for me—they’d probably had their orders before I’d even made it out of the last first-class coach.
The red light came on again, and I pressed the reader hard against the window, keeping it as steady as possible. The modulation sequence was far too fast for human eyes to register, but the sensor built into the reader ought to be able to capture it and slow it down enough for me to make some sense of it later.
The light came and went three more times in the next few minutes. Apparently, the Bellidos were feeling chatty today. Three minutes later it flashed one final time, then went silent.
I waited by the window another half hour before finally calling it quits. Making my way back to the bed, I turned the lights up to a dim glow and got to work.
With the basic mode of their communication so unlikely to be spotted, I’d hoped the Bellidos might have gone with something simple like digitized text or voices. But no such luck. The modulation turned out to be some sort of Morse-style code, and it wasn’t following any of the usual Belldic encryption systems.
Still, at least I knew now how it had been done. That was worth a lot right there, especially since it offered a little more insight into the people I was up against. Cleverness and simplicity seemed to be their style. I’d do well to remember that.
But for now, my head was starting to hurt again and fatigue was dragging at my eyelids. Going to the tiny washroom, I got some water and took another painkiller and QuixHeal, then turned off the light and got undressed for bed.
My last act before crawling under the blankets was to set my reader on “record” and prop it up in the window. Just in case.
I slept long and deep and awoke ravenously hungry. I checked the other compartment, found Bayta already up. I had a quick shower and shave, and together we went back to the dining car.
None of the Bellidos were there at the moment. Bayta’s Spider friends reported to her that the two in first class had already eaten and returned to their compartment, while the ones back in third had eaten in shifts. I kept an eye on the handful of Halkas in the room wondering if JhanKla had put someone on our tail straight from the last station, or whether he’d just sent a message on ahead.
But no one seemed to be taking any particular interest in us. Which didn’t prove anything one way or the other, of course.
We finished eating and returned to my compartment, where we spent a few minutes sifting through the tourist brochures on the Modhra resort and discussing what exactly we would do when we got there.
Surprisingly, the choice of lodging turned out to be our biggest sticking point. Bayta wanted to take the lodge on the surface, where we would have a view of Modhra II and the gas giant Cassp, while I pushed equally hard for the underwater hotel JhanKla had mentioned. Eventually, Bayta gave in, though clearly not happily, and stalked back to her own compartment.
When the wall between us was closed again, I checked my reader to see if the Bellidos had transmitted any more secret messages during the night. They hadn’t.
The rest of the trip passed uneventfully. Bayta stayed alone in her compartment most of the time, joining me only for meals, and I did what I could to catch up on my sleep and healing.
It was only as I was repacking my carrybags in preparation for our arrival at Sistarrko that it belatedly occurred to me that information wasn’t the only thing I should have asked the Spiders for when this whole thing had started.
I should also have asked for a gun.
ELEVEN:
JhanKla had described Sistarrko as a minor colony system, but from the size and design of its transfer station I would have guessed it to be more along the lines of a regional capital like Kerfsis. From the size of the two warships that had silently escorted us in from the Tube, I would have put it even higher than that.
Of course, the system
Maybe.
We made it through customs without incident, the Saarix in my carrybag grips whispering right past their sensors. I didn’t spot any of the Bellidos, but that wasn’t surprising. The Halkas had separate customs areas for the different traveling classes, and I’d already seen how this bunch shifted class and status without batting a whisker. They were probably two levels below us, working their humble way through the third-class stations.
And of course, after they did that, they’d be getting their genuine status guns out of their lockboxes. The next time I faced them, they would be fully armed.
What a lovely thought.
Like Quadrail Tubes everywhere in the galaxy, the Grakla Spur cut through Sistarrko’s outer system, in this case just outside Cassp’s orbit. That would put the Modhra resort at a considerable distance from the station for much of any given decade, which I suspected would cause trouble for the tourist logistics a few years down the line. Fortunately, at the moment the planet was nearly at its closest approach, which meant the travel time would be measured in hours rather than days. The transport rep directed us to the proper departure lounge, where we found a fifty-passenger short-haul torchferry waiting, and we climbed aboard with thirty fellow travelers. I’d expected at least one of the Bellidos to join the party, if only to keep an eye on us, but none of them did.
We took off in a blaze of superheated heavy-ion plasma, and five hours later reached the delicately ringed gas giant. Shutting down the drive well clear of Modhra I’s icy surface, we switched to Shorshic vectored force thrusters, and a few minutes later settled gently onto the light-rimmed landing pad.
The view was everything JhanKla had promised. Bulging up over the resort area’s horizon, Cassp had the same turbulent cloud bands and thousand-kilometer-wide storms as Jupiter and Saturn back in Sol system, but with a wider range of coloration than either of those two worlds. Its ring system was at least as impressive as Saturn’s, as well, with much of it extending well past us. Overhead, Modhra II moved across the sky, a glistening ball of stone and ice arcing its way along the Modhra Binary’s common orbit.
As an extra bonus, some quirk of celestial mechanics had put the Modhras’ combined orbit at right angles to Cassp’s ring system. That meant that as the two moons moved around their combined center of gravity, our view of the rings shifted from slightly above to a straight edge-on view to slightly below, then rose back through them again. It made for an ever-shifting, ever-changing panorama that all by itself would probably have justified the development of the place as a tourist getaway.
The lodge-style building we set down beside was a sprawling copy of an ancient Halkan High Mountain fortress, complete with distinctive star-shaped turrets. The modern airlock entrances spoiled the illusion a bit, but neither of the two moons was large enough to hold much atmosphere. Bayta and I joined the rest of the passengers in climbing into the torchferry’s vac suits, and a few minutes later we all headed out across the frozen surface.
The lodge’s interior decor was High Mountain style, too, with several centuries’ worth of Halkan armor replicas standing in front of equally ancient wall hangings. The motif was carried even to the check-in procedure, which was handled by desk clerks in half-scale mail instead of by self-serve computer terminals. When our turn came I asked about the underwater hotel and was directed to a bank of ornate elevators waiting across the entry foyer. We joined five of the other guests, and fifteen minutes later emerged into the hotel lobby and what could only be described as an undersea wonderland.
The whole place was decorated with a graceful mixture of wispy sea plants and multicolored rock, all overlaid with a filigree of ice and frozen sea foam. Large convex windows showcased the view here beneath Modhra’s ice cap, illuminated by an array of floodlights. JhanKla had said these oceans ran up to five kilometers deep, but the resort had been built in one of the shallower areas, and some of the famous Modhran coral ridges could be seen snaking their way across the ocean floor below.
The desk clerks here were dressed in outfits that looked vaguely mermaid and merman, though I couldn’t remember any such legends in any Halkan mythos. The single-room rates were outrageous enough, but the two- room suite we needed was astronomical, far beyond what I had in any of my cash sticks. The Spiders hadn’t thought to include any actual money with their Quadrail pass, which left me no option but to put the room on my
