Night Train to Rigel

the Quadrail tracks we needed to cross to get to our platform. “These three came from third class.”

“Are they talking?” I murmured back, resisting the urge to look over my shoulder. The whole point of having the Spiders relay this information to me via Bayta was so that I wouldn’t look like I had any suspicions about what was going on behind me.

“Yes,” she said. “But none of the Spiders are close enough to hear.”

“Let me know when they start moving,” I instructed her. “Anyone else taking any interest in us?”

We reached the next track, the low protective barrier folding up and over into a little footbridge for us and our trailing carrybags. “I don’t think so,” she said. “Wait. The five Bellidos have split into two groups again and are moving this way.”

“How fast?”

“Not very,” she said as we reached the far side of the track and the bridge folded back into its barrier form. “And they aren’t following us, exactly, just coming this general direction.”

Either being coy about their target or else simply heading for the Grakla Spur train, too. “What about Rastra and JhanKla?”

“They’ve left the Peerage car and are walking toward the stationmaster’s building,” she reported. “The guard- assistant, YirTukOo, is with them.”

“Probably making arrangements to switch the car to a different train,” I said. JhanKla had done his bit by nudging me toward Modhra, and he and his entourage were apparently now out of the game.

We reached the Grakla Spur platform, which was lined by the usual mix of restaurants, lounges, shops, and maintenance buildings. “You ever had a Jurian soda creme?” I asked Bayta.

“A—? No.”

“Then you’re way overdue,” I said, taking her arm and steering her toward the larger of the two restaurants.

“I’m not hungry,” she protested, trying to pull away.

“This is more like a dessert than a meal,” I assured her, not letting go. “More to the point, with all those Spider waiters wandering around in there, we’ll have a better chance of keeping an eye on everyone than we would in any of the regular waiting rooms.”

The resistance in her arm muscles evaporated. “Oh,” she said.

About half the restaurant’s tables were occupied, a nice comfortable percentage. Suppressing my usual impulse to sit where I could see the door, I led Bayta to one of the tables in the center. “You want me to order for you?” I asked.

She shrugged in silent indifference. I pulled up the menu, found the proper listing, and ordered two of the cremes. “I gather you haven’t spent much time in the Jurian Collective,” I suggested, leaning back in my seat.

“Not really.” She hesitated. “Actually, not at all.”

“Ah,” I said, looking around. Unlike the Quadrail bar, this place hadn’t been designed with conversational privacy in mind. “How long have you been with your friends?”

“As long as I can remember,” she said, lowering her voice. “Is this really the right place for this?”

“Why not?” I countered. “I don’t especially like working with someone I know next to nothing about.”

She pursed her lips. “If it comes to that, I don’t know much about you, either.”

“Your friends seem to have the full inside track on me.”

“That doesn’t mean I do.” Her forehead creased slightly. “The Bellidos have all gone to one of the waiting rooms by the Grakla Spur platform.”

Passing up a possible chance to eavesdrop in favor of not taking the risk of being spotted and spooking the quarry. They certainly seemed to know what they were doing. “So what do you want to know?”

“About…?”

“About me.”

She studied my face, her forehead creased, clearly wondering if I was just baiting her. “All right. What did you do to get fired from Westali?”

I felt my throat tighten. I should have guessed she’d pick that particular knife to twist. “What, you’ve been asleep the past two years?” I growled.

The corner of her lip twitched. “I’d really like to know.”

I looked away from her, letting my eyes sweep slowly around the restaurant. Most of the patrons were Juriani, but there were a few Halkas and Cimmaheem as well.

And, of course, there was us. A pair of Humans, strutting around the galaxy as if we owned it. “Do you know how humanity got to be number twelve on the Spiders’ Twelve Empires list?”

“I presume the same way everyone else did,” she said. “When a race colonizes enough systems, the Spiders confer that designation.”

“You colonize four of them, to be exact,” I told her, Colonel Applegate’s words from a few days ago echoing through my brain. And Yandro makes five. “Which gives you a total of five, including your home system. Yandro was the colony that put Earth over the bar and got us invited into the club.”

“And there was a problem with that?”

I sighed. “The problem, Bayta, is that there’s nothing of value there. Nothing. A few varieties of spice, some decorative hardwoods, a few animals we may or may not be able to domesticate someday, and that’s it.”

“And?”

“What do you mean, ‘and’?” I bit out. “The UN Directorate dumped a trillion dollars down the drain for that Quadrail station, for no better reason than so they could pretend they were important when they traveled around the galaxy.”

Her eyes widened with sudden understanding. “You’re the one who blew the whistle, aren’t you?”

“Damn straight I did,” I growled. “Between the faked resource reports and the carefully prepped enthusiasm of the colonists, you’d have thought Yandro was the next Alaska. I couldn’t let them get away with that.”

“Alaska?”

“The northernmost state of the Western Alliance,” I told her. “Formerly called ‘Seward’s Folly’ after the man who purchased it a couple of centuries ago for a lot of cash that most people thought was being thrown down a frozen mud hole. The ridicule lasted right up until they discovered all the gold and oil reserves.”

“You don’t think that could happen with Yandro?”

I shook my head. “The reports they released to the public were masterfully done. But I got hold of the real ones, and you could literally hear the increasing desperation of the evaluators as they came closer and closer to the end of their survey and still couldn’t find anything valuable enough to make it worth exporting in any serious quantities.”

“I can see why the UN would be upset with you,” she murmured.

“Oh, they were upset, all right,” I agreed bitterly. “And the public was pretty upset with them right back. For a while. Problem was, they weren’t upset long enough for anything to actually get done about it. The Directorate made a big show of firing a few scapegoats, denied personal responsibility six ways from Sunday, and waited for the ruckus to die down for lack of interest. Then they quietly went ahead and signed up for the station anyway. With their friends and supporters getting most of the contracts for the materials and construction modules, I might add.”

“And then they made sure you paid for your opposition,” she said quietly. “I’m sorry.”

I shrugged, forcing my throat to relax. “It’s okay,” I assured her. “I’m over it.”

Which was a lie, of course. Even after all this time, just talking about it was enough to twist my blood vessels into macrame.

A Spider stepped up to our table, holding a tray with the frothy soda cremes I’d ordered. “We’ve got raspberry and Jurian shisshun,” I told Bayta as I lifted the tall glasses onto the table. “Which one do you want?”

She chose the raspberry, and we settled down to eat in silence I wasn’t in the mood for more conversation, and she was either feeling likewise or was too busy communing with her Spider friends to spare me any attention.

It wasn’t until we were heading back toward the platform that I belatedly noticed that her question about my career had completely sidetracked my plan to find out something about her.

The train bound for the Grakla Spur was, not surprisingly, considerably shorter than the one we’d taken to Jurskala, reflecting the smaller volume of traffic and cargo involved. The Spiders had another double first-class