Night Train to Rigel

carrybag. In a galaxy where self-propelled luggage was the norm, I doubted that one in a hundred travelers had more than a vague idea what their handles really felt like. The only reason I’d caught the alteration so quickly was because of my carrybags’ chronic motor problems, the very problems I’d been cursing five hours ago.

There was a lesson there, or at least a bit of irony, but at the moment I couldn’t be bothered with either. Like the smaller carrybag, the larger one’s handle had also been padded out. Pulling out my pocket multitool, I extended the fingertip-sized blade—the biggest knife permitted aboard a Quadrail—and began digging carefully beneath the grip.

My first guess was that the Spiders had decided to backstop their watchdog by planting a tracer or transmitter on me. But as I scraped millimeter after millimeter away without finding anything except whisker-thin embedded wires, that idea began to fade. I kept at it; and finally, two centimeters in, I struck something familiar.

Only it wasn’t a transmitter. It was, instead, a short-range receiver connected to a small pulse capacitor, which was in turn connected to the whisker wires buried in the material.

The sort of setup you might find in a remotely triggered antipersonnel bomb.

Pulling out my reader, I selected a data chip from my collection marked Encyclopaedia Britannica. So Bayta had a specially-gimmicked reader, did she? Fine. So did I. Plugging in the chip, I touched the reader’s activation control and held one corner close to the material I’d scraped out of the handle.

It was not, in fact, a bomb, antipersonnel or otherwise. This sensor was the most advanced bit of technology in the Terran Confederation, a gadget any Westali field director would probably give his best friend’s right arm for, and it wasn’t picking up even a hint of the fast-burning chemicals all explosives had in common. I retuned the sensor twice, just to be sure, then switched to scanning for poisons. Again, nothing.

But nothing in the case of poisons could merely mean that the stuff was too well disguised for a normal scan. Fortunately, there were ways of teasing such things into the open. Pulling out my lighter, I flipped the thumb guard around, swinging it over the flame jet where it would serve as a specimen holder. I put a single grain of the mystery material on top, set the sensor at the proper reading distance, and ignited the lighter. The flame hissed out, clean and blue-white, and there was a brief burst of pale smoke as the grain burned as well. Shutting off the lighter, I set it aside and keyed for analysis.

And this time, the sensor finally found the active ingredient carefully buried beneath the inert containment matrix.

Saarix-5 nerve gas.

The image of the Spiders’ dead messenger rose unpleasantly in front of my eyes as I unplugged the data chip and returned it and the reader to my pocket. In the absence of any move against me during the voyage from Earth, I’d begun to wonder if his death might have been a bizarre coincidence, the result of some random crime that had nothing to do with me.

Now it was looking like whoever was behind his murder had simply been biding his time.

Only here it wouldn’t be just me who went down. Depending on what percentage of the packing material was Saarix-5, there could be enough there to kill every oxygen-breather within ten meters. If my assailant set it off in the enclosed space of a Quadrail car, the effects would go even farther.

Which led to another interesting question. Namely, how had this little conjuring trick been performed in the first place? The only time the bags had been out of my sight after leaving the transfer station was right after we’d docked, as the passengers climbed up the ladder and the shuttle’s conveyer system pulled the luggage from the racks and shoved them up into the Tube after us. The sheer mechanics required for someone to insert a pair of booby traps in such a brief time was bad enough. What was worse was why the Spiders’ sensors hadn’t picked up on it.

Or maybe they had picked up on it. Maybe that was why that drudge had swooped down on me and walked off with the bags. But then why hadn’t they detained me, or kicked me off the Quadrail, or at least removed the Saarix?

Unless it was the drudge itself that had gimmicked them.

I stared at the bags, a hard knot forming in my stomach. The Spiders had been running the Quadrail with quiet efficiency for at least the past seven hundred years. In all that time there had never been a report of conflict among them, which had naturally led to the conclusion that they were a monolithic culture with no factions, disagreements, or rivalries.

But what if that wasn’t true? What if there were factions, only one of which wanted me to investigate this impending interstellar war? In that case, there might be another group seriously opposed to the idea of airing their secrets to a lowly human, especially a lowly human whose own government wanted nothing to do with him.

They might even be opposed enough to look for a permanent way to make sure that didn’t happen.

Gathering up the material I’d scraped out. I began stuffing it back beneath the grip. Bayta could return at any moment, and if she didn’t already know about the Saarix this wasn’t the time to break the news to her. If she did know, it was even more vital that she didn’t find out I was on to the scheme. It would have been nice if I could have disabled the receiver or capacitor, but a properly designed detonator came with built- in diagnostics, and I didn’t have the equipment to trick the gadget into giving itself false readings. If my would-be poisoner found out I’d neutralized this particular threat he would just come up with a different one, and it was always better to face a trap you knew about than one you didn’t.

I was sitting in the lounge chair, skimming through a colorful computer brochure on Quadrail history, when Bayta returned with the onion rings.

“Thanks,” I said, taking the basket from her. The aroma reminded me of a batch I’d had once in San Antonio. “Have one?”

“No, thank you,” she said, stepping back to the middle of the floor. “Have you come up with a plan yet?”

“I’m still in the information-gathering phase,” I said, crunching into one of the rings. They tasted like the San Antonio ones, too. “For starters, I want you to ask the Spiders for a list of situations under which weapons are allowed aboard Quadrails.”

“I can answer that one,” she said. “Personal weapons like Belldic status guns can be put in lockboxes at the transfer station, which are then stowed in inaccessible storage bins beneath the cars. Larger weapons and weapons systems can be sent by cargo Quadrail only with special governmental permits.”

“Yes, I know the official exceptions,” I said. “I want to know the unofficial ones.”

She shook her head. “There aren’t any.”

“That you know about.”

“There aren’t any,” she repeated, more firmly this time.

I took a careful breath, willing myself to be calm. Dogmatic statements always drove me crazy. “Ask the Spiders anyway,” I said. “I also want to know everything about the Tube’s sensors. How they work, what they look for, and what exactly they do and don’t detect”

She seemed a bit taken aback. “I’m not sure the Spiders will be willing to give you that kind of information,” she warned.

“They’re not being offered a choice,” I said. “They’re the ones who asked me in on this, remember? Either I get what I need or I’m walking.”

Her mouth twitched. “All right, I’ll ask,” she said. “But none of the conductors will have that kind of information.”

Another dogmatic statement. This one, though, I believed. “Fine. Who will?”

“It’ll have to go through a stationmaster,” she said, her forehead wrinkled in thought.

“Is that a problem?” I asked. “I assumed you could talk to all the Spiders.”

“Yes, I can,” she said. “But there aren’t very many of them at Yandro Station. Probably not enough for a clear relay to the stationmaster’s building.”

“A clear what?”

“My… communication… method has a limited range,” she said reluctantly. “For longer distances a message can be relayed between Spiders, but only if the Spiders are physically close enough to each other.”

“I see,” I said, nodding. So apparently she didn’t even have to look at a Spider to communicate, as I’d first thought. Some form of telepathy, then?

Problem was, as far as I knew no human being had ever demonstrated genuine, reproducible telepathic