Night Train to Rigel

FOUR:

Exactly one hour and nine minutes later I felt a slight jolt run through the car. Two minutes after that, the connecting door at the front of the car irised open and a conductor appeared from the vestibule, its slender legs picking their way carefully down the narrow aisle toward us. I watched it come, listening to Bayta’s slow breathing behind me; and as the Spider came within five meters of us I heard a sudden catch in the rhythm as she came awake. “Yes?” she called.

“I think we’re here,” I said, half turning to look at her.

“Yes, we are,” she said, her fingertips rubbing the skin on either side of her eyes. “He’s come to show us to our new compartment.”

“Do you know which one is ours?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Then tell it thanks, but we’ll get there on our own,” I said. “An escort will just draw unnecessary attention.”

She hesitated, then nodded. “All right,” she said, locking her eyes onto the conductor. Its globe dipped slightly in response, and it reversed direction and left the car. “So?” she prompted. “Are we going?”

“Patience,” I said, studying my watch. So apparently all she had to do was to look at a Spider to communicate with it. Interesting. “In another twenty minutes we’ll reach New Tigris. There won’t be a lot of traffic coming and going, but at least we won’t be the only ones on the move.”

We sat in silence until, twenty minutes later, we decelerated to a stop. Then, as the expected trickle of passengers began, we headed forward.

The walk proved more interesting than I’d expected. On the Quadrail trips I’d taken while working for Westali I’d normally traveled third class, making it up to second only on the rare occasion when some nervous medium-level bureaucrat insisted on having an escort assigned to him. In each of those latter instances I’d ended up in cars dominated by other humans, either business or government types or minor celebrities who couldn’t swing the price of a first-class seat.

Now, as we passed through the last of the second-class cars into the first-class section, I got to see how the galaxy’s elite and powerful traveled.

The seats themselves were, not surprisingly, larger and better furnished than those in second and third class. They were also far more mobile. Third-class seats were fixed in place, with only limited adjustability. Second-class seats were a step up from that, attached to small floor circles that permitted them to both rotate and also move laterally to a limited extent, allowing passengers to create little conversation circles for themselves. The first-class cars had gone this one better, with seats that could be moved anywhere in the car, allowing a lounge atmosphere in which neat rows and aisles were pretty much nonexistent.

What was surprising to me was how the occupants had used this flexibility to sort themselves out. Unlike the lower classes, where travelers tended to congregate with their own species, the first-class cars were much more heterogeneous. Shorshians and Bellidos sat together, engaged in serious discussions, while here and there humans conversed as equals with Halkas or Juriani, despite the fact that both those races had been busily colonizing their home solar systems when Charlemagne was still planning his conquests of Central Europe.

Even political differences didn’t seem to matter. The Juriani and Cimmaheem were currently embroiled in a major controversy regarding the development of a half dozen worlds bordering their empires, yet I saw a mixed group of them sitting around a table playing a card game and chatting quite amicably.

The bar end of the first-class dining car was much the same, with the social lubricant of alcohol and other intoxicants adding an extra layer of goodwill and camaraderie. Only in the restaurant section did the travelers largely segregate themselves, and I suspected that had more to do with the challenges of species-specific food aromas than any xenophobia.

The car in front of the dining car contained more first-class seating, with more of the social mixing I’d already seen. Finally, in the compartment car ahead of that one, we reached our new home.

It was as nice as I’d expected, and then some. It was small, of course, but the space had been utilized so efficiently that it didn’t feel at all cramped. Attached to the front wall was a narrow but comfortable-looking bed that could be folded up for extra floor space. Above the bed was a luggage rack with my two carrybags sitting neatly side by side. Against the outer wall was a lounge chair with a swivel computer beside it on one side and an expansive display window—currently blank—on the other. On the opposite side of the display window was a fold-down clothes rack, with memory-plastic hook/hangers that could stretch or shrink as needed, plus a built-in sonic cleaning system with a quick-turn cycle for half-hour freshening. A tiny human-configured half bath was tucked into the corner beside the door, the whole cubicle converting into a shower stall for use after long overnight trips. Finally, the back wall contained a curve couch with a set of reading and ambiance lights strategically placed above it. The room was done up in a tasteful color scheme, with decorative moldings and small cameo-style carvings where the walls and ceiling met “I could get used to this,” I commented as I circled the room, touching the various controls and running my fingers over the moldings and the sections of polished wood and metal. The lounge chair had a leathery feel to it, while the curve couch was done up in something midway between velvet and very soft feathers.

“I trust you’ll find it adequate,” Bayta said. She stepped past me as I finished my tour and touched a control beneath the display window. In response, the curve couch and lights collapsed neatly into the back wall, which then retracted into the side of the half-bath cubicle to reveal a mirror image of the compartment we were standing in. “This one’s mine,” she said, a subtle note of warning in her tone.

“Of course,” I said. Not that I was likely to have made a swing for her even if I hadn’t had more important business on my mind. Walking back to my bed, I reached up to the luggage rack and hauled down the smaller of my two carrybags.

And as I did so, a quiet alarm went off in the back of my skull. Earlier, when I’d carried the bags out of the transfer station restaurant, the leatherlite grip that rode the handle straps had been flexible, even a little squishy. Now there was virtually no give to the grip at all. “Bayta, can you pull up a dining car menu for me?” I asked casually as I popped the bag open.

“Certainly,” she said, sitting down in the lounge chair and swiveling the computer around to face her.

And with her attention now safely occupied, I gave the handle a close look.

The reason for the change in its feel was instantly obvious. The space between the grip and the strap, the looseness of which had given the handle its squishiness, had been completely filled in, like an éclair with a double helping of cream. The material matched the leatherlite’s color and texture perfectly, but somehow I doubted that was what it was.

“Here it is,” Bayta announced, swiveling the display around. “But I thought you ate at Terra Station.”

“A good traveler learns to eat whenever he gets the chance,” I said, stepping to her side and paging quickly through the menu. “I don’t suppose first-class has delivery privileges.”

“Not usually,” she said. “Do you want me to ask one of the servers or conductors if he’ll bring you something?”

“No, thanks,” I said. “That’s what I’ve got you for. Be a good girl and go get me an order of onion rings, will you?”

In the past, I’d found the be-a-good-girl line to be a remarkably effective way of getting a quick reading on a woman’s temperament. Unlike most of those I’d tried it on, Bayta didn’t even bat an eye. “As you wish,” she said, sliding out of the chair. Crossing the compartment, she touched the door control to open it and disappeared into the corridor.

I went over to the door and made sure it was locked. Then, returning to the bed, I hauled down the other carrybag. In a galaxy where self-propelled luggage was the norm, I doubted that one in a hundred travelers had more than a vague idea what their handles really felt like. The only reason I’d caught the alteration so quickly was because of my carrybags’ chronic motor problems, the very problems I’d been cursing five hours ago.

There was a lesson there, or at least a bit of irony, but at the moment I couldn’t be bothered with either. Like the smaller carrybag, the larger one’s handle had also been padded out. Pulling out my pocket multitool, I extended the fingertip-sized blade—the biggest knife permitted aboard a Quadrail—and began digging carefully beneath the grip.

My first guess was that the Spiders had decided to backstop their watchdog by planting a tracer or transmitter on me. But as I scraped millimeter after millimeter away without finding anything except whisker-thin embedded wires, that idea began to fade. I kept at it; and finally, two centimeters in, I struck something familiar.

Only it wasn’t a transmitter. It was, instead, a short-range receiver connected to a small pulse capacitor, which was in turn connected to the whisker wires buried in the material.

The sort of setup you might find in a remotely triggered antipersonnel bomb.

Pulling out my reader, I selected a data chip from my collection marked Encyclopaedia Britannica. So Bayta had a specially-gimmicked reader, did she? Fine. So did I. Plugging in the chip, I touched the reader’s activation control and held one corner close to the material I’d scraped out of the handle.

It was not, in fact, a bomb, antipersonnel or otherwise. This sensor was the most advanced bit of technology in the Terran Confederation, a gadget any Westali field director would probably give his best friend’s right arm for, and it wasn’t picking up even a hint of the fast-burning chemicals all explosives had in common. I retuned the sensor twice, just to be sure, then switched to scanning for poisons. Again, nothing.

But nothing in the case of poisons could merely mean that the stuff was too well disguised for a normal scan. Fortunately, there were ways of teasing such things into the open. Pulling out my lighter, I flipped the thumb guard around, swinging it over the flame jet where it would serve as a specimen holder. I put a single grain of the mystery material on top, set the sensor at the proper reading distance, and ignited the lighter. The flame hissed out, clean and blue-white, and there was a brief burst of pale smoke as the grain burned as well. Shutting off the lighter, I set it aside and keyed for analysis.

And this time, the sensor finally found the active ingredient carefully buried beneath the inert containment matrix.

Saarix-5 nerve gas.

The image of the Spiders’ dead messenger rose unpleasantly in front of my eyes as I unplugged the data chip and returned it and the reader to my pocket. In the absence of any move against me during the voyage from Earth, I’d begun to wonder if his death might have been a bizarre coincidence, the result of some random crime that had nothing to do with me.

Now it was looking like whoever was behind his murder had simply been biding his time.

Only here it wouldn’t be just me who went down. Depending on what percentage of the packing material was Saarix-5, there could be enough there to kill every oxygen-breather within ten meters. If my assailant set it off in the enclosed space of a Quadrail car, the effects would go even farther.

Which led to another interesting question. Namely, how had this little conjuring trick been performed in the first place? The only time the bags had been out of my sight after leaving the transfer station was right after we’d docked, as the passengers climbed up the ladder and the shuttle’s conveyer system pulled the luggage from the racks and shoved them up into the Tube after us. The sheer mechanics required for someone to insert a pair of booby traps in such a brief time was bad enough. What was worse was why the Spiders’ sensors hadn’t picked up on it.

Or maybe they had picked up on it. Maybe that was why that drudge had swooped down on me and walked off with the bags. But then why hadn’t they detained me, or kicked me off the Quadrail, or at least removed the Saarix?

Unless it was the drudge itself that had gimmicked them.

I stared at the bags, a hard knot forming in my stomach. The Spiders had been running the Quadrail with quiet efficiency for at least the past seven hundred years. In all that time there had never been a report of conflict among them, which had naturally led to the conclusion that they were a monolithic culture with no factions, disagreements, or rivalries.

But what if that wasn’t true? What if there were factions, only one of which wanted me to investigate this impending interstellar war? In that case, there might be another group seriously opposed to the idea of airing their secrets to a lowly human, especially a lowly human whose own government wanted nothing to do with him.

They might even be opposed enough to look for a permanent way to make sure that didn’t happen.

Gathering up the material I’d scraped out. I began stuffing it back beneath the grip. Bayta could return at any moment, and if she didn’t already know about the Saarix this wasn’t the time to break the news to her. If she did know, it was even more vital that she didn’t find out I was on to the scheme. It would have been nice if I could have disabled the receiver or capacitor, but a properly designed detonator came with built-in diagnostics, and I didn’t have the equipment to trick the gadget into giving itself false readings. If my would-be poisoner found out I’d neutralized this particular threat he would just come up with a different one, and it was always better to face a trap you knew about than one you didn’t.

I was sitting in the lounge chair, skimming through a colorful computer brochure on Quadrail history, when Bayta returned with the onion rings.

“Thanks,” I said, taking the basket from her. The aroma reminded me of a batch I’d had once in San Antonio. “Have one?”

“No, thank you,” she said, stepping back to the middle of the floor. “Have you come up with a plan yet?”

“I’m still in the information-gathering phase,” I said, crunching into one of the rings. They tasted like the San Antonio ones, too. “For starters, I want you to ask the Spiders for a list of situations under which weapons are allowed aboard Quadrails.”

“I can answer that one,” she said. “Personal weapons like Belldic status guns can be put in lockboxes at the transfer station, which are then stowed in inaccessible storage bins beneath the cars. Larger weapons and weapons systems can be sent by cargo Quadrail only with special governmental permits.”

“Yes, I know the official exceptions,” I said. “I want to know the unofficial ones.”

She shook her head. “There aren’t any.”

“That you know about.”

“There aren’t any,” she repeated, more firmly this time.

I took a careful breath, willing myself to be calm. Dogmatic statements always drove me crazy. “Ask the Spiders anyway,” I said. “I also want to know everything about the Tube’s sensors. How they work, what they look for, and what exactly they do and don’t detect”

She seemed a bit taken aback. “I’m not sure the Spiders will be willing to give you that kind of information,” she warned.

“They’re not being offered a choice,” I said. “They’re the ones who asked me in on this, remember? Either I get what I need or I’m walking.”

Her mouth twitched. “All right, I’ll ask,” she said. “But none of the conductors will have that kind of information.”

Another dogmatic statement. This one, though, I believed. “Fine. Who will?”

“It’ll have to go through a stationmaster,” she said, her forehead wrinkled in thought.

“Is that a problem?” I asked. “I assumed you could talk to all the Spiders.”

“Yes, I can,” she said. “But there aren’t very many of them at Yandro Station. Probably not enough for a clear relay to the stationmaster’s building.”

“A clear what?”

“My… communication… method has a limited range,” she said reluctantly. “For longer distances a message can be relayed between Spiders, but only if the Spiders are physically close enough to each other.”

“I see,” I said, nodding. So apparently she didn’t even have to look at a Spider to communicate, as I’d first thought. Some form of telepathy, then?

Problem was, as far as I knew no human being had ever demonstrated genuine, reproducible telepathic abilities. Also as far as I knew, neither had any of the galaxy’s other known species.

Which made Bayta… what?

“On the other hand, we’re only in the station for fifteen minutes,” I reminded her. “That’s not much time.”

“No, but I’ll only need to deliver that one short request,” she pointed out. “The information itself will have to be gathered and sent to us farther down the line.”

“I suppose that’ll work,” I said, thinking it through. Cargo and passengers traveled at the Quadrails’ standard light-year-per-minute, but the news and mail in those message cylinders somehow managed the trick of crossing the galaxy over a thousand times faster. The most popular theory was that once the Quadrail got up to speed, the Spiders used the dish antenna in front of the message cylinder slot to transmit everything to a train farther up the line, using the Tube itself as a gigantic wave-guide.

The messaging apparatus was supposedly sealed and self-contained, impossible for even the Spiders to reach while the Quadrail was in transit. But of course that didn’t stop the conspiracy theorists. The more paranoid among them were convinced that the Spiders read everything, encrypted or otherwise, before they transmitted it.

If we were dealing with two different factions, the question of Spider eavesdropping might be a highly important one. Unfortunately, I couldn’t think of anything I could do about it one way or the other. “I presume you can arrange for them to deliver the data to us aboard whatever train we’re on at the time?” I asked.

Bayta nodded. “I’ll tell the stationmaster when I put in the request.”

“Good,” I said. “Tell him to deliver it to us at Kerfsis.” She drew back a little. “Kerfsis? The Jurian colony world?”

“Regional capital, actually,” I corrected her. “Why? You have a problem with Juriani?”

“No but—” She seemed to flounder a moment. “I assumed we’d be transferring to a cross-galactic express at Homshil and heading straight to Filiaelian space. That’s where the attack is supposed to take place.”

With a sigh, I popped the last onion ring into my mouth and stood up. “Come on,” I said, brushing off my hands.

“Where are we going?” she asked cautiously.

“To the bar,” I told her. “I need something to drink.”

She followed me silently down the corridor to the rear of our car, through all the genial camaraderie in the forward first-class coach, and back into the dining car. The bar was reasonably busy, but most of the patrons were drinking in groups and there were a few unoccupied tables for two. Choosing one in a back comer, I steered Bayta over to it. The chairs were lumpy and uncomfortable-looking, which probably meant some Shorshians had been using them last. “What’ll you have?” I asked, gesturing her to one of the chairs as I sat down in the other. The chair sensed my weight and body temperature, correctly deduced my species, and reconfigured itself into something a lot more comfortable.

“Something nonalcoholic,” she said a bit stiffly.

“Teetotaler, huh?” I hazarded, touching the button in the middle of the table to pull up the holodisplay menu. I gave it a quick scan, then tapped for a lemonade for her and an iced tea for me. “Too bad. Alcohol can be a nice little social equalizer.”

“Or it can be a way to cloud your mind and put you at a disadvantage with your enemies,” she countered.

I thought about the dead man in Manhattan and the Saarix-laden carrybags back in my compartment “Lucky for me, I don’t have any enemies,” I murmured.

Her eyebrow may have twitched, but I could have imagined that. “Why exactly did you bring me here?” she asked.

“I wanted to go someplace where we could talk in private,” I said. “I thought the Spiders might have the compartments bugged.”

“They wouldn’t do that,” she insisted.

“You never know,” I said. Actually, I did know; and no, they hadn’t. My watch came from the same stratospherically priced tech people as my disguised sensor system, and it would have tingled a warning if it had picked up any sign of eavesdropping equipment. Another trinket my old Westali colleagues would probably give spare body parts to possess.

“Think whatever you want,” Bayta said. Her voice was still stiff, but now it was a tired sort of stiff. “What do you want to talk about?”

I took a deep breath, let it out in a soft sigh. My attempts to get a reaction with the good-little-girl gambit had failed, and my take-it-or-leave-it arrogance about the weapons data hadn’t done any better. Maybe a sincere, humble, heart-on-the-sleeve approach would hit a resonance and give me a handle on this woman. “Look,” I said. “According to every bit of conventional wisdom, what Hermod says the Spider saw is impossible. The Spiders screen everything coming into the Tube; and the Fillies’ own transfer station screens everything coming out. There should be zero chance of getting any serious weaponry close enough to a Filly station to take it out.”

“Which is why you were asked to investigate it.”

“What I’m trying to say is that the whole thing has me completely flummoxed,” I said. “Frankly, I’m not even sure where to start.”

She started to reach out toward my hand, resting on the table. Midway through the gesture she seemed to think better of it and let her arm fall instead into her lap. “The Spiders wouldn’t have hired you if they didn’t think you could do it.” she said.

Encouraging words, and with some genuine concern behind them. The compassionate type, then, only she was afraid to show it?

Perhaps. Still, I couldn’t quite shake the impression that she was more like an observer watching a dit rec drama unfold than one of the people actually in the middle of the action. “Thank you,” I said humbly. “I just hope you’re right.”

“I am,” she said firmly. She glanced around the room, as if making sure no one was close enough to hear us, and leaned a little closer across the table. “But why go to Kerfsis? Do you suspect the Juriani?”

“Not really,” I said as a Spider arrived with our drinks. I handed Bayta her lemonade and took a sip of my iced tea. It was strong and sweet just the way I liked it. “It’s more likely that one of the Fillies’ neighbors will be the ones making the trouble,” I continued. “Serious grievances typically ferment close to home. Mostly, I want to see if the Jurian entry procedures have changed any in the couple of years since I’ve ridden the Quadrail.”

She took a sip of her lemonade, her eyes fluttering with clear surprise at the tang. Her first experience with the drink? “May I ask why?” she asked.

I nodded upward toward the bar’s slightly domed ceiling. Spread across it was a glowing map of the galaxy and the Quadrail system. “Here’s the problem,” I said. “The Fillies are all the way across the galaxy, about as far from Earth as you can get. Even if we take express trains the whole way, that’s still nearly two and a half months of travel. We simply don’t have the time to go there and start working our way back.”

“We have four months.”

“No, the Fillies have four months,” I corrected her “We, on the other hand, do not… because the Fillies aren’t going to be the first ones attacked.”

Her eyes narrowed. “What do you mean?”

“I mean that whoever these warmongers are, they’d have to be insane to take on the Fillies first crack out of the box,” I said. “Filly soldiers are genetically programmed for loyalty, their overall defense network is second to none, and depending on who’s doing the counting, their empire is either the biggest or second biggest in the galaxy. Would you try out a brand-new attack plan on someone like that?”

Her lips compressed briefly. “I suppose not.”

“Following that same logic, the test subject is likely to be one of the newer, younger, and therefore less dangerous races,” I continued. “If we limit ourselves to those who’ve joined the galactic club in the last two hundred years, that means the Juriani, the Cimmaheem, the Tra’ho’sej, and the Bellidos.” I took a sip of my tea.“And, of course, us.”

For a minute the only sound was the muffled background hum of a half dozen different conversations and the click-clack of the Quadrail’s wheels beneath us. Quadrail dining cars, I remembered from previous trips, were acoustically designed in such a way that the volume and intelligibility of a conversation dropped off sharply half a meter away from the center of the table. It made for considerably more privacy than one would expect just from looking at the layout, which was why I’d been willing to talk about this here at all. “And whoever they decide on,” Bayta said at last, “they’ll need to make their test at least a couple of months before the Filiaelian attack.”

“Right,” I said. “Which basically means any time from now on.”

She took another sip of her lemonade. “All right,” she said. “But if it’s entry procedures you’re interested in, wouldn’t we do better to go straight to Jurskala?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “A homeworld station—any homeworld station—will be too crowded for us to get a really good look at their setup. A regional capital like Kerfsis should have all the same stuff, but without all the busyness. We’ll take the shuttle out to the transfer station, look around a bit, then come back, pick up the next train, and move on.”

“To where?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. “I’m guessing our warmongers will want a test subject a little more advanced than us or the Tra’ho’sej. That leaves the Juriani, Cimmaheem, or Bellidos.”

She pondered a moment. “The Bellidos might be a good choice,” she offered. “They’re farther out on the arm than the Terran Confederation, which makes them even more isolated.”

“Right, but at the moment we’re heading the wrong direction,” I reminded her. “Rather than spend time backtracking, we might as well continue on and check out the Juriani and Cimmaheem.”

“There are a lot of worlds out there,” she murmured, looking down at her glass.

I nodded agreement, taking another swallow of my tea as I let my gaze drift around the bar. There were Jurian foursomes occupying two of the tables, with a scattering of Shorshians and Bellidos taking up most of the rest of the space. In the far corner two Cimmaheem sat across from a lone human, their features obscured by the swirling blue smoke of a traditional skinski flambé as a hardworking vent fan kept the fumes from bothering anyone else in the room. “We can look through the system listings along the way and see if we can figure out what sort of test area our attacker might like,” I said. “But no matter how you slice it, we’re talking a lot of search area.” I raised my eyebrows. “I just hope you and I aren’t the only team on the job.”

“What do we do if we find them?” she asked, ignoring the gentle probe. “The attackers, I mean?”

“That’ll be the easy part,” I said. “All your Spider friends have to do is shut down Quadrail service to those worlds.”

There was something about the way she took her next breath. Nothing obvious, but still noticeable. “Maybe,” she said.

“What do you mean, maybe?” I asked, frowning. “It’s their train system, isn’t it? Why can’t they classify someone as persona non grata and refuse to stop at their stations?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe they can. I just don’t know.”

I studied her face, trying to read past that neutral expression. On everything else, she seemed so certain about what the Spiders could or couldn’t or would or wouldn’t do. Now, suddenly, she wasn’t sure if they could shut down a few Quadrail stations?

Because if the Spiders couldn’t do that, maybe they weren’t the ones in charge of the system after all. And that was not something I wanted to hear right now. “Well, however they want to deal with it is their problem,” I said. Even to my own ears it sounded pretty lame. “Our job is just to figure out the who and where.” I yawned. “And it’s probably time we got a little rest.”

“Yes,” she said, taking another sip of her lemonade and getting to her feet. “And don’t worry. I won’t tell the Spiders about… you know.”

“Thank you,” I said, standing up as well. Actually, I didn’t much care whether or not the Spiders heard about my crisis of confidence. My main reason for having this conversation somewhere other than in my compartment was to see if there would be any obvious fuss on the Spiders’ part when I moved out of range of their little Saarix booby trap.

But there hadn’t been any such reaction, or at least none I’d been able to see, which left me basically where I’d started. Maybe all the fuss would happen later.

Still, the conversation had given me at least a partial handle on Bayta. That was worth something.

And at the very least, the iced tea had been good.