Axxter nodded, letting the voice slide past his awareness. Until Brevis signed off, with an even more radiant smile and cheerleader jazz. The terminal went blank; he gazed at the empty deadfilm for another minute before he shifted position.
The Norton had stationed itself next to the bivouac sling; its nightly grazing over, its fuel conversion tank now gurgled with mechanical contentment. The sling’s anchoring pithons creaked as Axxter stood up and began loading the wadded-up blankets and other gear into the sidecar.
Goodbye to all this; thank Christ for that. With everything stowed away, he straddled the Norton’s seat, pushing himself up and back from the handlebars to look around. No more scrabbling around these friggin’ waste-wall sectors looking for business; that’s something I won’t miss. Even if this last little expedition had been something of a season of wonders, both grim and bright. The ruin zone, the black twisted metal of the torn wall, and the smell of burned things inside – all that came sliding out of memory with no effort on his part. And another burned thing . . . more pleasant to think of that. If you had to go out into the wilderness to encounter angels, then maybe it was worth it. For a little while, at least.
He looked out across the sky, and saw the little speck again. Larger this time; he could almost recognize it. He dug the camera out of the sidecar and zoomed the object into close focus.
The angel Lahft drifted in the sky. He knew it was her even before he tilted the camera up to see her face; the biofoil with which he’d healed her flight membrane flashed silver into the lens, brighter than even her radiant skin.
He stowed the camera away and gunned the Norton’s engine. Turned the machine around in a tight circle, the wheels’ pithons snapping from hold to hold, and headed upwall. Making the effort not to look anywhere but toward his destination.
“What’s with the fuckin’ training wheels?”
“Wheels?” Axxter looked into the other’s grizzled face, as if some addendum were hidden in the network of scars.
“These suckers.” The Havoc Mass warrior reached down and twanged one of the pithon lines running from Axxter’s belt. It sounded a high rubber-band note, resonating in the wall where the pithon had taken grip, and in Axxter’s clenched teeth.
“Oh . . . those. Uh, well –” He shrugged and smiled, instantly regretting it. “You know . . . old habits die hard.”
The warrior grunted and shook his head, his grease-shiny braids dangling parallel to his shoulders. With no more anchor than what his boot-pithons gave him, he strode perpendicular across the wall toward the encampment’s banners and tents. Axxter lifted his bag from the sidecar’s bullet nose and hurried after him, slowed by the spidering pithons.
It had taken two solid days of traveling – including an over-nighter, drifting in and out of half-sleep while strapped into the Norton’s seat, wheels locked onto a vertical transit cable – to reach the camp. The directions Brevis had given him hadn’t brought him to the main Havoc Mass headquarters; that would’ve been even more days travel upwall. And more of a city than an encampment, a sprawling military base and political center within sight of the hated Grievous Amalgam’s patrolled borders. He’d passed by the Havoc Mass HDQS once, when he’d first set out as a freelancer, and had received a jocular warning shot, a tracer bullet over the Norton’s front wheel. The thug’s raucous laughter had seemed to follow him for kilometers down the wall.
This camp smaller, but still impressive enough. A division of the Mass, two thousand or so warriors – Axxter had developed a quick eye for estimating a tribe’s numbers, both military and financial – with the necessary support staff, contractors, camp followers, and other hangers-on all swelling the total to ten thousand. The gaudy tents, crested with fluttering pennants, had been set up in random profusion, creating a chaos of intertwining pathways, dangling catwalks, rope ladders, and nets. The division had been stationed in this one spot long enough for a second and third layer of tents and platforms to have grown out from the first, like overlapping limpets protruding from the building’s wall.
A wave of noise battered at Axxter as he followed his warrior guide into the encampment. A trophy ring, the circle of stakes that marked the camp’s original boundaries, sagged under the weight of vanquished enemies’ armor; some of the breastplates and helmets, obviously the most recently captured, still shimmered with the embedded graffex. The grislier trophies twisted and flapped in the wind, no effort having been made to tan or otherwise preserve the peeled skins. Swarming flies gave a pseudo-life to the rotting tissue; underneath them, the implanted biofoil was either dead gray or pulsing, like the corresponding armor, with the graffex remnants. Axxter supposed his former clients, the luckless Gnash Squad Boys, were somewhere in the display. Or at least part of them were; a hollow face, bloody scalp attached, gave him a lipless smile as he passed. He shuddered and hurried to catch up with his guide.
The noise came from the camp’s machine shops and the voices trying to shout over clatter of metal against metal. Crouching figures in welders’ masks sent sparks dazzling down the building’s blackened side, past the charred remains of tents that had been set up too close to the furious torches. Blades honed, dented shields pounded into rough circles with sledgehammer blows; underneath layers of grease and scar tissue the broad faces looked over at Axxter, then went back to the tasks beneath their hands and tools.
“Hey –” The close lanes of the camp had slowed the Havoc Mass warrior enough for Axxter to pull next to him. He shouted at the calloused ear, “Where exactly are we going?”
The warrior had been waiting for him in the clear space at the camp’s downwall perimeter, squatting on his haunches, squinty eyes scanning for anything that might come up the transit cables. With the ashes of a fire built on a small shelf stuck to the wall, and various gnawed bones and garbage remnants caught in the cables’ extrusions and loops below him, it was obvious that he had been there some time, stationed by his superior officers to await the arrival of the summoned graffex. The eyes looked to Axxter like razor slits cut into creased leather.
An old vet, the braids gray ropes; swirls of a tattooed tiger-mask –
ink
actually needled into the skin – traced out of the wrinkles. The guy should be in a museum, Axxter had thought. Even if grim and bulky enough to put a shiver up any normal person’s spine.
A brace of camp followers – younger than Guyer, and with more avarice in their glittering eyes – lazily regarded him from their perch upon a cable loop. Their gaze dismissed him as unprofitable; they went back to their monotone chatter.
“CO’s tent.” The old warrior’s thumb pointed into the heart of the encampment. “The general wants to see ya.”
“General –”
“Them’s my orders.” The warrior swung himself apelike through a tangle of ropes, then strode on without a backward glance.
Axxter worked his way through the ropes, then caught up with him again. “General who?”
A grunt, amazement at civilian stupidity. “Cripplemaker.”
He didn’t recognize the name. The exertions of their progress into the camp had sapped the oxygen from his brain; he couldn’t decide whether the unfamiliar name was a good or bad sign. A number of Havoc Mass commanders figured prominently in the tribe’s PR releases, complete with gruesome accounts of their military prowess. This one could be some nonentity, an also-ran in the blood-and-gore sweepstakes, not worth making publicity out of. Or – what he hoped wasn’t the case – somebody so goddamn horrible, flat-out bloodthirsty, that the Havoc Mass didn’t
need
to publicize him with a twenty-part hackslash-&-parade miniseries fed gratis into the Wire Syndicate’s juvenile entertainment channels. Somebody they haul out like a secret weapon and ten seconds later, without any advance hype, you
know
you’re in deep shit. Axxter resisted an impulse to stop, call up Ask & Receive on his terminal, and get whatever info did exist on this
Cripplemaker
– at this point, what use would it be? He was already in too far to walk out on this deal.
They arrived at the camp’s center. A tent larger than all those surrounding it, the center pole extending straight out from the building’s wall, the ribbon pennant at its tip twisting snakelike above the other multicolored roofs. Two guards, looking like younger brothers of Axxter’s guide, lounged at the curtained entrance, one asleep in a rope sling, the other picking at his black nails with the point of an ornamental knife. No ancient tattoos – Axxter noted only the minute segments of biofoil set into the warriors’ cheekbones and brows, quiescent now, awaiting the sparking signal to bring the images into view. A nodded greeting for the old warrior, a bored visual scan of the stranger; the rough-skinned hand pulled the curtain aside for them.
A moment for his eyes to adjust. Gazing around the tent’s interior, Axxter realized he’d expected more. More than empty space divided by ropes and nets. The patterns and hues of suspended carpets were dimmed with age; when he put his hand against one for balance a cloud of dust bloomed into his face. From the tent’s central pole hung a large-scale map of Cylinder’s surface, or at least the known morningside portion of it.
The old warrior left Axxter standing on a swaying catwalk. From some zone closer to the wall, a dim light filtered across the map. He could hear the muted tones of the old guy’s voice mixed with a couple of others, but too distant to make out what they were saying.
Axxter looked up at the map beside him. Blank sections marked MURA INCOGNITA; from little spots close to the top of the building, growing larger farther down, finally merging into the great unknown below the cloud barrier. Someone had drawn little childish stick figures, with horns and pitchforks, dancing around at the map’s bottom margin. The left and right sides were bounded by the two Linear Fairs, depicted as vertical ribbons of dollar signs. Obscenities, scrawled in a big looping hand across the top and over the faded red toplevel zone. The Grievous Amalgam’s alliances, in red stripes, clustered underneath. Below that, solid blue for the Havoc Mass, stripes for their allies, and a motley selection of other colors for the various unaligned small-fry tribes moiling about in the lower territories of the building’s exterior.
The map was woefully out of date. It didn’t take much political expertise on Axxter’s part to determine that. Some of the colored areas were labeled with names of military tribes that had disbanded, either voluntarily or by having their collective ass handed to them, years ago. Others, who’d come up from nowhere just recently, weren’t indicated on the map at all. Where were the Gone-Bad TV Cops? They’d come storming up and carved out a major strategic niche between the map’s red and blue zones and were currently receiving heavy recruitment bids from both sides. Just shows what can be done with a nasty enough attitude. That fuckin’ Brevis should’ve hooked me up with that bunch;
I
’d’ve been able to tell they were hot go-getters. The freelancer who’d wound up doing their graffex – some punk with less time out here than me – had been able to cash in his stock options in the tribe for a
bundle
. The thought wheeled a stone of envy around in his guts.
The return of his guide interrupted his morose inspection of the map. “Over here.” His broad thumb pointed to the farther reaches of the tent.
“This him?” A figure looked up from papers strewn across a desk; wet eyes, magnified by antique round spectacles, blinked. Rows of file cabinets, drawers ajar with overflow folders, formed an L-shaped boundary to the small platform. “You this Axxter?” A pen pointed toward him.
The old warrior shoved him forward. Someone in a black uniform with shiny leather and metal bits on it turned a herpetoid gaze around from one of the file drawers at the edge. The narrow face impassively regarded the small scene before him
“Uh . . . yeah. Yes, that’s right.” He regained his balance and nodded. “Got here . . . soon as I could.” He saw one of his hands fluttering nervously, grabbed it with the other, and secured them both behind his back. “When I got the call – you know, from my agent – I was way down near –”
“Have a seat.” The pen indicated a chair by the desk. “Sorry to keep you waiting, but things are in their usual state of chaos around here.” A smile, or a close imitation, as the hands went back to rummaging through the papers on the desk.
From where Axxter sat, the papers looked like bills, long dangling printouts of invoices and expenditure receipts, the hard-copy clutter of a substantial business. The little guy behind the desk – he could look down at the bald circle of head bent over the shuffled mess – obviously a concrete type, who couldn’t think without being able to grasp something solid. “When do I get to meet the general?”
The moist gaze swung up to his face again. “I
am
the general.”
Without looking around, he could feel the black-uniformed man smiling at him. Unpleasantly. The face had been disagreeable enough to lodge in his memory.
“Oh. Sorry.”
“Just hang on a little bit, and we’ll – get down to business. All right?”
“Sure. No problem.” He eased the strap of his bag off his shoulder and lowered it to the platform floor. “Take your time.” Shut up, he ordered himself.