Night Train to Rigel

TWENTY-FOUR:

“This is certainly a pleasant surprise,” Larry Hardin commented as McMicking and I walked between the palm trees flanking the doorway that led into the formal solarium of his New Pallas Towers apartment. “When the news about that missing Quadrail hit the net I assumed you were both lost. Does this mean the Spiders have found it, after all?”

“I don’t think so,” I told him. In actual fact, they had gone into the Tube and retrieved the derelict train. But since the Modhri had already killed everyone aboard, I doubted that would ever be announced. “Fortunately, we’d switched trains.”

“Lucky indeed,” Hardin agreed, gesturing toward a bench across from him set between a pair of lilac bushes. “As McMicking may have mentioned, I’ve had some second thoughts about your employment.”

“Yes, he did,” I confirmed, sitting down on the bench and sniffing appreciatively at the delicate scent of the lilacs. McMicking, for his part, went and stood at the back corner of Hardin’s bench, watching me closely. “Unfortunately, I’m afraid that you were right the first time.”

Hardin’s eyebrows lifted. “Excuse me?” he asked ominously. “I’m afraid I’m not going to be able to deliver, after all,” I told him.

“You’re giving up?”

“I give up when a job is finished or I’m convinced it’s not possible,” I said. “In this case, it’s the latter.”

“I see.” Hardin leaned back against his bench. “Speaking of unfinished jobs, I’ve been having my people do a little investigating of your, shall we say, unaccounted-for funding. Oddly enough, it’s also been impossible to track.”

“And what do you conclude from that?”

“Possibly that some governmental agency is involved,” he said. “I understand that a UN deputy director, who was also supposed to have been aboard that vanished Quadrail, has also returned alive and well. I further understand that you and he came back on the same torchliner and that you spent a great deal of the trip in his cabin.”

“You’re very well informed,” I said.

“I try to be,” he said. “You realize, of course, that our agreement has an exclusivity clause in it.”

“I haven’t told Director Losutu anything about this that I haven’t told you,” I assured him. “Our discussion was on other topics.”

“In that case, the only other possibility is that you were suborned by the Spiders themselves.” Hardin’s already cool gaze went a few degrees chillier. “And that wouldn’t be simply an exclusivity violation. It would be contract malfeasance and fraud, both of which are felonies.”

“You could certainly file charges and launch an official investigation,” I agreed. “Of course, that would mean letting the rest of the world know what you were planning to do. You really want that?”

“Not particularly,” he said. “But one way or another, I think we can agree that your actions have voided our contract. As such, according to Paragraph Ten, you owe me all the monies you spent over the past two months.”

“I understand,” I said. “Actually, as long as we’re on the subject anyway, money is the main reason I came here today. I’m afraid I’m going to need a little more of it.”

An amused smile touched Hardin’s lips. “You have chutzpah, Compton, I’ll give you that. Fine, I’ll bite. How much?”

“A trillion dollars ought to do it.”

His smile vanished. “You are joking.”

“Maybe a little less,” I added. “We’ll have to see how it all shakes out.”

“How it shakes out is that you’ve outstayed your welcome,” he said tartly, signaling for the guards standing in the shade of the door palms. “My accountant will contact you when he’s finished totaling up what you owe me.”

“I’m sure he will,” I said, making no move to stand up. “Interesting thing about that young man who died outside the New Pallas the night I left New York. You do remember him, don’t you?”

Hardin’s forehead creased slightly. “What about him?”

“He’d been shot six times,” I said. “Three of those shots being snoozers. Yet apparently he was still able to made it from my apartment all the way here to the New Pallas Towers.”

“Must have had a very strong constitution.”

“Indeed,” I said, lifting my eyebrows. “You don’t seem surprised to hear that he’d come here from my apartment.”

The guards had arrived at my bench now. “Yes, sir?” one of them asked.

Hardin hesitated, then shook his head. “Never mind.”

“Yes, sir,” the guard said. He gestured to his companion, and the two of them headed back through the foliage toward their posts.

“You see, I got to thinking about him during the trip back to Earth,” I continued when they were out of earshot again. “There are really only three possibilities as to who might have killed him.” I held up three fingers and started ticking them off. “It wasn’t your average mugger, because your average mugger carries snoozers or thudwumpers but usually not both. It also wasn’t the man’s enemies— never mind who they are—because his presence here would have alerted them to my relationship with you and they would certainly have moved to exploit that. Which leaves only the third possibility.”

I ticked off the third finger. “You.”

I saw the muscles in his throat tighten briefly. “I was in here with you when it happened,” he reminded me.

“Oh, I don’t mean you personally,” I said. “But you were certainly involved. The way I read it, your people reported there was someone hanging around my apartment, which got you wondering if our deal maybe wasn’t as secret as you’d hoped. You told them to bring him in for a chat, but they weren’t able to do that. So you told them to get rid of him.”

Hardin snorted. But it was a desperate, blustering sort of snort. “This is nonsense,” he insisted.

“Only he wasn’t as easy to kill as they thought,” I continued. “So when they hopped into their car and headed back here to report, he pulled himself up off the pavement, grabbed an autocab, and followed them. That’s the only way he could have been waiting for me when I came out that night.”

I gestured toward McMicking. “And it’s the only way to explain how McMicking was on the scene so fast. He’d gotten the frantic report that the target was not only alive, but was standing on your doorstep, and had gone down to finish the job. Unfortunately for you, I got there first.”

“Ridiculous,” Hardin murmured. But the denial was pure reflex, without any real emotion behind it.

“That was the real reason you made a point of coming to see me at Jurskala, wasn’t it?” I asked. “You’d figured out that the dead man and I were connected, and you needed to find out if I knew you’d been involved.”

Hardin took a deep breath; and with that, he was on balance again. “Interesting theory,” he said. “Completely unprovable, of course.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “We could subpoena all the personnel who were on duty in Manhattan that night. Unless the messenger gave someone time to change clips, the presence of both snoozers and thudwumpers implies two shooters. I’d bet at least one of them would be willing to skid on you to save his own skin.”

“I’d take that bet, actually,” he said with a touch of grim humor. “But I’m forgetting—you don’t have anything left to bet with anymore, do you?”

“You really think your people will fall on their swords for you?”

“No falling necessary,” he said calmly. “All you’ve got is conjecture. There’s absolutely no proof of any of it.”

“And the courts are open to the highest bidder?”

He shrugged. “I wouldn’t go quite that far,” he said. “But you’d be surprised what the right legal representation can do.”

“What about the court of public opinion?” I persisted. “This kind of accusation splashed across the media would make you look pretty bad. And you have plenty of enemies ready to fan the flames.”

He smiled tightly. “You, of all people, should know how fickle public opinion is,” he said. “A couple of months, and whatever fire you managed to kindle would quietly burn itself out.”

I glanced up at McMicking. He was looking back at me, his face completely neutral. “So you’re not afraid of me, the courts, or public opinion,” I said, looking back at Hardin. “Is there anything you are afraid of?”

“Nothing that’s worth a trillion dollars in hush money,” he said. “And now you really have outstayed your welcome.” He started to get up.

“How about the Spiders?” I asked.

He paused halfway up. “What do you mean?”

“Oh, that’s right—you didn’t know,” I said, as if the thought had only now occurred to me. “The man your people killed was an agent for the Spiders. The way I hear it, the Spiders are very unhappy about his death.”

Slowly, Hardin sat down again. “It wasn’t the way you think,” he insisted, his voice tight. “Yes, I was concerned about this stranger hanging around; and yes, I wanted him out of the picture. But I never wanted him dead. That was a completely unauthorized over-reaction.”

“I’m not sure that the Spiders would understand that kind of subtlety,” I said. “And I’d bet you’d lose an awful lot of money if they embargoed you from shipping anything through the Quadrail. Probably a lot more than a measly trillion dollars.”

His eyes hardened. “This is blackmail.”

“This is business,” I corrected. “Can I expect your credit authorization in a timely fashion? Or do you need the Spiders to cut off all your shipments for a month or two to prove you can’t slide anything past them?”

For a dozen heartbeats he continued to glare at me. Then the corner of his mouth curled in surrender. “The money will be messengered to you by tomorrow afternoon,” he said, his voice as dark-edged as a death notice.

“Thank you,” I said. “If it helps any, the money will be going to a very worthy cause.”

“I’m sure it will,” he ground out. “Once you leave this apartment, you’re to stay out of my way. Far out of my way.”

“Understood,” I said, getting to my feet. I looked again at McMicking, got a microscopic nod of confirmation in return. Hardin would pay up, all right, and he wouldn’t make trouble. McMicking would see to that.

And in paying up, Hardin would save the Spiders, the Quadrail, and the entire galaxy. Just one more bit of irony for my new collection. “Thank you, Mr. Hardin. I’ll see myself out.”

Six months later, I stood at the edge of the icecap that covered Yandro’s Great Polar Sea and waited for the enemy to appear.

He came in the form of a dumpy little man in a polar suit who emerged from a small meteorological station perched on the Polar Sea’s rocky shore. “Hello,” he called as he walked toward me. “Can I help you?”

“Hello, Modhri,” I said. “Remember me?”

For a moment the man just stared. Then his eyes seemed to go blank, his face sagged briefly, and he nodded. “Compton,” he said, his voice subtly changed. “You who disappeared, only to return from the dead.”

“Which is more than can be said for that particular segment of your mind, of course,” I said. “My condolences.”

“A great mystery, still unsolved,” the Modhri said. “Would you care to tell me the story?”

“There’s not much to tell,” I said. “The mind segment tried to kill me. I killed him instead.”

“And now you face me here,” the Modhri said, his eyes glittering with anticipation. “A very accommodating Human, saving me the trouble of preparing a suitable death for you in the far reaches of the galaxy.”

“I’m afraid you have it backwards,” I told him mildly. “It’s you who’s about to die.”

“Really,” he said, his eyes still glittering as he took a step toward me. “You against me, as it was aboard the Quadrail?”

“Actually, this time it’s going to be a little more one-sided.” I gestured to my right at the torchcruiser squatting on the rocks, its hatchway sitting open. “Recognize it?”

He glanced in that direction, turned his eyes back to me. “No,” he said, taking another step forward. “Should I?”

“I would think so,” I said. “I would assume you’d keep track of every vehicle in the entire Yandro system.”

He paused, a frown creasing his forehead as he took a longer look at the torchcruiser. The frown deepened as he looked back at me. “You’ve repainted and renumbered one of them,” he accused.

I shook my head. “No. It’s a brand-new vehicle, never before seen in this system.”

I pointed upward. “So are the three Chafta 201 ground-assault bombers that are currently mapping out the extent of your coral beds.”

The walker stiffened, throwing an involuntary glance at the darkening sky. “Impossible!” he hissed. “No vehicle parts or weapons systems have come into this system in over a year.”

“Not through your Quadrail station, anyway,” I agreed. “Not through the station you’ve built up such careful defenses around. But then, you didn’t know, did you?”

“Know what?”

I smiled. “That Yandro now has two Quadrail stations.”

He stared at me, his breath coming in quick puffs of white frost. “No,” he whispered.

“It’s more of a siding than a full-service station, actually,” I continued. “Very small, with no amenities whatsoever. But it has a parking area, unloading cranes, a couple of cargo hatchways, and enough Spiders to unpack and assemble four spacecraft and all the weaponry that go with them. Only half a trillion for the whole collection, plus another half trillion for the siding itself. A bargain all around.”

“You lie,” he insisted, his voice taking on a vicious edge. “I would have known if such money was missing. I have many walkers among the lesser beings at the United Nations.”

“Yes, the same behind-the-scenes people who helped push through the Yandro colonization in the first place,” I said, nodding. “That’s why we did the whole thing with private money, with no trail for your walkers to follow.”

“I see,” the Modhri said, his voice as bitter as the air temperature. “I should have killed you two years ago instead of merely having you fired.”

“You probably should have,” I agreed. “But then, you couldn’t really do that, could you? Any more than you could haul me into JhanKla’s Quadrail compartment or over to the resort casino waterfall and just rake me bodily across the coral. You didn’t know who else might be watching, and you absolutely couldn’t risk doing anything so blatant that it would draw attention to Humans and the Ter-ran Confederation. You had to play it exactly as you always did, and hope you could either infect me just like any other walker or else find a way to use me against Fayr’s commandos.”

I inclined my head at him. “Unfortunately for you, both attempts failed.”

“I underestimated you,” he murmured. “Very well. What are my options?”

I lifted my eyebrows. “Options?”

“You wouldn’t have come here merely to gloat,” he said. The anger and shock were gone now, replaced with something cold and calculating. “What do you want? Wealth? Power?”

“Ah, so we’re going with the three wishes thing,” I said, pulling out a comm.

“As many wishes as you choose,” he said, his voice smooth and seductive and utterly sincere. “I can give you anything you want.”

“I’ll settle for a promise,” I said, my finger poised over the comm’s power switch. “That you’ll bring all the rest of your outposts back here, and that you’ll let the colonies inside your walkers die. You can live here in peace, but that’s all you can do.”

He hesitated, then sighed. “Very well,” he said. “If there is no other way.”

“There isn’t.” I gestured to the man. “You can start by releasing this one.”

The walker’s eyes narrowed slightly. Then, with another sigh, he nodded. “As you wish.” He took a deep breath, and suddenly the man gave a violent twitch, blinking in obvious confusion. “What—?” he said, glancing around and then looking back at me. “Did you—I’m sorry; were you saying something?”

“No,” I assured him. “It’s all right now.” Nodding, I turned to go.

Hooking his gloved hands into talons, he leaped.

I jumped away, but not far enough. His outstretched hand slapped hard, knocking the comm out of my hand. “You fool,” he bit out savagely, grabbing my wrist with one hand and yanking me toward him with unexpected strength. “And now you will die.”

He was reaching his other hand toward my throat when the thundercrack of a gun came from the open door of my torchcruiser, the impact of the shot throwing him flat onto his back. He skidded a meter across the ice and lay still.

I staggered a bit as I stepped over to him, trying to avoid the bright blood spreading out over the whiteness, my ears ringing with the sound of the gunshot. “Thank you,” I said to the Modhri inside him. “That was what I needed to know.”

McMicking had joined me by the time I retrieved my comm. “I thought we agreed to use snoozers,” I said.

“You agreed to use snoozers,” he corrected me calmly. “I didn’t think it would be smart to take that chance. Besides, the Modhri would have had to kill him anyway once he’d used him to murder you.”

“I suppose,” I conceded, grimacing down at the dead man.

“Casualty of war,” McMicking said. “You ready?”

I nodded, and keyed on the comm. “This is Grounder,” I said. “Alpha code beta code omicron. Commence attack.”

“Acknowledged,” a terse voice came back.

McMicking and I were back in the torchcruiser and starting to lift off when the fire began raining onto the ice and the hidden coral below.