by Timothy Zahn
“Of course we have a choice,” Bayta said, her voice suddenly the color of despair. “We can end it. We can retreat back to Viccai and end everything.”
I winced, glancing at the open dispensary door. We really shouldn’t be talking about things like this in the middle of a crowded train. But the Spider who’d dropped off Witherspoon’s case was standing just outside in the corridor, clearly on guard against eavesdroppers.
As well he should be. The Quadrail was essentially a fraud, the reality of its magic a closely kept secret I’d stumbled across on my first mission for the Spiders. The Tube and trains were nothing more than window dressing for the exotic quantum thread that ran down the center of the Coreline. Traveling close to the Thread was what allowed a vehicle to travel at speeds of a light-year per minute or better, the actual speed depending on how close the closest part of the vehicle was to the Thread. Anything inside the vehicle, connected to it, or even just touching it ran at the same speed, with no tidal or other nasty effects to deal with.
The problem the Chahwyn had faced when hoping to restart interstellar travel after the defeat of the Shonkla-raa was that you didn’t need a train for the Thread to do its magic. You could just cozy up to it with a torchliner or torchyacht or even a garbage scow, and you’d be off to the races.
Which would have been fine if the Chahwyn could have trusted everyone in the Twelve Empires to stick with torchliners and garbage scows. Unfortunately, they couldn’t. That was how the Shonkla-raa had conquered the galaxy in the first place, sending their warships along the Thread to the galaxy’s inhabited systems, destroying or enslaving everything in their path.
And if the Thread’s secret became common knowledge, there was no reason to believe someone else wouldn’t take a crack at replicating that achievement. Hence, the Quadrail, with its limited points of entry, its massive station-based sensor arrays, and its strict no-weapons rules.
But if the galaxy ever got a whiff of the truth, it would be all over. “You can’t be serious,” I said to Bayta, lowering my voice despite the presence of our Spider watchdog. “You destroy the Tube and the Quadrails, and someone’s bound to figure out the secret.”
“I said we end everything, Frank,” she repeated, her voice weary in a way I’d never heard it before. “Everything. Including the Thread.”
I felt my jaw drop. “You can destroy the Thread?”
She nodded. “You already know we can ravel off pieces of it—that’s how we create loops and spurs. It’s thought that if we ravel the Thread too many times, its mass will drop below a critical level and it will simply evaporate.”
I felt a chill run up my back. “And what about the people who would be trapped off their worlds? How would they get home?”
“They wouldn’t,” Bayta said. “But exile is better than becoming slaves to the Modhri.”
Except that most of the worlds where the new exiles would find themselves already had a Modhran presence, and a lot of those worlds also had at least one Modhran coral outpost. The Quadrail would be gone, but the Modhri would go merrily on his way, making slaves of anyone who crossed his path. The only difference would be that he would have to settle for being a whole lot of small, isolated, local despots instead of a single, vast galaxy-wide despot. I couldn’t really see what difference that would make for his thousands of small, isolated, local groups of slaves.
Clearly, the Chahwyn who favored this approach hadn’t thought it through. Just as clearly, this wasn’t the time for a discussion of that shortsightedness. “Fortunately, we’re a long way from that kind of irrevocable decision,” I said instead. “Let’s focus on the here and now. We’ve got a plan. Let’s get it started and see where we go from there.”
“All right,” Bayta said. Her voice was still tired, but maybe a couple of shades less dark than it had been. “You go ahead. I’ll be in later.”
“Not too much later,” I warned. “You’ve been up as long as I have, and there’s time for at least a few hours of sleep before we pass that siding.”
“I won’t be long,” she promised. “Good night.”
“Good night.” I headed toward the doorway, stepping past the Spider into the corridor.
And paused. On any normal Quadrail, with a contingent of Spiders wandering around and the station sensors having successfully blocked out all weaponry, I wouldn’t have thought twice about leaving Bayta to wander the train alone.
But this was hardly a normal Quadrail. Not anymore.
And she was too important to risk letting our unknown assailant get a crack at her. Too important to our survival aboard this damn train. Too important to our war against the Modhri.
Too important to me.
“On second thought, you can set up your Greek Chorus from inside your compartment,” I said, gesturing to her. “Come on—we’ll go together.”
ELEVEN
Whoever our murderer was, he’d apparently decided to clock out for the night. I got Bayta to her compartment, made sure both our doors were locked, and just managed to get myself undressed and take one final QuixHeal before collapsing comatose on my bed.
I slept for ten hours straight, and when I finally dragged myself conscious I found the QuixHeals had done their chemical magic and I felt nearly back to full speed again. I took a quick shower, then opened the connecting door between our compartments to check on Bayta.
Only to find that she wasn’t there.
Muttering curses under my breath, I left the compartment and headed aft, fervently hoping that she was merely having breakfast and not off doing more solo sleuthing. I reached the dining car and went in.
To my relief, I spotted her sitting at a two-person table behind a plate of something Jurian-looking. “Good morning,” I said as I sat down across from her.
“Good afternoon,” she corrected, her eyes flicking measuringly across my face. “How do you feel?”
“Much better,” I said. “How about you?”
“I’m fine,” she said. “I got a few hours of sleep before we reached the siding, and was able to sleep a little more afterward.”
“That all go okay?” I asked, lowering my voice.
“We think so,” she said. “But we can’t be completely sure.”
“I guess we’ll find out,” I said. “What’s good for breakfast today? Or brunch, or whatever?”
“The vistren is good,” she said, gesturing toward her plate. “But I understand the servers may run out of livberries before we reach Venidra Carvo.”
“Say no more,” I said. Livberries were my absolute favorite Jurian fruit. “A Belgian waffle with livberries, if you would, and a glass of sweet iced tea.”
Her eyes flattened briefly. No point in dragging a server all the way over to our table to get my order when Bayta had a direct line to the kitchen. “On its way,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about Dr. Aronobal.”
“What about her?” I asked.
“Mostly just wondering,” she said. “We talked a lot last night about the missing first-class pass. But Dr. Aronobal’s been moving fairly freely between third and first ever since Master Colix’s death.”
“So has Dr. Witherspoon,” I reminded her.
“True,” she said. “But Dr. Witherspoon wasn’t alone with Usantra Givvrac for several minutes before she called a conductor to help get him to the dispensary. Dr. Aronobal was.”
“You mean just before Givvrac’s death?” I shook my head. “No. The damage to his gleaner bacteria was done long before then. The poisons were already backing up into his system when we spoke to him in the bar yesterday afternoon.”
“But she could have done something to help the process along,” Bayta persisted. “The other two Filiaelians who were affected seem to be recovering just fine.”
“Givvrac was a lot older than either of them,” I reminded her. “Besides, unless Aronobal’s working with a partner, she’s off the hook for the attack on Witherspoon and me.”
“How do you know?” Bayta asked. “The
only conductor in the area was waiting with Usantra Givvrac. Couldn’t Dr. Aronobal have followed you and Dr. Witherspoon to the rear, attacked you there, and then gone back to Usantra Givvrac?”
“For one thing, wouldn’t either you or the server in the dispensary have seen her double back?” I asked.
She grimaced. “Actually, probably not,” she said. “We were concentrating on di-Master Strinni’s body, preparing it for transport to the baggage car.”
So anyone could have been wandering around without being seen. That was useful to know. “It still couldn’t have been Aronobal,” I said. “Neither Witherspoon nor I heard the vestibule door open behind us, which means our attacker was already in the car waiting for us.”
“Because,” Bayta said slowly, “he knew you would come to help Osantra Qiddicoj. So could Osantra Qiddicoj’s poisoning have been a deliberate way of drawing you there so that he could get that hypo?”
“Possibly,” I said. “It’s not like the killer hadn’t already used the same stuff on Usantra Givvrac and the others. And of course, with di-Master Strinni gone, he even had the perfect hiding place to wait for us.”
Bayta’s lip twitched. “Di-Master Strinni’s empty seat.”
“Exactly,” I confirmed. “And since we saw Dr. Aronobal leave the dispensary heading the opposite direction, there’s no way she could have doubled back and gotten to Osantra Qiddicoj’s car ahead of us.”
“All right,” Bayta said. “But it still couldn’t have been Master Tririn.”
Privately, I’d already put Tririn low on my suspect list—poisoning your dinner companions without giving yourself so much as a stomach ache was a little too obvious for someone with our killer’s brand of subtlety. But it would be interesting to hear Bayta’s reasoning. “Why not?” I asked.
“Because even if he has the missing first-class pass, going up to di-Master Strinni and Usantra Givvrac would mean approaching people who knew he was supposed to be in third,” Bayta said. “Surely someone would have thought to mention that to us.”
“Good point,” I agreed, leaning back a little as the server appeared at our table and set my breakfast in front of me.
“Besides which, with di-Master Strinni’s death the team is back to an anti-Pellorian vote count,” she continued. “Why then kill Usantra Givvrac, too?”
“Let’s assume you’re right,” I said, spreading the berries across the waffle. “Here’s what we’ve got. Opportunity and motive are only so-so for Tririn. Opportunity is good for Aronobal and Witherspoon, but we have no motive for either of them.”
“And both doctors also have method, assuming the poison was injected.”
“True,” I said, taking a bite of my waffle. Now that I knew the meals were prepackaged, damned if they didn’t taste prepackaged. Sometimes it didn’t pay to know how the magician did the trick. “But if either of the doctors is involved, why go to all that effort to clobber Witherspoon and me to steal a hypo? They have plenty of their own. And unlike the rest of the passengers, they have a legitimate reason to carry them around.”
“Except that most of the time their hypos are locked up and inaccessible, even to them,” Bayta reminded me.
“Unless they’re out using them,” I said, thinking that one over. “What about people who have to self-medicate? Type Four diabetics, for instance? Do they get to carry their own hypos aboard?”
Bayta shook her head. “The Spiders store them in the drug cabinets along with the doctors’ bags. The passenger has to go to his area’s dispensary to use them, under a server’s watch.”
“Any chance someone could smuggle one out of the cabinet?” I asked. “Take one while palming a second, for instance?”
“It wouldn’t be easy,” Bayta said thoughtfully. “At the very least you’d have to distract the server.”
“So he’d probably need an accomplice,” I concluded. “You have a list of passengers who have hypos on file?”
“Let me get it.” Her eyes unfocused as she consulted with the Spiders. I took advantage of the break to work some more on my waffle. “There are three in second and one in first,” she reported. “Interesting.”
“What is?”
“The first-class passenger is Esantra Worrbin,” she said. “Isn’t that one of the Filiaelians on the contract team?”
“Not only one of the team, but one of the team opposed to the contract,” I confirmed. “Just like Master Tririn. Do we know what Esantra Worrbin’s particular condition is?”
“It’s listed as Tintial’s Disease,” she said. “It’s a rare form of diabetes that only appeared a few decades ago.”
“Of course it is,” I said with a cynical smile. “Rare diseases are so convenient when you want to snow a doctor or investigator.”
“You think Esantra Worrbin and Master Tririn could be working together?”
“It’s something we’ll want to look into,” I said, stacking my two remaining bites of waffle onto the fork and stuffing them into my mouth. It was a stretch, but I managed it.
“So what do we do now?” Bayta asked as I chewed my way valiantly through the mouthful. “Go see if Esantra Worrbin can account for all his hypos?”
I swallowed the last of the waffle. “Not quite yet,” I said. “Something else occurs to me as a possible reason why Witherspoon and I were jumped last night. Which of the baggage cars is serving as our temporary morgue?”
“The third one back,” Bayta said. “There was enough room in there to set up the isolation tanks.”
“Okay,” I said, taking a last swallow of my tea. “Let’s go take a look.”
We set off on the long walk toward third class. Three cars behind the dining car we passed the dispensary, and I noted that for the first time in a bad couple of days the room was empty except for the server Spider on duty. I wondered if we would catch the killer before it started filling up again.
The next car back, Bayta informed me, was the one where Esantra Worrbin and the two remaining contract team members were seated. I spotted the group at once as we headed through the car: three Fillies with their chairs turned to face each other, a hand of push-pull cards dealt onto their extendable trays. For the moment, though, the game was being ignored, the aliens instead speaking together in low voices. One of them glanced up as Bayta and I passed, but turned back to the conversation without speaking to us. I thought about pausing to introduce ourselves, decided I wanted to check my hunch about the bodies first, and passed them by.
Three cars later we reached the coach car where the late di-Master Strinni had had his seat, and where Witherspoon and I had been attacked in the dark of night. My neck throbbed in memory and edgy anticipation as we made our way through the clumps of chairs, my senses alert for trouble.
But no one jumped out at us. We arrived at the rear of the car and I reached for the vestibule release—
“Mr. Compton,” a hoarse voice said from somewhere behind me.
A surge of adrenaline shot through my body and straight through my still tender neck and ears. I turned, trying to make the movement look casual, my hands ready to snap up into fighting stance if necessary.
It wasn’t. The speaker was merely Rose Nose, or rather Osantra Qiddicoj, the Filly Witherspoon and I had been on our way to examine when we were jumped. He was resting in his seat, a blanket spread out across his legs and tucked up around his torso. His face and blaze were still noticeably pale after his bout with the digestive trouble that had killed Givvrac, but he was definitely on the mend. “Good afternoon, Osantra Qiddicoj,” I greeted him, hoping I was remembering his name right. Fillies hated it when you called them something like Rose Nose to their long faces. “You’re looking much improved.”
“Thanks to you and your friends,” Qiddicoj said, inclining his head. “I’m told I owe you my life. My deepest thanks.”
“You’re welcome,” I said. “But your thanks should more properly be directed to Dr. Aronobal and Dr. Witherspoon. They’re the ones who actually cured you. All I did
was point them in the right direction.”
“Yet without that direction, their skills would have lain fallow and unused,” he said. “Again, I stand in your debt.”
“Again, I’m glad I could help in my small way,” I said. “Rest now, and continue to heal.”
I turned and touched the release, and Bayta and I stepped into the vestibule. “Is extra modesty one of the necessities for detective work?” she asked as we crossed toward the next car.
“It wasn’t modesty,” I insisted. “I really didn’t say anything that Aronobal and Witherspoon wouldn’t have caught on to eventually.”
“Maybe,” Bayta said. “But whether they would have or not, the fact is that you did save Osantra Qiddicoj’s life.”
“In a small way.” I gave her a sideways look. “Besides, it never hurts to be overly modest, especially where potential sources of information are concerned. People who consider themselves in your debt are often amazingly eager to help you out.”
“I thought so,” Bayta murmured.
We passed through the thirteen second-class cars without talking to anyone and entered third. Dr. Aronobal was seated in the first of the third-class coach cars, dozing in her seat after her grueling night, and I made a mental note to get the Spiders to pass her to first later so that Osantra Qiddicoj could give her his thanks in person.
Two cars farther back, we reached the scene of the first two murders.
I found myself looking at Master Colix’s seat as we approached, an empty spot between the Juri, whom Bayta had already talked to, and Terese German, whom I was frankly tired of talking to. The Juri looked up as we approached, nodding politely as he recognized us. Terese, her headphones firmly in place over her ears, ignored us completely.
I was starting to pass the row when Bayta nudged me in the side. “Master Colix’s storage compartments?” she prompted.
I looked at the upper set of compartments, then at Terese. She had slid down in her seat with her legs stretched all the way out in front of her. Getting to Master Colix’s storage compartments would mean stepping over her, and would probably earn me a withering glare at the least. “We’ll do it later,” I told Bayta.
