“These,” said Axxter, “are the flakes you stuck me with. Warriors, my ass. Bunch of wankers, is what they are. They couldn’t rape and pillage their way out of a plastic bag. I mean, of all the tribes in my whole portfolio – tribes that you set me up with – who do you think’s doing the best? Huh? Out of this whole wimpy lot?”
Brevis shrugged. “I suppose… those young guys – what were they called? – Stylish Razorteeth; something like that. They were pretty hot, weren’t they?”
“Mode of Razorback.” Axxter shook his head. “Were hot – precisely. Now they get their butts kicked on a regular basis.” The mention of the tribe’s name grated on his nerves. He had done a full graffex workup for them, from the wall out, all the combat visuals and PR regalia that a brand-new military tribe required. A solid month’s work, without even any upfront money for it – Brevis had sold him so hard on the new tribe’s prospects that he’d swallowed this major inroad into his operating capital. Receiving for his labors a good-sized chunk of the Razorbacks’ initial issuance of stock. Preferred stock, he reminded himself. He’d get his share of whatever loot, ransoms, or other spoils the tribe brought in right at the initial divvying-up, zipped straight into his bank account. A cut of the gross; that was always the condition attached to one of these start-up deals, why the attraction for freelancers – not just graffices like him, but the whole panopoly of caterers, camp followers, tacticians, everything a military tribe needed to operate on Cylinder’s vertical wall. Attractive enough for freelancers still on the hustle – like me, thought Axxter. Hungry for those high returns on the investment of time and labor. Blood and sweat -
“I really worked for those suckers.” He muttered his thoughts aloud.
“I know you did, Ny.” Endless meters of sympathy from Brevis. Part of his job. “First-class work. Terrifying stuff; just terrifying as hell.”
“Yeah, right; terrifying.” His gloom deepened. “All they had to do was go out and terrify somebody with it. You know, get out there and do their job. Act like goddamn warriors. But did they? Tell me – did they?”
“That’s not quite fair, Ny. Their first couple of sorties went pretty well, all in all. For new guys. You made money off them, remember? You didn’t mind that so awfully much, now did you?” A waggling finger, admonishing a sulky child.
Axxter grunted. “About enough to sneeze on. And how’ve they done since then, huh? Eaten their shorts. Give me Stats. What’s the ranking on Razorback, Mode of.”
After a moment’s search came the response: THAT
TRIBE IS UNRANKED AT THIS TIME. UNDER THRESHOLD LEVEL FOR TRADING; INITIAL OFFERING PERIOD ELAPSED.
“Combat, historical quickscan, same tribe.”
PRECEDING SIX MONTHS FROM PRESENT DATE: THREE ENGAGEMENTS; TWO CHALLENGE SKIRMISHES, ONE RAID. LOST BOTH SKIRMISHES, HEAVY EMBARRASSMENT DUE TO FLEEING WALL SECTOR DURING WIRE SYNDICATE’S “UP & COMING” BROADCAST, LEADING TO DUMP OF HOLDINGS BY ALL SPECULATORS, THUS LOSS OF BOARD RANKING. RAID INCONCLUSIVE DUE TO MAP ERROR BASED ON INADEQUATE INFO: HIT UNOCCUPIED SECTOR. MORE DETAIL OR FURTHER BACK?
“Christ, no,” said Axxter.
“Come on, Ny.” Brevis lifted his hands, pleading. “I admit they’ve had some bad luck. They’ll pull out of it.”
Axxter glared at the image. “I doubt it. And they’re the best of the lot I’m stuck with. What about Straight-Line Ravage? Huh? What happened to them?”
Brevis winced. “Please…”
They’d gone over this before, more than once, but like probing a broken tooth, he couldn’t leave it alone. The particular black hole disaster of his freelancer portfolio. All that work down the drain… the thought of it still made him ache with fury. “Right off the board.” Distantly, he heard Brevis’s weary sigh. “Right off the goddamn board.”
Straight-Line Ravage had suffered the final ignominy, the ultimate possible for a military tribe. Too inept to even manage getting killed in a challenge with another tribe, unable to scrape together enough credit to feed themselves, they had sold themselves en masse on a long-term labor contract. Axxter supposed they were making plastic-extruded widgets in some grim horizontal sector factory at this very moment.
“Right off the board.” He said it wonderingly this time, anger having ebbed away. Right off the board and off the exterior of Cylinder itself, wiped from the vertical wall as if they had never existed, had never swayed on the transit lines or hung in their thin bivvy slings, boasting to each other and the open air of all the blood and havoc they were about to wreak on the great building’s unsuspecting inhabitants. Beating their fists on the warror decs that Axxter had worked into their armor and into the very skin over their pectoral muscles, along the swollen biceps. When he had sent the coded animating signal to the Small Moon and the appropriate response had been narrowcast back to the Ravage camp, the decs had writhed through their simple five-second cycle and the tribesmen had howled with an equally simple joy. Well, that’s over; Axxter could almost taste the sourness of the thought. Ain’t no joy in working the lever and pushing the button, putting out those widgets. You proud warriors. He managed to feel sorry for them, beyond the economic loss to himself, their selling out having left him and the other freelancers with shares in an enterprise gone bust. Sorry, and a certain chilling kinship.
Vertical was tough. Anybody could fall off the wall. One way or another; either the big step, right down into the cloud barrier below, or… back the other way, inwall to the horizontal. Where some fuming widget machine waited for him as well.
“Ny…” Brevis’s voice slid under his bleak meditation. “Can we just… put the Ravage thing behind us? And… look ahead?”
“‘Look ahead’ – Jesus.” Axxter turned his gaze toward the sky, managing not even to see it. “I’m looking ahead to starving out here.”
“Hey – it’s not any easier for me, Ny.” Finally, Brevis’s lubricated armor had worn through. His voice rose in pitch. “I got operating costs, too, you know. You’re getting nothing? Fine – I’m getting ten percent of that nothing. My other clients -” Bitter now. “What they bring in isn’t paying the comm charges, either. We’re all hurting, Ny. Can I help it if that Ravage bunch, and all these others, they turned out to be such wimps? They looked good, man; I had scouting reports up the ass on those guys. At the level we’re operating at, we can’t plug into some sure-bet outfit. We have to go with the chancy ones.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know.” He rubbed his brow, feeling a twinge of guilt. I don’t even know why I called him up, except to just bitch and whine. Which doesn’t come free, idiot. “I don’t have to put up with this freelance bullshit. I could’ve gone to work for DeathPix. They said they wanted me.” His oldest whine of all, invariably dredged up when he was feeling sorry for himself. The big topside corporation, which handled not only all the graffex work for the Grievous Amalgam, the ruling tribe of Cylinder, but also for the Havoc Mass, their main rivals for power – he had passed their hiring exam, been offered an entry-level job with them… and had turned it down. So he could go freelance. So bitch about it, asshole.
“Ny… you want to call it quits… you want to see if the DeathPix job’s still open… I’ll understand.” Brevis had recovered his smooth, soft ease again. “I don’t want to lose you, but… I’ll understand. I think you could make it, if you could just see your way to hanging on a little bit longer. But if you don’t think you can… Hey. It’s all right. I know it’s tough out there.”