Farewell Horizontal Read Online Free PDF Page B

dreaming of some golden future, made him wonder.
     
    “Yeah, well –” He shrugged. “Best of luck to ’em, I guess.”
     
    She looked at him with a sad reproof. “You really have to care more about it than that, Ny. It’s important.”
     
    The maternal tone irritated him “What’s important to me is hustling up some business, getting some real earners into my portfolio. Right? I’m gonna be out here on the wall doing that, no matter what happens between Grievous and Havoc up on top. They don’t mean shit to me, sweetheart.”
     
    Guyer said something back to him, but he didn’t hear it, overridden by the shout of his own thoughts. Important to me . Money, always money. The Havoc Mass had plenty of it, being the roughest and toughest military tribe currently operating, and good politicians with overlapping layers of alliances and treaties among all the other hard-case tribes. Collective force pressing up against the Grievous Amalgam – generations away from being the military tribe they had started out as. Now into the sheer Byzantry of power, raking the big license fees in from the toplevel agencies such as Ask & Receive, the Wire Syndicate, and the Small Moon Consortium. Mucho bucks there. A throughflow, to pay for the legions of mercenaries, the diplomatic and intelligence corps, all the machinery to keep the Amalgam court, in all its glittering pathology, right up where it had been for so long. The meaning-heavy phrase mucho bucks circled around in his thoughts again. If I could just squeeze out a few dimes of it – then I’d be happy. Christ, I don’t want it all. Or much. Just enough. And dimes were dimes, no matter who ate the dollars.
     
    Guyer’s voice broke in. “So that’s why I did it.”
     
    “Did what?”
     
    She regarded his blinking, up from fog, and sighed. “Cashed in all my Amalgam holdings, the preferred, the options, every single blue chip – and sank it into the Mass.”
     
    “Jeez.” Heard twice, and still unbelievable. She must mean it. Beyond mere faith – talking money now. One thing for her to dream of A Better Age, when those clean and hard-limbed warriors have kicked out the effete, sneaky politicos – Guyer being nuts, in a sweet way, he had decided long ago, with her still traveling and doing her business out in these godforsaken wastewall sectors. But for her to roll up her entire wad and bet in on that rosy prospect . . . Axxter shook his head, whistling his breath in through clenched teeth. Thought she was smarter than that. Just never know about people.
     
    “Gotta split. Catch you later.”
     
    He looked up to see her standing, perpendicular to the wall. From his crouch in the sling, he had to tilt his head back to meet her gaze. She turned and strode to her rig.
     
    From back aboard the Indian, its headlight pointed straight up: “Give us a good-bye kiss, Ny.” And the same indulgent smile as before.
     
    He knew what she wanted, the kiss a pretext. She had seen him before, when he’d been a hundred percent new to vertical. Clinging white-knuckled, chest against the wall like a flattened spider, pithons taut from shoulder and hip. Pitied him, gave him something . . . Now she wants to see how I’m getting along with it. A little test. He swallowed against the pulse in his throat and pulled himself up out of the sling.
     
    In his kneecaps he felt the snap of his boots’ pithons catching their holds on the wall as he stood up. Straight out, his shoulder to the cloud barrier far below. One line from his belt for balance, but that was all right; nothing uncool about that. Walk and don’t think, he told himself. All there is to it. Pithons stretched as he lifted his foot, the leader lines releasing and whipping ahead for the next grip. All there is.
     
    All there was. Axxter stood beside the Indian, pulse still high. But there. He regarded her narrow face for a moment before he bent down to kiss her.
     
    He felt the brush of her lashes