by K. W. Jeter
“Here you go.” She secured herself close to the jack.
A taped call was waiting for him as soon as he inserted his finger. NY – YOU CAN GET MEGASSASSIN LOCATION INFO DIRECT FROM A & R. KEEP IN TOUCH. BREVIS. That was cool; his agent had known exactly what he needed to find out. The Havoc Mass was probably making the megassassin’s progress public, just to work up audience interest and add to their reputation: You can run, but you can’t hide – that always played well.
Ringing up Ask & Receive revealed that the megassassin was only a little ways out from the Left Linear Fair, having crossed through the day before.
That’s weird. Axxter broke the connection and leaned back against the pithons. He’d figured the megassassin would’ve been much closer than that; he wouldn’t have been happy to find out that it was just about to clear the curve of the building, spot him, and come barreling across the wall to kick his ass, but he wouldn’t have been surprised. Weren’t those big fuckers supposed to be faster than that? He’d always heard that once they got going, they were unstoppable, building up speed, creaming their target as much by force of impact as by all the other goodies grafted into their formerly human bodies. This one seemed to be taking some kind of tourist route to get to him.
“So what’s the problem?” Felony had managed to listen in. “Just means you got a little breathing space.”
Axxter worked at a fingernail. “It just doesn’t make sense. If the Havoc Mass wants to dramatize their lethal effectiveness, they’d want that thing to be on top of me fast. Not sauntering around out there on the wall somewhere.”
“And you’re the guy who knows so much. You didn’t get filled in on this one, did you?”
“Meaning what?”
She spread her hands out, palms upward. “Hey – maybe these megassassins aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. Or maybe they are rough, but they’re deficient in some other skills. Like they’re not the world’s greatest trackers, maybe. It might be having a hard time picking up your trail – you arrived on this side by air, remember.”
He shook his head. “It should’ve had my last location pinpointed by the plug-in jack I used. Still doesn’t make sense.”
“Sense, shmense; you gonna worry about every little thing, good or bad? Just consider yourself lucky. For the time being, at least.”
Easy for her to say – Axxter regarded her. “Hey, how long were you trailing along after us?”
A shrug. “Long enough.”
“Did you hear what we were talking about?”
“You mean, did I hear what that Sai character said about me? Yeah, I heard. So what?” Her smile broadened. “The guy’s right. I’m not crazy – but I could be trouble.” She reached out, grabbing a new hold. “I got business to take care of. I’ll see you around.”
† † †
Through the night, he debated calling up Ask & Receive again, in case any more handy info had come in. Finally deciding against it – he already had enough to go on; anything else would probably have confused him even more.
As soon as it was light enough to see, he headed back toward the entry site. Through the hours of waiting in the dark, he had listened for any sound of Sai or the other Dead Centers, their high-pitched wailing calls to each other; there had been nothing but the building’s eternal silence. Now, leaning over the lip of the site, he peered into the darkness, searching for any sign of movement within.
Still nothing. Go on. The rounded metal edge grew slick with his perspiration. Go on in and see what you find.
Maybe the girl Felony was right; maybe the Dead Centers were nothing to be afraid of. She seemed to know more about what was going on around here, on the eveningside, than he did. Her ‘business’ brought her here, brought her – maybe – to a lot of places around Cylinder; she was in some ways an authority. If she’s not crazy – the other possibility. He only had Sai’s word that she wasn’t crazy, that all of her wild talk wasn’t just the wind whistling through the cracks in her skull. But if Sai was a Dead Center, then how much of what he said could be trusted? Maybe Sai had his own weird reasons for wanting him to believe that Felony could do those things; some spooky mindbend that he hadn’t figured out yet. And if you didn’t trust what Sai said about Felony – and why should you? – then you couldn’t trust what Felony said about the Dead Centers…
It went around and around, not in a circle, but more of a spiral, into a darkness as deep as the entry-site hole. He’d have to either trust both of them, Sai and Felony, or neither of them.
He was wasting time, he knew, trying to work it out. Either way, he was still on this side of the building, and everything he wanted – his whole life – was on the other, with a long walk in between. Worrying about who was lying to him – as if that were some novel state of affairs – was just a way of avoiding climbing into the entry site’s shivery black. Out of the light, as much of it as there was at the this hour of the eveningside’s half-dawn, and into the night inside the building, which never ended. Heavy spook territory.
Or he could starve to death out here. Axxter sucked in his breath and pulled himself into the entry site. He slowly got to his feet and stood up, feeling a solid horizontal surface under his feet; it had been a long time. The constant tension of moving around in the vertical world ebbed out of his spine, a sensation so pleasant that it sapped away most of his fear.
Cautiously, he walked forward, away from the circular light of the opening. Whatever the intentions of Sai and the other Dead Centers might have been toward him awhile ago, he probably hadn’t improved the situation by chasing Sai off with the travelhooks. That sort of thing could piss off the friendliest person, especially when it came in return for various favors performed. He’d have to watch out.
That worry aside, it wasn’t so bad inside the building. There was even light, parallel rows of faint blue radiance up on the ceiling; he hadn’t been able to see them from outside.
Maybe I’ll make it. He thought about that as he walked. Maybe he just had to keep putting one foot in front of the other, keep going; maybe he’d find some Dead Center cache of groceries, a big pile of those round loaves, or Sai or one of the others would take a liking to him again and drop off little presents while he slept. He rolled that thought around as the entry site’s opening grew smaller and smaller behind him.
He smelled it first, coming from a smaller tunnel branching off the main one. Like gasoline, sharp and pungent. Pushed into the air by a wave of heat. Some kind of machine; he only had a second to consider what that meant, when it came out of the dark beside him and hit a blow straight to his chest. He fell backward, flying for a moment, until the back of his head and his shoulder struck the floor of the tunnel. He shook his head, dazed, eyes refocusing. In front of him was the megassassin.
He didn’t know it could smile.
All black, darkness inside darkness, a raw machine stench of oil and heated metal, and at the same time, the human smells of sweat and shit. From Axxter’s angle sprawled on the floor, the thing’s bulk blotted out everything else, as though its massive shoulders rubbed against the limits of the tunnel’s ceiling.
It looked down at him, with the little red dots that had been its eyes, and smiled as its chest opened to reveal the sharp and the blunt things moving into readiness. At the center was the death ikon, the image spiraling into view.
At least it’s not mine. Somebody else’s work, a mandala of skull-headed black maggots, grinning with needle teeth as they writhed around a thorned heart. It would’ve been too much to be killed by something with his work on it.
Then again – his brain had dropped into an odd lucidity, tranquil and slow – it might’ve been nice. To have his own stuff be the last thing he ever saw.
He looked up into the megassassin’s grin. The whirling devices at the end of its arms converged toward him.
Then the explosion hit, and all he saw was flame and smoke.
“What the fuck -” The floor of the tunnel had rocked hard enough to knock
the megassassin off its feet. Axxter found himself slung against the wall, a curved section split open beside him.
A hand came through the smoke and grabbed his arm. “Come on -” A voice he’d heard before. “This way -”
He let himself be pulled through the jagged opening. Felony’s grip tugged him into a staggering run. Behind him, he heard the grinding howl of the megassassin echoing through the building.
THIRTEEN
“I think we’ll be safe here. For a while.”
She had led him through tunnels smaller and smaller, conduits branching off the main course. A world behind the smooth walls; ending finally in a tiny cubical space lined with pipes and a maze of wires. They both had to crouch under the space’s low ceiling.
The scramble on his hands and knees left Axxter panting. Head lowered, he saw his hands covered with oil and cindery ash. His jacket smelled singed. “What – what was all that? That explosion?” Maybe everything around him could go up in flame and smoke the same way.
Felony leaned back against the wall, arms wrapped around her knees. She shrugged. “No big deal. There’s some heavy-duty power lines running in spots, and the insulation has gotten old and unstable. All you gotta do is short ’em together, and you get a pretty messy bang – lots of smoke and stuff. I just did it to throw that big hulk on its can and make a hole big enough to grab you.”
He grunted his thanks. The slap of the explosion was still echoing inside his head. Alive – that amazed him. He’d never heard of anybody being shown a megassassin’s death ikon – not under the circumstances, at least, of its being out to get you – and being around later to talk about it.
“I thought… you’d taken off. To go take care of your business.”
Felony pushed a strand of hair away from her eyes. “Yeah, well, I was just on my way; I got some safe spots around here where I usually stash this body – you know, so nothing happens to it while I’m over on the other side. And I spotted that thing lurking around; lurking around as well as something that big is able to. I figured it was just waiting for you to come cruising by so it could jump out and do you over. There wasn’t time to come out and warn you; plus – hey – I didn’t want that sonuvabitch scoping me out and going after my ass.”
“Thanks, I guess.” He rubbed his hands on his trousers, smearing the black stuff. “Didn’t know you were that concerned about what happened to me.”
“I’m not. I just don’t like some ugly asshole like that lumbering around on my turf. Pisses me off.”
“I still don’t get it, though.” Axxter gazed back the way they had come. “That thing shouldn’t have been here. Not this quick; it was reported as having crossed over to this side just a day or so ago. Those things don’t travel that fast.”
A shrug. “Maybe they were wrong. About when it crossed over.”
He shook his head. “That can’t be – I got the info straight from Ask & Receive. Paid top dollar for it, hundred percent reliability. They can’t be wrong about stuff like that. It’s their business to know.”
“So? Maybe they lied to you.”
“Lied?” He stared at her. “You mean, didn’t tell me the truth?”
“Yeah, that’s the general idea; that’s what the word means.”
It meant more than that. Axxter rocked back on his heels where he crouched. They lied? – meaning they hadn’t just not told him the truth; the info agency had cooked up something, a statement about the megassassin’s location, a lie, and told him that instead.
“If they did that -” He mused aloud, the conjecture and its ramifications too big to hold inside. “If they’re capable of doing that… that would mean… everything.”
Felony regarded him with distaste. “What’re you getting into such a sweat for? So they fed you a line – what’s the big deal?”
“Don’t you see?” He leaned forward onto his hands. “It would mean that Ask & Receive couldn’t be trusted.” It astonished him as much as the first time he’d seen the sun setting beyond the clouds. “They’re an impartial source of information; that’s their whole reason for existence. You have to be able to trust what they tell you.”
“Impartial, huh?” She sneered. “They weren’t so impartial in this case, were they? What they told you led you right into that thing’s ugly face.”
Once you accepted this one possibility, you had to follow it through. The lie Ask & Receive had told him had worked only for the benefit of the Havoc Mass; it had handed him right over to the agent of their implacable vengeance. The megassassin hadn’t had to waste any time snooping around for him. He’d walked blithely into its clutches, looking over his shoulder for no more than Sai and the other Dead Centers. All of which, the lie and his reliance on it, his faith in the info agency, would mean that Ask & Receive had somehow been contaminated by the Havoc Mass. If the info agency wasn’t impartial, it wasn’t on his side, either; it was on their side. The people who wanted to kill him.
“Then I’m screwed.” He looked up at Felony and announced the result of the equation. “I’m fucked all the way. If I can’t trust them, then I’ve got no source of information that I can rely on. I never did; nobody ever has. For all I know, Ask & Receive’s been feeding shit to people for years. Handing poor suckers like me right over to the Mass. Only nobody’s ever found out, because the only way you could find out – getting the info from Ask & Receive – is screwed up the same way.”
She seemed unconcerned. “So? That’s what you get for believing everything they told you in the first place. You should’ve been going and finding things out for yourself, about what was true and what wasn’t.”
“About the whole world? Everything inside or outside the building? You can’t do that; nobody can. There’s just too much stuff.”
“Maybe. But you could’ve checked out the parts that concerned you a little better.”
A bleak, formless hole was growing in his gut. “I trusted them…”
Felony shook her head, pityingly. “So you die – trusting ’em. That’s the way it goes.”
It was the way it went for everybody, though; Axxter didn’t know whether to regard that as some sort of comfort, or as an even more chilling consideration. If everybody in or on Cylinder was relying on Ask & Receive’s tainted information – and that information was tainted to the Havoc Mass’s advantage – then that meant the Mass ruled Cylinder without anybody else even being aware of it. Or was about to rule the building; perhaps the corruption of the information agency was a fairly recent event, and the Mass was still setting up all its pieces on one great chessboard, encircling its old doddering rival, the Grievous Amalgam. No matter; however far along the process was, the Havoc Mass was the most powerful force on Cylinder. They had a direct pipeline, via Ask & Receive, into everyone’s brain. The part that dealt with facts and real things. The Mass had managed to usurp reality.
“Hey, cheer up.” Felony smiled at him “At least you’re better off than you were a little while ago. Now you know how you were getting screwed around with.”
“Yeah, great.” Axxter stared glumly at the tiny space’s wall. “Fat lot of good that does me. I won’t die ignorant, I suppose.” Of the big picture; there were still a lot of the small details that kept niggling at the far corners of his brain. Like why the megassassin had had a different death ikon graffed on it, instead of the one he had worked up for General Cripplemaker’s commission. Even if they had all taken out this great blood oath on his head – and the vigor with which they were pursuing it, the lengths to which the Mass was going in order to kill him, was also somewhat puzzling – it still didn’t seem likely that they would miss the chance to rub his face in it. Make his own work be the last thing he saw before he had his arms and legs plucked off, one by one. That went against everything he thought he knew about warrior psychology: they loved cheap, effective irony like that.
“So get off your dead butt and do something about it.”
“Yeah?” The puzzle of the ikon faded against more pract
ical concerns. “Like what? I’m stuck out here a million or so miles from where I need to get to – and from where the information I’d need to get there is kept. I can’t just go calling up for the info I need; not anymore.”
“No big deal. I can get you what you need.”
Axxter tilted his head, studying her. “What do you mean? Are you saying you can go on-line and crack open Ask & Receive’s restricted-access, high-security archives, and just haul out whatever info you want?”
She looked back at him, wide-eyed. “Of course not – why do you think they call those archives high security? It’s because people can’t get into them. They wouldn’t be high security otherwise, would they?”
“Oh.” Disappointed. “I thought you circuit riders and hackers and all were supposed to be able to do that kind of stuff.”
Felony sighed and shook her head. “What a load of shit you’ve got between your ears. Of course we can’t do that. Some little assholes, like that D:Fex crowd, they like to talk as if they can. But it’s all just talk. They can only screw around on open lines, unshielded ones, or networks that nobody else is using or that nobody cares enough about to boot them off of. All the valuable stuff – like the Ask & Receive archives – that’s all locked away tight. Nobody can get in there without permission, bullshitting hackers to the contrary.”
“Then what’re you talking about? About me being able to get info I could use?”
“Simmer down, will ya? I’m talking about going down to the dumps and picking up some stuff. You see, these little wiseacre hackers can’t really get in anyplace where they’re not wanted, but they can still make nuisances out of themselves – static on the line, prank calls, shit like that. So to keep them all romping around somewhere out of everybody’s hair, for years now Ask & Receive has been dumping outtake footage of any real good violent event that they’ve gotten tape of, all into an open-access file. What they sell as entertainment is the edited-down, hyped-up, and glamorous version that really snaps along, keeps people’s attention. But the circuit riders can go rummaging through the dumped footage and come up with all the little nuggets they want, incorporate them into their little on-line war games. They love playing war.”
