by Timothy Zahn
“You Chahwyn were designed by the Shonkla-raa to be incapable of aggression, which is why you bred the Spiders to run your Quadrail for you,” I said. “It stands to reason that you wouldn’t have ventured out into the big bad universe without some way of protecting yourself.”
“That does not imply a weapon,” he said stiffly. “I have Spiders to protect me.”
“Who are as useless in a fight as you are,” I said. “No, you’ve got some kind of weapon, all right. I want one, too.”
He looked at Bayta, and once again the two of them lapsed into a brief telepathic conference. “Actually, I’d venture to say you almost don’t have a choice anymore,” I said into the silence. “The Modhri already suspects I’m being allowed to carry a weapon aboard the trains. If and when he gets desperate enough to jump me, I’d better be holding something heftier than a bluff. Otherwise, scratch me, scratch Bayta, and scratch any chance of using any other bluffs against him. Ever.”
The Chahwyn’s eyes came back to me. “It cannot be allowed,” he said.
“Oh, I’ll bet it can,” I cajoled. “Come on, at least let me see what the thing looks like.”
For a long minute he sat stewing in indecision. Then, reluctantly, he reached somewhere inside his toga and pulled out a device that looked remarkably like a set of brass knuckles made of antiqued pewter. “It’s a neural shock weapon called a kwi,” he said, holding it out for my scrutiny. “A relic of the war against the Shonkla-raa.”
“What does it do?” I asked.
“It has two settings, each with three levels,” he explained, indicating a pair of spots on the weapon. “It can either create incapacitating pain or bring about unconsciousness for up to six hours.”
“Scope and range?”
“We believe it will work against any oxygen-breathing being, and up to a distance of perhaps forty or fifty meters.”
Not much range, as such things went. Still, it was better than nothing. And the any oxygen-breather part was definitely promising. “Will the knock-out setting take out a walker’s polyp colony?” I asked, just to make sure.
His face puckered. Not just the area around his mouth, but his whole face. “We are fairly certain that it will,” he said. “But we haven’t yet tried it against any living beings.”
An untested weapon. Terrific. “Well, the things apparently worked back during the war,” I pointed out. “Close enough. Wrap it up—I’ll take it.”
“Certainly you joke,” he said, tucking the kwi out of sight again. “As you have already said, this is my single defense against danger.”
“My apologies” I said. “In that case, I’ll make do with your backup piece.”
“My what?”
“Your backup weapon,” I said. “The one you keep hidden in your tender in case the bad guys manage to take this one away from you.”
The Chahwyn’s face rippled again. “Would you care to tell me exactly where the other weapon is hidden?”
“I don’t know the layout in there,” I reminded him. “But it’ll be somewhere within arm’s reach of the most valuable thing you have.” I paused, considering. “At a guess, it’s near your map of the Quadrail system. The one that includes all these sidings, your new home system, and any other secret hideaways you have stashed around the galaxy.”
He stared at me as if seeing me for the first time. “You’re very sure of yourself and your conclusions, aren’t you, Mr. Compton?”
“If you mean am I good at what I do, yes,” I said. “That’s why you hired me in the first place.”
He looked at Bayta, and then stood up. As he did so, and in perfect unison, the two Spiders behind him also straightened a bit. “Come.” He walked to the door, the two Spiders deftly inserting themselves between him and me, and we all headed outside.
We passed our truncated train, and I got a glimpse of Morse’s face as he peered between the legs of a Spider who had taken up guard position directly outside the baggage car door. If Morse had been despondently clutching the nearest legs it would have been the spitting image of a dit rec prison drama scene, and it was all I could do to resist calling out something about the governor and a pardon.
The Chahwyn noticed Morse, too, and the door abruptly irised closed.
We continued forward to the tender. The door irised open at our approach, and the Chahwyn disappeared inside. Bayta didn’t hesitate, but followed him in, so I did as well.
The interior layout was the same as that of the tender we’d ridden earlier, except that the forward set of bunks had been replaced by a workstation and a living area. The Chahwyn went to a wardrobe set against one of the side walls, opened it, and from a hidden compartment in the side withdrew another of the kwi weapons. He turned, and with only a little hesitation handed it to me. “Here,” he said. “Do not lose it.”
“Thank you,” I said, trying it on. The thing was heavier than I’d expected, but not unreasonably so. The adjustment knobs were within convenient thumb range. “Which of these is which?”
“The left-side switch allows you to choose between pain and unconsciousness,” he said. “Left is for pain. The right-side switch controls intensity, lowest at the left. Squeeze the grip to activate.”
“Got it,” I said, adjusting it for full-power unconsciousness. Might as well have it ready to go. “Don’t worry, I promise not to misuse it.”
“I’m certain you won’t,” he said gravely. “Because it is telepathically activated.”
I froze with the kwi halfway to my pocket. “What?” I asked carefully.
“It must be activated before use by either Bayta or a Spider,” he explained, and I could swear there was a hint of malicious amusement in his voice. I’d managed to talk him out of a forbidden weapon, but the last laugh was going to be his. “Once it is activated, you may use it at will.”
“And how many shots will I get before it has to be reactivated?” His face puckered again. “I don’t know,” he said. “We haven’t yet—”
“Tried it on anyone,” I interrupted. “Right—I forgot. I’ll be sure to let you know how it works. Come on, Bayta. Time we were getting back.”
The Spider standing guard outside our car stepped aside as we approached, and the door irised open. “About time,” Morse said as we entered, the door closing again behind us. “Who in bloody hell was that?”
“Who was who?” I asked. Beneath us, the floor rocked slightly as we got under way.
“Don’t be cute,” he growled. “That alien. I’ve never seen one like that before.”
“Who, Fred?” I asked. “He’s just a Shorshic trying out a new Halloween costume. Don’t worry about it.”
“Compton—”
“The important thing is that we’ve now got a plan,” I said. “You want to hear it, or not?”
“Please, don’t keep me in suspense,” he said sarcastically.
“For starters, we’re not going to make the exchange at Terra Station,” I said, pulling out my reader and keying for my Quadrail system map. “We’re going to do it at the Nemuti world of Laarmiten.”
“Why?” Morse asked.
“Because that’s where the Lynx is going to end up anyway,” I said. “We might as well make it easy for them.” I paused, as if weighing how much I should tell him. “Besides, we already have a friend on the ground there,” I added, remembering what I’d put on Fayr’s altered message chip.
“You seem to have friends all over the galaxy,” he said. “Just how big an organization are you part of, anyway?”
“I have no idea,” I said. It was even the truth, for a change. “There’s a train change coming up at Trivsdal a little over forty hours from now. Instead of continuing on down the main line toward Terra, we’ll switch to the Claremiado Loop and go to Laarmiten instead.”
“Fine,” he said. “Incidentally, when we hit Bildim I’m going to see about upgrading back to first class. No sense in staying back here guarding your luggage if there’s nothing in there worth guarding.”
The corner of his lip twisted. “Of course,” he said softly. “Maybe even two.”
TWENTY-TWO
Forty minutes later we felt the slight bump that meant we’d been reconnected with our train.
“It occurs to me we may have trouble letting the other side know we want to alter the exchange point,” Morse commented as we started down the aisle of the rearmost third-class car. “I don’t suppose you have a forwarding address for them.”
“No, but I don’t think it’ll be a problem,” I assured him. “They have people all around.”
“So I gather,” he said. “I think it’s about time you told me exactly who and what this group is.”
“Later,” I told him.
At the front of our car, one of the restroom doors opened and possibly the widest Cimma I’d ever seen pushed his way out into the aisle. With his eyes on the floor in front of him, completely oblivious to our presence, he started waddling in our direction. “This could be trouble,” Morse murmured.
“No problem,” I assured him, spotting an empty seat a few rows ahead. “We’ll pull in there and wait for him to pass.”
We were nearly there when the Cimma suddenly raised his eyes far enough to see us. “Ah—friends,” he panted, his blubbery flanks wobbling their way around another pair of seats. Apparently even this much of a stroll was outside his usual endurance level. “Excuse pre please. I am bother of great height.”
“That’s all right,” I said. Morse had already stepped into the gap, and I nudged Bayta to join him. There wasn’t enough room for all three of us, so I slipped into the row just behind them, apologizing with a nod of my head as my feet brushed a little too close to the toes of the Juri seated there.
The Cimma worked his way to the row in front of Bayta, then suddenly turned an intense gaze on me. “But you not sit from this car,” he said. “I would peer three Humans living here together.”
“No, our seats are farther forward,” I agreed. “We had to get something from our luggage.”
“All three of you?” Abruptly his jaws cracked wide in a sly smile. “You on running, my friend?”
“What?” I asked. The casual Cimmaheem approach to grammar made them masters at mangling all languages except their own.
“You on running,” he repeated, even more slyly. “You were cheating at cards, perhapsly, and went dark to hide?”
“No, of course not,” I said stiffly, putting all the wounded pride into my voice that I could summon on short notice. The Cimmaheem might be terrible with languages, but they could read attitude and tonal nuance with the best of them.
And they were better than most at jumping to wrong conclusions. “Ah,” he said knowingly as he got his bulk moving again, finally clearing Bayta’s and Morse’s row. “Never fear, friend. I will not orate upon you.”
“Thank you,” I said. “We appreciate it.”
“Nothing littler can one do for a friend,” he said, looking directly into my eyes as he cleared my row as well. “Be long-lived, friend, and do run safely to probable.”
With that, he continued on back, bumping into every seat and most of the shoulders along his path. I stared at his back as he went, an odd tingling somewhere at the base of my brain. There was something wrong about him, but I couldn’t put my finger on what it was.
“You coming?” Morse asked.
I snapped out of my reverie. “Of course,” I said, nodding again to the Juri as I stepped back out into the aisle.
Bayta was looking oddly at me. “You all right?” she asked.
“I’m fine.” I took a deep breath. “Come on, let’s get back to our seats. I want a nap before we hit Bildim.”
I was awakened by a hand shaking my shoulder. “Compton?” Morse’s voice called from somewhere in the distance. “Come on, snap out of it.”
I blinked open my eyes. Everything around me was dim, which meant the car’s lights had been lowered to their usual nighttime setting. That must mean we were about to come into Bildim Station. I lifted my wrist to check my watch.
It was only then I realized I wasn’t sitting in my nice, comfy third-class seat amid the smells and sounds of dozens of Humans and aliens. I was, instead, standing amid the crates and trunks in one of the baggage cars, facing a stack of dark blue boxes safety-webbed to the side wall.
I snapped fully awake. “What the hell?”
“I was about to say that myself,” Morse growled. “When did you start sleepwalking?”
“I don’t sleepwalk,” I told him, looking around. I was in a baggage car, all right. The front one, I tentatively identified it. “What happened?”
“As I said, you were sleepwalking,” Morse said. “I heard you mumbling, and when I looked back to see what the problem was you were lumbering down the aisle like Frankenstein’s latest science project.”
A cold chill ran up my back. “Thought virus,” I muttered.
“Come again?”
“Thought virus,” I repeated. “It’s a technique used by the enemy for planting suggestions in a person’s mind.”
“You mean like a hypnotic drug?” Morse asked, frowning.
“Similar, but a lot easier to deliver,” I said. “Remember that Cimma who talked to us as we were heading back to our seats earlier? It didn’t click at the time, but his hair didn’t fit his supposedly lower-class status.”
“Of course it did,” Morse said, frowning with concentration. “I remember. It was hanging completely loose.”
“Yes, but it had the kinking of having been recently braided,” I said.
“You’re right,” Morse murmured. “Bloody hell. But what does that have to do with this?”
“You were there on Ghonsilya,” I said. “You saw how most of the enemy’s soldiers were from the upper and ruling classes.”
Morse muttered something under his breath. “I was hoping they were just playing fancy-dress to throw the cops off the track.”
“No, they were real,” I assured him. “And the Cimma called me friend, four or five times at least. Friendship helps lower emotional barriers and gives the thought virus better access to the victim.”
Morse hissed between his teeth. “You ready yet to tell me what the hell is going on?”
“Later,” I said. “Right now, I need to figure out what I’m doing here. What happened after I came in?”
“You walked straight to this stack of crates and stopped,” Morse said. “You were staring at the labels when I decided enough was enough.”
I studied the stack of crates. All of them had destination labels for the same world, some place in the Cimmal Republic I’d never heard of. So did all the crates in the two stacks on either side of it. “Interesting,” I said, pulling out my multitool. “Let’s see what’s in them.”
“Easy,” Morse warned, suddenly cautious. “This is illegal even by the Spiders’ rules.”
“Don’t worry, I won’t hurt anything,” I said. Selecting the pry bar, I slid it beneath the lid of the top crate, digging into the plastic near one corner. With a twist of my wrist, I popped the lid half a centimeter up.
And as the train clattered around a curve and the car lurched, a spoonful of water rolled through the gap and trickled down the outside of the crate.
I touched a finger to it. It was cold water. Very cold water. The kind of water Modhran coral liked to live in.
I looked at the three stacks of crates. Suddenly this was feeling like a very unhealthy place to be. “Let’s get out of here,” I muttered, letting the lid back down and taking a careful step back.
“What is it?” Morse asked.
“Tell you later,” I said, taking another step back and turning around. I half expected to see the Cimma and an entire group of walkers watching in silent anticipation of me pulling a Sleeping Beauty and jabbing m
y finger on the sharp coral. One scratch was all it would take to put me on the track to joining them.
But there was no one there. Having wound up his puppet—me—the Modhri had apparently just turned me loose.
I jerked as Morse suddenly gripped my upper arm. “Not later,” he said flatly. “Later has become now. My life’s on the line here. So are Mr. Stafford’s and Ms. Auslander’s.”
“I suppose,” I conceded. “All right. As soon as we hit Bildim and I can get a compartment and some privacy, we’ll talk.”
We reached Bildim, swapped out the usual assortment of passengers, and started up again. There were no compartments available, but Morse and I were able to get seats in the first-class car directly behind the compartment car.
And as we pulled out into the permanent twilight of the Tube, he and Bayta and I settled into Bayta’s compartment and I told him the whole story. Or at least as much of the story as it seemed advisable to tell him.
He was silent for a long minute after I’d finished. Apparently his standard bloody hell was inadequate to cover this one. “And you can prove all this?” he asked at last.
“Prove may be too strong a word,” I conceded. “But Deputy Director Losutu can certainly vouch for the parts he was involved in. You can talk to him when we get back.”
“I’ll do that,” he said, a hint of challenge in his tone. “In the meantime, we have Ms. Auslander as a hostage to these things—”
“This thing, singular,” I corrected.
“Right,” he growled. “Group mind. Even the bloody grammar is scrambled with this thing. As I was saying, our first priority has to be getting Ms. Auslander away from him.”
“Agreed,” I said. “We’ll have a couple of hours at Trivsdal Station when we change Quadrails for Laarmiten. I’ll just wander the platform muttering message for Modhri until someone takes notice.”
“Sounds like the opening of that classic Hitchcock dit rec drama North by Northwest,” Morse commented. “A mistaken connection with the telegram boy launches the hero into danger and intrigue.”