Night Train to Rigel

Her eyes widened. “A submarine?”

“Oh, not one of the tour ships,” I hastened to add. “One of those midget maintenance jobs we saw poking around on our way in this morning. You’d need something like that if you wanted to move anything sizable around out there.”

“So you’re saying they stole a submarine so they could move something bigger,” Bayta said slowly, clearly having trouble working through this. “What is it they’re trying to move?”

“No idea,” I said. Unfortunately, that one was a hundred percent truth. “All I know is that a rock cavern on Modhra, under all this water and ice, is about as private as you can get and still have regular Quadrail and torchferry service.” I looked at my watch. “But there’s nothing to be gained sitting here wondering about it. The next torchferry from the Quadrail is due in a couple of hours. Let’s go to the surface and watch it land, maybe do some hiking or lugeboarding.”

Her mouth dropped open a couple of millimeters. “You want to go lugeboarding?”

“Absolutely,” I said. “We don’t want anyone wondering what we’re doing up there watching Modhra II go around and around, do we?”

Her mouth closed tightly. “Of course not.”

“Good,” I said, standing up. “Let’s see what kind of outdoor wear we’ve got in the closet.”

Along with its various formal outfits, the closet also included several sets of the thin but warm clothing designed to complement the insulation of a standard vac suit. While Bayta changed into one of them I called up to the lodge to check on the procedures for going outside and reserved us a couple of suits. The very nature of a place like this would make it impossible for us to slip out unnoticed, but hopefully the hidden listeners had bought into the excuse I’d given Bayta and wouldn’t pay much attention to our sortie into the great outdoors.

The pale disk of Modhra II was high overhead as we emerged from one of the airlocks onto the surface, with Cassp’s glowing, multicolored bands filling most of the sky to the north. We were currently below the ring plane, and the distant sunlight playing off the floating bits of ice and rock created a striking pattern of light and shadow above our heads. “Have you ever lugeboarded before?” I asked Bayta as we bounced our way along a line of tall red pylons marking the way to the toboggan tunnels.

“No, and it sounds rather dangerous,” she said, her voice coming from a speaker in the back of my helmet. “Rather pointless, too.” She gestured up at one of the pylons as we passed it. “Aren’t these awfully tall for trail markers?”

“Actually, they’re the pylons for a future ski lift system,” I told her. “Eventually, the red lift will go to the toboggan tunnels, with the blue and green ones taking you to the ski runs.”

“How do you know that?”

“It was in the brochures.”

“Oh.”

We reached the base of the hill that the map indicated was the starting point for the toboggan tunnels and started up. I’d worried a little about climbing upslope on ice, even with the special grips on our vac suits’ boots, but it turned out not to be a problem. The ice’s texture was reasonably rough, and the gravity and ambient temperature too low for our weight to form the thin layer of water that normally made ice so treacherous. Briefly, I wondered how that would affect the performance of our lugeboards, then put it out of my mind. People had been dealing with this kind of extreme physics for a long time, and the resort’s designers had presumably known what they were doing.

The entrances to the three tunnels were grouped around a common staging area, from which they headed underground in different directions. A circle of lights had been embedded in the ice around each entrance, and from the glow coming up from the tunnels I guessed there were lights all the way down. Three vac-suited figures— Halkas, probably, though I never got a look through their faceplates to confirm that—were just getting their toboggan ready to go at Number Three, and as we unfastened our lugeboards from our backpacks they headed in. I watched them drop out of sight beyond the first slope, then turned my attention to the east, where the red pylons we’d been following marched up the next group of hills and disappeared over the other side.

“You said you’d show me how this worked,” Bayta reminded me.

“Sure,” I said. Hoping I remembered how to do it, I popped my lugeboard’s straps. “First, you get it open. …”

We got the boards set up and headed down Number One. It was just as well I’d chosen the most undemanding of the tunnels, as it turned out, because even that was well beyond my modest abilities. Not only had the designers smoothed the ice to a high polish, but they must have installed heaters under the surface to bring it to precisely the optimal temperature to form that thin water layer I’d noticed the lack of while climbing the hill.

Worse yet, Bayta, with no experience whatsoever with these things, turned out to be better at it than I was. She fell probably once to every two tumbles I took, and near the end of the run was even daring enough to take a shot at one of the three-sixty spirals I wouldn’t have tried on a bet. The lower gravity made such stunts easier, of course, but that wasn’t much help to my bruised pride.

We reached the bottom, our momentum running us smoothly across the long flat area to a gentle stop near the elevators. Unfastening our boards, we headed inside, and I punched for the surface. “This goes down, too?” Bayta asked, pointing at the lower button.

“Yes, back to the hotel,” I told her. “This particular run ends just above the lobby. Probably planned that way so that bruised amateurs could go staggering straight home and collapse into bed or a whirl bath.”

“I guess,” she said. “That was fun.”

I looked through her faceplate. Bayta, the girl with no last name, who had once calmly told me she didn’t care if I lived or died, was actually smiling, her cheeks red with exertion, her face more alive than I’d ever seen it. “It was, wasn’t it?” I agreed. “We’ll have to do it again after my knees stop hurting.”

She looked back at me, her smile fading as she suddenly seemed to remember why we’d come to the surface in the first place. “Yes,” she said. “Well… maybe we could just climb one of the hills near the lodge and watch the ring pattern for a while. Until you feel better.”

“Sounds good to me,” I said.

The elevator let us out inside the lodge, just off the equipment rental area and near one of the airlocks. We headed back outside and walked along the red pylons to the top of the first big hill. There we found a comfortable place to sit together, and as I snuggled close and put my arm around her shoulders, I motioned for her to turn off her comm.

I leaned my helmet against hers, hoping that to any observers we looked like two lovers getting as romantically physical as it was possible to get in vac suits. “Can you hear me?” I called.

“Yes,” she called back, her voice sounding tinny as the sound transmitted across the contact between our helmets. “Why did you want to watch the torchferry arrive?”

“I don’t, actually,” I told her. “But someone bugged our suite while we were on our submarine tour, and I needed to find a reason to get you out here where I could be sure no one could eavesdrop.”

“We were bugged?” she demanded. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“You mean while we were there in the suite?” I asked.

“Oh,” she said, her annoyance fading into embarrassment. “Right.”

“Which is also why I had to tell you a few half-truths,” I went on. “Starting with those drill marks on the tunnel wall. Someone made them, all right, but whoever it was didn’t stash anything in there. At least, nothing important.”

She drew away to frown at me, and I saw her lips moving. I tapped her faceplate in reminder; grimacing with a little more embarrassment, she turned again and leaned her helmet against mine. “Sorry,” she said. “I said, how do you know?”

“First of all, because it was a little too obvious,” I said, watching her face out of the corner of my eye, hoping her reactions would give me some clue as to how much of this she already knew. So far, it all seemed completely new to her. “The marks were right there in the lighted areas, there hadn’t been any effort to disguise or obliterate them, and they quit showing up past that bottleneck, past the point where there was no chance of the Halkas getting in and finding any more of them.”

“Maybe they just got more careful.”