by K. W. Jeter
Axxter watched the cone of light diminish, and then he was alone in the dark.
† † †
“You sure that thing’s not around?”
“Stop worrying.” Sai shielded his eyes with his hand, looking across the sky. “You got a margin. The megassassin’s several levels inside the wall – even if he got a fix on you right now, it’d still take him awhile to work his way out here.”
Axxter bit his lip. “This sure seems to be taking a long time.”
“Like I said, don’t worry; she’ll show up. She’s got a crush on you.”
A dot appeared in the sky, growing larger until it had arms, legs, the sphere of the flight membrane behind. Then at last her smile radiating toward him.
“Hi. Hello.” Lahft dangled in air a few feet from where Axxter was latched onto the wall. She turned, looking over her shoulder at him and displaying the image on the grafted biofoil. “Good to see you.” She laughed, like bells falling.
Axxter looked at the picture of his own face that he’d transmitted. The sunlight glared off the shining curve of metal, obscuring the black dots ordered into eyes, nose, and chin. It was the first self-portrait he’d ever done; he resisted the temptation to work it over now, to rotate it to a three-quarter profile, so it wouldn’t look so full-on stupid. Like I’m waiting to get killed. This is accuracy.
“Come on.” Sai nudged him in the ribs. “Tell her what you need her to do. You don’t have that much time.”
He couldn’t tell if he was getting through to her; she just bobbed and listened, eyes wide.
“You got it?”
She tilted her head, her gaze drifting past him Axxter prayed that there was at least one gear meshing with another behind her brow. “Here… now.” She nodded, then pointed off into the sky. “There. After now.”
“Yeah, that’s right. Right out from the Linear Fair; I mean, the big line. Go out as far as you can. And stay there. You got it?”
She smiled at him.
“Jesus flipping Christ.” He turned toward Sai. “This is hopeless. This isn’t going to work.”
“How do you know?” Sai returned the angel’s smile. “She’s smarter than you think. She’s just on a different wavelength.”
Lahft reached out and touched Axxter on the shoulder. “When is now? Is now now?”
That took a moment to decipher. “Yeah – I want you to go there now.”
“Now good-bye.” She drifted away, still smiling Axxter watched her go, his heart leaden.
“You might as well start transmitting – that way, it’ll get bounced off as soon as she’s in position.”
Axxter nodded. He called up the file he’d prepared from his working archive and sent it out. On the display he flicked on REPEAT UNTIL INTERRUPT. Beyond the glowing words, the angel’s form dwindled slowly against the sky. “How long we gonna stay out here?”
Sai settled back against the wall. “As long as we can.”
† † †
The sun was setting, turning the cloud barrier red. Axxter watched the deepening color. The hours of inaction, latched to the wall while the transmission had gone beaming out, over and over, had seeped exhaustion into his muscles.
Sai’s hand on his shoulder jostled him out of a semi-doze. “You hear that?”
“Hear what?” Then he did: a low rumble vibrating through the building’s metal and into his flesh.
“You stay here. And keep transmitting.” Sai clambered toward the lip of the entry site. He was back in less than a minute. “Okay, show time’s over. Time to move.”
“It’s here? It’s found us?”
“It’s on its way. Come on, let’s go.”
He could smell it again, the choking odor of oil and hot metal, as they slipped inside the entry site. The megassassin was there, somewhere in the darkness inside the building. And coming closer, a straight line toward him; he had to resist the impulse to scramble back out onto the building’s surface.
Sai peeled back a panel from the tunnel wall, just wide enough to squeeze behind. He gestured for silence with a finger to his lips, then pushed Axxter through the opening. He turned and peered over Sai’s shoulder, out to the empty tunnel.
Empty for only a second; then a black shape, stooping under the tunnel’s ceiling, filled the space. It stopped, the pistons of its arms contracting, the shining hands opening and closing, fists clenching.
The massive head turned, and two red lights, small dots of blood, bored into Axxter’s gaze.
“Go!” Sai was shouting, pushing him ahead. Axxter stumbled, then got back onto his feet. “Move it!” Behind him, he heard the wall of the tunnel being ripped open.
When he reached the high-ceilinged space, he pitched forward onto his hands and knees. For a moment, all he could do was hang his head and pant for air. Past the throbbing of his own pulse, he heard Sai’s own laboring breath close at his ear as the other pulled him onto his feet.
“You gotta hit it, man. Get in the train and go.”
“How – how’s it work?” His mouth had dried; he couldn’t swallow.
Sai pushed him toward the machine. “It’s programmed – it’s only got one speed, and it’s only got one way it can go. Just punch the green button, and you’re outta – Where you going?”
He walked around the front of the train to the other side. In the space’s dim light, he found the motorcycle he’d spotted before.
“Jesus Christ – you don’t have time to screw around with that now -”
“I want it.” Axxter pulled the motorcycle off its center-stand and rolled it toward the train. “I’ve got to get something out of all this.” It was too heavy to push up the steps into the front cabin; he squeezed past the front wheel and climbed up. “Come on, give me a hand with this thing.”
“You’re out of your goddamn mind -” Despite his protests, Sai got behind the motorcycle and pushed. The two of them managed to wrestle it up into the small space behind the train’s control panel.
Panting with the effort, Sai stood outside the cabin, both hands gripping the sides of the door. “You happy now? Like I said, all you gotta do is -”
Then he was gone. A hand of dark metal, wide as his ribcage, knocked him aside, sending him sprawling across the floor. The megassassin’s bulk filled the doorway.
“Shit -” Axxter scrambled backward. The motorcycle toppled over and pinned him against the cabin’s wall. As the megassassin grinned and reached for him, Axxter’s hand fumbled about on the control panel. His fingers found something round that yielded to his pressing it.
A high-pitched whine vibrated the train. Beneath him, he could feel it gliding into motion as the megassassin snarled and lifted the motorcycle away from Axxter. The machine’s tank rose off his chest, then fell back as the train picked up speed, leaving the megassassin behind. A roar of frustration sounded, the megassassin’s metal fingers scrabbling at the side of the train.
The train’s speed increased, the whine of its engine singing in Axxter’s ears. The motorcycle toppled over, its wheels skidding on the cabin’s floor. Its weight slammed the back of his head against the wall. For a few seconds more, as the cabin tilted and went dark, he heard the megassassin screaming its rage in the distance.
† † †
A little red light flashing. He saw that out of the corner of his eye before he saw anything else, or even knew that he could see. The red pulse nibbled at the gray fog swimming around him
Axxter raised his head, feeling another pulse inside his skull. The rhythmic pain peeled back the fog in layers, until the front cabin of the train was revealed. The flashing red light was above him, up on the control panel. He pushed at the toppled motorcycle pinning him to the angle of the floor and the wall behind his shoulders; slowly, he managed to pull himself free of the machine’s weight.
He had to lean on the control panel with both hands to keep from falling over. The red light was a small rectangle with words printed in the center. END OF LINE. It went on flashing as h
e straightened up and stumbled to the door.
The side of the train was scarred, part of the metal sheathing torn loose where the megassassin had clawed it. Axxter looked around the space. It seemed tattered by neglect, with coils of wire and other debris scattered about. A smell of burnt things drifted in the air.
After some searching, he found what he was looking for, marked by the same concentric yellow rings. He wriggled his finger inside the plug-in jack to make contact.
He called up the Havoc Mass camp; when he ID’ed himself, he was put right through to General Cripplemaker.
“Axxter – good to hear from you!” The general’s voice in his ear sounded genuinely pleased.
“Did you get my message?” He leaned against the wall by the jack for support.
“Loud and clear! Clever of you – we didn’t know what the hell was going on at first. But when we saw what you were transmitting, with those tape excerpts you dug up and all – well, I can assure you that it certainly changed some minds around here. I owe you a personal apology, my boy.”
“Yeah, yeah, that’s great… wonderful… What I really want to know is whether I can come on through. To the outside. I mean, I made it this far, but I need to know whether it’s safe for me out there.”
Cripplemaker laughed. “You don’t have to worry about that anymore – what with the info you relayed to us, you’ve got yourself quite a hero’s status with us. We’ve got a welcoming reception all worked up for you.”
Axxter breathed out his relief, leaning his head against the wall. “Well, I might not be in shape for your kind of party right now; you might have to put it on hold for a little while. But I guess I’ll see you in a little while, then.”
He disconnected and pushed himself away from the jack. His legs were still weak beneath him as he walked back toward the train. Several meters ahead of the point where the bullet nose had come to rest, he found the torn metal of the barrier between the building’s interior and the horizontal sector beyond. He climbed up onto a mounded stack of rubble and looked. For a moment it was like a replay out of his own archive: the burnt-out sector, ashes and bones. Seen from a new angle, a long shot of destruction, the sharp edges rounded with the passing of time, decay setting into whatever soft bits had been left by the raiders. And in the distance, a patch of blue sky.
Something held him back. All he had to do was to climb on over and walk toward the sky, and he’d be there, on the morningside again. It was the smell, the odor of dead things, still hanging in the sector’s air; it would be there, he knew, long after it could no longer be sensed. Anyone would be able to feel it, as though it had seeped right into the metal of the walls.
Movement, out toward the exit; Axxter saw it. Hard to miss, something big…
He fell back from the barrier. The shock of seeing a megassassin out by the sector’s farthest limit had hit him like a blow to the chest.
Jesus Christ – what’s that thing doing here? It couldn’t be the one that had been on his tail, over on the eveningside; he’d left that one far behind. And even if it had somehow gotten here – if it had hung on all the way to the side of the train – it wouldn’t have strolled past the barrier to hang around in the burnt-out sector; it would’ve just stomped around to the front cabin once the train had stopped, reached in and dragged him out, then unscrewed his head like the lid from a jar.
Axxter cautiously raised his head over the bent ridge. The thing was still there. Facing him this time, its mass blotting out most of the sunlight from the opening just behind it. The two red dots of its eyes looked straight into his; it had spotted him. It didn’t move; Axxter was frozen to the spot, expecting the megassassin to come rushing toward him, its cruel arms flashing the sparks of bared steel.
A smile. If cats could smile when they had a mouse trapped in an angle of floor and wall…
The megassassin’s chest opened up, the metal panels folding slowly to either side. The death ikon blossomed over its oil-fed heart, the image spiraling out toward its throat and groin.
He saw it. His work. The one he’d done, General Cripplemaker’s commission. Black within black, darkness so deep you could fall into it forever. The work of his own hand turned in its mesmerizing glory.
It’s mine. He couldn’t turn his eyes away from the image, though his thoughts had gone skittering around inside his head. If it was his work, then the ones he’d done the work for – It’s theirs. It’s the Havoc Mass – it’s their megassassin. They had sent it here to wait for him. For him to just come bumbling out, singing and thinking all his worries were over; this was the welcome Cripplemaker had said they’d prepared for him
It didn’t make sense. Cripplemaker had said they’d gotten his message – they should’ve called off their megassassin, put it back in whatever brooding deep storage it usually resided. Instead of leaving it here, waiting for him to show up. And then when it’d opened up its chest, displayed its ikon – that meant it still had its assignment to do, the only one it was designed for. Soon as it was no longer amused at the sight of him frozen in place, with nowhere to hide, it would come rumbling down through the burnt-out sector, past the barrier… and do its little job.
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 -
