Mainline (35 page)

"No,"
Gerick said
firmly. "You don't need street muscle."

Karuu stood in the harborside office and glared at his antagonist. It was time to switch tactics.

With difficulty he smoothed the displeasure from his face. "I cannot be spending all my time on the waterfront and in office buildings," the squat alien explained in a conciliatory tone "Okorr's movement in those circles would bring too much notice."

"Maybe so," Gerick grudgingly admitted.

"You see? I need a derevin to approach people, to courier, to deliver presents that persuade cooperation." "Presents" like blackmail or drugs, or gifts of appreciation that started small and became large over time. "You few MazeRats alone will not sufficient for this."

Adahn's lieutenant hated to give in, but he saw the logic of th Holdout's argument. Gerick decided swiftly. "Alright, Karuu, I see your point. You wanted the Dockboys?"

"Yes," the Holdout agreed promptly. A young, inconsequential group he could mold into the shape he wanted.

"We'll have them signed up by tomorrow," Gerick decided and put the matter behind him. "Now, this other thing—"

"Lish?"

"Yes." The MazeRat's face hardened. "Hands off. Mr. H is taking care of the matter, and that's all you need to know." cold smile played about his lips. "If you defy his wishes in thi I'll kill you."

That startled the Dorleoni and he looked up into Gerick's unsettling eyes, one steely blue, the other an inhuman glowing g orb. Karuu believed the threat.

"She is yours to deal with, as you say," he conceded. "I am washing my hands of her."

"That's smart." The MazeRat motioned Karuu to his feet, and ushered the Dorleoni to the door. "Now you can start your w smoothing things over with Customs."

He left the alien abruptly on the walkway outside. Karuu bristled again. He was not a flunky, to be beckoned and dismissed the derevin leader's whim. This time he bared his tusks, didn't care who saw.

Lish relocated to
the waterfront. Reva began to prowl as much as she had in the Evriness estate, though for a different reason. Vask accompanied her, or walked a circuit she directed him to. The assassin didn't elaborate on what danger she felt threatened the Holdout, but her caution spoke for itself. For once she did not turn his help down. They both sensed that danger waited, not knowing where or when it would strike.

The waiting got on her nerves, she who had always been the initiator. Now she understood how Yavobo must have felt. He had been a hunter, too, not a guard.

It's far easier to chase your prey, she thought, than to protect it from unknown dangers.

She suppressed a shudder and kicked a piece of shattered cryocase off the edge of a dock, barely hearing it splash into the water Mow. Good riddance to Yavobo. We finally saw who was the better hunter there, didn't we?

She allowed herself a satisfied smile. That moment, when the bomb exploded, and the alien was blasted along with her target Reva was not one to revel in gore. Most of her kills were clean and neat. But the Aztrakhani, who had caused her pain—
worse, admit it, Reva, scared the hell out of you
—that was one death she was happy to review in her mind's eye. And to take caution from.

Never let your prey outsmart you, she thought. They can, and do, fight back.

Whoever was coming for Lish would learn that, soon enough.

Yavobo headed for
the
Ocello,
a midsized trader chartered for a run to Selmun III. Once aboard, he went directly to the coldstorage
 
units. The fifth freezer box gaped open, awaiting the alien who would travel inside.

It was a necessary evil. His earlier, precipitous departure from the waterworld had flagged his records in that star system. If he returned openly, he would be detained for questioning.

In this case, there was no other way to avoid the bureaucratic queries that could delay or ensnare him; no other way to close quickly with Reva, his ultimate target.

The warrior knew what to expect, but that did not lessen the discomfort of lying inside a cryobox too short for his height, knees drawn up and tucked close. Cryomonitors and AI could compensate for his alien biology, but human engineering made no allowances in the sizing of his chilly coffin.

Monitor patches were affixed to his skin, the lid lowered and vac-sealed around the edges with ear-popping suction. A gaseous hiss was the last thing the bounty hunter remembered before he fell asleep, drugged into a depressed metabolic rate before the freezer cycle began.

The bounty hunter feared neither discomfort nor danger. It was not until the lid closed on him that he thought of being buried alive, but he passed out before he could act on the panic swelling up within his breast.

Tion
was a
crumbling capital world of pleasure gardens and moldering palaces—a place where disused government building sold cheaply, where buyers rediscovered the research facilities once employed in the Satraps' Genewar. Those facilities were refurbished and leased to commercial geneers, spurring an influx of biotech, nanotech, genetech industries to the faded subsector capital. 

The Camisq were hardly the only providers of nanotech on Tion. Sa'adani and CAS Sector citizens went there for things that cybertechnology could not provide: body shaping, organically en hanced intelligence or reflexes, crafting of functional or inherited genes, baby-tailoring, and more. The services for humans we myriad, and a market catering to alien species was growing up in its shadow.

Devin turned a blind eye to the sculpting stores that littered the avenue. He liked himself just as he was, and this trip allowed no time to explore the diversions of the city, even had he been inclined to do so. He concentrated instead on the drive to the Camisq mission, where a mecho led him and Eklun to the subterranean laboratories where their nanotech product had been crafted. Their wait had stretched out for nearly an hour, but Devin hadn't been pacing long when a high-pitched buzzing interrupted his circuit of the room.

"Youuuu arrr frrrummm Lan-zzzig-g-g?"

The two men faced a door that had opened in the seamless wall of the lounge. A creature taller than a man stood there, half humanoid in form, half resembling an overgrown grasshopper. The legs were segmented, arms were cocked in the style of a mantis, and vestigial wings hugged its back. It appeared part exoskeletal, part flesh-articulated, a bastard combination that made the Camisq seem like an engineered creature. For all Devin knew, it might be. Its speech was full of whirs and clicks. It repeated its phrase before the two men could quit staring and comprehend its words.

"You are from Lanzig?" it asked again. With concentration its meaning became clear.

"We are," Devin replied.

"We apologize for the delay. We had to verify a final calculation. One moment, please." The Camisq rubbed its leg spars together, giving a peculiar vibrating flexion to the skeletal members. A musical trill resulted, like that of a giant cricket. The alien stood aside, and three smaller versions of itself came into the lounge, bearing an opened shipping case between them.

The smaller Camisq seemed more insectoid than the speaker, half the height of a man, with thicker chitin and heavier wings that lifted and flexed off the surface of the back. The drones set the case down before the Captain, and one raised the rack of flasks nestled inside.

The taller alien approached. "Eight large doses have been prepared, two per flask. These are for the borgbeasts. The last flask holds sufficient quantity for the Vernoi handlers. We have verified contents and stability for shipping. When sealed, the stasis field will engage. Your export license and tariff receipts are already coded into the case's datapad."

"What is this calculation you had to verify?" Devin asked.

The, Camisq trilled again to her drones, and they began to secure the case for shipping. "Administering this to adult borgbeasts requires injection of product into a food animal and feeding into the beast. We were verifying dosage calculations—"

An inquiring trill from a drone interrupted her. She clicked a response, and the drone activated the stasis field in the container. Before she could get back to her topic, Devin and Eklun moved toward the delivered product. "If it's all in the datapad, I'm sure we can figure it out later," Devin forestalled further conversation. "Thank you for your help, though, and seeing to such details for us." He offered the half-bow reserved for the conclusion of a mutually satisfying trade; together he and Eklun hoisted the container and walked it back to the lift. The Camisq called Esksk Prime clicked, and one of her drones detached from the virz, rushing to show the humans the switch that activated an imbedded repulsor strip. With a nudge, the box floated alongside its human escort.

"Farewell, then," Prime told her customers. "One-Virz will see you to the surface."

The drone escorted the emissaries through the bunkers to the lift. As they ascended, One-Virz became quiescent, soon abandoning attempts at conversation. The virz-member saw them to the exit of the palace. As the Camisq fragment withdrew to seek its nestmates, Devin and Sergeant Eklun settled the precious car in their car, and headed directly back to the
Fortune.

Deep, bone-seated chill.

A cold with such a grip upon the limbs that jaws clamped tight in rictus, not warm enough even to chatter.

Dull recognition of light. Meaningless sounds. Being heaved upright to sit, then guided in a staggering circle in imitation of walk, until something like sensibility returned. 

Yavobo emerged from coldsleep, his desert-born metabolisr protesting against the unnatural strain of cryogenesis. A torture more effective than the bite of sandlurks, more insidious the dust-lung. A torture unconceived of by the Aztrakhani, though one that would be fondly used, should they gain any notion of potential for nonfatal discomfort.

The warrior sat far longer than a man would have, his metabolism reacting grudgingly to stimuli designed for human biology. Warm beverages in the stomach meant little to a torsal landscape dominated by cooling-efficient lungs. Steam-heated air w have been more effective in reviving the alien, but that was recommendation the cryotech remarked on only in afterthought. In due time the red- and black-skinned Aztrakhani stood under his own power, causing a collective breath of relief to rise from his assembled caretakers. A quarter-day later he was fully functional once more, no longer stumbling, no longer staring at his surroundings in owlish disrecognition. The bounty hunter left the waterfront, equipped by Harric's henchmen, given money and contact information for the MazeRats who would be at his disposal should he need them. Yavobo's spirits took longer to recover, surrounded as he was with the damp, cloying air and the sea-scent of R'debh's all-pervasive blanket of moisture.

Then, in the midst of his brooding, he was forced to grin to himself, a predatorial baring of fangs that caused passersby to skirt him on the walkway. Soon enough he would taste the last of this foul planet's atmosphere. Soon enough he would be shut off from its thousand inconveniences, from food, to stenches, to water-loving thin-skins. Shortly, he would have his prey. He growled to himself, nostrils flaring in a snarling purr of exultation. Yavobo was on the hunt once more.

Devin triggered the crew alert with barely a conscious thought, recognizing from personal experience what sensors had just detected.

It was a stelloid, one of the several denizens of warped space: a creature like a small sun, of fusioning plasma and unlikely energy frequencies, casting off twisted harmonics barely traceable in the other-space of warp.

There was no question it was some kind of intelligent life-form. She miniature suns acted with motivation and cunning to satisfy one clear need: hunger. Some preferred mass, to be converted into energy, and so favored the substances of hulls or the organics concealed within. Others were drawn to the radiant discharge of warp engine or worse, the resonant crystal reactions dimly perceived within the drives themselves.

There was no communicating with such a creature, too alien to understand, too vastly different from organic sentience to reason with. Sometimes they could be bribed with jettisoned reactive crystals
,
lured off from the fleeing tidbit that a warp-driven ship represented. Other times they must be beaten off, jabbed with
unpleasant spikes of energy delivered at distance by ship's guns or missiles.

The alarm roused Eklun, who ran from crew unit to transport outtake, from there a leaping step into the gunner's bounce tube. A moment later he was in Gunnery One, overhead and to the rear of the flight deck. The sergeant strapped into the gunner's couch and freed the gimbal lock of the laser turret.

Warp space hugged the gun turret like glistening streaks of oil on dirty water, an unclean aurora that twisted the gut if you looked at it too long. Eklun kept eyes averted while he donned his com helmet and flipped down the warp visor to compensate his vision.

The impossible void beyond the turret smoothed into a multilayered gray abyss for the gunner. He powered up his weapons module. "Gun One online," he spoke into the headset, jacking into the fire-rigger system with one hand.

"Stand by." It was all Devin had to say for long minutes to come.