Night Train to Rigel q-1

by Timothy Zahn

  Considering the size of the resort, there was an amazingly low level of comm traffic going on, though in retrospect I should have realized that these people had come here to get away from it all, not bring it all with them. All the transmissions that were zipping around were encrypted, of course, and I had nothing with me nearly powerful enough to dig through all that protection.

  But then, actually eavesdropping on the conversations wasn’t the point of this exercise.

  The bulk of the traffic, not surprisingly, was running civilian Halkan encryptions, and I tackled those first. They varied in complexity and layering, depending on how leakproof their owners wanted them to be, but they all followed a very distinctive, very Halkan pattern. The next most common encryption pattern was Cimman, again not surprising given the proximity of the Cimmal Republic. I eliminated those, plus the dozen civilian Jurian systems, and finally the two Pirkarli ones.

  And that was all. There was nothing with the Peerage-type patterns that a Halkan high official like JhanKla would use. There was also nothing that followed any standard Belldic patterns, military or civilian.

  There was a movement at the corner of my eye, and I looked up as Bayta slid into the chair across from me. “Is anything wrong?” she asked. “You said an hour.”

  “Nothing’s wrong,” I told her, keying off the reader and pulling put the chip. “I just got tired early. How sure are you that JhanKla or one of his people didn’t get on our Quadrail at Jurskala?”

  “The Spiders said they’d all stayed behind.”

  “So we’re as sure as the Spiders are,” I concluded, wishing I felt reassured by that. “Fine. Hear anything interesting out there?”

  “Not really,” she said, frowning slightly. “They mostly seemed to be talking about whatever game they were playing.”

  “Yeah, I got a lot of that, too,” I said. “You happen to listen in on any Cimman conversations?”

  “There was one,” she said. “They were talking about taking a submarine cruise to an underwater cave a few kilometers from here.”

  “So were mine,” I said. “Interesting.”

  “Doesn’t sound very interesting to me,” Bayta said. “None of it did.”

  “My point exactly,” I said, looking out past the low wall at the milling gamblers. “When did you ever wander around this many people and not find someone talking business?”

  She pursed her lips. “Maybe they save all their business talk for somewhere else.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “But I didn’t hear anything about family or politics, either. They save all that for somewhere else, too?”

  She gave a hooded look to the side, toward a pair of Halkas sitting two tables away. “What are you implying?” she asked in a low voice.

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “Normally, you never make the assumption that everyone’s in on a gag except you. But in this case, I’m starting to wonder.”

  “You mean like a conspiracy?”

  “I admit it’s an overused presumption,” I said. “But you said yourself that I had no friends out here. And Apos Mahf did say the ultra-rich were a close-knit community.”

  “Apos Mahf?”

  “The Bellido you pointed out earlier,” I told her. “He claims to know me.”

  “A friend?” she asked, her tone suddenly cautious.

  “So he claims,” I said. “He named a ceremony I was at several years ago, but he apparently doesn’t know how good my memory is for faces. Even Belldic faces.”

  “But how could he have known you were at the ceremony unless he was there, too?”

  “Because some of the news footage of the VIPs happened to catch a couple of us security grunts in the background,” I told her. “I got chewed out royally about it afterward, in fact. As if it had been my fault.” I stroked my lip as a sudden thought struck me. “Come to think of it, it was our old friend Colonel Applegate who did most of the chewing. Our old acquaintance, that is,” I corrected myself.

  It was a small joke, and I hadn’t expected much of a response. Bayta didn’t give me any response at all. “What did you and Mahf talk about?” she asked instead.

  “He tried to renew our nonexistent acquaintanceship and then asked me about the incident aboard the Jurskala Quadrail. Interestingly enough, he mentioned details about that trip that he has no business knowing. That’s why I asked if the Spiders could have missed someone following us from Jurskala.”

  “No.” Bayta was positive.

  “Then someone must have sent one hell of a detailed message here ahead of us,” I grunted, slipping my reader back into my pocket. “Come on, let’s get back to the room and check the submarine tour schedule.”

  She seemed taken aback. “The what?”

  “Submarine tours seem to be the hot item today,” I pointed out. “Why, is there a problem?”

  “No, of course not,” she said, suddenly sounding flustered. “It’s just…”

  “It’s just that you don’t like being led around by the nose?” I suggested.

  Her lips compressed. “Something like that.”

  “I don’t much like it myself,” I said pointedly. “But someone has again gone to a lot of effort to lay out a trail of bread crumbs. I want to see where it leads.”

  “What if it leads into a trap?”

  I shrugged. “Hopefully, we’ll figure that out before we get there ”

  The hotel offered three different submarine cruises, two of them traveling to distant coral formations and one hitting the caverns Bayta and I had heard so much about in the casino. All of the day’s cruises were full, but there was a cavern trip scheduled for early the next morning that still had a half dozen vacancies. I booked us two seats on that one, and while I was at it made reservations for an early evening dinner.

  With a couple of hours to kill, Bayta went into the bedroom for a nap. Drawing myself a drink from the room’s dispenser, I settled down at the computer desk to learn all there was to know about Cassp, the Modhra Binary, and the Modhran resort.

  Dinner that evening was very much in the five-star range I would have expected from a place like this. Afterward, we browsed through one of the rows of shops for a while, and I bought Bayta a set of hair fasteners and a compact travel makeup kit.

  I could tell she wasn’t particularly impressed with the gifts. For that matter, it was clear that the whole idea of a leisurely shopping trip bored her to tears. I could sympathize, but it was something a good travel scout would be expected to do.

  Not that I thought anyone out there really believed that story anymore. But by sticking with the cover, it might be possible to fool them into thinking I still thought I was covered, which might lead them to underestimate my competence. Sometimes this got too complicated even for me.

  Finally, our token shopping out of the way, we returned to our suite and locked ourselves in for the night. It was still too early to go to bed, so we opaqued the walls and floors and I pulled up another classic Hitchcock dit rec drama to show her. This one was called North by Northwest, a story of a man on the run pursued by shadowy forces he didn’t understand. If the theme tugged at Bayta’s conscience, it didn’t show.

  With an early wake-up required for the tour, we made a point of turning in early. As I had already noted, the bed was huge and very comfortable-looking. Fortunately for me, the living room couch was comfortable, too.

  TWELVE:

  “And now it is the time for the adventurous among us to leave the safety of our vehicle and explore the caverns,” the guide intoned, switching from Halkan to English for our benefit. “I must warn you, though, that the caverns are extensive, and only a small percentage has been explored and mapped. Please stay in the areas with marker lights.”

  I nodded to Bayta, and we put on our helmets. Only a half dozen of the twenty passengers seemed interested in joining us, I noticed, the rest content to stay aboard the sub for another pass around the outer sections of the caverns. I also noted that, despite their verbal enthusiasm of the previ
ous day, there were in fact no Cimmaheem on our sub.

  We finished our preparations and lined up at the exit. Each of us was given a quick equipment check by the guide, then sent two by two into the airlock. Bayta and I received our check, listened to one final warning about staying on the marked paths, and went outside.

  The water was icy cold, I knew, but the pressure suits were well designed and only a hint of that chill made it through to my skin. With Bayta beside me, I touched my jet control, and as the pressurized water streams brushed past my heels we headed into the wide opening of the caverns, following the lights of those who had gone before us. Right at the opening we hit a current that tried to push us aside, but a little maneuvering and re-angling of the jets and we got through it.

  I’d toured a few other caverns back when I was young, two of them underwater, and compared to those these weren’t all that impressive. Still, the lighting had been arranged for maximum effect, and I could see a few interesting formations in the various side tunnels. “Did you want to see any of the tunnels in particular?” Bayta’s voice came through the small speaker in my helmet.

  “Not really,” I said casually, knowing that our comms also linked back to the submarine. Nothing we said out here would be private. “Let’s try over here.”

  I pointed my light toward a passage no one else seemed interested in. We jetted our way across to the tunnel and peered inside. “Pretty twisty,” Bayta pointed out. “The marker lights don’t go back very far, either.”

  “Oh, it’s not that twisty,” I admonished her, studying the rocky walls. It wasn’t that twisty, at least not for us. But even from here I could see a couple of spots that would be problematic for Halkas to get through.

  Was that why we’d been maneuvered into coming out here? To do some cave exploration for them?

  And then, as I moved my light around, something in the rock a few meters ahead caught my eye: a flattish spot that stood out glaringly amid the rest of the textured bumpiness. “Anyway, we’re not here to stay on the beaten path,” I added, kicking my feet and moving into the passage. “Let’s see where it goes.”

  My eyes hadn’t been playing tricks on me. The spot I’d noticed was indeed flat, and it definitely hadn’t gotten that way by itself. Something hard and probably metallic had brushed up against the rock, hitting it with enough force to grind off the bumps. Someone, probably fairly recently, had moved something large and heavy through here.

  I shone my light farther down the passage. Now that I knew what to look for, I could see a couple more smooth spots ahead, one of them just in front of the last marker light.

  I caught Bayta’s eye and pointed to the spot, then at the others down the tunnel. She frowned, then lifted her eyebrows questioningly and tapped her backpack with its air generator and jet system. I shook my head, pressing my fingertip into the plasticized coating to show that it had too much give to have scraped the rock that way “Looks like we’re running out of markers,” I said aloud for the benefit of our other listeners.

  I gestured emphatically, and Bayta nodded understanding. “We could at least go to the end,” she suggested. “We’ve got plenty of time.”

  “Sounds good to me.” Giving her a thumbs-up, I started forward.

  The other flat spots looked pretty much the same as the one I’d already examined. Interestingly, none of them were at particularly narrow spots in the tunnel. It was as if whoever had been maneuvering the object had been careful enough at the tricky places but had gotten careless when the going was easier.

  We reached the last marker, and I shone my light into the tunnel beyond it. Just past the marker was another flat spot, bigger than the others, as if the movers had been seriously rushed at the end and desperate to get behind the light where they wouldn’t be so visible.

  So rushed, in fact, that they hadn’t just bumped the side of their burden against the wall. Just ahead of the flat spot was a large protrusion with an abrupt indentation where they’d apparently run the object’s nose straight into the rock. A nose, I could see from the impression, that was about fifteen centimeters across, pointed, and had a hint of an angled, spiral shape behind the point.

  Exactly like the shape of an industrial-sized drill bit.

  I pointed it out to Bayta. She frowned, clearly puzzled, but nodded when I gestured ahead. Throwing a glance over my shoulder to confirm that no one was coming in after us, I eased past the marker and swam into the tunnel.

  The first part was the trickiest. A meter past the drill-bit indentation was the narrowest spot yet, complicated further by a sharp left turn just past the narrows. I had to bend at the waist to get through it then roll over midway to keep my legs from becoming lodged against the side. The lads with the drill had clearly had similar problems, leaving two more marks where they’d bumped their burden getting around the turn. Fortunately, the water was calm; with a current like the one we’d run into outside, it would have been well nigh impossible.

  Past the turn the tunnel straightened and widened again. I waited until Bayta had worked her way through, then together we moved on.

  A few meters beyond the turn the tunnel became a confused honeycomb as it joined up with other passages and sent branches of its own in several directions. Fortunately, I’d taken the precaution of bringing along the tube of bright red lip gloss from Bayta’s new makeup kit, and at each intersection and potential confusion point I marked the stone to show us the way back out.

  But whoever our clumsy driller had been, he’d apparently cleaned up his act. I found two more wall marks within the first couple of meters; and then, just as the labyrinth started to get particularly tangled, the marks disappeared completely. I went a short distance down several of the side passages, but saw nothing to indicate whether he’d been that way or not.

  I’d just given up on the eighth side passage when Bayta tapped me on the arm and pointed significantly to her wrist. Reluctantly, I nodded agreement: If we didn’t start back soon the Halkas were likely to send out a search party. Turning around, I led us back to the bottleneck and then out again into the reassuring glow of the marker lights.

  We were just in time. Even as the passage widened enough for us to use our jets, I could see that the rest of the divers had gathered around the submarine and were awaiting their turns in the airlock. We jetted out and joined them, and a few minutes later were back aboard.

  “Welcome,” the guide greeted us as we unfastened our helmets and shook off the excess water. “I trust you had an enjoyable and enlightening visit?”

  “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, f
or 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?”