Farewell Horizontal

by K. W. Jeter

  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…

  That’d be perfect, if the cable the Norton was locked on led straight into something like that. Some bunch with a real gripe against the Havoc Mass, where they’d get a big laugh out of what had happened at the banquet, shelter him until he’d figured out what to do, where to go next. The wind-forced tears ran in razor-straight lines to his jaw as he gritted his teeth and wished.

  Can’t fucking remember. He knew it would’ve been no good even if he had been able to; he’d been there in the Mass camp long enough that everything could have changed in this sector of the wall, tribes moved out, new ones taking their place. He’d kept his head down, working, paying no attention to the usual flow of reports and rumors that freelancers based their itineraries on. Anything left in his head from before then would be old news, useless.

  He’d have to call up Ask & Receive, pay the info agency for a current-time map, the extra bite for a high-reliability depth. Even with a band of murderers riding hard behind him for his blood, the thought of shelling out that kind of request fee made him hesitate. If there was any other way -

  Shit. So much for that major segment of his bank account. It’d gotten so nice and fat when General Cripplemaker had paid him his advance… Back to reality.

  He looked off to the right and saw the Small Moon hanging in the sky, bright silver and waiting. Those fuckers. Thanks a lot. But at least it was there for him to bounce his call up to Ask & Receive on the toplevel. If it hadn’t been there, if it had been hidden around on the Cylinder’s other side, he’d have been screwed. No way could he have stopped the Norton, climbed off, and gone looking for a contact point to route his call through the Wire Syndicate network; not with major ugly ass-kicking bearing down on him from upwall.

 
; Even as he blinked on Ask & Receive’s number from the directory, the digits supered over the clouds below, the thought nicked him, whether he could trust his call going through the Small Moon relay. They’d already screwed him over once, in league with DeathPix. But they probably think I’m already dead. That was a comfort. They’d figure I got my lights stomped out back at the banquet. The Small Moon Consortium wouldn’t be expecting him to be making priority calls from this far out from the Mass camp. He could slip in, get the info he needed, and out before they could dink with the relay. He blinked on the last digit and listened to it go bouncing off the reflecting satellite.

  YOU WANT IT, WE GOT IT. The info agency’s face spelled the words across his vision.

  “Give me audible.” That cost more, too, but there was no time to read dialogue.

  “You want it -”

  “Yeah, yeah; forget that.” Axxter leaned closer to the Norton’s gauges, hunching his shoulders to his ears, blocking out the rushing of the wind. “I need a map, a, uh, whatchacallit, a rolling trace, center of projection this caller. Got it?”

  FEATURES? “Sorry; features?”

  “Blank everything except operable transit cables and military tribes in map area. And on the latter, give me size of forces, estimated field strength, and political affiliations. I’m going to need at least eighty percent reliability depth on all that. Make it ninety.”

  “It’s going to cost you.”

  He authorized the dip into his account. “Just do it. Fast, okay?” The Ask & Receive face zipped away; he glanced at the bank balance in the corner of the field. It had already been slipping away from the call fee; suddenly it dipped, the digit at the front end disappearing completely. The sight hit him like a knife to the heart.

  Come on, come on – Jesus H. Christ. Another look over his shoulder. In the distance upwall, the face of the pack’s lead man was just barely visible, at least in the high definition of his imagination. And the warrior’s smirking grin.

  Then the map he’d paid for came up, straight snakes and a few scattered patches blotting out the pursuers. Axxter turned around and leaned into the map, studying it.

  Worse than he’d thought. His already-knifed heart sank, rolling along his spine. The snakes were scarce in this piece of map: they represented the transit cables, and there were hardly enough to form a square, let alone a grid of any kind. The pulsing circle that was him, the Norton and the Watsonian, hung motionless in the center of his vision, a bisecting line scrolling upward; right at the top, the Havoc Mass posse – black dots along the single cable – edged a centimeter closer as he watched. The blotches, different colors – the Amalgam and its allies always got shades of red, the Mass’s tribes in blues and greens – just a couple of each. And too far away – he was rolling away from the nearest blue, in fact, upwall and leftaround, disappearing in the map’s top right corner.

  He scrolled down the map, the pulsing circle and the black dots rolling out of sight at the top. Kept scrolling, seeing nothing but the vertical line of the cable down the 138 middle – until words flashed over: INSUFFICIENT DATA TO MAINTAIN RELIABILITY DEPTH. He gritted his teeth; he’d scrolled so far down the map that it was into unknown sectors of the wall. “Go to fifty percent.” The map scrolled for several more seconds, then went blank, even the cable line gone.

  “Save your money. That’s a long way past the cloud barrier, man.”

  Nothing. Just blank wall between here and the clouds. And nothing beyond that; everyone knew that. No bottom to Cylinder. Just nothing, the Nothing that he was accelerating toward.

  And no perpendicular cable to switch off to, no way of working himself even a few degrees around the circumference of the building. To where he could find a hiding place, a tribe that’d take him in. If he tried going off cable, letting the Norton hunt out holds for the pithons, the slow grunt work of the devices – the Mass warriors would be on his ass in no time. He wouldn’t be more than a couple meters away from the cable before they showed up: easy firing range.

  Goddamn – the whole world had shrunk to one line, a string with him on one end and everything that wanted to kill him on the other. For this I went vertical? He felt like both laughing and crying.

  Might as well just stop the Norton, turn around and stand on the pegs, exposing his belly to the coming knives. Get it over with -

  The Ask & Receive face waited for another request. “Get me Strategies.” He didn’t bother loading the map into his own files. What good was a blank page?

  His vision went clear except for the bank-account figures at the lower right quadrant. The numbers flickered; that meant they were checking him out.

  “Sorry.” The face again. “You don’t have the cash for that service. And we don’t work on credit.”

  “Uh – wait a minute…”

  “Nope.” The face was already dimming away. “You can’t afford us at all now, fella. Hasta la vista.” Gone.

  Fuck ’em; there were others. He didn’t want to look down at his bank account – how far had it sunk on this call? – but let the line search for a match between his funds and any of the various strategy agencies in the directory.

  The search was taking too long, whole seconds ticking away. The line must’ve gone down into the far reaches of the strategy listings, down into the smallest of the various annlanders, the ones that charged hardly anything. For good reason.

  A low-rez sign came up in his vision. ASK BENNY PERU – HE’S FAST, HE’S CHEAP, AND SOMETIMES HE’S RIGHT. That faded to a still picture of a fat man sitting behind an antique wooden desk. What had been left of Axxter’s heart, clinging by adrenaline to his ribcage, fell with the rest.

  “Got a problem?” No animation, just the audio laid over the still.

  Nothing to lose – he was already zipping downwall, the Norton’s throttle rolled full-on, Nothing ahead and everything to avoid behind him He told the fat man’s picture all about it.

  A drain of seconds – both the clouds and the warriors were closer, too close, eating up the line racing under him. He realized that the person on the other end of the call – Benny himself, he supposed – was actually thinking it all over.

  The bank account numbers hiccupped, a flat fee bite taken out of them. “Well, young fella, there’s a simple solution to everything. Isn’t there?”

  That sounded suspiciously like a prelude to religious counseling. Not what he needed at the moment. “Yeah? Like what?”

  “Simple.” The tone almost shrugged the picture’s shoulders. “Just – cut the cable.”

  “What?” He didn’t believe that; the signal bouncing off the Small Moon must have gotten screwed up. “Give me that again.”

  “I said, cut the cable. You know, the transit cable you’re on. That’s all.”

  The fat man, or whatever was behind the picture, had really said it. “Are you crazy -”

  “You want a full explanation, it costs you extra.” Bland, unperturbed, as though people had called him worse. “Save your money – what you got left – and go with it.”

  It hit him then: the guy was right. One hundred percent.

  “That it? Got any more problems? I do all kinds. How’s your love life -”

  Axxter blinked to disconnect. He had all he needed.

  Cut the cable – of course; if the world had shrunk to one line, you just had to get rid of the other end of it, the end with the bad business on it. The penalties for sabotaging any part of the building’s exterior transit network were huge – the Public Works Department up on toplevel was a law unto itself, more enduring than the ruling tribes like the Grievous Amalgam, which came and went; there were stories that Public Works went back to before the War, an entity reaching back into other, more obscuring clouds. Whatever – taking out the cable, especially in a sector with as few in place as this one, would draw him a fine that would wipe out the little bit left in his bank account and put him in the red for a long time to come. He’d be working for the Public Works Department, in effect, at l
east until he’d cleared off the debt. Better that than the other – there being no alternative that left him either moving around or breathing…

  Come on, get moving. All this had eaten up too much time. He didn’t need a current-scan map to see how much closer the Havoc Mass warriors were to his tail – he could look over his shoulder and see they’d eaten up whole kilometers of the gap, grinning and pushing their machines harder, their mouths watering for fun.

  There was a welding torch in the Watsonian’s toolkit. Every freelancer carried one, repairs out on some godforsaken section of wall being your lookout entirely. That’d slice through the cable easily enough, given a couple of minutes.

  He loosened the belt pithons holding him into the Norton’s seat, enough to lean over toward the sidecar’s open hatch. Stretching to keep the throttle rolled on, as he reached for the toolkit – the wind caught him full in his raised chest, nearly toppling him. He had to grip the edge of the sidecar’s opening, dragging himself close enough to pull the kit loose.

  A set of socket wrenches spilled out onto his crotch when he straightened back behind the handlebars and opened the kit. With only one hand free, he almost lost the torch as well; he clamped the cylinder to his chest to keep the wind from tearing it out of his grasp. He switched off the torch’s safety lock and thumbed the ignition. A blue flame spurted out of the nozzle, sputtering, then narrowing to a fierce, steady glow.

  He let go of the Norton’s throttle, and the machine started to coast to a halt. As it slowed, he turned and crouched on top of the seat, then flattened his chest against the rear fender. The lines from his belt tightened, securing him in position. Raising his head, he saw the Mass warriors roaring down toward him; the cable hummed from their machinery as he brought the torch’s flame against it.