Night Train to Rigel

up with a commando squad, anyway.

Besides which, it was time she and I had a little talk.

“So,” I commented, swiveling around in my seat to face her. We had taken off our helmets so that Fayr and his squad couldn’t listen in, keeping them handy in case of trouble. “Interesting theory, isn’t it?”

“What is?” she asked cautiously.

“Fayr’s fever dream about malevolent coral that wants to rule the universe,” I said, watching her closely. “Malevolent telepathic coral, yet. Crazy, huh?”

Her eyes slipped away from my gaze. “Very interesting,” she agreed, her voice studiously neutral.

“Never heard anything like it, myself,” I continued conversationally. “How about you?”

She didn’t answer. “There never was any vision of an attack on the Fillies, was there?” I asked, letting my voice harden. “In fact, this whole thing has been a scam from square one, hasn’t it?”

“No,” she protested, her eyes coming up to meet mine. Her lips compressed, and she again dropped her gaze to the floor. “No, there is a threat to the galaxy. A terrible threat.”

“From power-crazed coral?”

She glared at me. “You shouldn’t make jokes about things you don’t understand.”

“So enlighten me,” I countered. “Starting with what exactly my role was in all this.”

“What do you mean?” she asked, her voice gone cautious again. “You were hired to help us in the war against the Modhri.”

“No, I was hired to be your diversion,” I said bluntly. “Your Spider friends knew all about Fayr and his private little battle plan. You wanted to give him the best shot you could; and since you knew the enemy was watching, you brought me in to give them someone handy to watch.”

Her lip twitched. “It wasn’t like that.”

“Wasn’t it?” I bit out. “You have a drudge accost me and walk off with my carrybags in front of God and everyone at Terra Station. Then you throw everyone else off my car midway to New Tigris with the flimsiest excuse possible and hustle me off to a meeting on a secret Quadrail siding. And then you march both of us up from third-class steerage to a first-class compartment. You might as well have pinned a sign on my back that said Spider Agent—Kill Me in three languages.”

Her face looked like she was getting ready to cry. “We didn’t expect him to try to kill you,” she said earnestly. “You have to believe me. We thought he would think you were our latest attempt to find him and just watch you. That’s all. Just watch.”

“That’s very comforting,” I growled. “Unfortunately, good intentions don’t feed the bulldog. They knew about Fayr, too, or at least suspected something was in the works.” I paused, studying the shame and self-reproach in her face and feeling a small twinge of conscience. “And for whatever it’s worth, I don’t think those two Halkas back at Kerfsis were really trying to kill me,” I added reluctantly. “That incident was mainly designed to give Rastra and JhanKla an excuse to get us aboard the Peerage car.”

She shivered. “To try and make friends with us, so that they could bring us here.”

There it was, that whole friend thing again. “You keep talking about friends,” I said. “What do friends have to do with it?”

“There are natural emotional barriers between people that tend to block thought viruses,” she said. “Only between friends or trusted associates are there the emotional connections that allow the thought virus to pass.”

“Uh-huh,” I said, a few more pieces falling into place. “Which is why Mahf tried to pretend we’d met before that afternoon in the casino. And why you kept asking if Rastra or Applegate were friends of mine.”

She nodded. “I didn’t know if either of them was a walker. But if they were, I was afraid you’d trust them enough for a thought virus to get through.”

“Is that why you picked me for this job in the first place?” I asked. “Because you figured I’d become something of a loner?”

“Partly,” she admitted. “Mostly it was because you’d been ostracized by all your former official Terran government contacts. That was the pattern the Modhri followed with all the other species: An officially sanctioned team would go in to investigate, be infected by the Modhri, then go home to infect and conquer the rest of the upper military and government levels. With thought viruses passing freely between close friends and associates, it can happen very quickly.”

She gave me a wan smile. “Humans are almost the last ones left unconquered. We didn’t want to risk your people by getting someone who was still involved with important government officials.”

“And so you picked me,” I said, a small part of me appreciating the potentially lethal irony of the situation. If only they knew who I was involved with. “Why didn’t you tell me all this last night when I asked?”

She looked away from me. “I wasn’t sure I could trust you.” “And now?”

She shrugged noncommittally.

Which was pretty damn ungrateful, I thought, especially after all I’d done for her and her Spider friends. A surge of annoyance threatened to wash over me; ruthlessly, I forced it back. A combat situation was no place for stray emotional reactions. “What makes you think humanity hasn’t been conquered yet?”

“The Spiders have been watching the top levels of Human government very closely,” she said, clearly relieved to be back on less personal ground. “So far, they’ve seen no sign of Modhran influence.”

“Only you said the people themselves don’t even know when they’re carrying a colony,” I pointed out. “You have some kind of Rorschach test?”

“I wish we did,” she said ruefully. “But since the colony usually stays in the background of the walker’s mind, there usually isn’t anything that would show up on psychological tests.”

“Or emotional or skin/eye reaction tests, either, I suppose,” I said. “That just leaves straight-out physical tests.”

“Which also aren’t usually very helpful,” she said. “The polyps tend to gather in hidden areas, especially around and beneath the brain. It would take a very careful microscopic examination to spot them.”

“Is that why JhanKla insisted those two dead Halkas be cremated?”

“Yes, though of course he himself wouldn’t have known the true reason,” she said. “He would have had his own set of perfectly good excuses. And we’ve never found a scanning technique that can pick the polyps out from the organism they’ve attached themselves to.”

“So again, what makes you think Earth hasn’t been infiltrated?”

“There are patterns of behavior and decision that can be seen, especially on a group level,” she explained. “Neither the UN nor any of your nation-state governments have shown signs of such behavior.”

“We just too small for the Modhri to bother with?”

“The reasons are probably more practical,” she said. “For one thing, you have no coral outposts on your worlds, which by itself would make conquest difficult. There’s also your political structure, with its many nation-states and lack of a truly central governing body. That holds challenges they won’t have found elsewhere among the Twelve Empires.”

I’d never before thought of Earth’s political chaos as being a possible military asset. Usually just the opposite, in fact. “What would have happened if I’d touched the coral last night? I’d be a walker now, too?”

“Not yet,” she said. “It takes days or weeks for an implanted hook to grow into a polyp and then to reproduce enough to form a complete colony.”

“Okay, so back to current events,” I said, picking up the logic trail again. “We had Fayr and his commandos on one hand, and us on the other. The Modhri knew about both of us; but he didn’t know what the connection was. So he maneuvered us here, hoping we would trip over Fayr’s scheme and expose it for him.” I lifted my eyebrows. “Damn near worked, too, didn’t it?”

She grimaced. “I know,” she murmured.

“So if this is their homeland, why don’t the Spiders just lock them in? They have to travel by Quadrail like everybody else, don’t they?”

“Yes, of course,” she said. “But all we knew at first was that various leaders were being controlled and governments were being corrupted. It was a long time before we learned the mechanism and, later, where it was coming from.”