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.
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.
For a second, he had the feeling that the biofoil would just stay blank. Nothing would happen.
A black dot formed in the center of the old warrior’s breastplate, metastasized into a Fibonacci swirl. The crowd went
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
