pursuers concluded that we’d deliberately decreased our drive level to confuse them, a single clear view at the sensors would show the craft’s true nature.
But they wouldn’t be getting that clear look, at least not anytime soon. Unless they could push their acceleration a lot more than they already had, they would be spending the next couple of hours peering at the departing lifter through a haze of Cassp’s dit-rec-drama-fog atmosphere. By the time they got clear, they would be pretty well committed to the chase.
And in the meantime, we in the torchferry would do a nice tight slingshot around Cassp and emerge from its atmosphere with a vector two hundred seventy degrees off from the one we’d gone in at, driving outward toward the Quadrail station. And, as an extra added bonus, we would have picked up close to twice Cassp’s orbital speed in the process.
All of that assuming, of course, that the Halkas fell for it.
Four hours later, when we finally keyed the drive to full power again and headed off on our new course, we saw that they had.
“They will, of course, try to alert the transfer station as soon as they discover their mistake,” Fayr pointed out as we watched the distant blaze of the warship’s drive. “We’ll have to trust that the Halkas on Modhra won’t be able to repair the damage to their long-range transmitters before we reach there.”
“There may be a way to avoid the problem entirely,” I suggested. “If we head directly to the Tube from here, we can slip around to the far side and run parallel to it until we reach the station. As long as the second warship stays close to the transfer station—and I see no reason why it shouldn’t—we ought to be able to sneak in without anyone noticing.”
“We will still have to find a way into the station once we arrive,” Fayr pointed out doubtfully.
“I don’t think that’ll be a problem,” I said, looking sideways at Bayta. “There are service airlocks all around the station’s outer surface that the drudges use to move heavy equipment in and out. I’ll bet we can get someone to open one of them for us.”
Fayr gave me a strange look. “You
But I’d caught Bayta’s microscopic nod and merely smiled back. “Not at all,” I assured him.
He eyed me a moment longer, then shrugged. “Very well,” he said. “It is insane. But so was the rest of it. We shall try.”
We’d never tried Bayta’s telepathy trick through a Tube wall, and privately I wondered whether she’d be able to punch a signal through material that blocked sensors and comm systems as efficiently as this stuff did. But in the end, it all went as smoothly as a frictionless airfoil. We eased along the Tube to a halt at the back side of the station, apparently unobserved by anyone at the transfer station a hundred kilometers away on the other side.
There had been some discussion about whether we should try to dock with one of the service hatchways. But the torchferry was just too big for that kind of delicate work, and so we simply parked it a few hundred meters away, and with luggage in hand we spacewalked across the gap. Even before Fayr, bringing up the rear, had made it all the way to the Tube, the hatchway began to iris open in response to Bayta’s silent request.
Unlike the usual shuttle hatchways, this one was equipped with an actual airlock and was large enough for our whole group. We piled in and waited with varying degrees of patience and trepidation while it ran through its cycle. When the inner door finally opened, we found ourselves in a maintenance area half a kilometer from the more central, public areas of the station.
We also found ourselves surrounded by a solid wall of drudge Spiders.
They collected our luggage, making a special point of relieving the Bellidos of their status guns, then escorted us into a large machine shop nearby. Inside, a half dozen small Spiders of a type I hadn’t seen before took over, sifting deftly through our luggage and pulling out small weapons and other forbidden equipment that the station’s sensors had spotted. As they loaded the contraband into lockboxes, a pair of conductors appeared and started taking ticket orders.
Bayta and I used our passes to get our usual double first-class compartment. Fayr got a single compartment for himself, while the rest of his team took second- and third-class accommodations. The plastic imitation status guns came out of the carrybags and were sorted out into the commandos’ empty shoulder holsters, the sizes and numbers matching their appropriate travel classes. Fayr, as befit a first-class traveler, loaded four of the toy pistols into his holsters.
And with our informal entry procedure complete, we collected our luggage and followed one of the conductors back outside the shop.
There were a couple hundred people waiting on the various platforms, most of them Halkas, all of them gazing in obvious fascination as the Spider guided us across the maze of service tracks to the public areas. I heard Fayr muttering under his breath about stealth and secrecy, but there wasn’t much any of us could do about it. The conductor led us to our platform, bade us a pleasant journey, then headed off to whatever routine we had so rudely interrupted. The rest of the passengers, clearly intrigued by all this, nevertheless were either polite enough or wary enough to give us plenty of room.
Not surprisingly, the Spiders had booked us on the very next Quadrail headed down the Grakla Spur toward Jurskala. With a number of well-dressed Halkas in evidence, at least some of whom probably included Modhran walker colonies, I figured that news of our arrival had most likely made it across to the transfer station by now. I kept one eye on the nearest shuttle hatchways, half expecting Halkan officialdom to make one last-ditch effort to grab us.
But no one had appeared by the time our Quadrail arrived. We let the departing passengers off, then climbed aboard and made our ways to our various accommodations. Fifteen minutes later, while I continued to watch the hatchways through my compartment window, the Quadrail pulled smoothly and anticlimactically out of the station.
For the moment, at least, we were safe.
EIGHTEEN:
It was another four days back along the Grakla Spur to Jurskala, and for every minute of each of those days I fully expected the Modhri—or whatever was left of him—to make his move.
But the Quadrail made its stops, picked up and dropped off its passengers and moved on, and nothing happened. It was as if with the destruction of the homeland branch the other outposts and walkers had gone completely dormant.
Fayr didn’t believe it for a minute. “He’s planning something,” he declared two days into the trip as we pulled out of one of the Cimman stations on our way back toward Jurian space. “He surely won’t allow such an attack to succeed without at least an attempt at retribution.”
In principle, I agreed. Still, whatever desires for vengeance the Modhran remnant might be feeling, the fact was that we’d gotten out of the Sistarrko system about as fast as anyone could, and he was now up against the purely practical problem of coming up with a plan on the fly.
Of course, it wasn’t something he had to rush on. Even if Bayta was right about him not yet having infiltrated Earth and the Confederation, that still left damn few places where the walkers couldn’t get to us whenever they wanted to.
Still, while we continued to keep an eye over our shoulders, the four days ended up being completely uneventful. What the rest of the Bellidos back in second and third class did to fill the hours I never found out, but the three of us in first spent much of it listening to each other’s stories.
For Fayr, it had started several years earlier when the Belldic intelligence service had discovered secret dealings going on between the Spiders and the Tra’ho’sej. The Bellidos had investigated, eventually digging up a trail leading to the Modhra Binary and the discovery of some kind of influence emanating from it. The Tra’ho’sej themselves had been in the middle of setting up some kind of military operation when they suddenly and inexplicably abandoned it.
The Bellidos, now more than merely curious, had tried to pick up the operation. But instead of simply following their own leads, the heads of the investigation had made the fatal mistake of contacting their counterparts in the
