Mainline

by Deborah Christian

  Time runs differently for the phase-shifted. The ghost-ray considered.

  In the human world, days passed by.

  XLVIII

  Shiran Devin entered the Comax Shipping office without knocking. He glanced at Lish, looked unhappily around the room, and slumped frowning in a chair.

  "Devin." The Holdout's recognition carried with it a note of surprise. When he failed to respond, the woman abandoned her desk and came around to take a neighboring chair.

  Her clanmate looked much the worse for wear, ground down nearly to the comportment of a common spacer. "Did they get rough with you?" she asked.

  "Only the usual Bug tactics," he replied. "Tell the same story five times, then three more on truth juice."

  Lish's lips thinned into a tight line.

  "Don't worry, Domna." The Captain used the honorific with bitterness. "I didn't tell them anything. I didn't really know anything to tell, now, did I? You were pretty careful about that."

  "Oh, Devin," Lish began. "It's not like you think—"

  "Save it for Obray. We're both Shirani. Clanmates; once shipmates. I didn't think you'd set me up."

  Lish turned from the accusation in his eyes.

  "Tell me this: was your offer to do business with me legitimate, or was that part of the lure, too?"

  The silence stretched between them before she spoke. "If you really want to know what's going on, I'll tell you. If you only want an excuse to recriminate, you can leave."

  Devin spoke tiredly. "I'm not leaving. I acted in good faith, and it got me into a pile of shit with the authorities. I never heard of this Karuu fellow before he hired me, and it nearly lost me my pilot's license. I covered for you and I don't even know what for. I think you owe me an explanation."

  The Holdout considered his demand. "You're not going to like it."

  Devin's lips turned down. "I already don't. At least I'll understand it if you talk."

  She sighed, carelines deepening around eyes and mouth. "I admit I sort of used you, Devin," she regarded him seriously, "but that's not what I started out to do. I really am looking for a shipping partner, like I offered. I saw your name on the for-hire roster on the Net, and I remembered you'd gone independent, too."

  Devin waved a hand dismissively. The fact that he still did not own his own ship rankled. Stupidly, it was the prospect of gaining a ship of his own that had lured him to Selmun III.

  "I was also working a little sleight of hand with ship records," she continued. "Karuu made it to the top by setting up and taking down smaller Holdouts along the way. I think I was next. So when I had a really big run coming in, I wanted some insurance, so he couldn't finger me and grab my cargo. That's his pattern."

  Understanding began to dawn on the ship's Captain. "By Juro's brass balls. And you hired me to pilot that mess for you." Anger flared in Devin's blue eyes. "Thanks a lot, shipmate."

  "Devin, look. It was my chance to make a fortune. Millions. Really."

  He ignored the stress in her voice. "On borgbeasts? The same happy swimmers that are starting to sink ocean shipping?"

  Lish blinked, surprised.

  "On the news this morning. One ship down, and credit taken by some group called the Gambru League. Security put out a flash, warning seafarers about alien life-forms in Selmun III waters. Sounds like they sat on the knowledge a little too long to do those sailors any good."

  Lish's brow creased.

  "What?" demanded Devin. "Nothing to say? No explanation? Innocent people killed because of what you smuggled onplanet, Lish. How can you do work like this?"

  "You know there's not much logic to import laws. There's demand. I supply. That's all." She frowned. "It's not like you refused to move the cargo. I figured that 'quick and discreet' clause would warn you off if you weren't interested."

  Devin sat silent. She was right about that much. Like most cargo spacers, Devin supplied demand, and didn't always think far past that criterion himself.

  "I hope all this was worth your while." He motioned vaguely over his shoulder with his thumb, toward the street where hired Skiffjammers patrolled Lairdome 7. "Looks like you've bought a lot of trouble."

  A shadow passed over the Holdout's face. "If you can't help me out, Devin, I'm probably not buying a whole lot of anything."

  "What does that mean?"

  She told him, then, of the payment arrangements for the borg-beasts, and how she could no longer collect. "I'm overextended," she concluded grimly, "and time's running out."

  Devin cocked his head and studied his kinswoman. This was not the optimistic, ambitious Lish he remembered. Her trouble was big, alright, for it to weigh on her so. Old habits of concern for one's clanmate came to the fore, and his tone softened. "How overextended is that?" he asked.

  "A couple million," she said softly.

  His eyes widened. Scratch helping her out of his personal savings.

  "Millions?" he breathed.

  "Loans from the Scripman, due in a month. Well—six weeks now, that's all that's left." She referred not to a Selmun month, but to the bureaucratic standard set by Imperial fiat. Intentionally blind to any planet's natural cycle, calendar increments of twenty-five hours a day, ten days a week, ten weeks a month, made for convenient accounting across several hundred diverse sectors.

  She seemed to leave something hanging. "What else?" he prompted.

  "Short payment to the netrunner who finished the delivery for me," Lish conceded. "He's a dangerous one to shortchange. There's not much cash left, either. I've got enough to pay the derevin another two weeks. After that, my protection's gone." She gave a sick laugh. "I may not be alive for the Scripman to kill for his money when it comes due."

  "What about your smuggling runs?" he asked. "The hot drops?"

  "No one's getting through to do ocean drops these days. Security's too tight right now, unless ..." The Holdout spoke again, tentatively. "I don't suppose you'd want to do some runs for me...?"

  "Runs?"

  "Offplanet, onplanet. You're a great pilot, Devin, better than the others who work for me. You could beat system patrols." She warmed to the topic. "If I move cargo, I might be able to pay off some of this debt, buy some time—"

  He shook his head once, emphatically. "No."

  "But—"

  "No, Lish. I don't like the price you pay if you're caught."

  The Holdout's expression darkened. He went on, to soften his refusal. "Maybe there's some other way. You say this Lanzig died. So, why don't you demand payment from someone else?"

  She snorted. "Like who?"

  "No, wait." What he had said casually began to make sense to him. "Why not approach the people using the borgbeasts? They took delivery on the cargo and they're benefiting from it."

  Lish thought it through and a shadow seemed to lift from her face. "Say ... you might have something, there."

  "Who are these Gambru Leaguers?"

  "The terrorists? Don't know. I don't follow local politics."

  "Maybe you should start. As I see it, they're the ones owe you a couple million."

  "A lot more than that. Two mil and change is what I owe the Scripman, that's all. This was a high-risk, very high-profit venture."

  Devin ducked his chin. "Then demand that payoff from the ones who are using your cargo. That's my advice."

  Lish caught his eyes with hers. "Will you help me?"

  Contradictory answers flew through the spacer's mind, locking his mouth tightly shut. She watched the war behind his eyes, as recent irritation warred with old loyalties. The clan ties won out.

  "Dammit, Lish." He let out a breath and scowled at her. "Yes, I will."

  XLIX

  When things went wrong, it was Reva's habit to leave. There was no need to stick around in an ugly moment when you could move to. a Now that avoided the difficulty. So it was strange that she didn't skip across several Timelines after her fight with Lish, abandoning the Holdout and her problems in a Mainline that no longer existed subjectively.

>   Reva pushed that thought aside, puzzled by her own behavior. She didn't fight with people like she had with Lish. She killed them, or she ignored them. There was no one she cared about enough to fight with that way.

  Leaving Selmun was a reflex, her best way to escape a difficult situation besides using the Lines for a reality shift. She passed fluidly between moments, staying always close to Mainline, and left Selmun as an unseen passenger on the next ship out, a sector liner bound for Ard.

  At the Lyndir stopover, she left the ship and made some calls, then returned as a regular passenger with a claim to cabin and service. Ard was as good a place as any to receive final payment for the work on Selmun III, and she was overdue to collect.

  She met the Cardman in a bar near the Startown gate. She didn't wait long. The courier remembered her last fit of pique and was prompt in his delivery. He slipped into the booth across from her, and began without small talk. "Mr. Harric would like to know why the work took so long at your last location."

  Reva raised one incredulous eyebrow. A hit took however long it took to ensure untraceability. On R'debh, of course, there had been the minor distraction of an unscheduled trip to Des'lin and time spent with Lish—and that was none of Adahn's affair.

  "If he has time limitations, he needs to specify that when contracting. Fast costs twice the price, paid in advance. He already knows this, but you can remind him of my terms."

  The Cardman flinched at her unblinking gaze, and ducked his chin hastily. He lifted the security case to the table.

  Reva laid a hand atop it before he could open it. "Describe."

  The balding fellow swallowed audibly, and began his dealer's spiel. "Fifteen cuts resonant crystal, type N3, graded through 1,000 centierg amplification. Local product, quality-tested and cleared for transshipment offworld. Certificate's inside. Cash credit chit for 50k. That's all."

  "Crystal?"

  "Yes."

  She reconsidered the case. "Open market goods, clear and legal?"

  "Yes."

  Satisfying. "Open it," she ordered.

  He showed her the lock codes as he unsealed the container and force screen. Reva examined the contents.

  "Impressive," she conceded. Crystal prisms nested snugly in morphfoam, blue-green lights scintillating off the smooth-ground facets on their sides. A handspan long and a finger wide, they were the power conversion and output element essential to devices as various as medcenter scanners and subspace com systems. Larger versions powered blast cannon and warp engines; smaller shards focused the output of hand-held energy weapons. Reva was looking at about 150,000 CR worth of perfectly legal and valued components she could trade anywhere.

  The silver-hued plastic chit in a corner of the security case was almost easy to miss. She plucked it out and studied the green-hued hologram embedded in the surface; 50,000, cash. Then she dropped the chit back into the case and closed the lid.

  The courier breathed a little easier, and went on to his next item of business. "I'm supposed to ask when you'll be available for any new work that may come up."

  Her long-nailed fingers gripped the carry handle, but left the case on the table. She pursed her lips and a moment of silence passed. "Tell Adahn I'll call when I'm on the market again."

  The Cardman blinked, unhappy with the noncommittal reply.

  "Was there anything else?"

  He cleared his throat. "No. That's all."

  Reva nodded in satisfaction, then collected the case and left without another word.

  She started back to the starport, but a nervous clenching in her stomach slowed her footsteps. She tried to place the feeling, then paused in the inky shadow of an alley mouth and slipped into the mode between Timeliness. Surveying the multifaceted Nows, she saw nothing threatening near her or in the near future. Slowly she realized it was not anticipation that she felt; it was a nervous kind of dread, a formless anxiety that left her back in Mainline, standing aimlessly near the walk that led to the starport.

  She took a few slow steps until ennui arrested her motion outside a restaurant. She stared thoughtfully toward the dome and the transport it offered offworld, unable or unwilling to continue on her way.

  I don't want to go, she suddenly knew. If I go, I decide. On to Merith, where I can fence these goods. Or back to R'debh.

  I don't have a choice, she considered. I've got to move these goods; Merith is the place to do that, and it's a good long distance away from that woman and her deathwish.

  She stepped into the nearby restaurant then, and ordered something she didn't plan on eating, to gain time.

  Time for what? she wondered. To make up my mind? I thought I already had.

  She had been through this once before, on the flight out from Selmun III. It was simple enough: collect payment; trade it for cash and percentage through the Merith fence; spend time there to regroup. Forget about Lish. Reva's anger at the Holdout's actions had unsettled even herself.

  I need distance, she told herself. I don't have to go back there again. I can just go on....

  Right, a cynical voice sneered in her head. That's why you've been careful to stay in the same Mainline as the Lish you know. You can go easily enough, but you don't really want to get away.

  Why's that? she challenged the voice, but the cynic was quiet, leaving the assassin to fill in the blanks for herself. She toyed with her food while she turned over possibilities, and knew all the while she was evading a simple truth she hated to express. .

  Lish has become my friend. I don't want it to end like this.

  Reva forced a swallow of recycled water past the tightness in her throat. Her past was checkered with all kinds of unfinished business and abandoned relationships, but this time, things went deeper than that, and it didn't take much pondering to get to the heart of the matter. The answer was there, anxious to intrude into her conscious thoughts.

  I feel more toward her than I would toward a friend, Reva admitted to herself. Not that she knows it. Not that I'll ever act on it. Everyone I get close to I lose, and I don't need to lose more people than I already have in my life.

  It was that attraction that had fluttered to life on Des'lin, buried these many weeks but not languishing in the back of Reva's mind, seeking a life of its own in this coloration of what had started as casual friendship. She laughed suddenly, sharply, a short ironic bark that caused other restaurant patrons to turn and look at her, then look away.

  If I'd just slept with her, I'd be over it by now, ready to leave this Line and all these people behind. Wouldn't I?

  She sighed ruefully. Not so sure that was true, either. She loved neither men nor women, surely never fell in love with either. She amused herself with both sexes, and that one time she'd loved a lover... well, he was unplanned, an accident that chance had snatched away from her soon enough. It was all pretty damn confusing, especially when you added in Line-traveling and tried to return to someone who didn't know you anymore. And at the base of it all, underlying these tangled caring webs she tried to avoid, was a foundation of friendship. She wasn't very good at doing friendship.

  But not for lack of trying. Maybe that was the thing with Lish: Reva might never be more, but at least she could be that, a friend. And her friend had never even heard her reason for anger, for her concern over the smuggler's latest actions on R'debh. Lish was dangerously ignorant of Karuu's connections to Adahn, and the crime boss' power and taste for retaliation.

  Reva chided herself for letting the incident linger on her mind. You can't baby-sit every new Holdout on the block, she thought, and in the next heartbeat told herself to quit whining about it. Lish wasn't every Holdout. She was the one Reva had invested time and energy in, and that made her different from everyone else.

  Reva began to pick at her food, grown cold during her internal debate. She mulled over the alien idea of friendship, wondered if Lish was still mad at her.

  Would she even listen to me if I went back?

  It was a subject to leave to the future. A
cknowledging the issue had freed her steps for now; today it was enough to go on to Merith, and once there, Reva could decide how to deal with the Holdout. Her friend.

  L

  "Listen good," Daribi boomed out to Islanders from a tabletop in the Dive, their bar and headquarters.

  Faces looked at him expectantly and he continued.

  "You know who shut Karuu down?" he declared. "Shiran Lish, the Holdout in Lairdome 7. Some kind of trick. She set him up, let him get snagged for a cargo she brought onworld. And you know who's our biggest threat on the docks right now? Same person.

  "It's been a long time since we had a war here." Daribi spoke louder, more excitedly. "I say it's time for another. Time to get our revenge for being made to scurry from the Bugs. Time to make sure we won't be challenged on the docks. And time to take a bigger piece of the action from this offworlder who made trouble for us!"

  "She signed the Skiffjammers," a voice in the crowd volunteered.

  "That's right, she did." Muttered curses swept through the assembled Islanders. There was no love lost between the derevin.

  "With the cargo she landed, and the maneuvering she's done, she's making a bid to run the show here on R'debh."

  "So?" challenged one. "What's it to us?"

  The Chief waited until the crowd silenced to hear his reply.

  "She's not established yet. If we move now, we can take over before she's entrenched. If we don't, she'll move in with Skiff-jammers sooner or later to cut us out of the waterfront." Angry grumbles agreed with him. "So here's our chance. Streetwar."

  By the end of his speech he was exhorting them in shouts, and they were shouting right back with him. A chorus of approval came from the majority, fists raised and ritual victory steps danced in anticipation. In the end all were in agreement.