Farewell Horizontal

All black, darkness inside darkness, a raw machine stench of oil and heated metal, and at the same time, the human smells of sweat and shit. From Axxter’s angle sprawled on the floor, the thing’s bulk blotted out everything else, as though its massive shoulders rubbed against the limits of the tunnel’s ceiling.

It looked down at him, with the little red dots that had been its eyes, and smiled as its chest opened to reveal the sharp and the blunt things moving into readiness. At the center was the death ikon, the image spiraling into view.

At least it’s not mine. Somebody else’s work, a mandala of skull-headed black maggots, grinning with needle teeth as they writhed around a thorned heart. It would’ve been too much to be killed by something with his work on it.

Then again – his brain had dropped into an odd lucidity, tranquil and slow – it might’ve been nice. To have his own stuff be the last thing he ever saw.

He looked up into the megassassin’s grin. The whirling devices at the end of its arms converged toward him.

Then the explosion hit, and all he saw was flame and smoke.

“What the fuck -” The floor of the tunnel had rocked hard enough to knock the megassassin off its feet. Axxter found himself slung against the wall, a curved section split open beside him.

A hand came through the smoke and grabbed his arm. “Come on -” A voice he’d heard before. “This way -”

He let himself be pulled through the jagged opening. Felony’s grip tugged him into a staggering run. Behind him, he heard the grinding howl of the megassassin echoing through the building.

THIRTEEN

“I think we’ll be safe here. For a while.”

She had led him through tunnels smaller and smaller, conduits branching off the main course. A world behind the smooth walls; ending finally in a tiny cubical space lined with pipes and a maze of wires. They both had to crouch under the space’s low ceiling.

The scramble on his hands and knees left Axxter panting. Head lowered, he saw his hands covered with oil and cindery ash. His jacket smelled singed. “What – what was all that? That explosion?” Maybe everything around him could go up in flame and smoke the same way.

Felony leaned back against the wall, arms wrapped around her knees. She shrugged. “No big deal. There’s some heavy-duty power lines running in spots, and the insulation has gotten old and unstable. All you gotta do is short ’em together, and you get a pretty messy bang – lots of smoke and stuff. I just did it to throw that big hulk on its can and make a hole big enough to grab you.”

He grunted his thanks. The slap of the explosion was still echoing inside his head. Alive – that amazed him. He’d never heard of anybody being shown a megassassin’s death ikon – not under the circumstances, at least, of its being out to get you – and being around later to talk about it.

“I thought… you’d taken off. To go take care of your business.”

Felony pushed a strand of hair away from her eyes. “Yeah, well, I was just on my way; I got some safe spots around here where I usually stash this body – you know, so nothing happens to it while I’m over on the other side. And I spotted that thing lurking around; lurking around as well as something that big is able to. I figured it was just waiting for you to come cruising by so it could jump out and do you over. There wasn’t time to come out and warn you; plus – hey – I didn’t want that sonuvabitch scoping me out and going after my ass.”

“Thanks, I guess.” He rubbed his hands on his trousers, smearing the black stuff. “Didn’t know you were that concerned about what happened to me.”

“I’m not. I just don’t like some ugly asshole like that lumbering around on my turf. Pisses me off.”

“I still don’t get it, though.” Axxter gazed back the way they had come. “That thing shouldn’t have been here. Not this quick; it was reported as having crossed over to this side just a day or so ago. Those things don’t travel that fast.”

A shrug. “Maybe they were wrong. About when it crossed over.”

He shook his head. “That can’t be – I got the info straight from Ask & Receive. Paid top dollar for it, hundred percent reliability. They can’t be wrong about stuff like that. It’s their business to know.”

“So? Maybe they lied to you.”

“Lied?” He stared at her. “You mean, didn’t tell me the truth?”

“Yeah, that’s the general idea; that’s what the word means.”

It meant more than that. Axxter rocked back on his heels where he crouched. They lied? – meaning they hadn’t just not told him the truth; the info agency had cooked up something, a statement about the megassassin’s location, a lie, and told him that instead.

“If they did that -” He mused aloud, the conjecture and its ramifications too big to hold inside. “If they’re capable of doing that… that would mean… everything.”

Felony regarded him with distaste. “What’re you getting into such a sweat for? So they fed you a line – what’s the big deal?”

“Don’t you see?” He leaned forward onto his hands. “It would mean that Ask & Receive couldn’t be trusted.” It astonished him as much as the first time he’d seen the sun setting beyond the clouds. “They’re an impartial source of information; that’s their whole reason for existence. You have to be able to trust what they tell you.”

“Impartial, huh?” She sneered. “They weren’t so impartial in this case, were they? What they told you led you right into that thing’s ugly face.”

Once you accepted this one possibility, you had to follow it through. The lie Ask & Receive had told him had worked only for the benefit of the Havoc Mass; it had handed him right over to the agent of their implacable vengeance. The megassassin hadn’t had to waste any time snooping around for him. He’d walked blithely into its clutches, looking over his shoulder for no more than Sai and the other Dead Centers. All of which, the lie and his reliance on it, his faith in the info agency, would mean that Ask & Receive had somehow been contaminated by the Havoc Mass. If the info agency wasn’t impartial, it wasn’t on his side, either; it was on their side. The people who wanted to kill him.

“Then I’m screwed.” He looked up at Felony and announced the result of the equation. “I’m fucked all the way. If I can’t trust them, then I’ve got no source of information that I can rely on. I never did; nobody ever has. For all I know, Ask & Receive’s been feeding shit to people for years. Handing poor suckers like me right over to the Mass. Only nobody’s ever found out, because the only way you could find out – getting the info from Ask & Receive – is screwed up the same way.”

She seemed unconcerned. “So? That’s what you get for believing everything they told you in the first place. You should’ve been going and finding things out for yourself, about what was true and what wasn’t.”

“About the whole world? Everything inside or outside the building? You can’t do that; nobody can. There’s just too much stuff.”

“Maybe. But you could’ve checked out the parts that concerned you a little better.”

A bleak, formless hole was growing in his gut. “I trusted them…”

Felony shook her head, pityingly. “So you die – trusting ’em. That’s the way it goes.”

It was the way it went for everybody, though; Axxter didn’t know whether to regard that as some sort of comfort, or as an even more chilling consideration. If everybody in or on Cylinder was relying on Ask & Receive’s tainted information – and that information was tainted to the Havoc Mass’s advantage – then that meant the Mass ruled Cylinder without anybody else even being aware of it. Or was about to rule the building; perhaps the corruption of the information agency was a fairly recent event, and the Mass was still setting up all its pieces on one great chessboard, encircling its old doddering rival, the Grievous Amalgam. No matter; however far along the process was, the Havoc Mass was the most powerful force on Cylinder. They had a direct pipeline, via Ask & Receive, into everyone’s brain. The part that dealt with facts and real things. The Mass had managed to usurp