by Timothy Zahn
The Modhri made as if to say something, then stopped. “You suggest I destroy the Abomination and use its same location?” he asked at last. “A location which you already know?”
“Actually, I don’t already know it,” I corrected him, fudging the truth only a little. “And of course that would be silly. What I’m suggesting is that you figure out his method or technique and adapt that for your own purposes. Whether it’s a matter of the location itself, or some kind of camouflage, if it works for Abomination coral it should work equally well for you.”
“And what then of the Abomination?”
“What of it?” I asked. “We both agree it’s no threat to you. Find out how they’re doing this, then leave the Abomination to itself and go find a place where you can do the same thing. Live and let live, I always say.”
His beak opened in a mocking gesture. “As you and I already do?”
“I offered that option to you once,” I said. “I was nearly killed for my trouble.” I gave him a tight, slightly mocking smile. “But you probably never knew about that.”
“On the contrary, I know about everything,” he said coldly. “And your subsequent actions show clearly that your offer was not sincere.”
“Actually, it was,” I said, feeling a shiver run through me. Bayta, I knew, still thought our brief side trip to the Yandro transfer station on our way to New Tigris had been a complete waste of time. Up to now, I had suspected differently.
Now it was no longer merely a suspicion. “But that’s water under the bridge,” I went on. “Do we have the making of a deal here?”
For a few seconds he eyed me in silence. “I will keep the Human Bayta,” he said at last. “You will lead my Eyes to this place. When I have seen it and learned its secrets, I will release her.”
“You’ll release her into my direct custody,” I said. “And you’ll do it immediately after I’ve led your Eyes to the Abomination’s hideout. If you want to stick around and root out its secrets, you can do it on your own time.”
Again, he took a moment to study me. “Agreed,” he said. “Which train do we need to take?”
“Whichever the next train is on the Kalalee Branch,” I said. There was a fair chance that he’d seen the label on our crate, and I might as well keep my lies consistent and easy to remember. “We’re heading to Benedais.”
“Benedais,” he repeated, his eyes boring into mine. “Be certain you speak truthfully to me.”
“You be certain you have Bayta ready to hand over to me by the time we reach Benedais,” I said. “And in mint condition. I presume you’ll want to make the travel arrangements yourself. Rebekah and I will need a double adjoining compartment.”
“No,” he said flatly. “You will stay in a first-class coach car where I can watch you.”
“Do you want Rebekah to take us to the Abomination’s hideout, or don’t you?” I asked patiently “Because if you do, she has to think that things are back to normal, and normal means a double compartment.”
He considered. “And the Abomination?”
“It’ll be in the compartment with us,” I told him. “Just in case you get the urge to go poking around in baggage cars again.”
He took a careful breath. “As you wish. What will you tell the young Human female?”
“I’ll think of something,” I said. “You just get the tickets for our train. While you’re at it, you might want to expedite my getting out of here.”
“It will be done.” Tas Yelfro stood up. “I will take the weapon now,” he added, holding out his hand.
I looked at the kwi still wrapped around my knuckles, “It’s of no use to you,” I said.
His beak clacked sarcastically. “While I have it, it’s of no use to you, either.”
There was no way around it. Slipping the kwi off my hand, I tossed it to him. “I’ll want it back when this is all over,” I warned.
“We shall see,” he said, pocketing the weapon and moving toward the door. “I shall let you know which train you will be taking.”
He opened the door and paused. “And,” he added, “I will be watching.”
“Yes,” I said. “I’ll just bet you will.”
Even with the Modhri’s assistance, it took nearly four hours for the stationmaster to officially release me from my hotel room. Or maybe the delay was because of the Modhri. There would be some preparations he would want to make for our trip, and he probably preferred me kept on ice until they were complete.
I headed down the stairs again to the hotel lobby. Tas Yelfro himself was nowhere in sight, but one of the Halkas on his backup team was waiting at the main door with the news that our train would be arriving in two hours. I assured him we’d be ready, then headed across to the Spider storage area where Bayta had said Rebekah was waiting.
I’d told the Modhri I would figure out something to tell Rebekah. Over the long hours of my forced idleness, I had.
I told her the truth.
She listened in silence as I described the situation. “What do you want me to do?” she asked when I’d finished.
“That depends on what you’re willing to do,” I told her. “Option one is that you put your neck into the noose along with Bayta’s and mine. Option two is to say no thanks, and be home in time for dinner.”
She wrinkled her nose. “That would be a good trick.”
“Actually, at the moment it would be simplicity itself,” I said, pointing toward the station’s service area. “There’s a Spider tender parked right over there, ready to go. Usually Bayta’s the one who coordinates these special travel arrangements, but I could probably muddle through the process without her this once. You and your coral could be aboard and out of the station before the Modhri even knows you’re gone.”
She looked in the direction I’d pointed, as if she could see through the wall by sheer willpower. “What would happen to Bayta if I did that?”
“Do you care?” I asked bluntly.
She looked back at me and smiled, a sad, wistful sort of thing. “This is a test isn’t it?” she asked. “You want to know if I’m willing to risk my life for her. Whether I and the rest of the Melding are truly worth saving.”
“It’s a fair question,” I pointed out. “I do know you’re wiling to risk your life for your chunks of coral. Otherwise, you could have destroyed it back on New Tigris and slipped away. That kind of loyalty certainly counts for something.”
“But the coral is family?” she said.
“The coral is family,” I agreed. “It’s a different thing entirely to take the same risk for a relative stranger.”
“And if I’m not willing, I’m no better than the Modhri?”
“Or you’re young and scared, neither of which I could really hold against you,” I said. “Besides, in the grand scheme of things, what does it really matter what I think?”
“It always matters what a friend thinks,” Rebekah said quietly. “Do you have a plan for us to use?”
“I have the opening moves of one,” I said. “The details will depend on what the Modhri decides to do. I’ll need Bayta aboard the train with us when we make our move.”
“What if he leaves her here instead?”
“Then we’ll have to tour around the galaxy for a while until he decides I’m stalling and brings her aboard so he can threaten her to my face,” I said.
Rebekah’s eyes unfocused. “No, he’ll bring her along,” she said slowly. “He likes keeping his eggs in one basket.”
“Yes, I’ve noticed that,” I said. “Let’s hope he stays to form on this one.” I looked at my watch. “Our train arrives in just under an hour, with a forty-five-minute layover. Plenty of time for us to make our arrangements. We’ll have our usual double compartment, by the way, which we’ll be sharing with your supposed crate of Melding coral.”
“And the real coral?”
“Don’t worry, it’ll be right there with us,” I assured her, smiling tightly. “Just leave that one to me.”
&nbs
p; One hour and forty minutes later, our train pulled out of the station.
I stayed in my compartment with my face pressed to the window from the moment Rebekah and I got in until the moment the conductors stepped back inside the train and irised the doors closed. I saw no sign of Bayta.
Nevertheless, half an hour after leaving the station, when I took Rebekah on a brief walking tour up and down the compartment car corridor, she confirmed that Bayta was indeed aboard.
“She’s in the first compartment, the one across from the car door,” she told me as she sat down on the edge of the bed in her compartment. “I don’t know why I couldn’t sense her when we first came in.”
“She was probably still unconscious,” I said, stepping back and leaning an elbow on the crate I’d positioned on the midline between our two compartments. It was a fairly inconvenient place to put the thing, actually, and I anticipated a few stubbed toes and barked shins in my future. But if someone started to break into one of our compartments I wanted to be able to quickly shove the crate into the other one and close the dividing wall. It might only gain us a minute or two, but sometimes that made all the difference. “But at least that explains why the Modhri made sure to drag out the cancellation of my murder charge.”
“It does?” Rebekah asked, frowning.
“Sure.” I pointed toward the front of the car. “The Modhri wanted Bayta along, but he didn’t want us seeing where he’d stashed her. So instead of all of us just boarding the train at Jurskala, he had his walkers put her on a train going the other direction, took her off at the next station, and then loaded her aboard this train when it came through. That way, by the time we check in, she’s already in and hidden.”
“Only he doesn’t know I can sense her,” Rebekah murmured.
“There are a lot of things he doesn’t knew,” I sad, feeling a little of the worry lifting from my shoulders. All our erudite expectations aside, the Modhri could still have decided not to bring Bayta aboard our expedition until we reached our supposed destination of Benedais thirteen and a half days from now. That would have been awkward, since Rebekah and I needed to get off at Sibbrava a week earlier than that. “Anyway, I’m hungry,” I went on. “Let’s go to the dining car and get something to eat.”
“You think that’s safe?” Rebekah asked, looking at the door.
“The Modhri thinks you’re blissfully leading him to the Promised Land, remember?” I reminded her. “He won’t bother us. Besides, now that Bayta’s awake we need a Spider to see us so she knows we’re aboard with her.”
“Oh. Of course,” she said, standing up. “Now that you mention it, I’m sort of hungry too.”
“Good,” I said, giving the crate a tap as I moved toward her door. “By the way, how’s your coral doing?”
She frowned toward the rear of the train. “He’s all light,” she said.
“It’s not going to be a problem, you being this far away from him, is it?”
“It shouldn’t be,” she assured me.
“Good,” I said. “Then let’s go eat. By the way, have you ever tried onion rings?”
NINETEEN
The train the Modhri had chosen for us turned out to be a local, which meant that as we traveled along we never went more than four or five hours before finding ourselves at yet another stop. Occasionally a station’s decor and service buildings showed some imagination and originality, at least from what Rebekah and I could see through our compartment windows. But most of the stops were small Jurian colony worlds, and for those a fairly straightforward cookie-cutter design mentality had been at work. By the time I turned in that first night, I was hardily even bothering to look out the window anymore as we rolled to a stop.
The next day dawned—figuratively speaking, of course—looking to be a copy of the first.
It didn’t stay that way for long.
“What is this?” Rebekah asked, peering at the breakfast order I’d brought back to our compartment.
“A Cimman delicacy called daybreak noodles,” I told her as I set our plates on top of the crate. With neither of us really comfortable sitting out in the open in the dining car, and with the curve couches of both our compartments unavailable inside the folded-up dividing wall, the crate had naturally evolved into our dining table. “Try it—you’ll like it.”
“Uh-huh,” she said, with the kind of knowing look only a ten-year-old can deliver.
“No, really,” I insisted, scooping up one of the deep blue noodles from my plate with my fork and folding it into my mouth. “Try it.”
“I never heard of anyone eating noodles for breakfast,” she said, still looking doubtful as she cut off a small piece of noodle with the edge of her fork. She gave it a cautious nibble, her face screwing up as she did so. “It’s kind of spicy.”
“Kija spice, to be specific,” I told her. Putting another noodle into my mouth, I rolled it over my tongue, mentally gauging it against my personal taste-bud Richter scale. “It’s no worse than oreganino, really.”
“Which people also don’t eat for breakfast.”
“You’d be surprised what some people eat for breakfast,” I told her. “It’s not more than an order of magnitude stronger than cinnamon, either, which people eat for breakfast all the time.”
“I suppose,” she said, trying another noodle. “It’s not so bad once you get used to it.”
“That’s the spirit,” I said approvingly. “Anyway, be forewarned that kija’s a staple of Cimman cooking, so you’d better get used to it if you’re going to set up shop on Sibbrava.”
“I suppose,” she said, turning her head to gaze out the window. We had passed through an atmosphere barrier and were angling downward, headed into yet another station. “There are so many things about these peoples I don’t understand.”
“I would assume a telepath would know everything about everyone,” I said. “Especially his fellow telepaths.”
“I didn’t say I didn’t know them,” she said, taking a larger bite of noodle. She was still chewing cautiously, but at least she wasn’t wincing outright anymore. “I do, probably as well as any Human. I just don’t understand them.”
“Ah,” I said, not entirely sure I understood the distinction.
“Well, like there,” she said, pointing out the window with her fork. “All Jurian architecture involves the image of a key somewhere, either a real key shape or else a stylized representation of one.”
“You’re kidding,” I said, frowning. I’d never even heard of such a thing before.
“No, it’s true,” she said. “They keep it a dead, dark secret from outsiders—they think it sounds silly, and they’re sort of ashamed of it. But they keep doing it.”
“It’s no sillier than stuff the rest of us do,” I said, setting down my fork and stepping over to the window. I’d lost track of exactly where we were, but I could see this was a bigger station than most we’d passed through the previous day. Probably a subregional or maybe even a regional capital. “A lot less harmful, too.”
“I know,” she said. “But try telling them that.”
I eyed the buildings laid out between the various train platforms. If there was a recurring key motif hidden in there, you sure couldn’t prove it by me. Of course, I was too far away to see anything subtle.
I lowered my eyes to the thirty or so passengers awaiting us on the platform. Most of them were Juriani and Halkas, but I spotted a pair of slender Tra’ho’seej at the third-class end of the platform and a lone Human at the other end, where our first-class cars would be stopping.
And then, behind me, I heard Rebekah’s fork clatter onto her plate. “What is it?” I demanded, spinning around.
Her eyes were wide and horrified, her hands gripping the edge of the crate, her face gone suddenly pale. “There’s coral out there,” she whispered. “He’s bringing coral onto the train.”
A chill ran up my back as I turned back to the window, cursing silently. I should have guessed the Modhri wouldn’t simply wa
it around and see if I carried out my end of the bargain.
In fact, not only should I have anticipated it, but I’d even had a giant clue practically dropped on my foot. Part of the reason we’d cooled our heels for six hours at Jurskala Station was so that he could shuffle Bayta back and forth between trains. Now I realized he must have also used those hours to get one of his outposts moving down the line where it could intercept our train.
I looked back at the platform, my eyes and brain performing a quick evaluation of each carrybag, shoulder case, and rolling trunk sitting beside or behind the waiting passengers. The hell of it was the coral could be in any of them. For that matter, it could be split among several—there was nothing to stop the Modhri from dividing up the outpost the same way Rebekah had done with her Melding coral.
My gaze reached the lone Human and the large, trunk-shaped box beside him. Rather like a smaller version of our own crate, now that I thought about it. I glanced up at his face.
And froze. It was Braithewick, the minor UN diplomat and Modhran walker who had accosted Bayta and me at the Yandro transfer station. The one who’d offered us free rein in exchange for finding and destroying the Abomination.
For maybe two seconds I just stood there, my brain working furiously. My lurking suspicions about Braithewick . . . but there was no time for that now. We had to get out, and we had to get out now.
With a squeal of brakes the train came to a halt. At the edges of my vision as I gazed out the window I saw conductors step out the door of our car and the door of the car behind us, stiffening to Spiderly attention as a handful of exiting passengers filed past them. The brief trickle ended, and the line on the platform began to come aboard. Braithewick, I noted, was hanging back, courteously allowing his fellow travelers to board ahead of him.
As he might well do if his trunk was especially heavy. Heavy enough with coral and water to roll especially slowly . . .