by Timothy Zahn
“I just saw another shuttle from that same group only let out five passengers,” she said. “All of them upper class.”
“So they had a short load,” I said. “So what?”
“But then only five outgoing passengers got on,” she said. “Belldic shuttles are supposed to carry sixty passengers.”
I frowned. She was right about the number. And given that it cost as much to run a half-empty shuttle as it did a full one, nobody deliberately ran short loads without a good reason. “Let’s take a closer look,” I suggested.
Sure enough, before we’d gotten twenty paces the flow of incoming Bellidos from the shuttle stopped. Five of them, just as Bayta had said. The outgoing passengers started filing down the stairway; again, only five made it in before the hatchway light went out, indicating the shuttle was full.
“Interesting,” I said, shifting my attention to our five new arrivals. A dozen paces from the shuttle hatchways they joined up with another group of five, possibly the ones from the shuttle Bayta had first noticed. The first five were standing casually enough, looking at first glance like any other collection of travelers regrouping before heading for their trains.
But they weren’t talking among themselves or looking at their tickets or admiring the brilliantly flashing Coreline that ran through the center of the Tube above our heads. Instead, they stood silently, their attention focused outward toward the rest of the crowd milling about the station.
Even more interestingly, their carry-on luggage, instead of hugging their owners’ sides like well-behaved self-rolling luggage should, was gathered together in the middle of their circle like the women and children in an old dit rec western.
The other lighted hatchway opened, and a third group of upper-class Bellidos started filing up into the Tube. “Wait here,” I told Bayta. Turning off the leash button inside my lapel to keep my luggage from following, I headed toward the hatchway, weaving in and out of the other travelers as quickly and unobtrusively as I could.
Only five Bellidos got out of this shuttle, too. By the time I reached the waiting crowd the first five outgoing passengers had disappeared down the stairway and the hatchway’s rim lights had gene out. Picking up my pace, I hurried forward, and as the hatchway started to iris shut I jumped through the opening.
The stairway had already retracted, and I dropped two meters straight down onto the folded metal. I hit with a rattling clang, nearly twisting my ankle on the uneven surface as I threw a hand against the side wall to steady myself. Recovering my balance, I lifted my eyes from my footing.
To find myself staring down the muzzles of a dozen guns.
Not the fake ones Bellidos were allowed to carry into the Tube, either. These were the real thing: large caliber, undoubtedly loaded, and gripped in very steady hands. Hands whose owners were furthermore encased in Belldic military uniforms.
“Who?” one of the soldiers demanded.
Somewhere deep in my chest, I found where I’d mislaid my voice. “Sorry,” I croaked, carefully opening both hands to demonstrate their emptiness. “Wrong shuttle.”
There was a soft clanking from above me as the hatch opened again. “Go,” the Bellido ordered, twitching the muzzle of his gun upward in case my ears had stopped working the same time my voice had.
I got a grip on the edges of the hatch, my eyes flicking once to the five wide-eyed nonmilitary Belldic passengers in the front row, and pulled myself up and out. The shuttle hatch irised closed, followed by the station’s own hatch, both of them nearly catching my legs before I could get them out of the way.
“What in the world was that for?” Bayta demanded, hurrying toward me with my carrybags in her hands and her own rolling at her heels. “If Morse had seen you trying to get away—”
“I wasn’t trying to get away,” I assured her as she set down my bags with perhaps a little more force than necessary. “Besides which, the shuttle was already full.”
“With only five passengers?”
“That’s right.” Turning my leash control back on, I let my bags roll into position behind me, then gave a casual glance at the—now—fifteen Bellidos who’d emerged from the three special shuttles. The original ten were still gazing outward, looking for all the world like a group of combat soldiers settled into a defensive ring around their clustered luggage.
The five new arrivals, in contrast, were looking straight at me.
“Come on,” I said, taking Bayta’s arm again and picking a random direction away from them.
The Bellidos didn’t make any move to follow. I waited anyway until we’d built up some distance before speaking again. “Two reasons why the shuttles were already full,” I said quietly. “Reason one: they were military layout, with only twenty seats each. Reason two: the other fifteen seats were occupied by armed Bellidos.”
Bayta’s eyes went wide. “They’re not supposed to bring weapons this close to a station,” she insisted.
“They must have gotten special permission,” I said. “It did seem to be an official military operation. And they didn’t try to—”
“I don’t care how official it was,” Bayta said. She actually looked angry, an emotion I didn’t see in her very often. “No weapons are allowed in the trains or Tubes. They know that.”
“And they didn’t try to bring the weapons into the Tube,” I finished patiently. “Come on. If the Spiders could keep their temper over this, you should be able to, too.”
Her lips compressed into a thin line. Then, slowly, the tension lines eased. “It was still a waste of effort,” she said. “Once the shuttle has left the transfer station, what good are armed soldiers going to do anyone?”
“Not a scrap,” I agreed. “But someone aboard must have been feeling nervous about whatever he was up to. Apparently he wanted to get to the Quadrail with at least the illusion of safety.”
Bayta started to look over her shoulder, seemed to think better of it. “The Modhri shouldn’t care all that much if one of his walkers is kidnapped or killed,” she said, her voice almost too quiet to hear. “Why protect them that way?”
“We don’t know the Modhri’s involved in this, any more than we know he was involved with Smith’s murder,” I reminded her. Still, I’d pretty much come to that same conclusion. “But if he is, you’re right, he shouldn’t care. So kidnapping and murder are out. That just leaves theft.”
“Something valuable in their luggage?” Bayta asked, clearly still working it through. “Is that why it’s all bunched together that way?”
“Could be,” I agreed. “The question is, what?”
“The Lynx Mr. Smith mentioned?” she suggested. “In fact … could he have been on his way here to meet with these people?”
“Could be,” I said again. The girl was definitely starting to click with this detective stuff. “Alternatively, maybe he had information on their movements that they didn’t want getting out. Speaking of which, how about asking the Spiders where they’re all going?”
We’d made it another fifty meters before she got her answer. “Laarmiten,” she said. “It’s on the Claremiado Loop, one of the five regional capitals of the Nemuti FarReach.”
An unpleasant tingle went up my back. The Nemuti FarReach. The place Smith’s last-gasp Lynx had come from. This was definitely starting to push the edges of coincidence. “When does their Quadrail leave?” I asked.
She glanced at one of the holodisplay clocks hovering in various spots around the station. “Thirty minutes, from Platform Ten. It’s an express.”
“Get us a compartment on it.”
She shook her head. “I can’t,” she said. “All the compartments are booked.”
I scowled at the nearest Spider as he strode purposefully across the station on his seven slender legs, his central metallic globe reflecting the colors of the Coreline’s light show. As recently as a few months ago, the Spiders had made a point of keeping a double compartment open for us on all trains in our vicinity.
Still, to be fa
ir, we had been heading the opposite direction. “Can you pull rank or something?” I asked.
“There’s nothing left,” Bayta said with the impatient tone of someone who’s already answered the question. “They were all booked three weeks ago.”
I frowned. “By our fifteen nervous Bellidos?”
“They—” She broke off. “Actually, yes, they were,” she continued, her impatience fading away. “There’s one Juri who’s continuing on from Misfar, but the rest are all new Belldic passengers.”
And all of them heading to a Nemuti world. “What about ordinary first-class seats?” I asked. “Can you get us a couple of them?”
“You mean … just seats?” she echoed warily. “With walkers aboard?”
“Does that really make a difference?” I countered. “You know as well as I do that if they really want us a compartment door isn’t going to hold them for long.”
She swallowed. “I suppose not,” she said in a low voice.
“Don’t worry, the Modhri’s not going to throw away any of his walkers just for a little revenge,” I soothed. “With his homeland wrecked, he can’t afford to waste any of his resources without a damn good reason, and that includes his walkers. As long as we don’t bother him, I don’t think he’ll bother us.”
“You assume.”
“Okay, yes, I assume,” I conceded. “But either way, this is too intriguing to pass up.”
She nodded, still looking unhappy at the prospect of sharing a Quadrail car with an unknown number of Modhran walkers. “All right. We have seats.”
“Good girl.” I glanced at my watch. “As long as the Spiders are tracking down our mysterious Daniel Mice anyway, they might also see what they can find about this Nemuti Lynx. It’ll be fairly obscure—I already searched my encyclopedia and came up dry.”
“Mine didn’t have anything, either,” Bayta confirmed. “I doubt anyone here will know. Can they put the information in a data chip and deliver it to us somewhere down the line?”
“That should work,” I said. “But make sure they put a high-priority stamp on it. This is no time to be flying blind.”
“They’ll get it to us as quickly as they can,” she assured me.
I looked back across the station at the train we’d just left, where a pair of drudges were crowding close beside the door of the first-class compartment car. Morse was there, too, standing off to the side, Lady Dorchester near him. Even at this distance I could see they both looked stiff and unhappy.
And as we all watched, the Spiders maneuvered a covered stretcher out through the door and onto the platform.
No weapons were allowed aboard the Spiders’ nice, clean, safe Quadrail. So someone had simply beaten a middle-aged man to death.
Whoever was playing this game, they were playing it for keeps.
FOUR
Of the twelve civilizations served by the Quadrail system—people-groups which the Spiders liked to refer to as empires—seven had been riding the rails since the beginning. The rest of us had dribbled into the club over the centuries since then, with Humans being the most recent to join, three decades ago.
Our people-group, of course, consisted of Earth and four pathetic little colony systems, while at the other end of the spectrum the Shorshians had literally thousands of worlds to call their own. Nevertheless, to the Spiders we both qualified as galactic empires.
A lot of Humans tended to strut a little over that alleged equality. I had no idea what the Shorshians thought of the whole thing. Probably they just accepted it as one of the Spiders’ peculiarities and ignored us as best they could.
The Spiders had a lot of peculiarities, and a lot of secrets. I knew more about them than most people, and even I didn’t have anything close to a complete picture. All I really knew was that the Spiders were being directed from behind the scenes by the Chahwyn, a below-the-radar alien race who had survived the galaxy’s rebellion against the Shonkla-raa.
I also knew that, strictly speaking, the Quadrail was a fraud.
A benevolent fraud, perhaps, but a fraud nonetheless. The trains, the thousands of light-years of four-railed track, the whole damn Tube system—none of it had anything to do with the light-year-per-minute speeds the galaxy was privileged to enjoy.
The effect was due solely to the Coreline that ran down the center of each Tube. Lurking inside the light-show window dressing the Spiders had set up was some kind of exotic quantum thread. An object moving parallel to the Thread at close range picked up terrific speed, with that speed increasing the closer to the Thread the object got.
That was how the message cylinders that carried the galaxy’s information managed to travel so much faster than the trains themselves. Once out of the station and away from prying eyes, an outgoing train would kick its cylinder up into the loose mesh that surrounded the Coreline, where it zipped along until kicked back down to another train coming into the next station along the way.
A cynically minded person might assume the Spiders maintained the fraud in order to rake in the money the rest of us had to pay for interstellar transport. But there was more to it than that. A lot more. With the Tube severely limiting access to the Thread’s vicinity, the Spiders could maintain tight control over everything that traveled between the stars. Specifically, they could restrict war-class weapons, limiting such transfers to legitimate governments, and then only in order to beef up the defenses at those governments’ own colony worlds.
Which meant that anyone who wanted to make trouble on someone else’s turf would end up going against warships with the military equivalent of popguns. With the Tube in place, and the Spiders controlling the Tube, interstellar war was impossible.
With the Tube gone, all bets would be off. Anyone would be able to build warships and troop transports and self-guiding weapons and send them zipping along the Thread to the next empire down the line.
And they would. I knew enough about alien psychology, and more than enough about the Human version, to know that if interstellar travel was open and unrestricted we would soon have the sort of massive power struggles that had plagued Earth for most of its history. The Thread had enabled the Shonkla-raa to enslave most of the galaxy, and the Spiders and Chahwyn were determined not to let it happen again.
They’d been doing a pretty good job of it, too, until the Modhri showed up.
The first-class car Bayta and I found ourselves in was identical to all the others I’d seen during the months I’d been working with the Spiders. The seats were large and comfortable, with automatic cushion adjustments that could accommodate the full range of passenger rear ends. Each seat had its own reading light, drink holder, and music system, plus an eyeshade and sonic neutralizer for when the occupant grew tired of the genteel party atmosphere that usually pervaded first class and wanted to get some sleep. The chairs here were also mobile, and could be moved around to create conversation or game circles, swiveled for a view of whatever was playing on each of the car’s display windows, or just moved off into a corner for reading or quiet contemplation.
The passenger roster was also pretty typical of what I’d seen before, consisting of the rarefied upper crust of a variety of the galaxy’s species. In second and third class, travelers tended to segregate themselves by species. Not so in first. Juriani and Halkas, Bellidos and Pirks, Humans and Cimmaheem—we were all just one big happy family.
Of course, for the passengers the Modhri had co-opted, the family metaphor was literally true.
But if the Modhri mind segment I assumed was riding our train recognized Bayta and me, he apparently decided to play it cool. There were no obvious stares or scowls from any of the passengers, and certainly no attempts to make any trouble. In fact, aside from a few curious looks at our nonrarefied-upper-crust clothing, the rest of the car’s occupants pretty much ignored us.
As for the fifteen Bellidos who’d arrived at Bellis Station under armed escort, they seemed to be keeping to their compartments one car forward.
Still,
there was one amenity even a first-class compartment lacked, and that was personal food service. As the hours crept by, in ones and twos, the reclusive Bellidos began passing through our car on their way to the first-class dining car just behind us. Lounging in my seat, my legs propped up comfortably and my reader nestled in the crook of my elbow just for show, I took careful mental notes.
The first stop on our way back toward Human space was the Greesovra system, one of the Belldic regional capitals, seven hours out from Bellis. A few of our car’s passengers, mostly Bellidos, got off there, to be replaced by a slightly more varied group of new arrivals. With a Spider conductor standing the usual watch at each of the train’s doors, Bayta was able to confirm that all the passengers in the first-class compartments stayed put.
I’d hoped those seven hours would be long enough for the Spiders to do the Nemuti Lynx and Daniel Mice research I’d asked for. But the train pulled out of Greesovra Station without word being passed to Bayta that any such data chips were waiting to be picked up.
Three hours later we reached Dyar, the train’s final stop in the Bellidosh Estates-General. Again, there was some shuffling of passengers, though not as much as we’d seen at Greesovra. Again, not a peep from the Spiders about my data requests.
But I’d made some progress of my own with our mysterious Gang of Fifteen, as I’d privately dubbed them. The stripe patterns of Belldic faces were fairly easy for Human eyes to distinguish between, and over the past ten hours most of the Bellidos had made at least one trip back to the dining car.
All of them, that is, except two.
“The conductor says they’re in compartments two and three,” Bayta said as we had some dinner of our own in one of the dining car’s back corners.