by Timothy Zahn
Along with its various formal outfits, the closet also included several sets of the thin but warm clothing designed to complement the insulation of a standard vac suit. While Bayta changed into one of them I called up to the lodge to check on the procedures for going outside and reserved us a couple of suits. The very nature of a place like this would make it impossible for us to slip out unnoticed, but hopefully the hidden listeners had bought into the excuse I’d given Bayta and wouldn’t pay much attention to our sortie into the great outdoors.
The pale disk of Modhra II was high overhead as we emerged from one of the airlocks onto the surface, with Cassp’s glowing, multicolored bands filling most of the sky to the north. We were currently below the ring plane, and the distant sunlight playing off the floating bits of ice and rock created a striking pattern of light and shadow above our heads. “Have you ever lugeboarded before?” I asked Bayta as we bounced our way along a line of tall red pylons marking the way to the toboggan tunnels.
“No, and it sounds rather dangerous,” she said, her voice coming from a speaker in the back of my helmet. “Rather pointless, too.” She gestured up at one of the pylons as we passed it. “Aren’t these awfully tall for trail markers?”
“Actually, they’re the pylons for a future ski lift system,” I told her. “Eventually, the red lift will go to the toboggan tunnels, with the blue and green ones taking you to the ski runs.”
“How do you know that?”
“It was in the brochures.”
“Oh.”
We reached the base of the hill that the map indicated was the starting point for the toboggan tunnels and started up. I’d worried a little about climbing upslope on ice, even with the special grips on our vac suits’ boots, but it turned out not to be a problem. The ice’s texture was reasonably rough, and the gravity and ambient temperature too low for our weight to form the thin layer of water that normally made ice so treacherous. Briefly, I wondered how that would affect the performance of our lugeboards, then put it out of my mind. People had been dealing with this kind of extreme physics for a long time, and the resort’s designers had presumably known what they were doing.
The entrances to the three tunnels were grouped around a common staging area, from which they headed underground in different directions. A circle of lights had been embedded in the ice around each entrance, and from the glow coming up from the tunnels I guessed there were lights all the way down. Three vac-suited figures—Halkas, probably, though I never got a look through their faceplates to confirm that—were just getting their toboggan ready to go at Number Three, and as we unfastened our lugeboards from our backpacks they headed in. I watched them drop out of sight beyond the first slope, then turned my attention to the east, where the red pylons we’d been following marched up the next group of hills and disappeared over the other side.
“You said you’d show me how this worked,” Bayta reminded me.
“Sure,” I said. Hoping I remembered how to do it, I popped my lugeboard’s straps. “First, you get it open…”
We got the boards set up and headed down Number One. It was just as well I’d chosen the most undemanding of the tunnels, as it turned out, because even that was well beyond my modest abilities. Not only had the designers smoothed the ice to a high polish, but they must have installed heaters under the surface to bring it to precisely the optimal temperature to form that thin water layer I’d noticed the lack of while climbing the hill.
Worse yet, Bayta, with no experience whatsoever with these things, turned out to be better at it than I was. She fell probably once to every two tumbles I took, and near the end of the run was even daring enough to take a shot at one of the three-sixty spirals I wouldn’t have tried on a bet. The lower gravity made such stunts easier, of course, but that wasn’t much help to my bruised pride.
We reached the bottom, our momentum running us smoothly across the long flat area to a gentle stop near the elevators. Unfastening our boards, we headed inside, and I punched for the surface. “This goes down, too?” Bayta asked, pointing at the lower button.
“Yes, back to the hotel,” I told her. “This particular run ends just above the lobby. Probably planned that way so that bruised amateurs could go staggering straight home and collapse into bed or a whirl bath.”
“I guess,” she said. “That was fun.”
I looked through her faceplate. Bayta, the girl with no last name, who had once calmly told me she didn’t care if I lived or died, was actually smiling, her cheeks red with exertion, her face more alive than I’d ever seen it. “It was, wasn’t it?” I agreed. “We’ll have to do it again after my knees stop hurting.”
She looked back at me, her smile fading as she suddenly seemed to remember why we’d come to the surface in the first place. “Yes,” she said. “Well… maybe we could just climb one of the hills near the lodge and watch the ring pattern for a while. Until you feel better.”
“Sounds good to me,” I said.
The elevator let us out inside the lodge, just off the equipment rental area and near one of the airlocks. We headed back outside and walked along the red pylons to the top of the first big hill. There we found a comfortable place to sit together, and as I snuggled close and put my arm around her shoulders, I motioned for her to turn off her comm.
I leaned my helmet against hers, hoping that to any observers we looked like two lovers getting as romantically physical as it was possible to get in vac suits. “Can you hear me?” I called.
“Yes,” she called back, her voice sounding tinny as the sound transmitted across the contact between our helmets. “Why did you want to watch the torchferry arrive?”
“I don’t, actually,” I told her. “But someone bugged our suite while we were on our submarine tour, and I needed to find a reason to get you out here where I could be sure no one could eavesdrop.”
“We were bugged?” she demanded. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“You mean while we were there in the suite?” I asked.
“Oh,” she said, her annoyance fading into embarrassment. “Right.”
“Which is also why I had to tell you a few half-truths,” I went on. “Starting with those drill marks on the tunnel wall. Someone made them, all right, but whoever it was didn’t stash anything in there. At least, nothing important.”
She drew away to frown at me, and I saw her lips moving. I tapped her faceplate in reminder; grimacing with a little more embarrassment, she turned again and leaned her helmet against mine. “Sorry,” she said. “I said, how do you know?”
“First of all, because it was a little too obvious,” I said, watching her face out of the corner of my eye, hoping her reactions would give me some clue as to how much of this she already knew. So far, it all seemed completely new to her. “The marks were right there in the lighted areas, there hadn’t been any effort to disguise or obliterate them, and they quit showing up past that bottleneck, past the point where there was no chance of the Halkas getting in and finding any more of them.”
“Maybe they just got more careful.”
“No,” I said. “Remember that current we ran into outside the cavern? That showed Modhra’s underground ocean keeps itself moving, probably driven by tidal forces from Cassp. But there weren’t any currents inside the tunnel we explored. If someone had made the kind of opening in the far end that we talked about, even if they camouflaged it afterward, the water would have been sloshing back and forth and we’d have been tossed around like guppies.”
“Then what was the point of the marks?”
“The same point as the drunk act that Bellido put on for me on the Quadrail,” I said. “Something big and bold and obvious to get people looking and thinking the wrong direction.”
“So they didn’t actually steal a submarine?” she asked, sounding thoroughly lost now.
“Actually, I’m guessing they did,” I said. “The fake drunk had all the right cues and telltales, which tells me these people pay attention to the details. If
you want someone to waste their time searching the caverns, you need to give them a good reason to do so.”
“Yes, I see,” Bayta said. “And you don’t want the Halkas to know about this?”
“No,” I said, watching her closely. “Because I think the Bellidos are on our side.”
There was a moment of silence. This was the perfect moment, I knew, for her to confess that she already knew that. The perfect moment to finally fill me in on everything else she knew about Modhra and what was going on here.
Only she didn’t. “You mean the people who hit you on the head and locked you in a spice crate?” she asked instead.
“I mean the people who didn’t injure me,” I growled, a sudden stirring of anger sending heat into my face. “I mean the people who could have simply broken my leg if all they’d wanted was to put me out of action for a while.” I slid my helmet around the side of hers so that I could glare straight into her eyes. “I mean the people who haven’t been lying through their teeth to me since this whole thing started.”
Her face had gone suddenly rigid. “What do you mean?” she asked.
“You know what I mean,” I bit out, suddenly sick of it all. “You know what’s going on here. You know all about JhanKla and the Bellidos. You’ve known right from the beginning.”
She tried to pull away from me. I grabbed the back of her helmet and yanked it back, pressing it firmly against mine. “Go ahead—tell me I’m wrong,” I invited harshly. “Tell me that I’m imagining things.”
“Frank—I’m sorry,” she said, the words coming out in little puffs of rapid air. Her face had come alive with fear, her throat muscles working rapidly. “I couldn’t—”
“Of course you can’t,” I cut her off. “So now tell me why I shouldn’t just go ahead and bail on this whole damn thing.”
“No!” she all but gasped. Her face shot through the whole range of fear and landed squarely on sheer terror. “Please. You can’t leave.”
“Why not?” I demanded. “The Bellidos didn’t hurt me because the fake drunk saw me take the chip from the Spider and figured I was on their side. Only I’m not really on their side, am I? I’m not on anyone’s side. All I am is a dupe.”
I let go of her helmet, suddenly too disgusted with her to touch even that. “I won’t be a dupe, Bayta,” I said. “Not for you; not for your damn Spiders.”
Her breath was coming in hyperventilating huffs, her face still rigid with fear. “Please, Frank,” she managed. “Please. You can’t leave me here alone—”
I didn’t want to hear it. Standing up, I turned my back on her and strode off down the ice hill. I kept walking, up the next small hill and down into its valley, until she was out of sight. Then, folding my arms across my chest, I stopped and glared up at the shifting ring pattern blazing softly across the Modhran sky.
I should do it, I told myself firmly. I should turn around, go to the hotel and pack my stuff, and then head straight back to the Tube on the next torchferry. Maybe I’d drop her fancy unlimited-travel pass in the fire pit before I left, a nice dramatic gesture that would make it clear to her and the Spiders what I thought of them. I had places to go and things to do, and the last thing I needed was to hang around here in the cold and dark with a bull’s-eye painted on my chest. The sooner I shook the dust of this off my feet, the better.
I had just about made up my mind to do it when the face of the dead messenger outside the New Pallas Towers floated up from my memory.
The Spiders had gone to a lot of trouble to entice me into this game. Someone else had gone to even more trouble to keep me out of it.
And I was damned if I was going to quit before I knew what the game was.
Bayta was sitting where I’d left her, her knees hunched up against her chest, her arms wrapped tightly around them. Her whole body seemed to be quivering as I approached, perhaps shaking in fear or anger. I sat back down beside her… and it was only then that I realized what the shaking actually was.
She was crying. My stoic, wooden-faced Bayta was actually crying.
I leaned my helmet against hers. “One question,” I said, forcing calmness into my voice. “Are the Bellidos on our side?”
Her eyelids fluttered as she tried to blink away the tears. “I think so,” she said, sniffing. “I mean, I think we ultimately want the same thing. Only they’re… sort of independent.”
I grimaced. Independent operations were always wasteful, usually counterproductive, and way too often dangerous. But in the world of intelligence and covert ops, they were unfortunately a fact of life, “Do you know what their plan is?”
She closed her eyes, squeezing out another couple of tears in the process. “No.”
I took a couple more calming breaths. I didn’t need this. I really didn’t. “Fine,” I said. “Let’s see if we can find out.”
She opened her eyes, gazing nervously at me as if expecting another outburst. “Does that mean you’re staying?”
“For now,” I told her, unwilling to commit myself to anything long-term at this point. “Go ahead and switch your comm back on, and let’s head back to the toboggan tunnels.”
I started to reach for my own comm switch, but she snaked a hand up and caught my arm before I could reach it. “I told you once I wasn’t your friend,” she said, her voice shaking with emotion. “But I’m not your enemy, either.”
I stared into her eyes, eyes from which all the defenses had crumbled. There was indeed a real, live person back there. “Glad to hear it,” I said. “Be ready to switch off again when I give you the signal.”
I turned on my own comm, and we headed back upslope. She was clearly still too shaken to counterfeit a casual conversation, so instead I kept up a more or less running monologue about how her first lugeboard run had been beginner’s luck. About halfway there, she was finally able to ease back into the conversation.
We reached the lugeboard tunnels; but instead of stopping, I motioned her to keep going, and we followed the pylons as they headed up the next hill. JhanKla had said there were two other toboggan tunnels in production, and it seemed logical that the Halkas would have laid out their future ski lift to serve all five.
We reached the top of the hill, and there they were: two large openings facing each other from the sides of another pair of hills. Like the first set of tunnels, a flattened staging and preparation area had been created between them, this one crowded with heavy equipment and crates of supplies. Some of the equipment was attached to conduits and cables of various colors and diameters that snaked their way down into the tunnel mouth. No one else was visible, and the tunnels themselves seemed dark.
I motioned to Bayta, and we switched off our comms. “There you go,” I said, pressing my helmet against hers again.
“There I go where?” she said, frowning.
“It’s classic diversionary technique,” I said. “You get your opponents looking one direction while you set up your operation in the other. The Bellidos get the Halkas looking down at the underwater caverns, then settle themselves into a nice little staging area up here. An unused tunnel, complete with stacks of stuff where you could probably hide pretty much anything you wanted.”
“But there are Halkan workers here,” she pointed out.
“Only during the day,” I said, checking my watch. “Then they go inside, which is where they all are now, leaving the place nice and deserted.”
I started forward, but Bayta grabbed my arm and pressed her helmet against mine again. “What if the Bellidos are in there?”
“They aren’t,” I assured her. “They can’t be back from Sistarrko yet.”
“Unless they took a later torchferry from the Tube and never went to Sistarrko at all.”
I shook my head. “I poked around the resort computer system for a while last night after you went to bed. Room registration listings are always protected, but the restaurant and room-service records are usually more accessible. There were only two sets of Belldic meals served yesterday, and one
of those has to have been to Apos Mahf.”
“Do you think he’s working with them?”
“Definitely not,” I said. “For one thing, he tried too hard for information as to who had left me in that spice crate. For another, he tried to get me to touch the coral.”
I heard her inhale sharply. “You didn’t, did you?” she asked anxiously, her grip tightening on my arm.
“No, no, I didn’t even get close,” I assured her hastily. The sudden dark tension in her face was unnerving. “Maybe you should tell me why that’s such a big deal to you.”
Through her faceplate, I saw her throat work. “I can’t,” she said, letting go of my arm. “You just have to trust me.”
For a moment I was tempted to again threaten to walk. But I’d already made my decision on that, and I knew better than to bluff when there was nothing to back it up. “Sure,” I growled. “Come on.” I stalked off across the ice toward the leftmost of the two tunnels, the one on the north side of the staging area. With only a slight hesitation, Bayta followed.
The tunnel was clearly being planned as a more challenging run than the one Bayta and I had gone down earlier, with a much steeper initial plunge. Fortunately, the Halkan workers weren’t relying on the nonsmoothed ice to get back and forth, but had rigged a corrugated walkway along the tunnel’s left-hand side. Pulling out my light, I got a grip on the handrail and started down.
The first fifty meters of the tunnel floor were smooth and clean. Past that point we hit an area of work in progress, and got a hint of just how complicated these things actually were. My earlier speculation about an embedded heater system was confirmed: Wide sheets of fine mesh encircled the entire tunnel, buried a few centimeters beneath where the toboggan surface would ultimately be. Every few meters we came upon large holes that had been dug in the tunnel walls, with various bits of machinery tucked away inside. Some of the devices were easily identifiable: area minigenerators for the lights and heaters, and impact registers like those used in sports arenas for alerting the staff to possible medical emergencies. Others I didn’t have a clue about.