All the standard tools of mayhem were on the list, from plasma and laser weapons with their huge energy signatures, to the thudwumper and shredder rounds I was most familiar with, to more subtle devices like dart throwers and even such passive devices as nunchaku fighting sticks and police billy clubs. If there was a weapon the Spiders hadn’t included, I couldn’t think what it might be.
There was obviously way too much for a single set of hatchway sensors to look for, but the chip had the answer to that long-standing puzzle as well. There were definitely hatchway sensors that checked passengers as they arrived from the shuttles, but the deeper and more subtle scanning was done as they made their way to the platforms, via sensors built into the Tube’s flooring and support buildings. In effect, each Quadrail station was a massive sensor cavity, discreetly protecting the passengers from each other.
And
that
was certainly not included in the building supplies that made up the major part of a station’s trillion-dollar price tag. All of it had to be added afterward, put in by the Spiders themselves. Perhaps, I decided grudgingly, the cost of a new station wasn’t quite the extortion I’d always thought.
Above the top of the reader, something again seemed to flicker at the edge of my vision. Again I looked up, and again there was nothing.
But this time I spotted something I hadn’t noticed before. Preoccupied with the data chips and my own musings, I’d neglected to opaque the window.
Frowning, I set the reader aside and turned off the room lights completely, and as my eyes adjusted to the darkness I could see a faint luminescence begin to fill the window. For a moment I wondered where it was coming from, then realized that I was seeing a reflection of the Coreline glow from high overhead on the curved Tube wall surrounding us.
Getting to my feet, I walked over to the window, and for a minute I leaned against it and gazed out into the perpetual night of the Tube. How many thousand light-years of Quadrail track was there out there? I wondered distantly. Enough to link all the known inhabited worlds, certainly, with other lines probably already in place waiting for up-and-coming species like us to stumble across. Soon, perhaps, there would be Thirteen Empires, and then Fourteen, and Fifteen—
And without warning, a spot of brilliant red light flashed across my sight someplace far to the rear of the train.
I jerked in surprise as the light winked out again. It hadn’t been all that bright, I realized now, except relative to the soft Coreline glow and my own dilated pupils. I stared at the spot where it had been, wondering if that had been what had caught my attention earlier and what in the world it could be. Some kind of erratic running light? But Quadrails didn’t carry running lights, at least as far as anyone knew. Some kind of warning beacon, then? Out here in the middle of nowhere, I hoped to God not.
The light flashed on again. Experimentally, I turned my eyes slightly away, and this time I thought I could detect a slight flicker in it.
And as it winked off again, I suddenly understood.
My jacket was hanging beside me on the cleaning rack. I dug madly into the pockets, pulling out my reader and data chip pack and swearing under my breath as I tried to read the chips’ labels by the dim reflected Coreline light. Finally, I located the right one. Jamming it into the slot, I turned the reader on and pressed it against the window.
It was obvious now, with the crystal clarity only hindsight could bring to a situation. My playacting Bellido back on the Jurskala train hadn’t needed anything so esoteric as a tap into Spider computer or control systems to keep in touch with his buddies back in third class. He’d had a compartment window, a simple low-power laser pointer, a fluctuation modulator, and the whole Tube wall to bounce messages off of. No wonder his friends had been ready for me—they’d probably had their orders before I’d even made it out of the last first-class coach.
The red light came on again, and I pressed the reader hard against the window, keeping it as steady as possible. The modulation sequence was far too fast for human eyes to register, but the sensor built into the reader ought to be able to capture it and slow it down enough for me to make some sense of it later.
The light came and went three more times in the next few minutes. Apparently, the Bellidos were feeling chatty today. Three minutes later it flashed one final time, then went silent.
I waited by the window another half hour before finally calling it quits. Making my way back to the bed, I turned the lights up to a dim glow and got to work.
With the basic mode of their communication so unlikely to be spotted, I’d hoped the Bellidos might have gone with something simple like digitized text or voices. But no such luck. The modulation turned out to be some sort of Morse-style code, and it wasn’t following any of the usual Belldic encryption systems.
Still, at least I knew now how it had been done. That was worth a lot right there, especially since it offered a little more insight into the people I was up against. Cleverness and simplicity seemed to be their style. I’d do well to remember that.
But for now, my head was starting to hurt again and fatigue was dragging at my eyelids. Going to the tiny washroom, I got some water and took another painkiller and QuixHeal, then turned off the light and got undressed for bed.
My last act before crawling under the blankets was to set my reader on “record” and prop it up in the window. Just in case.
I slept long and deep and awoke ravenously hungry. I checked the other compartment, found Bayta already up. I had a quick shower and shave, and together we went back to the dining car.
None of the Bellidos were there at the moment. Bayta’s Spider friends reported to her that the two in first class had already eaten and returned to their compartment, while the ones back in third had eaten in shifts. I kept an eye on the handful of Halkas in the room wondering if JhanKla had put someone on our tail straight from the last station, or whether he’d just sent a message on ahead.
But no one seemed to be taking any particular interest in us. Which didn’t prove anything one way or the other, of course.
We finished eating and returned to my compartment, where we spent a few minutes sifting through the tourist brochures on the Modhra resort and discussing what exactly we would do when we got there.
Surprisingly, the choice of lodging turned out to be our biggest sticking point. Bayta wanted to take the lodge on the surface, where we would have a view of Modhra II and the gas giant Cassp, while I pushed equally hard for the underwater hotel JhanKla had mentioned. Eventually, Bayta gave in, though clearly not happily, and stalked back to her own compartment.
When the wall between us was closed again, I checked my reader to see if the Bellidos had transmitted any more secret messages during the night. They hadn’t.
The rest of the trip passed uneventfully. Bayta stayed alone in her compartment most of the time, joining me only for meals, and I did what I could to catch up on my sleep and healing.
It was only as I was repacking my carrybags in preparation for our arrival at Sistarrko that it belatedly occurred to me that information wasn’t the only thing I should have asked the Spiders for when this whole thing had started.
I should also have asked for a gun.
JhanKla had described Sistarrko as a minor colony system, but from the size and design of its transfer station I would have guessed it to be more along the lines of a regional capital like Kerfsis. From the size of the two warships that had silently escorted us in from the Tube, I would have put it even higher than that.
Of course, the system
was
the home of the famous Modhran coral, and an up-and-coming tourist center to boot. Maybe that explained it.
Maybe.
We made it through customs without incident, the Saarix in my carrybag grips whispering right past their sensors. I didn’t spot any of the Bellidos, but that wasn’t surprising. The Halkas had separate customs areas for the different traveling classes, and I’d already seen how this bunch shifted class and status without batting a whisker. They were probably two levels below us, working their humble way through the third-class stations.
And of course, after they did that, they’d be getting their genuine status guns out of their lockboxes. The next time I faced them, they would be fully armed.
What a lovely thought.
Like Quadrail Tubes everywhere in the galaxy, the Grakla Spur cut through Sistarrko’s outer system, in this case just outside Cassp’s orbit. That would put the Modhra resort at a considerable distance from the station for much of any given decade, which I suspected would cause trouble for the tourist logistics a few years down the line. Fortunately, at the moment the planet was nearly at its closest approach, which meant the travel time would be measured in hours rather than days. The transport rep directed us to the proper departure lounge, where we found a fifty-passenger short-haul torchferry waiting, and we climbed aboard with thirty fellow travelers. I’d expected at least one of the Bellidos to join the party, if only to keep an eye on us, but none of them did.
We took off in a blaze of superheated heavy-ion plasma, and five hours later reached the delicately ringed gas giant. Shutting down the drive well clear of Modhra I’s icy surface, we switched to Shorshic vectored force thrusters, and a few minutes later settled gently onto the light-rimmed landing pad.
The view was everything JhanKla had promised. Bulging up over the resort area’s horizon, Cassp had the same turbulent cloud bands and thousand-kilometer-wide storms as Jupiter and Saturn back in Sol system, but with a wider range of coloration than either of those two worlds. Its ring system was at least as impressive as Saturn’s, as well, with much of it extending well past us. Overhead, Modhra II moved across the sky, a glistening ball of stone and ice arcing its way along the Modhra Binary’s common orbit.
As an extra bonus, some quirk of celestial mechanics had put the Modhras’ combined orbit at right angles to Cassp’s ring system. That meant that as the two moons moved around their combined center of gravity, our view of the rings shifted from slightly above to a straight edge-on view to slightly below, then rose back through them again. It made for an ever-shifting, ever-changing panorama that all by itself would probably have justified the development of the place as a tourist getaway.
The lodge-style building we set down beside was a sprawling copy of an ancient Halkan High Mountain fortress, complete with distinctive star-shaped turrets. The modern airlock entrances spoiled the illusion a bit, but neither of the two moons was large enough to hold much atmosphere. Bayta and I joined the rest of the passengers in climbing into the torchferry’s vac suits, and a few minutes later we all headed out across the frozen surface.
The lodge’s interior décor was High Mountain style, too, with several centuries’ worth of Halkan armor replicas standing in front of equally ancient wall hangings. The motif was carried even to the check-in procedure, which was handled by desk clerks in half-scale mail instead of by self-serve computer terminals. When our turn came I asked about the underwater hotel and was directed to a bank of ornate elevators waiting across the entry foyer. We joined five of the other guests, and fifteen minutes later emerged into the hotel lobby and what could only be described as an undersea wonderland.
The whole place was decorated with a graceful mixture of wispy sea plants and multicolored rock, all overlaid with a filigree of ice and frozen sea foam. Large convex windows showcased the view here beneath Modhra’s ice cap, illuminated by an array of floodlights. JhanKla had said these oceans ran up to five kilometers deep, but the resort had been built in one of the shallower areas, and some of the famous Modhran coral ridges could be seen snaking their way across the ocean floor below.
The desk clerks here were dressed in outfits that looked vaguely mermaid and merman, though I couldn’t remember any such legends in any Halkan mythos. The single-room rates were outrageous enough, but the two-room suite we needed was astronomical, far beyond what I had in any of my cash sticks. The Spiders hadn’t thought to include any actual money with their Quadrail pass, which left me no option but to put the room on my credit tag. I did so without actually wincing, though I suspected there would be all sorts of unpleasant future ramifications for this kind of unauthorized usage.
But then, according to Bayta, odds were I’d be dying here anyway. No future; no future ramifications; no worries. I signed the authorization, and we were directed to the elevator for one final descent.
Our suite wasn’t quite as luxurious as JhanKla’s Peerage car. But it was lavish enough, and the view beat the car hands down. We were on the hotel’s lowest level, with a transparent floor and two transparent corner walls giving us a spectacular wraparound view of the rippling water and coral ridges below. In the center of the room a pair of couches faced each other over a glowing fire pit—artificial, of course, but very realistic. There were two comfortable lounge chairs and six carved wooden uprights, the latter group arranged around a similarly carved wooden dining/conference table. Set against the two nontransparent walls were a computer desk and a huge entertainment center.
The bedroom was just as nice, though smaller, with its floor and its single outside wall again transparent. Here the center was dominated by a gargantuan bed big enough for a Cimmaheem couple or at least four standard-issue humans, with a duplicate of the living room’s entertainment center on one wall and a large walk-in closet on the other. The closet, I noted, came prefurnished with clothing in a wide range of styles and sizes.
There were also no bugs anywhere in the suite. For me, that was the biggest surprise of all. “Nice enough for you?” I asked Bayta as I emerged from my bedroom sweep into the living area.
Bayta was standing beside one of the outer walls, gazing out at the coral and the lights from a group of divers and a couple of midget submarines that were moving around among the ridges. “I mean, there
was
a Grand Suite listed if you think we should upgrade, I added.
“What exactly are you planning to do here?” she asked, not turning around. She’d hardly said two words since our arrival at Sistarrko Station and the muscles of her neck seemed to have settled into a permanently taut state.
“We start by trying to relax,” I told her, stepping to her side and taking her hand. Trying to take it, anyway, before she deftly pulled it out of my grip. Her skin was icy cold. “No one’s going to try to kill us here. It’s too public and way too high-profile.”
“So they’ll wait until we’re off in some quiet and lonely place?” she asked with only a trace of sarcasm.
I shrugged. “Something like that.”
“And, of course, we
will
be going to some quiet and lonely places?”
“Well,
I
will,” I told her. “Like I said before, you’re welcome to stay here, or even go back to the Tube.” I crossed toward the desk and computer terminal. “Let’s see what they’ve got in the way of entertainment.”
There were, as it turned out, quite a few options to choose from. JhanKla had already listed the outdoor activities for us, but the resort had a large number of indoor ones as well. There were half a dozen restaurants, ranging from casual to formal-wear-fancy, two theaters with rotating stage shows designed to appeal to a wide range of Halkan and offworlder tastes, and a fully equipped casino for anyone who still had money left after paying for their room and meals. Our entertainment centers had access to a wide range of music and dit recs, as well, more extensive even than JhanKla’s private collection. “Let’s try the casino first,” I suggested. “Unless you’d rather start with a swim.”
“Shouldn’t we be focusing on our investigation?” she countered.
“We’ve got time,” I assured her, getting up from the desk and crossing to her side. “I’m expecting our Bellidos to show up before anything interesting happens, and they definitely weren’t on our torchferry. Either they decided to take a later one, which according to the schedule won’t be in for another eight hours, or else they’ve gone into the inner system to Sistarrko itself, which means they can’t be here for a minimum of thirty.”
“Why would they go to Sistarrko?”
“No idea,” I said. “Maybe there’s some prep work they still need to do.”
“Or maybe that’s where this theoretical test of yours will take place?”
“I suppose that’s possible,” I conceded. “Still, JhanKla pointed us here, not Sistarrko, and Modhra’s the name that apparently also caught my fake drunk’s attention. No,
something’s
going to happen here, and most likely within the next hundred hours.”
She frowned. “How do you know that?”
“Because the crate they stuck me in was bound for Alra-kae, nearly two days past Jurskala,” I reminded her. “If I hadn’t been found until then and had had to backtrack, it would have cost us just about a hundred hours. If the idea was to get me out of the way while something happened here, we can assume it’ll all be all over by then.”
I gestured to the view “But until they arrive, the point is moot. So let’s spend some time getting the lay of the land.”
“How will you know when the Bellidos arrive?”
“There are ways,” I assured her. “So again: casino or swimming?”
“Casino,” she said reluctantly. She turned toward the bedroom, paused. “This whole place will probably be decorated with Modhran coral,” she said, her voice suddenly very strange. “Whatever you do, don’t touch it. All right?”
“The stuff’s not fragile,” I soothed her. “I’ve seen pictures of it being used—”
“Just
don’t touch it
!” she cut me off sharply. “Promise me you won’t touch it.” Her shoulders rose slightly as she took a deep breath. “Please,” she added more quietly.
“Okay,” I managed, trying to unfreeze my brain. An outburst like that from my calm, unemotional Bayta? “Since you say
please
… sure.”
“Thank you.” Her shoulders rose and fell again. “All right. Let’s go.”