Judgment at Proteus q-5

by Timothy Zahn

  “Not long.” I felt the elevator car come to a halt, and drew my Beretta as the doors slid open.

  There was no one visible. Doug and the other watchdog trotted out, looked in both directions— “Clear,” the Modhri said. “We go left.”

  I got a grip on the chair’s control stick, maneuvered Minnario out of the car, and headed left.

  Instead of an actual corridor, with walls and a ceiling and everything, we were in what was simply an extra-wide open space surrounded by industrial equipment. Most of it consisted of dozens of varying-sized tanks, connected by kilometers of rigid pipes and flexible tubing, with occasional readout stations and overhead fans whose sole purpose seemed to be to move the tropical air around instead of actually doing anything to cool it. The watchdogs broke into a fast lope; I adjusted Minnario’s chair to match their speed and followed. “How long to the emergency node?” I asked.

  “Perhaps ten minutes of walking up here, then a short elevator ride, then three more minutes of walking,” the Modhri said.

  “Can Minnario hold out that long?”

  “I think so.” The Modhri hesitated. “But there may be a problem. The emergency node is on the edge of the main administrative part of Kuzyatru Station, which is almost certainly now engaged in a frenzied hunt for you. Worse still, there is a security nexus only four doors away.”

  “That could be a problem, all right,” I agreed. “Any progress with the security cameras?”

  “No,” he said. “I’m sorry, but I have no direct access to patrollers or patroller equipment.”

  I hissed between my teeth. This just got better and better. “Any chance you can bring Minnario to the node alone? Just do what you’re doing right now and tell them you had an accident and get them working on you?”

  “I don’t think so,” he said. “I can talk, but I can’t operate his arm and therefore the chair controls. But one of the msikai-dorosli may be able to pull me in.”

  “Is that something they might conceivably do on their own?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve never seen them do anything like that during my time here.”

  “Well, just because you haven’t seen it happen doesn’t mean it can’t,” I said, blinking sweat out of my eyes. “I’ll get you down to the right floor, and they’ll have to take it from there.”

  “You mean you’ll ride in the elevator?”

  “I doubt those paws can handle the buttons.” I frowned as something suddenly struck me. “They can handle computer keys, though, can’t they? You’re the one who put that message on my computer the night Yleli was murdered.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Their claws aren’t designed to handle the necessary pressure needed for the elevator buttons, but they’re strong enough to push computer keys.”

  “I suppose you’re the one who took out the medical-dome cameras, too,” I said as it all fell into place. “You used Minnario and one of the thrusters from his chair to bend the one upward, while Doug just leaped up and tore the other one off its gimbals with his claws.”

  “Yes,” the Modhri said again. “I was intrigued by the mystery of Building Twelve, and since you had expressed interest in looking into it, I tried to clear the way for you.” His breathing caught, halted for a couple of seconds, then resumed. “Unfortunately, before I could get the message to you the Shonkla-raa saw the camera damage, assumed you were responsible, and prepared a trap for you.”

  “Just as well they didn’t see you actually take them out,” I said, eyeing Minnario apprehensively. He seemed to be fading fast. “How much farther?”

  “Not far,” the Modhri said. “But you won’t be coming with me.”

  “I thought we just decided I had to,” I reminded him.

  “You can enter the elevator, push the proper buttons, and then leave,” he said. “The msikai-dorosli can take him the rest of the way.”

  I shook my head. “No good. Like you said, they don’t usually go wandering Proteus all by themselves. If someone else gets on along the way and sees a pair of them out for a walk, he’ll either call the Jumpsuits or try to corral them himself. Either way, Minnario’s likely to die before you get him to the emergency node.”

  “Then he will die,” the Modhri said firmly. “I cannot permit you to put yourself at such risk. Not with Bayta still a prisoner of the Shonkla-raa. You must stay hidden and decipher her last message to you.”

  “I can do that and get Minnario to the node, too,” I said stubbornly.

  “Really? Then tell me the meaning.”

  I grimaced. “I’m working on it.”

  “And once you’ve deciphered it, you still face the task of freeing her and making your escape,” he continued. “What is Scotland?”

  “It’s a place on Earth,” I said, frowning suddenly as a stray thought caught my mind. With my brain tearing itself apart over the image of Bayta in Shonkla-raa hands, I hadn’t remembered … but hadn’t she just been talking about Scotland?

  Yes, she had. Two nights ago, when we were lying together in our adjoining cells in the security nexus after Yleli’s murder. She’d been talking about the dit-rec drama The 39 Steps and commenting about the similarities to my own situation. And in that story, Scotland was the place where Richard Hannay went to get the answers to the mystery.

  No—I was wrong. He found answers there, but that wasn’t the reason he went. He went there trying to escape.

  And in that same conversation, I remembered now, Bayta had also been evasive about what she’d been doing on the room’s computer earlier that evening.

  The inference was obvious. Somewhere, somehow, she’d set up a plan for our escape.

  Only I didn’t have the foggiest idea what that plan was.

  “Before the attack, after I talked to her, did she do anything?” I asked the Modhri. “Did she say anything to Emikai, or make any calls?”

  “She made one call,” the Modhri said. “I wasn’t looking at her at the time, but I didn’t hear her speak to anyone.”

  A data transfer? “How long was she on?”

  “Not long,” he said. “Perhaps half a minute.”

  So it was either a very short data transfer, or else some kind of activation signal. “Do you know if Proteus is set up so that you can access a personal room computer via comm?”

  “I assume so,” the Modhri said. “I’ve never actually tried.”

  “How about sending a pre-stored message?” I asked. “Can that be done?”

  “Yes, I believe so.”

  I grimaced. So her last act before being kidnapped had been to send me a message. Unfortunately, if she’d sent it to our room computer, I wasn’t likely to be able to get to it any time soon.

  Even worse, if she’d sent it to my comm, Wandek was probably reading it right now.

  But Bayta wouldn’t have been that careless. Not with the way people were always taking our comms. Had she echoed it back to the one I’d just called her from? I pulled out Minnario’s comm, but there were no waiting messages. “I need to crack into the station’s comm system,” I said. “Do you have any of the access codes?”

  “No,” the Modhri said. “Only senior communications techs and santra-class administrators have that access.”

  I cocked an eyebrow. “Or patrollers?”

  He was silent a moment. “I don’t know. Perhaps.”

  It was a risk, I knew. A big risk. But I had no choice. Bayta had sent me a message, and I absolutely needed to find out what that message said. Trying to stifle my sense of misgiving, I punched in Emikai’s number.

  “It’s Compton,” I said when he answered. “First of all, are you all right?”

  “I am uninjured,” he said, his voice dark with anger and shame. “I am sorry, Compton. She was taken.”

  “I know,” I said. “Don’t worry, we’re going to get her back. I’m told she made a call just after I talked to the two of you. Did you see who she called, or what the signal was, or anything about it?”

  “I believe i
t was a call to the queue,” he said. “The part of the system where outgoing messages are stored for later transmission.”

  “But you didn’t see who the message was being sent to?”

  “The destination would be part of the outgoing message,” he said. “She would only have transmitted a pre-set code.”

  I squeezed the phone. “Logra Emikai, I need to get a look at that message,” I said. “You’re an official Proteus Station patroller now. Is there any way you can get access to it?”

  “Are you still under suspicion of murder?”

  I grimaced. “Probably.”

  “Then the answer is yes,” he said. “If you are a suspect in a major crime, all information concerning you or your associates is open to me, including any message records.”

  “Terrific,” I said. “Get on it as soon as you can. And add in a search for the keyword Scotland. Let me know the minute you have something.”

  “I will,” he promised. “Stay safe.”

  “Bet on it.” I keyed off and dropped the comm back into my pocket. “Modhri?”

  “Just ahead,” he said.

  “I see them,” I said as I spotted a small bank of elevators. Releasing the chair control, I ran ahead and punched the call button, then returned and finished moving the chair to a halt in front of the elevators. “Just tell them you had an accident, that you hit your head on something,” I instructed him. “Do not say anything about someone hitting you. Am I going to need an access code to get off this floor?”

  “No, only to enter it,” he assured me. “The floor you want is 142.”

  The doors of the middle car opened, and the two watchdogs bounded inside. I followed with the chair, punched in the floor number, and started to turn the chair around to face forward—

  Without warning, Doug grabbed my jacket sleeve in his jaws and yanked hard, pulling me off-balance and halfway through the open door. Before I could recover, the other watchdog threw his full weight against my back, sending me sprawling onto the floor outside the car.

  “Save Bayta,” Minnario said, his voice whispery soft.

  I had just enough time to turn around, and not nearly enough time to get my sleeve out of Doug’s grip, when the other watchdog leaped back inside and the doors slid closed.

  And they were gone.

  “No!” I shouted toward the closed door. “No! Damn you—” I broke off as Doug released my arm, and I shifted my glare to him. “Damn you, anyway,” I snarled, raising my fist in a flash of blind fury.

  Doug didn’t move, but just stood there looking back at me. For a frozen second I continued to glare at him, my pulse pounding in my throat, my fist shaking with helpless rage.

  And then the rage faded, and with another, quieter, curse I let my arm fall uselessly to my side. How could I take out my frustrations on an animal that didn’t even know what he was doing?

  For that matter, how could I even be angry at the Modhri? He had the same facts that I did, and had simply come to a more practical and less emotion-driven conclusion as to our best strategy.

  With a sigh, I climbed back to my feet, wondering briefly if I should try calling another car and following them down. But since the whole idea had been for me to be there to fend off anyone curious or meddlesome enough to interfere with the supposedly stray watchdog, riding down in a completely different car would be pretty useless. “So what now?” I asked.

  Doug gave a little woof and settled back on his haunches. “Right,” I said with another sigh. “I guess we wait.”

  * * *

  Across the passageway from the elevators, tucked in behind some kind of forced-air filter, was yet another monitor station, currently unmanned like all the others we’d encountered. I pulled out the chair, dropped into it, and settled down to wait. Doug sat down again on his haunches in front of me. Then, perhaps knowing better than I did that we were in for the long haul, he lay all the way down, settling his head between his front paws.

  I closed my eyes, a wave of weariness washing over me, my mind churning with fear and anger. Beneath the thunderclouds of emotion a colder part sifted through contingency plan after contingency plan, most of them completely impractical, all of them an utter waste of effort given that I didn’t even know where the Shonkla-raa had taken her, let alone what kind of defenses and safeguards they might have arranged.

  And between all the worry and the grandiose plans, I thought about the Modhri.

  Why was he helping us this way? True, aboard the super-express I’d had a temporary truce with the mind segment Minnario had been part of. But there had been good and urgent reasons for us to work together there, namely the presence of a shadowy murderer who seemed to be killing passengers at random, including some of the Modhri’s own walkers.

  But that threat was long since past. Even if it hadn’t been, Minnario hardly held the controlling interest in the Modhran mind segment that had already been here on Proteus when he came over from the Quadrail.

  Or was that even how it worked? The group mind concept sounded simple enough in theory, with the makeup of each mind segment continually changing as new walkers moved into or out of range, with each new bit of experience and information eventually rippling out to reach every segment as travelers carrying that information moved back and forth across the galaxy.

  But the more I thought about the actual mechanics of how such a mind worked, the more tangled the whole thing got. Bayta and I were pretty sure the Modhri had established a new homeland on the Human world of Yandro, and we’d speculated that there was some kind of overall strategic or planning area centered in the mind segment there. But the details of how that actually worked were still pretty vague.

  There was another possibility, of course, namely that the Modhri wasn’t actually on my side at all, but that this was some elaborate game designed to run us in circles until we dropped. But as I’d already told Bayta, I couldn’t for the life of me see any point in that. If the Modhri was working with the Shonkla-raa, Wandek and his buddies could have had us any time they wanted. They could certainly have snatched Bayta while she was sitting at Terese’s bedside with Minnario and Dr. Aronobal.

  Besides, there was still the fact that if they wanted Bayta under their control, the simplest of all possible solutions was to scratch her with a piece of Modhran coral. Once a polyp colony had formed beneath her brain, they could sing their Modhri siren song and have her just walk into their lab, with no fuss, bother, or questions asked. No, whatever the Shonkla-raa knew about the Modhri in general, they had no idea that he was aboard Proteus.

  But that blissful ignorance was about to come to an abrupt end. Even if my improvised explanation for the Modhri’s massed watchdog attack had managed to fool them, they were certainly already thinking and wondering. Add to it the soon-to-be-circulating tale of another watchdog miraculously pulling a semiconscious Nemut from an elevator to an emergency node, and that wondering would blossom into full-blown suspicion.

  And once that happened, all one of them would have to do would be to find the nearest watchdog and hum his siren song. The Modhri might not want to draw attention to himself by activating all four hundred sixty-eight of his watchdog walkers, but I doubted the Shonkla-raa would be so worried about rocking the boat that far.

  Bayta and I might be able to elude a couple dozen Shonkla-raa, or however many were aboard the station. There was no way we could elude them and four hundred watchdogs besides. An hour or two after Minnario arrived at the node, the Shonkla-raa would suddenly have themselves a brand-new army.

  We absolutely had to be off Proteus before then.

  I was still gnawing at the edges of the problem when Minnario’s comm suddenly vibrated in my pocket.

  It was Emikai. An oddly confused-sounding Emikai. “Are you certain you are under suspicion of a crime?” he asked.

  “I was spotted leaving the scene of a murder,” I said. “I also shot a santra with a couple of snoozers. Either one of those should have done the trick.”

&nbs
p; “Apparently not,” he said. “Your name is not on any of the patroller search-and-detain lists.”

  I frowned at Doug, who was back on his feet looking alertly up at me. “That’s impossible,” I said. “You sure you didn’t just miss it?”

  “I did not miss anything,” he said sternly. “Nor did I have to. Your records and Bayta’s would have been automatically opened to patroller access as soon as your name was listed. Since those records are still blocked, you are clearly not on the list.”

  I grimaced, feeling like a fool. Of course Wandek had kept me off the patroller lists. The last thing he wanted right now was for the patrollers to pick me up and hear my side of what had happened in Hchchu’s office. “So you got nothing?”

  “Not entirely,” Emikai said. “Though I could not access individual records, I could search for all messages going through the system at the time she made her call.”

  “Any torchferry reservations in the mix?”

  “No,” he said. “Most of the messages were official notifications or internal equipment activations. The only one that struck me as being of interest was a message that had been sent to the laser for transmission to the Tube.”

  I felt my blood go suddenly cold. Of course. Bayta hadn’t just booked us standby passage on the next torchferry, where the Shonkla-raa would undoubtedly be waiting for us to show up. She’d instead sent a message to the Spiders, telling them to come and get us.

  Only it wouldn’t be ordinary Spiders who arrived on Proteus’s doorstep. Ordinary Spiders were genetically incapable of any sort of fighting, and with us trapped in the middle of a Shonkla-raa stronghold, Bayta would have called for someone who could fight.

  Which meant she’d called for some defender Spiders.

  I stared down at Doug, my stomach hardening into a knot. Back at the beginning of this war, I’d seen a large number of freshly created Modhran walkers take out a whole trainful of Spiders. More recently, on the super-express, I’d seen a single Shonkla-raa freeze a pair of defenders where they stood, while simultaneously taking on three Modhran walkers and Bayta and me and nearly killing all of us. If the Shonkla-raa tumbled to the Modhri’s presence on Proteus, not even a group of defenders would have a chance against them.