Farewell Horizontal

THIRTEEN

“I think we’ll be safe here. For a while.”

She had led him through tunnels smaller and smaller, conduits branching off the main course. A world behind the smooth walls; ending finally in a tiny cubical space lined with pipes and a maze of wires. They both had to crouch under the space’s low ceiling.

The scramble on his hands and knees left Axxter panting. Head lowered, he saw his hands covered with oil and cindery ash. His jacket smelled singed. “What – what was all that? That explosion?” Maybe everything around him could go up in flame and smoke the same way.

Felony leaned back against the wall, arms wrapped around her knees. She shrugged. “No big deal. There’s some heavy-duty power lines running in spots, and the insulation has gotten old and unstable. All you gotta do is short ’em together, and you get a pretty messy bang – lots of smoke and stuff. I just did it to throw that big hulk on its can and make a hole big enough to grab you.”

He grunted his thanks. The slap of the explosion was still echoing inside his head. Alive – that amazed him. He’d never heard of anybody being shown a megassassin’s death ikon – not under the circumstances, at least, of its being out to get you – and being around later to talk about it.

“I thought… you’d taken off. To go take care of your business.”

Felony pushed a strand of hair away from her eyes. “Yeah, well, I was just on my way; I got some safe spots around here where I usually stash this body – you know, so nothing happens to it while I’m over on the other side. And I spotted that thing lurking around; lurking around as well as something that big is able to. I figured it was just waiting for you to come cruising by so it could jump out and do you over. There wasn’t time to come out and warn you; plus – hey – I didn’t want that sonuvabitch scoping me out and going after my ass.”

“Thanks, I guess.” He rubbed his hands on his trousers, smearing the black stuff. “Didn’t know you were that concerned about what happened to me.”

“I’m not. I just don’t like some ugly asshole like that lumbering around on my turf. Pisses me off.”

“I still don’t get it, though.” Axxter gazed back the way they had come. “That thing shouldn’t have been here. Not this quick; it was reported as having crossed over to this side just a day or so ago. Those things don’t travel that fast.”

A shrug. “Maybe they were wrong. About when it crossed over.”

He shook his head. “That can’t be – I got the info straight from Ask & Receive. Paid top dollar for it, hundred percent reliability. They can’t be wrong about stuff like that. It’s their business to know.”

“So? Maybe they lied to you.”

“Lied?” He stared at her. “You mean, didn’t tell me the truth?”

“Yeah, that’s the general idea; that’s what the word means.”

It meant more than that. Axxter rocked back on his heels where he crouched. They lied? – meaning they hadn’t just not told him the truth; the info agency had cooked up something, a statement about the megassassin’s location, a lie, and told him that instead.

“If they did that -” He mused aloud, the conjecture and its ramifications too big to hold inside. “If they’re capable of doing that… that would mean… everything.”

Felony regarded him with distaste. “What’re you getting into such a sweat for? So they fed you a line – what’s the big deal?”

“Don’t you see?” He leaned forward onto his hands. “It would mean that Ask & Receive couldn’t be trusted.” It astonished him as much as the first time he’d seen the sun setting beyond the clouds. “They’re an impartial source of information; that’s their whole reason for existence. You have to be able to trust what they tell you.”

“Impartial, huh?” She sneered. “They weren’t so impartial in this case, were they? What they told you led you right into that thing’s ugly face.”

Once you accepted this one possibility, you had to follow it through. The lie Ask & Receive had told him had worked only for the benefit of the Havoc Mass; it had handed him right over to the agent of their implacable vengeance. The megassassin hadn’t had to waste any time snooping around for him. He’d walked blithely into its clutches, looking over his shoulder for no more than Sai and the other Dead Centers. All of which, the lie and his reliance on it, his faith in the info agency, would mean that Ask & Receive had somehow been contaminated by the Havoc Mass. If the info agency wasn’t impartial, it wasn’t on his side, either; it was on their side. The people who wanted to kill him.

“Then I’m screwed.” He looked up at Felony and announced the result of the equation. “I’m fucked all the way. If I can’t trust them, then I’ve got no source of information that I can rely on. I never did; nobody ever has. For all I know, Ask & Receive’s been feeding shit to people for years. Handing poor suckers like me right over to the Mass. Only nobody’s ever found out, because the only way you could find out – getting the info from Ask & Receive – is screwed up the same way.”

She seemed unconcerned. “So? That’s what you get for believing everything they told you in the first place. You should’ve been going and finding things out for yourself, about what was true and what wasn’t.”

“About the whole world? Everything inside or outside the building? You can’t do that; nobody can. There’s just too much stuff.”

“Maybe. But you could’ve checked out the parts that concerned you a little better.”

A bleak, formless hole was growing in his gut. “I trusted them…”

Felony shook her head, pityingly. “So you die – trusting ’em. That’s the way it goes.”

It was the way it went for everybody, though; Axxter didn’t know whether to regard that as some sort of comfort, or as an even more chilling consideration. If everybody in or on Cylinder was relying on Ask & Receive’s tainted information – and that information was tainted to the Havoc Mass’s advantage – then that meant the Mass ruled Cylinder without anybody else even being aware of it. Or was about to rule the building; perhaps the corruption of the information agency was a fairly recent event, and the Mass was still setting up all its pieces on one great chessboard, encircling its old doddering rival, the Grievous Amalgam. No matter; however far along the process was, the Havoc Mass was the most powerful force on Cylinder. They had a direct pipeline, via Ask & Receive, into everyone’s brain. The part that dealt with facts and real things. The Mass had managed to usurp reality.

“Hey, cheer up.” Felony smiled at him “At least you’re better off than you were a little while ago. Now you know how you were getting screwed around with.”

“Yeah, great.” Axxter stared glumly at the tiny space’s wall. “Fat lot of good that does me. I won’t die ignorant, I suppose.” Of the big picture; there were still a lot of the small details that kept niggling at the far corners of his brain. Like why the megassassin had had a different death ikon graffed on it, instead of the one he had worked up for General Cripplemaker’s commission. Even if they had all taken out this great blood oath on his head – and the vigor with which they were pursuing it, the lengths to which the Mass was going in order to kill him, was also somewhat puzzling – it still didn’t seem likely that they would miss the chance to rub his face in it. Make his own work be the last thing he saw before he had his arms and legs plucked off, one by one. That went against everything he thought he knew about warrior psychology: they loved cheap, effective irony like that.

“So get off your dead butt and do something about it.”

“Yeah?” The puzzle of the ikon faded against more practical concerns. “Like what? I’m stuck out here a million or so miles from where I need to get to – and from where the information I’d need to get there is kept. I can’t just go calling up for the info I need; not anymore.”

“No big deal. I can get you what you need.”

Axxter tilted his head, studying her. “What do you mean? Are you saying you can go on-line and crack open Ask & Receive’s restricted-access, high-security archives, and just haul out whatever info you want?”

She looked back at him, wide-eyed. “Of course not – why do you think they call those archives high security? It’s because people can’t get into them. They wouldn’t be high security otherwise, would they?”

“Oh.” Disappointed. “I thought you circuit riders and hackers and all were supposed to be able to do that kind of stuff.”

Felony sighed and shook her head. “What a load of shit you’ve got between your ears. Of course we can’t do that. Some little assholes, like that D:Fex crowd, they like to talk as if they can. But it’s all just talk. They can only screw around on open lines, unshielded ones, or networks that nobody else is using or that nobody cares enough about to boot them off of. All the valuable stuff – like the Ask & Receive archives – that’s all locked away tight. Nobody can get in there without permission, bullshitting hackers to the contrary.”

“Then what’re you talking about? About me being able to get info I could use?”

“Simmer down, will ya? I’m talking about going down to the dumps and picking up some stuff. You see, these little wiseacre hackers can’t really get in anyplace where they’re not wanted, but they can still make nuisances out of themselves – static on the line, prank calls, shit like that. So to keep them all romping around somewhere out of everybody’s hair, for years now Ask & Receive has been dumping outtake footage of any real good violent event that they’ve gotten tape of, all into an open-access file. What they sell as entertainment is the edited-down, hyped-up, and glamorous version that really snaps along, keeps people’s attention. But the circuit riders can go rummaging through the dumped footage and come up with all the little nuggets they want, incorporate them into their little on-line war games. They love playing war.”

“What good does that do me? A bunch of raw footage of warrior skirmishes?”

She nodded sagely. “Well – I’ve done a little checking around of my own. Just because I’m interested in your… unusual situation. And it seems to me that all the shit you’re in started after you came across that sector over on the other side, where some heavy action had just happened. If I were you, I’d want to know all I could about that little scene.”

He shook his head. “There wouldn’t be footage of that in there. That didn’t have anything to do with any of the warrior tribes, so there wasn’t any coverage prearranged for it.”

“Oh?” She leaned back, smiling “You’re sure about that?”

“Don’t get all mysterious with me. Not now. Just tell me what you’re talking about.”

“Hey – like I said – the time’s come for you to check some things out on your own.”

† † †

He watched as she hooked one alligator clip onto a length of bare wire, the other clip pinching the end of his finger.

“What I’m going to do -” Felony licked the end of her own finger and dabbed spit on the connections. “I’m going to go on-line myself, and then patch you in. That way, anything that’s looking for you – like Mr. Big-and-Ugly out there – won’t know it’s you on the line and come stomping in here. At least not right away.”

“How am I going to find what I’m looking for?” He was starting to get cramps in his legs from squatting so long in the tiny space.

“It’s just a simple chrono stack, no fancy indexing or anything. You’ll just have to go back to the date when you found that place and root around from there.” She hooked a couple of wires together. “Good luck.”

† † †

This is hopeless. A loop of numbers had crawled up across Axxter’s vision. He scanned down the list of dates, finally tagging a clutch of them.

The first file he opened up was a collection of outtakes from a low-intensity raiding party; the participants, a couple of nothing gangs he’d never heard of, seemed more interested in making faces at each other than in actual bloodshed.

He opened the second file. It was the raid on the burned-out sector. He recognized the sharp edge of the metal, the way the explosion had twisted it out into the air. A glance up at the map coordinates in the corner confirmed it.

Jesus – Axxter stared at the scene. Smoke and red light billowed out of the opening. This wasn’t supposed to be here. All of this stuff. There was a lot of it, taped from several different angles; he fast-forwarded through it, the recorded screams having raised the hairs on his arms and back of his neck. He stopped at a good shot of the raiders, froze the scene, and zoomed in on them. All in black uniforms that he didn’t recognize, without any insignia. They operated with cold, destructive efficiency rather than the usual warrior swagger and guffawing laughter. Two megassassins, towering over the rest of the cohort, were in the middle of the slaughter, clanking forward with grim inevitability.

He went back to the start of the file. Before any explosion or smoke or flames: the black uniforms were gathering, checking out their weapons and setting up equipment… on the outside of the building. Axxter watched in amazement as one of the camera angles shifted, revealing the edge of the building, dawn light breaking over the clouds. At a signal from a commanding officer, the raiders swarmed toward the smooth, unscarred lip of an entry site. The explosion followed a few seconds later, ripping the metal into the great jagged edges that dangled out into the air.

They came from outside. Axxter stopped the tape. That meant -

He zipped toward the end of the file. Everybody dead now, the horizontal sector’s inhabitants reduced to ash and blackened meat. And, at the farthest awaylight limit, an unbroken barrier wall to the building’s center regions. Which was soon taken care of: more explosions, then a team of the raiders grabbing hold of the smoldering metal and bending the shards out toward them.

So it would look like they came from inside the building. That’s what it meant. Axxter stared at nothing, thinking it through. They set it up that way. Who?

Back into the file. He found the best shot of one of the two megassassins; for a moment, there had been three separate cameras trained on it. He switched through the angles. The last one was a full-on frontal shot. Its chest panels were open, revealing the death ikon. Death’s-head cobras writhing in a circle. The same as he’d seen here, less than a meter away, looming over him in the tunnel.

Well, well, well – an interesting discovery. Axxter rested his chin on his knees, arms folded around his shins. The things you find out. The Havoc Mass was going around blowing open horizontal sectors and letting those old boogeymen the Dark Centers take the rap. Bad business – military tribes weren’t supposed to do shit like that. They were supposed to stay out on the vertical, bashing each other’s heads and having a rollicking good time scheming for control of the toplevel, or a little farther up the wall, closer to the good sweet things that power brought. Not slaughtering defenseless people who stayed on the horizontal precisely to be safe, to stay out of harm’s way. Those were the rules; anybody breaking them was playing a harder game, one that stopped at nothing. Including the secret taking-over of the one sure rock that everybody depended on, the supposedly impartial Ask & Receive? Once you break one rule, you might as well break them all.

He played the last tape in the file. The raiding party, work done, went back out to the building’s surface. Framed in the now-jagged entry site opening was a gas angel, suspended in air and smiling curiously at the scene inside. He winced when he saw her familiar face; a gout of flame from one of the men’s weapons knocked her out of the sky. Laughter on the soundtrack.

On the tape, an equipment vehicle was parked on the wall, waiting for the men. Easy, relaxed joking-around as they stripped off the black uniforms and slid into olive-drab fatigues. Axxter zoomed in on the commanding officer, on his shoulder patch turned toward the camera. The rocker bar below the main patch read RECONNAISSANCE. Above that, circled around a golden sunburst, were the words GRIEVOUS AMALGAM.

That can’t be – Axxter stared at the image in his sight. No, they’re Havoc Mass; they have to be. Because of the death ikon on the megassassin’s chest, on the tape; if it was the same as the one that was over here chasing him, and it was the Havoc Mass that wanted him dead, then a megassassin bearing that ikon had to belong to the Havoc Mass. It was the only way it made sense.

Unless – a new, chilling thought crept into his head – unless the Grievous Amalgam also wanted him dead. And they’d sent their own megassassin to do the job.

Work it out. Why would the Grievous Amalgam want to kill some poor schmuck graffex who hadn’t done shit to them? Maybe for the same reason their raiding party would shoot some inquisitive little gas angel out of the sky for poking her pretty face into something they wanted to keep secret. If they’d wanted people to know it was the Grievous Amalgam doing it, they wouldn’t have been wearing the black uniforms. And if some freelance graffex comes strolling into the scene, lah-dee-dah, while the metal’s still hot, there’s no telling what clues he might glom onto as to who did it – best to ice him, too. The Amalgam had probably been wanting to kill him for some time now, ever since he’d reported his finding of the burned-out sector to Ask & Receive and they’d realized that somebody had stumbled across the aftermath of the raid. His getting the commission, and landing up in the Havoc Mass camp where the Amalgam couldn’t get at him easily, was probably the only thing that had kept him alive. Until they’d heard he was over here on the eveningside; then they’d sent the heavyweight gun over to snuff him, to keep him from blabbing any giveaway he might have spotted at the burned-out sector that would pin it on the Amalgam. Of course, nobody would have known that; so Brevis, when he’d heard the report of a megassassin crossing over Linear Fair to the eveningside, had naturally assumed it was the Havoc Mass’s machine, coming to settle their grudge against him.

The thoughts whirled faster in his head, too fast to catch. Then it’s not the Havoc Mass that’s taken over Ask & Receive; it’s the Grievous Amalgam. That’s how they stay in power -

Too much to work out now. He’d have to think about all this, if he lived long enough. Once he’d loaded all the files on the raid into his own archives, he broke the connection.

“Felony?” He looked around the cramped space. She wasn’t there.