Night Train to Rigel

the place nice and deserted.”

I started forward, but Bayta grabbed my arm and pressed her helmet against mine again. “What if the Bellidos are in there?”

“They aren’t,” I assured her. “They can’t be back from Sistarrko yet.”

“Unless they took a later torchferry from the Tube and never went to Sistarrko at all.”

I shook my head. “I poked around the resort computer system for a while last night after you went to bed. Room registration listings are always protected, but the restaurant and room-service records are usually more accessible. There were only two sets of Belldic meals served yesterday, and one of those has to have been to Apos Mahf.”

“Do you think he’s working with them?”

“Definitely not,” I said. “For one thing, he tried too hard for information as to who had left me in that spice crate. For another, he tried to get me to touch the coral.”

I heard her inhale sharply. “You didn’t, did you?” she asked anxiously, her grip tightening on my arm.

“No, no, I didn’t even get close,” I assured her hastily. The sudden dark tension in her face was unnerving. “Maybe you should tell me why that’s such a big deal to you.”

Through her faceplate, I saw her throat work. “I can’t,” she said, letting go of my arm. “You just have to trust me.”

For a moment I was tempted to again threaten to walk. But I’d already made my decision on that, and I knew better than to bluff when there was nothing to back it up. “Sure,” I growled. “Come on.” I stalked off across the ice toward the leftmost of the two tunnels, the one on the north side of the staging area. With only a slight hesitation, Bayta followed.

The tunnel was clearly being planned as a more challenging run than the one Bayta and I had gone down earlier, with a much steeper initial plunge. Fortunately, the Halkan workers weren’t relying on the nonsmoothed ice to get back and forth, but had rigged a corrugated walkway along the tunnel’s left-hand side. Pulling out my light, I got a grip on the handrail and started down.

The first fifty meters of the tunnel floor were smooth and clean. Past that point we hit an area of work in progress, and got a hint of just how complicated these things actually were. My earlier speculation about an embedded heater system was confirmed: Wide sheets of fine mesh encircled the entire tunnel, buried a few centimeters beneath where the toboggan surface would ultimately be. Every few meters we came upon large holes that had been dug in the tunnel walls, with various bits of machinery tucked away inside. Some of the devices were easily identifiable: area minigenerators for the lights and heaters, and impact registers like those used in sports arenas for alerting the staff to possible medical emergencies. Others I didn’t have a clue about.

We followed the twists and turns for another hundred meters to where the tunnel ended at a concave wall. Several heavy-duty melting units were on the floor in front of the ice face, along with a pair of high-pressure pumping units connected to two of the thicker conduits.

Bayta touched her helmet to mine. “Nothing here,” she said “Maybe the other one.”

“Maybe,” I said, eyeing the wall on the far side of the tunnel. On the other hand, if I were hiding something, I would put it on the side farthest away from the traffic zone. “Go ahead and start back,” I told her. “I’m going to take a stroll.”

I crossed to the far side and started up, alternating my light and attention between the ice wall and the cables and hoses running alongside it. Even in the low gravity there were a couple of spots where I had to use one of the cables to pull myself up.

Midway through one of the tighter curves, where the slope made a particularly sharp drop, I found it. Catching Bayta’s eye, I waved her over.

It took her a minute to backtrack to a spot where she could cross the tunnel and join me. “Take a look,” I told her, pointing to the drain hose, our helmets again touching for private communication. “See here, where the color is just slightly off the rest of the hose?”

She peered at it. “Looks like a patch.”

“Very good,” I said. Working my fingertips under one edge, I peeled the patch back a couple of centimeters to reveal a handful of small punctures below it. “Behold: a homemade mister. Something to make liquid water mist, which will then freeze on contact with a wall.” I touched the tunnel wall beside me. “This wall, for instance.”

She shook her head. “I don’t understand.”

“Let’s say you want to burrow into a tunnel wall,” I said. “The digging itself is trivial; all you need is a tight- beam plasma cutter or nuke torch. Hiding the hole afterward is the tricky part. You need liquid water and a way to deliver it to the hole.”

I gestured at the hose. “Luckily for you, there’s a fresh supply available at the tunnel face for you to tap into. A few small holes, a good aim, maybe a small grinder to smooth out any big lumps afterward, and you’re done.”

“But the hose only carries water when the workers are here.”

“Sure, but the equipment stays here all day,” I reminded her. “It wouldn’t be hard to sneak out at night and fire up the pump just enough to bring through the water you needed to close up the opening.” I cocked an eyebrow as a new thought struck me. “Or they might even have slipped into the work team and done it right in front of the Halkas’ flat little faces. A lot of Bellidos are able to speak alien languages without an accent—I’ve heard some of them do it—and once they’re wrapped up in vac suits no one’s going to pick them out of a crowd without a good look through their faceplates. With a chaotic enough workplace, they could conceivably pull it off.”

Tentatively, she touched the ice wall with her fingertips. “So how do we get in to take a look?”

I studied the wall, wishing I’d brought my sensor with me. “Well, we can’t do it now,” I said slowly. “We may be under surveillance, and I don’t want to blow the Bellidos’ cover before we know what they’re up to. Our best bet would be to wait until they get here and let them open it for us.”

I looked over my shoulder down the tunnel. “Or we could help ourselves to a couple of workers’ suits and drop in on tomorrow’s work party.”

Bayta’s eyes went wide. “Are you crazy?”

“Probably,” I conceded. “But it’s still worth thinking about. Let’s check out the other tunnel, and then we’ll have that lugeboard rematch.”

We climbed the rest of the way up and headed across the staging area. The work in the south tunnel was about as far along as that of the north, and I searched it with the same degree of care. But if anyone had been doing unauthorized work, I couldn’t find any sign of it. Finally, and to Bayta’s obvious relief, we left and headed back to the finished tunnels.

I did considerably better on this run, falling down less than half as often as I had on the first run. Unfortunately for my pride, Bayta’s learning curve was steeper, and she still came out looking better than I did. We took the elevator down this time, turning in our vac suits and other equipment at the hotel’s service desk.

“Now what?” Bayta asked as we headed across the lobby.

“Dinner, then an early bedtime,” I said as we passed one of the observation lounges on our way to the guest room elevators. “Tomorrow could be a very busy—”

“Compton!” a voice from the lounge cut across the low buzz of conversation. “Frank! Over here!”

Clamping my teeth down onto my tongue, I turned to look.

It was Colonel Applegate, seated at one of the lounge tables, a friendly smile on his face as he waved a hand invitingly.

And seated across from him, his own expression studiously neutral, was Deputy UN Director Biret Losutu.

A man who once said he wished I was dead.

THIRTEEN:

“What do we do?” Bayta murmured.

For a long moment I considered turning my back on them and continuing on my way. But that might look like I was afraid to face Losutu again, and there was no way in hell I was going to give anyone