Farewell Horizontal (17 page)

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 . . .