K Jeter - Farewell Horizontal

Even though the sentry at the tent’s entrance recognized him, he still couldn’t get in without the little rectangle – gilt lettering on black: Nunc est bibendum, nunc pede libero mura pulsanda – in his hand. So another whole trip outside the camp, keeping his head low to avoid fists and missiles, weaseling between sweating backs and legs. He was just now getting his wind back, his good jacket torn, a suspicious-looking beige stain clotting on his boots.

Cripplemaker wrapped an arm around his shoulders and pulled him toward the center of the tent. “But you made it! Great!” Axxter flinched against the general’s roar.

There was a seat waiting for him near the central dais. Junior ranks and a few hereditary dignitaries on either side of him, the closest on the left facedown in a pool of wine dribbling off the edge of the table, one hand still locked on the handle of the jug. “You’re who?” demanded the bleary face on his right.

In the corner of the tent, the horns had climbed back onto the bandstand and were duking it out with the percussion. “Just a hired hand,” said Axxter, pacific smile, as he lifted his elbow from the wine spill. “Little graffex work here and there.”

“Yeah, yeah; great.” The other looked away, down the length of the table, and snagged another pitcher. He drank and stared heavy-lidded in front of himself, ignoring everyone else.

Axxter craned his neck, looking up toward the dais. Pretty sure he’d missed out on the food; the waiters were clearing away greasy plates with gnawed bones on them. He had no appetite, anyway: his stomach was bouncing up and down in expectation.

He could see Cripplemaker in the center of the dignitaries’ table, reseated and talking – laughing, shoulder-clapping – with the men on either side of him. They weren’t in Havoc Mass formal dress; some high mucketymucks from the major allied tribes, Axxter figured. The big guns – old, grizzled bastards with that same narrow, gunslit gaze the general had, the long stare of command and slaughter. When they laughed, it was like steel-jawed traps creaking apart to show the hair-trigger mechanisms within. Cripplemaker leaned back in his chair, drawing on a torpedo-size cigar; his gaze intercepted Axxter’s. The general’s thumbs-up sign showed through an exhaled barrage of smoke.

The alarm clock Axxter had set in the terminal trilled inside his ear, a little red dial ticking at the corner of his vision. Three minutes to showtime, and counting. The band left off their internecine combat and segued into a major-key ostinato , growing less ragged with each da capo . Waiters with cattle prods began clearing the floor in front of the dais.

A corridor formed through the crowd, bodies held back by the Havoc Mass sentries linking arms, digging into the platform surface with their heels. Behind them, the party mob, compressed into a smaller space, frothed and howled, worked up by the band modulating through minor seconds. Axxter could see one of them chewing a sentry’s ear into red gristle; an elbow to his throat sent him tumbling back under the feet of his comrades.

The horns held and vamped a half-step short of resolving the octave; the drums kicked into a double-time accelerando . The tentlights dropped, except for a single spot lancing through the dark, picking out a figure at the far end of the tunnels of faces.

They oiled him good – Axxter barely recognized the old warrior as he strode toward the center of the tent. The medestheticians, the Mass’s own or some freelancers brought in for the occasion, had pumped the old boy full of something that had straightened his spine and put a fierce glitter in his deep-set eyes. Beard washed and combed, then braided and tied with black ribbons, some of them long enough to flutter over his shoulders as he walked, planting a silver-headed staff tall as himself with each step, a contact mike at its tip to snap a bullet report over the mounting din. An embroidered cape hung to the tops of his glistening boots, concealing the armor beneath.

The band’s chord resolved as the old warrior hit the middle of the space cleared for him. He stopped and threw back his head, arm locked to thrust forward the head of the staff. He surveyed the crowd, his yellow teeth showing as he relished the collective gaze fastened on him

The horns and drums cut; miraculously, there was silence. Axxter felt his head vibrating from the battering noise, now ended. The crowd had shut up, right on cue. They were all straining to get a better view, raising themselves on tiptoe behind the armlocked fence holding them back.

00:00:30 flashed the clock at the corner of Axxter’s eye; 00:00:29, 00:00:28 … His heart moved up to sync with the red light.

He looked up to the dais just as General Cripplemaker raised his hand and let it fall like a hatchet. A signal to the old warrior: Axxter swung his gaze around and saw that the bearded-and-beribboned figure had already shrugged the cloak from his shoulders, the bright cloth lying in a puddle around his boots. The air inside the tent thinned as the crowd sucked in its breath.

The warrior’s armor, the great curves of the breastplate, the wide band of the stomacher, the domes of shoulder pads and knee protectors, the brassards and jambeaus – all were blank. Shining foil, mirroring the goggling faces on all sides. An empty canvas, grafted onto the calloused flesh beneath, warmed with the blood pulsing under the skin. Waiting to come to life.

00:00:01 and – 00:00:00 . The red clock exploded at the corner of Axxter’s eye.

For a second, he had the feeling that the biofoil would just stay blank. Nothing would happen. They screwed it up . The voice inside him rose, gibbering in panic. Those Small Moon assholes, they screwed it up; they didn’t send out the animation signal -

A black dot formed in the center of the old warrior’s breastplate, metastasized into a Fibonacci swirl. The crowd went aaahhh . Axxter slumped back down in his chair, his spine suddenly liquid with relief.

The dots swarmed, merged; the armor went obsidian, a black mirror. Then gray mist, banks of fog rolling back to reveal a skull-strewn battlefield. Above the landscape, the old warrior looked down at himself in childish wonderment.

Figures on the battlefield, backlight stretching their shadows out before them. A murmur went up from the crowd as they pointed out to each other old dead heroes, grizzled veterans bearing their squadron colors, the current chiefs of staff looking sage and decisive as they gazed over the crushed limbs of their adversaries and toward a distant horizon full of future glories. Behind them all stood the mythic figures of the Tin Can Brothers, the founders of the tribe, radiant in the manner of immortals.

The crowd was cheering, scrabbling against the backs of the sentries to get a better look. The old warrior grinned, raising his hands wide to gather in the appreciative noise.

Axxter looked around to the dais. The top brass, the ambassadors from the allied tribes, all were watching the graffex show unfold. He tried to catch Cripplemaker’s eye, but the general’s gaze was also locked onto the figure in the floor’s open space.

Then Cripplemaker’s expression changed. The cigar dropped from his open mouth, scattering spark and ash over the table. His face drained to gray, then blossomed with red, a blue vein jumping at his temple. On either side of him, the faces registered shock; at the far end of the dignitaries’ table, one burly emissary burst into guffawing laughter.

The crowd’s applause died, trickling into silence.

What the – Axxter rose up in his chair, looking around the tent. All eyes were fastened onto the old warrior. Something – He turned and looked in front of him.