by Timothy Zahn
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 H
alkan 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.
EIGHTEEN
It was another four days back along the Grakla Spur to Jurskala, and for every minute of each of those days I fully expected the Modhri—or whatever was left of him—to make his move.
But the Quadrail made its stops, picked up and dropped off its passengers and moved on, and nothing happened. It was as if with the destruction of the homeland branch the other outposts and walkers had gone completely dormant.
Fayr didn’t believe it for a minute. “He’s planning something,” he declared two days into the trip as we pulled out of one of the Cimman stations on our way back toward Jurian space. “He surely won’t allow such an attack to succeed without at least an attempt at retribution.”
In principle, I agreed. Still, whatever desires for vengeance the Modhran remnant might be feeling, the fact was that we’d gotten out of the Sistarrko system about as fast as anyone could, and he was now up against the purely practical problem of coming up with a plan on the fly.
Of course, it wasn’t something he had to rush on. Even if Bayta was right about him not yet having infiltrated Earth and the Confederation, that still left damn few places where the walkers couldn’t get to us whenever they wanted to.
Still, while we continued to keep an eye over our shoulders, the four days ended up being completely uneventful. What the rest of the Bellidos back in second and third class did to fill the hours I never found out, but the three of us in first spent much of it listening to each other’s stories.
For Fayr, it had started several years earlier when the Belldic intelligence service had discovered secret dealings going on between the Spiders and the Tra’ho’sej. The Bellidos had investigated, eventually digging up a trail leading to the Modhra Binary and the discovery of some kind of influence emanating from it. The Tra’ho’sej themselves had been in the middle of setting up some kind of military operation when they suddenly and inexplicably abandoned it.
The Bellidos, now more than merely curious, had tried to pick up the operation. But instead of simply following their own leads, the heads of the investigation had made the fatal mistake of contacting their counterparts in the Tra’ho intelligence community in hopes of getting inside information. Naturally, they’d gone to the Tra’ho’sej with whom they had the closest professional and personal relationships, and Modhran thought-viruses had done the rest. In rapid succession the upper levels of Belldic intelligence had fallen to the silent invasion, followed by the military leaders who controlled them, followed by the political leaders to whom they all reported. For the Modhri, it was just one more conquest, one more potential threat that had been eliminated.
Or so he thought. What he hadn’t realized was that the Belldic intelligence service was a strongly compartmentalized organization, consisting of many independent groups that had for centuries maintained their own identities for historical reasons that were only vaguely remembered. Fayr had been in one of those groups, and as he and some of the others had noticed odd behavior and decisions from their superiors they had started a fact-finding mission of their own.
They’d also attempted to contact the Spiders. The Spiders hadn’t been very enthusiastic, apparently still smarting over their failure with the Tra’ho’sej. Still, they had given the group some logistical support, including the encryption system I’d seen Fayr use with his pulse laser communications aboard the Quadrail. The Bellidos had moved with careful deliberation, bringing spices and gourmet foods and high-end electronics to Sistarrko over a period of two years as they studied the situation, building up their network of trading partners and black market contacts in the system for the time when they would be ready to make their move. They’d also sent members of the team to the Modhran resort, who mingled with the rich and powerful and scouted out the battle zone.
Fortunately for them, many of the resort’s patrons were of the newly rich and powerful whom the Modhri hadn’t yet had a chance to infect, which meant the uninfected Bellidos didn’t completely stand out of the crowd. By the time Fayr launched Phase Two, the theft of the resort maintenance sub, the infiltrators had become so much a part of the general background that the Modhri apparently couldn’t even figure out which species had been responsible.
As for me, I’d caught Fayr’s attention on the very first leg of my Quadrail journey. He had taken a seat in the hybrid passenger/baggage car so that he could keep an eye on their final shipment of antique jewelry, and his suspicions had been aroused when the Spiders unceremoniously promoted everyone except me up to the next car. When he’d subsequently seen Bayta slip back there, then discovered the door to the car had been locked, his suspicions had turned to near-certainty. By the time we reached New Tigris and he saw us head straight up to first class, he had concluded that the Modhri had ferreted out his plot. When Bayta and I had disembarked at Kerfsis, he’d taken four of the group and followed, sending the rest of the team on ahead with the jewelry to make the final arrangements on Sistarrko. When we’d returned to the Quadrail in the company of a high Jurian official, he’d made sure to place his three commandos in the rear coach where they could alert him if I made any movement out of the Peerage car.
His theory had then done a screeching bootlegger reverse when he’d spotted the conductor slipping me that data chip in the first-class bar. That had quieted his fears that I was a Modhran walker, but now he was faced with the possibility that the Spiders were launching an operation of their own that could easily blunder into his plan and wreck them both. Rather than take that risk, he had me waylaid on my way back to the Peerage car and stuffed in the spice crate where I would hopefully be out of the way long enough for his team to finish their job.
It hadn’t worked, though, and from that point on we’d been rather informal and slightly problematic allies, right up to the moment when he’d eavesdropped on the conference room conversation via the remora transceiver still in my pocket and decided I was worth the risk of rescuing.
We also spent a lot of time going over the data chips his people had taken from the harvesting complex. There were three of them, all of a slightly non-standard size which only Bayta’s reader could accept. They were also copy-proofed, which meant we had to either take turns sifting through the numbers or else stare at them over each other’s shoulders.
None of the staring did us much good. The Halkas had been shipping out Modhran coral for nearly a hundred fifty years, though these particular records only went back the last ten of those. Even so, that turned out to be a lot of coral. Fayr, we now learned, had agreed to the data raid in the first place because he’d hoped there might be a way to identify the Belldic outpost and walker colonies. But there turned out to be so many transfers and middleman operations that we couldn’t even be sure where all the coral had gone, let alone who might have come in contact with it.
My reasons for wanting the data I kept to myself. There was no point in worrying the others until I was sure.
And so matters stood when we reached Jurskala. Again, I expected some sort of reception to be waiting. Again, the Modhri was apparently still a couple of steps behind us. If that held until we made it aboard our next Quadrail, maybe I could relax a little.
It was as we went to check the schedule that the secret I’d been carrying since the New Pallas Towers finally caught up with me.
“No,” Fayr said firmly, gesturing at the floating holodisplay. “Agreed, the Bellis Loop will take several extra days to bring you to your people. But it will depart from here in less than an hour, three hours earlier than the direct Quadrail to your own empire. Equally important, it will also permit us to stay toge
ther until we are clear of Jurian territory.”
“Only to take us straight through the Estates-General,” I pointed out, hoping he’d get the inference. There were several other beings crowding around the three of us, also checking the listings, and I didn’t want to make any overt references to the Modhri. “I’m not sure what this gains us.”
“The Juriani have had the problem for nearly a hundred years,” Bayta murmured from beside me. “The Bellidos have had it for less than ten.”
“I suppose,” I said, studying the schedule. Actually, the most important difference as far as I was concerned was the fact that the Bellis Loop Quadrail stopped at fewer Jurian stations along the way than the next train to the Confederation. The fewer the stops, the fewer the opportunities for any Modhran walkers to put something together against us.
From my other side came a tentative plucking at my sleeve. I turned, tensing, but it was only a slightly hunched-over middle-aged Human with white-flecked brown hair tied back in a short ponytail, muttonchop whiskers, and a rather bewildered expression as he blinked at the schedule. “Excuse me, sir,” he said in a quavering voice. “I can’t seem to locate my train. Could you possibly help me?”
“I can try,” I said. “Where are you going?”
“I can’t pronounce it,” he confessed, pressing a folded and dog-eared piece of paper into my hand. “Here’s the name.”
I opened the paper. But there wasn’t any station name written there, pronounceable or otherwise.
Tlexiss Café. Now. Mc.
I took a second, longer look at the man… and only then did I see past the whiskers and the slightly disheveled hair and the overall air of harmless helplessness.
It was Bruce McMicking, bodyguard and general trouble-shooter for multitrillionaire industrialist Larry Cecil Hardin.
My boss.
“It’s right there,” I said between suddenly dry lips as I pointed to a random line on the schedule. McMicking here… and Bayta stranding right beside me. This was not good. “Track Five in thirty-five minutes.”
