Odd Girl Out (3 page)

I waited until evening, and then headed outside and caught an autocab. No one was loitering outside my apartment as I left, nor was anyone waiting for me when I arrived at Sutherlin Skyport. I watched my fellow passengers closely as they came aboard, but given that the only view I’d had of the two Modhran walkers had been a nighttime glimpse of heads inside a car, I wasn’t really expecting to recognize either of them. Sure enough, I didn’t recognize anyone.

We lifted from the field and headed for our orbital rendezvous with the torchliner that would take us to the Tube cutting across the outer solar system. At Earth’s current position in its own orbit, the trip would take a little under eight days.

I spent most of those days in my tiny shipboard stateroom, avoiding the rest of the passengers and reading everything I could find on the thriving colony world of New Tigris, the first of the Terran Confederation’s four colony worlds as you headed inward toward the center of the galaxy. It was about three hundred light-years away, which translated to a nice comfortable five-hour Quadrail trip from Terra Station.

My research on the place, unfortunately, didn’t take nearly all of those eight days. The colony had been officially founded twenty years ago, and in that time the population had grown to nearly two hundred thousand people. That sounded impressive, but I knew the truth: most of that growth had been pushed and prodded and possibly bribed by UN officials desperate to bring Earth to the level of the other eleven empire-sized alien civilizations.

Unfortunately, all that prodding had yet to produce much in the way of tangible results. Of the four colony worlds, all but Helvanti were still little more than charity cases, heavily subsidized by the mother world, with little prospect of ever becoming anything more.

Fortunately for Earth’s taxpayers, among whom I was so very honored to count myself, it wasn’t only public money that was being poured down the rabbit hole. The UN had managed to persuade a number of corporations, both the superlarge as well as the merely large, to add some of their own cash to the pot.

On the firms’ balance sheets they were probably called investments, with an eye toward future advancements or discoveries. A more honest approach would be to write them off as favorable publicity and general goodwill.

More cynically-minded types might even consider the donations as a form of other-directed bribes designed to soothe the UN’s regulators into looking elsewhere for someone to scrutinize.

I had to admit, though, that New Tigris’s founding fathers had done a decent job with all the money flowing into their coffers. They’d built a single major town, Imani City, for those who liked a variety of restaurants and clubs, plus several smaller outlying towns and rural farming communities for those who preferred their companionship in smaller doses and were more casual about haute cuisine.

But even the colony’s relative youth, the constant influx of public money, and the leadership’s good intentions hadn’t prevented a dark underbelly from forming on their new world. There were a couple of districts in Imani where the poor, the frustrated, and the otherwise disenchanted among the populace had developed a habit of gathering to express their grievances. Many of those malcontents already lived there, and as the like-minded were drawn in the more upstanding citizens had found it advisable to go elsewhere. Slums, in everything but name.

Zumurrud District, where Lorelei had said her sister was hanging out, was naturally one of those garden spots.

It was probably a good thing, I reflected more than once, that McMicking had given me that carry permit.

The permit, of course, didn’t extend to the Quadrail station itself. The Spiders didn’t allow weapons into their Tube, either obvious weapons or more subtle items that might easily be combined into instruments of mayhem. All such devices had to be put in lockboxes at the transfer station, which the Spiders would carry across in their own shuttles and subsequently stow in special compartments beneath the train cars where they’d be out of anyone’s reach during the trip.

Agent of the Spiders though I might be, I still wasn’t exempt from those particular rules. Mostly I wasn’t, anyway So I put my Glock in a lockbox as directed, accepted my claim ticket from the Customs official, and headed through the door into the main part of the transfer station and the shuttle docking stations at the far end.

Quadrail passengers had the option of either going directly to the Tube and doing their waiting there, or else staying on the transfer station until their trains were called. Since I wasn’t scheduled for any train in particular, I took the first available shuttle across the hundred-kilometer gap. With luck, I could touch base with the Spider stationmaster and use my special pass to book a seat or compartment on the next train for New Tigris.

With even more luck, Bayta would have gotten my message and be waiting for me.

For once, luck was indeed with me.

“I only arrived about two hours ago,” Bayta said as we sat down at a table in one of the outdoor cafes. “I wasn’t sure when you were due in, so when the stationmaster told me you had a data chip waiting I went ahead and picked it up.” She handed me the chip.

“Thanks,” I said, taking the chip and pulling out my reader, my eyes tracing the lines and contours of her face as I did so. Sometimes it wasn’t until you got something back that you realized just how much you’d missed it.

To my surprise, and maybe a little to my consternation, I suddenly realized how much I’d missed Bayta. She’d become such a permanent part of my life and my work over the past eleven months that it had felt strange to spend a couple of weeks all alone without her.

But only because she was my colleague and ally, I told myself firmly. I needed her, and she needed me, in this shadowy war against the Modhri. There’d been a time once when she might have been drifting toward feeling something more than that for me. But that time was past. We were colleagues and allies. Nothing more.

“You all right?” Bayta asked.

To my embarrassment, I realized I’d been staring at her. “Just a bit tired,” I said, lowering my eyes to my reader and plugging the chip into the reader’s slot. “First things first. Were you able to figure out where all that coral was going?”

She shook her head. “As far as the Spiders’ records go, it looks like no crates of their description ever made it to the Cimmal Republic. I’m sorry.”

“Not your fault,” I assured her, trying not to be too annoyed. It had been almost a month ago that the Modhri had dangled all that coral temptingly in front of us on the train ride between Ghonsilya and Bildim in the Tra’hok Unity. The choice had been clear: follow the crates and see where he was moving it, or stay with the mission we were already on.

We’d stayed with the mission, and it was probably just as well that we had. Still, I’d hoped we might get to have it both ways. “It was still worth a try,” I said, keying the reader. The decryption program had done its magic, and there was Lorelei’s Quadrail itinerary.

Some itinerary. Twenty days ago the woman had left New Tigris Station and headed to Earth. Adding in the torchliner trip, it looked like she’d gotten to my apartment only a couple of days before I had.

And that was it. There was no record of her arrival into the New Tigris system, or of her departure from anywhere else in the galaxy. The woman might have been born on New Tigris for all the travel data the Spiders had been able to dig up.

“What is that?” Bayta asked.

“Apparently, a huge waste of Spider time,” I said, handing the reader to her. “You ever hear of this woman?”

“Lorelei Beach,” Bayta murmured as she glanced over the report. “I don’t think so. Should I have?”

McMicking’s suggestion that Lorelei might have been another Spider agent flashed to mind. “Just thought you might have met her somewhere,” I said. “She was killed in New York a little over a week ago.”

“Was she a friend of yours?”

I shook my head. “I met her for the first time a few hours before she died. She was shot with one of my guns, by the way.”

Bayta’s eyes were steady on me. “I think you’d better start at the beginning.”

I laid it all out for her, starting with the gun in my face and pausing only when the waiter brought over our lemonade and iced tea. Bayta listened in silence the whole time, not interrupting even once with a question or comment. Her knack for keeping quiet at the right time was one of her most endearing talents.

“So what are we going to do?” she asked when I had finished.

“Well,
I’m
going to go hunt up this sister of hers,” I said. “Not sure what
you’re
going to do.”

“You don’t want me with you?”

Her face was expressionless, the words nearly so. But just the same the hurt behind her eyes managed to make it out into the open. Another of her many talents. “Don’t get me wrong,” I assured her hastily. “Under normal circumstances I’d love to have you along. But this is likely to be dangerous.”

She smiled wanly. “Like everything else we’ve done together hasn’t been?”

“Point,” I conceded. “But there’s a particular edge of nasti-ness to this one. You didn’t see what they did to Lorelei. I did.”

“I thought you’d decided the Modhri did that to cover the fact that he needed to destroy the walker’s polyp colony,” she reminded me.

“That’s one possibility,” I said. “Problem is, he’s never done anything like that before with any of the other walkers he’s had to sacrifice for one reason or another. At least, not with anyone he’s sacrificed in our presence. It seems out of character for him, and it’s definitely a change of pattern. Either of those alone would be enough to worry me. Both of them together get my shivers up.”

“What do you think it means?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But I’ve had a few days to think, and a couple of possibilities have occurred to me.”

I drank down half my iced tea in a single swallow. Talking about death and mutilation always made my throat dry. “One: the whole thing could have been staged for my benefit. A ploy to get my attention, but good, and make me curious enough to keep digging.”

“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 Yandro 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.”