His lip twitched at that one. No doubt he still thought I was involved with Kunstler's death. 'It's still lunatic,' he insisted. 'Why would a ranking Jurian diplomat get himself involved in theft and murder?'
'Why does anyone get involved in that sort of mess?' I countered, looking quickly for a reason that didn't require me to mention the Modhri. 'Greed, blackmail, bad judgment, even just being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Pick one.'
'Wrong place and rime certainly seems to be
'A quick look inside his compartment, and I'm done,' I promised.
'And that's
'You have it,' I assured him, stifling a twinge of conscience. He didn't have the whole story, of course. He barely had the first page. But I couldn't give him all of it. Not yet. 'I get in, I look for the Hawk, and I get out.'
'And you promise that this is it?' Morse persisted. 'That if the Hawk's not there you aren't going to want to work your way through all the rest of the compartments?'
'Scout's honor,' I said. 'If the consul hasn't got it, the entire theory department's back to square one.'
For a moment he continued to measure me with his eyes. Then, he shook his head. 'Losutu had better be right about you,' he said. 'All right. Tell me what you want me to do.'
We waited until late in the Quadrail's night schedule, hoping to increase the chances that the Hawk's courier would be sleeping. Whether the Modhri colony inside him would also be asleep, unfortunately, was anyone's guess.
Morse didn't know about that part, of course. My rationale to him was that the late hour would catch the Jurian consul in the other compartment in a half-awake state where he might be more easily manipulated.
It was a few minutes after one o'clock when Morse carefully positioned himself in front of the consul's door and touched the chime button.
A minute went by. Nothing. Morse glanced over at Bayta and me as we leaned against the corridor wall five meters farther forward, pretending to be engaged in a heartfelt conversation. I nodded toward the door, and Morse keyed the chime again. Another half minute went by, and then the door slid open and a Jurian face leaned out. eyes blinking groggily above his beak. 'What is this you do, Human?' he demanded.
'My name's Morse,' Morse said, holding up his ID wallet. 'Terran Confederation EuroUnion Security Service. We have a situation two cars back that requires the assistance of a Resolver.'
'I am not a Resolver,' the Juri said. But I could hear the growing interest in his voice. All Jurian diplomats had at least a modicum of Resolver training, and a lot of them had ambitions in that direction. Getting called in to fix a social problem aboard a Quadrail would be a nice step toward that goal.
'I was misinformed,' Morse said, playing it with a perfect mix of respect and regret. 'My apologies.'
'Not so hastily, Mr. Morse,' the Juri said, lifting a hand to block Morse's departure. 'Perhaps I can still assist.'
'I wouldn't want to disturb you,' Morse said.
'It would be my honor to assist,' the Juri said. 'Permit me a moment to garb myself.'
He stepped back into the room and the door slid shut. Morse looked back at me, his eyebrows raised questioningly. I nodded encouragement as I straightened up from the section of wall I'd been leaning against and prepared for action. I'd spent an hour practicing this maneuver in one of Penny's friends' compartments, but it was still going to take perfect riming to pull it off.
Morse nodded back and gave one last look at my rolled-up belt peeking from between his feet, looking for all the world like a large black snail or nautilus shell. Most people, I knew, seldom looked down unless there was some actual reason to do so. I hoped the Juri was like most people.
The door slid open again and the Juri stepped out into the corridor, nattily attired now in full diplomatic regalia. He must
'This way,' Morse said, gesturing toward the rear door. As he did, I left Bayta and started walking casually toward them.
The Juri glanced incuriously at me as he stepped past Morse and headed aft. Morse fell into step beside and slightly behind him as the compartment door started to slide closed.
And as I reached the spot where Morse had been standing, I gave the coiled belt a gentle sideways nudge with my foot, sending it unrolling across the corridor and dropping its tip neatly across the path of the sliding door.
Quadrail compartment doors had built-in safeties that were supposed to make sure they didn't close on someone in the process of passing through. But those sensors were clustered midway along the panel. Way down at the bottom, there was nothing but the backup pressure sensors designed to stop the door's movement before it exerted any significant pressure on a Jurian back claw, Shorshian tail, or Human toe.
The key was that, unlike the main safeties, the pressure sensors would merely stop the door and wait there for further instructions.
The Juri fell for it, of course. There was practically no way he couldn't have. He'd heard his door closing, he
I made sure to keep walking with them all the way to the end of the car. There I courteously allowed them to go into the vestibule first.
As soon as they'd vanished behind the door, I did a one-eighty and hurried back to the compartment. I had maybe ten minutes now while Morse searched in vain for the alleged travelers whose alleged confrontation had sent him looking for diplomatic smoothing in the first place.
Bayta was waiting, her throat muscles working nervously. 'See?' I said. 'No worries.' I reached into the narrow gap between door and jamb, and as my fingers triggered the safeties, the door gave its little whoosh and slid open again. I ushered Bayta inside, scooping up my belt from the floor as I followed.
The Juri's compartment had the almost pathological neatness I'd come to expect from ambitious rank-climbing members of the galaxy's various diplomatic corps. His personal items were precisely positioned, with the clothing hanging in the cleaning rack actually laid out in descending spectrum order of basic color. If the Hawk had been in here. I reflected, I would probably have found it filed alphabetically in his luggage.
'Douse the lights,' I murmured to Bayta as I stepped to the back of the compartment and the wall switch that controlled the collapsing divider wall.
The room went dark. A moment later. I sensed the movement of air that meant she'd joined me. 'You ready?' I asked.
'As ready as I'm going to be,' she said. 'Wait—the window.'
'Right.' Reaching over to the control, I opaqued the window, cutting off the last bit of faint reflected glow from the Coreline overhead. Moving back to the wall, I pressed my ear against it.
Nothing. Still, given the Spiders' soundproofing and the clickity-clack of the wheels below me, the courier would have to have a live-spec music party going in there for me to hear anything. 'Okay,' I murmured to Bayta. 'Glitch number one: now.'
With the room's lights out, there was no obvious indication that we'd just suffered a quarter-second power flicker. 'Ready glitch number two,' I said, and pressed the wall release.
Against my hand, I felt the wall begin to retract.
It didn't open very far, making it only about half a meter before Bayta's mental order to the Spiders again shut down power to the double compartment. But that was all I needed. Squeezing Bayta's arm reassuringly. I slipped through the gap.
The courier had also opaqued his window, with the result that the compartment was as black as a politician's financial records. Fortunately, our trip in the tender had given me a fair amount of experience in moving around a blacked-out Quadrail compartment. Hoping the courier wasn't the sort to leave his laundry piled in the middle of the floor, I made my way toward the bed.
I could hear the sound of slow breathing now. If the Modhri colony was awake and aware of my presence, he was being very quiet about it. I reached the bed and located the rack above it. There were three good-sized pieces of luggage up there, none of them the easily carried hand bag I was expecting.
Had the Modhri mind segment decided that the shoulder bag idea was too obvious and stashed the Hawk in
