Night Train to Rigel

I resisted the impulse to roll my eyes. In terms of flat-out, words-per-minute chattiness, Bellidos were even worse than Halkas when they drank. “I work for a travel agency,” I told him, getting a grip on my bottle and trying to figure out how to make a graceful exit without him watching me the whole way out. Maybe if I signaled the Spider to follow me to the restaurant area and we made the handoff there—

And then, right in the middle of my planning, it suddenly hit me. This was the same Bellido I’d passed on the way to my seat in the hybrid Quadrail car I’d taken out of Terra Station. The Bellido whose casual look had sent an unidentified but unpleasant tingle up my back.

My eyes flicked to the soft plastic grips of the status guns beneath his arms. Bellidos didn’t just roll out of bed in the morning and decide which set of weapons would best suit the day’s wardrobe. Those guns were as much a declaration of his societal position as a human banker’s scarf or a Cimma’s lacquered coiffure. These in particular were copies of Elli twelve-millimeters, a caliber that placed their owner somewhere in the upper middle class, and Bellidos of that class never took off their guns in public, not even if they wound up traveling beneath their class.

Back on the hybrid car he hadn’t been carrying these guns. In fact, he hadn’t been carrying any guns at all. Which meant he’d either been lying to the universe then, or he was doing so now.

And Bellidos never lied like that. Not without a damn good reason.

A renewed tingle ran up my back. Could he be a con artist? Possibly. But in my experience professional criminals were usually smart enough not to get this tipsy in public. A social pretender, then, intent on knocking back the good times and rubbing shoulders with the elite before he got caught? There were severe penalties for such things on Belldic worlds, but of course Belldic law didn’t apply on the Quadrail.

“A travel agency, you say?” he prompted.

“Yes,” I said, getting back to my explanation and my exit-strategy planning. Now, more than ever, I didn’t want him to see me getting a data chip from a Spider. “I’m looking for unusual vacation experiences to offer my fellow humans.”

“An enjoyable profession, no doubt,” he said. “What is your next destination?”

“A Halkan system named Sistarrko,” I said. “There’s a resort on a moon there that’s been recommended to me.” I glanced at my watch. “And I need to get back and prepare for my change of trains.”

“Oh, there are hours yet to go,” he chided. “Tell me, have you ever tasted properly aged Droskim?”

“It would probably eat a hole in my stomach,” I told him. “And I really must go.”

His expression fell a little. “Then a pleasant journey to you, sir.” Lifting his glass in salute, he stood up and made his unsteady way back toward his table.

I stood up, too, picking up my bottle and turning toward the restaurant section. As I did so, the Spider loitering at the end of the bar unglued itself from the floor and started toward me.

I swallowed a curse and picked up my pace. With my Bellido would-be best friend on one side and Rastra’s imminent reappearance on the other, I might as well try to make this secret handoff onstage at the Follies.

But Rastra wasn’t here yet, and the Bellido was still on his way to his table with his back toward me. If I could do this quickly enough …

I cut across the Spider’s path, and as I did so one of its legs curled up from the floor and stretched out toward me. I caught the glint of a data chip, and without breaking stride I let my arm swing slightly out of line to pluck it from the pad. Pressing it into temporary concealment in my palm, I continued on, glancing back just as the Bellido dropped heavily into his chair.

I nearly bumped into Rastra as I crossed into the restaurant. “Ah—there you are,” he said. “My apologies, but it appears they are out of onion rings. Apparently, they’re a delicacy among Pirks as well as humans.”

“Too bad,” I said, lifting my bottle with one hand as I surreptitiously slipped the data chip into my jacket pocket with the other “The important thing is that they had the Jack Daniel’s. Let’s get back to the others.”

“I’m afraid you’ll have to begin without me,” Rastra said regretfully “I’ve been informed that one of the first- class passengers has a problem that needs to be dealt with. As senior Resolver aboard, I must see if I can help.” The scales around his eyes and beak crinkled slightly. “Try to remember to save me some.”

“No problem,” I said, a creepy feeling rippling across the skin between my shoulder blades. “Don’t be long.”

“I won’t.”

I watched until he’d passed through the door into the vestibule leading forward. Then, for no particular reason, I looked back over at the corner table.

The Bellido’s drink was still there. The Bellido himself was gone.

I looked around the room, the creepy feeling turning into a full-fledged unpleasant tingle. The way he’d been moving earlier, he should have had trouble even finding the door, let alone moving stealthily enough to slip out without me noticing. Like the two Halkas before him, he’d apparently decided that the best way to fool a Human was to pretend to be drunk. Unlike the Halkas, he’d had all the nuances of the role down cold.

Which strongly implied he wasn’t simply a social pretender, either. So what the hell was he?

I didn’t know; but suddenly I wasn’t feeling very good about hanging around here anymore. Trying to watch every direction at once, I headed back toward the Peerage car.

No one accosted me as I passed through the first- and second-class cars. I paid special attention to the Bellidos scattered among the passengers, but none of them seemed the least bit interested in me.

Which actually wasn’t all that surprising. There was no way the fake drunk could have gotten past me while I was talking to Rastra, which meant he was still behind me somewhere in the forward part of the train. Comms didn’t work aboard Quadrails, or anywhere else inside the Tube for that matter, which meant there also wasn’t any way for him to have communicated with any confederates he might have farther back.

Unless, of course, he didn’t need to communicate with them because they already had their orders. Trying not to look too much like I was hurrying, I left the last second-class car and crossed the vestibule into the third-class section.

I hadn’t focused on the passengers on my way forward, but to the best of my memory nothing much seemed to have changed since then. Again, I paid special attention to the Bellidos; again, they didn’t seem to be paying any attention back.

I was midway through the last of the passenger cars when my eyes fell on a set of three empty seats in the last row.

There had been occasional empty seats on my way forward, their occupants presumably either out having dinner or else communing with nature in one of the pair of restrooms at the front of each car. But there hadn’t been any threesomes in the second/third-class dining car just now, and the chances of three passengers in the same row deciding to hit the head at the same time had to be pretty small.

Much smaller, I suspected, than the chances that those same three passengers had drifted off to the privacy of one of the baggage cars to arrange some kind of unpleasant surprise. Still, unless I wanted to wait for the fake drunk to catch up and turn three-to-one odds into four-to-one odds, there was nothing to do but keep going.

But like I’d told Bayta earlier, alcohol was a good equalizer. As my playmates were about to learn, that equalizing capability also extended to nonsocial events.

Anywhere in the galaxy except aboard a Quadrail, there would have been no question about how I would do that. A typical glass whiskey bottle made a natural club, which was probably why the Spiders were careful to package all their beverages in this flimsy plastic instead. One good thump, and the bottle would split along its tear lines and dump its contents all over the floor.

But the warped minds at Westali had been mulling over this for a few years, and they’d come up with a couple of tricks. With luck, maybe I could give any waiting footpads a surprise of their own.

I reached the end of the car and stepped through the door into the vestibule. There, momentarily shielded from view from either direction, I pulled the stopper from the bottle and replaced it just tightly enough to keep it closed. Now, with a good squeeze, I could send the stopper flying straight into an assailant’s face, with a slosh of whisky right behind it. I couldn’t remember how Bellido eyes reacted to alcohol, but even if it didn’t temporarily blind him it should at least slow him down long enough for me to be faced with only two-to-one odds. Still not good, but better than nothing. Holding the bottle at its base, I opened the door and stepped into the first baggage car.

My natural instinct was to pause there, peering down the stacks of safety-webbed crates and listening for some