Night Train to Rigel (Quadrail Book 1)

by Timothy Zahn

  “Oh, yes,” I assured him, smiling. “We did indeed.”

  We made our way back to the hotel, passing a couple of the smaller maintenance subs we’d seen the previous day through the walls of our suite. Stripping off our suits, we returned them to the preparation room and headed out of the docking area. It was close to lunchtime, and even though it was clear Bayta was anxious to get back to the suite where we could talk, I insisted we stop at one of the restaurants first. We had a quick meal, then returned to the suite.

  And as I ushered Bayta inside and closed the door behind us, I finally felt something I’d been expecting ever since leaving New York: the gentle tingling of my watch against my skin.

  While we’d been exploring the ocean depths, someone had bugged our rooms.

  “Were those marks what I think they were?” Bayta asked as I locked the door behind us.

  “Probably,” I told her, gesturing her toward one of the couches as I scrambled furiously to revise the conversation I’d been planning to have with her. There were some things I didn’t mind unknown listeners knowing—in fact, there were a couple of half-truths it might be very useful to feed them. But there were other topics I needed to avoid at all costs. “Assuming, that is, you think they were made by someone bouncing an industrial-sized drill around off the walls,” I continued.

  “Okay,” she said slowly as she sat down. “But what would the Halkas want in there with a drill?”

  “Well, for one thing, it wasn’t the Halkas,” I said. “That dogleg would have been impossible for anyone with their joint arrangement. To me, that strongly suggests whoever did it chose that tunnel precisely because the Halkas couldn’t go in after him.”

  “But why?” she persisted. “What’s in there anyone would want?”

  “Empty space, of course,” I said. “You remember the guide mentioning that the caverns were huge and hadn’t been completely explored? What better place to stash something big that you didn’t want anyone else stumbling over?”

  “But how big could it be?” she asked. “We barely made it through ourselves.”

  “Hence the drill,” I said, nodding. “I’m thinking someone went off into a far corner of the caverns and found himself a nice open space like the entrance area we went through. He then drilled himself a private entrance, doing all the work from the inside so as not to leave telltale chips lying around, brought in his prize, and camouflaged the entrance. Bingo: instant storage unit.”

  “For what?” Bayta asked, her voice gone cautious. “What are they hiding?”

  “My guess?” I said, thinking again of our silent audience. “One of the hotel’s submarines.”

  Her eyes widened. “A submarine?”

  “Oh, not one of the tour ships,” I hastened to add. “One of those midget maintenance jobs we saw poking around on our way in this morning. You’d need something like that if you wanted to move anything sizable around out there.”

  “So you’re saying they stole a submarine so they could move something bigger,” Bayta said slowly, clearly having trouble working through this. “What is it they’re trying to move?”

  “No idea,” I said. Unfortunately, that one was a hundred percent truth. “All I know is that a rock cavern on Modhra, under all this water and ice, is about as private as you can get and still have regular Quadrail and torchferry service.” I looked at my watch. “But there’s nothing to be gained sitting here wondering about it. The next torchferry from the Quadrail is due in a couple of hours. Let’s go to the surface and watch it land, maybe do some hiking or lugeboarding.”

  Her mouth dropped open a couple of millimeters. “You want to go lugeboarding?”

  “Absolutely,” I said. “We don’t want anyone wondering what we’re doing up there watching Modhra II go around and around, do we?”

  Her mouth closed tightly. “Of course not.”

  “Good,” I said, standing up. “Let’s see what kind of outdoor wear we’ve got in the closet.”

  Along with its various formal outfits, the closet also included several sets of the thin but warm clothing designed to complement the insulation of a standard vac suit. While Bayta changed into one of them I called up to the lodge to check on the procedures for going outside and reserved us a couple of suits. The very nature of a place like this would make it impossible for us to slip out unnoticed, but hopefully the hidden listeners had bought into the excuse I’d given Bayta and wouldn’t pay much attention to our sortie into the great outdoors.

  The pale disk of Modhra II was high overhead as we emerged from one of the airlocks onto the surface, with Cassp’s glowing, multicolored bands filling most of the sky to the north. We were currently below the ring plane, and the distant sunlight playing off the floating bits of ice and rock created a striking pattern of light and shadow above our heads. “Have you ever lugeboarded before?” I asked Bayta as we bounced our way along a line of tall red pylons marking the way to the toboggan tunnels.

  “No, and it sounds rather dangerous,” she said, her voice coming from a speaker in the back of my helmet. “Rather pointless, too.” She gestured up at one of the pylons as we passed it. “Aren’t these awfully tall for trail markers?”

  “Actually, they’re the pylons for a future ski lift system,” I told her. “Eventually, the red lift will go to the toboggan tunnels, with the blue and green ones taking you to the ski runs.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “It was in the brochures.”

  “Oh.”

  We reached the base of the hill that the map indicated was the starting point for the toboggan tunnels and started up. I’d worried a little about climbing upslope on ice, even with the special grips on our vac suits’ boots, but it turned out not to be a problem. The ice’s texture was reasonably rough, and the gravity and ambient temperature too low for our weight to form the thin layer of water that normally made ice so treacherous. Briefly, I wondered how that would affect the performance of our lugeboards, then put it out of my mind. People had been dealing with this kind of extreme physics for a long time, and the resort’s designers had presumably known what they were doing.

  The entrances to the three tunnels were grouped around a common staging area, from which they headed underground in different directions. A circle of lights had been embedded in the ice around each entrance, and from the glow coming up from the tunnels I guessed there were lights all the way down. Three vac-suited figures—Halkas, probably, though I never got a look through their faceplates to confirm that—were just getting their toboggan ready to go at Number Three, and as we unfastened our lugeboards from our backpacks they headed in. I watched them drop out of sight beyond the first slope, then turned my attention to the east, where the red pylons we’d been following marched up the next group of hills and disappeared over the other side.

  “You said you’d show me how this worked,” Bayta reminded me.

  “Sure,” I said. Hoping I remembered how to do it, I popped my lugeboard’s straps. “First, you get it open.…”

  We got the boards set up and headed down Number One. It was just as well I’d chosen the most undemanding of the tunnels, as it turned out, because even that was well beyond my modest abilities. Not only had the designers smoothed the ice to a high polish, but they must have installed heaters under the surface to bring it to precisely the optimal temperature to form that thin water layer I’d noticed the lack of while climbing the hill.

  Worse yet, Bayta, with no experience whatsoever with these things, turned out to be better at it than I was. She fell probably once to every two tumbles I took, and near the end of the run was even daring enough to take a shot at one of the three-sixty spirals I wouldn’t have tried on a bet. The lower gravity made such stunts easier, of course, but that wasn’t much help to my bruised pride.

  We reached the bottom, our momentum running us smoothly across the long flat area to a gentle stop near the elevators. Unfastening our boards, we headed inside, and I punched for the surface. “This g
oes down, too?” Bayta asked, pointing at the lower button.

  “Yes, back to the hotel,” I told her. “This particular run ends just above the lobby. Probably planned that way so that bruised amateurs could go staggering straight home and collapse into bed or a whirl bath.”

  “I guess,” she said. “That was fun.”

  I looked through her faceplate. Bayta, the girl with no last name, who had once calmly told me she didn’t care if I lived or died, was actually smiling, her cheeks red with exertion, her face more alive than I’d ever seen it. “It was, wasn’t it?” I agreed. “We’ll have to do it again after my knees stop hurting.”

  She looked back at me, her smile fading as she suddenly seemed to remember why we’d come to the surface in the first place. “Yes,” she said. “Well … maybe we could just climb one of the hills near the lodge and watch the ring pattern for a while. Until you feel better.”

  “Sounds good to me,” I said.

  The elevator let us out inside the lodge, just off the equipment rental area and near one of the airlocks. We headed back outside and walked along the red pylons to the top of the first big hill. There we found a comfortable place to sit together, and as I snuggled close and put my arm around her shoulders, I motioned for her to turn off her comm.

  I leaned my helmet against hers, hoping that to any observers we looked like two lovers getting as romantically physical as it was possible to get in vac suits. “Can you hear me?” I called.

  “Yes,” she called back, her voice sounding tinny as the sound transmitted across the contact between our helmets. “Why did you want to watch the torchferry arrive?”

  “I don’t, actually,” I told her. “But someone bugged our suite while we were on our submarine tour, and I needed to find a reason to get you out here where I could be sure no one could eavesdrop.”

  “We were bugged?” she demanded. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “You mean while we were there in the suite?” I asked.

  “Oh,” she said, her annoyance fading into embarrassment. “Right.”

  “Which is also why I had to tell you a few half-truths,” I went on. “Starting with those drill marks on the tunnel wall. Someone made them, all right, but whoever it was didn’t stash anything in there. At least, nothing important.”

  She drew away to frown at me, and I saw her lips moving. I tapped her faceplate in reminder; grimacing with a little more embarrassment, she turned again and leaned her helmet against mine. “Sorry,” she said. “I said, how do you know?”

  “First of all, because it was a little too obvious,” I said, watching her face out of the corner of my eye, hoping her reactions would give me some clue as to how much of this she already knew. So far, it all seemed completely new to her. “The marks were right there in the lighted areas, there hadn’t been any effort to disguise or obliterate them, and they quit showing up past that bottleneck, past the point where there was no chance of the Halkas getting in and finding any more of them.”

  “Maybe they just got more careful.”

  “No,” I said. “Remember that current we ran into outside the cavern? That showed Modhra’s underground ocean keeps itself moving, probably driven by tidal forces from Cassp. But there weren’t any currents inside the tunnel we explored. If someone had made the kind of opening in the far end that we talked about, even if they camouflaged it afterward, the water would have been sloshing back and forth and we’d have been tossed around like guppies.”

  “Then what was the point of the marks?”

  “The same point as the drunk act that Bellido put on for me on the Quadrail,” I said. “Something big and bold and obvious to get people looking and thinking the wrong direction.”

  “So they didn’t actually steal a submarine?” she asked, sounding thoroughly lost now.

  “Actually, I’m guessing they did,” I said. “The fake drunk had all the right cues and telltales, which tells me these people pay attention to the details. If you want someone to waste their time searching the caverns, you need to give them a good reason to do so.”

  “Yes, I see,” Bayta said. “And you don’t want the Halkas to know about this?”

  “No,” I said, watching her closely. “Because I think the Bellidos are on our side.”

  There was a moment of silence. This was the perfect moment, I knew, for her to confess that she already knew that. The perfect moment to finally fill me in on everything else she knew about Modhra and what was going on here.

  Only she didn’t. “You mean the people who hit you on the head and locked you in a spice crate?” she asked instead.

  “I mean the people who didn’t injure me,” I growled, a sudden stirring of anger sending heat into my face. “I mean the people who could have simply broken my leg if all they’d wanted was to put me out of action for a while.” I slid my helmet around the side of hers so that I could glare straight into her eyes. “I mean the people who haven’t been lying through their teeth to me since this whole thing started.”

  Her face had gone suddenly rigid. “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “You know what I mean,” I bit out, suddenly sick of it all. “You know what’s going on here. You know all about JhanKla and the Bellidos. You’ve known right from the beginning.”

  She tried to pull away from me. I grabbed the back of her helmet and yanked it back, pressing it firmly against mine. “Go ahead—tell me I’m wrong,” I invited harshly. “Tell me that I’m imagining things.”

  “Frank—I’m sorry,” she said, the words coming out in little puffs of rapid air. Her face had come alive with fear, her throat muscles working rapidly. “I couldn’t—”

  “Of course you can’t,” I cut her off. “So now tell me why I shouldn’t just go ahead and bail on this whole damn thing.”

  “No!” she all but gasped. Her face shot through the whole range of fear and landed squarely on sheer terror. “Please. You can’t leave.”

  “Why not?” I demanded. “The Bellidos didn’t hurt me because the fake drunk saw me take the chip from the Spider and figured I was on their side. Only I’m not really on their side, am I? I’m not on anyone’s side. All I am is a dupe.”

  I let go of her helmet, suddenly too disgusted with her to touch even that. “I won’t be a dupe, Bayta,” I said. “Not for you; not for your damn Spiders.”

  Her breath was coming in hyperventilating huffs, her face still rigid with fear. “Please, Frank,” she managed. “Please. You can’t leave me here alone—”

  I didn’t want to hear it. Standing up, I turned my back on her and strode off down the ice hill. I kept walking, up the next small hill and down into its valley, until she was out of sight. Then, folding my arms across my chest, I stopped and glared up at the shifting ring pattern blazing softly across the Modhran sky.

  I should do it, I told myself firmly. I should turn around, go to the hotel and pack my stuff, and then head straight back to the Tube on the next torchferry. Maybe I’d drop her fancy unlimited-travel pass in the fire pit before I left, a nice dramatic gesture that would make it clear to her and the Spiders what I thought of them. I had places to go and things to do, and the last thing I needed was to hang around here in the cold and dark with a bull’s-eye painted on my chest. The sooner I shook the dust of this off my feet, the better.

  I had just about made up my mind to do it when the face of the dead messenger outside the New Pallas Towers floated up from my memory.

  The Spiders had gone to a lot of trouble to entice me into this game. Someone else had gone to even more trouble to keep me out of it.

  And I was damned if I was going to quit before I knew what the game was.

  Bayta was sitting where I’d left her, her knees hunched up against her chest, her arms wrapped tightly around them. Her whole body seemed to be quivering as I approached, perhaps shaking in fear or anger. I sat back down beside her … and it was only then that I realized what the shaking actually was.

  She was crying. My stoic, wo
oden-faced Bayta was actually crying.

  I leaned my helmet against hers. “One question,” I said, forcing calmness into my voice. “Are the Bellidos on our side?”

  Her eyelids fluttered as she tried to blink away the tears. “I think so,” she said, sniffing. “I mean, I think we ultimately want the same thing. Only they’re … sort of independent.”

  I grimaced. Independent operations were always wasteful, usually counterproductive, and way too often dangerous. But in the world of intelligence and covert ops, they were unfortunately a fact of life. “Do you know what their plan is?”

  She closed her eyes, squeezing out another couple of tears in the process. “No.”

  I took a couple more calming breaths. I didn’t need this. I really didn’t. “Fine,” I said. “Let’s see if we can find out.”

  She opened her eyes, gazing nervously at me as if expecting another outburst. “Does that mean you’re staying?”

  “For now,” I told her, unwilling to commit myself to anything long-term at this point. “Go ahead and switch your comm back on, and let’s head back to the toboggan tunnels.”

  I started to reach for my own comm switch, but she snaked a hand up and caught my arm before I could reach it. “I told you once I wasn’t your friend,” she said, her voice shaking with emotion. “But I’m not your enemy, either.”

  I stared into her eyes, eyes from which all the defenses had crumbled. There was indeed a real, live person back there. “Glad to hear it,” I said. “Be ready to switch off again when I give you the signal.”

  I turned on my own comm, and we headed back upslope. She was clearly still too shaken to counterfeit a casual conversation, so instead I kept up a more or less running monologue about how her first lugeboard run had been beginner’s luck. About halfway there, she was finally able to ease back into the conversation.

  We reached the lugeboard tunnels; but instead of stopping, I motioned her to keep going, and we followed the pylons as they headed up the next hill. JhanKla had said there were two other toboggan tunnels in production, and it seemed logical that the Halkas would have laid out their future ski lift to serve all five.