“- and we put it through the first guy’s neck, but that didn’t work, you see, ’cause it just ripped right through when we lifted it up, so we -” The old warrior’s gaze focused on Axxter’s hand as he came back up from memory time. “Huh? Where ya going?”
“I just, uh, need to get some fresh air.” Axxter pointed with his thumb over his shoulder to the tent flap. “We been going at it for a couple of hours now; I just need to clear my head a bit. That all right?” He didn’t like the way the warrior was looking at him.
“Don’tcha want to hear the rest?”
The warrior’s jaw poked forward far enough to hook the points of his bottom teeth over his straggling gray mustache. His eyes burrowed under his lowered brow, leaving just two glints of red.
Axxter reached out and patted the recorder hanging on one of the tent ropes. “No problem. Getting it all right here.” The little box swayed on its knotted strap. “Great stuff – just great.” He felt his stomach rising into his throat again; it had been threatening all the time he’d been listening to the war stories. “You just keep right on talking; I’ll listen to it later.” He turned away and ducked under the tent flap before he got any more argument.
Outside, he climbed over to the closet transit cable and anchored his hip belt to it. He glanced down to make sure he had a clear shot downward, in case he lost it completely; all he needed now was to upchuck on some Havoc Mass sentry posted at the camp’s downwall boundary. Even if he did have privileged artisan status with General Cripplemaker – these bastards were all touchy as hell. Affronts to honor could get you drilled, with no thought given to what brig time they might pull for it. Drilled, or given the big step – or something even worse, along the lines of what that old bastard back in the tent was still gassing on about. Axxter shook his head as he relaxed against the cable, as though he could shake the veteran’s grinning words right back out. Judging from his anecdotes, the guy must have risen in the Mass’s ranks not from any military prowess, but from his bent imagination regarding what to do with any unlucky POWs after a skirmish. What a sick sonuvabitch – Axxter gazed down at the clouds; at the atmosphere’s bonding edge, they roiled up into guts and skulls, tangling around each other. He closed his eyes for a moment, but could still see them, and hear the old warrior’s voice, leering with fond violent memories.
Still, a paying job; the thought soothed his own gut, a warm glow easing outward along his limbs. He gathered the sour taste that had seeped under his tongue and spat; it looped silver, and was gone. Paying job, and not just that: the second one from these good folk. Which meant he’d pulled it off.
I did it. In solid with a major tribe. The major tribe, if you left out the Grievous Amalgam, which had been locked in up at the toplevel for so long it was like air or the vertical wall behind your back, part of the nature of things. But to have cracked the Havoc Mass… to have slid right under the nose of DeathPix, and done it… because he was good, his stuff was just so fucking good… That meant his scrabbling-around days were over. That was worth listening to gruesome after-battle stories, any number of them.
The first commission that he’d gotten from the general – the new death ikon for the megassassin – had just about burnt him out. And his portfolio; he’d been saving up ideas for years, all the time he’d been out on the wall, good bits just waiting for a job worthy of them. Stuff you couldn’t waste on some scrub-ass little gang of hooligans, the kind of gigs he’d been getting up until this had fallen in his lap. But some had leaked out, naturally enough; you couldn’t hold back all the time, if only to keep your skills up. He still wondered what he’d done that had caught the Mass’s eye; maybe one of the deep subliminals for the Gnash Boy Squad, the black teeth hidden in blackness, the rotating and replicating mirror-images in a throat that could swallow you down to your ankles if you looked at the biofoil image long enough. But that had been subtle stuff; those Gnash wankers hadn’t even known what they were getting, just groused about how long it was taking him – a lot more work than they were paying him for. He’d really been doing it just to see if he could pull it off. But somebody here with the Mass had spotted it, or some other neat piece he’d done, and realized its worth; that must mean there was some real aficionado of the art up in the top brass. Cripplemaker himself? Axxter doubted it; the man was strictly blood-and-guts bluster and politics. It must’ve been some behind-the-scenes type, a secret string puller, the kind with a wire running to every little detail, like a spider with a web so fine you didn’t even know you were caught in it. Not that he minded being caught; it was what he’d been hoping for all along. He just wished he could trace out who it was in the Havoc Mass that was responsible, so he could wrap himself up even tighter in the web.
He rubbed his eyes, still fried from the round-the-clock sessions on the death ikon for the megassassin. Fried, but worth it. No tricky sublims on that job; he’d wanted something that would zap Cripplemaker right off, impressive on the percept surface. Repeat-fold macro-tominiatures were best for that; a cheap trick, as long as you were willing to work the details down to those levels, but still a trick that always went over big with the rubes. You could watch them reverting to children – or as much of a childhood as somebody born into a military tribe ever got – as they went staring down into all that mandelbrot jazz-and-dragons. And then when it moved, when you sent the prearranged code up to the Small Moon and they came bouncing back with the animating signal – spasms of pleasure. Grizzled old murderers wriggling like puppies. Got ’em where you wanted ’em.
Fuzzy stars pulsed into the salt rim under his eyelids as he pressed harder with his thumb and fingertips. Now wasn’t the time to crap out; bear down and be set for life. He pulled his hand away, one finger smearing tear leakage across his cheek. Blinking, he scanned out over the clouds. She wasn’t there, this time at least. Maybe she’d finally gotten tired of hanging around, making her own moon out of her wordless crush, or else, more likely, she’d just drifted away with the other angels, off on one of their slow random errands. She’d disappeared from the sky before – the vacuum draining his heart with both a sense of relief and an odd sadness – only to show up again, a distant sphere and figure laced with sun. Smart enough to dangle out there, beyond easy sniping range of one of the Mass warriors lounging around bored. They didn’t like firing and not hitting anything.
His stomach had settled down. You could get used to anything, as long as you were getting paid for it. He unhooked himself from the transit cable and swung back up toward the tent.
He heard the snoring, deep, gelatinous, even before he lifted the flap. Inside, in the cozy filtered light, the old warrior’s hands fumbled at his belly hair, the black-crescented nails tracking some vague itch. The face behind the beard had gone soft, babyish, the pleasure of his dreams seeping out in a wet smile. Axxter didn’t want to know what the old bastard was unwinding inside his head; something disgusting, no doubt.
A chemical smell, the same as always on the old warrior’s breath, but stronger now, filled the tent. An empty bottle rolled in a clattering circle, dislodged by Axxter’s knee as he squatted down. A centimeter of clear pink fluid rolled around the bottom as he picked it up. He was about to sling the bottle out through the tent flap when he realized, looking over his shoulder, that there was someone standing behind him, head bent low against the ridgepole.
“What a grand old fellow.” General Cripplemaker gazed down at the sleeping warrior. He squatted beside Axxter, balancing himself with one hand against the tent’s springy mesh floor. The knuckles of his other hand stroked the warrior’s beard, evoking snuffling noises and one of the dirty paws rising up to brush at an invisible fly.