Night Train to Rigel (2 page)

Seven minutes later, far down the Tube, the telltale red glow of our Quadrail appeared.

The rest of the passengers had gathered on the platform, and once again I could hear the amazed and slightly nervous twitterings of the first-timers. The train approached rapidly, the red glow resolving into a pair of brilliant laserlike beams flashing between the engine’s oversized front bumper and the Coreline overhead. In the spots where the beams touched it, the Coreline’s own light show became even more agitated, and I amused myself by watching out of the corner of my eye as several of the uninitiated eased a few steps backward. The lasers winked out, and the dark mass resolved into a shiny silver engine pulling a line of equally shiny silver cars, the whole thing decelerating rapidly as it neared the platform. The engine and first few cars rolled past us, and with a squeal of brakes the Quadrail came to a halt.

There were sixteen cars in this particular train, each with a single door near the front. The doors irised open simultaneously and each disgorged a conductor Spider, a more or less Human-sized version of the drudge who’d made off earlier with my luggage. The conductors moved to the sides of the doors and stood there like Buckingham Palace sentries as lines of Humans and aliens maneuvered their carrybags out onto the platform and headed for either the waiting rooms or the glowing hatchways marking the spots where shuttles were waiting. At the rear, drudges were busily removing larger pieces of luggage from the baggage car for transfer to the shuttles, while on the far side of the train I knew other drudges would be doing likewise with the various undercar storage compartments.

I looked toward the front of the train, where a pair of drudges had reached the engine. One of them set its feet into a line of embedded rings and climbed partially up the side to a slightly lumpy box set into the engine’s roof just behind a compact dish antenna. Two of the spindly legs reached up and popped the box lid open, delicately removing a flattened message cylinder and handing it down to the other drudge waiting below. The second Spider accepted the cylinder and passed up one of its own, which the first then replaced in the box. Deceptively compact, those cylinders were packed with the most current news from around the galaxy, along with private electronic messages and encrypted data of all sorts.

Passengers, cargo, and mail, the ultimate hat trick of any civilization. All of it running via the Quadrail.

All of it under the control of the Spiders.

A few minutes later the outward flow of passengers ended, and the line of conductors took a multilegged step forward. “All aboard Trans-Galactic Quadrail 339216, to New Tigris, Yandro, the Jurian Collective, the Cimmal Republic, and intermediate transfer nodes,” they announced in unison, verbalizing the information that was also being given by a multilanguage holodisplay suspended over the train. “Departure in twenty-three minutes.”

The crowd surged forward as the Spiders repeated the announcement in Juric and Mahee, rather a waste of time since there weren’t any Juriani or Cimmaheem waiting for this particular Quadrail. But procedure was procedure, as I’d learned during my years of government service, and not to be trifled with merely because it didn’t happen to make sense. Circling around the back of the crowd, I headed for Car Fifteen, the last one before the baggage car.

My ticket had come edged in copper, which had already indicated it was one of the lower-class seats. But it wasn’t until I climbed through the door and stepped past a stack of safety-webbed cargo crates into the aisle that I realized just how far down the food chain I actually was. Car Fifteen was a hybrid: basically a baggage carrier, stacked three-deep on both sides with secured cargo crates, with a single column of thirty seats shoehorned like an afterthought between the aisle and the wall of boxes to the right.

A half dozen nonhumans were already seated: Cimmaheem, Juriani, and a lone Bellido, none of them paying any attention to me as I worked my way down the aisle. The Juriani, looking like upright iguanas with hawk beaks and three-toed clawed feet, had the unpolished scales of commoners, while the pear-shaped Cimmaheem wore their shaggy yarnlike hair loose instead of in the elaborate braids of the higher social classes.

I paid particular attention to the Bellido as I approached him, checking for the prominently displayed shoulder holsters and handguns that typically conveyed status in their culture. Actual weapons weren’t allowed inside the Tube, but the Bellidos had adapted to the Spiders’ rules by replacing their real guns with soft plastic imitations when they traveled.

To me, the aliens always came off looking rather ridiculous, like tiger-striped, chipmunk-faced children playing soldier with toy guns. Given that outside the Quadrail their guns were real, I’d made it a point to keep such opinions to myself.

But this particular Bellido’s shoulders were unadorned, which was again pretty much as I’d expected. Interstellar steerage, the whole lot of us. Whoever my unknown benefactor was, he was apparently pretty tight with a dollar.

Still, this car would get me to Yandro as fast as the first-class seats up front. And for once, at least, I wouldn’t have to worry about a seatmate of excessive with or questionable personal hygiene.

And then, as I passed the Bellido, he gave me a look.

It wasn’t much of a look, as looks go: a casual flick upward of his eyes, and an equally casual flick back down again. But there was something about it, or about him, that sent a brief tingle across the back of my neck.

But it was nothing I could put my finger on, and he made no comment or move, and I continued on back to my seat. Thirteen minutes later I heard a series of faint thuds as the brakes were released. A few seconds after that, with a small jolt, the train began moving forward. A rhythmic clicking began from beneath me as the wheels hit the expansion gaps in the railing, a rhythm whose tempo steadily increased as the train picked up speed. My inner ear caught the slight upward slope as we left the station area and angled up into the narrower part of the main Tube. A moment later we leveled out again, and were on our way to Yandro. A total of eight hundred twenty light-years, a nice little overnight train ride away.

Which was, of course, the part that
really
drove the experts crazy. Nowhere along our journey would the Quadrail ever top a hundred kilometers per hour relative to the Tube itself. That much had been proved with accelerometers and laser Doppler measurements off the Tube wall.

Yet when we pulled into Yandro Station some fourteen hours from now, we would find that our speed relative to the rest of the galaxy had actually been almost exactly one light-year per minute.

No one knew how it worked, not even the six races who claimed to have been with the Quadrail since its inception seven hundred years ago. They couldn’t even agree on whether speeds in this strange hyperspace were accelerated or whether it was the distances themselves that were somehow shortened.

In the past, I’d always thought the argument mostly a waste of effort. The system worked, the Spiders kept it running on time, and up to now that was all that had mattered.

But that had been before everything that had happened at the New Pallas Towers a week ago.

And, of course, before the Spiders had lost my carrybags. I could only hope they’d ended up somewhere else aboard the train and that I would find them waiting when I got off at Yandro.

Tilting my chair back, I pulled out my reader and one of the book chips from my pocket. A little reading while everyone got settled, and then I would take a trip through the rest of the third-class coaches to the second/third-class dining car. There was a chance my unknown benefactor was aboard the train with me, planning to make contact once we got off, and it would be a good idea to run as many of the passengers as I could through my mental mug file.

But even as I started in on my book, I found my vision wavering. It had been a long trip from Earth, and I was suddenly feeling very tired. A quick nap, I decided, and I’d be in better shape to go wandering off memorizing faces. Tucking my reader away, I set my watch alarm for an hour. With one final look at the back of the Bellido’s head, I snuggled back as best I could into my seat and closed my eyes.

I awoke with a start, my head aching, my body heavy with the weight of too much sleep, my skin tingling with the sense that something was wrong.

I kept my eyes shut, my ears straining for clues, my nose sifting the air for odd scents, my face and hands alert for the telltale brush of a breeze that would indicate someone or something was moving near me.

Nothing. So what was it that had set off my mental alarms?

And then, suddenly, I had it. The steady rhythm of the clacking rails beneath me was changing, gradually slowing down. The Quadrail was coming into station.

I opened my eyes to slits. My chin was resting against my breastbone, my arms folded across my chest with my watch visible on my wrist. Two hours had passed since our departure from Terra Station: an hour longer man I should have slept, three hours less than it took to get to New Tigris.

So why—and where—were we stopping?

Carefully, I lifted my head and opened my eyes all the way. When I’d gone to sleep there had been six other passengers besides me in the car. All six had disappeared.

Or perhaps not. No one was visible, but in front of the stack of crates on my right, in the narrow space leading to the exit, I caught a slight movement of shadow. Someone, apparently, was standing by the car’s door.

The Bellido?

I slid sideways out of my seat, my heartbeat doing a nice syncopation with me click-clack of the wheels, and started forward. Theoretically, the Spiders didn’t permit weapons aboard passenger Quadrails. But theoretically, there weren’t any stops between Earth and New Tigris, either.

I’d covered about half the distance to the door when, with the usual muffled squeal of brakes, we rolled to a halt. The shadow shifted again, and I crouched down behind the nearest seat as the figure stepped into view.

It wasn’t the Bellido. It was The Girl.

“Hello, Mr. Compton,” she said. “Would you come with me, please?”

“Come with you where?” I asked carefully.

“Outside,” she replied, gesturing to the door beside her. “The Spiders would like to speak with you.”

The door opened, and because I doubted I really had a choice, I followed her out onto the platform.

At first glance it seemed to be your standard, plain-vanilla Quadrail station. But the second glance showed that there was not, in fact, anything standard about it.

For one thing, there were only four sets of tracks spaced around the inside of the cylinder instead of the usual thirty. The station itself was far shorter than usual, too, probably only a single kilometer long. Finally, instead of the standard mix of maintenance and passenger-support buildings, the spaces between the tracks were filled with purely functional structures, ranging in size from small office-type buildings to monstrosities the size of airplane hangars, with whole mazes of extra track leading between them and the main lines.

“This way,” The Girl said, setting off toward one of the smaller buildings.

I watched her go, my feet momentarily refusing to move. I could think of only one reason the Spiders would possibly want to talk to me, and it wasn’t a particularly pleasant thought.

And for them to have been willing to stop a whole train to do so made it that much worse. I glanced back over my shoulder, wondering what they were going to tell the rest of the passengers.

They weren’t going to tell the rest of the passengers anything for the simple fact that there weren’t any other passengers. The rest of the Quadrail had vanished. My car, conveniently emptied of all its occupants except me, plus the baggage car behind it, stood together on the track in front of another engine that had apparently pushed us here.

“Mr. Compton?”

I turned back. The Girl had reached the building and was standing expectantly beside the door. “Right,” I said, forcing my feet to move. She waited until I caught up with her, and together we went inside.

Beyond the door was a small room as drably functional as the building’s exterior, its furnishings consisting entirely of three chairs set in a triangle arrangement facing each other. One of the seats was already occupied by an amazingly fat middle-aged man dressed in shades of blue and sporting a contrasting skullcap of gray hair. Standing behind him was a Spider midway in size between a conductor and a drudge. A stationmaster, possibly, though this one seemed slightly bigger and didn’t carry the usual identifying pattern of white dots across its sphere.

“Good day, Mr. Compton,” the man greeted me gravely. His voice carried an oddly bubbling quality, as if he were talking half underwater. “My name is Hermod. Please, sit down.”

“Thank you,” I said, stepping forward and settling into one of the two remaining chairs as The Girl took the third. “Do I get to know where I am?”

“You’re in a maintenance and storage facility off the main Tube,” he said. “Its actual location is not important.”

“I thought all maintenance work was done in the stations themselves.”

Hermod’s massive shoulders shrugged slightly. “Most of it is,” he said. “The Spiders don’t advertise the existence of these other facilities.”

“Well, this should certainly make up for that,” I pointed out. “Or don’t you think New Tigris is going to wonder when their incoming Quadrail comes up two cars short?”

“Give the Spiders a little more credit than that,” Hermod said dryly. “They would hardly have gone to all this trouble to speak privately with you and then let something so obvious ruin it. No, you’ll be rejoining the rest of the train well before it reaches New Tigris.”

“Ah,” I said, making a conscious effort to sit back in my chair as if I were feeling all relaxed, which I definitely was not. So not only did the Spiders want a chat, they wanted a very private chat. This just got better and better. “So what’s this all about?”

“The Spiders have a problem,” Hermod said gravely. “One which may well determine the future of the entire galaxy. They thought you might be able to help them with it.”

“What makes you think that?” I asked, feeling sweat popping out all over my body.

“You’re a well-trained observer, investigator, and analyst,” he said. “Trained by one of the best, in fact: Western Alliance Intelligence.”

“Who sacked me over a year ago,” I reminded him, passing over for the moment the question of whether Westali really
was
one of the best.

“But not for lack of ability,” Hermod reminded me right back. “Merely for—what did they call it? Professional indiscretion?”

“Something like that,” I agreed evenly. That was what the dismissal papers had called it, anyway.
Professional indiscretion
, like I’d been caught stealing hotel towels or something. I’d sparked a major furor in the press, been responsible for a handful of political scapegoats having their heads handed to them in the hallowed halls of the United Nations, and earned myself the permanent loathing of both the secretary-general and the Directorate in the process.

And all they’d had the guts to call it was professional indiscretion.

But I let that one pass, too. “There are plenty of other ex-Westali people around who are as good as I am and a lot more respectable,” I said instead. “So again: Why me?”

Hermod’s forehead wrinkled. “Your reticence puzzles me, Mr. Compton,” he said. “I would think that, considering your present circumstances, you’d jump at the chance for employment.”

My
present circumstances
. On the surface, an innocent enough expression. Nearly as innocent, in fact, as
professional indiscretion
.

Did he and the Spiders know about my new job? It was hard to imagine how they could, not after all the paranoid-level convolutions we’d gone through to keep it secret.

On the other hand, it was equally hard to imagine how they could
not
know. Their messenger had been right there, after all, right outside the New Pallas Towers the evening the whole thing had been finalized.

But there was no hint of any such secret knowledge in Hermod’s face or body language. There was no anticipation I could detect no sense of the hunter waiting eagerly beside his trap as the prey wanders toward the tripwire. There was nothing there, in fact except an almost puppy-dog earnestness set against a background of distant fear and unease. If he
did
know about me, he was being damn coy about it “So my present circumstances aren’t as good as I might like,” I said. “How about some information instead of flattery?”

His lips puckered. “There are many mysterious places in this galaxy,” he said. “One of them, which the Spiders have dubbed the Oracle, sits a short distance from a siding similar to this one. Occasionally, Spiders passing through the area see visions of future events.” He gestured at the Spider standing over him. “Five weeks ago, this Spider saw the future destruction of a Filiaelian transfer station.”

I sat up a little straighter in my chair. Filly transfer stations were among the biggest and best-protected in the galaxy. “How sure are you that it was a Filly station?”

“Very sure,” Hermod said, his voice darkening. “Because there were the remains of two gutted
Sorfali
-class warships drifting alongside it.”

I threw a look at the Spider. “Your friend’s been hallucinating,” I said flatly. “Filly soldiers are genetically programmed against rebellion or civil war.”

“I never said it was a civil war,” Hermod countered, his voice going even darker. “The attack came from somewhere
outside
the system.”

I looked over at The Girl’s expressionless face. If this was a joke, no one was laughing. “Now
you’re
the one hallucinating,” I told Hermod. “You can’t smuggle weaponry through the Tube. Certainly nothing that could take out a
Sorfali
. You know that better than I do.”

“It seems impossible to the Spiders, as well,” Hermod agreed. “Nevertheless, that
is
what he saw. And since the Oracle’s past visions have subsequently proven valid, the Spiders have no choice but to assume this one may, too.” His eyes locked onto mine. “I trust you don’t need me to spell out the implications.”

“No,” I said, and I meant it. There were twelve empires spanning the galaxy, or at least twelve species-groups the Spiders officially recognized as empires. A few of them, like the five worlds of our pathetic little Terran Confederation, weren’t worthy of the name; others, like the Filiaelian Assembly and Shorshic Domain, were the genuine article, consisting of thousands of star systems spread across vast reaches of space. Historically, at least on Earth, powerful empires seldom bumped into each other without eventually going to war, and from what we knew of alien psychology there was no reason to assume anyone out there would react any differently if they had a choice.

Only in this case, they didn’t. The only way to cross interstellar distances was via Quadrail, and there was simply no way to stuff a war machine into a group of Quadrail cars. The only exception was interstellar governments, who under very special and very strict transport conditions were allowed to ship the components of planetary defenses through to their own colonies.

Which meant that anyone who wanted to make war against his neighbor would find himself facing as much military nastiness as the intended victim had felt inclined to set up. In a Quadrail-run galaxy, defense was king.

But if someone had figured out how to take out not only a transfer station but a couple of warships along with it, cozy peacefulness and stability were about to come to a violent end. “Was there anything else in this vision?” I asked. “Any idea which of the Fillies’ stations it was, or who might have been involved?”

“Neither,” Hermod said. “But he did see that the Filiaelian warships carried both the insignia of the current dynasty and the one scheduled to come to power in four months. We can therefore assume the attack will take place sometime during the transitional period.”

Four months. This just got better and better. “That’s not much time.”

“No, it’s not,” Hermod agreed. “The Spiders will, of course, give you all the assistance they can, including unlimited use of the Quadrail system.”

I felt my eyes narrow slightly. “Including access to places like this?” I asked casually, gesturing around me.

“Yes, if you need them,” he said, frowning a bit. “Though I can’t think why you would need that.”

“You never know,” I said, my heartbeat starting to pick up a little. Suddenly this was becoming more than just interesting. “How exactly do I get all this unlimited access? Pass key? Secret handshake?”

“You begin with this,” he said, nodding to The Girl. Right on cue, she dug a small folder out of her belt pouch and handed it to me. It was the same sort of folder I’d taken off the dead kid in Manhattan, except that instead of being made of cheap plastic this one was a high-end variety of brushed leather.

And instead of the copper-edged ticket of a third-class Quadrail seat, this one held the diamond-dust-edged tag of a first-class, unlimited-use pass, something I’d never seen before except in brochures. “Nice,” I said. “How long is it good for?”

“As long as you need it,” Hermod said. “Assuming, of course, that you take the job. Will you?”

I angled the ticket toward the light for a better view, my brain spinning with the possibilities. If they were on to me and this whole thing was a trick, then whatever answer I gave him wouldn’t matter in the slightest. Whatever I did or said, I was already sunk.

But if they
weren’t
on to me and this offer was legit, then I was being offered a gift on a platinum platter.

Of course, if I took the job I’d also be morally obligated to put some actual effort into it. Four months wasn’t a lot of time to figure out who was planning to start an impossible interstellar war and find a way to stop it.

Still, this was way too intriguing to pass up. And despite the old saying to the contrary, it was surely possible for a man to serve two masters. “Sure, why not?” I said, tucking the folder into my inner jacket pocket “I’m in.”

“Excellent.” Again, Hermod gestured to The Girl. “This is Bayta. She’ll be accompanying you.”

I looked at her, found her looking back at me with her usual lack of expression. “Thanks, but I work alone,” I told him.

“You may need information or assistance from the Spiders along the way,” Hermod said. “Only a few of them can communicate with humans in anything more than a handful of rote phrases.”

“And, what Bayta speaks their language?”

“Let’s just say she knows their secret handshake,” Hermod said with a faint smile.

I suppressed a grimace. I didn’t want company on this trip, particularly company who might have come off a mannequin assembly line. Still, I should have expected that the Spiders would insist on assigning me a watchdog. “Fine,” I said. “Whatever.”

“One other thing,” Hermod said. “The messenger who delivered your ticket was supposed to accompany you here. Did he happen to mention why he had chosen not to do so?”

I hesitated, but there didn’t seem to be any point in lying. “I’m afraid choice had very little to do with it,” I said. “He died at my feet.”

Bayta inhaled sharply, and the whole room suddenly went very still. “What happened?” Hermod asked.

“He was shot,” I said. “Multiple times, actually. Someone was very serious about getting rid of him.”

“Did you see what happened?”

“All I know is that he was already bleeding when I found him,” I said, choosing my words carefully. If they already knew about me, mentioning the New Pallas Towers wouldn’t be telling them anything new. But if they
didn’t
know, I certainly wasn’t going to be the one to point them that direction. “Considering the shape he was in, I’m surprised he made it as far as he did.”

“He knew the importance of his mission,” Hermod said soberly. “Do you know what kind of weapon he was shot with?”

“Snoozer and thudwumper rounds,” I told him. “Fortunately, they didn’t need to escalate to shredders.”

“Human ordnance, then?”

“Yes, but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything,” I said. “Terra Station’s
very
particular about keeping alien weaponry out of the system.”