Farewell Horizontal

up short… if he could just get there…

That’d be perfect, if the cable the Norton was locked on led straight into something like that. Some bunch with a real gripe against the Havoc Mass, where they’d get a big laugh out of what had happened at the banquet, shelter him until he’d figured out what to do, where to go next. The wind-forced tears ran in razor-straight lines to his jaw as he gritted his teeth and wished.

Can’t fucking remember. He knew it would’ve been no good even if he had been able to; he’d been there in the Mass camp long enough that everything could have changed in this sector of the wall, tribes moved out, new ones taking their place. He’d kept his head down, working, paying no attention to the usual flow of reports and rumors that freelancers based their itineraries on. Anything left in his head from before then would be old news, useless.

He’d have to call up Ask & Receive, pay the info agency for a current-time map, the extra bite for a high- reliability depth. Even with a band of murderers riding hard behind him for his blood, the thought of shelling out that kind of request fee made him hesitate. If there was any other way -

Shit. So much for that major segment of his bank account. It’d gotten so nice and fat when General Cripplemaker had paid him his advance… Back to reality.

He looked off to the right and saw the Small Moon hanging in the sky, bright silver and waiting. Those fuckers. Thanks a lot. But at least it was there for him to bounce his call up to Ask & Receive on the toplevel. If it hadn’t been there, if it had been hidden around on the Cylinder’s other side, he’d have been screwed. No way could he have stopped the Norton, climbed off, and gone looking for a contact point to route his call through the Wire Syndicate network; not with major ugly ass-kicking bearing down on him from upwall.

Even as he blinked on Ask & Receive’s number from the directory, the digits supered over the clouds below, the thought nicked him, whether he could trust his call going through the Small Moon relay. They’d already screwed him over once, in league with DeathPix. But they probably think I’m already dead. That was a comfort. They’d figure I got my lights stomped out back at the banquet. The Small Moon Consortium wouldn’t be expecting him to be making priority calls from this far out from the Mass camp. He could slip in, get the info he needed, and out before they could dink with the relay. He blinked on the last digit and listened to it go bouncing off the reflecting satellite.

YOU WANT IT, WE GOT IT. The info agency’s face spelled the words across his vision.

“Give me audible.” That cost more, too, but there was no time to read dialogue.

“You want it -”

“Yeah, yeah; forget that.” Axxter leaned closer to the Norton’s gauges, hunching his shoulders to his ears, blocking out the rushing of the wind. “I need a map, a, uh, whatchacallit, a rolling trace, center of projection this caller. Got it?”

FEATURES? “Sorry; features?”

“Blank everything except operable transit cables and military tribes in map area. And on the latter, give me size of forces, estimated field strength, and political affiliations. I’m going to need at least eighty percent reliability depth on all that. Make it ninety.”

“It’s going to cost you.”

He authorized the dip into his account. “Just do it. Fast, okay?” The Ask & Receive face zipped away; he glanced at the bank balance in the corner of the field. It had already been slipping away from the call fee; suddenly it dipped, the digit at the front end disappearing completely. The sight hit him like a knife to the heart.

Come on, come on – Jesus H. Christ. Another look over his shoulder. In the distance upwall, the face of the pack’s lead man was just barely visible, at least in the high definition of his imagination. And the warrior’s smirking grin.

Then the map he’d paid for came up, straight snakes and a few scattered patches blotting out the pursuers. Axxter turned around and leaned into the map, studying it.

Worse than he’d thought. His already-knifed heart sank, rolling along his spine. The snakes were scarce in this piece of map: they represented the transit cables, and there were hardly enough to form a square, let alone a grid of any kind. The pulsing circle that was him, the Norton and the Watsonian, hung motionless in the center of his vision, a bisecting line scrolling upward; right at the top, the Havoc Mass posse – black dots along the single cable – edged a centimeter closer as he watched. The blotches, different colors – the Amalgam and its allies always got shades of red, the Mass’s tribes in blues and greens – just a couple of each. And too far away – he was rolling away from the nearest blue, in fact, upwall and leftaround, disappearing in the map’s top right corner.

He scrolled down the map, the pulsing circle and the black dots rolling out of sight at the top. Kept scrolling, seeing nothing but the vertical line of the cable down the 138 middle – until words flashed over: INSUFFICIENT DATA TO MAINTAIN RELIABILITY DEPTH. He gritted his teeth; he’d scrolled so far down the map that it was into unknown sectors of the wall. “Go to fifty percent.” The map scrolled for several more seconds, then went blank, even the cable line gone.

“Save your money. That’s a long way past the cloud barrier, man.”

Nothing. Just blank wall between here and the clouds. And nothing beyond that; everyone knew that. No bottom to Cylinder. Just nothing, the Nothing that he was accelerating toward.

And no perpendicular cable to switch off to, no way of working himself even a few degrees around the circumference of the building. To where he could find a hiding place, a tribe that’d take him in. If he tried going off cable, letting the Norton hunt out holds for the pithons, the slow grunt work of the devices – the Mass warriors would be on his ass in no time. He wouldn’t be more than a couple meters away from the cable before they showed up: easy firing range.

Goddamn – the whole world had shrunk to one line, a string with him on one end and everything that wanted to kill him on the other. For this I went vertical? He felt like both laughing and crying.

Might as well just stop the Norton, turn around and stand on the pegs, exposing his belly to the coming knives. Get it over with -

The Ask & Receive face waited for another request. “Get me Strategies.” He didn’t bother loading the map into his own files. What good was a blank page?

His vision went clear except for the bank-account figures at the lower right quadrant. The numbers flickered; that meant they were checking him out.

“Sorry.” The face again. “You don’t have the cash for that service. And we don’t work on credit.”

“Uh – wait a minute…”

“Nope.” The face was already dimming away. “You can’t afford us at all now, fella. Hasta la vista.” Gone.

Fuck ’em; there were others. He didn’t want to look down at his bank account – how far had it sunk on this call? – but let the line search for a match between his funds and any of the various strategy agencies in the directory.

The search was taking too long, whole seconds ticking away. The line must’ve gone down into the far reaches of the strategy listings, down into the smallest of the various annlanders, the ones that charged hardly anything. For good reason.

A low-rez sign came up in his vision. ASK BENNY PERU – HE’S FAST, HE’S CHEAP, AND SOMETIMES HE’S RIGHT. That faded to a still picture of a fat man sitting behind an antique wooden desk. What had been left of Axxter’s heart, clinging by adrenaline to his ribcage, fell with the rest.

“Got a problem?” No animation, just the audio laid over the still.

Nothing to lose – he was already zipping downwall, the Norton’s throttle rolled full-on, Nothing ahead and everything to avoid behind him He told the fat man’s picture all about it.

A drain of seconds – both the clouds and the warriors were closer, too close, eating up the line racing under him. He realized that the person on the other end of the call – Benny himself, he supposed – was actually thinking it all over.

The bank account numbers hiccupped, a flat fee bite taken out of them. “Well, young fella, there’s a simple solution to everything. Isn’t there?”

That sounded suspiciously like a prelude to religious counseling. Not what he needed at the moment. “Yeah?