by Timothy Zahn
“Why?”
“I won’t know that until I find something,” I said. “Scenario two: framing me for a gruesome double murder was intended to put me out of circulation long enough for the Modhri to pull off some other stunt.”
“Maybe related to all that coral he was moving?” Bayta suggested.
“Could be,” I said. “Of course, that would require Lorelei to also have been a walker who went to my apartment to snag one of my guns. Scenario three is that the whole thing was a setup to get me to flush McMicking out into the open for him.”
Bayta took a thoughtful sip of her lemonade. “You did say the walkers following you seemed more interested in him than in you.”
“True,” I agreed. “On the other hand, we could still be on scenarios one or two, and deciding to follow us was just something the Modhri decided on the fly after seeing McMicking bail me out.”
“I don’t know,” Bayta said thoughtfully. “Something about the last two scenarios bothers me.”
“Me, too,” I said. “Starting with the fact that if Lorelei was a walker there was no reason for her to keep hanging around my apartment after she’d stolen my gun. There was certainly no reason for her to spin me that story about a kid sister in trouble.”
“So what you’re saying is that, for good or evil, someone wants you to go looking for her,” she concluded slowly.
I cocked an eyebrow. “‘For good or evil’?”
She colored slightly. “I’ve been reading Earth literature lately,” she admitted. “I thought it would help me to understand … all of us … a little better.”
I suppressed a grimace. Bayta was in effect a hybrid, a Human who’d grown up with a full-blown alien Chahwyn similarly growing up inside her. They shared much the same sort of dual mind as a walker and his Modhran colony, except that in Bayta’s case it was a true symbiosis and not simply a parasitical relationship. The Chahwyn part gave her a stamina beyond normal Human capacity, and let her communicate telepathically with the Chahwyn and the Spiders, an ability that came in handy on a regular basis.
If I thought about it too hard, it could become a little unsettling. But for her, obviously, it worked.
But partly because of that, and partly because Bayta had been raised by the Chahwyn, there were certain gaps in her Human cultural understanding. I’d been doing my best to help fill those gaps over the past few months by showing her some of the classic dit rec dramas by Hitchcock and Kurosawa and Reed. Now, it seemed she’d decided to branch out into literature, as well.
Still, there was something vaguely embarrassing about her admission, composed as it was of equal parts childlikeness and the painful awareness that for all her Human appearance she still wasn’t fully Human. I turned my eyes away from her, pretending I was just checking out the area around us.
My eyes halted their sweep, Bayta’s discomfiture abruptly forgotten. Sitting on a bench fifty meters away, his left profile turned to me, was a Pirk.
There was nothing unusual about that per se. Pirks loved to travel, and were reputed to spend more of their income on that than anything else except housing. This particular Pirk was typical of his people: wiry, covered with goose-like feathers, wearing the simple headdress that denoted modest means and social standing. He was gazing across the platforms that straddled the various four-railed Quadrail tracks running along the inside of the Tube.
But there was something else about him, something that was decidedly atypical of the species. The bubble of empty space that typically surrounded every Pirk wasn’t there. Other travelers, Humans as well as non-Pirk aliens, were passing by his bench without veering away, some of them getting as close as a meter before they even seemed to notice he was there.
Either Terra Station was witnessing a mass paralysis of the olfactory organs, or else we’d stumbled across the galaxy’s first non-aromatic Pirk.
“Frank?” Bayta asked.
“Take a look,” I said, nodding fractionally toward the bench. “The Pirk over there with the yellow-and-pale-blue headdress.”
Lifting her lemonade, she casually looked that direction. “Looks fairly young,” she said. “Lower-middle-class, probably, from the headdress. Maybe even a bit lower …” She trailed off.
“Yeah, that’s what I was thinking,” I agreed. “Did the Pirks suddenly discover deodorant when I wasn’t looking?
“Deodorants don’t do any good,” she said, frowning at him. “The distinctive Pirk aroma comes from the food they eat. The by-products are metabolized and excreted through the skin pores—”
“I was being facetious,” I interrupted. Cultural gaps aside, Bayta’s general book learning was very much up to date. “So does that mean this one’s on a special diet or something?”
“I don’t know,” Bayta said. Her eyes shifted a little to the left. “Do you know those Humans he’s staring at?”
Caught up in the novelty of it all, I hadn’t even picked up on the fact that he was looking at something across the way. I tracked along his sightlines, and found myself facing a similar bench two platforms over.
There, chatting amiably together, were two men I did indeed recognize. “They’re a couple of my fellow torchliner passengers,” I said. “I don’t know their names.”
Bayta tapped thoughtfully on our table. “There’s something about them that bothers me.”
I took a sip of my tea. Now that she mentioned it, there was something about them that bothered me, too. I watched them out of the corner of my eye, trying to figure it out. They were both in their late forties, with similar bland facial features and rotund physiques that put them halfway to the dit rec cartoon version of Tweedledee and Tweedledum. They were nicely dressed but not ostentatiously so, with none of the look of the superrich that were the Modhri’s favored target for planting colonies inside.
Still, I knew that up to now he hadn’t launched that kind of campaign against humanity, contenting himself with keeping an eye on us via low- and mid-level governmental functionaries. The two Tweedles could easily fit into that category.
But then, so could any number of other people.
So what was it about them that had caught our attention?
And then, suddenly, it hit me. Since I’d been watching them neither man had checked his watch, or looked up at one of the floating schedule holodisplays, or even glanced down the track whose platform they were sitting beside.
They had, in short, a settled look. Like two men who weren’t really anticipating the arrival of their train, but were simply hanging around the station enjoying the ambience.
It was much the same look as our non-stinky Pirk had, now that I thought about it. For that matter, it was the same look Bayta and I probably had. Three sets of travelers, none of whom had anywhere to go.
I lowered my eyes to the luggage nestled beside the two Tweedles. Four reasonably large rolling bags, plus two shoulder bags. Enough carrying capacity for someone who was traveling light to go anywhere in the galaxy. “Do me a favor,” I said to Bayta. “Find out when the next train is due to arrive on that track, and where it’s going.”
Bayta’s eyes took on a slightly glazed look as she sent out a telepathic message to the station’s Spiders. “It’s an express heading outward toward the Bellidosh Estates-General,” she said after a moment. “It doesn’t arrive for nearly two hours.”
“Ah,” I said. “Okay. Well, the good news is that your instincts are working perfectly.”
I quirked a lip toward the Tweedles. “The bad news is that our friends over there seem to be waiting patiently for us to make our move.”
Bayta nodded, a typically calm acceptance. “Do we have one yet?”
I ran a finger idly up the side of my now nearly empty glass. “I think so,” I told her. “We’re going to need two different trains. The first will be a local going coreward to Yandro and Jurian space.”
“Where are we going?”
“Yandro,” I said. “The second will be another local passing outward through Y
andro back here.”
Her forehead creased for a moment as she studied my face. Then the wrinkles smoothed out again. “All right,” she said. “Let me see what’s available.”
Her eyes glazed over again. Her lemonade was also gone, and I wondered briefly whether or not I should get us some food when I ordered refills.
“Got it,” she said, her eyes coming back to focus. “The train for Yandro leaves from Platform Seven in forty minutes.”
So much for getting food or even more drinks. But there would be plenty of both on the train. “And the other?”
“It’ll leave Yandro two hours after we arrive.”
“Perfect,” I said. “We have compartments on both?”
“Of course,” she said, as if I even had to ask.
“Good,” I said. Pulling out a cash stick, I plugged it into the payment slot in our table. “Let’s go.”
“Already?” she asked, frowning. “There’s still forty minutes.”
“I know,” I said. “But our friends over there are going to need time to buy their tickets, too. No point in making them rush.”
She gave a quiet sigh. “I suppose not. Oh, and you’ll probably want this back.” Pulling a folded handkerchief from her pocket, she pushed it across the table toward me.
I closed my hand over it, feeling the reassuring weight of the Chahwyn kwi weapon as I picked it up. “Thanks,” I said, slipping it into my own pocket. “Did you have to use it?”
She shook her head. “The Modhri seems to be avoiding me.”
“I don’t blame him,” I said. The kwi had two basic settings—unconsciousness and pain—both of which worked quite well against Modhran walkers.
Of course, it was anyone’s guess as to how long the thing would last. The kwi was over a millennium old, a relic from the war that had originally spawned the Modhri in the first place. The Chahwyn who’d dug up the kwi didn’t know an awful lot about it, including if or when it might suddenly pop a vital circuit and become nothing more than a flexible and rather decorative set of brass knuckles.
Still, for now the thing worked, and it worked well, and the Chahwyn had given me permission—albeit grudgingly—to carry it aboard the Quadrail. For that I was grateful.
Grateful enough that I didn’t even resent the fact that Bayta and I seemed to be field-testing the thing for them.
Retrieving my cash stick, I stood up and keyed the leash control inside my jacket. Obediently, the two bags at my feet aligned themselves, ready to roll as soon as I started moving. Bayta also stood up, her bags similarly preparing themselves for duty. “Okay, let’s go,” I said. “Nice and easy and casual.”
“I know the routine,” Bayta said. “By the way, Frank …”
I looked at her, seeing the sudden discomfort and embarrassment in her face. “Yes?” I asked.
Her lip twitched. “Nothing,” she murmured. “Sorry.”
“That’s okay,” I assured her. “I’m glad we’re back in the trenches together, too.”
A flicker of surprise crossed her face, followed rapidly by relief and then a second surge of embarrassment. “Right,” she said. “Me, too.”
“So let’s get to it,” I said, gesturing her ahead of me like a proper gentleman.
As we headed away from the table toward Platform Seven, out of the corner of my eye I saw our settled-looking Pirk get up off his bench. He fussed for a moment with his headdress, then started off in the same direction we were also going. I didn’t want to turn around and check on the two Humans, but I suspected they had joined the parade as well.
Fourteen hours to Yandro, another eleven back to New Tigris, then probably five to eight days to get to New Tigris proper via torchliner. Add in the twenty days since Lorelei had left New Tigris Station, plus the five to eight days up from the planet itself, and by the time we reached her kid sister Rebekah it would be a month or more that the girl had been on her own.
I just hoped she wasn’t in any pressing hurry to be rescued.
Buy Odd Girl Out Now!
A Biography of Timothy Zahn
Timothy Zahn is a New York Times bestselling and award-winning science-fiction author of more than forty novels, as well as dozens of novellas and short stories. He is best known for his Star Wars novels, which have been widely credited with rejuvenating the Star Wars book franchise. Zahn is known for his engaging writing style, pithy dialogue, compelling plot lines, intricately detailed alien cultures, inventive alien technology, and the complex morality of his characters.
Born in 1951, in Chicago, Illinois, Zahn holds a bachelor’s degree in physics from Michigan State University and a master’s degree in physics from the University of Illinois. It was while working toward his PhD in the late 1970s that Zahn began focusing on writing science fiction. He sold his first story in 1978 and, two years later, began to write fulltime.
In 1984, Zahn won a Hugo Award for his short story “Cascade Point.” That same year he also published Blackcollar, the first installment of his Blackcollar series. He launched the Cobra series two years later with Cobra (1985), and published the celebrated Thrawn trilogy, which gave the Star Wars narrative new life, throughout the 1990s. His YA Dragonback series, of which Dragon and Thief (2003) was named an ALA Best Book for Young Adults, includes six books published between 2003 and 2008.
Zahn is especially beloved among the Star Wars fan community for his contributions to the Star Wars books. His best-known Star Wars titles, the Thrawn trilogy, were voted onto NPR’s list of the top 100 science-fiction and fantasy books of all time.
Zahn lives in Oregon with his family.
Zahn’s school portrait from 1957, when he was six years old.
A yearbook photo of Zahn playing the cello in his high school orchestra in 1969.
Zahn’s high school senior class picture from 1969.
Zahn and his wife, Anna, on their wedding day in August 1979.
Zahn poses with his wife, Anna, and their son Corwin, 1983.
Zahn takes the podium at the Hugo Award ceremonies, September 1984.
Zahn with his agent Russell Galen, September 1984.
Zahn with fellow authors David B. Coe and Jim Frenkel, March 2002.
Zahn with Dr. Les Johnson at the NASA Advanced Propulsion Group, July 2003.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2007 by Timothy Zahn
Cover design by Kat Lee
ISBN: 978-1-5040-1641-4
This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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