by Timothy Zahn
“I didn’t, exactly,” McMicking said with a shrug. “But I spent ten years as a bounty hunter before I started working for Mr. Hardin. I know a little about how fugitives think.” He favored me with a thin smile. “Especially clever ones like Mr. Compton. How about telling me what’s going on?”
I could feel Bayta tense up as I continued unfastening her bandages. Fortunately, I’d already worked up a story, one that McMicking might actually believe. “It’s basically a blackmail and extortion scheme,” I said. “One that’s sucked in most of the top people across the galaxy.”
“Our people haven’t heard anything about this,” he said, eyeing me closely.
“It’s been going on very quietly,” I explained. “And so far Humans and the Confederation seem to have been ignored. But that’s about to change; and when they do come for us, I guarantee Mr. Hardin will be one of the first on their list.”
McMicking’s eyes narrowed. I had his full attention now. “Let them come,” he said, a soft menace in his voice. “We’ll be ready.”
“You may not even know it’s happened,” I warned as a small additional spark of inspiration struck. Applegate had been content with half the Modhran story. Maybe McMicking would be, too. “They make their conquests through a highly addictive chemical found in Modhran coral.”
He frowned. “Coral?”
“Goes in through small scratches in the skin,” I said. “One touch, and they’ve got you.”
He snorted. “You need to touch it? Coral? You’ve got to be kidding.”
“Their agents are very persuasive.”
“Not that persuasive,” he countered with a sniff. “I can’t imagine anyone speaking well of grabbing a chunk of coral.”
I stared at him, a sudden tingle at the back of my neck. I can’t imagine anyone speaking well of grabbing a chunk of coral …
And with that, the rest of the pieces fell into place.
That was it. God above, that was it.
“So what are they after you for?” McMicking continued. “You get on someone’s list of the rich and famous when I wasn’t looking?”
“Hardly,” I said mechanically, dragging my mind back to the conversation at hand. “Some of us made a mess of their main base a couple of days ago. They’re not happy about that.”
There was a tap at the door. “You expecting anyone?” McMicking asked, his voice suddenly taut as he stepped to the door.
“No,” I told him, lowering my voice.
“It’s all right,” Bayta said. “It’s just our luggage.”
McMicking threw her an odd look. “Your luggage has its own secret knock?”
“Just open the door,” I growled.
He transferred the odd look to me, then turned and opened the door. A conductor stood there, our carrybags dangling from three of its legs. Wordlessly, McMicking took them, dropped them onto the bed, then closed and relocked the door. “So,” he said conversationally as he stepped over to the curve couch and sat down. “We have just this one compartment?”
“No, we have two compartments,” I said “You, on the other hand, are getting off this—”
I broke off as the thud of releasing brakes sounded from beneath us. “Afraid not,” McMicking said calmly.
“McMicking, you son of a—” I choked off the curse and grabbed for his arm. I’d throw him off bodily if I had to.
But he evaded my grab with ease. Besides, it was way too late. Even as I made a second and equally futile grab, the train started moving. “McMicking!” I snarled again, dropping my hands uselessly to my sides.
“Relax,” he said. “You didn’t think I came just to help you aboard and then let you ride off down the rabbit hole, did you? A man like Mr. Hardin didn’t get where he is by not protecting his investments.”
“Investments?” Bayta asked.
I sighed. “I’ll tell you later.”
“In the meantime,” McMicking continued, lacing his fingers comfortably behind his head, “where exactly do I sleep?”
TWENTY
It was a four-day trip from Jurskala to Terra, and like the journey from Sistarrko to Jurskala, this one quickly settled into a fairly dull routine.
Dull, but with a dark edge of tension. We couldn’t let Bayta out in public, for starters, and even in disguise I didn’t dare poke my own nose out for anything beyond a thrice-daily trip to the dining car to get our meals. The fact that I was supposedly the physician to a badly injured Juri made it worse, since one of those meals each time had to be Jurian sickbed fare. The necessary blandness of the diet got old after about the middle of the second day.
At each stop I stood at the compartment window, watching the arriving passengers and trying to gauge which of them might be Modhran walkers. It was a pretty futile exercise; if the walkers themselves didn’t know what they were, I didn’t have much hope of figuring it out. Still, Bayta had suggested it was the rich and powerful who were first targeted, and the farther we got from Jurskala the more infrequent the first-class travelers seemed to become.
Unfortunately, there was enough traffic in the corridor outside our door to show that the first-class compartments remained full, and first-class passengers of any species were automatically suspect.
And then, of course, there was McMicking.
I had had serious reservations about sharing my compartment with him right from the start, but once the Quadrail left the station there wasn’t much I could do about it. Our dramatic entrance to the train might have been quickly forgotten by the rest of the passengers; but on the other hand, it might not. I couldn’t simply cut McMicking loose after he’d publicly attached himself to us the way he had, particularly since he probably didn’t have a ticket for any of the other seats on the train. We were stuck with each other until we got to Terra Station, and would just have to make the best of it.
Not that he was a particularly unpleasant guest. On the contrary, once I got over my initial annoyance at being scammed I found him to be a reasonable enough traveling companion. He made a point of taking walks several times a day, going up and down the train to keep tabs on what was happening, at the same time giving Bayta and me a little breathing space. Occasionally, when we were all together and the right mood struck him, he would tell a story about his life as a bounty hunter.
Three days later, we pulled into Kerfsis Station, the last big colony system before Earth. Given the trouble we’d had the last time through, I half expected to find Major Tas Busksha waiting on the platform with a warrant in hand for my arrest. But we pulled out again without incident, and I finally began to feel some of the tension draining away. After Kerfsis came Homshil, a transfer point where several cross-galaxy lines intersected, and beyond that there were only two more stops in Jurian space, both of them small outpost colonies not much further along in their development than New Tigris or Yandro. Twenty-three hours and five stops from now, we would be pulling into Terra Station and as safe a haven as we were likely to find anymore in the galaxy.
We were two hours short of Homshil when it all went straight to hell.
“… and a bowl of frisjis-broth soup,” I told the Spider at the dining car carry-away counter. I was, in fact, getting royally sick of frisjis, and I’d only had it three times since leaving Jurskala. But the medical section of my encyclopedia said it helped promote tissue regeneration in Jurian burn victims, which meant we were pretty well stuck with it.
The Spider dipped its globular body slightly in acknowledgment and headed back into the service area. I stepped away from the counter and took a seat at an empty table nearby. Now that we were almost to Earth, it was time to start thinking about what we were going to do once we got there. The Modhri may have been content to leave humanity alone up to now, but my guess was that that neglect was about to come to an abrupt end.
The problem was that the very quality that had made me a good candidate for the Spiders in the first place was now going to work against me. I had no close contacts, personal or professional, with an
yone in the government, certainly no one who would listen to me. Hardin was the only influential person I knew, and I could just hear what he would say if I trotted an insane story like this in front of him.
Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a glimpse of movement as someone stepped to my side. Sighing, I settled my face into kindly physician mode and ran my concerned-physician spiel through a quick update. Most of the Jurskala passengers who had seen me bring Bayta aboard were long gone, but there were still a few aboard, at least one of whom cornered me for updates whenever he spotted me out and about. “Yes?” I asked mildly as I looked up.
But it wasn’t an inquisitive passenger. It was, in fact, the last person I would have expected to see.
“Well, well,” Losutu growled, his voice dark and sarcastic as he glared down at me like a summer thundercloud. “Look who we have here.”
“Director Losutu?” I gasped, scrambling quickly to my feet. Beyond his glare I saw Applegate hurrying toward us from the bar section, a look of consternation on his face. “What are you doing here?”
“I could ask you the same question,” he bit back. “I’d have thought the Halkas would have you strapped to a torture rack by now.”
I just shook my head, my brain frozen with the impossibility of it. Fayr had gotten us to Sistarrko Station in time to catch the first Quadrail out of the system, and even with the extra three-hour delay in our departure from Jurskala there was no way Losutu and Applegate could have caught up with us via a later connection from Modhra.
Which meant they must have been aboard the same trains with us the whole way. But how could they have gotten to Sistarrko Station ahead of our borrowed torchferry?
“I don’t know what possessed you to participate in such an insane venture,” Losutu was saying, in full chew-out mode now. “Applegate told me you—”
“Sir, please,” Applegate cut him off urgently as he came up to him. “Not here. I told you—”
“And I’m tired of listening,” Losutu snapped, sparing him a brief glare before turning his attention back to me. “I’m waiting, Compton. Give me a reason why I shouldn’t turn you over to High Commissioner JhanKla right here and now.”
I felt my heart try to seize up. “High Commissioner JhanKla?”
“We just left his Peerage car” Losutu said, and even through his anger I could hear the self-satisfaction that he’d been afforded such an honor. “He was kind enough to give us a ride from Sistarrko Station after Superintendent PrifKlas ordered us off Modhra.”
“And who then called the other warship in from the transfer station to take you to the Tube,” I said as it finally came together. No wonder we hadn’t had any trouble with that second Halkan warship; it had been pressed into transport duty to get Losutu and Applegate to the Quadrail in time to shadow us. And of course, sneaking up around the back of the Tube as we had, we hadn’t seen that it was missing from its post.
“And thanks to you, we’ll be lucky if the Halkas don’t block our purchase of those Chaftas,” Applegate put in indignantly. “You’ve wrecked an entire diplomatic initiative—”
“Forget the Chaftas,” Losutu cut him off. “I’m still waiting for Compton’s explanation about Modhra.”
“Yes, sir,” Applegate said. “But again, we shouldn’t be discussing this out in the open. Perhaps the High Commissioner would permit us to continue the discussion in the Peerage car.”
“I’m sure he would,” I said, my brain finally starting to kick into gear. “But there’s no reason for us to go all the way back there. I have a very comfortable compartment two cars forward.”
“No,” Applegate said sharply before Losutu could answer.
A UN deputy director, I suspected, was not used to having his decisions made by underlings. “What did you say?” Losutu asked ominously.
Applegate flicked a look at me, the wrinkles around his eyes deepening briefly as if he were just as startled as Losutu that he’d spoken out of turn. “My apologies, sir,” he said. “But the High Commissioner needs to be a part of any conversation that deals with the Modhran attack.”
“You disappoint me, Colonel,” I said. “This isn’t the attitude you showed back on Modhra, when you were trying so hard to be my friend.”
“That was before you joined ecoterrorists and participated in an attack on Halkan soil,” Applegate countered stiffly.
“Is that what it was?” I asked. “Or is it that you were still trying to get me to trust you, hoping to give the Modhri one last crack at me?”
Applegate’s forehead wrinkled. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Actually, you probably don’t,” I conceded. “But you see, I’m on to your quiet little friend. You and he made a slip when we were all having dinner together in the Redbird. Not a big slip, nothing I noticed at the time, but something that came back to me later when I heard someone else comment that he couldn’t imagine anyone speaking well of grabbing a chunk of coral.”
“I didn’t say anything good about touching coral,” Applegate said, still frowning. “In fact, I think I said just the opposite.”
“Yes, you did,” I agreed. “The slip was in the specific words you used. You said that coral was such rough, pointy, scratchy stuff.”
“You have a point here?” Losutu put in. His voice hadn’t lost any of its anger, but there was a hint of curiosity starting to edge its way through. For all his dislike of me personally, he knew the kind of Westali agent I’d once been.
“Yes, sir, I do,” I assured him. “Because just one day earlier I’d used those same words, in that same order, when Apos Mahf was singing the praises of Modhran coral. Rough, pointy, scratchy. Tell me, Colonel: How likely is it for you to have come up with all three of those words on your own unless there was someone whispering them in your ear?”
“This is insane,” Applegate insisted. “Completely insane.”
“I agree,” Losutu seconded. “If you’ve got something to say, Compton, say it.”
“I’ll be happy to, sir, if you’ll just step over to my compartment,” I said. “And if JhanKla wants to join us, he’s also welcome.”
“So now you want a Halkan High Commissioner to leave the comfort of his Peerage car for your convenience?” Applegate demanded contemptuously.
“Is it his comfort you’re worried about?” I asked. “Or his safety?”
“His safety?” Applegate echoed, frowning.
“Yes,” I said, suddenly feeling tired of this whole thing. Applegate had never been a friend; but even so, it was strangely debilitating to fight a man who didn’t even know he was an enemy. Maybe that was where the true strength of the Modhri lay. “Tell me, Colonel, what’s he afraid of? Me? Bayta?”
“Stop calling him Colonel,” Losutu growled. “He’s a civilian now.”
I shook my head. “No, sir, he’s just with a different army. The army of the Modhri.”
“The what?” Losutu demanded.
But I wasn’t looking at him. Applegate’s eyes had gone oddly flat, the muscles of his face sagging visibly as if he had fallen asleep on his feet. Before I could react, his face tightened up again, and his eyes came back to focus.
Only now the eyes were too bright, his posture too stiff, his face a subtle parody of the man who had once gazed coolly at me across a Westali desk and told me I was fired. It was no longer Colonel Terrance Applegate who stood before us.
The real enemy had finally come out to play.
“Ah,” I said, trying to keep my voice conversational. “Do I finally have the honor of speaking directly to the Modhri?”
“You do,” Applegate said. It wasn’t quite his voice, either.
Losutu apparently heard the difference, too. “Applegate?” he asked uncertainly. The anger was gone now, a growing apprehension in its place. “What’s going on?”
“Shut up,” Applegate said. He stepped to Losutu’s side, and the other inhaled sharply as his right wrist was suddenly pinned in a control lock. “You win, Compton.
Let’s go to your compartment.”
“What for?” Losutu asked, fighting to keep his composure as Applegate marched him across the dining car.
“We’re going to talk,” Applegate told him calmly. He looked at me, the strange eyes gone suddenly dead. “And then,” he added, “I’m going to end it.”
The entire contingent of first-class passengers was in motion as we stepped through the connecting door into the coach car, their drinks and readers and cards abandoned as they strode purposefully toward us like soldiers marching into combat. I tensed, hardening my hands into fists; but to my surprise they merely swerved both ways around us and continued on, heading back through the vestibule toward the dining car. “Where are they going?” Losutu asked, craning his head to watch as the last of them filed out of the car. “Applegate?”
“It’s no concern of yours,” Applegate said. Or rather, the thing possessing Applegate said. When the time came, I would have to remember that it was no longer a human being that I would be facing.
We were halfway across the now-empty car when the door ahead of us opened and a second stream of passengers appeared, heading aft with the same air of purpose as the first. Apparently, the Modhri was clearing out his walkers from all of the first-class compartments, too.
By the time we reached the compartment car itself the corridor was empty. “Which one?” Losutu asked.
“These,” Applegate said, gesturing toward the doors of our two compartments. “They’re the only ones I didn’t control.”
“We’ll go in here,” I said, stepping to Bayta’s compartment and touching the door chime. “We might as well bring Bayta in on the conversation.”
“And your other companion, too,” Applegate said. “The one posing as another doctor.”
The door opened, and I saw a flicker of surprise on Bayta’s face as she realized I had company. A second flicker followed as she saw who the company was. “Yes?” she asked carefully.
“Sorry,” I said, gently easing her aside and stepping in. The connecting wall between the two compartments, I saw, was partially open, just the way I’d left it. “Afraid we’ve miscalculated.”
