Night Train to Rigel

abilities. Also as far as I knew, neither had any of the galaxy’s other known species.

Which made Bayta… what?

“On the other hand, we’re only in the station for fifteen minutes,” I reminded her. “That’s not much time.”

“No, but I’ll only need to deliver that one short request,” she pointed out. “The information itself will have to be gathered and sent to us farther down the line.”

“I suppose that’ll work,” I said, thinking it through. Cargo and passengers traveled at the Quadrails’ standard light-year-per-minute, but the news and mail in those message cylinders somehow managed the trick of crossing the galaxy over a thousand times faster. The most popular theory was that once the Quadrail got up to speed, the Spiders used the dish antenna in front of the message cylinder slot to transmit everything to a train farther up the line, using the Tube itself as a gigantic wave-guide.

The messaging apparatus was supposedly sealed and self-contained, impossible for even the Spiders to reach while the Quadrail was in transit. But of course that didn’t stop the conspiracy theorists. The more paranoid among them were convinced that the Spiders read everything, encrypted or otherwise, before they transmitted it.

If we were dealing with two different factions, the question of Spider eavesdropping might be a highly important one. Unfortunately, I couldn’t think of anything I could do about it one way or the other. “I presume you can arrange for them to deliver the data to us aboard whatever train we’re on at the time?” I asked.

Bayta nodded. “I’ll tell the stationmaster when I put in the request.”

“Good,” I said. “Tell him to deliver it to us at Kerfsis.” She drew back a little. “Kerfsis? The Jurian colony world?”

“Regional capital, actually,” I corrected her. “Why? You have a problem with Juriani?”

“No but—” She seemed to flounder a moment. “I assumed we’d be transferring to a cross-galactic express at Homshil and heading straight to Filiaelian space. That’s where the attack is supposed to take place.”

With a sigh, I popped the last onion ring into my mouth and stood up. “Come on,” I said, brushing off my hands.

“Where are we going?” she asked cautiously.

“To the bar,” I told her. “I need something to drink.”

She followed me silently down the corridor to the rear of our car, through all the genial camaraderie in the forward first-class coach, and back into the dining car. The bar was reasonably busy, but most of the patrons were drinking in groups and there were a few unoccupied tables for two. Choosing one in a back comer, I steered Bayta over to it. The chairs were lumpy and uncomfortable-looking, which probably meant some Shorshians had been using them last. “What’ll you have?” I asked, gesturing her to one of the chairs as I sat down in the other. The chair sensed my weight and body temperature, correctly deduced my species, and reconfigured itself into something a lot more comfortable.

“Something nonalcoholic,” she said a bit stiffly.

“Teetotaler, huh?” I hazarded, touching the button in the middle of the table to pull up the holodisplay menu. I gave it a quick scan, then tapped for a lemonade for her and an iced tea for me. “Too bad. Alcohol can be a nice little social equalizer.”

“Or it can be a way to cloud your mind and put you at a disadvantage with your enemies,” she countered.

I thought about the dead man in Manhattan and the Saarix-laden carrybags back in my compartment “Lucky for me, I don’t have any enemies,” I murmured.

Her eyebrow may have twitched, but I could have imagined that. “Why exactly did you bring me here?” she asked.

“I wanted to go someplace where we could talk in private,” I said. “I thought the Spiders might have the compartments bugged.”

“They wouldn’t do that,” she insisted.

“You never know,” I said. Actually, I did know; and no, they hadn’t. My watch came from the same stratospherically priced tech people as my disguised sensor system, and it would have tingled a warning if it had picked up any sign of eavesdropping equipment. Another trinket my old Westali colleagues would probably give spare body parts to possess.

“Think whatever you want,” Bayta said. Her voice was still stiff, but now it was a tired sort of stiff. “What do you want to talk about?”

I took a deep breath, let it out in a soft sigh. My attempts to get a reaction with the good-little-girl gambit had failed, and my take-it-or-leave-it arrogance about the weapons data hadn’t done any better. Maybe a sincere, humble, heart-on-the-sleeve approach would hit a resonance and give me a handle on this woman. “Look,” I said. “According to every bit of conventional wisdom, what Hermod says the Spider saw is impossible. The Spiders screen everything coming into the Tube; and the Fillies’ own transfer station screens everything coming out. There should be zero chance of getting any serious weaponry close enough to a Filly station to take it out.”

“Which is why you were asked to investigate it.”

“What I’m trying to say is that the whole thing has me completely flummoxed,” I said. “Frankly, I’m not even sure where to start.”

She started to reach out toward my hand, resting on the table. Midway through the gesture she seemed to think better of it and let her arm fall instead into her lap. “The Spiders wouldn’t have hired you if they didn’t think you could do it.” she said.

Encouraging words, and with some genuine concern behind them. The compassionate type, then, only she was afraid to show it?

Perhaps. Still, I couldn’t quite shake the impression that she was more like an observer watching a dit rec drama unfold than one of the people actually in the middle of the action. “Thank you,” I said humbly. “I just hope you’re right.”

“I am,” she said firmly. She glanced around the room, as if making sure no one was close enough to hear us, and leaned a little closer across the table. “But why go to Kerfsis? Do you suspect the Juriani?”

“Not really,” I said as a Spider arrived with our drinks. I handed Bayta her lemonade and took a sip of my iced tea. It was strong and sweet just the way I liked it. “It’s more likely that one of the Fillies’ neighbors will be the ones making the trouble,” I continued. “Serious grievances typically ferment close to home. Mostly, I want to see if the Jurian entry procedures have changed any in the couple of years since I’ve ridden the Quadrail.”

She took a sip of her lemonade, her eyes fluttering with clear surprise at the tang. Her first experience with the drink? “May I ask why?” she asked.

I nodded upward toward the bar’s slightly domed ceiling. Spread across it was a glowing map of the galaxy and the Quadrail system. “Here’s the problem,” I said. “The Fillies are all the way across the galaxy, about as far from Earth as you can get. Even if we take express trains the whole way, that’s still nearly two and a half months of travel. We simply don’t have the time to go there and start working our way back.”

“We have four months.”

“No, the Fillies have four months,” I corrected her “We, on the other hand, do not… because the Fillies aren’t going to be the first ones attacked.”

Her eyes narrowed. “What do you mean?”

“I mean that whoever these warmongers are, they’d have to be insane to take on the Fillies first crack out of the box,” I said. “Filly soldiers are genetically programmed for loyalty, their overall defense network is second to none, and depending on who’s doing the counting, their empire is either the biggest or second biggest in the galaxy. Would you try out a brand-new attack plan on someone like that?”

Her lips compressed briefly. “I suppose not.”

“Following that same logic, the test subject is likely to be one of the newer, younger, and therefore less dangerous races,” I continued. “If we limit ourselves to those who’ve joined the galactic club in the last two hundred years, that means the Juriani, the Cimmaheem, the Tra’ho’sej, and the Bellidos.” I took a sip of my tea.“And, of course, us.”

For a minute the only sound was the muffled background hum of a half dozen different conversations and the click-clack of the Quadrail’s wheels beneath us. Quadrail dining cars, I remembered from previous trips, were acoustically designed in such a way that the volume and intelligibility of a conversation dropped off sharply half a meter away from the center of the table. It made for considerably more privacy than one would expect just from looking at the layout, which was why I’d been willing to talk about this here at all. “And whoever they decide on,”