Night Train to Rigel

TWENTY:

It was a four-day trip from Jurskala to Terra, and like the journey from Sistarrko to Jurskala, this one quickly settled into a fairly dull routine.

Dull, but with a dark edge of tension. We couldn’t let Bayta out in public, for starters, and even in disguise I didn’t dare poke my own nose out for anything beyond a thrice-daily trip to the dining car to get our meals. The fact that I was supposedly the physician to a badly injured Juri made it worse, since one of those meals each time had to be Jurian sickbed fare. The necessary blandness of the diet got old after about the middle of the second day.

At each stop I stood at the compartment window, watching the arriving passengers and trying to gauge which of them might be Modhran walkers. It was a pretty futile exercise; if the walkers themselves didn’t know what they were, I didn’t have much hope of figuring it out. Still, Bayta had suggested it was the rich and powerful who were first targeted, and the farther we got from Jurskala the more infrequent the first-class travelers seemed to become.

Unfortunately, there was enough traffic in the corridor outside our door to show that the first-class compartments remained full, and first-class passengers of any species were automatically suspect.

And then, of course, there was McMicking.

I had had serious reservations about sharing my compartment with him right from the start, but once the Quadrail left the station there wasn’t much I could do about it. Our dramatic entrance to the train might have been quickly forgotten by the rest of the passengers; but on the other hand, it might not. I couldn’t simply cut McMicking loose after he’d publicly attached himself to us the way he had, particularly since he probably didn’t have a ticket for any of the other seats on the train. We were stuck with each other until we got to Terra Station, and would just have to make the best of it.

Not that he was a particularly unpleasant guest. On the contrary, once I got over my initial annoyance at being scammed I found him to be a reasonable enough traveling companion. He made a point of taking walks several times a day, going up and down the train to keep tabs on what was happening, at the same time giving Bayta and me a little breathing space. Occasionally, when we were all together and the right mood struck him, he would tell a story about his life as a bounty hunter.

Three days later, we pulled into Kerfsis Station, the last big colony system before Earth. Given the trouble we’d had the last time through, I half expected to find Major Tas Busksha waiting on the platform with a warrant in hand for my arrest. But we pulled out again without incident, and I finally began to feel some of the tension draining away. After Kerfsis came Homshil, a transfer point where several cross-galaxy lines intersected, and beyond that there were only two more stops in Jurian space, both of them small outpost colonies not much further along in their development than New Tigris or Yandro. Twenty-three hours and five stops from now, we would be pulling into Terra Station and as safe a haven as we were likely to find anymore in the galaxy.

We were two hours short of Homshil when it all went straight to hell.

“… and a bowl of frisjis-broth soup,” I told the Spider at the dining car carry-away counter. I was, in fact, getting royally sick of frisjis, and I’d only had it three times since leaving Jurskala. But the medical section of my encyclopedia said it helped promote tissue regeneration in Jurian burn victims, which meant we were pretty well stuck with it.

The Spider dipped its globular body slightly in acknowledgment and headed back into the service area. I stepped away from the counter and took a seat at an empty table nearby. Now that we were almost to Earth, it was time to start thinking about what we were going to do once we got there. The Modhri may have been content to leave humanity alone up to now, but my guess was that that neglect was about to come to an abrupt end.

The problem was that the very quality that had made me a good candidate for the Spiders in the first place was now going to work against me. I had no close contacts, personal or professional, with anyone in the government, certainly no one who would listen to me. Hardin was the only influential person I knew, and I could just hear what he would say if I trotted an insane story like this in front of him.

Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a glimpse of movement as someone stepped to my side. Sighing, I settled my face into kindly physician mode and ran my concerned-physician spiel through a quick update. Most of the Jurskala passengers who had seen me bring Bayta aboard were long gone, but there were still a few aboard, at least one of whom cornered me for updates whenever he spotted me out and about. “Yes?” I asked mildly as I looked up.

But it wasn’t an inquisitive passenger. It was, in fact, the last person I would have expected to see.

“Well, well,” Losutu growled, his voice dark and sarcastic as he glared down at me like a summer thundercloud. “Look who we have here.”

“Director Losutu?” I gasped, scrambling quickly to my feet. Beyond his glare I saw Applegate hurrying toward us from the bar section, a look of consternation on his face. “What are you doing here?”

“I could ask you the same question,” he bit back. “I’d have thought the Halkas would have you strapped to a torture rack by now.”

I just shook my head, my brain frozen with the impossibility of it. Fayr had gotten us to Sistarrko Station in time to catch the first Quadrail out of the system, and even with the extra three-hour delay in our departure from Jurskala there was no way Losutu and Applegate could have caught up with us via a later connection from Modhra.

Which meant they must have been aboard the same trains with us the whole way. But how could they have gotten to Sistarrko Station ahead of our borrowed torchferry?

“I don’t know what possessed you to participate in such an insane venture,” Losutu was saying, in full chew-out mode now. “Applegate told me you—”

“Sir, please,” Applegate cut him off urgently as he came up to him. “Not here. I told you—”

“And I’m tired of listening,” Losutu snapped, sparing him a brief glare before turning his attention back to me. “I’m waiting, Compton. Give me a reason why I shouldn’t turn you over to High Commissioner JhanKla right here and now.”

I felt my heart try to seize up. “High Commissioner JhanKla?”

“We just left his Peerage car,” Losutu said, and even through his anger I could hear the self-satisfaction that he’d been afforded such an honor. “He was kind enough to give us a ride from Sistarrko Station after Superintendent Prif Klas ordered us off Modhra.”

“And who then called the other warship in from the transfer station to take you to the Tube,” I said as it finally came together. No wonder we hadn’t had any trouble with that second Halkan warship; it had been pressed into transport duty to get Losutu and Applegate to the Quadrail in time to shadow us. And of course, sneaking up around the back of the Tube as we had, we hadn’t seen that it was missing from its post.

“And thanks to you, we’ll be lucky if the Halkas don’t block our purchase of those Chaftas,” Applegate put in indignantly. “You’ve wrecked an entire diplomatic initiative—”

“Forget the Chaftas,” Losutu cut him off. “I’m still waiting for Compton’s explanation about Modhra.”

“Yes, sir,” Applegate said. “But again, we shouldn’t be discussing this out in the open. Perhaps the High Commissioner would permit us to continue the discussion in the Peerage car.”

“I’m sure he would,” I said, my brain finally starting to kick into gear. “But there’s no reason for us to go all the way back there. I have a very comfortable compartment two cars forward.”

“No,” Applegate said sharply before Losutu could answer.

A UN deputy director, I suspected, was not used to having his decisions made by underlings. “What did you say?” Losutu asked ominously.

Applegate flicked a look at me, the wrinkles around his eyes deepening briefly as if he were just as startled as Losutu that he’d spoken out of turn. “My apologies, sir,” he said. “But the High Commissioner needs to be a part of any conversation that deals with the Modhran attack.”

“You disappoint me, Colonel,” I said. “This isn’t the attitude you showed back on Modhra, when you were trying so hard to be my friend.”

“That was before you joined ecoterrorists and participated in an attack on Halkan soil,” Applegate countered stiffly.

“Is that what it was?” I asked. “Or is it that you were still trying to get me to trust you, hoping to give the Modhri one last crack at me?”

Applegate’s forehead wrinkled. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Actually, you probably don’t,” I conceded. “But you see, I’m on to your quiet little friend. You and he made a slip when we were all having dinner together in the Redbird. Not a big slip, nothing I noticed at the time, but something that came back to me later when I heard someone else comment that he couldn’t imagine anyone speaking well of grabbing a chunk of coral.”

“I didn’t say anything good about touching coral,” Applegate said, still frowning. “In fact, I think I said just the opposite.”

“Yes, you did,” I agreed. “The slip was in the specific words you used. You said that coral was such rough, pointy, scratchy stuff.”

“You have a point here?” Losutu put in. His voice hadn’t lost any of its anger, but there was a hint of curiosity starting to edge its way through. For all his dislike of me personally, he knew the kind of Westali agent I’d once been.

“Yes, sir, I do,” I assured him. “Because just one day earlier I’d used those same words, in that same order, when Apos Mahf was singing the praises of Modhran coral. Rough, pointy, scratchy. Tell me, Colonel: How likely is it for you to have come up with all three of those words on your own unless there was someone whispering them in your ear?”

“This is insane,” Applegate insisted. “Completely insane.”

“I agree,” Losutu seconded. “If you’ve got something to say, Compton, say it.”

“I’ll be happy to, sir, if you’ll just step over to my compartment,” I said. “And if JhanKla wants to join us, he’s also welcome.”

“So now you want a Halkan High Commissioner to leave the comfort of his Peerage car for your convenience?” Applegate demanded contemptuously.

“Is it his comfort you’re worried about?” I asked. “Or his safety?”

“His safety?” Applegate echoed, frowning.

“Yes,” I said, suddenly feeling tired of this whole thing. Applegate had never been a friend; but even so, it was strangely debilitating to fight a man who didn’t even know he was an enemy. Maybe that was where the true strength of the Modhri lay. “Tell me, Colonel, what’s he afraid of? Me? Bayta?”

“Stop calling him Colonel,” Losutu growled. “He’s a civilian now.”

I shook my head. “No, sir, he’s just with a different army. The army of the Modhri.”

“The what?” Losutu demanded.

But I wasn’t looking at him. Applegate’s eyes had gone oddly flat, the muscles of his face sagging visibly as if he had fallen asleep on his feet. Before I could react, his face tightened up again, and his eyes came back to focus.

Only now the eyes were too bright, his posture too stiff, his face a subtle parody of the man who had once gazed coolly at me across a Westali desk and told me I was fired. It was no longer Colonel Terrance Applegate who stood before us.

The real enemy had finally come out to play.

“Ah,” I said, trying to keep my voice conversational. “Do I finally have the honor of speaking directly to the Modhri?”

“You do,” Applegate said. It wasn’t quite his voice, either.

Losutu apparently heard the difference, too. “Applegate?” he asked uncertainly. The anger was gone now, a growing apprehension in its place. “What’s going on?”

“Shut up,” Applegate said. He stepped to Losutu’s side, and the other inhaled sharply as his right wrist was suddenly pinned in a control lock. “You win, Compton. Let’s go to your compartment.”

“What for?” Losutu asked, fighting to keep his composure as Applegate marched him across the dining car.

“We’re going to talk,” Applegate told him calmly. He looked at me, the strange eyes gone suddenly dead. “And then,” he added “I’m going to end it.”

The entire contingent of first-class passengers was in motion as we stepped through the connecting door into the coach car, their drinks and readers and cards abandoned as they strode purposefully toward us like soldiers marching into combat. I tensed, hardening my hands into fists; but to my surprise they merely swerved both ways around us and continued on, heading back through the vestibule toward the dining car. “Where are they going?” Losutu asked, craning his head to watch as the last of them filed out of the car. “Applegate?”

“It’s no concern of yours,” Applegate said. Or rather, the thing possessing Applegate said. When the time came, I would have to remember that it was no longer a human being that I would be facing.

We were halfway across the now-empty car when the door ahead of us opened and a second stream of passengers appeared, heading aft with the same air of purpose as the first. Apparently, the Modhri was clearing out his walkers from all of the first-class compartments, too.

By the time we reached the compartment car itself the corridor was empty. “Which one?” Losutu asked.

“These,” Applegate said, gesturing toward the doors of our two compartments. “They’re the only ones I didn’t control.”

“We’ll go in here,” I said, stepping to Bayta’s compartment and touching the door chime. “We might as well bring Bayta in on the conversation.”

“And your other companion, too,” Applegate said. “The one posing as another doctor.”

The door opened, and I saw a flicker of surprise on Bayta’s face as she realized I had company. A second flicker followed as she saw who the company was. “Yes?” she asked carefully.

“Sorry,” I said, gently easing her aside and stepping in. The connecting wall between the two compartments, I saw, was partially open, just the way I’d left it. “Afraid we’ve miscalculated.”

“What do you mean?” she asked as the others came in behind me, Applegate closing the door behind him.

“He means the game is over,” Applegate said, releasing Losutu’s wrist and giving him a shove toward the bed. “Sit down, all of you. I’ll make this as quick and painless as possible. You—in the other compartment! Come here. Now.”

There was no answer. “You—Human!” Applegate called again, putting an edge to his voice. “Come now.”

“Just a minute,” a timid voice came at last. McMicking’s voice, but quavering like a frightened accountant. “Please. I’m not dressed.”

Applegate hesitated, probably wondering whether it would be safe to leave us alone while he went to the other compartment and dragged McMicking in by his neck. His eyes touched mine, and he apparently decided against it. “You have one minute,” he called.

Losutu cleared his throat. “You promised to tell me what’s going on, Compton.”

“Basically, Colonel Applegate has been turned into a sort of pod person,” I told him, making sure my voice was loud enough to carry to McMicking. “I say sort of because up to now he’s been completely unaware that he’s playing host to a section of a group mind called the Modhri.”

“Even now he isn’t aware of it,” Bayta said, her voice so low I could barely hear her. “The Modhri has taken control by putting his personality to sleep. When he releases him, Applegate will return, with no memory of what happened. He’ll think he simply blacked out.”

“Only this time that may be a problem,” I warned, eyeing Apple-gate thoughtfully. “He’ll remember that I was talking about you just before he suffered an unexplained blackout. He’s too good an intelligence agent not to connect the dots.”

“I doubt it,” Applegate said calmly. “Primitives like you are amazingly good at rationalizing away events you don’t understand.”

“Why are you doing this?” Losutu asked, and I had to admit a grudging flicker of admiration for the man. All of this dumped on him like a truckload of rocks, and yet he was already thinking like a diplomat. “What exactly do you want?”

“I want to be all, and to rule all,” Applegate said, as if it were obvious. “And that day will come. But to business,” he went on, shifting those dead eyes back to me. “You took three data chips from Modhra 1. Give them to me.”

“If you insist.” I gestured toward the lounge chair where Bayta’s reader and the chips were lying on a pull-out armrest table. “They’re right there.”

Applegate backed over to the chair, keeping his eyes on us, and picked up the chips. A quick confirming glance at them, and he dropped them into his pocket. “Now tell me what you’ve learned from them.”

I thought about playing dumb, but it didn’t seem worth the effort. “You’ve shipped out a hell of a lot of coral recently,” I said. “Aside from that, nothing.”

His eyes glittered. “Nothing?”

“Absolutely nothing,” I assured him truthfully. I hadn’t figured it out from his precious data chips, after all. “Though it wasn’t for lack of trying.”

“I see,” Applegate murmured. He started to turn away—

And before I could react, he stepped to the bed, grabbed a handful of Bayta’s hair, and yanked her upright. “You lie,” he said calmly, twisting her around and pulling her close in front of him. “Tell me where it is, and I’ll release her.”

“I don’t know where it is,” I protested, feeling sweat breaking out on my face as he shifted his grip, wrapping his right arm around her throat. “Leave her alone.”

“Where what is?” Losutu demanded.

“Fine,” Applegate said. “Have it your way.” His left hand dipped into his side jacket pocket and came out again.

Holding a lump of Modhran coral.

“Now,” he said, holding the coral up for my inspection. “Will you tell me the truth? Or do I simply scratch her so”—he pantomimed running an edge of the coral along her cheek—“and turn her into the thing she fears most in the universe?”

“Leave her alone, damn it,” I snarled, half rising to my feet. Applegate twitched the coral warningly; clenching my teeth, I sank back down again. “I tell you we don’t know.”

“Do you agree, servant of the Spiders?” Applegate asked Bayta, his lips almost brushing her ear.

She didn’t answer, her eyes blazing with anger and terror. “Well?” he prompted.

“You will die,” she said, her voice strained but firm. “Do you hear me?”

“I hear you,” Applegate said calmly. “A final chance: Tell me where the homeland is, or join us. I assure you—”

“I’m coming out,” McMicking called from the other compartment, his voice still trembling. “Please don’t hurt me.”

Applegate flicked a glance at the open wall, clearly annoyed at the interruption. “Just come,” he snapped. There was another moment of hesitation, and then McMicking appeared, sidling nervously through the gap.

He hadn’t changed his hair in the past twenty minutes. But even so, for that first couple of seconds I almost didn’t recognize him. The air of professional awareness and competence had vanished into a bubbling nervousness. His eyes were bulging in panic, his fingers and lips and throat working with barely contained terror, his face halfway to bursting into tears. “Please don’t hurt me,” he begged.

“Sit down,” Applegate said disgustedly, jerking his head toward the bed. He turned his eyes back to me, as if even the alien within him was embarrassed at the sight of such a pathetic excuse for a Human being. “Well?” he demanded, again lifting the coral toward Bayta’s cheek.

And in that moment, McMicking struck.

He threw himself at Applegate in a flat leap that covered the two-meter gap between them, his fist slamming hard into Applegate’s exposed right armpit. Applegate bellowed with pain, and Bayta twisted away from him as the arm holding her suddenly went limp. Applegate twisted around as well, his left hand slashing out with the coral toward McMicking’s face.

But McMicking was no longer there. Even before Bayta was completely free he had dropped into a low crouch; and as the coral swung through the air above his head he swiveled around, his right leg sweeping Applegate’s legs out from under him.

With a curse, Applegate toppled over, slamming hard onto his back on the floor. I jumped up to assist, but there was no need. McMicking finished his sweep and hop-switched legs, jabbing his left foot out like a Russian dancer to catch Applegate solidly behind his right ear. There was a sickening thud, and with a single convulsive spasm, Applegate collapsed and lay still. His left hand opened limply, the coral rolling a few centimeters away across the floor.

“Everyone okay?” McMicking asked, giving Applegate’s ribs a test nudge to make sure he was going to stay down.

“We’re fine,” I said, getting up and kneeling over Applegate. “Did he get you with the coral?”

“Not even close,” McMicking assured me.

“Be careful,” Bayta warned as I checked Applegate’s pulse. “Modhran walkers aren’t easy to knock out.”

“I don’t think we’ll have that problem,” I said grimly, getting back to my feet. “He’s dead.”

“What?” McMicking demanded, dropping down and checking for himself. “That’s crazy—I didn’t hit him that hard.”

“The colony must have suicided,” Bayta said with a shiver. “Like the two Halkas at Kerfsis.”

“This Modhri sounds like a sore loser,” McMicking said with a grunt, straightening up and prodding the coral with his shoe. “What should I do with this?”

“Don’t touch it,” I warned. Nudging him away, I kicked it under the bed where it would be out of the way. “I wonder where the hell he got it from.”

“From the Peerage car,” Losutu murmured mechanically, still staring at Applegate’s body. “JhanKla has a long spine of it in a pool in his sleeping compartment.”

So the Peerage car wasn’t just a walker’s convenient and comfortable transport. It was also a full-fledged mobile command center. “Should have guessed,” I said. “Bayta, do you know if it can hear us?”

“You mean the coral?” Losutu asked, breaking his gaze away from Applegate to stare up at me. “What in the—?”

“Director, please,” I said. “Bayta?”

“I don’t think so,” she said. “The polyps can detect and interpret vibrations, but only under water.”

“What about Applegate?”

“But you said he was dead,” Losutu protested.

“Director, please,” I said, trying hard to hold on to my temper.

“He might,” Bayta conceded. “The—I mean—the neural degeneration hasn’t yet started—”

“Out in the hall with him,” McMicking said briskly, grabbing Applegate under the armpits. “Better kick that coral thing out there, too, just to be on the safe side.”

A minute later we had dumped both the body and the coral out in the corridor, making sure to retrieve the data chips first. “What about you?” I asked Bayta when we were back in the compartment. “Did he get you with the coral?”

“No,” she said, rubbing gingerly at her cheek.

“You sure? No—hold still,” I ordered as I took hold of her chin and tilted her head up toward the light. “Let me see.”

“See what?” she retorted, pushing my hand away. “A microscopic scratch? I tell you, he didn’t touch me.”

“Okay, okay,” I growled. “I was just trying to help.”

“Help by figuring out what he’s going to do next,” she growled back. Dropping back down onto the bed, she pulled her knees up to her chest and hugged her arms tightly around them as she stared off into a corner.

“What do you mean, what he’s going to do?” Losutu asked, his expression unreadable. “He’s dead, right?”

“She means he, the Modhri, the group mind,” I told him. “Weren’t you listening?”

“Yes, but…” He trailed off. “You were serious, weren’t you? But that’s…”

“Insane?” I suggested tartly. “Ridiculous? Horrifying? Pick an adjective and move on, because it’s also true.”

Losutu took a deep breath, let it out slowly. “All right,” he said. “Assume for the moment it’s true. As she says: What now? What exactly are his options?”

“You saw all the first-class passengers moving like zombies while we were coming here,” I reminded him. “All of them are Modhran walkers, just like Applegate was, all of them apparently being directly controlled by the group mind.” I patted my pocket. “And their sole purpose in life is to get these data chips back.”

“How many of them are there?” McMicking asked.

“At least everyone in first class, plus JhanKla and his entourage, plus probably a few others scattered around for insurance,” I told him. “The odds here are not good.”

“Yeah, but it’s only another hour to Homshil,” McMicking pointed out. “Maybe we can barricade ourselves in until we get there.”

“And then fight our way through them to get off?” I asked doubtfully. “Worth a try. Let’s see if we can get these beds off the walls—”

And from behind me, Bayta screamed.

“What?” I snapped, spinning around to face her.

Her eyes were staring into infinity, her face gone deathly white, her chest heaving with short, rapid breaths. “Bayta?” I asked, dropping down on the bed beside her and taking her hand. It was icy cold. “Bayta, what is it?”

“They killed him,” she whispered, her voice shaking. “They killed one of the Spiders.”

“Who did?” I asked, a creepy feeling running up my back.

“The crowd,” she whispered. “The mob. All of them.”

“That can’t be,” McMicking objected. “You said it was just first class. There can’t be enough of them to take out a Spider.”

“He was wrong,” she murmured, her eyes still blank. “They’re all part of the Modhri now. They’re attacking the Spiders, and they’re going to kill them all.”

She closed her eyes. “And then they’re going to kill us.”