Mainline (34 page)

He could always get the clandestine weapons later, acquired with the help of Internal Security, if necessary. Now was the time In see what occupied Reva on this, her first jaunt outside the villa since her days of moody brooding had begun. It was for this that he had reserved his psionic powers, saving them for a time when trailing her seemed worthwhile. Hurrying to close with his quarry, he followed along behind, unseen and undetected.

Devin
took
final astrogation bearings above the plane of the Selmun system, and initiated calculations for their course through warp space.

The feel he gained for the process, bleeding through cyberlinks from the navcomp, was nothing like the explanation of warp travel taught in dirtside schools. A ship generates a warp bubble, so common wisdom would have it, and sits nested safely inside while space itself slips past the hull.

That was a gross oversimplification, he knew. In warp, you were in another dimension, literally, fallen into the interstices between physical reality and the multiverse that bound it all together. Warp space had a reality and substance of its own, though it was a twisting, mind-bending dimension difficult to perceive or comprehend. It could drive a person insane if exposed to it without adequate protections. To transit warp safely, you needed to travel wisely, and hope for a dash of good luck on your side.

Jump ships hopped in and out of warp, skimming that dimension too briefly for its hazards to be a real threat. But continuous warp vessels—like the
Fortune
—could encounter real problems in that extraspatial void. There were things
beyond,
things native to the warp region, that could fatally interrupt a ship's voyage.

Patrolled space lanes were the safest routes to take—and the most roundabout. It would take twelve days to reach Tion by established lanes, and that was not an option on this run. Instead, their route curved spinward, past Lyndir, past the Claw nebula, and finally looped coreward to Tion. Devin confirmed the navcomp plot. The course would get them there in little more than three days.

"Prepare to warp," he warned the crew, then gave a mental command through his rigger jack. Space twisted around the freighter. Stars smeared and stretched into thin lines; then the transition to warp was complete. Visual compensators engaged, and viewscreens displayed a twisting gray fog dotted with muted blurs of yellow and orange lights. It was a computer analog of extradimensional space, with orange for stars below the plane of the galactic equator, yellow for those above. It was nothing like the real thing that hugged the hull of their ship, but a safe and neutral illusion for the fragile human minds buffered inside the skin of the
Fortune.

The engines had transitioned to warp smoothly; systems felt tight to Devin's rigged senses.

They were on their way to Tion.

Reva followed a
seemingly random path through waterfront dives, ships' outfitters, receiving docks, a body sculpting and tattoo parlor, and one blackwire shop. Each stop, each round of questions and greased palms, led her closer to her goal: the local Street Weasel, the Watchman who worked the Lairdomes around the marina. His guttersnipes were the skimmer-heisting, wheedling, drug-peddling children and youths who loitered near the skiff marina fence and the warehouses. They were not yet derevin, but were too street-hardened to be destined for much else.

Long before she found the Weasel, she had that odd sensation again. Hairs rose on the back of her neck, as if she were being watched. She coped with the annoyance as she had before, slipping between Lines, walking along a shadow of the Mainline she had worked so hard to stay in.

That was where Vask lost her—and where he finally found her again.

The assassin cut between two buildings, out of sight of onlookers. When Kastlin entered the alley a moment later, she was gone from sight. It was too fast, too neat, with no place to hide.

Finally alert to how she must have vanished, the IntSec agent followed suit. As rapidly as he had ever done, he let himself go into the sideslip state, hoping to catch sight of her in the ethereal world of unphased matter. He would have to hang back, for blindspotting was not possible in the energy-shifted mode, and two unphased persons appear as solid reality to each other while all around them is insubstantial.

He glimpsed Reva down a misty alleyway, and hurried to catch up. But the assassin was not as he expected to find her, and he slowed cautiously as he neared her ghostly form. That much was wrong, eerily wrong. He glanced at his hands, solid-seeming to the phase-shifted observer; she should look that way, too. But she did not.

Reva was barely visible to the Mutate's eye. He stared unbelieving at her shimmering figure, a shifting blur that sometimes appeared as one person, sometimes two or three, each overlaid one upon the other so they often moved as one. The assassin seemed to be in some realm beyond the sideslip, existing in a different vibrational frequency altogether.

No wonder I was never able to find her, he thought in amazement. What in the seven hells is she doing?

The agent followed as she walked past loading docks, moving around objects that Vask's incorporeal form could pass right through. It seemed as if she were limited by the physical landscape before her, yet in some manner transcended it.

It made no sense to the Psionicist at all, and he trailed her mostly by good luck and guesswork. Sometimes her blurred form was easy to follow; at other times she vanished entirely from sight, to reappear as suddenly several steps ahead or a moment later. Finally she faded from the shifted state completely, but this time her slow blend back into the physical clued Vask to what was happening. Being careful to shift down directly into a place of concealment, he left the otherworldly state of the sideslip as well. He moved into a blindspot and eavesdropped on Reva one more time.

The assassin scowled in discomfort. Her short jaunt between the Lines had not dispelled that crawling feeling. ..,

The Watchman took the frown as intended for himself. It wasn't a good way to start business, not with this one.

"I remember you," he said slowly. "What would a professional like yourself be wanting with the Kipper's crew?"

The last the Kipper knew of her, Holdout was her line. One who could hire a derevin for jobs, no need of street rats. No wonder he watched her with guarded curiosity.

"You've got eyes on the street," Reva said.

The Kipper shrugged. "So have the big boys." He meant the derevin.

She shook her head, a smile touching only her lips. "Your eyes are more discreet. Less noticed, wouldn't you agree?"

"Maybe so," he conceded.

"Then let's deal."

It took a while, but bargaining with the Watchman was pretty straightforward. When Comax Shipping reopened its doors, the surrounding streets and the customer traffic would be observed by the Kipper's ubiquitous street children. Hanging out, as usual; overlooked, as usual.

All for a price that was far less than a week's worth of Skiff-jammer protection. Reva paid in advance, and left the Watchman thanking the Sea Father for his good fortune.

Naturally Dorleoni scientists
would choose Selmun
III
as their meeting place. A convention with the theme of optimizing marine life-forms could hardly go anywhere else. Some convention-goers even planned to swim in the rich ocean water, to see whether its unpleasant flavor and cloying substance was rumor or accurate report from others of their race.

One of their number already knew the truth of the ocean water's feel, and had no desire to repeat his earlier experiences in that line. Okorr ducked out on his fellow travelers, right inside the starport's busy kiosk and shop area. As Dorleoni followed their guide to a waiting transport van, their wayward companion sought the comfort stations, and stayed there for entirely too long.

One hour later, a platinum-pigtailed MazeRat knocked tentatively on the door of his fresher booth.

"Come on," said the MazeRat. "Gerick's waiting for you."

"It took you long enough to get here," a sullen complaint came In response. The door opened to reveal a walrus-faced alien who thrust his carrybag at the street thug. "Carry this, will you? I am grown tired of it."

It contained his identification as scientist and conventioneer, and none of the contents mattered to him anymore. He was already past the Customs checkpoint, where ID verification and random checks of retina prints were the only real obstacle to his return to R'debh. The prints of Okorr's eyes were unknown here, and there was no way they would show up on the Selmun III computers.

Then again, Okorr's eyes were new to their wearer as well. They had been in the Dorleoni's head for barely two weeks, after an unwelcome transplant operation had removed his old orbs and hands and supplanted them with the organs and paws of his unwilling body double. He had to give Adahn credit, though: when it really mattered, the Tribune of the Red Hand was endlessly— , if repulsively—inventive.

The short-furred alien formerly called Karuu stumped after his MazeRat escort. He was soon tucked into a private air car and driven off into the side streets of Amasl.

Wee'ska had strayed
from the pod, wending past coral-grown islands and skirting kelp patches, making her way on dull, unthinking instinct into deeper water. Brightfang, her handler, noticed her departure, and followed his life-friend eastward into the deep. Sometimes such sulks and moods took Handler and borg-beast away from the pod for a time; the others continued on their way, knowing that the pair would rejoin them when the matter was settled, and Wee'ska soothed back into cooperation with her mates.

Brightfang knew something greater was amiss when Wee'ska ignored his croons and demanding clicks, and continued her journey propelled by languid strokes of her tail flukes. She had her mind set on going away. This time, unlike the others, Brightfang detected a morbid single-mindedness to his life-friend's efforts.
O Waterlords, give her hope,
he thought. He knew her illness, her tiredness of spirit and body, and shared much of it himself. But this unerring migration into the depths could betoken only one thing, something neither he nor the other handlers had anticipated in life-friends still so young and able.

It was
ekikeku,
the death-swim, the final distancing wherein a dying creature drew predators and scavengers to itself. A swift end, which kept the podmates safe and abbreviated the failing one's misery.

Brightfang followed Wee'ska's descent through downsloping ravines, hurried to keep sight of her where the light faltered at depth. There were no sizable predators in the R'debh waters, none to ease the borgbeast's passing. Her end would be lingering and slow, a doom of starvation or the slow madness of disorientation and loneliness, far from the solace of her pod.

The handler paused, crooned, and whistled back news of his task to Sharptooth and the others. They would understand he must be by her side for this event. If he could not persuade his life-friend to continue with the others, he must ease her passage from this life. Somehow.

The ghost-ray neared one of the sounds, a rasping scream in a pitch heard more with the soul than with the sound-sensing membrane of near-incorporeal hide. The Sea Father of R'debh slowed and stopped in a broad deepwater valley, hanging there in darkling waters, phosphorescent motes aswirl in his wake.

For the first time he saw what had disturbed his sleep, that which had called to him from half a world away. A slab-headed creature, nearly the length of one of the ray's wings, sizable for (he puny life-forms on this world—
no.
Not from this world, that was it, the strangeness about her. She radiated unnatural frequencies, from the broadband static of her brain to the strangely modulated pulsation of three hearts.

And beneath it all, the groan. The cry of illness and despair that had drawn the Sea Father on, even when interest had waned and curiosity had dulled to indifference. A plaguesome sound, that, a moan from the heart, a disharmony like none that should disorder the sea song of R'debh. And with this one, unlike the others of its kind, the moan had deepened, become a plea to die.

Responding to that need, the ghost-ray obliged. Moving through the water, he phased halfway out of the physical sea. A massive ripple of displaced ocean pulsed ahead of him, but not enough to shove Wee'ska out of the way. Before the borgbeast's huge body could be pushed far aside by the sudden current, she was enveloped by the ghost-ray, the semimaterial wings wrapping about her in an embrace of water and phosphorescence.

Then the Sea Father completed his shift to elsewhere, and took the leviathan with him.

Brightfang, caught on the edge of the phase effect, was stunned. The biochemical changes set off in his brain would have caused visions in a man; in the handler, they triggered excessive neural activity far beyond the being's ability to cope. Brightfang died of a seizure that affected his nervous system, then shut down his overloaded heart.

His podmates shared the moment of his passing, and stopped in midocean to gather, trembling, and seek comfort in each other's eompany. They sang the far-call, urgent and demanding, but of Wee'ska and Brightfang there was no further trace.

The handlers looked at one another, and were afraid.