Still, a paying job; the thought soothed his own gut, a warm glow easing outward along his limbs. He gathered the sour taste that had seeped under his tongue and spat; it looped silver, and was gone. Paying job, and not just that: the second one from these good folk. Which meant he’d pulled it off.
I did it
. In solid with a major tribe.
The
major tribe, if you left out the Grievous Amalgam, which had been locked in up at the toplevel for so long it was like air or the vertical wall behind your back, part of the nature of things. But to have cracked the Havoc Mass . . . to have slid right under the nose of DeathPix, and
done it
. . . because he was good, his stuff was just so fucking good . . . That meant his scrabbling-around days were over. That was worth listening to gruesome after-battle stories, any number of them.
The first commission that he’d gotten from the general – the new death ikon for the megassassin – had just about burnt him out. And his portfolio; he’d been saving up ideas for years, all the time he’d been out on the wall, good bits just waiting for a job worthy of them. Stuff you couldn’t waste on some scrub-ass little gang of hooligans, the kind of gigs he’d been getting up until this had fallen in his lap. But some had leaked out, naturally enough; you couldn’t hold back all the time, if only to keep your skills up. He still wondered what he’d done that had caught the Mass’s eye; maybe one of the deep subliminals for the Gnash Boy Squad, the black teeth hidden in blackness, the rotating and replicating mirror-images in a throat that could swallow you down to your ankles if you looked at the biofoil image long enough. But that had been subtle stuff; those Gnash wankers hadn’t even known what they were getting, just groused about how long it was taking him – a lot more work than they were paying him for. He’d really been doing it just to see if he could pull it off. But somebody here with the Mass had spotted it, or some other neat piece he’d done, and realized its worth; that must mean there was some real aficionado of the art up in the top brass. Cripplemaker himself? Axxter doubted it; the man was strictly blood-and-guts bluster and politics. It must’ve been some behind-the-scenes type, a secret string puller, the kind with a wire running to every little detail, like a spider with a web so fine you didn’t even know you were caught in it. Not that he minded being caught; it was what he’d been hoping for all along. He just wished he could trace out who it was in the Havoc Mass that was responsible, so he could wrap himself up even tighter in the web.
He rubbed his eyes, still fried from the round-the-clock sessions on the death ikon for the megassassin. Fried, but worth it. No tricky sublims on that job; he’d wanted something that would zap Cripplemaker right off, impressive on the percept surface. Repeat-fold macro-tominiatures were best for that; a cheap trick, as long as you were willing to work the details down to those levels, but still a trick that always went over big with the rubes. You could watch them reverting to children – or as much of a childhood as somebody born into a military tribe ever got – as they went staring down into all that mandelbrot jazz-and-dragons. And then when it moved, when you sent the prearranged code up to the Small Moon and they came bouncing back with the animating signal – spasms of pleasure. Grizzled old murderers wriggling like puppies. Got ’em where you wanted ’em.
Fuzzy stars pulsed into the salt rim under his eyelids as he pressed harder with his thumb and fingertips. Now wasn’t the time to crap out; bear down and be set for life. He pulled his hand away, one finger smearing tear leakage across his cheek. Blinking, he scanned out over the clouds. She wasn’t there, this time at least. Maybe she’d finally gotten tired of hanging around, making her own moon out of her wordless crush, or else, more likely, she’d just drifted away with the other angels, off on one of their slow random errands. She’d disappeared from the sky before – the vacuum draining his heart with both a sense of relief and an odd sadness – only to show up again, a distant sphere and figure laced with sun. Smart enough to dangle out there, beyond easy sniping range of one of the Mass warriors lounging around bored. They didn’t like firing and not hitting anything.
His stomach had settled down. You could get used to anything, as long as you were getting paid for it. He unhooked himself from the transit cable and swung back up toward the tent.
He heard the snoring, deep, gelatinous, even before he lifted the flap. Inside, in the cozy filtered light, the old warrior’s hands fumbled at his belly hair, the black-crescented nails tracking some vague itch. The face behind the beard had gone soft, babyish, the pleasure of his dreams seeping out in a wet smile. Axxter didn’t want to know what the old bastard was unwinding inside his head; something disgusting, no doubt.
A chemical smell, the same as always on the old warrior’s breath, but stronger now, filled the tent. An empty bottle rolled in a clattering circle, dislodged by Axxter’s knee as he squatted down. A centimeter of clear pink fluid rolled around the bottom as he picked it up. He was about to sling the bottle out through the tent flap when he realized, looking over his shoulder, that there was someone standing behind him, head bent low against the ridgepole.
“What a grand old fellow.” General Cripplemaker gazed down at the sleeping warrior. He squatted beside Axxter, balancing himself with one hand against the tent’s springy mesh floor. The knuckles of his other hand stroked the warrior’s beard, evoking snuffling noises and one of the dirty paws rising up to brush at an invisible fly.
Cripplemaker nodded. “This old sonuvabitch,” still gazing at the warrior, “he was the one who ran me through my first basic training. Scared the shit out of me, he did.” A glance at Axxter, almost shy, embarrassed at revealing the tender lining of his soul. “End of the course, he’d rape the bottom ten percent of the class. The bottom one percent, he’d rape and eat.” The general’s eyes locked fervently on Axxter’s. “You can’t believe what a desire to excel that instills in you.”
“Yeah . . . well . . . I guess it would.” Cripplemaker’s hand had grasped Axxter’s wrist, squeezing hard enough to rub the bones together. He wondered uneasily what that was supposed to mean. The general was dressed all in black, he saw now, an outfit suitable for spies or assassins skulking around in the dark. Every time he’d seen the general before, there had been a double rank of medals dangling on his chest.
“Tradition – that’s important, you know.” The general looked again at the sleeping figure, his nostrils flared as though he could inhale the warrior entire. “There’s nothing we can do without it. We’d
be
nothing without it – not warriors, just rabble driven by the wind, bellies wrapped against our spines, getting our asses kicked by every little pipsqueak on the wall. That’s what we’d be.” The general’s voice had gone quieter and tighter, a vibrating wire. His eyes moved around to Axxter again, two little sparks inside narrow slits. “That’s why this job we’ve given you is so important. This man –” He let go of Axxter’s wrist and stroked the warrior’s gray hair, tenderly. “This man represents the tribe’s history; he
is
our history.”
Axxter kept his mouth shut. He’d heard this whole spiel before, when Cripplemaker had given him the new commission – couldn’t quite figure out why he was going through it all again.
“Do you understand me?”
“Well . . . sure.” Axxter shrugged. “I mean – that’s why I’ve been down here listening to him so much.”
I’m not listening to this shit ’cause I dig it
– he held that back behind his teeth. “All the campaigns and stuff, the big march, uh, the battles and . . . um . . . stuff . . .” Christ, what else had the grizzled old sadist gone rattling on about? He reached out for the recorder dangling beside their heads. Holding it against his chest, he sent the little glowing numbers dancing back to zero. “Great stuff . . . I mean – it’s just great material for me to use. You want to hear some of it?” He held up the machine.
“No, no; that’s all right.” The general smiled and patted his knee. “I’m sure you’ve been working very hard.”
“Well . . . always like to do a good job.” Axxter felt the recorder’s metal grow slick with the sweat from his palms. The general had eaten up all the space in the tent somehow, except for the little bit between them. And that he could gulp down in one swallow.
“A good job . . . yes . . .” The general’s face drew tight, skin becoming angles of chiseled stone. Eyes deep in the sun-wrinkled crevices. “But more than that. A, a
great
job. I know – you can do it.”
Axxter shrugged, as though the skin around his shoulders had gotten uncomfortably tight. “Well . . . thanks. Give it my best.” He pulled back – slowly – from the other, his spine pushing against the tent fabric.
The two little points followed him. “The whole history of the tribe – that’s what you have to catch.” The general nodded, sinking deeper into his brooding. “On one man.” He stroked the broad curve of the old warrior’s breastplate. “The living embodiment of . . . of a
saga!
” The points brightened into sparks.
The guy was sure getting worked up about this deal. Axxter couldn’t figure what the big song-and-dance was for. These historical friezes were a regular cliché in the graffex industry.
Every
tribe had one, right down to the couple of louts who had nothing more to brag about than a successful shoplifting expedition in the stalls over in Linear Fair. Saga, my ass. He didn’t say it out loud – not with the general in front of him, all worked up – but this was the kind of job that really got on a graffex’s tits. Lots of busy little details to get down, you had to listen – Christ knows – to one grisly war story after another. You usually had about fifty different top brass sticking their noses in, each of them wanting some particularly flattering exploit embroidered into the friggin’
saga
. . . Though Cripplemaker had saved him from that last hassle; it seemed to be a one-man project with him.
Maybe that was why the big leaning-over-my-shoulder number, the pep-talk rerun. The man’s an enthusiast – I can deal with that. Better that than starving out on the wall.
Axxter felt the tent rubbing against the back of his head. “I think . . . you’ll like it.”
The general smiled. “I’m looking forward to it. At the banquet – are you going to have it done in time?”
The usual push. The customer is always antsy. “No sweat.” If the senile old bastard snoring away between them could be woken up, and the last few good bits tapped out of him. And that was just for color, the little personal bits, frosting on the cake. He’d rung up Ask & Receive days ago, when Cripplemaker had first given him the frieze assignment, and gotten a full historical rundown on the Havoc Mass. On the sly. Clients usually didn’t want you going outside, getting a losses-and-all account, and working from that. Their own PR line was all ups. “It’ll be ready. You don’t have a thing to worry about.” He patted the sleeping warrior’s breastplate, sounding a dull heartbeat from the blank biofoil. No worries at all: he’d have to push it to get it all implanted, but he’d already sketched out the major panels, programmed the routines.
The general straightened up from his crouch, reaching behind himself for the tent flap. “Keep it up.” Smile wider, and a wink that crinkled his face like a finger poked in an eye-socket. The black skulking getup slid out and looped away on the nearest hold.
Whatever that was all about – Axxter rubbed the side of his face, wondering. But not much. He was too tired, the grit under his eyelids getting sharper edges, to worry about it.
The old warrior was still snoring, scratching with one of his grizzled paws at his breastplate. He’d managed to peel up the edge of the biofoil; a hairline trickle of red oozed out from beneath. Axxter had stripped off the old foil from the armor, implanted in all fresh; you could recycle old foil, often did if you had a standing contract, blanking out the old stuff or just coding up new animation signals if the basic patterns were close enough to what you wanted to do. Not for a job like this, though. It smacked of working on the cheap, and the fine details tended to come out blurry. Plus – the big trouble – the coding for the warrior’s old foil was still being carried by the Small Moon Consortium as a DeathPix account, keyed to this locus.
They might not know that the old foil had been stripped off, wadded up, and tossed downwall – but if he’d been stupid enough to try and contract for an override signal, that would’ve been a dead tip-off that he was horning in on one of their clients. At this stage, he couldn’t be sure of the Mass protecting him from DeathPix retaliating for that kind of action. But what they didn’t know . . . Beyond that, overrides just cost too damn much money; the Small Moon Consortium threw on a prohibitive fee schedule for that sort of thing, to discourage graffices from sabotaging each other’s work and generally giving the industry a bad name.
The old warrior snuffled as Axxter prodded him in the shoulder. The aged baby’s-face contorted against the intrusion of the world outside its delicious remembering. “Hey. Come on. Wake up.” Realizing how tired he was had made Axxter nerveless. The aged bear didn’t scare him now; he just wanted to get the job done.
The warrior’s fingers had smeared the blood across his leather-sheathed ribs. He’d complained – fussily, like a child – that the new foil ‘tickled’; Axxter knew that whatever nerve endings the old boy had left were buried so far down under armor and scar tissue that he couldn’t feel a thing.
Have to reimplant it. Put a bandage or something over it so the old fool couldn’t go picking at it again. He reached into the corner of the tent for his toolkit. As long as the subject was relatively still, sleeping away . . .