Night Train to Rigel

mixed freely. Unfortunately, as I made my rounds I discovered that business interests seemed to have been left back in the guest rooms. All the conversations I dipped into seemed related either to the current game in progress, the profit and loss levels of previous games, or the other activities available on Modhra I. Even a trio of Cimmaheem, who generally avoided exercise like the plague once they’d reached this age and status level, were talking enthusiastically about taking a submarine tour to one of the cavern complexes nearby and suiting up to go explore it.

Eventually, my wanderings brought me to the central waterfall/ fountain.

It was one of the standards of Halkan decor, consisting of several small fountains at different levels squirting water upward where it then tumbled down layers of molded rock. Each fountain had its jets set at different heights and intervals, the whole group working together in a nicely artistic pattern. Additional injectors at various levels of the waterfall added more variation to the flow, stirring up the water, sending it into small whirlpools, or whipping it into brief whitewater frenzies. The reservoir pool stretched out a meter from the base of the rock pile, though the water itself was only about half a meter deep, and the waist-high wall around the whole thing was embossed with colored light ridges running a counterpoint pattern of their own.

And as I’d observed from the entrance ramp, the pool itself was full of coral.

Considerably more coral than I’d realized, too. The bits I’d spotted sticking up out of the water were only the tips of much larger formations snaking along the floor of the pool, covering it completely in places, with hidden colored lights creating contrast and dramatic shading.

Anywhere else in the galaxy, a display with this much Modhran coral would have cost millions. Here, fifty meters above the spot where the stuff grew, it was rather like decorating a Yukon winter scene with ice sculptures.

“What do you think?” a voice rose above the general murmur of the crowd.

I turned. The military-clad Bellido Bayta had pointed out earlier was standing behind me, idly swirling the dark red liquid in his glass as he gazed up at the waterfall. I could see now that his insignia identified him as an Apos, the equivalent of a brigadier general. “It’s beautiful,” I said.

“Isn’t it, though,” he agreed, lowering his eyes back to me. “Apos Taurine Mahf of the Bellidosh Estates-General Army Command.”

“Frank Compton,” I said in reply. “No position in particular at the moment.”

He made a rumbling noise. “And they were fools to allow your departure.”

I frowned. “Excuse me?”

His chipmunk face creased with a smile. “Forgive me,” he said “You are the Frank Compton once with Earth’s Western Alliance Intelligence service, are you not?”

“Yes, that’s right,” I said, studying his face. As far as I could recall, I’d never run into this particular Bellido before. “Have we met?”

“Once, several years ago,” he said. “It was at the ceremony marking the opening of the New Tigris Station. I was one of the guard the Supreme Councillor sent to honor your people.”

“Ah,” I said. In fact, I remembered that ceremony well… and unless Apos Mahf had had extensive facial restriping I was quite sure he hadn’t been there. “Yes, that was an adventure, wasn’t it?”

“Indeed,” he said, taking a sip from his drink. “What exactly do you do now?”

“At the moment, I work for a travel agency,” I told him. “A much simpler and safer job.”

“Even so, you cannot seem to avoid adventure,” he said. “I understand you nearly vanished from your last Quadrail.”

An unpleasant tingling ran across my skin. “Excuse me?” I asked carefully.

“Your adventure with the baggage car and your unknown assailant,” Mahf elaborated. “He was unknown, was he not?”

“Yes, unfortunately,” I said.

“No idea at all?” Mahf persisted. “Even knowledge of his species would be of help to the authorities.”

“I didn’t see or hear a thing,” I said. “Is keeping track of Quadrail incidents part of your job?”

He waved his hand in the Belldic equivalent of a shrug. “Not at all,” he said. “But this topmost level of galactic society is a small and tightly bound machine. Gossip and rumor are the fuels that drive it.”

“Ah,” I said, deciding to try a little experiment. “Yes, it was an unexpected adventure, all right. Rather like that of the old woman in the classic dit rec drama, in fact.”

Mahf’s whiskers twitched with uncertainty, then smoothed out again. “Yes, indeed,” he said knowingly. “The Lady Vanishes. Very much like that, in fact. Still, I’m pleased you won out in the end.”

“As am I,” I said between stiff lips. There should have been no way for him to have caught on to which specific dit rec drama I’d been referring to. No way in hell.

Unless he had a direct pipeline to someone who’d been in that Peerage car with us.

The Spiders had told Bayta that everyone from that group had stayed behind at Jurskala. I’d checked the schedule for Sistarrko-bound Quadrails, and there wasn’t any way for someone to have caught a later one and arrived here by now. JhanKla or Rastra would have had to send a message on ahead, a message apparently detailed enough to include even the dit recs we’d watched. Either that or the Spiders had lied to Bayta.

Or else Bayta had lied to me.

“I see you admiring the coral,” Mahf said into my thoughts.

I had been doing no such thing, but I nodded anyway. “Beautiful, isn’t it?” I said. “Unfortunately, our laws don’t permit it to be imported to our worlds.”

“A pity,” he said, gesturing toward the fountain. “I presume that means you’ve never had the chance to actually touch it.”

Bayta’s strange warning flitted through my mind. Was everybody in the whole galaxy obsessed with this damn stuff? “No, but I’ve touched Earth coral a couple of times,” I told him. “Very rough very pointy, very scratchy.”

“But this is Modhran coral,” he said reprovingly. “It has a texture far different from that of any other coral in the galaxy. Different from anything else, for that matter.”

I stepped to the wall and looked down. I’d never seen Modhran coral up close, and as I gazed into the pool I was struck by how vibrant and colorful and glittery it was. Human coral just sort of lay there, silently warning the unwary diver with its sharp brittleness but this had an odd look of suppleness, even cuddliness, that I couldn’t quite explain, even to myself.

“Go on,” Mahf murmured. He was right beside me now, practically breathing onto my neck. “Touch it. It’s quite safe, and very pleasant.”

“No, that’s all right,” I said, straightening up and taking a long step back from the pool. “Mother taught me never to pick up strange things. You never know where they’ve been.”

For a long moment he stared at me, his earlier cheerfulness suddenly hidden beneath an almost wooden mask. Then, to my relief, the smiles came out again from behind the clouds. “I would never seek to overturn such counsel,” he said, lifting his glass to me. “Farewell, Compton. May your stay be pleasant.”

There were half a dozen cashiers seated in booths along the walls, walled off behind traditional flame- patterned iron gratings. “Your desire, sir?” one of them asked as I stepped to his window.

“Do you have link-games?” I asked.

“Yes, indeed,” he assured me, selecting a link chip from a bowl. “Do you need a reader?”

“Got one, thanks,” I said, taking the chip and heading for the bar. Choosing a table that gave me a view of the rest of the casino, I pulled out my reader, palming my sensor chip as I did so. Switching on the reader, I made as if to plug in the link chip, then did a flip switch and put in the sensor instead. Settling back into my chair, pretending I was playing the link-game, I keyed for a scan of the comm-frequency transmissions.

Considering the size of the resort, there was an amazingly low level of comm traffic going on, though in retrospect I should have realized that these people had come here to get away from it all, not bring it all with them. All the transmissions that were zipping around were encrypted, of course, and I had nothing with me nearly powerful enough to dig through all that protection.

But then, actually eavesdropping on the conversations wasn’t the point of this exercise.

The bulk of the traffic, not surprisingly, was running civilian Halkan encryptions, and I tackled those first. They varied in complexity and layering, depending on how leakproof their owners wanted them to be, but they all followed a very distinctive, very Halkan pattern. The next most common encryption pattern was Cimman, again not