With that plan in mind, Karuu started to leave his desk, then hesitated, and called up Janus instead. Karuu was going to need a bit of help with the Imperials, and Adahn's lieutenant, who had so kindly offered, was going to provide it.
XXVI
The guidepack was a small shoulder-mount unit, worn in the same spot where Reva and Lish had placed their ammo reserves. The device was an artificially intelligent construct, a brain in a box consisting of neural net, voice and sensor chips, a data library, and a variety of narrator personalities to chose from. Vask punched up the neutral docent tone, got the guide in place on one shoulder, slung the standard tourist-issue Berka 408 dart rifle on the other, and started into the preserve.
When he set foot inside the gate, the tour guide stirred to life.
"Is this your first visit to Keshnavar, sir?'' it asked.
"Hmm," Vask replied distractedly, surveying the trails ahead of him to see which way the two women had gone.
The tour guide was used to ambiguous answers from humans. "May I suggest the Yeskaya Nature Walk for your first excursion, sir? It is mildly invigorating, gives an overview of the six different terrain and vegetation systems contained within the preserve, and, of course, I will be happy to comment on the nature and habits of wildlife we might encounter—"
"Quiet," Vask commanded. "Guide, answer queries only."
"Certainly, sir," the unit responded, and lapsed into dutiful silence.
He saw two hikers on a path through the brown-needled yeskaya trees, an elderly couple pausing every now and then to record vistas with a hand-held holocam. A few other strollers, singly or in small groups, could be glimpsed on other trails and one distant hillside. Vask saw no one walking eastward across virgin snow, into the rougher terrain where lodge staff said the hunting was best. And nowhere could he detect so much as a footstep straying from the snow-cleared nature paths.
"Idiot," he blurted out loud.
"Sir?" queried the tour guide, which Kastlin automatically ignored.
Intent on approaching the women in what would seem a casual manner, Vask had paid little attention to the implications of air-shoes. He had never worn them before. They made snowwalking easier and incidentally eliminated tracks to discourage stalking predators.
They also discouraged stalking Security agents.
Heads on a spike, he thought, look at that. Not a damn mark anywhere, except my own, and I'm not using the liftpads right now.
He trotted along, studying the snow edge to each side of the trail to confirm his suspicion. Nowhere was there compacted snow or a footprint, only the clean, sharp line where snowbots had dissolved precipitation and sucked it away from the trail's edge.
Anyone stepping off the path in an airshoe as good as vanished.
Vask had waited too long, and now it seemed he had lost his quarry. Unless they bumped tree branches and knocked snow down, disturbing the groundcover that way. Alright. That was something worth looking for.
"Guide,'' he addressed the shoulder pack. "Give me a map of the preserve."
The unit extruded a projection bar forward of Vask's shoulder, then displayed a holographic topo-view of the resort.
"Mark my location." A blinking red dot obligingly appeared near the trailhead at the game preserve entrance.
"Can you track other guests?"
"Only if they have requested that their location be monitored and are carrying the correct type of homing transponder with them. Some persons with health conditions or—"
"Never mind. Are you monitoring anyone right now?"
"No, sir."
The screen remained in mid-air, depicting nearly 5,000 square kilometers of wilderness, with only a small portion covered by groomed trails. "Show me where the best hunting is," he ordered.
An eastward section of the map lit up in blue shading. "The best places to make a catch with an acceptable degree of risk can be approached along these trails. To reach the first trail..."
Vask let the unit drone on while he considered the map. Reva and Lish weren't equipped like people looking for an "acceptable degree of risk." He doubted they had followed this resort-planned agenda. Neither could they have gone far in only a quarter of an hour.
"Guide," he interrupted the travelogue. "What's the best place for an experienced hunter to go after challenging game?"
The contours of colored space changed on the map. Sections previously undesignated were now lit. The safe "tourist" region was not among them.
That's better, Vask thought. "What's the best way to get there from here? Draw me a route to follow."
The guide seemed to hesitate before responding to his question. It undoubtedly had him pegged as a novice hunter, which he was. But Vask didn't plan to go hunting, just socializing. If he got too far out, he'd turn back and follow his alternative plan, to catch the women in the lodge that evening when they came back in from the preserve.
"Route?" he prompted.
The tour guide marked a path for him in green, and showed how he must move from his present position.
"That's fine. Keep that map on display, will you?"
"If you wish, sir."
The unit sounded reluctant to encourage his unconventional jaunt, but comply it did. Vask switched on his airshoes, and stepped over the path's edge onto a virgin blanket of snow. With spongy steps he headed in the direction it seemed his quarry must have gone, forging ahead into potentially dangerous wilderness. The snow behind him held no trace of his passage.
Lish held the dart rifle awkwardly, not accustomed to its weight or feel. Reva showed her the best way to brace its bulk with the sling, and to walk a little to the side and rear. With both their guns angled correctly, the two motion sensors covered a 180-degree arc ahead of them.
"You haven't hunted much, have you?" Reva observed as they moved eastward.
"Not on shipboard. And I've been too busy with my work in the last few years to get out much."
"Ever spearfish on R'debh?"
"Not that, either."
"You mind killing things?" the assassin wondered aloud.
Lish shrugged. "When I was young I was in House Arleon's military academy. I wasn't thinking about it then, though I guess that was getting ready to kill people. Got kicked out for fighting. Maybe if there'd been things to hunt I would've left my classmates alone."
"You don't seem like the kind to start things."
"What makes you say that?"
"You just don't."
"You're right. I was small for my age. And Shiran, too, in a dirtsider school. That was incentive enough for others to start things. I just finished them."
They walked jn silence for a while, skirting yeskaya stands and keeping to the high ground near the ridge crests.
"How about you?" Lish followed up.
"Me?"
"Yeah. Did you fight when you were a kid?"
A spasm of guilt ripped through Reva, and she bit back the
truthful answers that almost slipped out. No, she shouted in her head, I didn't fight when I was a kid, though I should have! Instead, I crippled a friend with an angry thought. I killed my mother and my brother, or left them as good as dead someplace very far away from here. I don't dare fight in anger, because I can't tell who I'll hurt or where I'll end up. Leave my heart out of it, though, do it in cold blood—oh, yes, I can fight that way—
"Reva?"
"What?" Her tone was harsher than she intended, and she realized it right away. "Sorry," she apologized, trying to brush it off. "I don't like to talk about... about my childhood."
"Never mind, then."
They hiked in silence past leafless red-claw brush, and paused while Reva got her bearings. "Down there, I think." She pointed to a partially wooded valley running to the northwest where two ridges drew closer together. "That looks less brushy, more like a place for deska to graze. Where you find deska, you'll find the kria who hunt them."
"Can I ask about your hunting?" Lish asked tentatively. "How do you know so mu
ch about this? That looks like any other mountain slope to me."
Contrite over her earlier response, Reva smiled to show the question was not offensive. "I lived here with the Vudesh for a while," she offered. "In the north, where the kria run free and the winter is longer."
"Whatever for?" Lish was astonished. She couldn't imagine giving up civilized comforts to huddle with unwashed tribesmen in their primitive, poorly built longhouses.
Reva looked at her friend. "Because they know how to live," she explained, "and I needed to learn that at the time."
The truth of it was rather different, but Reva wasn't sharing all her secrets. "Let's head on that way," she changed the subject, "and I'll show you what a fight squaller is for."
XXVII
When Reva was eighteen, her father had retired from his work in the deep domes, and took a post teaching aqualogy on Chorb.
"I'm not going with you," she had declared. "I have too much going on here."
"The hell you're not," Jerrik flared. "You come with me, or I'll have the police shut you down."
She was astonished, and furious. Angrily he confessed to spying on his daughter, to ferreting out her clandestine smuggling activities. Though he didn't know the half of it—her contact with the techrunner Karuu, the selling of cyberware to blackwire shops—he knew enough that he could get her arrested. What the competition hadn't yet pulled off, her own father threatened to do gladly: turn her over to the Grinds.
There was a stupid speech about mending her ways. Oh, he was righteous. She tried not to respond: he was not, after all, her real father, not the understanding man of her childhood, just one of these ghost-people from a Mainline that wasn't really, truly, the one she should be living in.
But it was the one she was stuck in, more or less, and since her decision to never again skip wildly across the Lines, she knew that any nearby Timeline would hold virtually the same blackmailer with the same nasty sense of recrimination.
She was tired of being a Holdout anyway. She cleared her bank account, put it all in her credmeter, and sneaked aboard the next flight out of the starport.
When she hit Des'lin, she had no place to go, and didn't dare check into a resort—her father was too resourceful to dodge that way for long. She rode a local snowtransport as far as it would take her, then cadged a ride with an ice runner hauling supplies to Keshkaric at the edge of the Great Ice.
That is where she stayed, for three years. Three years that failed to heal what was wrong with Reva's life, although the harsh demands of frontier survival pushed that to the back of her mind. The Vudesh never welcomed her, nor did they drive her forth. They took pride in their simple existence, and with them Reva learned to value anew things she had forgotten were part of life.
Those were things inexplicable and grand, like the elemental power of nature in a scouring ice storm, and the joy of food when one is near-starving. They were things one had to experience to appreciate.
The Vudesh offered many such experiences. They tested Reva, and taught her, and finally asked her to leave when she slew a chieftain's son who insisted too forcefully that he would take her to wife.
She almost regretted leaving. She had a lot to thank them for. The Vudesh were fine hunters, and excellent killers, and their student never forgot a lesson that she learned.
XXVIII
Vask's hope of finding the women quickly soon vanished. There was no trail of disturbed snow knocked from tree branches to suggest where they had gone, and the convoluted terrain denied a viewpoint from which he might be able to spot them.
It didn't take long before the urban-bred Kastlin wasn't entirely sure of his own path, either. The ridge folds and stands of yes-kaya, the broken ground and clumps of red-claw protruding through the snow, conspired to force him off the line of march described by the tour guide's green map route. After he had trudged down another snowy ridge and found himself in another brushy valley bottom, he paused to catch his breath.
He looked at the holomap. The blinking red light that was himself was to the north of the green line of recommended travel. He looked to his right, toward that imaginary line, and saw wind-scoured limestone forming the face of an untraversible ridge. There was no way to rejoin the right line of march from here.
"Guide," he said, exasperated. "Show me the best way back to the lodge."
A yellow line appeared, marking a route from his present location back to the resort buildings. As he turned to survey the path he would have to follow, movement in the red-claw brush drew his startled attention. Vask unslung his dart rifle; before he could hold it ready, a large white and russet heap of fur lumbered out of the scrub before him. He sighed. This six-legged beast, taller than a man at the shoulder and twice as long, was fat and slow-moving and herbivorous. It was a deska, walking on in-turned toes made for gripping tree limbs. It snuffled the air as it caught the man's strange scent.
Vask was reslinging his rifle when the tour guide spoke up.
"Sir, I am required by law to inform you that you are now dangerously close to kria hunting grounds. If you recall the waiver that you signed upon check-in, Keshnavar Resort is not responsible for the safety of guests who move too closely to deska grazing areas. You have now done so, and I have so duly recorded."
Vask frowned at the shoulder pack. "Why didn't you tell me this before?"
"You have been moving through brushlands favored by deska.
Until I sensed this creature here, I could not be certain this pasturage was in use. It is, and you are duly notified."
Vask growled and considered turning the guide unit off. He had turned his back on the harmless grazer when a drawn-out high-pitched scream froze him in his tracks. He spun back around. It came from the southeast, from a hilly point overlooking the valley. "What was that?" he demanded of the guide. "That was the combat call of the kria, a challenge issued by one beast to another to fight over hunting territory." "Great."
Vask turned back toward the lodge and began to trot over the snowcover when a second kria answered the fighting call. He froze in his tracks, horripilation raising every hair on his body. The answering call came from the brush directly ahead.
Reva let the air-amplified blast from the fight squaller echo off the ridge sides, then dropped her hand back by her side. Lish's eyes were wide, and widened more when an answering challenge ripped through the frosty air.
"There's one down there, all right." Reva pointed. "If we can provoke it enough, it'll head straight for us instead of stalking. That's what we want." She held the squaller out to Lish. "You want to give it a try?"
"Sure." Lish reached gingerly for the palm-sized device, as if it, not the kria, could bite.
"Aim the speaker plate down the valley, like so, and press," Reva explained.
Lish did, and another fearsome squall rang out before them. Instead of the hair-raising yowl they expected in reply, they heard something else: a distinctive human outcry, and a crashing in the brush. Lish's smile faded as the pair watched the small figure of a man burst from the brush and run toward the edge of the wooded valley.
A kria pursued, its six-legged gait eating up the ground at an impossible rate of speed.
"Squall again!" Reva snapped the order and Lish unthinkingly obeyed. The assassin threw her gun up to her shoulder and fired off three rounds at the great white-furred predator.
The fighting squall rang out again, ear-piercingly loud. The explosive darts flew almost to the limit of their range, a good 100 meters away, and missed the cat—then exploded on impact with
the snowpack at its feet. The squall and the explosions were enough to distract the hunting beast, and it hesitated in its charge.
It swung its head, glancing about to see if there was an immediate danger. There was not.
As Reva pulled darts from her ammo pack and hastily reloaded her rifle, the snowcat was back on the trail of the man. Even so, the diversion had bought a little time. The strayed tourist reached a yeskaya tree, and began to climb as fast
as he could.
"Sea Father!" Reva exclaimed. "Kria can climb, too!" She turned to Lish. "Don't use the squaller again, we don't want that eat coming after you. Lay down here on the snow and brace your shots. Shoot at the kria. If you can hit it, fine. If not, aim for the tree trunk over its head. Keep it out of that tree until I can get close enough to deal with it better."
There was no discussion. Lish threw herself down in a prone firing position. With nervous fingers she set up the ranging adjustment on her scope, and fired as the cat squatted at the base of the tree.
Her first shot went wild, leaving an impact explosion in the snow, as before, that caused the kria to start.
Reva went over the lip of the ridge and headed down into the valley in a long, controlled, snowy slide.
"Guide," Vask gasped, scrambling for the next-higher branch, "call for help."
"I can't, sir. We are out of my limited communications range with the resort lodge."
Kastlin yanked his rifle sling free from a grasping needle-clump, and pushed an arm's length higher up into the dense conifer. "What do you mean, can't?" he snarled. "Don't you have an emergency channel?"
The kria leapt into the air, and made a swipe at Vask's foot. Kastlin leapt up the tree trunk as well, pulling his feet clear, and snapping the projector bar off the guidepack. "Damage to this unit will be added to your bill, sir," the guide commented in its neutral-docent tone.
"Vent that! Do you have an emergency channel!?" he almost screamed at the tour robot.
"No, sir. If you would like your movements monitored, you need a transponder with an emergency call button on it, and an extra fee must—"
"Shut up!" If the kria didn't get him first, the guidepack would drive him crazy. Vask pulled himself a little higher, then saw he was reaching the limits of his escape. Branches grew too closely together, and the brown, pricking yeskaya needles grew into a dense, impenetrable mass higher up the tree trunk. He had come as far as he could.
Vask looked down, right into the amber, hungry eyes of the squatting predator. The kria hunched on four of its legs, and used the forward pair to grasp the tree trunk a mere four meters below Kastlin's feet. The beast gave the yeskaya a shake, and then a harder one. The tree swayed enough to be unsettling, though not enough to dislodge the agent's death grip. The kria withdrew its front paws, claws slicing effortlessly into the bark and leaving a trail of curled green pith where it had gripped.
Mainline Page 7