Farewell Horizontal (23 page)

Where the seal had been broken
 . . . A bad memory, a memory of bad things, rose up and connected, socketing in tight to the analytical thought.

The burned-out sector.

His own little discovery, come back around. Some place you’d swear never to go back to; that one look was all you’d need for the rest of your life, every little sensory pulse, every crunch of ashy bone beneath your feet, every scent of blackened flesh, sealed under diamond crystal.

No problem with the seal having been broken between that brightly-lit horizontal world just under the building’s surface and the dark stuff farther inside. And then some. He dug the coordinates for the burned-out sector from his archive, then scanned them across the map filling the center of his sight. A match: one of the little circles marking an entry site lined up.

“There you go –” He nodded to himself, not sure how pleased he should feel about this new discovery. If there were tunnels running through the building, then the end of that one was definitely open. Would’ve been handier if the spot was closer to the crossing of the two lines he’d drawn on the map. It’d take him days to get to the corresponding spot on this side, the other end of the line drawn straight to the building’s center.

That was also assuming that the tunnel was open on this side. Also that the supposed tunnel did run through the center, instead of at some other angle through the building. And a few million other things.

He had the advantage of being up against it, with no other choice. You were absolved of the fear of making the wrong decision. In some ways, Axxter figured, dead men had it easy.

In the morning – morning on the other side, the disconcerting half-light on this – he’d start out for the spot where he’d calculated the tunnel opening should be. In the meantime, there was this night to get through.

You’re a fool
. Knowing already what he was going to do. With money in his account, and a phone line handy, he always did the same thing. He reached over and wriggled his finger inside the plug-in jack, made contact, and called up HoloDays.

† † †

He didn’t expect her to be waiting for him. She never was.

He extended a forefinger of the image he was walking around in; the sensor at the side of the door picked up the presence of coherent light activity and rang the bell inside her apartment. The sensor, at least, interpreted him as being human.

Maybe she wasn’t home – whenever he got this close, he started hoping that. Though he couldn’t imagine where else she’d be. Off work, she socked in tight into her cozy home space. The same as everyone else on the horizontal.

The door swung open. Axxter held up the image of his hand. “Hi. Just thought I’d drop by. And say hello.”

Ree glared at him. There was a discrepancy, a jitter on the line: the image she perceived of him was displaced a few inches behind his sensory feedback. The effect was as though her narrow gaze was boring right into the back of his skull.

“What do
you
want?”

He made the image shrug. “Hey – like I said. I just wanted to see you. That’s all. I mean, I don’t even have tactile sensation. See?” He poked at the doorjamb, the image of his finger disappearing two inches into the panel. “So it’s not like I’m here just to . . . fool around or anything.”

A weary sigh from her. “Believe me; you wouldn’t have, anyway.” She leaned against the door, arms folded. “So now you’re here, you’ve seen me – is that it? You’re happy now?”

“Well, there were some things I wanted to tell you –”

“Tell
me?
I’ll tell you a few things. I’ll tell you that I don’t appreciate having some idiot that everybody’s seen is an idiot come round knocking on my door. I don’t need my neighbors checking it out, that I got the biggest fool in or outside the building thinking that he’s got something going with me –”

“I don’t?” Axxter tilted the image’s head, puzzled. “I mean – you and me – we’re not –”

Her eyes, small to begin with, disappeared in the tight lines of her scowl. “Not after this latest bullshit. You don’t care about yourself, you’re happy to be some bum out on the wall, some . . . some glorified tattoo artist – fine. That’s up to you. But you’re not going to embarrass me with it anymore.”

“That’s what I came to talk to you about. What I came to tell you – I’m going to give it up.” His image had stepped back, away from the freezing chill of her words; he could feel that with or without any sensory input.

“Really. I’m not kidding you about this. I’ve thought about it a lot. And that’s what I’ve decided. Soon as I get back, I mean back for real, I’m going to go back on the horizontal. Give up running around on the vertical. I’ll have plenty of money, I’ll be able to buy myself a commission, some nice junior executive job . . . the whole bit. And then . . . you and me . . . you know, we could work it out.”

She shook her head. “Ny – I don’t believe you. You’ve always been a lying sack of shit.”

He was about to say something, some vow of intention, when another voice shouted, loud enough to rattle the image’s optical feedback, setting the corridor and the open door shimmering in his sight.

“Hey! Who the fuck are you!” A female voice, but not hers; he could see her mouth, closed and tight-lipped. “Get off this line, or I’ll deck you so hard you won’t know what’s happening!”

He saw her staring at him now, eyes widening a bit, lips curling in disgust.

“You heard me!” The voice, attached to nothing, went louder. “You little shit! Just you wait!”

Then he wasn’t standing outside his girlfriend’s apartment, way over in the distant horizontal. The hookup with HoloDays had evaporated with a jarring suddenness. He was hanging in the dark again, over on the eveningside.

“I’m gonna kick your butt so hard –”

He pulled his finger from the plug-in jack, and the voice inside his head disappeared. Leaving silence.

What the hell was that?
Some kind of a parasite on the line. He’d encountered line-ghosts before – the main hazard of being too cheap to shell out for shielded calls – but never any with that brand of death-threat hostility. Usually they just made nuisances out of themselves with their constant wheedling to come and play, to join in their little line-ghost games.

He stuck his finger back into the jack; an experiment. With immediate results.

“There you are, dickhead. I wasn’t through with you.” The voice grated low. “You’re in deep shit with me now.”

“Hey, hold on a minute.” The barrage was getting tiresome. “Who is this? What’s the problem?”

“You’re gonna find out what the problem is, fella. And you know damn well who this is. And you know this line is part of
my
network, too. You’re one of those cracker defects guys, aren’t you? I can tell.”

“Who? What are you talking about –”

The words CRACKER D:FEX spelled out in his sight, one red letter after another, then faded away.

“I’ve had just about enough shit from you D:Fex clowns. This is
my
network, and it’s off limits to you and your jerkoff buddies. And now that you’ve been hanging on the line long enough for me to get you pinpointed, I’m gonna be over there in person to kick you off. See you later, dipshit.”

Silence again, then more red words. This time spelling out FELONY M:PULSE. They took a lot longer to fade away.

Jesus H. Christ
. The cold hard tone in the woman’s voice had been more unnerving than her initial wrath. He hadn’t understood half of what she’d been rattling on about.

Violence had been promised, though of what sort –
Screw it
. At this point, what was there to worry about? His dead-man status still insulated him.

Still with his finger in the jack; a legit call came through.

“Ny – where the hell have you been?” Brevis’s voice was excited, but not in any way that indicated money. Panic, instead. “I’ve been trying to get hold of you for hours!”

“What’s the matter?”

“You gotta get moving, Ny; I mean, like
right now
. You don’t have time to go figuring out routes and stuff. You gotta get off that spot immediately, man.”

“Hold on. Come on, slow down.” His agent’s words had come swarming over him, almost too fast to understand. “What’re you going on about?”

The sound of a big gulp of breath came over the line. “Heavy action, Ny. I didn’t count on shit like this. It’s the Havoc Mass – they’ve sent major weight out after you. A megassasin has been spotted crossing over Linear Fair Left; it’s apparently making a beeline straight for you. I can’t believe how pissed those people are at you; I mean, this is the first reported instance of any military tribe personnel entering eveningside territory. It’s just unheard of. But the word’s out, Ny – they’re not going to stop until they’ve got you squashed like a bug.”

He felt dazed. As if he weren’t in enough shit already.
Don’t these guys ever give up?
They’d already had their shot at him. Time to give the rest of the world a turn.

“How long ago? I mean, how long ago did it go through the Fair?”

“Don’t know, exactly – might’ve been four, five, maybe six hours ago. And it was making tracks, by all reports. Those big megs can really move.”

Axxter wondered if it was the same one that he’d done the graffex designs on; Cripplemaker’s commission. It’d appeal to the warriors’ sense of irony for him to get squashed by the megassassin bearing his own work. The last thing he’d see would be the emblem he’d designed himself. It’d be like getting killed by your own signature.

Brevis’s voice rattled on. “That’s what I mean, Ny. You gotta get moving. It’s got you pinpointed by the location of the jack you’ve been using. The longer you hang around there, or anywhere nearby, the sooner it’s going to be on your ass.”

“Christ . . .”

“Look, just get away from there. Any direction’s fine; but just go. I’ll do what I can from this end – maybe I can find out what direction the meg’ll be coming in – but everything else you’re going to have to figure out on the run. Okay? And give me a call when you find some place just as far from where you’re at as you can make it.”

When the first gray half-light oozed around him, the plug-in jack with its yellow marking rings was already beyond sighting, hidden by the curve of the building. His progress had been slow in the dark, clambering blind, his chest close to the wall, only the pithons sure about striking out for new holds.

He paused to catch his breath; his heart had been hammering in his throat the whole distance. Brevis’s panic had infected him, locking into his spinal column.
Take it easy
 – he could make it if he just kept a steady pace, kept traveling. Maybe he could. If he could reach the entry site to the interior, the tunnel opening he’d calculated . . . then he might have a chance.

His pulse had slowed with the light; trying to move in the dark had spooked him. Too much like running in nightmares, where there was no sign of motion at all. He filled his lungs, nostrils stinging with the chill air, and reached out for another handhold.

He heard the whistle of the cable reeling out before it hit him. Across the shoulderblades, knocking him flat up against the wall – then he was jerked back by an arm around his throat.

“Don’t move, sucker.” The voice snarled at his ear. A woman’s voice; he’d heard it before. Something pointed dug through his jacket toward his ribs. The sensation ended, simultaneous with the appearance of a shining knifeblade close to his face. “Get the picture? Be smart.”

The woman shifted her weight off his back. He turned his head to look at her.

She sat in a loop knotted in the cable, dangling alongside him. A kid, younger than he, with dark hair cropped short. She looked him over, her level gaze traveling from his boots upward.

“You’re not a circuit rider.” She used the point of the knife to scratch the side of her face. “I can tell. You should be over on the other side. What’re you doing here?”

The voice that had broken in on his hollow-time call; now confronting him in the flesh. “You know, you don’t need to wave that thing around.” The blade annoyed him. “You want to know something, you can just ask.”

She smiled and tucked the knife into her belt. “I thought you were one of that D:Fex bunch. I’ve got it in for ’em.” She leaned back against the wall. “So what’s the deal – you trying to get back over to the morningside? Is that it?”

“You’ve heard about me?”

The woman shook her head. “What you people do is no concern of mine. I’ve got other business to take care of. I wouldn’t’ve come around here at all if you hadn’t been using part of my network.”

“Your network?” He remembered some of the things she’d said before, when she’d just been a voice on the line. “Was that that M something or other?”

“M:Pulse. Yeah, that’s it.”

“So you’re, uh, Felonious.”

“Felony. Sometimes; most of the time, actually. When I’m not something else.”