Mainline (45 page)

Lish had made it, just under the wire, and was in the clear by over 7 million credits. Rich, by anyone's standards.

The cyborg departed with a half-bow, a strange gesture from a creation neither man nor mech. The derevin escorted him back to the gate and the air car waiting there. Reva felt eyes on the back of her neck then, and turned to see Lish staring at her. Hands on hips, as if to say, there, it's done, it's all taken care of. Rid of the Scripman, and rid of you.

Reva returned the stare until the Holdout broke off, her slender red-clad figure retreating into her office. Then the assassin left Lairdome 5, out of the gate now devoid of car and cyborg, and went back to the meager haven offered by her north city apartment.

In Mainline, the Ministry of Internal Security had offices in a towerplex near the government center of Amasl. In this Realtime, the whole architecture was subtly off. The place where Security's high-rise should be was now occupied by a small park with a leaping fish pond as its centerpiece.

Vask swore under his breath.

Internal Security didn't advertise its presence and wouldn't be listed in a lobby directory. There were eight offices ringing this plaza. Where to start?

Two hours later—and two more head-pounding recall alarms later—he was inside the third building to the north of the plaza. He found what he wanted at his third stop down from the top floor.

Instinct cautioned him to come in like an ordinary agent, in the physical, to see and be seen among his peers. So he surrendered thumb- and retina print at the door, offered his field ID code, and was admitted into the Ministry's offices on Selmun III. Obray met him personally in the door to his office and ushered him in. The Commander took a seat behind his desk, and Vask dropped casually into a nearby chair.

"What in the seven hells is wrong with you?" his superior officer roared immediately.

"Sir?"

"You wounded or hurt?"

Vask blinked in surprise. "No."

"Then get the hell up on your feet and report, man!"

Kastlin sat for a heartbeat longer and then shot to his feet. His heart was racing with sudden anxiety.

Shit. Reva was right about that. It's the little things that trip you up.

Obray studied him with flint-hard eyes, his dress whites crisp and smooth, his hands resting on the desktop spaced apart just so. He toyed with a writing stylus, the only sign of tension Vask could detect in the man.

"Well?"

Kastlin drew himself up. This was a drill from training school, reporting as ordered to the officer of the day. He remembered the drill, but went through the motions like an ill-rehearsed stand-in.

"Agent Kastlin reporting as ordered, sir. I heard the recall."

"Took you a damn long time to get here, too. What? Three, four hours? What was the delay?"

"It wasn't possible to disengage immediately, sir. I was in a meeting with our subject of investigation, Shiran Lish."

Vask heard himself say the half-lie, and winced inside. As if he'd been with Lish that whole time. That was the first time he'd ever colored the truth in a report. It was one thing to omit irrelevant info and unconfirmed theories—everyone did that, now and then, and he'd held back his share about Reva—but an exaggeration like this was as good as a lie, and lies belonged on the street, not in an official report. Thank the gods Obray was no sensitive or truth-reader.

"I want a briefing in full, Kastlin. Update me on events since the sweep at Rinoco."

"Yes, sir."

"Go on, then. What happened after the borgbeast attack? We lost track of you."

Vask wondered if the slow marshaling of his thoughts seemed as ponderous to Obray as it did to himself. Probably; the Commander was looking more grim by the moment. He said what he could, then, erring on the side of brevity—no telling what this Obray knew, or how much he himself had held back or volunteered in the past events of this Realtime. Kastlin lied by omission, and wracked himself as he heard a bare-bones narration of events pass his lips. Too bare.

I can hardly tell him about the ghost-ray and the timeshift, he agonized. Can I? I don't need to muddy the waters with that issue, not until I have it figured out for myself. Stick to the facts for now—where I was, what I did.

He related how he'd followed Reva and Lish, struggled with Edesz, and later slipped out of Rinoco Park. How it had seemed important to stay with the assassin, who seemed upset over events in the waterpark—an understatement that almost made him laugh with nervous tension. Then the meeting with Lish, ending in Reva's termination, and dismissal of them both from the Holdout's association.

He made no mention of Yavobo, and hoped that was one tidbit missing from Obray's knowledge base. Kastlin finally wound down and remained at attention, awaiting his commander's response.

Obray Parnos drew his brows together, looking for some flicker of unease in the Mutate before him, and finding none. He dropped the stylus on the desktop and pushed himself back in his chair. He didn't offer Kastlin a seat as he addressed the agent in clipped, formal tones.

"I think you've gotten too involved on this assignment, Agent. At the very least, you're out of touch for too long. At worst, you're getting involved with these criminals as if they were real people. I don't like to see you risking your life to save the butt of someone destined for brain-wipe and prison."

Kastlin said nothing, and kept his eyes on the cloud-smeared sky beyond Obray's window.

When no response was forthcoming, Obray continued. "The reason I sounded recall is this. I want you well away from Lairdome 5 this afternoon. I'm bringing the Holdout in for questioning, and I don't want you accidentally caught up in the action, if there is any."

Kastlin started. "Questioning, sir?"

Obray smiled slyly. "A grab-and-dump. Terrorists have given us cause and hearsay evidence. Now we have sufficient reason to pull her in. When we're done, we'll have all her secrets. Then we'll arrest her, and she'll be out of action for good." The Commander seemed proud of himself, as if it were a coup. From his standpoint, it was. Kastlin didn't feel the same.

"You know her layout there. Sit down with Lieutenant Adari to map it out. I want to know where Skiffjammers can hide, where her security bots are positioned—the usual."

Kastlin could only nod in silence.

"Good. Then there's one other loose end I want tied up. This assassin of yours. Bring her in. As soon as Shiran is locked down, we're off this ball of mud and on to bigger and better things. I don't want you wasting your time on some minor bomb fanatic. We'll bring this killer in and let the Grinds take it from there."

Kastlin offered a salute by way of acknowledgment. It wasn't his habit, and the old Obray would never have expected it, but this—this wasn't the old Obray.

His superior returned the salute from behind his desk. With long-unpracticed military precision, Kastlin spun about-face and marched stiff-backed from the Commander's office. It was the only way to avoid betraying himself by eye contact or speech.

Lish's taking down was inevitable; whether this Holdout or the one he knew, he'd seen it coming for a long time. Why, then, did he feel like a traitor, compelled to reveal her security arrangements?

As for Reva—she was his ticket out of this Timeline.

There was no way he was turning her in now.

He let himself back into the apartment, and found Reva engrossed in another holovid. He tapped her shoulder. "Can you stop that?" he asked. "We gotta talk."

She nodded and pulled the neurogrip from her head. "What's up?"

He ran a hand through his hair and let a studied look of worry crease his brow. "The bottom line is this. I want to go back. You want to go back, too."

"What have you got in mind?" she asked. "Made friends with the Sea Father lately?"

He quirked a smile. "No, but I think if we work together, we don't need the Sea Father to help. I want you to teach me your timetravel trick."

Reva shook her head. "It's nothing I can teach, Vask." "Have you ever tried?" "Well... no, but—"

"Listen. I've read all kinds of stuff on psi talents. I wanted to know all I could. I think I can at least ask the right questions. Maybe this is a learnable talent. Maybe not. We won't know until we try."

"Say you learn it—what then? How does that help us?" "I'm thinking there might be a way back, that I can figure out—"

"Beldy guts, Fixer." She leaned back in the couch. "I've been trying to figure that my whole life, and if I haven't had any luck, what makes you think you will?"

Because I'm trained for this and you're not, he thought, and then invented another answer he could speak out loud.

"We each have different perspectives on our talents. I think working together we might find a way to navigate across Lines. But I can't even experiment until I know how you do this kind of shifting."

"Mm." Her expression darkened. "What do I get for this? I don't know that I want to share my skill with you, even if it is possible."

"
I
'll teach you how to sideslip, if you can learn it. Even trade. And we might get back to Mainline. The one we know."

She considered for a while, and finally nodded. "I'll try it. When do you want to start?"

"Right now."

"This minute?"

"Yes."

Reva looked him up and down and gave him a knowing smile. "Some old girlfriend didn't recognize you? Or someone came after you for a debt you didn't know you owed. Right?"

He grasped the excuse. "Something like that."

She nodded understanding. "If you can do anything to get us back where we want to be, that's fine by me. So let's get started."

"Ye an't freeloading
any longer," Riggo said flatly. "Can't allow it."

Daribi looked up at the Dockboy from his pallet on the floor. He trembled with fatigue and the slack muscles left when too many hoppers wear off suddenly. The derevin chief was just a kid, too young to tell an old Islander what to do. He was doing it, though.

Daribi gestured around the storeroom, cluttered with packing tape, squirt cans of solvent, miscellaneous tools-—the detritus of a Dockboy's odd jobs on the waterfront.

"Am I taking up too much storage space?" he rasped.

Riggo blinked. "Ye better vanish yesterday, Islander. There's a want out for ye."

Daribi sat up swiftly. "A want? The Grinds—?"

Riggo shook his head. "A Holdout, with a price on yer head." He smiled coldly. "I got exclusive rights to collect, seeing as I knew ye from Islander days."

"Oh." Daribi slumped. He could guess which Holdout that was. "Just let me sleep for now, will you?" he said. "I'll be gone soon enough."

"See that ye are. I'm warning ye off, fer old times' sake. Later I'm coming looking, 'cause then ye're fair game."

Riggo's booted foot scraped on the floor and the door closed behind him. Daribi curled up and shut his eyes.

This was not the safe haven he had hoped for, not after what he had discovered: that the Dorleoni using Karuu's old shipping network really was Karuu. In the past, the Holdout had scrupulously avoided being seen on the waterfront, but a name-change was hardly enough to keep his identity secret from his former lieutenant.

The smuggler was working out of Verchiko's Imports, a cover office near the docks. Daribi had hoped that, under his old boss' wing again, he would have a chance at a fresh start. He needed a break to make that happen: this battered body wasn't going to let him lord it over derevin muscle again any time soon.

He shuddered on his cold pallet, remembering again the Skiff-jammer raid, the explosion that had blown him out into the water with other flotsam, thrown him clear of the enemy lurking in the ocean below. Sinking through cold, dark waters. He'd clawed his way to the surface on pure panic-driven instinct alone, struggled toward concealing headland rocks.

After that was a blur. Staggering ashore, promising too much to a streeter to take him to a blackwire shop—days in a haze, his Islander identity erased, tended by medics in a clandestine clinic that stitched up backstreeters on the run.

Since then, avoiding the 'Jammers who would finish the job if they found him alive. The loss of an eye was hardly a disguise and there was no way to buy a replacement, unless he got connected again....

That's what he was trying to accomplish when Karuu jumped him in the alley.

There's no use talking to him now, Daribi thought grimly. He must have discovered the skimming. He'll want me dead for stealing from him.

He huddled into a thin blanket trying to get warm, the tremor of depleted hoppers shaking him with cold chills. A sudden inspiration tensed him up again, almost stopped the involuntary reaction that kept him aflutter on the bed.

Wait a minute. Maybe Karuu
is
a way out, after all.

He'd heard street talk, of a big reward for the Holdout, posted only a few weeks ago. Maybe the offer was still open. He mulled that over as exhaustion claimed his battered body and pulled him down into slumber.