Farewell Horizontal (16 page)

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.