Night Train to Rigel

possibly want to talk to me, and it wasn’t a particularly pleasant thought.

And for them to have been willing to stop a whole train to do so made it that much worse. I glanced back over my shoulder, wondering what they were going to tell the rest of the passengers.

They weren’t going to tell the rest of the passengers anything for the simple fact that there weren’t any other passengers. The rest of the Quadrail had vanished. My car, conveniently emptied of all its occupants except me, plus the baggage car behind it, stood together on the track in front of another engine that had apparently pushed us here.

“Mr. Compton?”

I turned back. The Girl had reached the building and was standing expectantly beside the door. “Right,” I said, forcing my feet to move. She waited until I caught up with her, and together we went inside.

Beyond the door was a small room as drably functional as the building’s exterior, its furnishings consisting entirely of three chairs set in a triangle arrangement facing each other. One of the seats was already occupied by an amazingly fat middle-aged man dressed in shades of blue and sporting a contrasting skullcap of gray hair. Standing behind him was a Spider midway in size between a conductor and a drudge. A stationmaster, possibly, though this one seemed slightly bigger and didn’t carry the usual identifying pattern of white dots across its sphere.

“Good day, Mr. Compton,” the man greeted me gravely. His voice carried an oddly bubbling quality, as if he were talking half underwater. “My name is Hermod. Please, sit down.”

“Thank you,” I said, stepping forward and settling into one of the two remaining chairs as The Girl took the third. “Do I get to know where I am?”

“You’re in a maintenance and storage facility off the main Tube,” he said. “Its actual location is not important.”

“I thought all maintenance work was done in the stations themselves.”

Hermod’s massive shoulders shrugged slightly. “Most of it is,” he said. “The Spiders don’t advertise the existence of these other facilities.”

“Well, this should certainly make up for that,” I pointed out. “Or don’t you think New Tigris is going to wonder when their incoming Quadrail comes up two cars short?”

“Give the Spiders a little more credit than that,” Hermod said dryly. “They would hardly have gone to all this trouble to speak privately with you and then let something so obvious ruin it. No, you’ll be rejoining the rest of the train well before it reaches New Tigris.”

“Ah,” I said, making a conscious effort to sit back in my chair as if I were feeling all relaxed, which I definitely was not. So not only did the Spiders want a chat, they wanted a very private chat. This just got better and better. “So what’s this all about?”

“The Spiders have a problem,” Hermod said gravely. “One which may well determine the future of the entire galaxy. They thought you might be able to help them with it.”

“What makes you think that?” I asked, feeling sweat popping out all over my body.

“You’re a well-trained observer, investigator, and analyst,” he said. “Trained by one of the best, in fact: Western Alliance Intelligence.”

“Who sacked me over a year ago,” I reminded him, passing over for the moment the question of whether Westali really was one of the best.

“But not for lack of ability,” Hermod reminded me right back. “Merely for—what did they call it? Professional indiscretion?”

“Something like that,” I agreed evenly. That was what the dismissal papers had called it, anyway. Professional indiscretion, like I’d been caught stealing hotel towels or something. I’d sparked a major furor in the press, been responsible for a handful of political scapegoats having their heads handed to them in the hallowed halls of the United Nations, and earned myself the permanent loathing of both the secretary-general and the Directorate in the process.

And all they’d had the guts to call it was professional indiscretion.

But I let that one pass, too. “There are plenty of other ex-Westali people around who are as good as I am and a lot more respectable,” I said instead. “So again: Why me?”

Hermod’s forehead wrinkled. “Your reticence puzzles me, Mr. Compton,” he said. “I would think that, considering your present circumstances, you’d jump at the chance for employment.”

My present circumstances. On the surface, an innocent enough expression. Nearly as innocent, in fact, as professional indiscretion.

Did he and the Spiders know about my new job? It was hard to imagine how they could, not after all the paranoid-level convolutions we’d gone through to keep it secret.

On the other hand, it was equally hard to imagine how they could not know. Their messenger had been right there, after all, right outside the New Pallas Towers the evening the whole thing had been finalized.

But there was no hint of any such secret knowledge in Hermod’s face or body language. There was no anticipation I could detect no sense of the hunter waiting eagerly beside his trap as the prey wanders toward the tripwire. There was nothing there, in fact except an almost puppy-dog earnestness set against a background of distant fear and unease. If he did know about me, he was being damn coy about it “So my present circumstances aren’t as good as I might like,” I said. “How about some information instead of flattery?”

His lips puckered. “There are many mysterious places in this galaxy,” he said. “One of them, which the Spiders have dubbed the Oracle, sits a short distance from a siding similar to this one. Occasionally, Spiders passing through the area see visions of future events.” He gestured at the Spider standing over him. “Five weeks ago, this Spider saw the future destruction of a Filiaelian transfer station.”

I sat up a little straighter in my chair. Filly transfer stations were among the biggest and best-protected in the galaxy. “How sure are you that it was a Filly station?”

“Very sure,” Hermod said, his voice darkening. “Because there were the remains of two gutted Sorfali-class warships drifting alongside it.”

I threw a look at the Spider. “Your friend’s been hallucinating,” I said flatly. “Filly soldiers are genetically programmed against rebellion or civil war.”

“I never said it was a civil war,” Hermod countered, his voice going even darker. “The attack came from somewhere outside the system.”

I looked over at The Girl’s expressionless face. If this was a joke, no one was laughing. “Now you’re the one hallucinating,” I told Hermod. “You can’t smuggle weaponry through the Tube. Certainly nothing that could take out a Sorfali. You know that better than I do.”

“It seems impossible to the Spiders, as well,” Hermod agreed. “Nevertheless, that is what he saw. And since the Oracle’s past visions have subsequently proven valid, the Spiders have no choice but to assume this one may, too.” His eyes locked onto mine. “I trust you don’t need me to spell out the implications.”

“No,” I said, and I meant it. There were twelve empires spanning the galaxy, or at least twelve species-groups the Spiders officially recognized as empires. A few of them, like the five worlds of our pathetic little Terran Confederation, weren’t worthy of the name; others, like the Filiaelian Assembly and Shorshic Domain, were the genuine article, consisting of thousands of star systems spread across vast reaches of space. Historically, at least on Earth, powerful empires seldom bumped into each other without eventually going to war, and from what we knew of alien psychology there was no reason to assume anyone out there would react any differently if they had a choice.

Only in this case, they didn’t. The only way to cross interstellar distances was via Quadrail, and there was simply no way to stuff a war machine into a group of Quadrail cars. The only exception was interstellar governments, who under very special and very strict transport conditions were allowed to ship the components of planetary defenses through to their own colonies.

Which meant that anyone who wanted to make war against his neighbor would find himself facing as much military nastiness as the intended victim had felt inclined to set up. In a Quadrail-run galaxy, defense was king.