Mainline (7 page)

Vask clenched his jaw, tripping a molar relay, and a microcir-cuit implant started recording what came to his ears. It was nearly as passive a device as an implant could be, powered by a simple bio-electrical relay, recording the sounds captured by Kastlin's own inner ear. Psionicists had a low tolerance for cybersystems, which interfered with their fine-tuned control of mental and physiological processes. Vask hated using even this simple device, but some evils were necessary in order to do his job right. He listened, and let the dumb recorder do its work.

At first the women sat in silence, sipping the Cadanessa, uncertain what to say.

Before the silence could become uncomfortable, Reva forged ahead, deciding to get out one of the things that had been on her mind.

"You take too many risks in your work," she declared bluntly.

Lish raised an eyebrow. Reva felt a twinge of misgiving; that was not the kind of small talk she'd had in mind when coming here. Since there was no angry outburst to stop her, she went on. "You're doing hot drops out on the ocean. If I could figure that out, you can be sure someone else will. Bugs. The Grinds—"

"I bribe the police," Lish interjected.

Reva narrowed her eyes. "No, you don't. You think you do. They'll milk it for what it's worth, then turn you over for extra points to someone with less invested. Maybe Selmun Customs. They must be hopping mad by now. You've been doing this for, what, eight months or so? You're running out of time, Lish."

The Holdout gave her a calculating look. "How do you know all this? About the Grinds? And Customs?"

Reva set down her wineglass. "Look. First, you make these underwater runs after dark, submerged. Harbor Patrol tracks that traffic. Are your smugglers good enough to avoid detection on each run, or are they counting on being faster than Customs?"

Lish shrugged.

"That's what I thought. So on half the runs they slip in undetected. The other half, you can bet someone's put the pieces together."

Lish's brow furrowed in thought. "I'm not the only Holdout on R'debh. Customs must have their hands full with other traffic."

"Don't count on it. You keep your transponders hooked up, don't you?"

"If there's an emergency—"

"—at sea, you want Patrol to be able to help you out. So your movements are traced. It's a two-way deal, you know. You ping the navsat for your location; the navsat knows where you are by your squawk."

The smuggler paled. "Are you certain my ID is recorded? There's so much ground traffic...."

Reva looked at her shrewdly. "You're not used to working dirtside, are you?"

Absently the Holdout shook her head. "Started in shipping."

"And you continue to think that way. That'll get you killed, or locked up."

Lish studied her guest with a thoughtful eye, then refilled their glasses. "Got any other suggestions?" she asked seriously.

Reva shook her head. "Too late for that. You cut a deal with Karuu, that'll keep you safe for a little while. He's connected. But when the fall comes, your cargo will be grabbed by someone else—probably the Dorleoni—while you and your playmates get swept up by the Grinds. Or Internal Security, with the kind of stuff you've been moving."

Lish waved that comment aside. "I'm safe from Security. I've got connections."

The assassin looked skeptical. "I haven't heard of any that'll keep the Bugs off your back. Generally speaking. What makes you think you're so safe?"

Lish chewed her lip and hesitated before speaking. "Do you know of the Shiran Traders?" she finally ventured.

Reva shook her head.

"From the Empire. Sa'adani space, I mean, from before we annexed the Confederacy."

"Ahh...." The meaning of that sank in, and Reva looked at her host as if seeing her for the first time. The Confederacy of Allied Systems was thirty-three subsectors conquered by the Sa'adani Empire over a century and a half ago, now lumped into one large administrative sector for Imperial purposes. Lish meant that she was from that greater Sa'adani Empire, a place that remained largely alien in culture and attitude from what predominated on the CAS "frontier."

"I couldn't tell to look at you," Reva commented. Almost all Sa'adani wore a caste mark of some sort, either visible on their skin or formalized in their clothing. To be without that mark was a crime, for then how would high-caste tell low-caste apart? It seemed impossible for a Sa'adani to have social interaction without consciousness of caste and therefore relative rank.

Yet here sat Lish, with nary a mark upon her. She blushed slightly under Reva's scrutiny, let her thumb stray to the left side of her jaw. She stroked the skin there. "I had it removed," she said, apologetically.

Reva looked closer and saw a faint blemish there the length of a finger. She hadn't noticed it earlier, and certainly wouldn't have taken it for a caste mark if she had. She rehearsed in her mind the list of identifying marks that young children were made to memorize in school.
Stylized battleslash, laser-scribed in skin of left jaw...

"Rus'karfa." She identified what caste Lish must be. The

Holdout nodded almost shyly. "Warrior-in-service," it meant, one of the higher-ranking Sa'adani classes. From it were drawn officials, military officers, persons with authority who were expected to oversee operations under the direction of high-caste nobility.

Reva coiled more tightly where she sat. "Isn't it a crime to be without your caste mark?" she asked, unable to resist the jab.

Lish blushed again. "That's not well enforced in the CAS Sector. You know how people are about caste here."

Reva knew: not accepting of Sa'adani efforts to force a caste system down their throats. Yet the smuggler had gone to some considerable trouble to have her mark of aristocracy removed, and Reva was curious about that. "Laser-scribe marks are permanent," she observed. "It must've been expensive to lose that."

"They do interesting things with nanobugs on Tion," Lish replied awkwardly.

Nanotechnology was one of the few areas where the CAS Sector held its own—in fact, exported products and know-how to the greater Empire. Reva hardly thought twice about it; everyone she knew took bodysculpting and other nano spin-off for granted.

"I suppose any unhappy Sa'adani can come here, lose their caste mark like you did, and start a new life," she mused. "There must be a lot more Imperial refugees in this Sector than we realize."

Lish's back stiffened and she put down her wineglass. "I'm no refugee, and this uncouth Sector is hardly a haven. I can go back if I want to. I just... don't want to."

The silence between them was strained. After a minute Reva asked, "So who are the Shiran Traders?"

That subject was not much more neutral, and Lish abruptly changed it. "Never mind. It was a mistake, bringing it all up." She eyed the food on the sideboard. "Want something to eat?" She jumped to her feet without waiting for agreement, loaded two plates with pepper-roast, breadleaf, and radish root, then returned to the fireside.

Reva took a plate, refilled their glasses, and returned stubbornly to their prior topic. Her curiosity was piqued, and consideration for the amenities of polite conversation had fallen by the wayside.

"I said watch out for Security, and you said you're safe from them. What do Shiran Traders have to do with that?"

Lish set her mouth, disapproval evident on her features. That was no surprise to Reva: probably her sense of caste interaction was offended. Yet whatever reaction the Holdout felt she soon quashed, and Reva gave her a point for self-discipline. A smuggler couldn't afford to put too much stock in rigid observance of caste and rank; street savvy and common sense were a lot more important, and Lish seemed to have that. She took an audible breath, found her equanimity, and answered Reva's question.

"Shirani are the trading and shipping arm of House Arleon in Sa'adani space. We were one of your first trade contacts, initially in the Corvus subsector, later in other Confederacy systems."

Reva downed a chunk of pepper-roast and chased it with a drink. "That sounds like legitimate trade." The unspoken question was, how did Lish get from that into smuggling?

The Sa'adani woman wasn't biting. She skipped ten years of personal history, and simply said, "IntSec won't arrest me because of my family ties."

"Are you saying the Empire doesn't care what kind of crime you're running if you're well-born enough?"

Lish quirked a smile. "Well... yes, actually. Usually."

"I haven't heard of the Bugs holding back. Even when big names are involved."

"They like to clean up in this sector, but never when high-caste is involved. At least, not publicly."

"Maybe you're overlooking something," Reva pointed out cynically. "You've lost that caste mark. Maybe they think you're just another CAS Sector bottom-feeder. If they come in blasting, you could get in the line of fire as easily as anyone."

Lish let the bottom-feeder jibe go and shook her head. "That can't happen," she said, gesturing with a yellow radish. "Once they know my family connections, they're bound by law and honor to treat me like the Rus'karfa I am."

Reva was taken aback by the woman's sincere tone. "You really believe that, don't you?"

The Sa'adani looked surprised at the question, and Reva shook her head in exasperation. By the Sea Father, this woman was naive! In this business, it would surely get her killed.

The conversation wandered then, by mutual consent, a break from the intensity of the last hour. Lish revealed no more about her background, and Reva even less. The pair enjoyed small talk, another bottle of wine, and a long game of castle-stones.

While they played, Reva studied the smuggler. Lish was unaware of the attention, bent over the board, biting her lip with the intensity of her concentration. She had a fine-boned beauty about her, accentuated by the firelight. A full lower lip, red highlights from the embers shining in her blond hair...

The assassin felt the strings of attraction, and thrust that thought from her mind as quickly as it surfaced.

Business and pleasure do not mix, came her rote reprimand of self. Besides, I don't have time for relationships. They make you vulnerable. Good way to get close and kill someone.

She knew; she'd used the pose of intimacy more than once to do her work, with men and women alike. Lish was neither threat nor target, but the habit of reserve that kept Reva alive was not something she was about to set aside over one firelit dinner.

Don't waste time thinking about it, she told herself sternly. That's what sex-shops and quick pick-ups are for.

She forced her mind away from that line of thought, and considered the other reasons why the smuggler intrigued her. Lish wasn't too ready to listen to common sense, that was for sure. It was an irritating trait.

She thinks she knows how things will play out. Short-sighted, short-sighted...

It made Reva wonder if anyone could save another from herself. No one had been able to do it for her. It would be a waste of time to try it with Lish.

But she's so damn much like me, stubborn, cocky—a younger, stupider me....

Again and again, Reva saw the woman's flaw illustrated in the way she played. She was too confident, too trusting in the routine way of doing things. Toward the end, when the assassin played her own variation on the Moat Gambit, Lish followed with the traditional response. Consistently she overlooked the small variables that indicated an outcome other than what she expected.

She's smart, and she's trying hard, Reva thought wryly, but she needs someone to jar her complacency. Someone should teach her the error of her ways, before she ends up dead.

A silent headshake accompanied the thought.

Why's it have to be you, Reva?

Well, you know it's not going to be Karuu, she answered herself.

That left her with a lot to think about besides the game, and it took longer than she expected to decimate the Holdout's forces.

When Lish's queen was finally made to retire, Reva looked up from the board.

"Say," she asked, "want to go hunting?"

Not right then, of course, but after the blizzard cleared in several days. The kria would be out, easily tracked atop the fresh snow. The challenge lay in their ability to anticipate the human's move; who would become hunter and who the hunted was never a foregone conclusion.

Lish agreed. She had wanted to try the sport for years.

"Great," Reva said. "We can go to the reserve and rent guns there." The hunting would not be as good as in the wilds, but it would be a little safer—the oldest and most ferocious of the female cats were culled from the hunting herds before tourists and offworlders were permitted inside.

Kria were challenging enough, culled or not. The assassin remembered the lessons in survival that she had learned in the hunt; that was what Lish needed, something to bring home the unpredictability of people and events around her, and teach her to respond in kind.

Even if the Holdout didn't learn that in one or two object lessons, at least it would be a start. And for the time being, Reva promised herself that she wouldn't switch Timelines. She would take on whatever she encountered right here in Mainline, exactly as she had in that long-ago training period with the Vudesh. It was a lesson she could use reminding of, too.