by Timothy Zahn
Bayta nudged me, and I looked over Givvrac’s shoulder to see that Kennrick had reappeared on our side of the car, a pair of drinks in hand. “Thank you for your openness and honesty,” l said to the Filly, inclining my head. “Perhaps we can speak now of the other possible motive for these horrific crimes, namely that of revenge. Can you think of any reason why someone would be carrying anger or hatred toward either Master Colix or Master Bofiv?”
“Here we go,” Kennrick said as he came up to the table. He set the drinks down and then resumed his seat beside Givvrac. “My apologies for the delay.”
“No apologies required,” Givvrac said. “As to your question, Mr. Compton, I believe it would be inappropriate for me to speak of another’s life after his voice is silenced.”
“I understand,” I said, suppressing a grimace. Was it inappropriate to gossip about the deceased at all, or was it only inappropriate because Kennrick was now back in the conversation? “In that case. I think that’s all I need for the moment, I thank you deeply for your time and wisdom, Usantra Givvrac.”
“You are welcome,” Givvrac said. “Feel free to approach me with further questions if you have the need. Will you also wish to speak with Esantra Worrbin, Asantra Muzzfor, or Asantra Dallilo?”
“Perhaps later,” I said. “If I do, I’ll be sure to obtain your permission first.”
“No need,” he said. “I hereby grant you open access to all Filiaelians under my authority aboard this train.”
“I appreciate that,” I said, inclining my head again. Fillies weren’t the obsessive sticklers for protocol that Juriani were, but they had definite ideas of rank and chain of command. Violating those rules would burn whatever goodwill I might have started with, and could conceivably get the whole crowd of them to clam up on me completely. With Givvrac’s carte blanche in hand, at least I didn’t have to worry about that.
“Then we take our leave.” Givvrac said, placing both hands on the table and carefully getting to his feet. “Perhaps, Mr. Kennrick, you’ll assist me back to the bar area?”
“Certainly,” Kennrick said, scrambling quickly to his feet and holding out a hand where the Filly could grab it if necessary. “Compton, could you give me a hand with the drinks? I can’t handle both of them and offer Usantra Givvrac assistance at the same time.”
“Certainly,” I said, standing up.
“No need,” Givvrac said, waving me down again. “My drink has lost its taste, and Mr. Kennrick can easily handle his own.”
“Are you sure?” I asked. “It’s no trouble, I assure you.”
“I’m sure,” Givvrac said. “Thank you for your time, Mr. Compton. Mr. Kennrick?”
“Ready,” Kennrick said, picking op his own drink. As I sat down again, they turned away and started across the dining room.
And then, two steps away, Givvrac paused and retraced his steps back to our table. “One other thing, Mr. Compton,” he said. “If I may be so bold as to offer you advice in your area of expertise.”
“In my area of expertise there’s always more to learn,” I assured him, gesturing to the chair he’d just vacated. “Please speak on.”
“Thank you,” he said, making no move to sit down. “You stated that the motives for murder were passion, profit, and revenge. In your place. I would consider two additional possibilities.”
“Those being?” I asked.
“The first is honor,” he said. “With Filiaelians and Shorshians alike, damage or endangerment to one’s honor can be reason to eliminate the one who presents that threat. I don’t know if Humans feel similar motivations.”
“We do, though perhaps to a different degree,” I told him.
“And to varying degrees within our species,” Kennrick added. “Certainly there are Earth cultures that hold honor very important.”
“True,” I said. “And the second motive, Usantra Givvrac?”
His eyes burned into me. “Insanity.”
For a moment the word hung in the air like a bubble of black in a dark gray silence. Then, Givvrac gave me a final nod. “Thank you for your time. Mr. Compton. Good day.”
“Good day, Usantra Givvrac,” I replied. “Good health to you.”
“Perhaps,” he said. “We shall see.”
He headed back across the dining area, Kennrick at his side. “What do you think?” I asked Bayta.
“I was just wondering if Mr. Kennrick has figured out who was on which side of the contract discussion,” she said, her voice thoughtful.
“If Mr. Kennrick is worth anywhere near his salt, one would certainly hope so,” I said.
“Could he want the contract enough to kill to make sure it went through?”
“Possibly.” I said. “The problem with that theory is that, at the moment, two-thirds of the poisoning victims were already on his side.”
“Unless he misread their intentions.”
“True,” I said. “But if we’re going down the profit side of the street, it would make more sense if the killer was on the other side of the deadlock.”
“Master Tririn?”
“He certainly shows promise,” I said. “He’s opposed to the contract, and he had easy access to two of the victims.”
“But not to the third,” Bayta pointed out. “Di-Master Strinni was in first class, where Master Tririn wouldn’t have been able to get to him.”
“Unless Strinni liked to go back and visit the others like Kennrick did,” I said. “Givvrac implied that he didn’t, but Givvrac may not know for sure. Or Tririn might have come up here if someone in first asked for him.”
Bayta frowned into space. “No one asked Master Tririn to come forward,” she said.
I shrugged. “It was a long shot. It’s not like Master Tririn’s been in high demand around the train the way Dr. Aronobal and Dr. Witherspoon have.”
“True,” Bayta agreed. “It also occurs to me that we only have Usantra Givvrac’s word that Master Tririn was actually opposed to the Pellorian contract.”
“Very good.” I said approvingly. “As I told Givvrac. investigations require questions and answers. But you don’t necessarily believe those answers. Any other thoughts?”
“Just this.” She pointed at Givvrac’s abandoned drink. “Do you know what this is?”
I picked it up and gave the contents a sniff. The concoction had a tangy, exotic aroma, but with no scent of alcohol that I could detect. “Not a clue,” I said.
“It’s miccrano,” she said. “A traditional Filiaelian remedy for serious stomach and digestive trouble.”
“Is it, now,” I said, eyeing the drink with new interest. “Sounds like he may be feeling more than just a bit delicate. Has he had a chat with either of our two doctors?”
Bayta’s eyes defocused as she again consulted with the Spiders. As she did so, the server appeared from the rear of the dining area with the meals we’d ordered before Kennrick first came to our table. I’d actually expected the food to show up during our conversation, which could have been a little awkward since Givvrac would certainly have insisted on a polite departure. Knowing Bayta, she’d probably telepathically instructed the Spider to hold the meals until we’d finished and our visitors had left.
Bayta’s eyes came back. “He had a conductor bring Dr. Aronobal up from third class about an hour ago,” she reported. “Dr. Aronobal is the one who recommended the miccrano to him.”
“Which also probably explains why Kennrick was here instead of in his compartment.” I said as the Spider set our plates in front of us. “Givvrac would have been in the bar, working through his tummy-soothers, when Kennrick passed by on his way to lie down. Do we know how many of them he had?”
“This was his third,” Bayta said, nodding at the glass.
“Which he never touched,” I commenced, rubbing my chin. “I wonder why he decided to abandon it.”
“Maybe he was feeling better,” Bayta suggested.
“Or decided that the first two hadn’t done him any good anyway,” I said,
something prickly running up my back as I eyed the glass. If someone had poisoned the drink …
I snorted under my breath. No—that one was pure paranoia. Even if Kennrick was the killer, he’d have to be crazy to poison Givvrac at a time when we knew they were having a drink together.
Still, it couldn’t do any harm to check. “Bayta, can you have the server in the dispensary bring me one of those little vials from the sampling kit?” I asked.
“Yes, of course,” she said, her voice suddenly uncertain. “You think there’s something in Usantra Givvrac’s drink?”
“No, but we might as well be thorough about this.” I picked up my fork. “Meanwhile, this isn’t getting any warmer. Let’s eat.”
The meal was up to the usual Quadrail standards. Unfortunately, it was impossible for me to properly enjoy it with my gut rumbling the way it was. Halfway through, I gave up and pushed the plate away.
Bayta was either feeling better than I was or else was stubbornly committed to not wasting any of the food her Spider friends had hauled across the galaxy for our benefit. She made it all the way through her vegetable roll, chewing silently but determinedly.
She was just finishing off her lemonade when a server Spider appeared and set a sampling vial and a small hypo on the table beside my plate.
“Thank you,” I said. Taking the hypo, I extracted a couple of milliliters of Givvrac’s drink and injected it into the vial. “I said thank you,” I repeated, looking at the Spider.
“He’s waiting for you to give back the hypo,” Bayta explained.
“Ah,” I said, reversing the instrument and holding it up. The Spider extended a leg and took it, then folded the leg up beneath his globe and tapped his way back out of the dining area. “Any news on the air filter?” I asked Bayta.
“It’s nearly done,” she said. “It should be ready by the time we get back there.”
“Good,” I said, standing up and slipping the sample vial into my pocket. “Let’s go.”
EIGHT
It was getting toward train’s evening, and the third-class passengers were starting to drift back to their seats after a busy day in the entertainment car, the exercise area, or the bar.
Which meant there was a large and curious audience already in place when Bayta and I moved toward the rear of the car and the disassembled air filter system waiting there for us.
I’d never asked Bayta what exactly the disassembly procedure entailed. Now, as we joined a group of knee-high mite Spiders and a pair of the larger conductors, I could see why the job had taken this long. A section of ceiling nearly a meter square had been taken down, probably with the help of the two conductors, and was currently hanging by thin support wires attached to its four corners at about throat level over the back row of seats. The occupants of those seats, not surprisingly, had found somewhere else to be for the moment.
“We couldn’t bring in a couple of cameras so the whole train could watch?” I grumbled as we passed our third knot of rubberneckers.
“I thought you’d want to take the sample yourself,” Bayta countered, a slight edge to her voice. Clearly, she didn’t like having the Quadrail’s innards exposed to the paying customers this way any more than I did, and she didn’t appreciate me getting on her case about it. “There’s no way you could have reached the filter while it was still in place.”
And given the tight tolerances of Quadrail floor space, there was probably nowhere more private where they could have lugged the filter assembly for the procedure. “I suppose,” I conceded.
We reached the hanging plate, and I took a moment to study its upper side. The filter assembly consisted of about a dozen boxes of various sizes and shapes scattered across the plate, all of them marked with incomprehensible dot codes. They were connected to each other by a bewildering and colorful spaghetti of tubes, ducts, cables, and wires. Other tubes and conduits, carefully sealed off, ran to the edges of the plate, where presumably they connected to equipment tucked away above the rest of the ceiling. The plate itself had sixteen connectors, four per side, for fastening it to the rest of the ceiling. The connectors, I noted, were accessible only from above. It was pretty clear that no one was going to tamper with the system without Spider help. “Which one do I want?” I asked Bayta.
“That one,” she said, pointing to the largest of the boxes. “The Spiders will take off the cover for you.”
“Thanks,” I said, looking down at the mites grouped around us like shiny seven-legged lap dogs. “Do they need a boost?”
“No,” Bayta said, and I quickly stepped back as a pair of fist-sized twitters appeared from inside the ceiling and deftly slid down the corner lines onto the exposed machinery. Picking their way across the miniature landscape, they reached the box Bayta had indicated and started removing one of its sides.
“Here,” Bayta said, pressing a pair of sample vials into my hand. “Will you need a hypo or scraper?”
“Got one, thanks,” I said, pulling out my multitool and selecting one of the blades. The twitters got the filter’s side off, and I leaned in for a closer look.
I’d expected to find some sort of thin but tangible layer of fluffiness, the sort of thing you might find in an office building air filter that hadn’t been replaced for a few weeks. But the dimpled white material sitting in front of me looked as clean and fresh as if it had come right out of the box.
It looked, in fact, like some industrious Spider had given it a thorough cleaning sometime in the past few hours. And if one of them had, this whole thing was going to be a complete waste of time. “You did warn the Spiders not to clean it, didn’t you?”
“Of course,” Bayta said. “It hasn’t been touched since Homshil.”
“Looks pretty clean to me,” I pointed out.
“It’s the third-stage filter,” she said. “It always looks clean.”
I suppressed a grimace. Of course it did. All the larger dust and lint particles would have been captured by a larger-mesh filter somewhere upstream in the system. But it was this filter that would have a shot at trapping impurities the size of cadmium atoms and compounds. “Just making sure,” I said, trying to salvage a little dignity.
Experimentally, I gently scraped the multitool blade along one edge of the filter. A small cascade of fine white powder appeared and drifted slowly downward. Moving the blade to a different part of the filter. I held one of the vials in position and scraped more of the white powder into it. I waited until the dust had settled and then handed the vial to Bayta for sealing. I repeated the operation on a third section of the filter, again handing the vial to Bayta when I was done. “That should do it.” I told her. Folding the blade back into the multitool, I turned around.
And stopped short. Standing three meters away, right in the center of the ring of gawkers, was the Filly I’d had the brief tussle with earlier that day in the third-class bar. He was Staring at me with an intensity I didn’t at all care for. “Can I help you?” I asked.
“What do you do here?” the Filly asked, his long nose pointing toward the filter assembly.
“Just a routine maintenance sampling,” I said in my best authoritative-but-soothing voice. “Nothing you need to be concerned about.”
I’d used that voice to good advantage many times over the years. Unfortunately, this particular Filly wasn’t buying it. “Is there danger in the air?” he demanded. “Is there risk to us all?”
“There’s no risk to anyone,” I said firmly if not entirely truthfully. “As I said, this is just a routine maintenance check.”
But it was no use. A low-level murmur was already rippling through the rest of the onlookers, some of whom had probably ridden this line before and knew that there was nothing routine about what we were doing. “If there is risk, we deserve to know the truth,” the Filly said firmly, his volume rising to a level that would reach most of the car instead of just the group assembled here at the rear.
“There is no risk,” I said again, letting my gaze drift over th
e crowd as I tried to think up an answer that would satisfy them. “But you’re right, you deserve to know the truth. If you’ll all be quiet a moment?”
I stopped, waiting for them to pick up on the cue. I could feel Bayta’s eyes on me, and her concern as she wondered what exactly I was doing.
I wondered what I was doing, too. Telling them there was a murderer aboard the train was definitely out—we could wind up with a riot on our hands, with nowhere anyone could escape to. But I’d had enough experience with rumor mills to know that if we didn’t give them something the situation would only get worse, possibly leading to the same riot I was hoping so hard to avoid.
Ergo, I had to give them some truth. The trick, as always, would be to figure out how much.
Slowly, in bits and pieces, the mutterings faded away. “Thank you,” I said. “I presume you’re all aware that two of your fellow travelers died yesterday.”
The last mutterings abruptly vanished. I had their full attention now. all right. I heard Bayta mutter something under her breath, but it wasn’t like the rest of the passengers wouldn’t have noticed the two newly empty seats. “What I’m doing here is checking for the presence of what are called after-elements,” I went on. “Those are bits of nucleic acid residue, antibodies, mucousids—the sorts of things that might have been exhaled by a person in his last battle against a lethal congenital defect.”
The Filly’s nose blaze darkened a bit. “A congenital defect? In both victims?”
“I can see no other likely conclusion,” I said, noting in passing his unusual use of the word victims. “No one else in the car has shown any signs of illness, which eliminates the possibility that they died from some contagious disease.”
I gestured toward a pair of Shorshians near the rear of the crowd. “It can’t even be something specific to Shorshians, since other Shorshians in the car haven’t been affected.”
“So you say it was a congenital disease,” the Filly said, his tone a hit odd.
