The view of the megassassin, silhouetted at the sector’s entrance, stirred something in his memory. Another time . . .
He moved back from the barrier. In the building’s darkness, he called up the files he had loaded from the dump. He fast-forwarded through the tapes until he found what he was looking for. The two megassassins that had been there in the middle of the raid on the sector. The ikon that marked one of them as belonging to the Grievous Amalgam was clearly visible; he worked through the camera angles, trying to get a clear frontal shot of the other one.
Nothing; the cameras had only caught the second megassassin from the back, working away, the great hands flashing and cutting. Beyond it you could see the faces of its victims, their faces contorted as they looked upon the megassassin’s death ikon, the last thing they’d see . . .
He stopped the tape, and magnified the frozen image as far as it would go, centering on one poor bastard about to be reduced to ash and pulp. His sight filled with the image of the man’s face; he magnified again, centering on one eye.
There it was. A reflection, curved by the round surface of the eye, but still visible. The death ikon. Axxter recognized it; he had almost known beforehand what it would be. The same one he had seen before, up in the Havoc Mass camp, that he’d replaced with his own work.
Which meant – it flashed perfect through his head – that it was the Havoc Mass’s megassassin. The second one on the tape, back there in the raid on the sector. It hadn’t been just the Grievous Amalgam’s doing; the Havoc Mass had been in on it, too.
The sonsabitches
. Axxter blinked away the file, leaving him gazing into the darkness in front of him. They were all in it together; they had always been. One more universally assumed truth had turned out to be a fiction. The Grievous Amalgam and the Havoc Mass weren’t rivals for power – they were in league together. It made sense, once you followed it all the way through: why stop at reducing Ask & Receive to a charade? Once the only reliable source of obtaining info had been corrupted, there’d be no way of detecting all the other frauds and conspiracies that could be devised. Except for the occasional dumb bastard who stumbled onto something he shouldn’t have – and those could be easily eliminated. His clever message to the Havoc Mass had served only as a confirmation that he’d found out too much. So naturally General Cripplemaker had told him to come on through. Where their little reception committee would be waiting for him.
“Screw this.” His voice was loud in the darkness. No longer afraid; the angry pulse at the hinge of his jaw had driven everything else out.
Let’s just get it over with
.
He went back to the barrier. “Hey!” He cupped his hands around his mouth as he shouted. “Give me ten minutes, okay? Think you could do that? Then I’ll be ready for you.” He thought he saw, out at the sector’s exit, the megassassin smile; at any rate, it didn’t move from its position at the metal lip. Axxter nodded and headed back to the train.
It took less than ten minutes; there wasn’t much that had to be done. He’d found an operable welding torch in the train’s maintenance compartment; that, plus the coils of cable scattered around the area, simplified things.
One section of the blown-open barrier was low enough to wheel the motorcycle over. The metal edge was fused smooth, with nothing to snag the thick steel cable trailing behind the bike from where he had spot-welded the cable’s end to the frame. The cable snaked over the barrier and back to where the other end was welded to one of the protrusions jutting out from the train’s undercarriage. He glanced over his shoulder – the megassassin was still waiting there, as if watching his antics with amused puzzlement. It was in no hurry.
The engine’s roar echoed through the sector as Axxter straddled the motorcycle and switched on the ignition. In the distance ahead of him, the megassassin tilted its head, the red-dot eyes glaring at him. He dropped the machine into gear and rolled on the throttle. He glanced back over his shoulder, to see the steel cable unwinding behind the rear wheel; then he lowered his head over the handlebars as the machine’s speed battered the air into his face. His eyes locked with the megassassin’s as it spread its arms wide and braced for impact.
It looked so big the last few seconds, as the sector’s charred ruins blurred past on either side, that it seemed like a wall, a wall with eyes and a spiraling black image, dark within dark, at its center. He could already see himself smashing into bone splinters and jelly; that would have been fine as well, anything that happened now was fine, as long as it happened, no more fucking around –
Then he hit. For a moment he felt the megassassin’s fingers folding over his spine, as the motorcycle’s front wheel crumpled and sparked against the thing’s chest. Then he was surrounded by light and air, wind rushing against his arms and legs, and he knew he was sliding beyond the megassassin’s grasp. It howled, and he heard it; not rage, but fear and shock as it spun and fell, knocked clear of the entry site’s edge. It had thought it could never die.
Red webbed over Axxter’s eyes; some metal piece from the motorcycle had torn loose and stung his brow. He held on, wrapping his arms around the tank. The motorcycle kept on its course, flying straight out from the building.
The motorcycle twisted about; he could see back toward Cylinder. The steel cable slowly lost its slack, becoming a straight line. Then for a moment it was straight, a dark perfect line incised through the air. He gripped the motorcycle tighter, arms and legs squeezing hard onto the crumpled metal. If he could hold on, if the cable held, if he survived the arc back down to the wall –
With a sharp bell note, louder than the roaring wind, the cable snapped.
He pushed himself away from the motorcycle. The megassassin was long gone, falling toward the clouds; now he wanted to be free of everything else. He opened his arms wide, head tilted back, the heart beneath his breastbone pulling him on with a sudden joy.
Another figure, its form silhouetted against a halo of light, rushed from the clouds to meet him He reached out for her, though she was so far away, and fell.
He was making progress, slow but steady, heading upwall, when he heard the motorcycle from down below. He looked over his shoulder – wincing – and saw a familiar face smiling over a set of handlebars.
“Hey, Ny!” Guyer Gimble lifted one hand and waved. “Hold it right there!” She leaned over the motorcycle’s gauges and gunned toward him.
She pulled up alongside him and killed the engine. Her smile grew even wider and fiercer in complete delight. “Christ, Ny, I was hoping I’d find you out here. How the hell are ya?”
He leaned back against the pithons, shrugged, and managed a smile. “I’m okay, I guess. In one piece, at least.” He hadn’t felt that way when he’d come to, strapped to the wall, the day before; every part of him had seemed to have come loose, held together only by the bag of his skin. That was the aftereffect of his head-on impact with the megassassin. He’d been glad when there hadn’t been any more blood welling up in his mouth to spit out.
“You sly sonuvabitch – you been having adventures right and left, haven’t you? You got any idea how famous you are?”
He shook his head. “You mean for coming all the way through the building?” She must have been following the story, he figured, watching the entertainment broadcasts.
Guyer barked out a laugh. “That, plus other things. You heading up to the toplevel?”
“Yeah.” Axxter nodded, the motion sparking a flare of red in his eyes. “Gotta see my agent.” He’d already come across a plug-in jack and tried making a call, but had gotten only dead silence. All this slamming around had put something out of commission.
“It’ll take you a long time, crawling up there like that. Come on, get in; I’ll give you a ride. That’s where I’m heading, too.”
He managed to climb into the sidecar and strap himself in. Guyer eyed the mottled bruise covering one side of his ribcage, revealed when his jacket rode up.
“You okay? You look kinda messed up.”
“I’m okay.” He wedged his legs down among her stowed gear. “Mostly.”
She started up the motorcycle and headed upwall. Axxter looked back over his shoulder. He hadn’t gotten very far from where he’d started. He could still spot the dangling, ragged lines with which Lahft – or maybe another angel; he hadn’t been conscious when he’d been helped – had fastened him to the wall. Maybe it had become some kind of sport among them, catching him every time he came falling toward the clouds. Twice was lucky enough; he didn’t feel like trying it a third time.
“You’re gonna be strolling into some heavy action, Ny.” Guyer shouted over the engine noise and the rush of wind. “The whole building’s in an uproar, from the top-level all the way down the wall. Everything’s upside down now, man.”
He leaned toward her. “Why? What’s going on?”
She grinned. “You’ll see, man. When you get there. Your agent will fill you in.”
His head ached too much to try to figure anything out. He sat back, gazing straight up the wall, and closed his eyes.
† † †
“Ny – Jesus Christ, it’s good to see you.” Brevis came around the side of his desk and grabbed Axxter’s hand. “I didn’t know what the hell had happened to you, whether you were dead or what. But I kept hoping.”
He let his agent deposit him in a chair. “What the hell’s going on out there?” He pointed his thumb toward the door. “It’s like a riot or something.” Not like, but was, he knew; getting from where Guyer had dropped him off to Brevis’s office had been harder than he’d expected, with shouting crowds surging in waves, and the crackle of distant gunfire and explosions. He’d spotted at least a dozen different military tribes, all engaged in freestyle grappling with each other. Sticking close to any handy walls and sidling through had seemed the wisest course of action. Something big was up, obviously.
“Haven’t you heard?” Brevis sat back down behind his desk. “Uh, guess you wouldn’t have . . . what with your being in transit, as it were.” He gestured toward the walls with both hands. “This is it, Ny: the big one. Revolution time. Everything’s up for grabs. Cylinder’s whole structure of power has collapsed. Alliances, treaties . . . everything. There’s going to be a lot of scrambling around for a while.” He leaned back, hands clasped behind his head. “No matter what happens to you personally, Ny, at least you’ll always have the satisfaction of knowing you made an impact on the way things work.”
“Me? What’d I do? I didn’t do anything to cause all this.” He tilted his head toward the door; from beyond the sounds of the rioting could be heard.
“Nobody’s told you? It was your little broadcast, Ny. I mean, that was a great idea about bouncing your signal off that angel – when the signal hit this side, everybody wondered what was going on, so they traced back and figured out what you’d done. And when I say everybody, I mean
everybody
; every military tribe that’d ever had graffex work done for them, or anybody else with access to programmed biofoil.”
“What’re you talking about?”
“Don’t you see, Ny?” Brevis smiled. “You didn’t just send that little transmission you’d cooked up to the Havoc Mass; you sent it to everybody. The signal wasn’t encoded the way that the Small Moon encodes everything it sends out – the coding is what limits the signal’s reception to the intended target. Without that coding, your signal went completely wide-band. Every piece of active biofoil on this side of the building got its usual programming overridden and started showing all that stuff you’d put together, those tapes and everything. It wasn’t some little secret between you and the Havoc Mass anymore;
everybody
saw the proof about the conspiracy between the Havoc Mass and the Grievous Amalgam. Soon as their respective allies and treaty partners saw that, then the game was up. Thus all this foofarah going on outside.”
“Jeez.” A vague wonder moved inside Axxter’s chest; all he’d been trying to do was save his own ass. And all this had come about because of it . . . “So what’s going to happen now?”
“Oh, some new order will emerge. Eventually. That’s how things always go. The only thing that’s certain is that it won’t be either the Grievous Amalgam or the Havoc Mass calling the shots up here. They’ve already gone through mass defections, all their ranks scrambling around for position with somebody else. If they can; a lot of old grudges are going to get settled at their expense.”
Cripplemaker would probably do all right, sneaky shit that he was. But the general’s fate wasn’t of any concern to Axxter. “Well . . . whatever comes down, money’s always going to come in handy. Right? Now that I made it on through, it’s time to rake it in. What’s the payoff come to?”
Brevis’s smile disappeared. He looked sadly at Axxter. “There isn’t any payoff, Ny.”
His heart went cold. “What do you mean?”
“No payoff. No money, no nothing. That was the other effect of your broadcast. Remember? Your evidence completely indicted Ask & Receive, too. They’re bankrupt, washed up, kaput. They were completely liable for the validity of the info they had been supplying, so now everybody’s got a suit against them. Fat lot of good it’ll do, though, since they’ve already rolled over.”