Night Train to Rigel (12 page)

The Quadrail pulled into Jurskala Station, and with a round of farewells to Rastra and JhanKla I left the Peerage car and headed across the platform toward the track where the Grakla Spur train would be arriving in two hours. Bayta, silent and wooden-faced, was at my side.

I had thought about trying to find a clever way to sneak off the train, but had decided it wouldn’t be worth the effort. Even if the Bellidos hadn’t yet figured out that I’d escaped their impromptu holding cell, there would be plenty of time for them to spot us as we hung around the station waiting for our next Quadrail. The alternative, to spend that time hiding in one of the Spiders’ buildings, would probably just make things worse. Clearly, there were multiple players in this game, and I saw no point in advertising my cozy relationship with the Spiders for anyone who hadn’t already figured it out.

Especially when we could use that relationship to other advantages.

“Three more Bellidos have joined with the two from first class,” Bayta murmured as we approached the first of the Quadrail tracks we needed to cross to get to our platform. “These three came from third class.”

“Are they talking?” I murmured back, resisting the urge to look over my shoulder. The whole point of having the Spiders relay this information to me via Bayta was so that I
wouldn’t
look like I had any suspicions about what was going on behind me.

“Yes,” she said. “But none of the Spiders are close enough to hear.”

“Let me know when they start moving,” I instructed her. “Anyone else taking any interest in us?”

We reached the next track, the low protective barrier folding up and over into a little footbridge for us and our trailing carrybags. “I don’t think so,” she said. “Wait. The five Bellidos have split into two groups again and are moving this way.”

“How fast?”

“Not very,” she said as we reached the far side of the track and the bridge folded back into its barrier form. “And they aren’t following us, exactly, just coming this general direction.”

Either being coy about their target or else simply heading for the Grakla Spur train, too. “What about Rastra and JhanKla?”

“They’ve left the Peerage car and are walking toward the stationmaster’s building,” she reported. “The guard-assistant, YirTukOo, is with them.”

“Probably making arrangements to switch the car to a different train,” I said. JhanKla had done his bit by nudging me toward Modhra, and he and his entourage were apparently now out of the game.

We reached the Grakla Spur platform, which was lined by the usual mix of restaurants, lounges, shops, and maintenance buildings. “You ever had a Jurian soda crème?” I asked Bayta.

“A—? No.”

“Then you’re way overdue,” I said, taking her arm and steering her toward the larger of the two restaurants.

“I’m not hungry,” she protested, trying to pull away.

“This is more like a dessert than a meal,” I assured her, not letting go. “More to the point, with all those Spider waiters wandering around in there, we’ll have a better chance of keeping an eye on everyone than we would in any of the regular waiting rooms.”

The resistance in her arm muscles evaporated. “Oh,” she said.

About half the restaurant’s tables were occupied, a nice comfortable percentage. Suppressing my usual impulse to sit where I could see the door, I led Bayta to one of the tables in the center. “You want me to order for you?” I asked.

She shrugged in silent indifference. I pulled up the menu, found the proper listing, and ordered two of the crèmes. “I gather you haven’t spent much time in the Jurian Collective,” I suggested, leaning back in my seat.

“Not really.” She hesitated. “Actually, not at all.”

“Ah,” I said, looking around. Unlike the Quadrail bar, this place hadn’t been designed with conversational privacy in mind. “How long have you been with your friends?”

“As long as I can remember,” she said, lowering her voice. “Is this really the right place for this?”

“Why not?” I countered. “I don’t especially like working with someone I know next to nothing about.”

She pursed her lips. “If it comes to that, I don’t know much about
you
, either.”

“Your friends seem to have the full inside track on me.”

“That doesn’t mean I do.” Her forehead creased slightly. “The Bellidos have all gone to one of the waiting rooms by the Grakla Spur platform.”

Passing up a possible chance to eavesdrop in favor of not taking the risk of being spotted and spooking the quarry. They certainly seemed to know what they were doing. “So what do you want to know?”

“About…?”

“About me.”

She studied my face, her forehead creased, clearly wondering if I was just baiting her. “All right. What did you do to get fired from Westali?”

I felt my throat tighten. I should have guessed she’d pick that particular knife to twist. “What, you’ve been asleep the past two years?” I growled.

The corner of her lip twitched. “I’d really like to know.”

I looked away from her, letting my eyes sweep slowly around the restaurant. Most of the patrons were Juriani, but there were a few Halkas and Cimmaheem as well.

And, of course, there was us. A pair of Humans, strutting around the galaxy as if we owned it. “Do you know how humanity got to be number twelve on the Spiders’ Twelve Empires list?”

“I presume the same way everyone else did,” she said. “When a race colonizes enough systems, the Spiders confer that designation.”

“You colonize four of them, to be exact,” I told her, Colonel Applegate’s words from a few days ago echoing through my brain.
And Yandro makes five
. “Which gives you a total of five, including your home system. Yandro was the colony that put Earth over the bar and got us invited into the club.”

“And there was a problem with that?”

I sighed. “The problem, Bayta, is that there’s nothing of value there. Nothing. A few varieties of spice, some decorative hardwoods, a few animals we may or may not be able to domesticate someday, and that’s it.”

“And?”

“What do you mean, ‘and’?” I bit out. “The UN Directorate dumped a trillion dollars down the drain for that Quadrail station, for no better reason than so they could pretend they were important when they traveled around the galaxy.”

Her eyes widened with sudden understanding. “You’re the one who blew the whistle, aren’t you?”

“Damn straight I did,” I growled. “Between the faked resource reports and the carefully prepped enthusiasm of the colonists, you’d have thought Yandro was the next Alaska. I couldn’t let them get away with that.”

“Alaska?”

“The northernmost state of the Western Alliance,” I told her. “Formerly called ‘Seward’s Folly’ after the man who purchased it a couple of centuries ago for a lot of cash that most people thought was being thrown down a frozen mud hole. The ridicule lasted right up until they discovered all the gold and oil reserves.”

“You don’t think that could happen with Yandro?”

I shook my head. “The reports they released to the public were masterfully done. But I got hold of the
real
ones, and you could literally hear the increasing desperation of the evaluators as they came closer and closer to the end of their survey and still couldn’t find anything valuable enough to make it worth exporting in any serious quantities.”

“I can see why the UN would be upset with you,” she murmured.

“Oh, they were upset, all right,” I agreed bitterly. “And the public was pretty upset with them right back. For a while. Problem was, they weren’t upset long enough for anything to actually get done about it. The Directorate made a big show of firing a few scapegoats, denied personal responsibility six ways from Sunday, and waited for the ruckus to die down for lack of interest. Then they quietly went ahead and signed up for the station anyway. With their friends and supporters getting most of the contracts for the materials and construction modules, I might add.”

“And then they made sure you paid for your opposition,” she said quietly. “I’m sorry.”

I shrugged, forcing my throat to relax. “It’s okay,” I assured her. “I’m over it.”

Which was a lie, of course. Even after all this time, just talking about it was enough to twist my blood vessels into macramé.

A Spider stepped up to our table, holding a tray with the frothy soda crèmes I’d ordered. “We’ve got raspberry and Jurian
shisshun
,” I told Bayta as I lifted the tall glasses onto the table. “Which one do you want?”

She chose the raspberry, and we settled down to eat in silence I wasn’t in the mood for more conversation, and she was either feeling likewise or was too busy communing with her Spider friends to spare me any attention.

It wasn’t until we were heading back toward the platform that I belatedly noticed that her question about my career had completely sidetracked my plan to find out something about
her
.

The train bound for the Grakla Spur was, not surprisingly, considerably shorter than the one we’d taken to Jurskala, reflecting the smaller volume of traffic and cargo involved. The Spiders had another double first-class compartment set aside for us, and we were settling in when the door chimed and a conductor paused in the doorway long enough to hand Bayta a data chip. “That the information on Rastra and JhanKla?” I asked as she pulled out her reader.

“The conductor didn’t know, but I assume so,” she said, plugging in the chip and peering at the display. “Yes, it is,” she said, handing it to me.

I glanced down the directory. “I don’t see anything here on the two Halkas who jumped me in the interrogation room.”

“They probably haven’t had time to pull that together yet.”

I grimaced. Still, half a loaf, and all that. “What’s happening with the Bellidos?”

“Two of them have the compartment just behind ours,” she said slowly “The other three have gone to the last of the third-class coaches.”

“We’ll want their profiles and history too,” I said. “Better add that to the Spiders’ things-to-do list.”

“All right,” she said, swaying momentarily for balance as the Quadrail started up. I looked past her at the display window, but there were only a few wandering drones on that side of our track. “I can talk to the stationmaster at the next stop,” she went on. “But it’s only four days to Sistarrko. They may not be able to get the data collected before then.”

“That’s all right,” I said, sitting down in the lounge chair. “I’ve got plenty to read already. You want to join me?”

“No, thank you,” she said, turning toward the door. “I’ll be in my compartment if you need me.”

“Hold it,” I said, reaching over and touching the switch that opened the wall between our rooms. “Let’s not use the corridor any more than necessary, okay? There are nosy neighbors down the hall.”

“Oh,” she said. “Right.” Stepping past me, she went into her compartment, pointedly tapping the control on her own wall as she passed it. I waited until the wall had closed; then, changing my mind, I got up from the chair and crossed over to the bed instead. Throwing my carrybags up onto the rack, I dimmed the lights, propped myself comfortably on the pillow, and started to read.

Given the haste with which the Spiders had thrown together the information package, I hadn’t expected anything too extensive or startling. I wasn’t disappointed. Rastra had been born to a good if not really highly placed family and had risen through the ranks of Guardians until he showed talent in mediating conflicts, at which point he’d been promoted to Resolver. He’d risen through the ranks there, too, being assigned to increasingly important posts until he’d been promoted to
Falc
and been given his current Resolver-at-large position, going wherever his government needed him. The Spiders had included his last five years’ worth of Quadrail travel, which confirmed he’d spent the past three months on the road with JhanKla, no doubt smoothing the High Commissioner’s path through the murky labyrinth of Jurian protocol.

JhanKla, in contrast, had been born pretty much at the top of the food chain, to one of the Halkan Peerage families. He’d been schooled and trained in the art of being an aristocrat, and upon completion of those studies had been handed a commissioner’s job on Vlizfa. He’d served there for three years, apparently with at least a modicum of competence, then moved on to a succession of more important posts on various Halkan worlds. The details of his promotion to High Commissioner weren’t given, but with Halkas that could be a result of merit, a fluctuation in family prestige, or even the serendipity of the right person dying at an opportune moment. Most of his Quadrail travel over the past five years had consisted of trips within the Halkavisti Empire.

As near as I could tell, comparing the two sets of records, there was no indication that he and Rastra had ever even been in the same solar system together prior to this extended visit to the Jurian Collective.

Something seemed to flicker at the edge of my vision. I looked up, but whatever it was had apparently passed. I looked around the room for a moment, then turned my attention back to the reader and swapped out the chip for the one holding the Tube security data.

I’d had just a few minutes to study the chip earlier, but even through a throbbing head I’d hit enough of the high points to be impressed. Now, as I dug into the details, I found myself even more so.

The Tube sensors spotted explosives, of course, including the explosive loadings of projectile handguns. Everyone knew that much. What I hadn’t spotted on my first pass was that the detectors also picked up a wide range of the more innocuous components that could be assembled into things that could go bang in the night. Even homemade explosives were apparently out.

There was also a wide variety of chemical and biological poisons and disease organisms on the list, both fast- and slow-acting varieties, many of which I’d never even heard of. Some were reasonably general threats to the galaxy at large, items like Saarix-5 or anthrax that attacked pretty much every carbon-based metabolism to one degree or another. Things that were more species-specific, like HIV or Shorshic shellbeast toxin, were also screened for.