Mainline (2 page)

"It doesn't matter," her mother Niva assured her often. "The mutation doesn't always take. We get along fine without it, your father and I. You will, too."

Reva dropped through the water-lock and swam toward school behind her brother. The fins on her feet propelled her through the water as well as or better than a sea-child's webbed toes. Like other R'debh natives, she was lean, with the muscles of a swimmer. In that respect she was no different from the others, and faster than most. She drew close to Calin despite his head start.

They met Lita beneath the kelp rafts, their friend treading water slowly, her weight belt not adjusted quite right for neutral buoyancy. Reva looked for the others, caught a motion behind the kelp fronds. She slowed, on her guard. They were hiding. She had been the brunt of many a joke that had started this way before.

Her brother body-signed to Lita, asking if she wanted to race to school. She signed no, waved him on, and waited, hands sculling through blue-green ocean.

As Reva came near, Lita clutched at a sudden cramp in her leg, gills flaring in pain. Her over-weight belt pulled her down, toward the poisonous spines of the beldy, urchins that lived among the kelp stalks on the bottom. Reva glided close, grasping to pull her friend up and away from the danger. The girl uncoiled as the others burst from their hiding places amid the fronds. Hands grabbed Reva's feet, stripping the fins from her legs. Lita grinned and plucked the breather mask from Reva's face. The children laughed, an explosion of bubbles, then turned and raced toward school.

Through angry, slitted eyes, streaming tears lost in the bio-rich ocean around her, Reva glared after her schoolmates in a rage of frustration and hurt. She drew up a leg to scissor-kick her way to the surface—but before she could, the undersea scene blurred and shifted. This was not a distortion caused by stinging seawater, but unfocus of another kind Reva had never seen this way before.

She became light-headed. Time slowed. There were several scenes to watch instead of one, several bodies superimposed in the same place, like different versions of the same vidcast. Each figure acting like, yet unlike, the clones of its image.

It was a confusing garble: her agemates swimming to school, her gear gripped in their hands. Frelo releasing a fin and letting it bob to the surface; Frelo holding the fin, and swimming with his hand inside it. Simultaneously, Lita carrying the breathing gill, donning it for fun, letting it drop, being distracted by it, brushing too close to a kelp-crawler....

Angry impetus fixed on that vision. Yes! thought Reva. I wish she were hurt. I don't care. Then the multiple vision was gone, and she kicked her way to air.

Frelo followed, screaming to Reva over the whitecaps. "Get help! Lita's bit by a kelp-crawler!" He vanished beneath the waves.

Reva was stunned, swimming without thinking to the nearest kelp platform. The men there dove, got the sea-child to medical care. But not in time. Lita lost her arm.

And Reva discovered her gift.

Reva put Selmun III
out of her mind. The courier was late, and she paced while she waited, high-heeled boots clicking an angry staccato on the ceraplast flooring.

By time the Cardman showed, she was ready to strangle the man. She held him with her gaze, a trick of intensity she had perfected to an art. He was middle-aged, pale, and slim, a bureaucrat with a receding hairline and a security case bonded to his wrist.

"Next time I don't wait," she said coldly, "and you can explain to Adahn why his contract is refused."

The Cardman blanched. Before he could decide on a response, Reva pointed him toward a conference cubicle. He slipped gratefully out from under her stare and entered the chamber. Reva followed right behind him, sealing the door shut in Kirk's face. She opaqued the outer wall and motioned to the security case.

"Let's see it."

Inside were ten vials of drugs and one palm-sized AI link module. "What's the line?" Reva asked, picking up a vial first.

The Cardman cleared his throat and spoke in dealer's shorthand. "Ten vials, 50 cc per, top-batch hallendorphs. Contraband on Class B worlds and better. Psychologically addictive. Going rate after 50 percent dilute cut, 100 creds per cc to smugglers. Hijacked MCP, the newest from Renels-Lyman."

"Mind control pharmaceuticals," Reva echoed. "Imperial?"

The Cardman nodded.

A muscle tightened in her jaw, and green-gilded nails clicked against the vial. She replaced it in the case and picked up the link module. "And this?"

"Kardon-3M language brain. Ten thousand languages, program independent. Fits standard smartmechs."

Reva looked up from the unit in her hand. "Where's it from?"

The Cardman swallowed nervously. "Imperial Army smart-mech."

"Hot, like the drugs." It was a statement, not a question.

The courier dipped his head. "But rated at 50K credits, conservative," he added. "It'll probably go for 100K."

She slipped the palm-sized unit back into its holder. "Tell Adahn, 'No more.' I'm tired of the risk. In the future I take only clean goods worth the same or more. You hear me?"

The courier nodded as he removed the bonded wristlock from his arm. "But he needs to move these things, you understand, and you're so—"

Steel-hard fingers gripped his throat, pushed him back against the opaque wall. The Cardman smelled her perfume, spicy and sweet, just before his air was shut off.

Reva's face came close to his, her voice low and naturally husky. "I'm so good, I don't need backblast from you or Adahn.

He wants my services, he pays going rate. Clean. I'm not a clearinghouse. Gichnu?" She emphasized the Ganandi query with a squeeze of her fingers. The Cardman gurgled and tried to nod, pawing futilely at her hand.

Reva released her grip and left him collapsed and gasping against the wall. Security case in hand, she unsealed the cubicle and left.

Kirk was so fascinated by the stricken courier he forgot to follow her. She didn't ask him along.

Security could be
tight in starports, where planetary authorities like to monitor who and what comes through their points of entry. That was why Reva seldom carried anything with her on a job but a credmeter and a change of clothes so widely mass-marketed they couldn't be traced.

The drawback was that she had to supply her needs locally. When those needs included specialty items—concussion detonators, bypass circuitry, even simple drugs—then that required a special contact: a Holdout, the smuggler or black market connection that greased the skids of private enterprise on almost every world in the Empire. It was the trade she had started in, and the one whose people she judged best.

Her preferred Holdout on Selmun III was Karuu. When she arrived in Amasl, she headed to his midtown offices, staffed by the innocent employees of his beldy packing firm. As with most good Holdouts, it was an impeccably legitimate front. She avoided that front by using the private entrance to Karuu's lounge-suite. A keycode and a spoken password admitted her and alerted the Holdout to his visitor.

Karuu stepped out of the bounce tube, a straight drop from his office, and waddled over to join her, his flipperlike feet bare beneath the yellow R'debhi sarong. His bright eyes were almost lost behind a bristling mustache and the doleful expression common to Dorleon natives. Reva thought of the walruslike hoslodi whenever she saw the alien Holdout.

"Reva!" he enthused. "So happy you are here! Please to sit." He gestured her to a float-couch, punched for drinks on the service table. "The usual?" he asked. "Kabo juice?"

The assassin nodded, perversely taking a chair instead of the couch. She accepted the drink when it came. Staring at the glass hid her lapse of concentration as her timesense roved nearby Lines. In none of them did she pass out after drinking. In none was she rudely surprised by arresting officers bursting from concealment.

Reva let the drink stand after a single sip, waiting for the Dorleoni to settle himself. It didn't pay to rush business with this one. His display of congeniality was misleading: although nods and encouragement were always forthcoming, nothing happened until numbers and terms were agreed upon. And those agreements came only after cutthroat bargaining.

Karuu opened with a simple query. "And how can I help you this time, tall one?"

"I hear the arms trade is doing real well, Karuu."

The alien nodded benignly.

"I also hear you have toys moving through Amasl that've never been here before."

Karuu shrugged. "Many things are heard, Reva. Who knows where rumors start?"

"Is it true you can get time patches?"

The alien sat stock-still, his evasive chatter silenced for the moment. "Time patches," he echoed.

Their trade name was IDP, Inert Delivery Patch, an industrial variation on the medicine patches used to deliver drugs through the skin over a precisely timed period. Their construction was delicate: two thin sheets of inert synthetic, the center of one shaved microns thinner than the other. With an active liquid or gel sandwiched between the two, the patch degraded where it was thinnest. Mixed, matched, and measured correctly, the contents of the patch bled through a pinhole leak at an exact time: seconds, minutes, hours, or days later.

The destructive potential was too good for criminals or saboteurs to pass it up for long. Want to set off an explosion where conventional detonators would be detected? Slap a time patch holding the right catalyst on the explosive, and leave. Want someone's vacc suit to decompress while he's in it and no one's around? If you knew when he'd be in vacuum, a time patch holding acid was your answer.

IDPs caught on quick, and were outlawed quicker. But that was what Holdouts were for.

Reva verbally prodded her connection. "Come on, Karuu. Downlink."

The alien looked perplexed. "I do not know what to tell you, Reva. I cannot help you in this way, no."

"Then why the reaction?"

His mustache bristled. "I, too, hear rumors that time patches are here, yes. I do not have them; new source does."

"I need one. Who's the connection?"

The Holdout shook his head. "I cannot vouch for the source. New Holdout, new trade. Could be Customs already have finger on her. Hard to say."

He evaded her questions until Reva brought out her credmeter. She tapped out the figure "1000 CR" and showed it to him. "A one-time referral fee," she said. "For a one-time purchase. You're not losing my business, you know."

The beldy packer didn't hesitate long. "Lairdome 7. Ask for Lish. She sells cryocases for offworld cargo runs, owns the company. Ask about the 'hex-pack special.' She will know to work with you."

After the credits were transferred to Karuu's credmeter, he added, "Lish came from nowhere. We are not sure of her yet. I offer no guarantees about service or product, tall one."

Reva stood. "No guarantees," she acknowledged.

She'd lived without guarantees since she'd learned to cross the Lines. So what else was new?

Aztrakhani warriors didn't
leave their homeworld often. No one wanted to hire them, and they were unwelcome as travelers. Xenologists said they were the victims of seasonal hormone surges so strong that Aztrakhani tribes were driven to periodic campaigns of genocide against their own race. The role this played in population control on their homeworld was notable, but was not a great enticement to tourism. Few citizens of the Empire knew Aztrakhan existed; fewer knew its dominant species by sight.

Physically, Yavobo was a typical member of his race. At 2.6 meters in height, he towered over most humans. His black and red mottled skin was leathery in texture, a perfect camouflage

pattern for the deserts of his native land. His slitted pupils gave him exceptional night vision. His reflexes were desert-trained and warrior-fast.

It was less apparent that Yavobo was a eunuch, and thus not subject to the extremes of hormone-induced temper for which his race was notorious. Not that he was without temper. No. And the moods of an Aztrakhani eunuch were enough to put bystanders in the medcenter. This warrior, however, had found a creative outlet for his natural aggressions.

Yavobo was a bounty hunter. Though an accident of youthful combat made the warrior an outcast among his people, it freed him for travel in the Empire, and with years of experience he had finally hit upon this way to legitimately hunt a sentient being, his favorite prey. His clients felt he had made the best of his circumstances.

Clients like Albek Murs, Senior Advisor to the Economic Council of Selmun III.

When Murs wanted to hire Yavobo, the Aztrakhani at first re
fused the commission. "I'm not a bodyguard," he said flatly.

Albek held a powerful position. He wasn't used to being refused, and persisted with the alien. "I don't want a bodyguard. I want a bounty hunter. You are that, I take it?"

The comment was calculated to goad. Unfortunately, Albek underestimated how easily an Aztrakhani was provoked. Before he could blink he was staring down the muzzle of a wide-bore j dart gun, the kind that holds heavy-caliber hunting darts designed for maximum damage at short range.