by Timothy Zahn
“So you thought you’d stop by and help yourself to the data?”
“I stopped by merely to inquire on your progress,” he corrected.
“Of course,” I said. “You must have forgotten that I’d already told you that if there was anything relevant the Spiders would inform everyone at the same time.”
“Perhaps,” he said. His eyes drifted around the room, pausing on the two carrybags sitting together on their rack above my bed. “But perhaps they fear to reveal the truth.”
“Has anyone else dropped dead?” I asked, watching his eyes. He was definitely interested in my carrybags. Probably wondering which of them held my alleged spectroscopic analyzer. “Has anyone else even gotten sick?”
“Not to my knowledge,” he admitted, shifting his gaze back to me. “But the two Shorshians were in equally good health for over two weeks before their sudden deaths.”
“Why are you even interested about the air in that car?” Kennrick asked. “I spent a fair amount of time back there with my associates, and I never once saw you put in an appearance. Is that even your car?”
“Should not one be concerned about the welfare of others?” Emikai countered. “Especially if one has the ability to guard that welfare?” He looked back at me. “Or claims to have that ability.”
“Are you suggesting I don’t actually have the spectroscopic analysis equipment Dr. Aronobal told you about?” I asked mildly.
His nose blaze lightened noticeably in reaction at Aronobal’s name. More aftereffects of the kwi—normally he probably would have tried to suppress such a giveaway. “The Filiaelian physician?” he hedged. “I have not spoken to her about any such equipment.”
“Oh, please,” I scoffed. “It’s painfully obvious that Aronobal’s midnight call just now was to get me out of the way so you could use your little first-class pass to come up here and burgle my room.” I gestured to the carrybags. “By the way, if you were hoping for a look at my analysis equipment, forget it. It’s not actually here at the moment.”
Again, his nose blaze lightened briefly. He’d been scoping out my bags, all right. “That may be,” he said, an edge of challenge in his voice. “In my view, until I have evidence of its existence, I also have no belief.”
“Wait a second,” Kennrick said, looking back and forth between Emikai and me. “Wait just a damn second. This guy has a first-class pass? I thought he was riding in third.”
“He is,” I confirmed. “Apparently, he likes slumming.”
“Why, you son of a—” He jabbed a finger at the Filly. “It’s him. It has to be. He’s the one who’s been killing off our contract team.”
“I have harmed no one,” Emikai insisted, his blaze lightening again in reaction. “I give you my word.”
“Like your word means camel spit,” Kennrick snarled, taking a step toward him. “Compton, this is the guy. It all fits.”
“Calm down,” I soothed, putting a restraining hand on his arm. “We’re a long way yet from accusing him of mass murder.”
“Are we?” Kennrick countered. “Who else had access to both third and first?”
“Well, for starters, everyone in first,” I reminded him.
He stopped in mid-tirade, his lip twisting. “Oh. Yes, I suppose …” He trailed off.
“But attempted breaking and entering is another story,” I went on, hefting the flat gray box we’d found outside my door. On the outside, it looked like a standard bypass mimic, the sort used by locksmiths when people lock themselves out of their apartments or cars. But I was betting its guts were considerably more sophisticated than that. “You have a license for this, I assume?”
“That device is not mine,” Emikai insisted. “I never saw it before.”
“Of course not,” I said. “And you attacked me why?”
“I did not attack you,” he said. “I saw something on the door explode into a white powder in front of you, and I was coming to offer my aid.”
“You mean this kind of white powder?” I asked, holding up the squeeze bulb.
“I do not know what kind of powder it was,” Emikai said, an edge of wounded indignation in his tone. “My powder is for relief of a painful rash from which I suffer.”
“Ah,” I said, nodding. With the effects of the kwi wearing off, he was proving himself a decent actor and liar both. I would have expected nothing less from the professional who’d snookered me into that trip wire in the baggage car.
The question was, what had he been looking for back there? And what had he hoped to find in my compartment?
But whatever the answers, we weren’t going to get them tonight. I’d seen Emikai’s type enough times to know that he was going to require a lot more persuasion, or the right lever, before he would give anything up. “Whatever,” I said. “You realize, of course, that you’re going to have to be locked up pending a full investigation.”
“Nonsense,” he said stiffly. “You have not reached the required legal bar for such action.”
“Maybe not by Filiaelian standards,” I said. “But in case you haven’t noticed, we’re aboard a Quadrail. Quadrails run under Spider rules.”
Emikai looked at Kennrick, then Bayta, then back at me, and I could see that the full nature of his situation was starting to sink in. “The Filiaelian Assembly will not tolerate the mistreatment of its citizens,” he warned.
“Oh, I don’t think they’ll have too much of a problem with it,” I said, waving him to his feet. “In general, Filiaelians dislike criminals every bit as much as Humans do.”
Slowly, Emikai stood up. His eyes flicked again to Bayta, probably checking on her alertness. Having been shot from behind, he couldn’t know what exactly she’d done to lay him out on the corridor floor that way. But from his expression and cautious movements it was clear that he wasn’t interested in having another go at it. “Where do you intend to take me?” he asked.
“Well, we don’t have a proper brig,” I said consideringly. “So I guess we’ll have to put you in the morgue.”
“The morgue?”
“Yes,” I said. “Unless you’re ready to have a serious talk?”
He drew himself up. “There is nothing to talk about,” he said. “Show me to my prison.”
“As you wish,” I said. “Bayta, let the mites in, will you?”
She crossed to the door and opened it, and a pair of the little Spiders came in. “What do you want with those?” Emikai asked, a hint of apprehension creeping into his voice as the mites skittered toward us on their seven slender legs.
“Unfortunately, wristcuffs aren’t allowed on Quadrails,” I said. “So we’re going to have to improvise. Turn around, please, and cross your wrists behind your back.”
I actually wasn’t at all sure this was going to work. But Bayta had caught on to the plan, and with a little experimentation—and probably a lot of silent communication—we got the mites wrapped solidly around Emikai’s arms, their slender legs interlocked to keep them in place. “I’ll have to remember this one,” I commented to Bayta as we headed out the door into the corridor.
Bayta nodded toward the waiting conductor. “What did you want him to do?” she asked.
“He’s to keep an eye on our compartments while we’re gone,” I said. “Just in case Logra Emikai and Dr. Aronobal have another friend aboard.”
“I am not associated with Dr. Aronobal,” Emikai insisted.
“Right—I keep forgetting,” I said. “By the way, Bayta, is the good doctor still waiting for me in the dispensary?”
“Yes,” she confirmed.
“Have the server tell her that I’m not coming and to go back to her seat,” I said. “He can tell her I’ll come by in the morning and talk to her then.”
“All right.” Bayta said doubtfully. “You sure you don’t want to deal with this tonight?”
“Positive,” I said. “This way, by the time we get back there, she’ll hopefully have her privacy shield up and won’t see us march Emikai past her. She’ll t
hen have a few hours to miss her friend and wonder what went wrong before I go see her.” I nudged Emikai in the side. “Get moving—we’ve got a long way to go.”
It was a long, but fortunately quiet, walk back to the rear of the train. Emikai, probably still aching from the kwi blast, had apparently opted for the fight-another-day strategy and gave us no trouble along the way. I half expected him to stumble, cough, or otherwise try to signal Aronobal as we passed the doctor’s privacy-shielded seat, but he didn’t even try that.
I’d had Bayta send instructions on ahead, and by the time we reached the third baggage car I found the Spiders had set up everything just as I’d requested. There was a chair, a small table holding a box of emergency ration bars and bottled water, and a spare self-contained toilet the Spiders had scrounged from one of the storage cars, everything laid out neatly in front of one of the stacks of cargo boxes. We settled Emikai on the stool, and using the pieces of safety webbing he’d cut earlier, I tied his wrists to opposite ends of the crate stack. I adjusted the lengths carefully, leaving him enough slack to be able to reach his food tray and to shift himself over onto the toilet, but not enough for either hand to reach the other hand’s rope. With Humans or Shorshians I would also have had to keep him from biting through his bonds, but Filly teeth weren’t configured for that sort of thing.
“There we go,” I said, stepping back to examine my handiwork. “Enjoy the quiet, Logra Emikai. We’ll be checking on you every once in a while, in case you decide you want to tell us what you and Dr. Aronobal are up to.”
“Dr. Aronobal and I have nothing to do with each other.”
“Right,” I said. “Well, pleasant dreams. I hope you can sleep sitting up.”
Ushering Bayta and Kennrick in front of me, we left Emikai to his new home. “Aren’t you going to leave a guard?” Kennrick asked as we reached the vestibule and crossed into the next car forward.
“No need,” I assured him. “He’s not going anywhere.” I carefully avoided looking significantly at Bayta who, I was sure, was similarly smart enough not to look significantly at me. There was a guard team on duty, in fact: a pair of twitters, lurking in nearby shadows where they could watch for visitors or escape attempts.
“I suppose not,” Kennrick muttered. “Anyway, even if he gets loose, it’s not like he can jump from a moving train. You still going to wait until morning to brace Dr. Aronobal about this?”
“Why? You think I should do it now?”
“It might not be a bad idea,” Kennrick said. “She has to know that something has gone wrong. If you wait until tomorrow, she’ll have had all those extra hours to come up with a good story.”
“She’ll also have had those same hours to sweat about what’s happened to her accomplice and wonder what went wrong,” I pointed out.
“I still think it’d be better to do it now,” Kennrick said. “If you’re too tired, I could run the interrogation while you watched. I trained in law, remember—I know all the techniques for getting witnesses to say the wrong thing.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” I said. “It’s still not happening tonight.”
Kennrick hissed out a sigh. “Whatever.” He sent me a sideways glare. “Just remember that it was my contract teammates who were killed. Whenever you’re ready to try and get a confession—out of either of them—I want to be there.”
“You’ll be at the top of the visitors list,” I promised.
“Fine,” he said. “By the way, do you think I could have a look at that bypass mimic of his?”
“What for?”
“Just curious,” he said. “Early on in my career I handled a high-level corporate espionage case, and I ended up learning a lot about gadgets like that. I might be able to figure out if his would actually work.”
“So you can duplicate it?” I asked mildly.
“So I can find out whether I can sleep for the next three weeks,” he retorted. “Once Emikai and his buddies have finished off the rest of the contract team, who’s to say they won’t come after Dr. Witherspoon and me, too?”
“An intriguing thought,” I agreed. “Maybe after the Spiders have checked it out they’ll let you take a look.”
We walked the rest of the way in silence. When we reached our car, I sent Bayta through her compartment door, nodded a good-night to Kennrick as he and I reached mine, and opened my door as he continued forward to his.
I’d barely closed the door behind me when the divider opened and Bayta came in. “How long do we wait?” she asked briskly.
“How long do we wait for what?” I asked.
“To go back and confront Dr. Aronobal,” she said, frowning. “We were just dropping off Mr. Kennrick so he wouldn’t be there, weren’t we?”
“No, we were dropping off Mr. Kennrick so that we could all go to bed and get some sleep,” I said.
Her face fell a little. “Oh,” she said. “I thought …” She trailed off.
“You thought I was blowing smoke,” I said. “And under other circumstances, I might have been. But not this time.”
“Oh,” she said again. “Well, then … I’ll see you in the morning. Good night.”
“Good night,” I replied. “Sleep well.”
She disappeared back into her compartment, and the dividing wall between us again closed.
With a tired sigh, I checked my watch. Twenty minutes, I decided, would be enough for her to finish her bedtime preparations and fall asleep.
It wasn’t like I’d just lied to her, I reminded myself firmly. I really wasn’t going back to third to confront Aronobal.
The Modhri had clued me in on Emikai’s attempt on my compartment. Why he’d done that I didn’t know.
But twenty minutes from now I was going to find out.
My first plan was to go back to the rear first-class coach car, where the Modhri had spoken through Qiddicoj to warn me about the intruder. But the Modhri was a group mind, after all, which meant that talking to one walker was the same as talking to another. On a hunch, I stopped by the bar.
Sure enough, the Juri I’d seen earlier was still there. He’d collapsed onto his table, his head pillowed on his folded arms, obviously sound asleep.
Back when I’d traveled third-class for Westali I’d seen occasional passengers sleeping that way. Up to now I’d never seen a first-class traveler who hadn’t managed to make it back to his or her much comfier seat. The implications, and the invitation, were obvious. Walking over to the sleeping figure, I sat down across the table from him. “Hello, Modhri,” I said quietly.
“Hello, Compton,” the Juri replied instantly. “I see you were able to stop him.”
“Yes, thanks to your timely information,” I confirmed. “Why did you do it?”
“I hoped to prove myself trustworthy.” He hesitated. “I need your help.”
I felt my eyebrows creeping up my forehead. The Modhri as someone trustworthy was novel enough. The idea that he needed—and wanted—help from me was right off the scale. “To do what?” I asked.
“To find the murderer aboard this train,” he said. “Is the intruder you stopped that murderer?”
“It’s possible,” I said. “He’s got a first-class pass, and those don’t come cheap, which means this guy has some serious financial backing.” I grimaced. “But my gut says no.”
“Then the killer is still at large,” the Modhri said grimly. “And may kill again.”
“Fair chance of that, yes,” I agreed. “Why do you care?”
Again, he hesitated. “Because as he kills those aboard this train, he is also killing me.”
I stared down at the sleeping face. “He’s what?”
“He has killed four and tried to kill two others,” the Modhri said. “Two of the dead were my Eyes.”
I looked over at the server Spider standing behind the counter, out of range of our conversation, my brain swirling as everything about this case tried to realign itself. Could the as-yet-unexplained motive for these murders be something
as simple as an attempt to kill off this particular Modhran mind segment? “Which two?” I asked.
“The first and third to die,” he said. “Master Colix and di-Master Strinni.”
“And what makes you think you can trust me?” I asked. “I’m your enemy, remember?”
“But you have destroyed my Eyes and Arms only in battle,” he said. “Never have you engaged in direct murder.” The sleeping Juri’s mouth twitched. “And you have already saved one Eye that would also have been lost without your intervention.”
He was right on that one, anyway. Qiddicoj would almost certainly have died of the same intestinal ravages that had killed Givvrac if I hadn’t come up with the solution. “Of course, I didn’t know Osantra Qiddicoj was a walker at the time,” I reminded him.
“Would that have made a difference?”
I thought it over. The worst thing about fighting the damn Modhri was that most of his pawns were both unwilling and innocent. You couldn’t go around slaughtering them for crimes they didn’t even know they’d committed. You couldn’t stand by and let someone else knock them off, either. “Not really,” I conceded.
“As I thought,” the Modhri said. “At first I feared you might be the person responsible for the deaths. But I’m now convinced otherwise.”
“Glad to hear that,” I said. I was, too. About the only thing that could have made this situation worse would have been to have a paranoid Modhran mind segment also gunning for me. “But just because I’m not going to let people get murdered doesn’t mean I’m ready to jump on board as your ally.”
“Yet I may be of assistance in your investigation,” the Modhri pointed out. “And recall that two others who were not associated with me have also been killed. Do you not seek justice for them?”
I chewed the inside of my cheek. After all I’d been through with the Modhri, the thought of cooperating with him had all the skin-crawling unpleasantness of being offered lunch by a high-ranking member of the Inquisition.
And yet, the detached Westali investigator in me could see the possibilities here. One of the most frustrating roadblocks of the investigation so far had been my inability to nail down the last few hours of Master Colix’s life. But if he’d been a Modhran walker, all those details were suddenly available to me, as clear and precise as if his whole life had been copied onto off-site backup. Which, in a sense, it had. “Let me get this straight,” I said. “You’re suggesting that we work together—you and I—to catch the murderer aboard this train.”
