Mainline

by Deborah Christian

  If he knew who had carried out this attack, Yavobo would declare clan-feud, and hunt him down like the skigrat he was. At first it seemed futile rage, but as the hours wore on, the notion became more and more appealing. Why not? he asked himself. I am a hunter of sentients, after all. I have had no personal enemy in a long time. Perhaps it is time to renew the power of shkei-ko, of blood oath and feudhunt fulfilled.

  Razor-keen incisors showed in a vicious grin. He vowed his revenge to his personal gods and family totem. He forbore to slice the feud-mark on his forearm, not while he was in strange waters where unknown predators might smell his blood, but the Aztrakhani warrior swore he would take that final step as soon as he knew he would live, and be able to fulfill his oath.

  For a day and a half the Aztrakhani drifted with the currents, swimming when he could, resting when the unfamiliar exertion cramped even his hardened muscles. On the second night, a strong briny smell hung heavy in the air. A large body bumped against his legs and he started out of a tired haze, pulling knees up to his chest. But no fangs sank into him, no tentacles dragged him down: he extended legs again and another scaly side nudged him in passing. It was too dark to see the waters, but a splash now and then interrupted the monotonous bobbing of the waves.

  It must be a school of fish, he conjectured. As long as they're not hungry, I should be alright.

  Unable to do anything about it if he was wrong, he returned to his exhausted doze. And that is why he did not notice the distant running lights draw nearer, or sense the thrum of pulse engines in the water. Yavobo awoke before dawn when fishy bodies collided with his once more. He tried to move his legs aside again, but couldn't.

  He was caught in the net of an apaku trawler, snaring the run of spawning fish off the coast before they could dash ashore and expire.

  He laughed in exultation, a rasping bark unnoted by fishermen amid the grind of winches hoisting netting. When he was dumped to the deck under bright worklights, sprawling among the thrashing apaku nearly half his own size, Yavobo slithered to the edge like a monster from the deep and found his feet with a triumphant shout. He rose from the deck, red and black skin wrinkled and waterlogged, scales glistening along his legs and flank, with breather mask at waist and flotation belt around his chest. The trawler crew gaped at the sight, and fell back from their strange catch.

  Yavobo drew his knife with a flourish, and they fell back another step. Apaku flopped around his feet as he slashed the blade across his forearm, then brandished the bloody weapon and shouted an oath in his own tongue.

  "By Blood Oath and Clan, I swear vengeance for this wrong that was done! This blade shall not drink again, but it be for that cause!"

  Yavobo sheathed his knife without cleaning it, and laughed at the uncertain harpooner who stood portside, spear-rifle held in a threatening pose.

  The Aztrakhani strode forward from the mess of fish and nets and demanded in passable R'debhi, "Let me talk with your Captain."

  XV

  Reva picked through the oddments on her sidetable, bits and pieces collected in the last couple of days. A ticket tab for the holoshow, an empty ampule from Kovar's Sensorium, a wrinkled flimsy with the Murs lost-at-sea newsblurb. A stranger's personal comp number that she didn't plan on calling. An address chit.

  A blue, triangular chit with a Des'lin address on it.

  She turned it over in her fingers, tapped it with a violet-hued nail. Tyree Longhouse.

  Reva toyed with the chit, and reckoned local time. It had taken a while to set up the hit on Murs, and it was now just into the start of apaku season, when the game fish rushed the island shallows to spawn. Just starting the last month of summer, that was.

  Lish would be on Des'lin, then, if she'd stuck to her plans. Reva needed to start thinking about Lanzig, niece of the late departed Advisor, and the main reason she was back on Selmun III She already had some ideas about how to approach this project. Maybe the Holdout would be worth talking to, see if she had some more specialty items that were hard to find—

  Dolophant dung, Reva interrupted herself. At least be honest about it. That woman is making the wrong moves, and she's going to get in trouble over it, sooner or later, Karuu or no Karuu Maybe I can give her a tip or two on the Holdout business....____

  The thought gave her pause. Why care? Why get involved? It's not like they were friends or anything. That was one kind of] entanglement Reva found easy to avoid. Even when she had wanted one, friends were too easy to lose when you crossed Lines. Her talent had taught her isolation early on, and relationships had slipped through her grasp as quickly as she could change the moment she called Now.

  Still, there was something perversely likable about the smuggler. Here, in this Mainline, she reminded Reva of a younger version of herself: with an overconfidence that spoke of underlying arrogance, the kind that put you out on a limb without even knowing it. The assassin shook her head and studied the address chit in her hand. Lish wasn't a kid, wet behind the ears, but she wasn't as well set up to be a Selmun smuggler as she might think.

  It was a sure bet the Holdout wouldn't want to hear that kind of thing from a stranger. Reva paused on the verge of tossing the chit.

  Then again, a new business connection couldn't hurt. It would require social niceties ... use of someone's house pass demands some kind of politeness in return. The semblance of friendship, if not its substance, to make dealings a littie smoother.

  She smiled to herself. She could play that game, if she wanted to. She had a mood, a demeanor, for every occasion. And it would be amusing, maybe truly useful, to turn this casual invitation into a reliable connection.

  What the hell. She hadn't seen Des'lin in forever.

  She pocketed the chit and punched out on the hotel room comp.

  XVI

  Reva traveled mostly on commercial transport. The next hop to Des'lin was the morning commuter run, outbound to the hunting lodges on Selmun IV and the crystal mines on V. She boarded the shuttle, resigned to the company of complacent vacationers and combine executives checking on fur trapping investments.

  It was a routine journey she could sleep through, and did.

  Three hours later saw her past Customs' cursory check for in-system passengers. She emerged into the nearly empty concourse of Freebay's small starport, unchanged since her last trip through had taken her off Des'lin and away from the Selmun star for the first time. She found the ground travel agent in the place she expected, and leaned on the counter.

  "I need to go to Baneks Cape. What's the best way there?"

  The agent looked up from a terminal at the unexpected customer. "The Cape?" she repeated. "Either ground car or monorail, Domna. Rail would be faster. The storm season is on us already. Though you look prepared for it."

  Reva gave a false smile out of reflex to the small talk, and brushed one hand down the fur-lined kria-leather coat she'd bought for this journey. She knew all too well just what season gripped northern Des'lin at this time, and though her garment was chosen for its suggestion of local style, it offered real protection against what could be deadly cold. There was nothing warmer than kria-fur on this iceball, she knew. She had killed and worn her share of them before.

  "Rail, then." She bought a one-way ticket and studied the tourist map the woman handed back with the ticket tab. The monorail line was new to her, and now that she had the topography in hand, she saw where one spur led to Baneks Cape, a narrow, curving peninsula on the west coast of the larger of the two inland seas. Ponds, they seemed, after R'debh, but the weather upon them could be just as fierce, and from the shore, she knew, the waters looked just as vast.

  There were no slidewalks in Freebay's backwards terminal, part of the contrary Des'lini pride in doing things the frontier way. She strolled down a long hall toward the monorail platform, wondering as she went if Lish would be home for this unexpected

  visit. Though that's no real concern, thought Reva, because this isn't just an address marker I have. It's a house pass. She's
either deathly naive or has very good instincts about whom to trust.

  She was shaking her head over that when an odd sensation came over her and she did her best not to halt in mid-stride. Every hair raised itself along her neck and spine, and a cold wave of anxiety forced an involuntary shudder. Reva walked as casually as she could to a vendbot and turned sideways in the hall, pretending to examine its selection of refreshments.

  A quick glance showed the hall behind her was empty, and just one person walked the passage ahead. Then what had given her that uncanny feeling? It seemed like it should herald danger, so stark and primeval it was. Her skin prickled beneath her clothes where every small hair had risen with electric chill.

  There, in the mecho's chromed dispenser arm, she thought she saw the reflection of a moving figure. Her eyes darted that way, not moving her head, and saw nothing. She tried to slip into timetrance, but the eeriness she felt hindered her.

  "May I assist with your selection, Domna?"

  The vendbot's programmed query startled her again, and she, moved away with two swift steps. The mecho trundled slowly back to the main concourse, and Reva stood with her back against the wall, forcing herself by will alone to center and search the Timelines for danger.

  A moment later Now shattered into its parallel parts, and she surveyed the hall again. It was a disappointingly empty space, filled with the shadows of one or two passengers who could have been late or might be early. Ghosts of chance, not real for her on this Mainline, and certainly no threat.

  Reva slipped out of trance, and shook her head. The incident disturbed her more than she cared for. Anything would that I can't explain, she told herself. I don't trust what I can't explain. That gets you killed.

  She glanced once more around the hall, then continued to the monorail platform, doing her best to shake off the feeling the uncanny disruption had given her.

  On the vendbot's dispenser arm, a reflection moved again across polished chrome, and vanished in Reva's direction.

  XVII

  Adahn sighed and ran his hands through graying hair, a look he kept for the added air of authority it gave him. A com light blinked insistently on the desk console before him. Even after three years as a Tribune of the Red Hand crime cartel, the MazeRat derevin and their affiliates occupied too much of his attention. There was no one to turn it over to, no one he trusted to manage the street muscle the way he wanted it run. While waiting for someone to distinguish himself in the lower ranks, he got to take calls like this one. Karuu, on subspace from Selmun III.

  "A fine good day to you, Mr. Harric," the Dorleoni's voice bubbled with native cheerfulness, filling the privacy speaker in Adahn's inner ear. The gang boss wasn't lulled by it. Dorleoni always sounded cheerful, even when they were slitting your throat.

  Adahn seldom let his face be seen by associates, so the vidlink was one-way only. "Karuu. You have a problem?"

  The walrus-faced Holdout tilted his head in response. "An inconvenience. There is new competition here, selling Inert Delivery Patches. I am wondering in the name of good business if you can provide me with same?"

  "Too risky," Adahn refused him. "Imperial Security monitors those raw materials. If we moved enough quantity to make it worth our while, we'd alert them."

  "Then Imperial Bugs come to see this competitor, I am hoping. Because if trade continues, we are maybe seeing loss of old customers."

  The Dorleoni did his best to look plaintive, but Adahn was having none of it. This was business-as-usual, and nothing for an up-and-coming Tribune to be wasting his time on.

  "You know the game," he snapped. "If you don't like the competition, get rid of it. Was there anything else?"

  He waited impatiently for the smuggler to shake his head. "Well, then. Later." The MazeRat boss severed the connection, jacked into his deck, and put out a call for Janus.

  His lieutenant was in the cybernet, as usual, and responded directly through Adahn's visual cortex. Janus appeared to float in mid-air over the crime boss' command console.

  "Sir?"

  "Holdout operations. Karuu's having trouble with a competitor on Selmun III. Help him a little, will you? If he really needs it."

  "Sure. Is it urgent?"

  "Don't know. Talk with him."

  "Will do."

  The exchange, facilitated through the Net, took place at the speed of light and flash relays. Janus' form vanished an instant after it appeared, and Adahn unplugged from the cyberdeck. He finished the breath he had been taking when he jacked in, and returned to the affairs the Holdout's call had interrupted.

  XVIII

  The monorail sliced toward Baneks Cape, its mag-field racing over the track ahead, bursting the thick sheath of ice and wet snow that coated it. The train was wrapped in dark and fog and veils of wind-driven ice crystals, a blizzard so dense that only flakes packing against the monorail windows could be seen.

  Reva did not try to make out the snowy, forested mountains and valleys she knew lay outside. Instead, she settled into her kria-fur coat, and regarded her fellow passengers.

  The sixth sense she had experienced in the terminal had left her uncomfortably wary, so she studied her fellow travelers closely: a R'debhi businessman; a mother and children with packages from a day of shopping; two Vudesh clansmen, their crossbows nearly hidden among the long strands of deska fur they wore as cloaks. She judged and dismissed each as representing no danger to her, then closed her eyes and concentrated on the soothing rhythmic vibration of the Cape-bound transport. Vask Kastlin watched Reva from his seat across the aisle, her closest observer and yet not one she had noticed. Then again, no one else had noticed the wiry, dark-haired man, either. No one could, at this moment, unless they glimpsed him with sensors or video monitors, or were as skillful at applied psychonetics as the man himself. For Vask was a Mutate, a graduate of the Academy of Applied Psychonetics, and, like many of his kind, an agent of the Emperor's Ministry of Internal Security. "Security" to the public; "IntSec" to the bureaucrats. "Bugs" to the criminal element, a play on their abbreviated department title.

  A bug, indeed, thought Vask. Like a bug on the wall, I see you; you don't see me.

  It was tiring, using his blindspot skill to assure that those around him failed to see him. They glanced nearby, or looked away, or walked past, unconsciously skirting his position, never quite registering his presence. Yet it made tailing his elusive quarry much easier.

  Reva's destination was clear, though what she planned to do there remained a mystery. As was she. Tall, with brunette hair today, dressed as a winter-clad Des'lini, no longer in the revealing party clothes she had worn in Amasl, he might have overlooked her in a crowd had she not already come to his attention. Inert Delivery Patches and their buyers were always of interest to IntSec.

  Vask relaxed into his seat, prepared to doze along with this buyer of contraband. Tracing the IDP delivery to her workshop had not been too hard; nevertheless, he had scrambled for the last several days, using more than his share of hoppers and marshaling psi energies carefully to stay on the trail. Then he had lost her for a time, and only picked up the trail again when she straggled back to her hotel after an extended revel out on the town.

  A quick data check turned up no records on Reva—not too surprising, if she worked with Holdouts. Strangely, though, he couldn't tell if she was really Normal: he sensed no active psi from her, and neither could he detect the surface murmur of her thoughts. That could be due to a cyberimplant, a psi shield, although such were tremendously expensive and rarely encountered. His telepathic powers were weak, but he should at least be able to pick up a sensation of conscious thought. Or if she were shielded by natural psi ability, there ought to be some period when she dropped the shield. So far, there was none. Reva was an enigma.

  Soon it would be time for Vask the Fixer to meet Reva, and become her friend. First, though, he would follow this trail to its end. Lish had attracted Imperial attention weeks before. While other agents investigated the smuggler and
her offworld connections, it fell to Kastlin to see who used the contraband she was passing, and what for. Her dossier mentioned Tyree Longhouse on Baneks Cape, so when Reva boarded the monorail there was hardly any need to guess her destination. Kastlin tagged along, inventing ways to approach her when the time came. His R'debh cover as Vask the Fixer had a lot of connections. Surely one could give him cause to go to Baneks Cape in a solstice storm.

  XIX

  Tyree Longhouse was an upscale version of the traditional Vu-desh structure, the preferred way to build in the chill Des'lin climate. It splayed on the land like a grounded turtle, a long rectangular box two-thirds underground, with sloping earth-bermed sides and synthetic thatching. Its ridge-top position braked gusting winds and caused snow to heap roof-high against the sides.

  A snowcrawler approached and stopped as close to the covered entranceway as possible. Reva got out, waded through thigh-high drifts, and pushed the call buzzer on the gate control panel.

  A scanner hemisphere emerged from the panel, angled toward Reva, retracted. Her face was not among those it was programmed to admit, and so the gate remained closed. She fumbled the blue house pass out of a pocket then and shoved it into the keyslot. Panel lights turned green, and the security bars lifted out of the snow-covered ground. Reva waved to the snowcrawler. The taxi turned back toward the monorail station as she walked inside the entrance gallery.

  She had no chance to try the chit on the house door. The portal that looked made of rustic wooden planking swung open before she could touch it, and Lish stood there to greet her. "Bad night for traveling," she said with collected poise. "Come on in."

  Lish led her visitor into the great hall, a ground-level room that ran the length of the longhouse. Running down its center was the traditional fire trench, with real logs burning at the far end of it. Felted mats and cushions for floor seating cluttered the edges, while food warmed on a nearby sideboard.