Yet human or ghost, either could be killed, and he would not underestimate his quarry again. She was nearby, he was certain, for a soul-stealer never strayed far from its intended victim, not when final battle had been joined. He took the knife into his hand again, and began to search for Reva.
CXXXIX
A warning telltale on Adahn's desk console flashed persistently. He glanced that way quickly, unwilling to miss the drama unfolding in the antechamber. Then he recognized what the flashing light meant.
"Hey!" he blurted. "Who unsealed the doors?"
His tone demanded an answer, but his MazeRats had none for him. He rekeyed the lock sequences, sparing hasty glances toward the vid monitor. Hopefully Reva would not realize her way out was unbarred—no time right now to figure how that had happened, later he could wring the neck of the idiot who had defied his orders—
Security screens came back on. Then flicked off of their own accord. He heard the four-way locking bolts in his blast-safe door retract from the wall, saw the status trace that showed his office unsecured—
"What the fuck is going on here?" he shouted, an angry bellow to MazeRats who stirred in concern but couldn't help him. Harric himself controlled the master console, the position that ordered this level of physical security. And he wasn't even jacked in.
He remedied that in a moment, slotting into his desk. Instead of the orderly realm of his virtual command center, he found himself in a featureless cybervoid.
"Tsk, tsk, tsk." A slender figure with jagged lightning-shaped edges confronted him. Its nearly stick-figure proportions made the wagging spike of a finger look ridiculous.
"Who the fuck are you?" the crime boss demanded hotly.
"You're not welcome here," the intruder replied. "Back upstairs you go, now."
Where there had been void a steely-black wall flashed into existence between Harric and the netrunner. A round hatchway separated the two sims, sealed an instant later by the many-leaved plates of an iris valve, contracting shut.
Harric's netlink went dead, and he was back, stranded at his desk, a command console no longer his to order. Telltales revealed the extent of the intrusion: security screens had dropped, his blast door was open, even his personal force field at his desk had been disabled.
His complacency was shattered beyond repair. These were the things that kept him safe, kept him insulated from Reva, or Yavobo for that matter. He stood, moved by anger and worry, just as the bolt from the Sundragon punched through the wall and blazed through his office.
Two MazeRats fell, one holed, one losing an arm and part of his torso. The charge passed close enough to heat the air near Harric's face, and burned on nearly into Janus' office. It dissipated in a crackle of ionization around the half-vaporized hole.
There was an outcry of dismay and a whimper from the dying wounded; MazeRats in a neighboring room hammered at a door that had mysteriously locked itself against them. Harric looked up, panic threatening to grab hold of him. This was not leisurely command of a sterile killing from a safe vantage point. Somehow he was suddenly on the firing line, his systems preempted.
"Janus," he barked into the intercom, "get in here!"
The wall monitor was black, destroyed by the energy beam. Harric was blinded and ignorant. How to regain control of his systems? Was he in immediate danger, from the net intruder, from the assassin? Impossible to gauge.
"Lock that door manually!" he snapped to the three remaining MazeRats. He thumbed the intercom. "You reserves—go through the service hall, cut through Janus' office. Get in here quick."
He waited for his instructions to be carried out. And waited.
Janus didn't respond. The door wouldn't lock; every time a Rat secured the bolt, automatic systems released it. MazeRats weren't flooding into the room, no armed security was handy—
Then something slammed hard against his office door, thrusting it open against the Rat who was trying to lock it. A man's limp arm fell through the gap, to drop sprawled out on the floor. Startled, Adahn looked up, glimpsed Yavobo moving in the antechamber—then the skirling of a perimeter alarm tugged his eyes back to the estate map on his desk.
Harric hammered his fists helplessly on his desktop. Why hadn't the system cleansed itself of this invasion yet? Was the perimeter alert a false alarm triggered by the decker?
The blast door swung wide, shoved by the towering alien. MazeRats fell back before him, handling their guns uneasily, looking to Harric for guidance.
Yavobo stepped over the body blocking the doorway, met Adahn's wide eyes. "Something's terribly wrong," Harric told him in a rush. "We have an intruder in the house systems. We might be under attack."
The alien glanced around the office, at Sundragon damage and slain MazeRats, took in Harric's stance and smell of nervous fear. "I seek the woman," he said simply.
"The hell with her," the crime boss said angrily. "I need your help."
Cruel amusement lit the warrior's face as he threw Harric's own words back at him. "You are on your own," he said, then turned on his heel and left the office, striding through the blood-spattered antechamber.
Adahn had no time to curse or call him back, because internal alarms joined the perimeter alerts. Com links were dead, but that didn't matter anymore.
He could hear weapons fire in the halls.
CXL
First step in walking the Lines is to see them. Easy. You could do that in one place, a trick of vision, of altered perception.
The second step is to move across the Lines: to pick one Now to live in, to commit to one reality. To translate subjective consciousness, according to Vask's theory, into an alternate self in a parallel Timeline.
Somewhere between those steps was that balance point Reva thought of as standing between the Lines, perching on the razor-thin edge that separated various Nows, not committed to any of them.
Usually she traveled swiftly through that balance point. It was hard to maintain that state which Vask called phase-shifted. It was much easier to slip into one of the neighboring Realtimes instead. Walking the Lines.
Only here, all the Lines held Yavobo, and her death was very close.
So Reva clung to that balance, precariously at first, then with increasing confidence. This wasn't much different than walking surveillance, except that she wasn't going to step in and out of Realtime. She didn't dare. Yavobo was here in the antechamber; moments ahead, in various Nows, he left, then returned. In some he caught her—her fatal mistake, she'd come back to solid reality at the wrong time, or wrong place. In some Lines he looked around, hunting, not finding, and left the room again.
Mainline was like that and she breathed a little easier. She was on the right track.
When Yavobo marched past her phase-shifted self, he headed for the door she had entered by. That was when she realized the doors were no longer locked. With the alien down the hall, she picked another exit at random and moved toward it. Not the one where Vask lay unmoving: she hoped he wasn't dead, but she had to save herself first, if she wanted to help him later.
Beyond the Fixer she saw Adahn, gesturing to MazeRats—but the crime boss was no longer a priority, either. In this urgent moment her retreat was just that: retreat, while Yavobo's back was turned for brief moments.
She slipped out a side door while the warrior searched for her in the wrong direction.
Yavobo moved down the marbled entrance hall. Nothing.
Checked rooms whose doors had been thrown open. Nothing.
Observed the defunct service mecho, its torso sheared by blast rifle fire.
He paused in his single-minded hunt and listened. The front of the great house was silent. He trod cautiously to the entrance, glanced outside. The woman's skimmer remained parked where she had arrived, and several others besides. Not skimmers: air cars, slewed in hastily abandoned positions. The warrior took in the scene, recalling Harric's words, and it all came clear to him.
Intruders. Reva had help, that was the only explanation fo
r this. Of course she had not come alone. She had smelled a trap.
He turned and ran back up the grand hallway. Infiltrators would approach from more than one direction, that was a given. And the assassin would not let Adahn go so lightly, Yavobo was certain. Joined by reinforcements, she must be there, still, near Harric's offices.
He ran into the antechamber. The man he had thrown remained motionless on the floor, but Harric's office beyond was empty. A side door gaped that had been closed just minutes before. Had Reva come this way?
He went through, into a service corridor. He heard weapons fire from down the hall, and moved cautiously toward it.
CXLI
"Back me up, Flash!" Nomad yelled over his shoulder. "I'm running out of juice!"
A slick-faceted panther came too close to the lockout grid, and he loosed a blast at it. Then a decker in the form of a silver knight nailed him in the torso with an acid-orange beam, a disrupter program similar to his own weapon.
The energy hit him with a shattering electrical charge. His blue wire-frame chest bleached through green to washed-out yellow. Data blackouts began as he recoiled from the hit. Virtual reality melted away, leaving him in IntSec ops, jacked into his deck; then the ops center vanished as backup circuits struggled to hold him in the Net. The virtual grid flickered back into sight, its red bars sliding open one by one, freeing the tunnel mouth as enemy netrunners overcame the security lockout.
Nomad retreated to FlashMan's position.
"Couldn't hold 'em ..." he squeezed out.
"You alright?"
"No." Nomad staggered to his knees as the last of the lockout grid faded away. He saw a glass-black panther rush by to spring at FlashMan. A second ICE construct slammed into Nomad's back and drove him to the ground on his face. He glimpsed Flash
driven backward as well, data leads ripping from his head. Panther jaws closed upon the lightning-form's chest.
In the body, Nomad thumbed his emergency disconnect.
Nomad could hear before he could see again, though his language centers were scrambled and the sounds around him made no sense. Something pricked him in the neck; when objects swam into sight once more, an op center medtech was leaning over him with tabgun in hand. Nomad sprawled on the floor, shot full of brainstim, one smoking rigger lead dangling from his burned-out cyberdeck in the console nearby.
Commander Obray pushed through the crowd, squatted by his nearly fried decker. "What happened?" he asked sharply. Emergency aborts were rare.
Nomad mouthed words before they made their slurred way from his mouth. "Flash friends 'tacking Harric. You wan' cartel, move fast. Harric's running."
Obray looked to a lieutenant. "Scramble a raid party. Now."
CXLII
Karuu was numb. Events conspired to kill him and all he could think of was what he couldn't do. Couldn't hide, not inside Harric's estate. Couldn't risk getting shot, as long as Janus kept a gun on him. For once his inventiveness was failing him. At this rate it would amount to his death.
Could he run for it—? Shouts and gunshots in the hall cut that line of thinking short. He and Harric's lieutenant exchanged a startled look, then both came to their feet as MazeRats burst into the room from Adahn's office. Sparing no attention for the fugitive Dorleoni, they charged ahead, out the other door, into the hall, sheltering behind the door panel to fire upon intruders who were coming at a run.
Adahn came on their heels, mouth opened to order Janus. His mouth stayed open as he spotted Karuu.
"You!" he shouted at this convenient outlet for his rage and frustration. Karuu quailed, but the crime boss was upon him, the man's meaty hands clamped tight about his stubby neck. Harric spared a glance at the doorway where his MazeRats had not yet
cleared the exit for him, then shoved Karuu back against the wall. He shook him like a scrap of cloth.
"All this shit started with you, you motherless turd!" Harric screamed red-faced. Before he could do more the door panel was blown down the hall and a concussion wave staggered everyone in the room. Lean, wiry commandos leapt over dead MazeRats in the doorway, and Harric whirled to face them, swinging Karuu about with him. The Holdout was swept through the air to dangle tiptoed before the crime boss, Harric's left arm about his neck. He struggled to pant for air.
Janus had dropped his gun and was ducking behind the desk as the last man stepped into the office. He was taller than his comrades, and clad in a spacer's gray coverall. He held only a needlegun, but his eyes widened as he recognized Harric from security pix. He brought his weapon to bear.
Before he could complete the motion Karuu saw Harric's right arm thrust forward with unnatural speed, palm out as if to halt the man.
"Don't move!" Adahn barked.
The intruders hesitated, for they saw the same thing Karuu did: the base of the man's palm swiveled downward, revealing the large-bore muzzle of a scatter cannon. The cyberweapon was installed in place of a forearm, housed in synthflesh that served Harric as an ordinary arm would. The bizarrely lethal device could blow away the cluster of commandos and the far wall in the wink of an eye.
"You're escorting me out of here, past your perimeter guard—"
With Karuu as a shield. To have his neck snapped as soon as he was no longer needed, of course.
The Holdout twisted his head toward his captor's beefy fist, close beside his jaw. Maybe this was a cyber-arm, too.
Maybe it wasn't.
The Dorleoni bared his tusks and struck. Ripping teeth sank into human flesh, and met in the middle of a very human hand, crunching finger bones that obstructed the way.
Harric let out a deafening scream and tried to yank his hand from Karuu's maw. Shiran Devin fired. Explosive-tipped needles ended Harric's outcry with abruptness and a spray of gore.
The falling body pulled Karuu to the floor with it. There he lay, jaws in a death-grip, face to face with a wide-eyed Janus, as renewed gunfire caused their attackers to draw back.
"Let's get out of here," said Adahn's former lieutenant.
Karuu couldn't have agreed more.
CXLIII
Reva walked softly down the corridor, resisting the urge to run as she watched for threats or danger. If she lost her concentration, she'd be back in Mainline or some nearby reality, maybe without the breathing space to shift away again. Her advance was cautious and slow, and she scanned the Lines ahead as best she could.
That's how she saw Devin.
The surprise of it threatened to drive her from that chancy balance point, plunge her unprepared into Realtime. She shut her eyes, held on to that center carefully. When she was secure again, she looked down the hallway once more.
At the end was an intersection, and across it ran the spacer. Several Devins, in several Realtimes: in Mainline he advanced behind Eklun and a handful of Skiffjammers, running down the hall, kicking in doorways and securing rooms as they came.
It was foolhardy and bold and incredible. She wanted to laugh with giddy relief. She had never needed or wanted help before, but it wasn't an offer she'd turn down right now.
The spacer and a handful of 'Jammers moved out of sight. She heard them shoot open the door to an office and flood within. Reva shifted down into Mainline, and hurried ahead to join them.
In the hall behind her Yavobo grinned fiercely and began to run. He moved in a sprint, abandoning stealth to close the distance between them.
The sudden rustle of motion behind her alerted Reva, and her heart leapt into her throat. She forced herself not to waste one precious second confirming what she already knew in her gut. Like a slow-motion runner in a nightmare, she tried to flee, willing muscles to accelerate, to carry her away from danger—
The hunter's dash that could bring a running keshun to ground caught Reva handily. She felt a weight drive into her from behind, something between a tackle and an overbearing rush. If she landed flat out, her enemy on her back, she would be at his mercy. She tried to angle her body even as he bore her to the ground, twisting
> so that she could bring her vibroblade into action.
The movement was futile. Yavobo's arm was around her waist and he slammed her down as she fell, left shoulder and head impacting the floor at the same time.
The world vanished in a flare of crimson pain. Vision receded for a moment, and Reva struggled to cling to consciousness. Yavobo flipped her over onto her back, sat atop her while she lay helpless, momentarily stunned.
He didn't even bother to pin her arms. Her left one was useless, waves of pain from the wounded shoulder a steady counterpoint to her racing pulse. Her vibroblade was clenched in her right hand, the straw clutched by a drowning woman. Yavobo seemed contemptuous of it. He held his own metal blade casually near her neck, within her line of sight.
Her breath came short and labored with the weight of the enemy upon her. Her nightmare confronted her, the relentless killer, the unstoppable machine. Like an echo of the person she had been, one who wouldn't quit until her target was dead.
She swallowed down nausea, and did the only thing left to her. She fought.
She drove toward his ribs with her blade that could slice plassteel without effort. He was ready for her, his arm twisting out of the way, hand striking down toward hers, long fingers wrapping around her fist and bringing it forward to squeeze, squeeze until she released the weapon. Small bones ground together in her hand and tortured pressure points shot fire up her arm. His iron grip compelled her to drop the weapon.
Unhanded, the monofilament wire went inert and tumbled to the floor beside her. Yavobo smiled and put his knife to her throat.
She faltered, the movement of his weapon a deadly fascination. Maybe it was just retribution. Revenge on her, as she had wanted on Lish's murderer. Or thought she wanted, for she was torn with the need to put the killing behind her. She used to believe she was only taking ghosts out of ghost Lines. She knew differently now.
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