by Timothy Zahn
“It’s not slavery,” he insisted, his voice calm and persuasive. “I’m sure the Spiders and Bellidos told you differently, but it really isn’t. The Modhri never interferes with your actions except when absolutely necessary. Like on the Kerfsis transfer station—remember? That was him calling to the soldiers, reacting faster than I could, telling them not to kill you.”
“I remember,” I said. “I believe ‘don’t kill it’ were his precise words. Shows you how highly we stand in his estimation.”
“He was rattled,” Rastra said, some frustration starting to creep into his voice. “Are you going to base your judgment on a single hasty word? Especially a word that saved your life?”
“So what should I base it on?” I countered, feeling fresh sweat starting to gather beneath my collar. We needed to get moving, but we couldn’t very well start climbing to the ceiling with Rastra standing there watching us. The second the Modhri realized what we were doing, he would throw everything he had left against us.
“Base it on what he can give you,” Rastra said. “Insights you couldn’t get anywhere else. Information your peers don’t have, courtesy of a mind that is everywhere and sees everything. Most importantly, base it on the promise of ultimate peace.”
I frowned. “Peace?”
“What need will there be for conflict when friends of the Modhri sit across every boardroom table and diplomatic pedestal across the galaxy?” he said. “Finally, and forever, we’ll all be in true harmony with each other.”
“Sounds like heaven on earth,” I agreed. “And all due to our mutual cooperation with the Modhri?”
He clicked his beak again. “Exactly.”
I shook my head in mock amazement. “You’re good,” I told him. “You’re very good. Every other time I’ve heard you, you’ve sounded like the gloating would-be conqueror from some dit rec drama. I see now that you can also play the Earnest Friend Of Mankind role.”
“What are you talking about?” Rastra said, the scales around his beak creasing. “This is me, your old friend, Falc Rastra.”
“My old friend was Tas Rastra, Modhri,” I corrected. “And as far as I can see, all that’s left of that friend is his body.”
A look of consternation flashed across Rastra’s face. “Compton— Frank—listen to me.”
And in that instant, the Modhri sprang his trap.
From behind me came the sudden rustle of cloth against plastic, and I spun to see JhanKla’s guard-assistant YirTukOo roll off the top of one of the stacks and drop to the floor between Losutu and Bayta, one of the missing oxygen masks covering the lower half of his face. His left hand slapped Losutu across the side of his head, dropping him to the floor, while his right went the other direction, backhand-ing Bayta across her face as well and sending her staggering backward. He stepped over Losutu’s crumpled form as McMicking leaped to the attack—
There was a scuffle of movement behind me, and I twisted around to see Rastra charging toward me, fastening a mask of his own over his beak as he ran. Swearing under my breath, I slashed my knife at the remaining strands of mesh and then jabbed the blade solidly into the side of one of the crates.
And as Rastra finished sealing his mask and stretched out his hands, I got a firm grip on the multitool and threw my full weight to my left.
The crate I was pulling on shifted partway out through the hole I’d cut in the mesh; and with the crates above it suddenly unbalanced, the entire stack collapsed, sending the boxes tumbling out into the aisle. I got a glimpse of startled Jurian eyes as Rastra was buried under the avalanche, then wiggled my knife free and headed back to the others.
Up to now I hadn’t seen McMicking have any real trouble with anything the Modhri had thrown at him. But either fatigue had taken its toll, or else the metal hailstorm in the previous car had shaken him up more than either of us had realized. Even as I sprinted back to help, YirTukOo ducked beneath the swinging nunchaku and slapped his closed right hand hard across McMicking’s face. McMicking staggered two steps backward and tripped over the broken Spider, his nunchaku clattering against the nearest stack of boxes as it fell from his hand. Clenching my teeth, I shifted my knife around into stabbing position and picked up my pace. YirTukOo saw me coming and lifted his hands into combat stance, and I could imagine a smug smile beneath his mask as he waited for me to reach him.
Only in that frozen moment of time I saw something he didn’t. Filling my lungs, I sent a bellow of challenge through my oxygen mask to echo off the ceiling.
A bellow that covered up any noise Bayta might have made as she came up behind the Halka and threw herself onto his shoulders. Wrapping her arms tightly around his neck, she dug both knees hard into his back and pulled.
It was probably the last thing YirTukOo had expected, that someone he’d hit that hard would already be back on her feet, and the shock of it paralyzed him a fatal half second too long. He started to grab for her arms, realized that I was already too close, and tried to get his hands back into a defensive posture.
Before he could, I was on him.
There were very few weak spots in Halkan physiology, and even fewer that could be reached by a knife as short as mine. Unfortunately for him, I knew all of them. Two quick and precise jabs, and it was over.
“You okay?” I asked Bayta as I shoved the Halka’s body off her and lifted her to her feet. The whole right side of her face above her mask, I saw, was a solid red mass where the back of his hand had connected.
“I think so,” she said, a little shakily. “What about the others?”
“I’m all right,” Losutu grunted from the floor behind her. He started to pull himself to his feet; and then, abruptly, he froze. “Oh, no,” he breathed. “Look.”
I followed his pointing finger to YirTukOo’s right hand. In it, still held loosely by the dead fingers, was a small lump of coral.
I felt my stomach tighten as I replayed the fight through my mind’s eye. He’d hit Losutu with his left hand—no danger there. With his right he’d hit Bayta, but with a backhanded blow that should have kept her clear.
And then he’d hit McMicking.
There was a muffled groan from behind me, and I turned to see McMicking push himself to his feet. “Cheap shot,” he muttered, rubbing the back of his head as he retrieved his nunchaku. “Cheap damn lucky shot. What happened?”
“Bayta and I got him,” I said, peering at his face. There was a touch of red just above the left side of his mask, right at the end of a long scratch across the mask itself.
“Looks like most of it hit the mask,” Bayta murmured hopefully from beside me.
“Yeah,” I said heavily. “But not all of it.”
“What are you talking about?” McMicking demanded, reaching up a finger to touch his cheek. He pulled it away, his eyes going flat as he saw the smear of blood. “Hell,” he said, very quietly. “Is this what I think it is?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It could have been just his hand that got you.”
“I doubt it,” he said with a sigh. “Well, that’s it. You’d better get going. Want me to help you get the hatch open first?”
“You’re not staying behind,” Losutu said firmly. “I won’t have it.”
“You don’t have a choice,” McMicking said, just as firmly. “I’m one of them now. Or I will be soon enough.”
“But not for days or weeks,” Losutu said. “Isn’t that right, Compton? We’ve got time to get him to a hospital.”
“A hospital won’t do him any good,” Bayta said, her voice tinged with sadness. “The doctors wouldn’t even know what to look for.”
“What about your Spider friends?” I asked, wondering why I even cared. McMicking was nothing more than an employee of someone I also happened to be working for, after all. “Would they know how to help him?”
She hesitated. Just a split second, but long enough. “No,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
“But he still has those days or weeks, right?” I persisted. “Even if
we can’t help him, we can take him back with us.”
“And then what?” McMicking demanded. “You’ll still have to kill me eventually.”
“I was thinking that an actual specimen might help prove our story,” I said.
Losutu looked at me, his eyes hard and disbelieving above his mask. “Compton, you are the most callous, heartless—”
“Save it,” McMicking cut him off. “He’s right. Fine, I’ll go. Can we get this hatch open now?”
“We can try,” I said. “Bayta, can you—”
I was interrupted by a clunk from above and a sudden swirling of air whipping around me. I looked up to see a section of the roof sliding down like a rolltop desk. “Bayta?” I called over the hurricane.
“The Spider,” Bayta called back, her voice barely audible as the air rushed out of the compartment.
My ears popped once, painfully, then seemed to settle down. Apparently, seven centuries of leakage from ten thousand Quadrail stations had left the Tube with at least enough air pressure to keep our eardrums from blowing. “I’ll take the tank,” I shouted to them, stepping back to where I’d left it. “McMicking, Losutu—you take the Spider.”
It took all of us to get the Spider up the sides of the stacked crates and through the hatch. Losutu and McMicking scrambled up after it, and I helped Bayta up behind them.
I had made it to the top and had a hand on the hatch when something made me pause and look down.
Rastra’s body was still pinioned beneath the crates I’d pulled over on him. But his face was visible, and his eyes as he stared up at me were burning with impotent fury above his oxygen mask. I could see his beak moving, but the air in the compartment was too thin for whatever he was saying to carry that distance.
“I’m sorry,” I said aloud, knowing that he wouldn’t be able to hear me, either. Knowing, too, that the Tas Rastra who I’d once known and liked and respected wasn’t the one who was staring hatred at me. What I had done had been necessary, but that didn’t diminish the pain and guilt whispering through me.
And even then, it occurred to me, the Modhri had missed a bet. He should have released Rastra to talk to me now, to plead in honest bewilderment for me to help him.
I might even have been tempted to do so.
But I had more pressing matters on my mind than the mourning of an old acquaintance. Turning my back on the thing lying dying on the floor, I made my way the rest of the way onto the roof.
It wasn’t nearly as bad as I’d feared it would be. The coach roofs were reasonably flat, and while there weren’t any lips or other guardrails at the edges, there were plenty of built-in hooks and anchor points for Spiders and maintenance cranes to attach to. The low air pressure meant only a gentle breeze would be brushing against our faces, and unlike the dazzling light show the Coreline typically put out at Quadrail stations, here it was giving off only a gently undulating glow behind its loose wire mesh, a glow not much brighter than a nice harvest moon.
“I’ll go first,” I instructed the others. “Bayta will come next, then McMicking and Losutu. Bayta can drive this thing if she has to, so if you can’t get the Spider across without risking a fall, leave it.” Bayta stirred at that, but remained silent. “Ready? Let’s do it.”
I set off across the top of the baggage car in an elbows-and-knees commando crawl, moving as quickly as I dared. Bayta had said it was impossible to open the doors outside a station, but I didn’t trust the Modhri not to find a way to do it. I reached the front of the car and eased myself down onto the slightly lower and more flexible top of the vestibule, then crawled across it and up the other side. Checking over my shoulder once to make sure the others were following, I continued on.
I had passed over that car and was just coming up out of the vestibule onto the next when I tilted a little too far to the side and the tank on my back began to roll off.
I stopped instantly, spread-eagling my arms and legs to the sides. The tank was better than half my own weight, and it wouldn’t take much movement on its part to pull me up onto my side and possibly roll me off the train altogether. I held that posture, feeling the rhythmic vibration of the train beneath me, until I was sure the tank had stopped moving. Then, carefully, I pushed up on that side with shoulder and hip to try to shift it back into position over my spine. It started to move, but a few centimeters shy of its proper position it froze up again. I tried jiggling it, but it wouldn’t budge; hung up, most likely, on one of its own straps.
Briefly, I thought about waiting for Bayta to catch up and seeing if she could straighten it out. But there was still the Modhri to worry about, and I didn’t want to waste the time. Besides, there was more than one way to skin a cat. Bracing myself, I hunched my back sharply upward, throwing the cylinder into the air and breaking it loose from its snag. With that much weight in motion my body bounced up with it, and I felt myself lift a fraction of a centimeter off the roof.
And suddenly I found myself skidding helplessly along the top of the car.
I flattened out again, grabbing futilely for the handholds as they whizzed past, fighting to slow down even as I tried to figure out what the hell had happened. My first, horrifying thought was that the Modhri had managed to take control of the engine and had hit the brakes. My second, even more horrible thought was that we’d hit something. Either way, unless I could stop myself, I was going to keep sliding until I ran out of train and tumbled onto the tracks ahead.
Abruptly, the roof dropped out from beneath me. I braced myself for the worst, and had just enough time to realize I had dipped into the next vestibule before I slammed head-first against the edge of the next car forward.
I lay there for the next couple of minutes, watching the stars bouncing around my vision and wondering if I’d broken my neck, split my skull, or both. Fortunately, I’d done neither. The pain subsided to a less pervasive level, allowing my brain to get back to the question of what the hell had happened. There had been no squealing or thudding of brakes, nor had there been the flash or sound of an impact. As far as I could tell, in fact, the Quadrail was still trundling merrily along its way.
I puzzled at it for another minute, but it was clear I wasn’t going to figure it out lying here. Meanwhile, there was still a trainload of walkers to get away from. Giving my neck one last experimental rotation, I pulled myself up onto the next car.
And got the shock of my life. Directly ahead, one car past the one I was on, was the Quadrail’s engine.
I stared at it, wondering if the shimmering glow from the Coreline was playing tricks on my eyes. But it was the engine, all right, all bright and shiny and pulling us through the Tube at its steady pace of one light-year per minute.
Only that was impossible. I’d been on the back of the coach two cars forward from our baggage car, nine back from where I now suddenly found myself. Had I blacked out somehow? Could I have done all those intervening cars in my sleep?
Or could my blackout have had a little help?
My mouth felt suddenly dry behind my mask. A blackout, an attempt to run across the cars instead of crawling across them—yes, it could all fit with a Modhran colony weaving its little spells through my body.
But in that case why was I still alive? Surely the Modhri wouldn’t have tried to run me off the train and then had second thoughts about it. Would he? I stared at the engine chugging along ahead of me…
And then, suddenly, I had it. It hadn’t been the Modhri, after all.
It had been something far worse.
I don’t know how long I laid there. Long enough to start thinking again, anyway, and to remember my priorities. Rubbing my neck, I crawled up onto the car and made my way to the front.
The engine didn’t have a convenient vestibule to crawl down onto, but there was a wide connector fastening it to the rest of the Quadrail with plenty of hand- and footholds along the way. Moving carefully, I climbed down, stepped across the connector, and made it onto the back of the engine itself. The cab door, fortunately, fac
ed the rear. I tried it, found it unlocked, and went inside.
I was waiting there, the big oxygen tank set up and ready to go in one of the front corners, when Bayta arrived.
“Whew!” she said as she climbed inside the cab and collapsed onto the floor beside the tank. “I’ve never been on top of one of these before. Not nearly as bad as I was afraid it would be. Don’t open that tank yet—the compartment doesn’t have an airlock.”
“Yes, I know,” I said. “You okay?”
“Yes, I’m fine,” she assured me. “Why, don’t I sound all right?”
“You sound nervous,” I told her. “You’re talking a blue streak, and you never do that.”
“I’m just tired,” she said quickly. Too quickly. “Too many emotional tumbles in the past hour.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. “As long as we have this moment alone together, let me ask you something. Back in the baggage car, after McMicking got hit by the coral, you said you couldn’t do anything to help him.”
Her eyes skittered guiltily away from mine. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry yet,” I warned. “To be precise, what you said was that the Spiders couldn’t do anything. You never said whether or not you could.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” she said carefully.
“Yes, you do,” I said. “You recovered from YirTukOo’s attack a lot faster than any of us expected. Including him.”
Her eyes had gone very still above her mask. “I’m not a Modhran walker, Frank,” she said, her voice steady.
“No, you’re not,” I agreed. “You’re one of the ones fighting the Modhri, as well as controlling the Spiders and the Quadrail and, apparently, pretty much the whole galaxy.” I lifted my eyebrows. “And I’m guessing both you and the Modhri came from something of the same stock. Tell me I’m wrong.”
For a long minute she just gazed at me. Fleetingly, I wished I could have waited until we’d had a room full of air, when I could have seen more of her face and maybe had a clue as to what she was thinking. But the cab was too small to provide any privacy, and I definitely didn’t want McMicking and Losutu in on this conversation. “What do you want?” she asked at last.
