by Timothy Zahn
I looked at her, wondering if she’d caught the man’s reaction. But her eyes were on the four Fillies. “You think they’re associated with our friends?” I asked, keeping my voice low. No telling which of the other passengers waiting their turn to board might be Modhran walkers.
“I don’t know,” Bayta said. “I was just noticing that none of the other Filiaelians seemed to mind letting those four push their way aboard first.”
I looked around. Focused first on the Fillies, and then on their Human associate, I’d completely missed the audience’s reaction to the little drama.
Bayta was right. All six of the other Fillies waiting to board our car were silently standing by, with no hint of impatience or annoyance on their long, horse-like faces. That probably implied the other four Fillies were even more upper-crust than the rest of us, though what the clues to that status were I didn’t know.
What I did know was that the Modhri worked especially hard to get into the Twelve Empires’ upper-upper crusts.
Terrific.
The four Fillies disappeared into the train, their luggage obediently rolling through the door behind them, followed by the Human and his three bags. Only then did the rest of the waiting Fillies make an orderly surge for the door.
I hung back, partly out of respect, mostly so I could watch the order in which the Fillies sorted themselves out. But as with the first four, the pecking-order cues they were using were too subtle for me to figure out.
When we ran out of Fillies, I let the waiting Shorshians, Halkas, and Juriani board. Then, with our section of the platform finally empty, I nudged Bayta ahead of me and we headed in.
I’d rather expected our double compartment to be different from those on standard Quadrail trains: a bit larger, or at the very least a bit more plush. But it looked very much the same as every other first-class compartment we’d traveled in over the past months. The luggage rack above the bed was longer, and there was an extra underbed drawer, both clearly put there with the assumption that passengers here would be traveling with larger wardrobes. But aside from that, the layout was the same. Super-express trains might include a plethora of extra cars, but the basic passenger accommodations had largely been left alone.
But there was something about the compartment that seemed subtly different. I took a couple of turns around the small room, studying the bed, the lounge chair and swivel computer, the curve couch, and the half-bath as I tried to figure it out.
And then it hit me. The compartment smelled fresher. Fresher, cleaner, and somehow more sprightly.
I stepped to the display window and looked out. The tracks in the super-express Tube were arranged slightly differently from those in ordinary Tubes. There were only six main tracks, for one thing, with the Tube itself being correspondingly somewhat narrower. A set of auxiliary service tracks paralleled each of the main tracks about five meters to the right, which the official brochure said were for tenders and other emergency equipment. That made a certain amount of sense, given the thousands of light-years we were about to traverse without a single station along the way.
Still, I couldn’t help feeling an ominous undertone to the emergency-vehicle idea. I’d never heard of a Quadrail engine failing during a run, but just because it never had didn’t mean it never would, and with my luck it would probably happen on a train I happened to be aboard at the time. It would be bad enough riding for six weeks with a Modhran mind segment without throwing in an extra week sitting dead on the tracks waiting for a new engine to be brought up.
There was a subtle puff of displaced air, and I turned to see the wall separating my compartment from Bayta’s sliding open. The curve couches on either side folded into the wall as it collapsed, the whole thing depositing itself neatly into the narrow space between our half-baths.
Bayta was standing by the computer chair in her compartment, gazing out the display window at the crowds milling around Homshil Station’s platforms. “What do you think?” she asked.
“About the compartment?” I asked. “Very nice. Smells fresh off the assembly line. Do they just build these trains from scratch when they need one?”
“There are a few hours scheduled between cross-galactic arrivals and departures,” she said, still looking out the window. “The Spiders need time to unload and reload the cargo cars and to restock the food and supply areas. Because of that, there’s time for a complete cleaning of the passenger spaces instead of just making do with the regular self-cleaning systems.”
She turned to look at me. “But that wasn’t what I meant. I meant what do you think of this idea now?”
“What do you want me to say?” I asked. “That I suddenly feel happy to be aboard? I don’t. But I still don’t see any practical alternative.”
“Not even with that man aboard?” she asked. “The one who recognized you?”
I grimaced. “I was hoping you’d missed that.”
Her eyebrows went up. “You were hoping I’d missed it?”
“Only because I knew you’d worry, and that there was nothing we could do about it,” I hastened to assure her.
“Except maybe find out from the Spiders who he is before we leave the station?” she countered tartly.
“Touché,” I admitted. “Okay. Who is he?”
She took a deep breath, and I could see her forcing herself to calm down. Even that mild touch of annoyance was more of an emotional display than she usually seemed comfortable with. “His ticket’s under the name Whitman Kennrick,” she told me. “He boarded the Quadrail at Terra Station, ultimate destination the Filiaelian Assembly system of Rentis Tarlay Birim.”
“What about his four Filly buddies?” I asked, pulling out my reader and plugging in the encyclopedia data chip. “Did they all come aboard together, or did he meet up with them somewhere between Terra and Homshil?”
Bayta’s eyes went distant, and I took the opportunity to punch Rentis Tarlay Birim into my reader and give the resulting page a quick skim. Back in Western Alliance Intelligence, where I’d once worked, there had been people—mostly the pompous and control-freak ones—who’d felt it necessary to create permanent links to their phones or data feeds. The affectation had always irritated me, especially when they went blank in the middle of intense conversations, and I sometimes wondered why Bayta’s version of the same thing wasn’t equally irritating.
Probably because it was a completely different situation. Bayta hadn’t chosen to be wired into the Spiders’ telepathic network; it was just something that came with the fact that she was a Human/Chahwyn melding. She could no more shut off that link than she could stop breathing.
Besides, the ability not only provided us with useful information but had saved our lives more than once. When you had an ace up your sleeve, it was the epitome of pettiness to complain that it chafed a little against your skin.
“The Filiaelians also came aboard at Terra,” Bayta reported, her eyes coming back to focus. “Though that doesn’t necessarily mean all of them already knew each other.”
“True,” I agreed. First-class Quadrail cars were one of the galaxy’s great social mixers. Kennrick and the Fillies could easily have struck up a conversation and ended up twenty-one hours later as best-friend traveling companions, especially once they’d discovered they were all going cross-galaxy together. “What’s the Fillies’ destination?”
“The same place,” Bayta said. “The same system, anyway. They could be traveling to entirely different places inside that system once they leave the Tube.”
“There are certainly enough for them to choose from,” I commented, gesturing toward my reader. “Rentis Tarlay Birim is a major industrial and manufacturing system, with three inhabited planets, five orbiting space colonies, and a truckload of minable asteroids. No way to know what Kennrick might be looking for there.”
“You know who he is, then?” Bayta asked.
“Not a clue,” I admitted, shutting off the reader and putting it away.
“Someone from you
r past, maybe?”
“What’s this, the old ‘your past coming back to haunt you’ routine?” I scoffed. “That works okay in old dit rec dramas, but not so much in real life. As long as you’ve got the stationmaster on the line, how about checking to see if any of the passengers are planning to change trains to the Ilat Dumar Covrey system like we are after we hit Venidra Carvo.”
Bayta’s eyes defocused again. “No, no one,” she reported. “At least, no one’s carrying a multiple-leg ticket for that station.”
“Good enough,” I said. Though with thousands of Filly systems to choose from, the odds that someone on our train would be matching our ultimate destination had been pretty slim in the first place. “Thanks.”
“You’re welcome,” she said. “Do you think Mr. Kennrick could be someone from your past?”
“I suppose that’s possible,” I said. So much for trying to deflect her interest away from Kennrick. I should have known it wouldn’t work. “I wouldn’t worry about it, though.”
“You really mean that?” Bayta asked pointedly. “Or are you saying that I shouldn’t worry about it?”
“Neither of us should worry,” I said firmly. “Besides, we’ll know soon enough who he is and what he’s doing here.”
Bayta gave me a wary look. “What are you going to do?”
“Don’t worry, I’m not going to kick in his door or crash his next dinner party,” I assured her. “But hey, we’re all here on the same train. Sooner or later, I’m sure an opportunity will present itself.”
But for the first two weeks, it didn’t.
That alone was surprising. Surprising, and more than a little ominous. Quadrail trains, while larger than their Terran counterparts, were hardly the size of Class AA torchliners. More significantly, they were laid out linearly, without the kind of multiple pathways that could allow a couple of torchliner passengers to endlessly chase each other in circles.
The lack of contact with Kennrick wasn’t from lack of trying on my part, either. I spent hours at a time wandering through the first-class areas of the train, checking the restaurant and bar and the entertainment and exercise facilities, without ever catching so much as a glimpse of our mystery man.
Through Bayta, I tried instructing the conductor Spiders to keep an eye on Kennrick’s door when they weren’t busy with other duties. But the two times I got word that he’d left his compartment he managed to disappear again before I could get there.
At one point, I lost my temper and ordered the Spiders to search the entire damn train for him. But the conductors and servers were no better than any other Spiders at distinguishing between Humans, and all my demand did was waste their time and irritate Bayta.
Otherwise, Bayta and I occupied ourselves as best we could. We watched dit rec dramas and comedies on our computers, ate far too much good food, and did our best to work off those indulgences in the exercise room. Often we had the facility to ourselves, as most of the other first-class passengers were older than we were, light-years richer, and had apparently decided they were beyond anything as plebeian and vulgar as sweat and strain.
It was late at night at the beginning of our third week of travel, and I was lying awake in the dark trying to come up with a new strategy for cornering Kennrick, when I felt a subtle puff of air across my face.
My hand slipped reflexively beneath my pillow to grip the kwi I always kept within reach. The kwi was a weapon I’d conned out of the Chahwyn, a relic they’d dug up from the days of the Shonkla-raa war. An elegantly nonlethal weapon, it was capable of delivering three levels of pain, or three levels of unconsciousness, to anyone within its somewhat limited range.
There was, unfortunately, one catch: the kwi was telepathically activated, which meant I needed Bayta or a Spider to turn the damn thing on for me.
Which meant that if the puff of air I’d felt meant there was trouble coming through my door, I would need to bellow Bayta awake through our dividing wall and hope she got the message before someone tried to strangle me in my bed—
“Frank?” Bayta’s voice came out of the darkness, tense and hurried and scared. “Frank, there’s trouble. The Spiders want us in third class right away.”
“What is it?” I asked, feeling a flicker of relief as I swung my legs out from under the blanket and grabbed for my clothes.
“It’s one of the Shorshians,” she said. “He’s come down sick.”
I paused, shirt in hand. She’d barged in on me for this? “So have them call a doctor,” I growled.
“The doctors are already there,” she said, her voice shaking, “and they say he’s not just sick.
“He’s been poisoned.”
TWO
I’d been about to toss my shirt back onto my clothes stack. Now, instead, I started pulling it on.
Poisons couldn’t be brought aboard Quadrail trains. They just couldn’t. The same huge station-based sensor arrays that sniffed out weapons and weapon components did an equally efficient job of screening out poisons. All sorts of poisons, and all known varieties of poison-producing flora and fauna. The sensors also looked for every known type of dangerous bacteria, viruses, and other microorganisms. The Shorshian back there simply couldn’t have been poisoned.
But some doctor apparently thought he had. Either we had an incompetent quack aboard, or there was a serious problem.
All Quadrail trains came equipped with a couple of small dispensaries, typically tucked in at one end of the first-class and second/third-class dining cars. The server Spider on duty there could do little except dole out an assortment of general-purpose medicines, but there was usually at least one doctor aboard any given train who could be brought on in a medical emergency. In exchange for putting their names on the on-call list, doctors got a sizable discount on their tickets.
Here, instead of being an add-on to the dining car, the second/third dispensary took up a section of the exercise car. Like everything else on the super-express, it was also larger than usual. The glass-fronted drug cabinet was over twice the size of an ordinary one, and in place of the usual examination chair was a Fibibib-designed diagnostic/treatment table.
Bayta and I arrived to find a small crowd already assembled. There were a pair of Shorshians, hovering nervously in the back of the small room, their dolphin snouts silently opening and closing, their smooth skin rippling with little crescent-shaped goose bumps. At the back of the room on the other side, a petite server Spider was silently watching the proceedings. Standing on opposite sides of the treatment table were a white-haired Human male and a Filiaelian female with a graying brown blaze down her long face. The Human was holding a biosensor with one hand while he thumbed ampoules from a dispenser with the other. The Filly was taking the ampoules from him and feeding them into a hypo.
And in the center of attention, lying unnaturally still on the table, was the patient.
A person who had somehow dropped out of the sky from an entirely different galaxy and who had never seen a Shorshian in his life would still have recognized instantly that this one wasn’t well. Someone like me, who’d had the standard Western Alliance Intelligence course in Shorshic culture, psychology, and physiology could see just as instantly that he was in a seriously bad way.
In fact, unless the two doctors could pull a rabbit out of their hat, I was pretty sure he was dying.
I eased toward the table for a closer look. The Shorshian’s skin was mottled, its black/gray/off-white color scheme mixed together like tiny tiles that had been thrown randomly on the floor instead of forming the smooth, flowing patterns that were the Shorshic norm. His breathing was labored, and there was some kind of mucus seeping from his nostrils and the corners of his mouth. I took another step forward, trying for a closer look.
“Get back,” the Human doctor ordered me brusquely, not looking up from his work.
“Sorry,” I murmured, and retreated back to Bayta’s side. I looked over at the other two Shorshians, hoping to catch their attention. But they only had eyes
for their downed comrade. Behind me, I heard a set of rapid footsteps approaching.
And I turned just as the elusive Whitman Kennrick hurried into the dispensary, his hair wild and unkempt, his clothes looking like they’d been thrown on by a paint spreader, his eyes with the half-lidded look of someone not yet fully awake. His throat was tight, and he was breathing almost as heavily as the patient. His eyes flicked to the table, the doctors, and the other two Shorshians.
And then he spotted Bayta and me.
Back on the Homshil Station platform, it had taken him a couple of seconds to make a connection with my face. This time, there was no such delay. His puffy eyes widened, and he skidded to a halt, reversed direction, and vanished out into the corridor.
I nearly knocked Bayta over as I charged out of the dispensary after him. “Hold it!” I called softly at his retreating back. “Kennrick!”
For a half dozen steps I thought he was going to ignore me, and that I would have to literally run him down and tackle him. Then, reluctantly, he slowed to a halt and turned around. “What do you want?” he asked, his voice halfway between sullen and wary.
“For starters, a little decorum,” I said as I strode up to him. “Second-class passengers may not be as coddled as we are up in first, but they get just as cranky if they’re woken up by a footrace through their car.”
“What do you want?” he repeated.
“A couple of answers,” I said. “Let’s start with who exactly you are.”
A frown creased his forehead. “Whitman Kennrick,” he said. “You just said that, remember?”
“And it tells me nothing,” I said. “Let’s try again: who are you?”
He searched my face another couple of beats, as if looking for a trap he knew had to be in there somewhere. “Eleven years ago,” he said at last. “Shotoko Associates.”
“Okay,” I said. Shotoko Associates I remembered: an international law firm that had more or less unknowingly ended up as the base of operations of one of the more brazen spies Westali had taken down during my years with the agency. “So?”
