K Jeter: Farewell Horizontal

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 -