Night Train to Rigel

SEVENTEEN:

We finished blasting our hole and lowered the sub in. It took off with a will, diving deep toward the coral beds and the Halkan subs no doubt already arrayed in its path.

But those defenders would be mostly civilians, whether they had some bizarre group mind helping them or not. The attackers were warriors, and I had no doubt that the Bellidos would make it through.

Especially with us throwing in a double helping of chaos at the other end of the rabbit hole. With the lifter again hugging our flank we took off, flew past the mass of ground vehicles still uselessly trying to get to us, and made for the harvesting complex.

My first thought as we approached was that someone must have seriously overestimated the importance of the place as well as the amount of profit coming out of it. All that was visible was a modest trio of single-story buildings set around a docking and under-ice access area.

It wasn’t until we were nearly on top of it that I realized the truth. The three buildings were merely the front of the operation, a deliberately deceptive façade designed to throw off inquisitive eyes and minds. The rest of the complex had been built almost invisibly into the ice, probably constructed on the surface with ice then layered over it.

The true access to the coral beds was camouflaged even better. The only way we knew where it was, in fact, was by backtracking the antiair fire that erupted in our direction as we approached.

But my hunch paid off. The defenses were geared toward protecting the coral beds, with the workers’ safety running a distant second. As a probably unintended consequence, several of the larger ice-sheathed buildings lay squarely in one line of fire or another, creating a whole set of kill-zone shadows in the outer parts of the complex. Fayr landed us in the most convenient of them, and with weapons at the ready he and the rest of his team headed off into battle.

Bayta and I stayed behind in the torchferry. Our vac suits didn’t have the protective armor and heavy-duty puncture-sealant systems their chameleon suits did, and I doubted either of us had the training and stamina to keep up with a commando squad, anyway.

Besides which, it was time she and I had a little talk.

“So,” I commented, swiveling around in my seat to face her. We had taken off our helmets so that Fayr and his squad couldn’t listen in, keeping them handy in case of trouble. “Interesting theory, isn’t it?”

“What is?” she asked cautiously.

“Fayr’s fever dream about malevolent coral that wants to rule the universe,” I said, watching her closely. “Malevolent telepathic coral, yet. Crazy, huh?”

Her eyes slipped away from my gaze. “Very interesting,” she agreed, her voice studiously neutral.

“Never heard anything like it, myself,” I continued conversationally. “How about you?”

She didn’t answer. “There never was any vision of an attack on the Fillies, was there?” I asked, letting my voice harden. “In fact, this whole thing has been a scam from square one, hasn’t it?”

“No,” she protested, her eyes coming up to meet mine. Her lips compressed, and she again dropped her gaze to the floor. “No, there is a threat to the galaxy. A terrible threat.”

“From power-crazed coral?”

She glared at me. “You shouldn’t make jokes about things you don’t understand.”

“So enlighten me,” I countered. “Starting with what exactly my role was in all this.”

“What do you mean?” she asked, her voice gone cautious again. “You were hired to help us in the war against the Modhri.”

“No, I was hired to be your diversion,” I said bluntly. “Your Spider friends knew all about Fayr and his private little battle plan. You wanted to give him the best shot you could; and since you knew the enemy was watching, you brought me in to give them someone handy to watch.”

Her lip twitched. “It wasn’t like that.”

“Wasn’t it?” I bit out. “You have a drudge accost me and walk off with my carrybags in front of God and everyone at Terra Station. Then you throw everyone else off my car midway to New Tigris with the flimsiest excuse possible and hustle me off to a meeting on a secret Quadrail siding. And then you march both of us up from third-class steerage to a first-class compartment. You might as well have pinned a sign on my back that said Spider Agent—Kill Me in three languages.”

Her face looked like she was getting ready to cry. “We didn’t expect him to try to kill you,” she said earnestly. “You have to believe me. We thought he would think you were our latest attempt to find him and just watch you. That’s all. Just watch.”

“That’s very comforting,” I growled. “Unfortunately, good intentions don’t feed the bulldog. They knew about Fayr, too, or at least suspected something was in the works.” I paused, studying the shame and self-reproach in her face and feeling a small twinge of conscience. “And for whatever it’s worth, I don’t think those two Halkas back at Kerfsis were really trying to kill me,” I added reluctantly. “That incident was mainly designed to give Rastra and JhanKla an excuse to get us aboard the Peerage car.”

She shivered. “To try and make friends with us, so that they could bring us here.”

There it was, that whole friend thing again. “You keep talking about friends,” I said. “What do friends have to do with it?”

“There are natural emotional barriers between people that tend to block thought viruses,” she said. “Only between friends or trusted associates are there the emotional connections that allow the thought virus to pass.”

“Uh-huh,” I said, a few more pieces falling into place. “Which is why Mahf tried to pretend we’d met before that afternoon in the casino. And why you kept asking if Rastra or Applegate were friends of mine.”

She nodded. “I didn’t know if either of them was a walker. But if they were, I was afraid you’d trust them enough for a thought virus to get through.”

“Is that why you picked me for this job in the first place?” I asked. “Because you figured I’d become something of a loner?”

“Partly,” she admitted. “Mostly it was because you’d been ostracized by all your former official Terran government contacts. That was the pattern the Modhri followed with all the other species: An officially sanctioned team would go in to investigate, be infected by the Modhri, then go home to infect and conquer the rest of the upper military and government levels. With thought viruses passing freely between close friends and associates, it can happen very quickly.”

She gave me a wan smile. “Humans are almost the last ones left unconquered. We didn’t want to risk your people by getting someone who was still involved with important government officials.”

“And so you picked me,” I said, a small part of me appreciating the potentially lethal irony of the situation. If only they knew who I was involved with. “Why didn’t you tell me all this last night when I asked?”

She looked away from me. “I wasn’t sure I could trust you.” “And now?”

She shrugged noncommittally.

Which was pretty damn ungrateful, I thought, especially after all I’d done for her and her Spider friends. A surge of annoyance threatened to wash over me; ruthlessly, I forced it back. A combat situation was no place for stray emotional reactions. “What makes you think humanity hasn’t been conquered yet?”

“The Spiders have been watching the top levels of Human government very closely,” she said, clearly relieved to be back on less personal ground. “So far, they’ve seen no sign of Modhran influence.”

“Only you said the people themselves don’t even know when they’re carrying a colony,” I pointed out. “You have some kind of Rorschach test?”

“I wish we did,” she said ruefully. “But since the colony usually stays in the background of the walker’s mind, there usually isn’t anything that would show up on psychological tests.”

“Or emotional or skin/eye reaction tests, either, I suppose,” I said. “That just leaves straight-out physical tests.”

“Which also aren’t usually very helpful,” she said. “The polyps tend to gather in hidden areas, especially around and beneath the brain. It would take a very careful microscopic examination to spot them.”

“Is that why JhanKla insisted those two dead Halkas be cremated?”

“Yes, though of course he himself wouldn’t have known the true reason,” she said. “He would have had his own set of perfectly good excuses. And we’ve never found a scanning technique that can pick the polyps out from the organism they’ve attached themselves to.”

“So again, what makes you think Earth hasn’t been infiltrated?”

“There are patterns of behavior and decision that can be seen, especially on a group level,” she explained. “Neither the UN nor any of your nation-state governments have shown signs of such behavior.”

“We just too small for the Modhri to bother with?”

“The reasons are probably more practical,” she said. “For one thing, you have no coral outposts on your worlds, which by itself would make conquest difficult. There’s also your political structure, with its many nation-states and lack of a truly central governing body. That holds challenges they won’t have found elsewhere among the Twelve Empires.”

I’d never before thought of Earth’s political chaos as being a possible military asset. Usually just the opposite, in fact. “What would have happened if I’d touched the coral last night? I’d be a walker now, too?”

“Not yet,” she said. “It takes days or weeks for an implanted hook to grow into a polyp and then to reproduce enough to form a complete colony.”

“Okay, so back to current events,” I said, picking up the logic trail again. “We had Fayr and his commandos on one hand, and us on the other. The Modhri knew about both of us; but he didn’t know what the connection was. So he maneuvered us here, hoping we would trip over Fayr’s scheme and expose it for him.” I lifted my eyebrows. “Damn near worked, too, didn’t it?”

She grimaced. “I know,” she murmured.

“So if this is their homeland, why don’t the Spiders just lock them in? They have to travel by Quadrail like everybody else, don’t they?”

“Yes, of course,” she said. “But all we knew at first was that various leaders were being controlled and governments were being corrupted. It was a long time before we learned the mechanism and, later, where it was coming from.”

“But you know now,” I said. “So why not just keep the coral off the Quadrails?”

“Because the sensors can’t detect it,” she said. “I mean, they can, but the chemical composition is so close to a hundred other things that it would require hand searches.” She shrugged uncomfortably. “Besides, by now the coral’s been distributed so widely that locking down Sistarrko system wouldn’t gain us anything.”

And with that, the final, ugly piece dropped into place. Modhran outposts all over the galaxy, accessible only via the Spiders’ own Quadrail system… “You didn’t hire me to find out how to stop a war,” I said quietly. “You hired me to figure out how to start one.”

She turned her face away from me. “You have to understand,” she said, her voice suddenly very tired. “We’d finally learned where the enemy was located, but we knew the same limitations that keep one empire from attacking another would also keep us from taking any action against them. We suspected Fayr was up to something, but we assumed he was still just investigating. And here especially the Modhri would make sure that the warships guarding the Tube transfer station were exclusively manned by walkers. We needed a way to break the stalemate.”

Involuntarily, I glanced back out the canopy. I’d forgotten all about those warships, and the fact that they might be burning space on their way here at this very moment. I hoped Fayr wasn’t taking time to smell the flowers. “You could have saved all of us a lot of time if you’d been up front with me in the first place,” I told her. “I could have told you that you do exactly what Fayr did: Bring in stuff to sell and then buy or create your weapons there in the target system.”

She sighed. “I understand that now,” she said. “But the Spiders thought the story of an attack on the Filiaelians would be the only way to get your attention.”

“Especially since Fayr’s technique wouldn’t work on the Fillies,” I conceded. “No weapons black market, and too many genetically loyal soldiers wandering around watching everything.”

“Yes.” Bayta ran a hand through her hair. “But at least now it’s almost over.”

“Maybe,” I said. “Maybe not.”

She frowned at me. But before she could ask, there was a ping from my helmet. “Compton?” a voice called faintly.

I picked up the helmet and slipped it over my head. “Here,” I said.

“We have the records and are moving to support the half squad at the dock,” Fayr reported. “Estimate arrival and retrieval in one and two-thirds hours, return one-third later. Hostiles?”

“No sign,” I said, looking out the canopy and giving the displays a quick check. “I think all the unfriendlies must be on your side of the fence.”

“Acknowledged,” he said. “Be watchful.”

“You, too.”

He clicked off, and I took my helmet off again. “He says they’ll be back in about two hours,” I told Bayta. “Then maybe we’ll find out whether it’s over or not.”

They were back exactly two hours and five minutes later. Rather to my surprise, all of them made it, including the two commandos from the sub. They had apparently succeeded in destroying all the coral they could find, while Fayr had located and pulled all the records stored in that part of the complex. He ordered a few quick preparations, and we were ready to go.

Unfortunately, the unwanted company was already coming up the walk.

“There,” Fayr said, pointing at the long-range display as we ran up the torchferry’s thrusters and eased cautiously away from the now out-of-business harvesting complex. “You see it?”

“It would be hard to miss,” I said. In actual fact, of course, most people would miss it: A small sensor dot nearly hidden behind the glow of its decelerating ion drive, hardly big enough to identify as an ore tug. But to someone with the right training, the sensor footprint of a stealthed warship was unmistakable. “Coming in fast, too,” I added. “I hope you have a plan for getting past him.”

“It won’t be possible to get past him,” Fayr said calmly as we reached a safe distance from the complex’s remaining defenses and lifted away from the surface.

“We’re sure not going to talk our way out of it,” I warned, frowning as he punched in our course. He was turning us toward the edge of Cassp’s disk, sitting directly ahead like a huge black hole in space with only its edge lit as the outer atmosphere refracted the light from the distant sun.

The Tube, though, was in exactly the opposite direction. The only thing in that direction was—“Sistarrko?”

“Why not?” he replied calmly. “It has a population of over three billion, including at least a hundred thousand resident Bellidos and three thousand Humans. There are also several smaller mining centers, colonies, and homesteads in the inner system. What better place for a small group of fugitives to hide until they can arrange passage back to the Quadrail?”

“Except that all those colonies and homesteads have bright shiny police and military units standing around with nothing to do,” I countered. “We’d never even get close before we got cut into bite-sized chunks.”

“Unless we have a plan to avoid that,” Fayr said, examining the power readings and adding a little more juice to the drive.

“Do we?”

“No.” His whiskers twitched. “But the Halkas don’t know that, do they?”

I frowned at him… and then, finally, I understood. “Cute,” I said. “You think they’ll fall for it?”

Hunching his shoulders once, he settled himself down into his flying. “We shall find out together.”

We pulled away from Modhra I, picking up speed as we drove inward through Cassp’s massive gravitational field, still heading for the gas giant’s edge. I alternated my attention between our projected course and the aft displays, and less than ten minutes after our departure I saw the warship’s drive wink out. “He’s turning over,” I reported. “Apparently decided we’re serious about heading inward and doesn’t want to get left behind.”

“A reasonable concern,” Fayr said. “Even without leaving Cassp there are four ring and far-moon mining operations we could be making for.”

I nodded. Torch ships were the fastest civilian spacecraft in the galaxy, but military ships were even faster. But this particular warship had been braking toward an arrival at the Modhra Binary, while we were now blazing away from the twin moons for all we were worth. If the Halkas back there let us build up too much of a velocity difference, they would have a hard time catching up.

Sure enough, the warship’s drive came on again, only now showing behind the sensor dot that represented the hull. “There they go,” I informed Fayr. “Flipped”—I checked the sensor reading—“and pulling pretty close to top acceleration.”

“Intercept point?”

I checked the computer’s projection and made a quick calculation of my own. “About eight hours,” I told him. “More importantly, we’ll be well within Cassp’s outer atmosphere before they’re in missile range.”

“Excellent.” He sent me a sideways look. “I’m told you were fired in disgrace from your empire’s service. Apparently it was not for lack of competence.”

“The wrong political toes got underfoot,” I said. “I’ll tell you all about it someday if you’re interested.”

“I am,” Fayr said. “Let us first see if we survive the next few hours.”

Thirty minutes later, we entered Cassp’s outer atmosphere.

In many ways, it was a good place to be. True, the roiling gases created a certain amount of friction on the hull, which always had the potential to be a problem. It also added drag, which required us to run the drive above its normal operating range in order to maintain our acceleration. But on the plus side it helped diffuse the glow from the drive, which made our position that much harder to pick up on both visual and nonvisual sensors. Fayr continued to move us inward, and the torchferry began to vibrate with turbulence, occasionally picking up more significant bumps and twitches. The glow of our pursuers’ drive faded behind us as we put increasingly thick layers of methane and hydrogen between us, until finally it disappeared entirely behind the planet’s edge.

And with us temporarily out of each other’s sight, Fayr shut down the torchferry’s drive and released the lifter that had been riding our hull since leaving Modhra. Activating its preprogrammed course, he sent it blazing off toward Sistarrko and the inner system.

I watched it fly away with a warm and slightly malicious sense of satisfaction. On paper, of course, it was a ridiculously tissue-thin trick. The lifter’s drive was nowhere near as powerful as the torchferry’s, and even if our pursuers concluded that we’d deliberately decreased our drive level to confuse them, a single clear view at the sensors would show the craft’s true nature.

But they wouldn’t be getting that clear look, at least not anytime soon. Unless they could push their acceleration a lot more than they already had, they would be spending the next couple of hours peering at the departing lifter through a haze of Cassp’s dit-rec-drama-fog atmosphere. By the time they got clear, they would be pretty well committed to the chase.

And in the meantime, we in the torchferry would do a nice tight slingshot around Cassp and emerge from its atmosphere with a vector two hundred seventy degrees off from the one we’d gone in at, driving outward toward the Quadrail station. And, as an extra added bonus, we would have picked up close to twice Cassp’s orbital speed in the process.

All of that assuming, of course, that the Halkas fell for it.

Four hours later, when we finally keyed the drive to full power again and headed off on our new course, we saw that they had.

“They will, of course, try to alert the transfer station as soon as they discover their mistake,” Fayr pointed out as we watched the distant blaze of the warship’s drive. “We’ll have to trust that the Halkas on Modhra won’t be able to repair the damage to their long-range transmitters before we reach there.”

“There may be a way to avoid the problem entirely,” I suggested. “If we head directly to the Tube from here, we can slip around to the far side and run parallel to it until we reach the station. As long as the second warship stays close to the transfer station—and I see no reason why it shouldn’t—we ought to be able to sneak in without anyone noticing.”

“We will still have to find a way into the station once we arrive,” Fayr pointed out doubtfully.

“I don’t think that’ll be a problem,” I said, looking sideways at Bayta. “There are service airlocks all around the station’s outer surface that the drudges use to move heavy equipment in and out. I’ll bet we can get someone to open one of them for us.”

Fayr gave me a strange look. “You are joking.”

But I’d caught Bayta’s microscopic nod and merely smiled back. “Not at all,” I assured him.

He eyed me a moment longer, then shrugged. “Very well,” he said. “It is insane. But so was the rest of it. We shall try.”

We’d never tried Bayta’s telepathy trick through a Tube wall, and privately I wondered whether she’d be able to punch a signal through material that blocked sensors and comm systems as efficiently as this stuff did. But in the end, it all went as smoothly as a frictionless airfoil. We eased along the Tube to a halt at the back side of the station, apparently unobserved by anyone at the transfer station a hundred kilometers away on the other side.

There had been some discussion about whether we should try to dock with one of the service hatchways. But the torchferry was just too big for that kind of delicate work, and so we simply parked it a few hundred meters away, and with luggage in hand we spacewalked across the gap. Even before Fayr, bringing up the rear, had made it all the way to the Tube, the hatchway began to iris open in response to Bayta’s silent request.

Unlike the usual shuttle hatchways, this one was equipped with an actual airlock and was large enough for our whole group. We piled in and waited with varying degrees of patience and trepidation while it ran through its cycle. When the inner door finally opened, we found ourselves in a maintenance area half a kilometer from the more central, public areas of the station.

We also found ourselves surrounded by a solid wall of drudge Spiders.

They collected our luggage, making a special point of relieving the Bellidos of their status guns, then escorted us into a large machine shop nearby. Inside, a half dozen small Spiders of a type I hadn’t seen before took over, sifting deftly through our luggage and pulling out small weapons and other forbidden equipment that the station’s sensors had spotted. As they loaded the contraband into lockboxes, a pair of conductors appeared and started taking ticket orders.

Bayta and I used our passes to get our usual double first-class compartment. Fayr got a single compartment for himself, while the rest of his team took second- and third-class accommodations. The plastic imitation status guns came out of the carrybags and were sorted out into the commandos’ empty shoulder holsters, the sizes and numbers matching their appropriate travel classes. Fayr, as befit a first-class traveler, loaded four of the toy pistols into his holsters.

And with our informal entry procedure complete, we collected our luggage and followed one of the conductors back outside the shop.

There were a couple hundred people waiting on the various platforms, most of them Halkas, all of them gazing in obvious fascination as the Spider guided us across the maze of service tracks to the public areas. I heard Fayr muttering under his breath about stealth and secrecy, but there wasn’t much any of us could do about it. The conductor led us to our platform, bade us a pleasant journey, then headed off to whatever routine we had so rudely interrupted. The rest of the passengers, clearly intrigued by all this, nevertheless were either polite enough or wary enough to give us plenty of room.

Not surprisingly, the Spiders had booked us on the very next Quadrail headed down the Grakla Spur toward Jurskala. With a number of well-dressed Halkas in evidence, at least some of whom probably included Modhran walker colonies, I figured that news of our arrival had most likely made it across to the transfer station by now. I kept one eye on the nearest shuttle hatchways, half expecting Halkan officialdom to make one last-ditch effort to grab us.

But no one had appeared by the time our Quadrail arrived. We let the departing passengers off, then climbed aboard and made our ways to our various accommodations. Fifteen minutes later, while I continued to watch the hatchways through my compartment window, the Quadrail pulled smoothly and anticlimactically out of the station.

For the moment, at least, we were safe.