thought. His already-knifed heart sank, rolling along his spine. The snakes were scarce in this piece of map: they represented the transit cables, and there were hardly enough to form a square, let alone a grid of any kind. The pulsing circle that was him, the Norton and the Watsonian, hung motionless in the center of his vision, a bisecting line scrolling upward; right at the top, the Havoc Mass posse – black dots along the single cable – edged a centimeter closer as he watched. The blotches, different colors – the Amalgam and its allies always got shades of red, the Mass’s tribes in blues and greens – just a couple of each. And too far away – he was rolling away from the nearest blue, in fact, upwall and leftaround, disappearing in the map’s top right corner.

He scrolled down the map, the pulsing circle and the black dots rolling out of sight at the top. Kept scrolling, seeing nothing but the vertical line of the cable down the 138 middle – until words flashed over: INSUFFICIENT DATA TO MAINTAIN RELIABILITY DEPTH. He gritted his teeth; he’d scrolled so far down the map that it was into unknown sectors of the wall. “Go to fifty percent.” The map scrolled for several more seconds, then went blank, even the cable line gone.

“Save your money. That’s a long way past the cloud barrier, man.”

Nothing. Just blank wall between here and the clouds. And nothing beyond that; everyone knew that. No bottom to Cylinder. Just nothing, the Nothing that he was accelerating toward.

And no perpendicular cable to switch off to, no way of working himself even a few degrees around the circumference of the building. To where he could find a hiding place, a tribe that’d take him in. If he tried going off cable, letting the Norton hunt out holds for the pithons, the slow grunt work of the devices – the Mass warriors would be on his ass in no time. He wouldn’t be more than a couple meters away from the cable before they showed up: easy firing range.

Goddamn – the whole world had shrunk to one line, a string with him on one end and everything that wanted to kill him on the other. For this I went vertical? He felt like both laughing and crying.

Might as well just stop the Norton, turn around and stand on the pegs, exposing his belly to the coming knives. Get it over with -

The Ask & Receive face waited for another request. “Get me Strategies.” He didn’t bother loading the map into his own files. What good was a blank page?

His vision went clear except for the bank-account figures at the lower right quadrant. The numbers flickered; that meant they were checking him out.

“Sorry.” The face again. “You don’t have the cash for that service. And we don’t work on credit.”

“Uh – wait a minute…”

“Nope.” The face was already dimming away. “You can’t afford us at all now, fella. Hasta la vista.” Gone.

Fuck ’em; there were others. He didn’t want to look down at his bank account – how far had it sunk on this call? – but let the line search for a match between his funds and any of the various strategy agencies in the directory.

The search was taking too long, whole seconds ticking away. The line must’ve gone down into the far reaches of the strategy listings, down into the smallest of the various annlanders, the ones that charged hardly anything. For good reason.

A low-rez sign came up in his vision. ASK BENNY PERU – HE’S FAST, HE’S CHEAP, AND SOMETIMES HE’S RIGHT. That faded to a still picture of a fat man sitting behind an antique wooden desk. What had been left of Axxter’s heart, clinging by adrenaline to his ribcage, fell with the rest.

“Got a problem?” No animation, just the audio laid over the still.

Nothing to lose – he was already zipping downwall, the Norton’s throttle rolled full-on, Nothing ahead and everything to avoid behind him He told the fat man’s picture all about it.

A drain of seconds – both the clouds and the warriors were closer, too close, eating up the line racing under him. He realized that the person on the other end of the call – Benny himself, he supposed – was actually thinking it all over.

The bank account numbers hiccupped, a flat fee bite taken out of them. “Well, young fella, there’s a simple solution to everything. Isn’t there?”

That sounded suspiciously like a prelude to religious counseling. Not what he needed at the moment. “Yeah? Like what?”

“Simple.” The tone almost shrugged the picture’s shoulders. “Just – cut the cable.”

“What?” He didn’t believe that; the signal bouncing off the Small Moon must have gotten screwed up. “Give me that again.”

“I said, cut the cable. You know, the transit cable you’re on. That’s all.”

The fat man, or whatever was behind the picture, had really said it. “Are you crazy -”

“You want a full explanation, it costs you extra.” Bland, unperturbed, as though people had called him worse. “Save your money – what you got left – and go with it.”

It hit him then: the guy was right. One hundred percent.

“That it? Got any more problems? I do all kinds. How’s your love life -”

Axxter blinked to disconnect. He had all he needed.

Cut the cable – of course; if the world had shrunk to one line, you just had to get rid of the other end of it, the end with the bad business on it. The penalties for sabotaging any part of the building’s exterior transit network were huge – the Public Works Department up on toplevel was a law unto itself, more enduring than the ruling tribes like the Grievous Amalgam, which came and went; there were stories that Public Works went back to before the War, an entity reaching back into other, more obscuring clouds. Whatever – taking out the cable, especially in a sector with as few in place as this one, would draw him a fine that would wipe out the little bit left in his bank account and put him in the red for a long time to come. He’d be working for the Public Works Department, in effect, at least until he’d cleared off the debt. Better that than the other – there being no alternative that left him either moving around or breathing…

Come on, get moving. All this had eaten up too much time. He didn’t need a current-scan map to see how much closer the Havoc Mass warriors were to his tail – he could look over his shoulder and see they’d eaten up whole kilometers of the gap, grinning and pushing their machines harder, their mouths watering for fun.

There was a welding torch in the Watsonian’s toolkit. Every freelancer carried one, repairs out on some godforsaken section of wall being your lookout entirely. That’d slice through the cable easily enough, given a couple of minutes.

He loosened the belt pithons holding him into the Norton’s seat, enough to lean over toward the sidecar’s open hatch. Stretching to keep the throttle rolled on, as he reached for the toolkit – the wind caught him full in his raised chest, nearly toppling him. He had to grip the edge of the sidecar’s opening, dragging himself close enough to pull the kit loose.

A set of socket wrenches spilled out onto his crotch when he straightened back behind the handlebars and opened the kit. With only one hand free, he almost lost the torch as well; he clamped the cylinder to his chest to keep the wind from tearing it out of his grasp. He switched off the torch’s safety lock and thumbed the ignition. A blue flame spurted out of the nozzle, sputtering, then narrowing to a fierce, steady glow.

He let go of the Norton’s throttle, and the machine started to coast to a halt. As it slowed, he turned and crouched on top of the seat, then flattened his chest against the rear fender. The lines from his belt tightened, securing him in position. Raising his head, he saw the Mass warriors roaring down toward him; the cable hummed from their machinery as he brought the torch’s flame against it.

The patch of cable behind the Norton’s wheel glowed red, then orange, finally white. Driblets of molten steel trickled down the wall behind. Axxter squinted as he aimed the blue glare, the reflected heat searing his cheeks.

He could hear them whooping now, their prey in sight, the warriors’ shouts cutting above the thunder of their engines. Looking up from the torch’s flame, Axxter saw the leader raising an ornamented scimitar above his head, face contorted in a manic grin. In a line behind the leader’s machine, the others yelled and brandished their weapons.

A minute away, or less – he felt like throwing down the torch, climbing back into the Norton’s seat, and rolling the throttle on full. Anything, just to get away, to buy ten more seconds – the chase had hopped up the Mass warriors, made them blood crazy. My blood. He bit his lip and pressed the torch closer to the cable.

Suddenly, the white-hot section seemed to thin, growing narrower where the flame played on it. The tension on the line that kept it taut against the wall – that was it, he realized. I did it. Stretching thinner, from two hands’ width, to one, then less, the metal and flame becoming one -

He heard it then, a high-pitched singing note from the cable itself. It drilled through his ears, into the center of the skull, so sharp that he could barely keep the torch in focus, pressing it against the melting steel.

Come on – come on, you bastard! His teeth buzzed against each other, the scream echoing inside his head.

And the other sound, the roaring of engines, the wall shimmering with the rolling impact. A shout, loud enough to cut through everything else, and he knew the scimitar was glittering in the light, raised higher, ready to strike, meters away, then less, and he couldn’t look up, his eyes locked on the flame and the glowing metal -

It snapped.

He saw, in a frozen moment, the cable suddenly thinning to the width of his finger. Then nothing, just the wall underneath, scorched by the flame; the tension-loading had snapped the ends apart.

He saw it, the bright line etched in his vision, the image still there when the wall had vanished. For a fraction of a second he wondered about that, about the sudden wind that streamed across his chest and outflung arms, about the welding torch with its blue flame tearing from his grasp, then spiraling away, out of reach. His head filled with a sharp tide of blood, reddening his vision, then sluiced away again, leaving dizzying black spots across the rotating sky.

Turning in air, he saw the clouds roll below him; then, amazingly – they were above him. Two Havoc Mass warriors, arms and legs swimming against nothing, drifted upward, their mouths wide with curses he somehow couldn’t hear.

The wind rolled him again. He saw the building now, the wall shrinking away from him. The transit cable, snapped in two, whipped free, flinging the rest of the warriors into the air, their machines and weapons spinning loose.

He realized then, in perfect immediate knowledge, what had happened. He looked down and saw himself suspended, nothing under him but sky. The other end of the cable, which the Norton’s wheels had been clamped on, writhed snakelike, dragging the motorcycle and sidecar rig in a wide curving arc.

I should’ve got off – he had time for the one thought before he felt the lines at his belt snap tight, the impact squeezing the air up out of his lungs. I should’ve got off and then cut the cable – you idiot -

The world sped up and became real again. Axxter twisted his neck, looking over his shoulder. The loose end of the cable was snapping back toward the wall; the Norton was still attached, the grappling lines from its wheels stretched to their limits. The last link, the end of the whip, was himself, hooked by the pithons to the Norton’s seat.

He hit the wall at an angle, the glancing blow against his shoulder sending sparks across his vision. He felt his hands, outside the shuddering pain, scrabbling at the wall’s metal, trying to find a handhold. Then the building tore away from him again, the snapped cable lashing back out into air.

He managed to open his eyes and saw the Norton break loose from the cable, the grappling lines peeling away. The rig spun about, the sidecar, split from where it had struck the wall, spilling his gear in a slow constellation against the sky.

The pithons gave way, strained past their limit; he heard them snap like distant pistol fire. Everything vanished, even the building itself, as the wind filled his hands, spreading him into an X, back arched against nothing. He saw the clouds below, still for a moment, then rushing up bright toward him.

He hit, and was blind, in a white, featureless world. He could still feel himself falling, turning in the mist heavy against his face.

Suddenly he could see again, in a soft gray twilight. He turned his head and saw the dark underside of the clouds, above him now.

Then he heard the singing.

And saw them, in circles around himself, their faces smiling, marveling at his passage among them.

He saw the ranks of angels, the sky filled with them, singing in the gray light. Darker as his thoughts ended, his head filling with nothing, his fall pulling the last bit of himself away. But still he heard them singing.

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