He stowed the camera away and gunned the Norton’s engine. Turned the machine around in a tight circle, the wheels’ pithons snapping from hold to hold, and headed upwall. Making the effort not to look anywhere but toward his destination.
SIX
“What’s with the fuckin’ training wheels?”
“Wheels?” Axxter looked into the other’s grizzled face, as if some addendum were hidden in the network of scars.
“These suckers.” The Havoc Mass warrior reached down and twanged one of the pithon lines running from Axxter’s belt. It sounded a high rubber-band note, resonating in the wall where the pithon had taken grip, and in Axxter’s clenched teeth.
“Oh… those. Uh, well -” He shrugged and smiled, instantly regretting it. “You know… old habits die hard.”
The warrior grunted and shook his head, his grease-shiny braids dangling parallel to his shoulders. With no more anchor than what his boot-pithons gave him, he strode perpendicular across the wall toward the encampment’s banners and tents. Axxter lifted his bag from the sidecar’s bullet nose and hurried after him, slowed by the spidering pithons.
It had taken two solid days of traveling – including an over-nighter, drifting in and out of half-sleep while strapped into the Norton’s seat, wheels locked onto a vertical transit cable – to reach the camp. The directions Brevis had given him hadn’t brought him to the main Havoc Mass headquarters; that would’ve been even more days travel upwall. And more of a city than an encampment, a sprawling military base and political center within sight of the hated Grievous Amalgam’s patrolled borders. He’d passed by the Havoc Mass HDQS once, when he’d first set out as a freelancer, and had received a jocular warning shot, a tracer bullet over the Norton’s front wheel. The thug’s raucous laughter had seemed to follow him for kilometers down the wall.
This camp smaller, but still impressive enough. A division of the Mass, two thousand or so warriors – Axxter had developed a quick eye for estimating a tribe’s numbers, both military and financial – with the necessary support staff, contractors, camp followers, and other hangers-on all swelling the total to ten thousand. The gaudy tents, crested with fluttering pennants, had been set up in random profusion, creating a chaos of intertwining pathways, dangling catwalks, rope ladders, and nets. The division had been stationed in this one spot long enough for a second and third layer of tents and platforms to have grown out from the first, like overlapping limpets protruding from the building’s wall.
A wave of noise battered at Axxter as he followed his warrior guide into the encampment. A trophy ring, the circle of stakes that marked the camp’s original boundaries, sagged under the weight of vanquished enemies’ armor; some of the breastplates and helmets, obviously the most recently captured, still shimmered with the embedded graffex. The grislier trophies twisted and flapped in the wind, no effort having been made to tan or otherwise preserve the peeled skins. Swarming flies gave a pseudo-life to the rotting tissue; underneath them, the implanted biofoil was either dead gray or pulsing, like the corresponding armor, with the graffex remnants. Axxter supposed his former clients, the luckless Gnash Squad Boys, were somewhere in the display. Or at least part of them were; a hollow face, bloody scalp attached, gave him a lipless smile as he passed. He shuddered and hurried to catch up with his guide.
The noise came from the camp’s machine shops and the voices trying to shout over clatter of metal against metal. Crouching figures in welders’ masks sent sparks dazzling down the building’s blackened side, past the charred remains of tents that had been set up too close to the furious torches. Blades honed, dented shields pounded into rough circles with sledgehammer blows; underneath layers of grease and scar tissue the broad faces looked over at Axxter, then went back to the tasks beneath their hands and tools.
“Hey -” The close lanes of the camp had slowed the Havoc Mass warrior enough for Axxter to pull next to him. He shouted at the calloused ear, “Where exactly are we going?”
The warrior had been waiting for him in the clear space at the camp’s downwall perimeter, squatting on his haunches, squinty eyes scanning for anything that might come up the transit cables. With the ashes of a fire built on a small shelf stuck to the wall, and various gnawed bones and garbage remnants caught in the cables’ extrusions and loops below him, it was obvious that he had been there some time, stationed by his superior officers to await the arrival of the summoned graffex. The eyes looked to Axxter like razor slits cut into creased leather.
An old vet, the braids gray ropes; swirls of a tattooed tiger-mask –
A brace of camp followers – younger than Guyer, and with more avarice in their glittering eyes – lazily regarded him from their perch upon a cable loop. Their gaze dismissed him as unprofitable; they went back to their monotone chatter.
“CO’s tent.” The old warrior’s thumb pointed into the heart of the encampment. “The general wants to see ya.”
“General -”
“Them’s my orders.” The warrior swung himself apelike through a tangle of ropes, then strode on without a backward glance.
Axxter worked his way through the ropes, then caught up with him again. “General who?”
A grunt, amazement at civilian stupidity. “Cripplemaker.”
He didn’t recognize the name. The exertions of their progress into the camp had sapped the oxygen from his brain; he couldn’t decide whether the unfamiliar name was a good or bad sign. A number of Havoc Mass commanders figured prominently in the tribe’s PR releases, complete with gruesome accounts of their military prowess. This one could be some nonentity, an also-ran in the blood-and-gore sweepstakes, not worth making publicity out of. Or – what he hoped wasn’t the case – somebody so goddamn horrible, flat-out bloodthirsty, that the Havoc Mass didn’t
They arrived at the camp’s center. A tent larger than all those surrounding it, the center pole extending straight out from the building’s wall, the ribbon pennant at its tip twisting snakelike above the other multicolored roofs. Two guards, looking like younger brothers of Axxter’s guide, lounged at the curtained entrance, one asleep in a rope sling, the other picking at his black nails with the point of an ornamental knife. No ancient tattoos – Axxter noted only the minute segments of biofoil set into the warriors’ cheekbones and brows, quiescent now, awaiting the sparking signal to bring the images into view. A nodded greeting for the old warrior, a bored visual scan of the stranger; the rough-skinned hand pulled the curtain aside for them.
A moment for his eyes to adjust. Gazing around the tent’s interior, Axxter realized he’d expected more. More than empty space divided by ropes and nets. The patterns and hues of suspended carpets were dimmed with age; when he put his hand against one for balance a cloud of dust bloomed into his face. From the tent’s central pole hung a large-scale map of Cylinder’s surface, or at least the known morningside portion of it.
The old warrior left Axxter standing on a swaying catwalk. From some zone closer to the wall, a dim light filtered across the map. He could hear the muted tones of the old guy’s voice mixed with a couple of others, but too distant to make out what they were saying.
Axxter looked up at the map beside him. Blank sections marked MURA INCOGNITA; from little spots close to the top of the building, growing larger farther down, finally merging into the great unknown below the cloud barrier. Someone had drawn little childish stick figures, with horns and pitchforks, dancing around at the map’s bottom margin. The left and right sides were bounded by the two Linear Fairs, depicted as vertical ribbons of dollar signs. Obscenities, scrawled in a big looping hand across the top and over the faded red toplevel zone. The Grievous Amalgam’s alliances, in red stripes, clustered underneath. Below that, solid blue for the Havoc Mass, stripes for their allies, and a motley selection of other colors for the various unaligned small-fry tribes moiling about in the
