The Third Lynx

we could catch one of the various planes, trains, or suborbital transports that would take us to our final destinations across the planet.

Morse's count had been correct: there were indeed four Halkas who joined us aboard the Magaraa City transport. I wondered briefly if the Modhri realized how they would stand out of a crowd of the thinner, more delicately featured Tra'ho'seej, then put the question out of my mind. That was the Modhri's problem, not mine.

Morse wasn't speaking to me much, basically limiting his conversation to necessary information exchanges. All of those were short and formal. Bayta wasn't speaking to me at all. Penny, in contrast, was almost chatty, though most of her conversation was of the casual cocktail-party variety. Usually I had little patience with that sort of thing, but I recognized it here as a cover-up for her nervousness about what might await us.

She also was showing a new penchant for hanging on to my arm as we walked. It would probably have made Bayta even quieter if she hadn't been at absolute zero already.

Off we all went for a fun-filled excursion together.

The suborbital transport took three hours to get across the Ghonsilya landscape, which when added to the local time zone change put us on the ground again just after local sunset. At my suggestion we parked our luggage in the depot storage lockers, with the idea that we'd pick it up later after we'd figured out what our long-term plans were going to be. We took the subway to the neighborhood of the art museum that had been burgled, and a few minutes later disembarked into the gathering dusk.

By our own internal biological clocks, of course, it was only lunchtime. Travel could be very wearing on the stomach.

'What's your plan?' Morse asked quietly as he. Penny, Bayta, and I walked along a street lined with small shops and quaint-looking houses, our four silent walkers running a wide screen formation around us a few meters away.

'I thought we'd try something outrageously clever and give the nearby hotels a call,' I said, pulling out my comm and keying for a local directory.

Morse snorted under his breath. 'And here I thought you'd be looking for a trail of bread crumbs.'

Penny half turned toward him, her eyes glowering. But whatever crushing retort she'd been preparing to offer on my behalf, she never got to it. As I lifted the comm the biggest of the four Halkas, whom I'd privately dubbed Gargantua, moved in from his place in the screen formation and plucked it from my grip. 'No,' he growled.

I was actually perfectly willing to let him have the comm. Stafford hadn't been traveling aboard the Quadrail under either his own name or the Daniel Mice moniker Kunstler had gasped at me, and I doubted he would go back to one of them here. That made a hotel survey pretty much useless.

Of course, Modhri already knew the Stafford name was a bust, since he would certainly have done a survey of his own the minute our walker escort got close enough to the planet for their Modhri colonies to meld with the locals and sound the alert. My suggestion had been pure red herring, designed to make Morse and the walkers think I knew something that they didn't.

Which, technically speaking, I did. But that wasn't the point. The point was to keep the Modhri thinking in the wrong direction, and if taking my comm away made him feel safer, he was welcome to it.

Unfortunately, Morse didn't know any of that. He apparently thought I was about to reveal Stafford's traveling identity, and figured it was therefore the right time to try to lose our escort. Slipping his hand inside his jacket, he turned toward Gargantua.

It was a complete waste of effort. The Modhri had easily anticipated the move. Two of the other Halkas moved in even before he completed his turn, and in typically perfect coordination one of them threw his arms around Morse's shoulders to trap his hand inside his jacket while the other reached inside and twisted the gun out of his hand.

Penny gave a little gasp as she jerked back from the sudden fracas. The fourth Halka was ready, catching her shoulders to discourage any thought of flight and relieving her of her own comm. She started to give him a withering over-the-shoulder look, but midway through her eyes seemed to catch on something behind my back. 'Frank?' she breathed.

I turned. Somewhere along the line, the four Modhran walkers who'd accompanied us from the Ghonsilya spaceport had picked up reinforcements. Twenty reinforcements, to be precise, all of them Tra'ho'seej. They were arranged in a loose but very deliberate guard ring around us about thirty meters away.

They didn't look like guards, of course. They were grouped in casual-looking twos and threes at corners or loitering silently as individuals in the various shop doorways around us. Most of them were dressed in the expensively embroidered clothing and multiple earrings of upper-class citizens, while the rest had the severe half- shaved heads and contrasting flowing topcuts of oathlings who'd taken the vow of government service.

Apparently, the Modhri had turned out most of his local mind segment in honor of our visit.

'Frank?' Penny repeated, more urgently this time.

'It's all right,' I soothed, studying the newcomers. They were making no move to approach, but were merely continuing with their conversations or private meditations. The Modhri would have maneuvered them here through his usual technique of quiet and reasonable suggestions, but was apparently holding off on the more drastic and riskier step of taking direct control of their bodies.

Playing it low-key …and it was going to cost him. Whispering subtle instructions in their ears had gotten the Tra'ho'seej here just fine, but it was highly unlikely that the hosts' rationalizations could have been made to stretch to the extent of bringing weapons along on their innocent evening group stroll. Twenty walkers were bad enough, but twenty armed walkers would have been a hell of a lot worse.

Of course, Gargantua and his buddies did have at least one gun now—Morse's—plus whatever hardware they might have brought with them from the Quadrail lockboxes. Morse and I would just have to deal with that as best we could.

Assuming it was still Morse and I and not just I. Judging from the look he was giving me as the Halkas continued frisking him I wouldn't have bet large sums of money on it. 'Lovely move, Compton,' he growled acidly. 'Lovely non-move, rather.'

'Sorry,' I apologized. 'But I try not to start fights when I'm on the short end of ten-to-one odds. Little rule I have.'

His glare slipped a little, his eyes flicking away from me. From the sudden change in his expression, it was clear he hadn't yet noticed our new outrider collection. 'Bloody hell,' he muttered.

'At the very least,' I agreed. 'I suggest we not make any sudden moves.'

The Halkas finished their search without coming up with anything else and took a step back. 'You through?' I asked, addressing Gargantua for convenience.

'For the moment,' he said, eyeing me closely. 'There will be no more trouble?' His eyes flicked significantly to Penny.

I followed the look. The Halka who'd taken Penny's comm had shifted his grip pointedly from her shoulder to the back of her neck. A squeeze, followed by a good solid twist, and she would die the way her friend Pyotr had. 'Understood,' I told Gargantua, a shiver running up my back. 'Come on. We start at the art museum.'

For the first time since I'd walked into the dit rec viewing room at Ian-apof the Modhri seemed genuinely startled. 'Why?' Gargantua asked.

'Who's the detective here, you or me?' I countered. 'You want the Lynx, or don't you?'

His eyes burned into me, but he nodded. 'Lead the way,' he said, gesturing me forward.

We set off again. Penny walking close beside me on my right, Bayta a bit farther away on my left, Morse bringing up the rear, the Halkas flanking, and the oblivious Tra'ho walkers wandering along more or less in formation. Half a kilometer directly ahead, I knew from the city maps I'd studied on the flight, our street dead- ended at the grounds of the art museum where the Viper had been stolen. Much closer than that, only a couple of blocks ahead, in fact, I could see the marquee of the Fraklog-Oryo Hotel.

Where Fayr's message had said he would be waiting for us.

I could feel Bayta's tension as we moved closer. She was onto the plan now, and preparing herself for action.

Or rather, she was onto half of it. I had the feeling she wasn't going to like the other half.

We were twenty meters from the hotel entrance when I stopped. 'Look, there's no reason we all have to go there,' I told Gargantua. 'Why don't we leave the others here and you and I can go alone?'