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and the shift of her gaze. He leaned back and turned his head to see what it was she saw.
     
    One hand had locked onto the nearest transit cable, every tendon in his wrist drawn tight as the metal line. Holding on, shameless, against the fear of gravity.
     
    Axxter looked back into Guyer’s smile. The Indian’s motor coughed as she twisted the throttle.
     
    “Take care, Ny.” A wink. “See ya again sometime.”
     
    The engine’s rasp came to his ear long after she had disappeared upwall by leftaround. On her ceaseless errands. He gripped the cable with both hands, no one to see him now, and pressed his burning cheek against the cool metal, only a little harder than the woman’s face and kiss.
     
      
     
    † † †
     
     
    Just before breaking camp, he went back online, calling up Ask & Receive. The Small Moon, in its orbit around Cylinder, had finally appeared, a silver nail-paring coming around the building’s leftedge. Cheaper to connect when only enough relay surface for audio signal; that was all he needed. He blinked on his transceiver.
     
    “Update on previous request.” His jawbone buzzed with the echo of his own voice. “Estimate of current position, Rowdiness Combine, military tribe. Scale reliability down to . . . oh . . . twenty-five percent.” An old trick that he’d picked up from the more experienced freelancers. If you took a high enough reliability on initial location requests, seventy-five percent or higher, you could cheap out on the updates. You’d still get close enough to your target to do a physical scan of the sector. Though twenty-five, he knew, was pushing it.
     
    The info agency ran through its location factors – previous sightings, speed of travel and direction, analysis of raiding strategies. Rowdiness hadn’t reached the point – might never – of having a PR service advertising its whereabouts, recruitment points, the big-league stuff; otherwise he would’ve dinged them for the call and info.
     
    At twenty-five percent reliability, it didn’t take long. Axxter detected, or imagined, a condescending tone to the coordinates reeled out in his ear.
     
    “All right.” As if addressing the Norton, no one else on the empty wall. He pulled the transceiver lead free from his wrist, folded up the dish and stowed it in the sidecar. His boot pithons came free as he mounted onto the motorcycle, the seat line zipping around his waist. A moment of vertigo as he gripped the handlebars and looked straight down the building’s long vertical fall. “Time to roll.”
     
    He didn’t stop until the motorcycle’s shadow stretched down Cylinder as far as he could see. Hours of traveling: sun right overhead, the leading edge sliced off by the building’s top rim. Only a bit more pure light before the sun’s zenith and the deepshade falling over the morningside. Whatever lay on the eveningside could come creeping out into the light then, on whatever unknown circuits might be pursued there. Axxter stood up on the pegs, easing the cramp in his butt, the vibration fatigue in both his thighs. The cloud barrier looked as far below as ever.
     
    Making good time, he figured. The transit cable the bike had locked onto had run free and clear all the way down here. And farther: the cable, thick around as his head where the wheels grappled onto it, dwindled down to spider-silk before disappearing into the clouds. A few kilometers more – he gazed around, estimating his position – and he could steer the Norton off the cable, tacking left. Lateral travel, across the vertical cables, always slower. The Rowdiness bunch should be pretty close, though; might not find ’em before dark, but tomorrow I will.
     
    He settled back down in the seat and gunned the engine. Satisfied with a day’s travel, almost completed; the angels had proved a good omen, besides the cash into his account. A certain representation of freedom. That’s why you became a freelancer. That, and starving to