Judgment at Proteus

by Timothy Zahn

  The other possibility was that the Shonkla-raa and Modhri felt so secure at Proteus that they didn’t even care whether or not Bayta and I showed up.

  Like every other shuttle hatchway in the Quadrail system, those at Ilat Dumar Covrey were set into the station floor and rimmed with glowing lights indicating whether or not there was a vehicle ready to carry passengers to the transfer station, where torchliners and torchferries waited to transport them elsewhere in the system. Only one of the hatchways in this part of the station was still lit, the one Terese and Emikai were currently heading for. Maybe she’d been right about Bayta and me being a little slow.

  Unlike the Tube and stations, which were under Spider control, shuttle design and organization were the province of the species that owned that particular solar system. I’d never been aboard a Filly shuttle before, and I watched with interest as, halfway down the stairway, Terese got her hand and luggage tagged by a laser scanner, which then lit up a holodisplay in English instructing her to put the bags on the conveyor to her left just below the station floor. She did so, and as the luggage disappeared into a wide slot set into the upper part of the shuttle she finished her trip down the stairs. Emikai followed, getting the same tagging and holodisplay, except that this time the instructions were in Fili instead of English.

  “Picking up on the passenger’s DNA,” Bayta murmured from beside me. “Probably marking the luggage with a code based on that.”

  I nodded. It made sense, considering the Fillies’ obsession with genetics. It was certainly more convenient than handing out claim tickets, the way the Spiders did for their secure under-train lockboxes.

  Briefly, I wondered if the scanner would spot the fact that Bayta was actually a blend of Human and Chahwyn, then put the thought out of my mind. Surely the Chahwyn Elders who had created her had been smart enough to keep the non-Human elements deep below the surface.

  Sure enough, the scanner gave no indication that it had noticed anything unusual. Bayta went through the procedure, followed by Aronobal, followed by me. There was plenty of room in the shuttle, I saw as I reached the deck, and we took three of the four empty seats right in front. Terese and Emikai, I noted, were already seated farther back. We strapped in, and I waited for the hatchway to seal so that we could get under way.

  Only it didn’t seal. It remained fully open, the muffled sounds of the station drifting down to us. “Hello?” I murmured.

  “There’s one more passenger still on his way,” Bayta murmured back, her eyes distant as she did some of her silent telepathic communication with the Spiders.

  And Terese thought Bayta and I had been slow. “What is he, crippled?” I growled.

  “Actually, yes,” Bayta said, her forehead suddenly wrinkled in concentration.

  I looked at the opening. “Trouble?” I asked, lowering my voice.

  And then, abruptly, Bayta caught her breath.

  “What is it?” I murmured, slipping my hand into my pocket and getting a grip on my kwi. Like Bayta herself, the brass-knuckle-shaped weapon was a nearly one-of-a-kind item, this one a relic from the Shonkla-raa war. Once telepathically activated by Bayta or a Spider, it was capable of inflicting three levels of pain or unconsciousness.

  Only Bayta wasn’t activating it. The kwi was just sitting in my grip, showing no sign of its usual start-up tingle. “Come on, girl, look alive,” I muttered.

  “No, it’s all right,” she said. But her voice was as tight as her face. “It’s not that kind of problem.”

  I was opening my mouth to ask what kind of problem it was when a shadow fell across the floor and a support chair appeared in the hatchway, descending into the shuttle in the grip of a couple of big drudge Spiders. Seated in the chair was a pale, frail-looking Nemut with an off-center hunch in one of his angled shoulder muscles, slightly watery eyes, and a noticeable distortion in his truncated-cone mouth.

  I felt my jaw drop. This wasn’t just some random cripple. This was Minnario, one of the first-class passengers on our ill-fated super-express train. “Minnario?” I called.

  He didn’t respond, but as his chair reached the shuttle deck and he started it swiveling around to face forward I saw a flashing light on the small display fastened to the chair’s control box. Minnario was deaf, I remembered now, with the display programmed to transcribe the speech around him. Apparently, it was also keyed to take special note if someone called his name. He continued to turn, bringing his chair around again to face the rest of the passengers, his eyes scanning the crowd for familiar faces. “Here,” I said, lifting my hand chest high. “Frank Compton. We met aboard the super-express from Homshil.”

  He peered at me, then looked down at his display’s transcription, and I saw sudden recognition in his face. [Mr. Compton,] he croaked, his Nemuspee marred by a slight lisp. [It’s good to see you again. You no longer chase murderers, I trust?]

  I felt a tightening in my stomach as the implications of Minnario’s presence suddenly flooded in on me. “Not right now,” I said carefully. “Tell me, what are you doing here? I thought you were on your way to a clinic for treatment.”

  [The most extraordinary thing has happened,] he said, his distorted mouth flattening in a distorted Nemuti smile. [I was traveling to Morak Trov Lemanab when I received a message that the genetic surgeons at Vibrant Station had accepted me for treatment.]

  “Vibrant—? Oh, right,” I said. The place officially known as Kuzyatru Station actually had thirty different names, one for each of the Twelve Empires’ official languages. Vibrant was the Nemuspee version, just as Proteus was its name in English. “Congratulations. I understand they’re the best in the Assembly. It was very wise of you to apply there.”

  [Ah! Therein lies the irony,] he said as he swiveled his chair around and maneuvered it into a set of clamps along the wall in front of us. [Knowing how few cases Vibrant Station takes, I didn’t apply there.]

  “Really,” I said. “And, what, the director picked your name out of a hat?”

  [I don’t actually know who decided to offer me treatment,] he said as the clamps locked securely around his chair. [The message carried no name, but merely Vibrant’s contract logo.] He swiveled half around, another lopsided smile on his face. [A gift from the heavens, indeed.]

  I looked at Bayta, saw the tightness around her mouth. “Indeed,” I murmured.

  Only I doubted it was the heavens that had supplied the crippled Nemut with this sudden largesse. This gift had come from much lower down, from the general vicinity of hell.

  Sometime during our last two weeks of travel, word of Asantra Muzzfor’s death had made it to Proteus … and someone there wasn’t buying my story that he’d died in the violent climax of the series of murders that had taken place aboard our super-express. That same person had apparently decided to hedge his bets by bringing in another witness to those events.

  Or maybe even more than one. For all I knew, the whole first-class section of that train could be on their way to Proteus right now.

  And that could be a problem. A big problem. I knew exactly where Emikai, Aronobal, and Terese had been at the time of Muzzfor’s death. Bayta and I had worked it out down to the quarter second and the square meter, confirming that none of them could have seen or heard anything that might contradict my version of those events.

  But I had no idea where Minnario had been. It had never even occurred to me to track his movements. And with the Spiders who had served on that train now fifteen thousand light-years behind us there was no way I was going to do it now.

  I didn’t know if Minnario knew anything. But it looked like someone on Proteus thought he might.

  And if he did, the carefully crafted story I’d worked out was suddenly not looking so good.

  The hatchway overhead closed, and there was a slight shudder as the clamps holding us to the station floor disengaged. A moment later the shuttle’s drive kicked in, angling us away from the Tube and bringing us around toward the transfer station a hundred kilometers away.
“Frank?” Bayta asked, just loudly enough for me to hear over the engine noise.

  I reached over and patted her hand. “Don’t worry,” I told her. “I’m on it.”

  After all, we still had the shuttle ride, the usual customs procedures at the transfer station, and then a three-hour torchferry journey to Proteus itself. Surely in all that time I could come up with a new story that would cover anything Minnario might be able to tell them.

  I’d better get started.

  * * *

  Kuzyatru Station, according to all the brochures and encyclopedia entries, was the diplomatic jewel of the Filiaelian Assembly, a high-visibility meeting area for conferences and interstellar meetings as well as a top-rated medical and genetic research facility. It was an odd combination, in my opinion, but it apparently worked well enough for the Fillies. Certainly the photos and holos of the place showed they’d considered it worth dousing with bucketfuls of money.

  It wasn’t until our torchferry was on its final approach that I realized just how inadequate those holos and descriptions really were.

  For starters, the place was huge. It was roughly disk-shaped, with a rounded top and bottom, the whole thing ten kilometers across and ranging in thickness from a kilometer at the edge to three at the center. I was a little vague on my high-school geometry, but I was pretty sure that gave it at least twice the volume of a typical Quadrail station.

  That was impressive enough. Even more so was the fact that a Quadrail station was mostly empty space, whereas Proteus’s living areas were sliced into three-meter-high decks. That gave the place the carrying capacity of a small nation.

  But more even than its size was its sheer grandeur. I had assumed that the huge historical panoramas decorating the areas around each of the thirty-three main edge-line docking stations were simple hull paintings. In fact, they were intricate mosaics, built of five-centimeter-thick tiles no doubt designed to be resistant to micro-meteor damage. The running lights that interstellar law required on every spacegoing vessel or station had here been tweaked into a laser light show that as near as I could tell never repeated itself once during the half hour it was visible from my torchferry window.

  And if that hadn’t been enough to set it apart from the rest of the galaxy’s space habitats, Proteus wasn’t just orbiting its sun, but was actually holding itself in constant, stationary position relative to the equally stationary Quadrail station by a massive, brute-force application of Shorshic vectored force thrusters. That meant that, instead of tracing out a long orbital path that might put it anywhere from two hours to four weeks away from the Tube, it was always going to be a convenient three-hour flight for new arrivals to the system.

  It was, in short, a huge, self-indulgent, self-aggrandizing stack of metal and plastic and ceramic.

  And as I listened to the murmured oohs and aahs of our fellow passengers I felt my heart sink.

  Because my plan had been to march into the station, loudly announce the arrival of Terese German, and watch for interested parties from the Shonkla-raa to pop out of the wainscoting. Now I realized that wasn’t going to work. Whichever docking station we ended up getting routed to, there was every chance that I would be so far away from the Shonkla-raa that they might not even hear the news that Terese was aboard until long after Reception had thanked me for my service and courteously ushered Bayta and me onto the next outgoing torchferry. Even if I could find some excuse for us to stay aboard, we could wander a facility this size for months without ever finding Muzzfor’s fellow conspirators. Especially since those conspirators probably didn’t want to be found.

  “Frank?” Bayta murmured.

  “I know, I know,” I murmured back. “I’ll figure out something.”

  “What do you mean?” she asked, frowning. “I was going to ask why we’d changed course.”

  I frowned in turn. I’d been so caught up with thinking about Proteus and the future of my plans I hadn’t even noticed the change in the torchferry’s insertion angle.

  But Bayta was right. Whereas we’d been heading for one of the docking stations in the upper twenties—probably twenty-seven or twenty-eight—we had now come around and were heading instead into the mid-teens.

  Had someone aboard the station belatedly spotted Terese’s name on the passenger list and rerouted us accordingly? If so, and if that someone was connected with the Shonkla-raa, Plan A might work after all.

  Not surprisingly, the Proteus docking procedure was different from that at every other space habitat I’d ever visited. Instead of simply sidling up beside the station so that our hatchways lined up, we nosed directly into a huge docking bay, complete with clamps and restraints and a collar that looked like it could adjust to anything from our torchferry all the way up to a full-blown torchliner. Personally, I would have simply made a group of docking bays of different sizes, but once again Proteus’s designers had decided to go for the more flamboyant approach.

  In some solar systems new arrivals had to go through customs twice, once on the transfer station and a second time at their final destinations. Fortunately, the Fillies had dispensed with that nonsense. Outside the wide doors leading out of the docking bay was a long line of desks that served merely as luggage-distribution points. A reader at the door scanned the marks that the passengers had been tagged with at the Quadrail shuttle, and holodisplays then directed each person to the proper pickup desk. Bayta and I were routed to a desk midway down the line, while Emikai, Terese, and Aronobal headed to one a few places farther over.

  I maneuvered us through the crowd to our desk and smiled at the female Filly seated there. From the hovering presence of a much older male Filly behind her, I guessed this was probably her first day on the job and he was there to vet her performance. “I greet you,” I said, offering my hand to the reader to confirm my identity. “You have a very efficient—”

  “Mr. Frank Compton?” the older Filly interrupted as he strode up to the desk.

  “Yes,” I confirmed. “My bags are those two over—”

  “I am Chinzro Hchchu, assistant director of Kuzyatru Station,” he interrupted, raising his hand like the Pope delivering a blessing. In response, three tall Fillies wearing gray and black jumpsuits, who had been loitering behind the row of desks to either side of us, started forward.

  “Is there a problem?” I asked carefully, watching the approaching Fillies out of the corner of my eye. In my pocket, I could feel the kwi tingling as Bayta activated it.

  “A very serious problem,” Hchchu said sternly. “You are under arrest.” He paused dramatically. “For murder.”

  TWO

  The entry bay was deathly silent by the time the three jumpsuited Fillies reached us. Two of them took my upper arms in a standard police control hold, while the third got a slightly more polite grip on Bayta’s arm. With Hchchu in the lead, we were marched off through the frozen tableau of our fellow torchferry passengers toward a door at the far end.

  Which wasn’t to say that we went quietly.

  “This is absurd,” I insisted loudly as we walked, trying to sound bewildered and outraged at the same time. “You obviously have me confused with someone else.”

  “You are Mr. Frank Compton, New York City, New York, Western Alliance, Earth, Terran Confederation?” Hchchu asked over his shoulder.

  “I’m a Frank Compton of New York,” I acknowledged. “But there must be dozens of us. Besides—”

  “Then there is no mistake,” he said firmly.

  “You have the wrong person,” I said, just as firmly. If the Modhri was on to me, none of this protesting would do any good. But it was the way an innocent man would behave and I had to play it through.

  Besides, any doubt I could create would only help me. The local Modhran mind segment had only Filly eyes and vision centers to work with, and Fillies in general weren’t all that good at distinguishing among Human faces. No matter how suspicious the Modhri might be, he couldn’t possibly be as certain as Hchchu sounded. At least, not unless h
e already had a sample of my DNA aboard.

  “What are the specifications of the charge?” a new voice cut in, and I turned to see that Emikai had left Terese and Aronobal and had joined our little procession.

  “And you are?” Hchchu challenged.

  “Logra Emikai,” Emikai said. “These Humans are our escort.”

  Hchchu did a sort of double take, and I caught a brief darkening of his nose blaze as he looked more closely at Emikai. “I welcome you, Logra Emikai,” he said. “I have words to speak with you, as well. But those words will wait.”

  “As you wish, Chinzro Hchchu,” Emikai said. “Again I ask: what are the specifications of the charge against Mr. Compton?”

  “Actually, this whole nonsense can wait,” I put in. “Logra Emikai and I have a task that we’ve promised to perform, to escort Terese Ger—”

  “The charges are plural,” Hchchu said, his eyes still on Emikai. “Six counts of murder against citizens of the Assembly.”

  Emikai looked at me, his blaze paling with surprise. “Six murders?” he repeated, sounding sandbagged.

  I was feeling a little sandbagged myself. I’d assumed this whole thing was coming from Asantra Muzzfor’s death aboard our super-express. Where in the world had Hchchu found five more dead Fillies?

  [I protest,] a thin voice called distantly from behind us.

  I turned my head. It was Minnario, floating through the bay toward us, clearly gunning his support chair for all it was worth. On his distorted face was an expression of full-blown righteous indignation.