Odd Girl Out (26 page)

But they were already too late. I scooped up the
kwi
, feeling the familiar activation tingle against my hand as I turned it upward and fired at the guard on my right.

I hadn’t had time to check what setting the
kwi
was on, but from the violent shudder that arced through the walker’s body as he tumbled uncontrollably to the floor across my leg it was clear that Rebekah had put the weapon on its highest pain setting. I fired twice more as I got the
kwi
into proper position on my hand, peripherally aware that all the walkers were shaking and twitching with the shared pain I was pumping into the group mind.

I fired a fourth time as I shoved the Juri off my leg and surged to my feet. I was barely vertical before I had to duck to the side to avoid a Halka who had managed to keep enough control of his body to throw himself at me. He slammed face-first into the stack of crates I’d been seated against, sending another ripple of pain through the mind. I fired one last jolt on the pain setting, then switched the
kwi
to its full knockout setting.

It was, to use the old phrase, like shooting ducks on the water. The walkers tried desperately to scatter, but the pain throbbing through their individual nervous systems had reduced their muscles to twitching jelly and their escape efforts into something halfway between laughable and pathetic. I strode among them, sending them one by one off to dreamland, occasionally shifting back to pain setting just to make sure those still conscious wouldn’t recover enough to mount some kind of counterattack.

Three minutes later, it was all over.

Bayta was still standing by the crate stack where I’d left her, her face tight, her right wrist cradled in her left hand. “You all right?” I asked her, nudging back her fingers so I could get a look at her wrist.

“Mostly,” she said, wincing. “I think it might be broken.”

“Looks more like just a sprain,” I said, gently touching the swelling skin. “We’ll try to find someone to look at it in the next few hours.”

Abruptly, she stiffened. “Frank, there are more first-class passengers coming this way,” she said tightly.

“Interesting,” I said, handing her wrist back into her care again. “I think that’s the first time the Modhri’s bothered to keep any of his walkers in reserve. I guess he
can
learn.”

“Never mind whether or not he can learn,” Bayta bit out. “What are we going to do?”

“Don’t worry, we’re covered,” I assured her, hefting the
kwi
. “Speaking of which.” I turned around. “Rebekah? You can come out now.”

There was a pause, followed by a slight shuffling noise as Rebekah peered cautiously from around one of the stacks. “He’s down?”

“Down and out, and going to stay that way for quite a while,” I confirmed.

She breathed a sigh of relief as she came over to us. “Thank you,” she murmured.

“Thank
you
,” I countered. “How’d you find our
kwi
, anyway?”

“It was in his pocket,” she said, pointing to the first Juri I’d clobbered in the Modhri’s initial surge through the vestibule.

“How did you know he had it?” Bayta asked.

“I didn’t,” Rebekah said. “I’d already searched the ones you knocked out just before they caught you.” She shivered. “I’m just glad it wasn’t on one of the ones still standing.”

“That would have been a little tricky,” I agreed. “Meanwhile, Bayta says there are more walkers on the way, which means it’s time to think about blowing this pop stand. Any word on when that might be?”

“Five minutes,” Rebekah said. “There’s a crosshatch just ahead.”

“A crosshatch?” Bayta echoed, frowning.

“A section of spiral-laid tracks that allow a Quadrail to quickly switch from one track to another,” I explained.

“Yes, I know what it is,” Bayta said, a little tartly. “What do they have to do with anything?”

“Because we need the tender that’s currently on Track Fifteen to come over to
our
track so it can pick us up,” I told her. “The tender that’s been paralleling us for the past two days, by the way.”

Bayta’s eyes flicked back toward the rear of the train with sudden understanding. “You put Rebekah’s coral aboard a
tender
?”

“Specifically, the tender the Spiders had on tap when you got snatched at Jurskala,” I said. “This way we could keep it close enough for the Modhri to sense it and think it was aboard the train, but at the same time keep it completely and permanently out of his reach.”

“Yes,” Bayta murmured, staring off into space. “Yes, I can sense the Spiders aboard now.” She focused on me again. “There
is
still one problem, though.”

“Actually, it’s covered,” I said. “Three stacks back from the front along the left-hand wall is a crate with three oxygen masks and tanks in it.”

“That’ll only solve the first part of the problem,” Bayta cautioned.

“Trust me,” I soothed. “You and Rebekah head to the rear door while I get the oxygen masks. As soon as I’ve done that—whoa,” I interrupted myself. “What have we
here
?”

One of the Jurian walkers, the first one I’d stunned a few minutes ago, was moving. Not very much, more like a person shifting around in a dream than someone clearing the decks for action.

But with a six-hour
kwi
jolt in him, he shouldn’t have been moving at all.

“Something’s wrong,” Bayta murmured.

“Agreed,” I said. I double-checked the setting and shot the walker again, and the dream-like movements stopped.

But for how long? “Maybe it’s losing its effectiveness,” I said, peering at the
kwi
. “It
is
several hundred years old, after all.”

“I sure hope that’s not it,” Bayta said, wincing. “Maybe you’d better give them all another shot, just to be on the safe side. Rebekah and I can get the oxygen masks.”

“Okay, if you think your wrist can handle it.”

“It can,” Bayta assured me. “Three stacks back from the front?”

“Right,” I said. “Top crate on the stack, green stripe pattern around the label. I’ve already loosened the lid.”

Bayta nodded and headed off, Rebekah trailing along behind her. I fired another
kwi
bolt into the next walker in line, watching the two women out of the corner of my eye.

As soon as they were gone, I knelt down beside the one I’d just zapped and started going through his pockets.

He didn’t have what I was looking for. Neither did the second walker I checked.

The third one did.

I was back on my feet, systematically zapping everything in sight, when Bayta and Rebekah returned with the oxygen masks. “They’re here,” Bayta announced as she handed me my mask. “As soon as we’re ready, they’ll open the roof to release the rear door’s pressure lock.”

I grimaced. Depressurizing the car would of course kill all the walkers lying asleep around us. By most of the galaxy’s legal codes, not to mention most of the galaxy’s ethical standards, that constituted murder.

But we had no choice. There was no other way for us to escape, and there wasn’t nearly enough time for us to first drag all these sleeping bodies back into the other baggage car. Not with more walkers on the way.

Besides, even if we did, the Modhri probably wouldn’t let them live anyway. By their very nature walkers had to be kept ignorant of their role, and there was no way in hell that even the most persuasive rationalization would explain away the blank spots or the broken bones. Either he would have their polyp colonies suicide, or he would permanently take them over and turn them into soldiers. The first was death. The second was worse.

But all the cold logic in the universe didn’t make it any easier to take. Collateral damage, unavoidable or not, was still collateral damage.

We were waiting by the rear door, our oxygen masks in place, when there was a creaking from above us and the roof began to open.

For a moment we felt some buffeting as the car’s air rushed out into the near-vacuum of the Tube. I felt my ears pop; from Rebekah’s sudden twitch, I guessed hers had done the same. Then the mild windstorm dropped away, and the roof closed over us again, and Bayta touched the door release.

We were facing the gleaming silver nose of a Quadrail engine, holding position about half a meter back from the rear of our train. Straddling the gap, with two of his seven legs braced on each of the two vehicles, was a dot-marked stationmaster Spider. Behind him, stretched out in a line all the way back across the top of the engine, were four of the slightly smaller conductors.

Bayta didn’t hesitate. She stepped forward, holding her arms slightly away from her sides. The stationmaster got two of his remaining three legs under her arms, holding the third ready in case of trouble, and lifted her across the gap. He passed her off to the next Spider in line, then swung his arms back to Rebekah and me.

I nudged Rebekah and gestured. What I could see of her expression through her mask wasn’t very happy, and her grip on my hand as she stepped to the edge of the short baggage-car platform was anything but gentle. But at least she went without having to be pushed. The Spider lifted her up and over, and then it was my turn.

And as he lifted me up, I took a good look at his dot pattern.

The trip over the speed-blurred tracks below us was mercifully short. A few seconds later, the first Spider handed me off to the next in line, and I was bucket-brigaded across to the rear of the engine.

Two more Spiders were waiting there, hanging on to rings set into the side of the first of the tender’s three passenger cars. They got their legs under my arms and lifted me over the coupling, maneuvering me through the open door on the side. Bayta and Rebekah were already inside, and as the Spider withdrew his legs the door irised shut and I heard the faint hiss as the car was repressurized.

I watched the gauge on the inside of my mask, wincing as my eardrums again struggled to adjust to the pressure change. The gauge reached Quadrail standard, and I closed the valve and took off the mask.

The air smelled sweet and fresh and clean. I took several deep breaths as Bayta and Rebekah removed their own masks, trying to wash away the emotional grime and sweat and guilt of the battle with the Modhri and his slave warriors.

“Are we safe now?” Rebekah asked.

I gazed at her face, searching in vain for the ten-year-old girl I’d seen only briefly in all our time together. What lofty goal was it, I wondered distantly, that deprived a child of her childhood? “Yes, we’re safe,” I said. “It’s all over.” Without waiting for a reply, I turned away.

Because it wasn’t over. Not by a long shot.

At least, not for me.

The car was similar to the ones Bayta and I had traveled in a couple of times before. It was laid out like a double Quadrail compartment, only without the central dividing wall and with a food storage and prep area taking the space where the second bathroom would be. There were two beds at each end, and it wasn’t long before all three of us had claimed our bunks and collapsed into them. Bayta and Rebekah were exhausted, and it wasn’t long before they were fast asleep.

I wasn’t in any better shape than they were, and I could feel fatigue tugging at my eyelids. But I couldn’t go to sleep. Not yet. I waited until their breathing had settled down into a slow rhythm, then gave it another five minutes just to be sure. Then, getting up from my bed, I crossed to the car’s rear door It opened at a touch of the control, and I stepped through the vestibule into the next car back.

It was a cargo car, unfurnished, unadorned, and mostly empty. The only cargo were the seventeen coral lockboxes we’d spirited off New Tigris, sitting together in the middle of the floor. At the far end was a door leading into the tender’s third passenger car.

Standing beside the car’s rear door like a Buckingham Palace guard was the white-dotted Spider who had carried us across the gap to safety. The same white-dotted Spider I’d run into before, in fact, the one I’d privately christened Spot.

I walked the length of the car, feeling a creepy sense of unfriendly eyes watching my every move. Spot stirred as I approached the door, moving sideways to stand in my way. “I need to see him,” I said, coming to a halt a couple of steps away.

“He will not see you,” Spot said.

“I think he will,” I said. “Tell him I know everything.”

There was a short pause. “He will not see you,” Spot repeated.

So he was calling my bluff. I’d expected nothing less. “He has two choices,” I said. “He can see me now, alone, or I can walk back to our car and wake up Bayta, and he can see the two of us together.”

There was another pause, a longer one this time. I waited; and then, slowly, Spot sidled back to his place beside the door. Stepping past him, I touched the door release, crossed the vestibule, and opened the door behind it.

“Good day, Frank Compton,” a melodic voice called as I stepped into the car.

Melodic, but with an unpleasant edge beneath it. Anger? Annoyance?

Fear?

“Hello, Elder of the Chahwyn,” I said, nodding to the slender, pale-skinned being seated on a chair in the middle of the room between a pair of Spiders. “You
are
an Elder, I assume?”

“I am,” he confirmed.

Good—someone with authority. “Elder of the Chahwyn, we need to talk,” I said.

“About what?”

“About this fraud you’ve perpetrated on us,” I said. “This fraud called the Melding.”

There was a stiffening of the cat-like whiskers on the ridges above his eyes. “There is no fraud,” he insisted. “The Melding is as Rebekah has described it.”

“Except for one small but critical fact,” I said. “The small fact that the Modhri didn’t create the Melding.”

I leveled a finger at him. “You did.”

For a long minute the Chahwyn just gazed across the room at me. “How did you learn this?” he asked at last.

At least he wasn’t going to waste my time with a useless bluff. I had to give him points for that one. “Lots of little things,” I said. “In retrospect, I’m surprised it took me as long as it did.”

I nodded behind me. “For starters, this business of melding species together is your trademark trick, not the Modhri’s. It’s the same thing you did with Bayta. In fact, Rebekah even pointed that out. Does she know, by the way?”

“Rebekah does not know,” the Chahwyn said. “None of the Melding does.”

“Nice to know she’s not as accomplished a liar as I was starting to think,” I said. “The next clue was that Rebekah told us the Melding had a secret place where they’d all gone to hide. You don’t get anywhere in this galaxy, certainly not by

Quadrail, without Spider cooperation. In a case like this, Spider cooperation means Chahwyn cooperation. QED.”

His eye-ridge tufts quivered. “QED?”

“
Quod erat demonstrandum
,” I explained. “It’s from an old Earth language and means
that which was to have been proved
. In this case, Chahwyn knowledge implies Chahwyn complicity.” I cocked an eyebrow. “Where exactly
is
the Melding hiding place, by the way?”

“In an uninhabited system near Sibbrava which the Cimmaheem are thinking about developing,” the Chahwyn said. “There is a temporary Quadrail stop there which services only their exploration teams.”

“But of course there’s no official station yet,” I said, nodding. “Which means no manned support services, no resident personnel, and no transfer station with its contingent of nosy Customs agents. Give the Melding a transport or two, and they can go anywhere.”

“They have such a transport.”

“Again, QED,” I said. “There was also your rather ham-handed attempt to protect the coral—or what you thought was the coral—from the Modhri on the train into Jurskala. There was no reason for his walkers to have moved the crate all the way to the last cargo car.
You
did that, probably sending your Spiders across from this very tender to get it out of their reach. When the walkers came looking for it, you let them get into the second car and popped the roof.”

“Yes,” the Chahwyn said. “I did not expect him to blame you for that.”

“I’m sure I appreciate the thought.” I reached into my pocket and pulled out the
kwi
Rebekah had given me. “But this was the real clincher,” I continued, holding it up. “At the critical moment in our fight, Rebekah was able to get this to me. She told me afterward that she’d found it in one of the walkers’ pockets.”

“You don’t believe that to be the truth?”

“I know it isn’t.” I reached into my other pocket. “Because
this
is my
kwi
.”

For a moment he gazed at the two weapons, his eye-ridge tufts again quivering. “What will you tell Bayta?” he asked.

“That depends,” I said. “In retrospect, I can see that from the moment Lorelei showed up in my apartment this whole thing was designed to get Bayta and me to help sneak Rebekah off New Tigris and to safety.”

“She was trapped and alone,” the Chahwyn said, a note of quiet pleading in his voice. “Our Spiders could not help her, not on a Human world far from the Tube. You were the only ones we could turn to.”

“In principle, I have no problem with that,” I said. “We do work for you, after all.” I let my face harden. “But that’s hardly the whole story. You wanted us to help Rebekah… but yet you
didn’t
want us to know you were also involved with her. Still don’t, for that matter. I want to know why.”

He exhaled softly, a sound that was almost a whistle but not quite. “Because we were afraid,” he said, his voice low and earnest and even a little ashamed. “We were afraid of what you would think.”

“What
would
we think?” I countered. “That you were trying to find a way to infuse the Modhri with a calmer, gentler, less aggressive form of himself? As a matter of fact, I brought up that exact idea myself.”

“Yet you were extremely angry when you first learned what we had done to create the Human/Chahwyn symbiont that is Bayta,” he reminded me. “Your anger nearly caused you to turn your back on us instead of choosing to support us.”

“I think you’re overstating the case just a bit,” I said.

“If so, only in degree, not in substance,” he said. “But more than that, there were Bayta’s feelings to consider. Whatever she may think about herself and her Chahwyn symbiont, would she accept that doing the same with Modhran polyps and other living beings was both acceptable and needful?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But considering how close she and Rebekah have become over the past couple of weeks, I don’t think she would have a problem with it.”

“Perhaps not,” the Chahwyn said. “But it was a risk we dared not take.” His face elongated slightly. “A risk we are still not prepared to take.”

“In other words, you want me to keep my mouth shut about this?”

“We would be most grateful if you would,” the Chahwyn said, relief evident in his voice.

“I’m sure you would,” I said. “But that’s not the whole story, either. And you, Elder of the Chahwyn, are a liar.” I stuffed the two
kwis
back into my pockets. “Permit me to prove it.” Bracing myself, I started toward him.

His mouth dropped open, his body stiffening with disbelief and probably fear. But the two Spiders flanking him didn’t even hesitate. Before I’d made it three steps they had moved in front of their master, each dropping into a low, four-legged stance with his other three legs raised high like a tarantula preparing to strike. I kept coming, feinting right and then ducking left.

And suddenly I found myself wrapped in a cold metallic grip as one of the Spiders snatched me off the floor. A second later my back was slammed none too gently against the top of the side wall.

I looked past the shiny Spider sphere at the Chahwyn still sitting frozen in his chair. “QED,” I said quietly. “The Melding experiment isn’t just your attempt to create a less dangerous Modhri.

“You’re trying to create a Spider army.”

“You are a fool,” the Chahwyn bit out, his breath coming in short, spasmodic bursts now. “You don’t understand your danger.”

“Oh, I understand my danger quite well,” I assured him, wincing as the Spider’s legs dug into my already sore ribs. “The question is, do
you
understand
yours
?”

For maybe a quarter minute no one moved or spoke. Then, slowly, the Spider holding me lowered me back to the floor. “You don’t understand,” the Chahwyn said again, his melodic voice gone flat and lifeless. “We cannot fight. We cannot defend ourselves. We are helpless before the Modhran onslaught. We had to do
something
.”

“You did do something,” I told him. “You hired me.”

He snorted, a dog-like sound. “Do truly think you can defeat the Modhri alone?”

“I’m not alone,” I said. “Neither are you. We have allies all over the galaxy. Not many of them, granted. Not yet. But our ranks are growing.”

“Not as quickly as the ranks of the enemy.”

“Perhaps,” I conceded. “But you can’t defeat the Modhri by becoming just like him.”

He looked back and forth between the two Spiders. “Then what
do
we become?” he asked. “Or do we simply resign ourselves to defeat and destruction?”

“You never do that,” I told him firmly. “As to what you should become, that’s a question for people a lot smarter than I am. All I know is that you’ve kept peace and prosperity throughout the galaxy by being what you are, and by keeping the Spiders what you created them to be. You don’t want to be in a hurry to upset that balance.”

His eyes were steady on me. “Will you tell Bayta?” he asked.

I thought about it a moment. “No,” I told him. “Or at least, not yet. But circumstances may force me to do so somewhere down the line.”

His mouth flattened into a wan smile. “As circumstances may likewise force us to do what we would otherwise prefer not to do?”

I grimaced. I hated it when people used my own logic against me. “I never said any of this was simple. I just don’t want you to turn a corner you may wind up bitterly regretting later on. Certainly not until turning that corner is absolutely necessary.”

“And until then?”

“Stay with what you are,” I said. “Hold on to the high ground, and give the less noble people like me time to do our jobs. We can stop the Modhri. I know we can. But I want to make sure that when it’s over we all have a safe, nondespotic Quadrail to ride home in.”

His eye-ridge tufts twitched. “I will deliver that message,” he said. “I do not guarantee the reception it will receive.”

“Good enough,” I said. “What about this second
kwi
? Do you want it, or does it go back to Rebekah?”

“I will take it,” he said. He held out a hand, the hand and arm both stretching fluidly toward me. “She was asked to keep that part of our involvement secret. It would disturb her to learn you had penetrated her deception by returning the weapon to her.”

“Which is one more good reason to back off the path you’re taking,” I pointed out as I dropped the
kwi
into his hand. “If you hadn’t been so concerned about Bayta and me finding out about your new class of Spiders, there would have been no need for you to play this whole thing so far under the table. Rebekah could have given me the
kwi
when we first boarded the train and saved us all a
lot
of trouble.”

“Yes.” The Chahwyn paused. “How
did
you learn of our new Spiders, if I may ask?”

“Basically, because you tried to be clever,” I said. “I already knew there was a class of Spider I didn’t know about—there’d been a couple of them hanging around every time we were spirited off a train for a chat with one of your people. I saw one of them aboard our previous train—I call him Spot, by the way—who probably came aboard with the group who moved our crate and then came into the passenger part of the train to keep an eye on things. They use a different telepathic frequency than regular Spiders, don’t they?”

“They can communicate on both levels,” the Chahwyn said. “It is similar to the difference in communication between the Modhri and the Melding.”

“Both of which are also different from the Chahwyn’s frequency,” I said as a stray fact suddenly stuck me. “Rebekah’s
kwi
was tuned to the Melding frequency, wasn’t it?
She
was the one activating it for me, not Bayta.”

“Correct,” the Chahwyn said. “Now that it has been returned, it will have to be retuned to the Chahwyn frequency.”

“While you’re at it, you should probably check the batteries,” I said. “The six-hour knockout charge is only lasting a few minutes.”

“That is not a problem with the weapon,” the Chahwyn said. “It is because the Modhri mind segment had coral nearby.”

I frowned. “What does coral have to do with it?”

“When the mind segment includes a coral outpost, the effects of the
kwi
are not as strong or long-lasting,” he said. “We believe the polyps in the coral are able to absorb some of the effect and dissipate it more quickly than is possible for a non-coral mind segment.”

“Oh, that’s handy,” I growled. “And when were you planning to tell me this?”

His cheeks puffed out slightly. “We did not know it ourselves until recently.”

Terrific. “Anything else you didn’t know until recently that you’d like to share with the class?”

“Not as yet,” he said. “But you were speaking about the Spiders.”

I grimaced. Getting timely and useful information out of the Chahwyn was like pulling teeth with greased fingers. “The problem came when you decided to disguise your special agent by printing—”

“Our defender,” the Chahwyn corrected. “We call them defenders.”

“Nice name,” I said. “It was when you decided to disguise him by putting a stationmaster’s dot pattern on his globe. It was reasonable enough in its way, I suppose—the two classes are about the same size, and I assume stationmasters are transferred back and forth on regular passenger trains every now and then. The problem was that when I mentioned him to Bayta, she told me there were no stationmasters aboard.”

“She could have been mistaken.”

“With a whole trainful of Spiders as her information network?” I shook my head. “No, it was simply that she’d asked the wrong question. If you’re in a band, and someone sees the trumpet player carrying a flute case, that person might ask you who the flutist is. You, knowing full well the band doesn’t
have
a flutist, would tell the questioner he was nuts. If Bayta had asked if there was a non-standard Spider aboard, they might have told her there was, and we would have figured it out sooner.”

“Yes,” he murmured. “And indeed, you describe a perfect example of the problem we seek so urgently to overcome. Would a Human have simply answered the question he was asked without also volunteering the bit of information that he
hadn’t
been asked?”

“Actually, some Humans probably would,” I told him. “We call them bureaucrats and mid-level managers.”

“But the best Humans would not.”

“Probably not,” I conceded.

His eye-ridge tufts twitched. “Best of fortune to you, Frank Compton.”

Apparently, the interview was over. But that was all right. I’d said everything I’d come here to say. “And to you, Elder of the Chahwyn,” I replied.