Mainline (55 page)

Feet shuffled. Reva darted past Yavobo's guard, out of his narrowing reach, and grunted as he struck home, the price paid for the evasion. They circled and she slipped out into the center of the room.

Vask angled his gun at Yavobo, and fired.

Reva spared him a word in that instant. "Get out," he thought she said as the killing beam blazed from his gun—to seer a char mark on the wall, missing the bounty hunter, who sprang forward, low and extended, in the moment that Kastlin squeezed the trigger. The warrior barreled into his attacker, slamming the Security agent against the floor, winding him with a well-placed shoulder and far too many kilos of weight.

Yavobo rolled to his feet beyond Vask. Carelessly, as if disposing of a minor distraction, the lanky alien spared one hand for his unexpected assailant. Fingers grabbed jacket and shirt. The Mutate felt himself swung up from the ground, snatched in one long, fluid movement that carried him off the carpet and set him flying through the air.

Time slowed. With the disjointed thought of one caught in an accident, he realized his motion was unnaturally fast and hard, that Yavobo, in battle, could throw Security agents around for hours and not be tired at the end of the day.

That was all he had time to think, for then head and shoulders crashed into the door of Harric's office, and he collapsed to the floor in a heap.

Reva saw Vask fall and thought of Lish, skull bashed in after their first encounter with Yavobo. She squelched the twinge of caring, of sorrow, that intruded.

The Fixer's sacrifice had bought her time, valuable time, and she was busy using it.

The Aztrakhani turned back to her, reorienting on her position, the slit pupils in his yellow eyes dilating like a hunting cat's. She had not moved to take advantage of his distraction; surely he took that hesitation for cowardice or fear. Yet it was something much more difficult than those ready emotions that froze her before him, vibroblade humming in one hand, blood dripping down the fingers of the other.

She ignored the crimson spots staining the carpet near her feet. She'd seen more than that, very close, in many Lines nearby— but she hadn't looked at all Lines. And then, charged full of adrenaline, driven by unthinking reflex, it had become impossible to marshal herself, to move between Lines and out of danger.

That was the opportunity Vask had created for her, maybe at the cost of his own life. She had time.

Time to rein in survival reaction, to pause for breath.

Time to recall what she had learned from Kastlin, experienced shifter of energies, a better master of his metabolism than she had been.

Time to tell her pounding heart that there
was
a way out of this, and she was about to find it....

Yavobo made a flourish with his bloodied blade, a ritual motion followed by an inclination of his head. A nod to the sheep that deigned to be slaughtered.

He stepped forward.

Reva inhaled deeply, her chest rising with a great lungful of air. She put her head back, exhaling slowly, eyes closed for an essential moment, a segment of time where she was elsewhere, picturing herself gone. If he leapt at her now, she was done. If he walked, she had a chance....

She drove consciousness of danger from her mind and sought that elusive place where one moment became many. She must reach that careful balance point, not actually moving across Lines, but poised upon the brink of doing so. It was enough to be simply out of phase with this material Now. If she could do even that much. It would be the hardest Lineshift she had ever done, but she had to try.

If she didn't, she was dead.

Yavobo raised his knife, savoring for a moment the choice of slashing the thin-skin's throat, so conveniently exposed, or sinking his blade into her gut, to tear the entrails forth as dishonorable foes deserved. Before he could decide she lowered her chin and looked square at him, her hazel eyes blazing with a look of— triumph?

His vision blurred, or unfocused, or his prey did, somehow. Reva's form shimmered and was gone, just as she had vanished from sight in the ocean.

"Soul-stealer!" the warrior hissed, dropping his knife like it had burned him, taking two hasty steps backward. The blade hung by its lanyard from his wrist, a smear of her blood wiping off on his thigh.

A token he would have taken a moment before as badge of victory he now rubbed off hastily with his palm. He had forgotten this, or hoped it not true, this thing about her nature he had observed before. Like the haunts of the lonely dunes under a midnight moon, she was more than human prey. She was a creature sent to test him, doubtless by ancestors offended by his actions, or curious about his abilities....

Yet human or ghost, either could be killed, and he would not underestimate his quarry again. She was nearby, he was certain, for a soul-stealer never strayed far from its intended victim, not when final battle had been joined. He took the knife into his hand again, and began to search for Reva.

A
warning telltale
on Adahn's desk console flashed persistently. He glanced that way quickly, unwilling to miss the drama unfolding in the antechamber. Then he recognized what the flashing light meant.

"Hey!" he blurted. "Who unsealed the doors?"

His tone demanded an answer, but his MazeRats had none for him. He rekeyed the lock sequences, sparing hasty glances toward the vid monitor. Hopefully Reva would not realize her way out was unbarred—no time right now to figure how that had happened, later he could wring the neck of the idiot who had defied his orders—

Security screens came back on. Then flicked off of their own accord. He heard the four-way locking bolts in his blast-safe door retract from the wall, saw the status trace that showed his office unsecured—

"What the fuck is going on here?" he shouted, an angry bellow to MazeRats who stirred in concern but couldn't help him. Harric himself controlled the master console, the position that ordered this level of physical security. And he wasn't even jacked in.

He remedied that in a moment, slotting into his desk. Instead of the orderly realm of his virtual command center, he found himself in a featureless cybervoid.

"Tsk, tsk, tsk." A slender figure with jagged lightning-shaped edges confronted him. Its nearly stick-figure proportions made the wagging spike of a finger look ridiculous.

"Who the fuck are you?" the crime boss demanded hotly.

"You're not welcome here," the intruder replied. "Back upstairs you go, now."

Where there had been void a steely-black wall flashed into existence between Harric and the netrunner. A round hatchway separated the two sims, sealed an instant later by the many-leaved plates of an iris valve, contracting shut.

Harric's netlink went dead, and he was back, stranded at his desk, a command console no longer his to order. Telltales revealed the extent of the intrusion: security screens had dropped, his blast door was open, even his personal force field at his desk had been disabled.

His complacency was shattered beyond repair. These were the things that kept him safe, kept him insulated from Reva, or Yavobo for that matter. He stood, moved by anger and worry, just as the bolt from the Sundragon punched through the wall and blazed through his office.

Two MazeRats fell, one holed, one losing an arm and part of his torso. The charge passed close enough to heat the air near Harric's face, and burned on nearly into Janus' office. It dissipated in a crackle of ionization around the half-vaporized hole.

There was an outcry of dismay and a whimper from the dying wounded; MazeRats in a neighboring room hammered at a door that had mysteriously locked itself against them. Harric looked up, panic threatening to grab hold of him. This was not leisurely command of a sterile killing from a safe vantage point. Somehow he was suddenly on the firing line, his systems preempted.

"Janus," he barked into the intercom, "get in here!"

The wall monitor was black, destroyed by the energy beam. Harric was blinded and ignorant. How to regain control of his systems? Was he in immediate danger, from the net intruder, from the assassin? Impossible to gauge.

"Lock that door manually!" he snapped to the three remaining MazeRats. He thumbed the intercom. "You reserves—go through the service hall, cut through Janus' office. Get in here quick."

He waited for his instructions to be carried out. And waited.

Janus didn't respond. The door wouldn't lock; every time a Rat secured the bolt, automatic systems released it. MazeRats weren't flooding into the room, no armed security was handy—

Then something slammed hard against his office door, thrusting it open against the Rat who was trying to lock it. A man's limp arm fell through the gap, to drop sprawled out on the floor. Startled, Adahn looked up, glimpsed Yavobo moving in the antechamber—then the skirling of a perimeter alarm tugged his eyes back to the estate map on his desk.

Harric hammered his fists helplessly on his desktop. Why hadn't the system cleansed itself of this invasion yet? Was the perimeter alert a false alarm triggered by the decker?

The blast door swung wide, shoved by the towering alien. MazeRats fell back before him, handling their guns uneasily, looking to Harric for guidance.

Yavobo stepped over the body blocking the doorway, met Adahn's wide eyes. "Something's terribly wrong," Harric told him in a rush. "We have an intruder in the house systems. We might be under attack."

The alien glanced around the office, at Sundragon damage and slain MazeRats, took in Harric's stance and smell of nervous fear. "I seek the woman," he said simply.

"The hell with her," the crime boss said angrily. "I need your help."

Cruel amusement lit the warrior's face as he threw Harric's own words back at him. "You are on your own," he said, then turned on his heel and left the office, striding through the blood-spattered antechamber.

Adahn had no time to curse or call him back, because internal alarms joined the perimeter alerts. Com links were dead, but that didn't matter anymore.

He could hear weapons fire in the halls.

First step in walking the Lines is to see them. Easy. You could do that in one place, a trick of vision, of altered perception.

The second step is to move across the Lines: to pick one Now to live in, to commit to one reality. To translate subjective consciousness, according to Vask's theory, into an alternate self in a parallel Timeline.

Somewhere between those steps was that balance point Reva thought of as standing between the Lines, perching on the razor-thin edge that separated various Nows, not committed to any of them.

Usually she traveled swiftly through that balance point. It was hard to maintain that state which Vask called phase-shifted. It was much easier to slip into one of the neighboring Realtimes instead. Walking the Lines.

Only here, all the Lines held Yavobo, and her death was very close.

So Reva clung to that balance, precariously at first, then with increasing confidence. This wasn't much different than walking surveillance, except that she wasn't going to step in and out of Realtime. She didn't dare. Yavobo was here in the antechamber; moments ahead, in various Nows, he left, then returned. In some he caught her—her fatal mistake, she'd come back to solid reality at the wrong time, or wrong place. In some Lines he looked around, hunting, not finding, and left the room again.

Mainline was like that and she breathed a little easier. She was on the right track.

When Yavobo marched past her phase-shifted self, he headed for the door she had entered by. That was when she realized the doors were no longer locked. With the alien down the hall, she picked another exit at random and moved toward it. Not the one where Vask lay unmoving: she hoped he wasn't dead, but she had to save herself first, if she wanted to help him later.

Beyond the Fixer she saw Adahn, gesturing to MazeRats—but the crime boss was no longer a priority, either. In this urgent moment her retreat was just that: retreat, while Yavobo's back was turned for brief moments.

She slipped out a side door while the warrior searched for her in the wrong direction.

Yavobo moved down the marbled entrance hall. Nothing.

Checked rooms whose doors had been thrown open. Nothing.

Observed the defunct service mecho, its torso sheared by blast rifle fire.

He paused in his single-minded hunt and listened. The front of the great house was silent. He trod cautiously to the entrance, glanced outside. The woman's skimmer remained parked where she had arrived, and several others besides. Not skimmers: air cars, slewed in hastily abandoned positions. The warrior took in the scene, recalling Harric's words, and it all came clear to him.

Intruders. Reva had help, that was the only explanation for this. Of course she had not come alone. She had smelled a trap.

He turned and ran back up the grand hallway. Infiltrators would approach from more than one direction, that was a given. And the assassin would not let Adahn go so lightly, Yavobo was certain. Joined by reinforcements, she must be there, still, near Harric's offices.