Odd Girl Out (24 page)

Travel, according to cliché, broadened the mind, and there was no doubt that the typical Quadrail travelers had had their minds broadened as much as anyone’s. Nonetheless, if the stares I collected on my way down the car were any indication, this was a new one on pretty much everyone.

Fortunately for them, none of them made any attempt to stop us.

We were about a third of the way down the aisle when the train again started up, jostling everyone in the car and nearly dumping me on my face. We continued on, and as the train started angling up the slope leading out of the station we reached the car’s rear door and slipped through into the first baggage car.

“What do we do now?” Rebekah asked as the door slid shut behind us.

“We get ready for company,” I said, gingerly sliding Bayta off my aching shoulder and setting her down on her feet on the floor. “Bayta, turn around.”

“There
is
a plan, then?” Bayta asked as she swiveled around to put her back to me.

“There was,” I said, pulling out my lockpick. “Unfortunately, it’s now been just slightly shot to hell.”

Bayta threw a look at Rebekah. “I hope you have a new one.”

“In production as we speak,” I assured her. “Rebekah, go push on the stacks of crates nearest the door. See if you can figure out which one’s the lightest.”

“Okay.”

Her tour of the stacks took about a minute, the same minute it took me to get Bayta’s wrist and ankle cuffs off. “This one, I think,” she said, pointing to the stack to the right of the door.

“Good,” I said, flipping out my multitool’s tiny knife, the only genuine weapon allowed inside the Tube. Stepping to the door side of Rebekah’s stack, I reached up and cut a long vertical slit in the safety webbing. I pried the webbing open, then jabbed the knife into the side of one of the crates midway up “Okay,” I said, getting a grip on the multitool. “I’ll pull. You two go around on the other side and push.”

The stack was a lot heavier than it looked, and it took a good half minute of grunting to get it to tip. But finally, and with a horrible crash, it came down, spreading its constituent crates all across the floor in front of the doorway.

“That won’t stop them for long,” Bayta warned as she surveyed our handiwork.

“It won’t stop them at all,” I corrected, hopping up on the nearest of the fallen crates and starting on the webbing of the stack on the other side of the door. “Bayta, can you climb up that stack over there and get ready to push the top of this one?

“I’ll do it,” Rebekah volunteered before Bayta could answer. Grabbing a double handful of webbing, she started up.

I returned my attention to my own stack and finished slicing through the webbing. “Bayta, give me a hand here,” I called as I again stuck the blade into the side of one of the crates.

“They’re coming,” Bayta murmured as she got into position around the back side of the stack.

“I know,” I said. “Rebekah?”

“Almost ready,” she called.

I nodded and got a grip on the multitool. Dropping this stack on top of the first one ought to leave the door properly blocked.

I was still standing there, waiting for Rebekah to get into position, when the door slid open and a large Halka strode though.

For a split second I hesitated, trying to decide if I could take the time to pull my multitool out of the crate so that I would have at least that much of a weapon in hand. Probably not, I concluded regretfully, and started to step away from the stack into the Halka’s path.

But to my surprise, I found Bayta was already there. “Stop!” she ordered, her voice bold and menacing, her hands upstretched like a wizard from a dit rec fantasy standing against the oncoming hordes of hell.

It was so unexpected that the Halka actually stopped, the Modhri controlling him apparently as stunned by Bayta’s action as I was.

And as he and Bayta stared across the two-meter gap at each other, she with righteous anger, he with utter disbelief, I felt the stack beside me start to tip. Breaking my own paralysis, I threw my full weight against my multitool.

By the time the Halka saw it coming, it was already too late. He leaped into the car, but the top of the falling stack caught him across his upper back, slamming him forward and downward as the rest of the crates fell in a jumble across the doorway.

But he wasn’t down and out, not yet. Even as I charged him, he struggled to his hands and knees, his flat bulldog face sniveling back and forth as he looked for a target. He spotted me and reared up on his knees, cocking his arm and closed right hand over his shoulder.

I beat the throw by about a quarter second, sending a spinning kick to the side of his head that twisted him a quarter turn on his knees before dropping him flat on his face.

And as the thud of his landing echoed across the car, his hand opened and something small and lumpy rolled through the limp fingers onto the floor.

A chunk of Modhran coral.

Beside me, I heard a sharp intake of air, and I turned to find Bayta staring wide-eyed at the coral. “It’s all right,” I said quickly. “He never got it anywhere near me.”

There was a thud from somewhere. I looked over at the pile of crates as a second thud sounded, and saw the box immediately in front of the door quiver. “That’s not going to hold him for long,” Bayta said tightly.

“No, but at least he can’t send more than two walkers at it at a time,” I pointed out. “One of the many advantages of doorways.”

“I suppose.” She looked around the car. “We should probably make the pile bigger.”

“Unfortunately, we can’t,” I said. “The rest of the stacks are too far away to do any good, and most of the individual crates are probably too heavy for the three of us to manually move over to the pile. Time to retreat to the rear car and see what we can come up with there.”

“All right,” Bayta said. “Rebekah?”

“I’m here,” Rebekah called, coming around from the side of the stack I’d sent her to climb.

“We’re going back to the next car,” Bayta said as I took her arm and started toward the door leading to the next baggage car. “Come on.”

“Wait a minute,” Rebekah said.

We both turned back to her. “What is it?” Bayta asked.

Rebekah visibly braced herself. “I was thinking maybe I should stay here.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Bayta said firmly. “Come on, now.”

“I’m not being ridiculous,” Rebekah countered. Her voice was trembling, but her tone was as firm as Bayta’s. “I mean… he doesn’t want you and Mr. Compton.”

“If you stay, you’ll be putting your people at terrible risk,” Bayta reminded her. “You can’t do that, not even for us.”

“She wouldn’t be putting them at risk,” I murmured.

“If the Modhri gets hold of her—” Bayta broke off, staring at me in disbelief. “Are you suggesting she should—?
Frank
!”

Actually, that wasn’t what I was suggesting at all. I opened my mouth to tell her so—"Mr. Compton and I have already been through this,” Rebekah said. “I was willing to give up my life for you. I’m even more willing to give it up for the Melding.” She looked at me, a silent plea in her eyes.

I grimaced. But she was right. She and I already knew why capturing her wouldn’t do the Modhri any good. With Halkan walkers beating on our front door, there was no reason why Bayta needed to know, too. After all, the Modhri might decide he wanted a prisoner or two for questioning. Better if at least one of those prisoners didn’t know anything. “Your nobility does you credit,” I went on. “But Bayta’s right. We’re not leaving you behind, which means that all this conversation is doing is wasting time. So get in gear and let’s go.”

Rebekah hesitated, then seemed to wilt a little. “All right,” she said as she finally came over and joined us.

“And don’t worry,” Bayta assured her, putting her arm around the girl’s shoulders. “Mr. Compton will come up with something.”

“Actually, Mr. Compton already has,” I said. “Come on You’re going to love this.”

Every Quadrail passenger car came stocked with an emergency oxygen repressurization tank, a complete self-contained and self-controlled supply/scrubber/regulator system that was ready to swing into action in the highly unlikely event of a loss of air pressure in the car. The repressurization of the baggage car where the two ill-fated Halkan walkers had asphyxiated indicated that the non-passenger cars probably had the same setup.

We found the large cylinder and its associated control system in the rear car’s front left-hand corner. Getting the tank off the wall, we manhandled it into the vestibule between the two baggage cars. Stripping it of its regulators took longer than I’d expected, but at last we were ready

“I don’t understand how this is supposed to work,” Rebekah said as I made one last check on the tank’s stability as it leaned against the vestibule wall. “I thought these doors only locked when there was vacuum on one side.”

“Actually, the Tube isn’t quite a vacuum,” I corrected. “Seven hundred years’ worth of leakage through the atmosphere barriers of multiple thousands of Quadrail stations has left a thin atmosphere out there. Not enough to breathe, but enough to keep your brains from boiling out through your ears.”

Rebekah shuddered. “Frank!” Bayta admonished me.

“Sorry,” I apologized. “To answer your question, your typical pressure lock doesn’t know what the actual air pressure is it’s dealing with. It doesn’t know, and it also doesn’t care. All it cares about is whether one side has significantly more pressure than the other. If and when that happens, a purely mechanical switch kicks in and locks the doors closed.”

Reaching to the top of the tank, I opened the valve, sending a hiss of cold oxygen into the vestibule and wafting into our faces. “And as the saying goes, if you can’t raise the bridge, lower the river,” I added, letting the door slide shut again. “There should be enough air in that tank to raise the vestibule pressure at least fifty percent, probably more. The pressure lock will kick in, and at that point there’ll be nothing the Modhri can do but break in the door.”

“I see,” Rebekah said. “Though once he does that, he’ll be able to get through both vestibule doors, right?”

“Actually, once he’s got even a small hole or crack to let the pressure out he can get through both doors,” I said. “But I figure it’ll buy us a couple of hours.”

“Meanwhile, he’s got a coral outpost out there,” Bayta murmured.

“It won’t help him any,” Rebekah said.

“I don’t think Bayta was referring to your coral, Rebekah,” I said. “She was thinking about the fact that if this mind segment wants to, he could turn the entire train into walkers.”

Rebekah’s face went rigid. “Oh, no,” she breathed. “But he wouldn’t do that. Would he?”

“He did it once before,” Bayta said grimly. “It nearly killed both of us.”

“But not quite,” I pointed out. “But I don’t think he will. Not this time. He already has plenty of walkers aboard for what he needs, and creating a bunch of new ones won’t really gain him anything.”

“Unless he does it just to spite us,” Bayta said.

I shook my head. “The Modhri doesn’t seem to care that much about spite or revenge. He has a pretty good soldier mentality, actually, which is one of the things that make him so dangerous. He’s too focused on his mission of galaxy domination to bother with petty distractions.”

“That might be true for the Modhri as a whole,” Rebekah said. “But remember, all we have aboard this train is a single mind segment.”

“And you hurt him pretty badly back there,” Bayta agreed. “The way Mr. Braithewick looked at you… Standing orders notwithstanding, he might decide to bend the rules a little.”

I hesitated, gazing at their faces, at their eyes filled with fear and compassion for all the innocent people riding our train. In theory, of course, they were right. A single mind segment, especially one that was out of touch with all the other mind segments, had a certain degree of autonomy. If it was out of touch long enough, as it would be on a long Quadrail trip, it could conceivably drift away from whatever the overall Modhran party line was at the moment.

In fact, that could be the very same mechanism that had caused the drastic change in Rebekah’s batch of coral when it came under the influence of her group of rogue symbionts. If so, I could see why the Modhri was so afraid of them, and why he was going to such lengths to find and destroy them.

Should I tell them the truth? Bayta would have to be told eventually, I knew. And it might help alleviate at least this one concern for both her and Rebekah.

But this was something the Modhri definitely didn’t want getting out… and he still might decide to take a prisoner for questioning. “I doubt the Modhri’s discipline is nearly that lax,” I said instead. “Personally, I think we’ve got better things to worry about than having the whole train rise up against us.”

I turned back to the vestibule. “That should be long enough,” I said. “Let’s give it a try.” Mentally crossing my fingers, I pressed the door release.

Nothing happened. I tried again, and once more just for luck. The door was indeed locked up tight. “Perfect,” I said briskly. “That should hold him for a bit.”

“We need to hold him longer than just a bit,” Bayta warned, giving me one of those thoughtful looks she did so well. She was smart enough to realize I’d deflected her concern without genuinely addressing it, but she was also smart enough to know when I was telling her to drop a subject. “It’s still several hours to the next station.”

“True enough,” I said, looking at the stacks on either side of the vestibule door. Both were composed of oversized crates with machinery labels on them and double layers of safety webbing. Not a chance in the universe the three of us would be able to knock those over. “Scavenger hunt time. What I want is a crate with a vertical side-sliding panel instead of the usual top-opening lid. It also needs to be on the bottom of its particular stack. First one to find me a crate like that wins a prize.”

“What kind of prize?” Rebekah asked.

“I’ll think of something,” I said. “You two head back; I’ll check the ones up here.”

The crate I’d described for them was important, but it wasn’t actually my first priority. As soon as the two of them were out of sight, I headed to the side toward the spot where the Jurskala Spider contingent was supposed to have loaded my special crate.

It was, thankfully, right where it was supposed to be, sitting on top of a short and easily climbable stack of other crates. I pried open the top, made sure my special cargo was inside, then closed it again. The crate had been a vital part of Plan A, and it was going to be an equally important part of Plan B.

It would probably be necessary even if we had to go to Plan C. Whatever Plan C might end up being.

I was back down on the floor, prowling among the crate islands, when Rebekah won the hunt.

“What’s in it?” she asked as I worked the safety webbing up and away from the bottom of the crate. It would have been faster to cut it, but this particular webbing I wanted left intact.

“Typically, side-opening crates contain one of two types of items,” I told her. “Either machinery designed to be rolled out at its destination, or stuff that’ll flow out into a bin or other container when you pull up the panel. Hold this webbing up, will you?”

She reached up and got a grip on the webbing, keeping it out of my way. “Which is it in this case?” she asked.

“No idea, but I’m hoping it’s the former,” I said. Popping the catches, I got my fingertips under the bottom of the panel and pulled upward.

I would have been happy with pretty much anything. As it was, I was quietly ecstatic. Packed inside its molded foam spacers was a beautifully restored classic Harley-Davidson motorcycle. “Bingo,” I said.

“We’re planning on riding somewhere?” Bayta asked, looking confused.

“Like where?” I countered, getting a grip on the front wheel and pulling. For a moment the bike resisted, then reluctantly rolled toward me, its spacers mostly coming along with it. “Besides, it won’t be fueled up.”

“Then why do we want it?” Rebekah asked.

“Because this is no longer a classic motorcycle,” I told her as it came free. “This is a neatly organized collection of spare parts.”

I gave the clutch grip an experimental squeeze. “A collection of spare parts,” I added quietly, “that can be turned into weapons.”

Bayta and Rebekah exchanged looks. “I see,” Bayta said, her voice sounding uncomfortable.

Small wonder. For seven hundred years the Spiders had gone to extraordinary lengths to keep weapons off their Quadrails. Now here I was, proposing to create an arsenal out of something that had sailed right through their filters. “It’s not a big deal,” I told her. “In the real world, almost anything can be turned into a weapon if you work at it hard enough.”

“I suppose,” she said. “It just makes the whole no-weapons thing seem rather futile.”

“Hardly,” I assured her. “Keeping guns and knives and plague bacteria off the trains is what’s kept the peace through the galaxy for the past seven centuries. Let’s not throw out the heirloom silver just because there’s a little tarnish on it here and there.”

“You’re right.” She took a deep breath. “What do you want Rebekah and me to do?”

“Right now, nothing,” I said. “With only one multitool among us, this is going to be pretty much a one-man job. You and Rebekah can go find yourselves a nice place to sit down and relax.”

“What about my prize?” Rebekah asked, a hint of the ten-year-old girl once again peeking through. “You said there would be a prize if I found you the right crate.”

“That I did,” I agreed, bracing myself. Someone was really going to hate me for this.

He would just have to get in line. Reaching to the Harley’s right-hand mirror, I snapped it off. “There you go,” I said, handing it to Rebekah. “Don’t spend it all in one place.”

She gazed at it a moment, then looked up at me again. “Thank you,” she said gravely.

And with that, the ten-year-old was gone again. “You’re welcome,” I said. “Now scoot, both of you. I’ll let you know when I need you again.”