by Timothy Zahn
“Even better,” I said. “Okay, first things first. Do you have a map of the Quadrail system? A complete map, I mean, one that shows these sidings and any other hidden goodies?”
“I don’t know what you mean by goodies,” she said as she selected a data chip from her belt pouch. “And you’ll need to use my reader,” she added, pulling it out and plugging in the chip. “The data is masked on normal readers.”
“Good idea,” I said, taking the reader from her. “What’s your last name, by the way?”
“I don’t have one,” she said, adjusting herself in her seat. “We’ll be rejoining the train in about an hour. If you have any questions, please wake me.”
She closed her eyes, and for a moment I studied that nondescript face of hers. She’d be watching every move I made from now on, I knew, ready to whistle up the nearest Spider at the first wrong step.
I turned back around to face forward. I still didn’t know if the Spiders were on to me or not. But if they were, they were certainly giving me plenty of rope with which to hang myself. It would be a shame to let that much good rope go to waste.
Settling back into my seat, I got to work.
FOUR
Exactly one hour and nine minutes later I felt a slight jolt run through the car. Two minutes after that, the connecting door at the front of the car irised open and a conductor appeared from the vestibule, its slender legs picking their way carefully down the narrow aisle toward us. I watched it come, listening to Bayta’s slow breathing behind me; and as the Spider came within five meters of us I heard a sudden catch in the rhythm as she came awake. “Yes?” she called.
“I think we’re here,” I said, half turning to look at her.
“Yes, we are,” she said, her fingertips rubbing the skin on either side of her eyes. “He’s come to show us to our new compartment.”
“Do you know which one is ours?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Then tell it thanks, but we’ll get there on our own,” I said. “An escort will just draw unnecessary attention.”
She hesitated, then nodded. “All right,” she said, locking her eyes onto the conductor. Its globe dipped slightly in response, and it reversed direction and left the car. “So?” she prompted. “Are we going?”
“Patience,” I said, studying my watch. So apparently all she had to do was to look at a Spider to communicate with it. Interesting. “In another twenty minutes we’ll reach New Tigris. There won’t be a lot of traffic coming and going, but at least we won’t be the only ones on the move.”
We sat in silence until, twenty minutes later, we decelerated to a stop. Then, as the expected trickle of passengers began, we headed forward.
The walk proved more interesting than I’d expected. On the Quadrail trips I’d taken while working for Westali I’d normally traveled third class, making it up to second only on the rare occasion when some nervous medium-level bureaucrat insisted on having an escort assigned to him. In each of those latter instances I’d ended up in cars dominated by other humans, either business or government types or minor celebrities who couldn’t swing the price of a first-class seat.
Now, as we passed through the last of the second-class cars into the first-class section, I got to see how the galaxy’s elite and powerful traveled.
The seats themselves were, not surprisingly, larger and better furnished than those in second and third class. They were also far more mobile. Third-class seats were fixed in place, with only limited adjustability. Second-class seats were a step up from that, attached to small floor circles that permitted them to both rotate and also move laterally to a limited extent, allowing passengers to create little conversation circles for themselves. The first-class cars had gone this one better, with seats that could be moved anywhere in the car, allowing a lounge atmosphere in which neat rows and aisles were pretty much nonexistent.
What was surprising to me was how the occupants had used this flexibility to sort themselves out. Unlike the lower classes, where travelers tended to congregate with their own species, the first-class cars were much more heterogeneous. Shorshians and Bellidos sat together, engaged in serious discussions, while here and there humans conversed as equals with Halkas or Juriani, despite the fact that both those races had been busily colonizing their home solar systems when Charlemagne was still planning his conquests of Central Europe.
Even political differences didn’t seem to matter. The Juriani and Cimmaheem were currently embroiled in a major controversy regarding the development of a half dozen worlds bordering their empires, yet I saw a mixed group of them sitting around a table playing a card game and chatting quite amicably.
The bar end of the first-class dining car was much the same, with the social lubricant of alcohol and other intoxicants adding an extra layer of goodwill and camaraderie. Only in the restaurant section did the travelers largely segregate themselves, and I suspected that had more to do with the challenges of species-specific food aromas than any xenophobia.
The car in front of the dining car contained more first-class seating, with more of the social mixing I’d already seen. Finally, in the compartment car ahead of that one, we reached our new home.
It was as nice as I’d expected, and then some. It was small, of course, but the space had been utilized so efficiently that it didn’t feel at all cramped. Attached to the front wall was a narrow but comfortable-looking bed that could be folded up for extra floor space. Above the bed was a luggage rack with my two carrybags sitting neatly side by side. Against the outer wall was a lounge chair with a swivel computer beside it on one side and an expansive display window—currently blank—on the other. On the opposite side of the display window was a fold-down clothes rack, with memory-plastic hook/hangers that could stretch or shrink as needed, plus a built-in sonic cleaning system with a quick-turn cycle for half-hour freshening. A tiny human-configured half bath was tucked into the corner beside the door, the whole cubicle converting into a shower stall for use after long overnight trips. Finally, the back wall contained a curve couch with a set of reading and ambiance lights strategically placed above it. The room was done up in a tasteful color scheme, with decorative moldings and small cameo-style carvings where the walls and ceiling met. “I could get used to this,” I commented as I circled the room, touching the various controls and running my fingers over the moldings and the sections of polished wood and metal. The lounge chair had a leathery feel to it, while the curve couch was done up in something midway between velvet and very soft feathers.
“I trust you’ll find it adequate,” Bayta said. She stepped past me as I finished my tour and touched a control beneath the display window. In response, the curve couch and lights collapsed neatly into the back wall, which then retracted into the side of the half-bath cubicle to reveal a mirror image of the compartment we were standing in. “This one’s mine,” she said, a subtle note of warning in her tone.
“Of course,” I said. Not that I was likely to have made a swing for her even if I hadn’t had more important business on my mind. Walking back to my bed, I reached up to the luggage rack and hauled down the smaller of my two carrybags.
And as I did so, a quiet alarm went off in the back of my skull. Earlier, when I’d carried the bags out of the transfer station restaurant, the leatherlite grip that rode the handle straps had been flexible, even a little squishy. Now there was virtually no give to the grip at all. “Bayta, can you pull up a dining car menu for me?” I asked casually as I popped the bag open.
“Certainly,” she said, sitting down in the lounge chair and swiveling the computer around to face her.
And with her attention now safely occupied, I gave the handle a close look.
The reason for the change in its feel was instantly obvious. The space between the grip and the strap, the looseness of which had given the handle its squishiness, had been completely filled in, like an éclair with a double helping of cream. The material matched the leatherlite’s color and texture perfectly, but
somehow I doubted that was what it was.
“Here it is,” Bayta announced, swiveling the display around. “But I thought you ate at Terra Station.”
“A good traveler learns to eat whenever he gets the chance,” I said, stepping to her side and paging quickly through the menu. “I don’t suppose first-class has delivery privileges.”
“Not usually,” she said. “Do you want me to ask one of the servers or conductors if he’ll bring you something?”
“No, thanks,” I said. “That’s what I’ve got you for. Be a good girl and go get me an order of onion rings, will you?”
In the past, I’d found the be-a-good-girl line to be a remarkably effective way of getting a quick reading on a woman’s temperament. Unlike most of those I’d tried it on, Bayta didn’t even bat an eye. “As you wish,” she said, sliding out of the chair. Crossing the compartment, she touched the door control to open it and disappeared into the corridor.
I went over to the door and made sure it was locked. Then, returning to the bed, I hauled down the other carrybag. In a galaxy where self-propelled luggage was the norm, I doubted that one in a hundred travelers had more than a vague idea what their handles really felt like. The only reason I’d caught the alteration so quickly was because of my carrybags’ chronic motor problems, the very problems I’d been cursing five hours ago.
There was a lesson there, or at least a bit of irony, but at the moment I couldn’t be bothered with either. Like the smaller carrybag, the larger one’s handle had also been padded out. Pulling out my pocket multitool, I extended the fingertip-sized blade—the biggest knife permitted aboard a Quadrail—and began digging carefully beneath the grip.
My first guess was that the Spiders had decided to backstop their watchdog by planting a tracer or transmitter on me. But as I scraped millimeter after millimeter away without finding anything except whisker-thin embedded wires, that idea began to fade. I kept at it; and finally, two centimeters in, I struck something familiar.
Only it wasn’t a transmitter. It was, instead, a short-range receiver connected to a small pulse capacitor, which was in turn connected to the whisker wires buried in the material.
The sort of setup you might find in a remotely triggered antipersonnel bomb.
Pulling out my reader, I selected a data chip from my collection marked Encyclopaedia Britannica. So Bayta had a specially-gimmicked reader, did she? Fine. So did I. Plugging in the chip, I touched the reader’s activation control and held one corner close to the material I’d scraped out of the handle.
It was not, in fact, a bomb, antipersonnel or otherwise. This sensor was the most advanced bit of technology in the Terran Confederation, a gadget any Westali field director would probably give his best friend’s right arm for, and it wasn’t picking up even a hint of the fast-burning chemicals all explosives had in common. I retuned the sensor twice, just to be sure, then switched to scanning for poisons. Again, nothing.
But nothing in the case of poisons could merely mean that the stuff was too well disguised for a normal scan. Fortunately, there were ways of teasing such things into the open. Pulling out my lighter, I flipped the thumb guard around, swinging it over the flame jet where it would serve as a specimen holder. I put a single grain of the mystery material on top, set the sensor at the proper reading distance, and ignited the lighter. The flame hissed out, clean and blue-white, and there was a brief burst of pale smoke as the grain burned as well. Shutting off the lighter, I set it aside and keyed for analysis.
And this time, the sensor finally found the active ingredient carefully buried beneath the inert containment matrix.
Saarix-5 nerve gas.
The image of the Spiders’ dead messenger rose unpleasantly in front of my eyes as I unplugged the data chip and returned it and the reader to my pocket. In the absence of any move against me during the voyage from Earth, I’d begun to wonder if his death might have been a bizarre coincidence, the result of some random crime that had nothing to do with me.
Now it was looking like whoever was behind his murder had simply been biding his time.
Only here it wouldn’t be just me who went down. Depending on what percentage of the packing material was Saarix-5, there could be enough there to kill every oxygen-breather within ten meters. If my assailant set it off in the enclosed space of a Quadrail car, the effects would go even farther.
Which led to another interesting question. Namely, how had this little conjuring trick been performed in the first place? The only time the bags had been out of my sight after leaving the transfer station was right after we’d docked, as the passengers climbed up the ladder and the shuttle’s conveyer system pulled the luggage from the racks and shoved them up into the Tube after us. The sheer mechanics required for someone to insert a pair of booby traps in such a brief time was bad enough. What was worse was why the Spiders’ sensors hadn’t picked up on it.
Or maybe they had picked up on it. Maybe that was why that drudge had swooped down on me and walked off with the bags. But then why hadn’t they detained me, or kicked me off the Quadrail, or at least removed the Saarix?
Unless it was the drudge itself that had gimmicked them.
I stared at the bags, a hard knot forming in my stomach. The Spiders had been running the Quadrail with quiet efficiency for at least the past seven hundred years. In all that time there had never been a report of conflict among them, which had naturally led to the conclusion that they were a monolithic culture with no factions, disagreements, or rivalries.
But what if that wasn’t true? What if there were factions, only one of which wanted me to investigate this impending interstellar war? In that case, there might be another group seriously opposed to the idea of airing their secrets to a lowly human, especially a lowly human whose own government wanted nothing to do with him.
They might even be opposed enough to look for a permanent way to make sure that didn’t happen.
Gathering up the material I’d scraped out, I began stuffing it back beneath the grip. Bayta could return at any moment, and if she didn’t already know about the Saarix this wasn’t the time to break the news to her. If she did know, it was even more vital that she didn’t find out I was on to the scheme. It would have been nice if I could have disabled the receiver or capacitor, but a properly designed detonator came with built-in diagnostics, and I didn’t have the equipment to trick the gadget into giving itself false readings. If my would-be poisoner found out I’d neutralized this particular threat, he would just come up with a different one, and it was always better to face a trap you knew about than one you didn’t.
I was sitting in the lounge chair, skimming through a colorful computer brochure on Quadrail history, when Bayta returned with the onion rings.
“Thanks,” I said, taking the basket from her. The aroma reminded me of a batch I’d had once in San Antonio. “Have one?”
“No, thank you,” she said, stepping back to the middle of the floor. “Have you come up with a plan yet?”
“I’m still in the information-gathering phase,” I said, crunching into one of the rings. They tasted like the San Antonio ones, too. “For starters, I want you to ask the Spiders for a list of situations under which weapons are allowed aboard Quadrails.”
“I can answer that one,” she said. “Personal weapons like Belldic status guns can be put in lockboxes at the transfer station, which are then stowed in inaccessible storage bins beneath the cars. Larger weapons and weapons systems can be sent by cargo Quadrail only with special governmental permits.”
“Yes, I know the official exceptions,” I said. “I want to know the unofficial ones.”
She shook her head. “There aren’t any.”
“That you know about.”
“There aren’t any,” she repeated, more firmly this time.
I took a careful breath, willing myself to be calm. Dogmatic statements always drove me crazy. “Ask the Spiders anyway,” I said. “I also want to know everything about the Tube’s sensor
s. How they work, what they look for, and what exactly they do and don’t detect.”
She seemed a bit taken aback. “I’m not sure the Spiders will be willing to give you that kind of information,” she warned.
“They’re not being offered a choice,” I said. “They’re the ones who asked me in on this, remember? Either I get what I need or I’m walking.”
Her mouth twitched. “All right, I’ll ask,” she said. “But none of the conductors will have that kind of information.”
Another dogmatic statement. This one, though, I believed. “Fine. Who will?”
“It’ll have to go through a stationmaster,” she said, her forehead wrinkled in thought.
“Is that a problem?” I asked. “I assumed you could talk to all the Spiders.”
“Yes, I can,” she said. “But there aren’t very many of them at Yandro Station. Probably not enough for a clear relay to the stationmaster’s building.”
“A clear what?”
“My … communication … method has a limited range,” she said reluctantly. “For longer distances a message can be relayed between Spiders, but only if the Spiders are physically close enough to each other.”
“I see,” I said, nodding. So apparently she didn’t even have to look at a Spider to communicate, as I’d first thought. Some form of telepathy, then?
Problem was, as far as I knew no human being had ever demonstrated genuine, reproducible telepathic abilities. Also as far as I knew, neither had any of the galaxy’s other known species.
Which made Bayta … what?
“On the other hand, we’re only in the station for fifteen minutes,” I reminded her. “That’s not much time.”
“No, but I’ll only need to deliver that one short request,” she pointed out. “The information itself will have to be gathered and sent to us farther down the line.”
“I suppose that’ll work,” I said, thinking it through. Cargo and passengers traveled at the Quadrails’ standard light-year-per-minute, but the news and mail in those message cylinders somehow managed the trick of crossing the galaxy over a thousand times faster. The most popular theory was that once the Quadrail got up to speed, the Spiders used the dish antenna in front of the message cylinder slot to transmit everything to a train farther up the line, using the Tube itself as a gigantic wave-guide.