K Jeter - Farewell Horizontal

The warrior’s glee had melted away; he gazed down at himself in bafflement. Across his breastplate, and in the smaller panels on his armored limbs, the heroes of the tribe were engaged in maniacal buggery. The stern, chiseled faces that a moment before had been looking into the future with the scalpel gaze of eagles, were now rolling their eyes and comically smacking their lips, savoring their own and each other’s shit.

The old warrior looked up, scanning across the rows of faces staring back at him. He looked as if he was about to burst into tears, just an old man now, a fool, the joke played so everyone would know.

Across the biofoil, the Tin Can Brothers’ images rolled like a hoop, their heads wedged between each other’s thighs.

Axxter felt his own head go light and vacant, the space inside the tent tilting and starting to swim around him. That’s all wrong – he wanted to stand up and shout it to the watching faces, but his legs had disconnected from his body. It’s all wrong, I didn’t do that; that’s not my stuff . He opened his mouth, but the words didn’t come out.

And at the same time, a red light blinked at the center of his vision. A priority call, INTERRUPT status plastered all over it: somebody somewhere was paying all the premiums to talk to him right now . Without even thinking, he blinked to receive.

The red light danced apart into words, no voice.

THAT’S WHAT YOU GET. And a little symbol, a servicemark, one that he could recognize right off. The skullpallete-and-brushes emblem of DeathPix.

The words stayed superimposed over the warrior and the crowd behind him for a few seconds, then faded away.

That’s what I get – he wondered about the message for a second, as if it had been delivered in some unknown language, the tongue of the Dead Centers or somewhere beyond that, the building’s eveningside maybe. Then it all became clear.

His brain wasn’t frozen still now – everything outside of him was, though: Cripplemaker and the dais full of tribal dignitaries and ambassadors, the other tables, the crowd and the fence of sentries, the old warrior, even the coprophiliac figures on the decorated armor. They were all in stopped time, or swimming through air thick as syrup, the mob climbing over the backs of the sentries a centimeter an hour, their shouts rumbling down into the infrasonic, too low to hear at all. While his brain went skittering ahead, so high and fast that it saw everything.

They knew. All along . DeathPix had; he saw that now. That he’d been horning in on their action; they’d found out – from whom? Maybe Lauren of the Small Moon order desk had scoped it out, turned him over for a bonus or maybe a little money on the side. Or someone on Cripplemaker’s staff, working off a retainer from DeathPix to keep an eye on things for them.

Then all they’d have to do is just cook up a different animating signal and lock it onto the track he’d paid for. A nice fat fee to the Consortium to grease the way, and then there’d it be. Full of nice little surprises, for him and the Havoc Mass. Something to pump their blood up, homo references being a heavy taboo among these brawny warrior types. Hitting a nerve, a lot of times – either way, it was enough to get Axxter’s head ripped off.

Dimly, through the congealed vista around him, he saw the sentries break ranks, dissolving into the mob they’d been holding back, their faces contorting with the same anger.

Shit, it could’ve been anybody, anywhere up and down the line. A corporation as big as DeathPix had its feelers everywhere, like a spider sitting at the center of its web, waiting for a twitch down the silk. He’d been a fool, exposing himself to a risk he couldn’t have even begun to calculate. Believed in luck, and how much he deserved it. That his time had come round at last. When you start thinking like that, you can convince yourself that you’re immune, you don’t have to worry.

Might not even have been turned over at all. His thoughts bounced around inside that one. Maybe it’d been a DeathPix setup from the beginning. It’d been awhile since they’d had to fuck somebody over for cutting in on them. Good management style to send a little object lesson out over the bush telegraph, remind any and all uppity freelancers of what the consequences were for client infringement. Keep ’em all on their busy little rat-runs, chasing after their two-bit hooligan accounts, and out of DeathPix’s hair. Arrange to have some fool smeared over the wall like cake frosting, word gets around.

Cripplemaker in on it? Point man for the setup? Could be, could be. A wall of faces contorted with rage moved at a glacier’s pace toward him, as he glanced round to the dais. The general was on his feet, standing on his chair in fact, his features boiling over, the blood about to spurt in twin jets from the throbbing blue snakes at his forehead. He was shouting something too, but Axxter couldn’t hear it through the bass roar filling the tent. He admired the possibility of the general’s acting ability: Cripplemaker looked genuinely outraged, jabbing a trembling finger toward him, urging on the crowd’s revenge.

All so clear now. Just how he’d been screwed over. If not in every detail, the hand behind the knife, still the glittering point of the blade sent sparks all around him. His thoughts floated above himself and the whole scene below, bobbing up against the top of the tent. He felt a laugh, a crazy bray, spreading open his jaws and battering at his teeth.

The poor fuck – the old warrior, weeping, had been bowled over by the mob’s slow tide. The angry figures nearest him were diverted, an eddy in the middle of the advancing wave, by the task of stripping the offensive armor off the old man. Foil and skin ripped, red seeping from broad patches of raw skin. Axxter felt bad about that: it wasn’t the old man’s fault. Much less so than his own. The old guy had been a pawn used to spear another pawn. He’d wind up spending a lot of time in the Mass hospital, getting new armor grafted on. Not that there would be any remedy for his senile broken heart.

The human wave hit, snapping Axxter back into real time. He toppled back in his chair as the edge of the table slammed into his stomach. The table itself rose, turning on its long axis, as the front of the mob surged against it. Axxter, knocked breathless, looked up in time to see the table come crashing down on him.

Or almost. The top edge caught against the tent fabric behind him, forming a triangular space with the platform underneath. Axxter uncurled from his knees-drawn-up egg, unlacing his fingers from the top of his head. He could hear the outraged Havoc Mass warriors foaming and scrabbling at the underside of the table, as though their black fingernails could scrape right through to him.

Jesuschristfuckingshit – the lofty, time-dilated perspective snapped away from him. On hands and knees, he listened to the shouts coming from the other side of the capsized table. The sonsabitches were going to kill him. If I’m lucky – once they got their hands on him, they had all sorts of ingenious ways to salve their wounded pride, at the expense of his flesh and nervous system. And that prickly emotion had been revved flat-out inside their breasts – being made mock of, like that , in front of the ambassadors and hangers-on from all their allied tribes – and by some little outside freelancer punk like him – they all had major payback to deal out.

The table shivered with the blows raining against it. The angle between it, the platform, and the tent wall formed a narrow tunnel; none of the crazed mob had thought yet of going around to either end, crawling in, and pulling him out. There were probably only a few more seconds before the crowd backed up enough to let the table be pulled away, exposing him.