Free Mainline by Deborah Christian Page A

his head sadly.
    Reva shook hers in return, passing on the robotic guide that steered tourists toward the safer nature trails within the safari preserve. The gun shop clerk assembled the goods on the counter, going into a back room for most of them. It was quickly charged to the villa account, and the pair went outside to equip.
    Reva guided Lish through the outfitting. Airshoes, to lift them above the snow and eliminate tracks the kria could follow. Air beacons, to summon gamekeepers to dress out a kill. Camietarps, a chameleon synthetic used for shelter if evading a hunting snowcat. Ammo packs attached to shouldertabs, holding twenty large-caliber explosive darts. Lish affixed hers while Reva added motion sensors to the dart rifle scopes.
    "Make sure you use your range finder," Reva commented. "Once propellant burns out in these darts, they drop like rocks."
    "All right."
    "Use the motion sensor, too. It'll blip movement in the brush up to about seventy-five meters, in a ninety-degree arc in front of you. You can see the sensor screen if you're carrying the rifle, or watch the blip track through the scope if you're aiming."
    Lish handled one of the 58-50s. Reva waved her hand in front of the barrel to demonstrate the motion tracking. Lish looked up.
    "Isn't this a bit of overkill for a game hunt? So kria are clever trackers." She motioned to her feet, resting on air two fingers' width above the ground. "We won't even be leaving tracks. What about a sporting chance?"
    The assassin gave a mirthless laugh. "You want sporting, try this on wooden snowshoes with a crossbow. You'll appreciate the edge."
    "No, really," the Holdout persisted. "Why is this necessary?"
    Reva rested the Lingon butt-first on the snowpack. "You've been reading up on the kria, right? Did you come across the statistic about how many first-time hunters are killed by the snow-cats?"
    Lish shook her head.
    "They keep that stat out of the public record if they can. It would scare off tourists. Look." She motioned to the dished relay antennae that topped the wire-mesh game preserve fence. "They run sonics along the fence line to keep aggressive cats from jumping the barricade. The few kria in there can't roam like they want to. They get cranky about that."
    She waved at the preserve beyond the fence and frequency barrier. "There are probably only three or four adult kria in there, all in a nasty mood. If you stray off the tourist trails and try some real hunting, those cats will be very ready to welcome you. An angry full-grown kria charges about five times faster than you can run."
    Lish was puzzled. "What about all the cats that get bagged here? You hear about it on the sportsnet."
    "They're shooting adolescents, brought in to stock the park. Not the wily adults." Reva patted the dart rifle. "Use the motion sensor, Lish. It can make the difference between dead and alive. And I don't mean the kria."
    The Holdout, though sobered, wasn't about to back down. Satisfied, Reva headed for the gate, followed closely by her newly wary companion.
    From inside the gun shop, Vask watched them go, and waited a good quarter-hour before he followed.

XXIV
    Yavobo 's new requirement was not something that his ordinary weapons supplier had an answer for. Nor the next. Nor the next.
    It was near the end of his three-day stay before he worked his way up the ladder far enough to talk with Spots, a bartender and frontman for the biggest smuggler on Selmun III.
    Spots took his nickname from the scaly specks on his skin, a vestige of the water-breathing mutation that had not run its full course in the R'debh native. In the subdued light of the Tidepool, his disfigurement could almost be overlooked.
    "There might be something like you're looking for," he replied to Yavobo's question. "For a little referral fee ..."
    Yavobo pushed his credmeter across the bar, watched while Spots tapped in a modest figure, agreed to it, and thumbed the transfer plate.
    "One of our competitors handles