Night Train to Rigel

used, the Tube’s system of artificial gravity began right at the inner edge of the entrance hatch. But there was always one idiot per shuttle who hadn’t bothered to read the directions. Ours was six people ahead of me, floating with brisk confidence up alongside the ladder and then abruptly changing direction as his head poked through the hatch and the Tube’s gravity grabbed him and shoved him straight back down again. On his next try, he made sure to hang on to the ladder the whole way up like he was supposed to.

And a minute later, for the first time in over two years, I was standing inside the greatest engineering feat the universe had ever known.

The station’s general layout was prosaic enough, and aside from the fact that it was built into the inside of a huge cylinder, it would have felt right at home beside any Earth-bound train or monorail yard. There were thirty sets of four-railed tracks spaced evenly around the surface, with groups of elegantly designed buildings set between them that functioned as service centers, maintenance facilities, restaurants, and waiting rooms for passengers transferring between different lines.

Why four rails were needed per track was one more mystery in the Quadrail’s stack of unanswered questions. Two rails this size were required for physical stability, and a third could be explained if power was being run to the trains from an external source. But no one could figure out why the system needed a fourth.

Most people probably never even wondered about it. In fact, at this point in their journey, most people didn’t even know the tracks were there. The first thing everyone noticed when they first entered the Tube was the Coreline.

The official rundown on the Quadrail described the Coreline as an optically coruscating pipe inside the Quadrail Tube of unknown composition and purpose, which was rather like describing a bird of paradise as a flying thing with colors. Ten meters in diameter, glowing and sparkling and flashing with every color in the spectrum—including deep infrared and ultraviolet—the Coreline was like a light show on caffeine overdose. At apparently random intervals the pattern changes increased in speed and intensity, and most people swore they could see the thing writhing like an overtensioned wire getting ready to snap. The loose wire meshwork that encased the Coreline another dozen meters out added to the illusion, looking like a protective safety screen put there to protect passengers from shrapnel if and when the thing finally blew.

Fortunately, sensor measurements had long since proved that the writhing was just another optical illusion. Those same measurements had also confirmed that the aptly named Coreline did indeed run along the exact geometric center of the Tube.

And that was all the sensors revealed. Most of the experts agreed that the Coreline was the key to how the Quadrail system operated—all except those who insisted it was the fourth rail, of course— but that was as far as anyone had ever gotten. No scanning equipment compact enough to fit through the Tube’s hatches had enough power to penetrate the Coreline’s outer skin to see what kind of equipment was tucked away inside, and the more powerful warship-class sensors couldn’t penetrate the outer wall of the Tube itself. Information stalemate, in other words, which was exactly how the Spiders liked it.

“Welcome, traveler,” a flat voice said in my ear.

Speak of the devils. Adjusting my expression to neutral, I turned around.

A Spider was standing behind me, a gray half-meter-diameter sphere hanging beneath an arching crown of seven segmented legs, the whole thing softly reflecting the Core-line’s ongoing light show. The whole thing was about twice my height, with the sphere hanging half a meter above my eye level, which marked this particular Spider as a maintenance drudge. That alone was noteworthy; usually it was the smaller conductors who did whatever communicating the Spiders deemed necessary. “Welcome yourself,” I replied wittily. “What can I do for you?”

“Where is your luggage?” it asked.

I looked back at the mass of bags being ferried up from the shuttle, some of them starting to roll away as their owners keyed their leashes. “Over there somewhere,” I said, pointing. “Why?”

“Please bring it here,” the Spider said. “It must be inspected.”

I felt my stomach tightening. In all my previous trips aboard the Quadrail the only times I’d seen anyone’s luggage pulled for inspection was when the Spiders’ unobtrusive sensor array had already decided there was something inside that violated their contraband rules. “Certainly,” I said, trying to sound calm as I tapped the leash button, hoping fervently that the bags wouldn’t embarrass me by dying halfway.

For a wonder they didn’t, successfully maneuvering their way around the rest of the luggage to where the Spider and I waited. “Shall I open them?” I asked.

“No.” The Spider stepped over them and shifted to a five-legged stance, deftly inserting the ends of its other two legs into the handles and lifting the bags into the air like a weight lifter doing bending bicep curls. “They will be returned,” it added, and strode off toward one of the buildings beside the track where my Quadrail was scheduled to arrive.

I watched it go, wondering like everyone else in the galaxy what the devil was inside those dangling globes. But the Spiders’ metallic skin was just as effective at blocking sensor scans as the Coreline was. They could be robots, androids, trained ducks, or something so weird that no one had even thought of it yet. It disappeared-into the building, and with a sudden premonition, I spun around.

The Girl was standing over by the pile of luggage, her carrybag at her feet, watching me. For a second we held each other’s gaze across the distance. Then, as if she’d just realized that I was looking back at her, she lowered her eyes.

Scowling, I turned and headed for me platform. If the Quadrail was on time and I’d never heard of one being late it would pull into the station exactly eight minutes from now. Thirty minutes after that, it would pull out again, with me on board.

The Spiders had until then to return my luggage, or there was going to be hell to pay.

Seven minutes later, far down the Tube, the telltale red glow of our Quadrail appeared.

The rest of the passengers had gathered on the platform, and once again I could hear the amazed and slightly nervous twitterings of the first-timers. The train approached rapidly, the red glow resolving into a pair of brilliant laserlike beams flashing between the engine’s oversized front bumper and the Coreline overhead. In the spots where the beams touched it, the Coreline’s own light show became even more agitated, and I amused myself by watching out of the corner of my eye as several of the uninitiated eased a few steps backward. The lasers winked out, and the dark mass resolved into a shiny silver engine pulling a line of equally shiny silver cars, the whole thing decelerating rapidly as it neared the platform. The engine and first few cars rolled past us, and with a squeal of brakes the Quadrail came to a halt.

There were sixteen cars in this particular train, each with a single door near the front. The doors irised open simultaneously and each disgorged a conductor Spider, a more or less Human-sized version of the drudge who’d made off earlier with my luggage. The conductors moved to the sides of the doors and stood there like Buckingham Palace sentries as lines of Humans and aliens maneuvered their carrybags out onto the platform and headed for either the waiting rooms or the glowing hatchways marking the spots where shuttles were waiting. At the rear, drudges were busily removing larger pieces of luggage from the baggage car for transfer to the shuttles, while on the far side of the train I knew other drudges would be doing likewise with the various undercar storage compartments.

I looked toward the front of the train, where a pair of drudges had reached the engine. One of them set its feet into a line of embedded rings and climbed partially up the side to a slightly lumpy box set into the engine’s roof just behind a compact dish antenna. Two of the spindly legs reached up and popped the box lid open, delicately removing a flattened message cylinder and handing it down to the other drudge waiting below. The second Spider accepted the cylinder and passed up one of its own, which the first then replaced in the box. Deceptively compact, those cylinders were packed with the most current news from around the galaxy, along with private electronic messages and encrypted data of all sorts.

Passengers, cargo, and mail, the ultimate hat trick of any civilization. All of it running via the Quadrail.

All of it under the control of the Spiders.

A few minutes later the outward flow of passengers ended, and the line of conductors took a multilegged step forward. “All aboard Trans-Galactic Quadrail 339216, to New Tigris, Yandro, the Jurian Collective, the Cimmal Republic, and intermediate transfer nodes,” they announced in unison, verbalizing the information that was also being given by a multilanguage holodisplay suspended over the train. “Departure in twenty-three minutes.”