by Timothy Zahn
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.”
TWENTY-ONE
For perhaps half a minute no one spoke. I looked at Bayta, then McMicking, then Losutu, seeing my own disbelief reflected in their faces. For centuries the Spiders had been the most stable and unchanging part of the galactic landscape: enigmatic and anonymous, striding silently through the background of interstellar events even as they enabled those events to happen. They had no faces or personalities; no apparent desires other than to serve; no hopes or dreams or joys or sorrows of their own.
And there had never, ever been any indication that they, like all the rest of us, might be mortal.
“What do we do?” Losutu asked at last. “We can’t hold off a whole train full of people until we reach Homshil, can we?”
“It doesn’t matter if we can or not,” Bayta said. The horror had faded from her face, leaving only a bitter resignation behind. “The Spiders are the ones who control the Quadrail.”
“You mean they’ve gotten to the engine?” McMicking asked.
Bayta shook her head. “There isn’t anyone in the engine,” she said. “They control it from back here. Once they’re all dead, we’ll just keep going until we run out of fuel. Or until we hit something.”
“At a hundred kilometers an hour,” Losutu murmured.
“Or a light-year per minute, depending on how you look at it,” I said grimly “But this doesn’t make sense. You told me it takes days or weeks for a colony to form inside someone.”
“That’s if you start with a single polyp hook from a single pinprick,” she said with a sigh. “If you put full-grown polyps in to begin with, and a lot of them—” She swallowed. “You could create a new walker within hours. Maybe even minutes.”
So that was what Applegate had been threatening her with. A slash across the cheek with the coral would dump dozens of the damn polyps straight into her bloodstream. “Zero to Modhri in fifteen seconds,” I said. “I guess that explains where everyone in first class was going. Back to the Peerage car for a lump of coral, then off to the first annual Modhran recruitment drive.”
“Stop babbling, Compton,” Losutu bit out. “What I want to know is, how does this gain them anything? Now they’ll all die.”
“Unless he doesn’t realize he’s killing the drivers?” McMicking suggested.
A spasm of pain flashed across Bayta’s face. “He’s killed another one,” she murmured.
“No, he understands, all right,” I said. “Remember, the Modhri is a group mind, with each colony forming connections with any others nearby. That’s what’s happened here: The colonies in Applegate and JhanKla and the first-class passengers were linked up with the coral back in the Peerage car. Now the mind segment’s apparently been extended to the rest of the passengers as well.”
“So they’ll still all die,” Losutu protested.
“He doesn’t care if this mind segment dies,” I told him. “All he cares about is making the segment big enough that he’ll be able to link to whatever mind segment is waiting in the Homshil Station when we go roaring through.”
“Where he can pass on the information,” McMicking said, nodding. “Sure.”
“What information?” Losutu asked. “What’s so important?”
“The fact that we have their stolen data chips,” I said. “Up to now, the Modhri didn’t know whether we had them, or Fayr had them, or whether we’d passed them off to someone else.”
“But if the train crashes, he’ll never get the chips back.”
“He doesn’t need them back,” I said. “He just needs to make sure no one else has them.”
“And this is worth sacrificing JhanKla and Applegate and all the rest of them for?” Losutu persisted.
“To the Modhri, the individuals don’t matter as long as the whole remains,” I said. “Would you worry about sacrificing a few brain cells?”
Losutu hissed between his teeth. “This can’t be happening,” he muttered.
“Trust me, it is,” I said, trying to think. I didn’t know how many Spiders there were aboard, but it was surely going to be a while longer before even a whole train full of walkers could take out all of them. We had that much breathing space to work with. “Bayta, is there anything you can do with the engine?” I asked. “Speed us up, slow us down—anything?”
“No,” she said dully. “Not from here.”
“But you talk to the Spiders,” I reminded her.
“It’s not the same,” she snapped suddenly. “If I was in the engine, I could do something. But I’m not.” She gave another spastic twitch, and her shoulders sagged. “And there’s no way to get there.”
“Why not?” McMicking asked.
“Because there just isn’t,” she said. “There aren’t any passageways between the engine and the rest of the train.”
“But it’s obviously connected to us,” I said. “Can we get to it from the outside?”
“There’s no air out there,” Losutu said. “Not enough to breathe, anyway.”
“There are medical kits in every car,” McMicking pointed out. “They all have emergency oxygen breathers, right?”
“Yes,” Bayta said slowly, a note of cautious hope starting to creep into her voice. “And there are bigger cylinders, too, for emergency repressurization. We could maybe use one of those to pressurize the engine compartment once we’re there.”
“Then we’re in,” I said. “How do we get the doors open?”
Bayta sighed. “We can’t,” she said, the spark of hope going out again. “They’re pressure-locked.”
“All of them?” Losutu asked.
Bayta nodded. “We’d need someone with the strength of a drudge to force one open.” She hesitated. “But there are some roof panels in the baggage cars for getting extra-large cargo crates in and out. They’re heavy, but they’re not airlocked. We might be able to get one open.”
“But they’re all the way at the back of the Quadrail,” Losutu objected. “How are we going to get there with the Modhri in the way?”
“Leave that to us,” I said, lifting my eyebrows questioningly at McMicking. “You game?”
“Absolutely,” he said grimly. “Let’s show this Modhri what a couple of primitives can do.”
Our first task was to collect all the oxygen tanks we would need. McMicking and I did that, slipping back to the first-class coach and retrieving the emergency medical kit and its oxygen breather. Fortunately, the passengers were still gone, apparently out beating Spiders to death. The breather’s tank wasn’t very big, but it ought to be enough to get one of us to the engine.
The actual mechanics of which I hadn’t quite worked out yet. As far as I knew, when Bayta and I had jumped off at Jurskala we’d been the first people to even stick our noses outside a moving Quadrail. Climbing on top of one going full tilt down the Tube was at least an order of magnitude crazier. There were so many unknowns, in fact, that it didn’t even pay to start listing them, and I would probably have voted to try the barricade approach if it hadn’t been for the absolute certainty that that would leave us all dead.
We also found and removed the emergency repressurization tank Bayta had mentioned. It turned out to be not just a simple tank, but a complete self-controlled supply/scrubber/regulator system. It also weighed nearly as much as Bayta, but fortunately it came with a built-in carrying harness that would easily convert to a backpack.
We returned to the compartment and dropped off both tanks, then pulled the medical kit from our own car. That gave us two personal-sized tanks, which added to the stretcher’s tank and the spare we’d brought from Jurskala Station gave us the four we would need for the trek across the top of the train.
Meanwhile, Bayta and Losutu hadn’t been idle. As per our instructions they’d set the stretcher up on its wheels and loaded it with spare clothing and bedding and everything else flammable they could find or tear loose from the compartments’ furnishings. They’d also rigged up shoulder or belt harnesses for the four oxygen tanks.
And with that, we were ready.
“As ready as we’re going to be, anyway,” I said, adjusting the small personal oxygen tank at my waist and manhandling the big one onto the stretcher’s center equipment rack. Now, more than ever, I wished I’d asked the Spiders for a gun when I’d had the chance. “Oh, and grab those two carrybags, too,” I told McMicking, pointing at my luggage.
“You want to bother with luggage?” he demanded, crossing the room and bringing back the bags.
“Trust me,” I told him as I stowed them on the stretcher’s lower rack. “Bayta? You ready?”
“I think so,” she said. She was still pale, but her voice was firm. Whatever black valley she’d gone through when the Spiders started dying, she’d worked her way through it. “Director?”
“I don’t like any of this, if you want to know the truth,” Losutu said, his voice heavy. “Attacking and maybe killing a whole group of people, especially people who aren’t accountable for their actions—”
“They’re not people,” McMicking interrupted. “They’re targets, or enemy combatants, or bug-eyed monsters. Not people. You start thinking about them that way and you’ll be dead.”
“I understand the emotional necessities of warfare, thank you,” Losutu said icily. “I just wish we didn’t have to do it.”
“I wish we had Fayr and his commando squad along,” I countered. “You don’t always get what you wish for.”
“If we did, we’d have some real weapons,” McMicking added sourly. “Unless those Spiders are putting up one hell of a fight, none of this is going to get us very far.”
He was right, of course; our gimmicked stretcher was hardly battlefield shock armor. But it was all we had. “You want some plastic Belldic status guns to wave around?” I offered, nodding toward the bed where they’d ended up when Bayta had pulled the clothing out of my carrybags. “Fayr gave them to me before we left him.”
