Night Train to Rigel

SIXTEEN:

The corridor outside the conference room was deserted. We saw a few people as we made our way to the airlocks, including a couple of Halkan soldiers. But it was always at a distance, and as far as I could tell none of them gave us a second look.

Everything outside looked pretty much the way we’d left it a few minutes earlier. The torchferry was still sitting on the ice, with the Halkan troop carrier squatting nearby. We headed toward the landing area, Bayta and me in front with our luggage, Fayr walking behind us with his gun out like a good Halkan prisoner escort should. “I hope you’re not relying on this charade to get us aboard that troop carrier,” I warned. “Halkan commandos have chameleon suits, too.”

“No fears,” Fayr assured me. Faintly through my remora I heard the sound of someone reporting to him on his own suit comm. “Other transportation has been arranged.”

Right on cue, a large bulky vehicle hove into view over the horizon, heading our direction. It took me a couple of puzzled seconds to identify it as the heavy lifter I’d seen earlier, now with the damaged tour bus clutched beneath it on its grapples. The lifter continued toward us, flying low and much faster than I would have expected something lugging that much mass could manage.

I was still watching when the grapples released in midair, sending the bus arcing sedately toward the surface. I heard Bayta’s sharp intake of air; and a second later the bus slammed squarely into the aft section of the troop carrier.

Even in Modhra’s thin atmosphere the impact was loud enough to hear, like a meat grinder that had had a bone tossed into it. “To the torchferry,” Fayr ordered over the noise.

We picked up our pace, fighting to maintain the delicate balance between maximal speed without hitting the ground hard enough to go bounding kangaroo-style into the air. Behind us, people were starting to pour from the lodge’s airlocks in response to the crash, and I saw a dozen figures in military vac suits hurrying in from over two of the nearby hills. The lifter itself, now relieved of its burden, shot past the lodge and disappeared over the horizon in the direction of the toboggan tunnels.

We reached the torchferry’s open outer door without incident and slipped inside. I drew my gun, just in case, as Fayr closed the door and cycled the airlock. The inner door slid open, and we went inside.

I needn’t have bothered with the gun. There were two figures already at the torchferry’s command and copilot stations, and though their vac suits were pure Halkan military it was obvious from their nonchalant glances our direction that they were in fact two of Fayr’s commandos. “I guess this explains where the Halkas’ prisoner went,” I commented as Fayr gestured us forward.

“Actually, he is piloting the lifter,” Fayr said. “I assumed that the last direction the Modhri would expect him to flee would be to the scene of his previous activity. Can you fly this vehicle?”

“Probably.” I stepped between the two Bellidos and gave the controls a quick look. All the labels were in Halkora, but the layout was standard enough. “Make that yes,” I said. “Provided you don’t want anything too complicated.”

“Nothing complicated at all,” Fayr assured me, gesturing the Bellidos out of their seats. “We need only return to where you found me earlier this morning.”

“Got it,” I said, slipping into the pilot’s seat and strapping in. I checked the thrusters and ion-plasma drive, confirmed they’d been run properly through their warm-up. “Say when.”

“Lift now,” Fayr said.

My limited Westali flight training had centered around starfighters and other military craft, and the first thing I noticed was how sluggishly the torchliner responded. But as I got us pointed the right direction and fed power to the ion-plasma drive it became considerably more lively, and we were pressed gently back into our seats as we shot over the frozen landscape below. A minute later, we’d reached the end of the red pylons and the unfinished toboggan tunnels. “Now what?” I called.

“We must melt the ice over the north tunnel,” Fayr called from the rear of the compartment. “You know where.”

I glanced back over my shoulder, paused for a longer look. While I’d been concentrating on my flying, Fayr and his buddies had been putting together a pair of very nasty-looking 15 mm hip-mounted packet guns. “Nice,” I said. “You get all this stuff from Sistarrko?”

“Yes,” Fayr said. “Military-class weapons cannot be transported via Quadrail, so we brought in trade goods and purchased the equipment we needed from local manufacturers.”

“By way of the black market, I’d guess,” I said. “Incidentally, you do realize those are outside toys, right?”

“No fears,” he assured me. “Concentrate on melting the ice, and leave us to deal with the starfighters.”

“The—?” I checked my board, then lifted my eyes to look out the canopy.

There they were, all right: a matched pair of Chafta 669s hovering watchfully over the ice, their bows pointed our direction.

And as I watched, one of them dipped its bow and then raised it upward again, tracking its weapons-lock systems across our hull in the universal command to surrender. “They’re not looking very happy,” I warned Fayr.

“Ignore them,” he said as he helped one of his armed compatriots into the starboard airlock. The other gunner was already in the portside lock, the inner door closing behind him. “This is a civilian craft,” he added, coming forward and taking the copilot’s seat. “They won’t fire on us until they realize we have not been fooled.”

“Fooled how?”

“Later,” Fayr said. “Now—carefully.”

I eased the torchferry to a hovering halt a dozen meters off the surface and perhaps thirty past the spot in the north tunnel where the buried sub waited. Tilting the bow upward—no simple task the way our force thrusters were vectored—I slowly fed power to the drive. “How exactly haven’t we been fooled?” I asked again as the ice began to boil away in a tornado of swirling white.

“I told you earlier that several of Applegate’s details were incorrect,” Fayr said, alternating his attention between the aft display’s boiling ice and the starfighters hovering in front of us. So far, he was right about them not seeming all that worried about what we were doing. “One of the more critical is the nature of the threat we face,” Fayr continued. “The Modhri is not simply a group of drug distributors. He is instead the coral itself.”

I frowned. “He—I mean they—what?”

“Modhran coral consists of many small polyps within a shell-like matrix,” he explained. “Unlike other corals, these polyps in large numbers form the cells of a group mind. A little more to the left.”

I eased the drive stream a few degrees that direction. “What do you mean, a group mind?”

“The polyps function like the cells of a normal brain, except that instead of connecting neurons they are linked telepathically,” he said. “A few thousand together can create a rudimentary self-awareness, and a large enough group can link with others up to hundreds of kilometers away to create a larger and more capable intelligence.” He eyed me. “You don’t believe me, of course.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” I said cautiously. Certainly not to someone with a pair of packet guns at his beck and call. “How do you know all this?”

“There,” he said, pointing at the display. “You see it?”

I looked at the display, fully expecting to see some amorphous mass of coral rising from the steam and freezing rain, like Count Dracula in a classic dit rec horrorific. But there was nothing; and it was only as I took a second look that I realized he was pointing to a pair of gray-metal pillars, the elevator beams attached to the stolen sub. We were almost there. “So what exactly is the threat?” I asked. “The chunks that have been exported spy for the main branch or something?”

“The exported masses of coral—we name them outposts—are too far from the homeland for direct linkage,” Fayr said. “The danger lies in the mobile colonies, or walkers, which they have created in most of the galaxy’s social and governmental leaders.”

A creepy sensation was starting to twist its way through me. “What do you mean, created? Created how?”

“By touch,” he said. “A polyp hook can enter a person’s skin and bloodstream via a small scratch when the coral is touched. Once there, it grows into a complete organism, then divides and grows and creates its own colony.”

“And then?”

“The colony creates a hidden secondary personality,” Fayr said. “It normally remains in the back of its host’s mind, offering subtle suggestions for behavior and decisions. Usually very reasonable suggestions, which the host can easily rationalize away.”

Go on, Mahf had urged that afternoon in the casino. Touch the coral.

And a day later, strangely and inexplicably asleep on my feet, I’d nearly rationalized my way into doing just that. “Do you need one inside you to get these suggestions?” I asked, not at all sure I wanted to hear the answer. If they’d gotten one of these things into me without my knowledge…

To my relief, he shook his head. “No, a large enough colony has the ability to offer suggestions at a distance,” he said. “We call them thought viruses. They can linger in a person’s mind for minutes or sometimes hours.”

“Giving the victim plenty of time to talk himself into going along with them,” I said grimly.

“Indeed.” Fayr pointed. “There.”

The top of the sub was visible now through the steam, its sides emerging as the ice melted away. “So if you’re trying to destroy the coral, what’s the sub doing way up here?” I asked.

“Shut down now so that the lifter may attach,” he said. “Once that’s done, we can melt away the rest of the ice.”

There was fresh movement on the aft display: The heavy lifter that had dropped the bus on the troop carrier had appeared from inside the south tunnel and was maneuvering carefully through the ice storm toward the sub. “Beware,” Fayr warned. “The starfighters will soon make their response.”

I looked back at the Chaftas. Neither had moved; but suddenly I had the sense that they were bracing for action. “Against us or the sub?”

“The sub,” Fayr said. “But—”

His protest was cut off as I threw power to the maneuvering baffles, turning us ponderously around and vectoring the thrusters to slide us directly between the Chaftas and the sub. “You did say they wouldn’t fire on us, right?” I shouted over the roar.

The words were barely out of my mouth when the starfighters attacked.

They split their formation, one going high, the other going low, both trying to do an end run around the bulk of the torchferry I’d now moved to block their direct line of fire at the sub and lifter. I cut back on the thrusters, dropping closer toward the ice to further block the low-run attacker. He dropped lower in response, apparently figuring that in a game of chicken his maneuverability would beat out mine. His partner, with me obligingly clearing the high road for him, swooped in for the kill.

To be met by a withering hail of anti-armor packet fire from the Bellido in my portside airlock. The Chafta twisted hard around, trying to get out of way as a portion of his starboard engine nacelle shredded under the multiple impacts.

The first starfighter was still trying to slip beneath me. Setting my teeth, I started to drop us lower—

And twitched in surprise as Fayr reached over to his copilot’s board and threw full power to the thrusters instead. “What are you doing?” I snapped as the torchferry lurched upward like a slightly drunk cork.

“Clearing the path,” he called back. “Brace yourself.”

I was taking in a fresh lungful of air when a slender black cylinder riding a streak of yellow fire shot horizontally beneath us. It caught the low-road starfighter squarely in its forward weapons cluster.

With a brilliant flash of smoke and fire, the Chafta disintegrated.

I shifted my attention to the other direction. Standing side by side in the opening to the south tunnel were a pair of Bellidos with shoulder-mounted missile launchers. Even as I watched, the second launcher flared with yellow fire, sending its missile shooting over the top of the torchferry into the remaining starfighter. Another explosion, and the fight was over.

With an effort I found my voice. “Well,” I said as conversationally as I could manage. “That went well.”

“For the moment,” Fayr agreed tightly. “The question will be what surprises he may yet have waiting.”

“This was surprising enough for me,” I assured him. The two Belldic gunners had discarded their launchers and were heading down into the crater I’d melted in the ice, while the rest of the Bellidos I’d seen that morning appeared from the tunnel behind them and followed. The group reached the half-exposed sub and the lifter hovering above it and began connecting them together via the elevator beams. “As long as we have a minute, you want to finish your story?” I suggested. “Starting with what the sub is doing up here if you’re gunning for the coral down there.”

“Because we’re not gunning for the coral down there,” Fayr said. “That was the other critical error in Applegate’s story.” He pointed downward. “This, you see, is not the world where Modhran coral originates.”

“That’s ridiculous,” I said, forgetting for a moment the packet guns behind me. “Every report I’ve ever seen says it does.”

“True, the reports state that it comes from Modhra I,” he said, his whiskers stiffening in a tight smile. “But this is not Modhra I. The Modhri, in an effort to confuse potential attackers, has switched the names of the two moons.”

I stared at him. “You’re joking. How do you rename two entire worlds without somebody noticing?”

“Who would notice?” Fayr pointed out reasonably. “Those who do the harvesting, packing, and shipping are all walkers, firmly controlled by the Modhri whispering in their minds. All others simply accept official designations as to which moon of the Modhra Binary is which.”

I chewed the inside of my cheek. There was a certain weird logic about it, I had to admit. “And you’re sure you’ve got it right?”

He pointed to the smoking rubble that had once been a Chafta starfighter. “Their own actions prove it,” he said. “Do you think the Modhri would have attacked that way unless he’d suddenly realized we knew the truth, and that the genuine coral fields were under threat?”

“I meant do you have any other proof of this name switch?”

His eyes bored into my face. “You are a curious species, Human,” he said. “You base many of your actions on strange leaps of illogic and hunch, beyond even those of the Shorshians. Yet in the same moment you demand proofs and evidences far beyond that which others would declare sufficient.”

“We’re a mass of contradictions, all right,” I agreed. “Do you have independent confirmation, or don’t you?”

“We have,” he said, his voice starting to sound a little strained. Maybe he was regretting saving us from the coral, after all. “The Modhri was clever enough to alter official records and even historical documents. But he neglected to change the early oceanographic data. A careful study of the depth charts clearly shows that the other moon is the one formerly called Modhra I, and the source of the coral.”

I nodded as the pieces started to finally fall together. So that was why Fayr had absconded with one of the lodge’s submarines and gone to all the trouble of bringing it up through the ice instead of simply purchasing one of his own and flying it here along with his guns and other equipment. He’d been deliberately playing the Modhri’s game, pretending he’d bought into the moons’ name switch. “So does the whole Modhri know they’re—it’s—in trouble yet?” I asked. “Or is it only the local group?”

“No, the homeland branch knows,” Fayr said, his eyes on the operation going on below us. “There are several walkers here who carry large colonies within them, plus there are many coral outposts in various parts of the resort. This mind segment can easily unite with the homeland branch.”

He gave me a sideways look. “Which is probably why you were invited to come here,” he added ominously. “An agent of the Spiders is a rarity the Modhri would certainly wish to study. Before he enslaved you.”

My stomach tightened. “Instant spy, huh?”

“It’s worse than that,” he said. “A Modhran colony normally stays in the background, but in need it can push the walker’s own personality aside and take complete control of the body.”

I thought about the two Halkas back at Kerfsis. “Complete enough to make the walker attempt theft or murder?”

“The wishes or scruples of the walker are completely irrelevant at such a point,” he said. “The walker’s own personality is suppressed and experiences a total blackout. If the Modhran colony is clever enough, the walker may never even realize anything has happened.”

“And that lodge is filled with Modhran walkers?”

He snorted. “The lodge is filled with the rich and powerful of the galaxy,” he said. “That makes your question redundant.”

I looked toward the lodge, half expecting to see the traditional dit rec horrorific mob coming at us with pitchforks and torches.

But the ice was empty. Anyway, torches wouldn’t work in the thin atmosphere. “What kind of reception can we expect at the main base?” I asked.

“The harvesting complex has ten small submarines and fifty divers at its disposal,” Fayr said. “They also have perhaps fifty other vehicles, including ten or twelve lifters and other small flyers.”

“Not to mention whatever’s still at the garrison.”

“They have no more than five vehicles left, now that the troop carrier and Chaftas have been disabled,” Fayr said. “And with many of the soldiers already here, they may not have the trained personnel to operate them.”

“Unless they commandeer the rest of the resort’s lifters and take the troops back home,” I pointed out, glancing up at the sky. Nothing was coming at us from that direction, either.

“The resort has no more spaceworthy flyers,” Fayr assured me. “Their long-range communications have been dealt with, as well.”

“That helps,” I said. “How about ground-based defenses?”

“The harvesting complex has antiair weapons in place,” he said. “Fortunately, we won’t land within range of them. We’ll open a hole in the ice at a safe distance from the complex, and from there our submarine will travel along the coral beds, using sonic disruptors and small explosives to destroy them.”

“How do we retrieve them afterward?”

“We don’t,” Fayr said. “For those two, this has always been a suicide mission.”

I felt my stomach tie itself into an extra-tight knot. I had always hated suicide missions.

Fayr apparently had no trouble reading my face on that one. “I don’t like it any better than you do,” he said grimly. “But I see no other alternatives.”

“Let me work on it,” I said.

“Do so.” He gestured. “They are ready.”

I looked down. The lifter and sub were connected together now, and the Bellidos were hurrying in our direction. “We’ll take the others aboard,” Fayr said, notching back on the thrusters and lowering us to the surface. “We will then melt the submarine free and be on our way.”

I gave one last look at the sky. Still clear. “Sounds a little too easy,” I warned.

“Perhaps we have taken the Modhri by surprise,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said. “Maybe.”

Three minutes later, with the commandos aboard and the sub freed, we were on our way.

The torchferry flew in front, with the lifter/sub combo riding our aft starboard flank like a baby whale staying close to mama. No one challenged us as we made our way across the short distance separating the two moons. The harvesting operation was on the far side, Fayr informed me, out of sight of any curious eyes from the resort, and he kept us low to the surface as we headed in that direction. As promised, he stopped us well short of the complex, picking a spot where a past meteor impact had made the ice relatively thin.

Relatively being the operative term, of course. With a limit to how hot we could run the drive without sending the torchferry skittering out into space, it was going to take a while to burn our way through.

We had made it about halfway when our opponents finally made their move.

We spotted them in the distance, sixty flyers and ground vehicles lumbering across the ice en masse like the proverbial lemmings heading for the cliff. At first glance they seemed to all be civilian craft, but our lifter, detached now from the sub and flying high cover, reported a handful of armed military roamers scattered throughout the convoy. Maybe they were hoping we wouldn’t notice the ringers in the crowd, or maybe they thought we would hesitate to shoot through civilians to get to them.

If that was their strategy, it didn’t work. The civilian craft pressing in close around them limited their own combat capabilities, and the Bellido packet gunners riding the lifter had the necessary marksmanship to single out the military craft and destroy or disable them well before they got within their own firing range.

I hoped at that point the civilians would take the hint and back off. But the Modhri was apparently more interested in stopping us than in conserving troops. The vehicles kept coming, maneuvering around the piles of debris but otherwise seemingly oblivious to the destruction going on around them. The Bellidos responded by first taking out the rest of the flyers, then dropping shatter charges in front of the ground vehicles to try to block their path.

But they kept coming. With a complete slaughter of the civilians as the only other option, Fayr reluctantly broke off our digging project and took the torchferry to a spot well ahead of the lead vehicles. There he used the drive to carve a trench in the ice in hopes of blocking any further advance.

It was a noble move, and it nearly cost us our lives. The Bellido gunners had indeed taken out all the military vehicles, but the Modhri had been crafty enough to hide a pair of Halkan soldiers in one of the civilian transports. I looked up from our work just in time to see them lean out from opposite sides with a pair of missile launchers.

I was also just in time to see their transport blown into shrapnel before they could bring the launchers to bear. Fortunately for our side, the Bellidos in the lifter knew all the tricks, too.

We finished the trench without further incident and headed back. “I wonder what they expected that to accomplish,” I commented as we resumed our attack on the ice.

“Obviously not to stop us,” Fayr muttered. “It can only have been to delay us while he prepares his submarines for defense of the coral.”

“It’s going to be ten-to-one odds down there, isn’t it?” I agreed soberly. “Not to mention whatever mischief the divers can cause. You have planned for that, I hope?”

“No fears,” Fayr assured me. I’d never heard that peculiar phrase from a Bellido before, but Fayr had apparently adopted it for his own. “The submarine has been equipped with sensor decoys and other countermeasures. I also expect the ongoing destruction of the coral to have a certain confusing effect on the defending walkers, as well.”

“But you don’t know for sure.”

“No,” he conceded. “To the best of my knowledge, an attack on the Modhri has never before been attempted, much less successfully.”

“Mm,” I murmured, gazing out in the direction of the now-stalled ground vehicles. “So after we drop the sub into the water, you’re planning to just leave?”

“Do not misunderstand,” Fayr said, his voice tight. “I do not wish to leave anyone behind. But we cannot assume that no messages were sent before we dealt with the resort’s transmitter. The Halkan warships at the Tube transfer station could be here in four hours, and it will take the submarine at least two and two-thirds to destroy the coral between here and the harvesting complex. If we wait the extra two-thirds hour for them to make the return trip, we could find ourselves trapped with little margin for error.”

“Okay, but what if we go to the harvesting complex and meet the sub there?” I suggested. “That would at least save us that last two-thirds hour.”

“And could end matters even more quickly,” Fayr countered. “Or had you forgotten the ground-based weapons at the complex?”

“Not at all,” I said. “It just seems to me there are a couple of points that may make it worth considering.” I gestured out at the horizon. “For one thing, I’m wondering how well those weapons will be manned, given how many of the residents are sitting out there in that convoy.”

“Possibly not as fully as usual,” Fayr conceded. “Certainly with his flyers destroyed he will have less capability against ground troops.” He eyed me curiously. “I find it interesting that you would care so much about two Belldic lives.”

“I don’t like wasting lives, human or otherwise,” I told him. “But I’m also thinking it might also be a good idea to take a good, hard look at the records they have in there.”

“What sorts of records?”

“All sorts,” I said. “I’m still wondering why the Modhri threw all the workers at us just now like cannon fodder, but didn’t do the same with the guests at the resort.”

“Those at the resort are the rich and powerful,” Fayr reminded me. “Perhaps the Modhri feared the repercussions that would follow such a high number of important deaths.”

“Yes, but why?” I persisted. “Isn’t this place right here his must-win stand?”

“It is his homeland and the center of his intellect and power,” Fayr agreed thoughtfully. “But as I said earlier, he has many outposts across the galaxy, and many, many walkers. Perhaps he still feels he can stop us here without risking his secret.”

“How secret can it be?” I pointed out. “Your government at least seems to know all about this. Don’t they?”

“Do they?” he said bitterly. “Like many others, my government has been enslaved. What is actually known of the Modhri, and what has been carefully suppressed, I cannot say.”

“But I thought—” I floundered.

“That we represent an official Belldic mission?” Fayr shook his head. “No. On this point, at least, Apos Mahf spoke the truth: My squad and I are renegades. We recognized that something was amiss and from various records were able to piece together the truth. But we have no official orders or sanction for what we do.”

His whiskers twitched. “In fact, any of us who survive will undoubtedly be brought before a military court upon our return.”

I grimaced. But it was not, I reflected, all that different from the reception I was likely to get when I got back to Earth. “I still want some answers,” I said. “And the harvesting complex is still the place to get them.”

“Perhaps,” he said. “You said there were two reasons you thought it would be worth the risk?”

I nodded. “You seemed concerned earlier about the idea of flying into a place guarded by antiair defenses. Right?”

“Correct.”

“But assuming you’re right about this whole setup being designed by the Modhri for his own benefit, where are those defenses likely to be centered? On the administration center, which holds the records we’re looking for? Or on the access to the harvesting areas, where the coral is?”

“Mmm,” he murmured. “Interesting.”

“Of course, once we’re down you’ll still have to get to the admin areas on foot,” I went on. “You’ll also have to neutralize enough of the weaponry around the access areas to get your people out once they’ve brought in the sub. But as you’ve already pointed out, the Halkas have lost most or all of their air power, which is usually the trickiest part.”

For a long minute Fayr gazed at me, his striped face expressionless. “You humans are without a doubt the most hunch-driven species in the galaxy.”

“Probably,” I agreed. “But for us, it works.”

“It does indeed,” he said, his whiskers stiffening in a tight smile. “Very well. Let us do it.”