'I sure hope that's not it,' Bayta said, wincing. 'Maybe you'd better give them all another shot, just to be on the safe side. Rebekah and I can get the oxygen masks.'
'Okay, if you think your wrist can handle it.'
'It can,' Bayta assured me. 'Three stacks back from the front?'
'Right,' I said. 'Top crate on the stack, green stripe pattern around the label. I've already loosened the lid.'
Bayta nodded and headed off, Rebekah trailing along behind her. I fired another
As soon as they were gone, I knelt down beside the one I'd just zapped and started going through his pockets.
He didn't have what I was looking for. Neither did the second walker I checked.
The third one did.
I was back on my feet, systematically zapping everything in sight, when Bayta and Rebekah returned with the oxygen masks. 'They're here,' Bayta announced as she handed me my mask. 'As soon as we're ready, they'll open the roof to release the rear door's pressure lock.'
I grimaced. Depressurizing the car would of course kill all the walkers lying asleep around us. By most of the galaxy's legal codes, not to mention most of the galaxy's ethical standards, that constituted murder.
But we had no choice. There was no other way for us to escape, and there wasn't nearly enough time for us to first drag all these sleeping bodies back into the other baggage car. Not with more walkers on the way.
Besides, even if we did, the Modhri probably wouldn't let them live anyway. By their very nature walkers had to be kept ignorant of their role, and there was no way in hell that even the most persuasive rationalization would explain away the blank spots or the broken bones. Either he would have their polyp colonies suicide, or he would permanently take them over and turn them into soldiers. The first was death. The second was worse.
But all the cold logic in the universe didn't make it any easier to take. Collateral damage, unavoidable or not, was still collateral damage.
We were waiting by the rear door, our oxygen masks in place, when there was a creaking from above us and the roof began to open.
For a moment we felt some buffeting as the car's air rushed out into the near-vacuum of the Tube. I felt my ears pop; from Rebekah's sudden twitch, I guessed hers had done the same. Then the mild windstorm dropped away, and the roof closed over us again, and Bayta touched the door release.
We were facing the gleaming silver nose of a Quadrail engine, holding position about half a meter back from the rear of our train. Straddling the gap, with two of his seven legs braced on each of the two vehicles, was a dot- marked stationmaster Spider. Behind him, stretched out in a line all the way back across the top of the engine, were four of the slightly smaller conductors.
Bayta didn't hesitate. She stepped forward, holding her arms slightly away from her sides. The stationmaster got two of his remaining three legs under her arms, holding the third ready in case of trouble, and lifted her across the gap. He passed her off to the next Spider in line, then swung his arms back to Rebekah and me.
I nudged Rebekah and gestured. What I could see of her expression through her mask wasn't very happy, and her grip on my hand as she stepped to the edge of the short baggage-car platform was anything but gentle. But at least she went without having to be pushed. The Spider lifted her up and over, and then it was my turn.
And as he lifted me up, I took a good look at his dot pattern.
The trip over the speed-blurred tracks below us was mercifully short. A few seconds later, the first Spider handed me off to the next in line, and I was bucket-brigaded across to the rear of the engine.
Two more Spiders were waiting there, hanging on to rings set into the side of the first of the tender's three passenger cars. They got their legs under my arms and lifted me over the coupling, maneuvering me through the open door on the side. Bayta and Rebekah were already inside, and as the Spider withdrew his legs the door irised shut and I heard the faint hiss as the car was repressurized.
I watched the gauge on the inside of my mask, wincing as my eardrums again struggled to adjust to the pressure change. The gauge reached Quadrail standard, and I closed the valve and took off the mask.
The air smelled sweet and fresh and clean. I took several deep breaths as Bayta and Rebekah removed their own masks, trying to wash away the emotional grime and sweat and guilt of the battle with the Modhri and his slave warriors.
'Are we safe now?' Rebekah asked.
I gazed at her face, searching in vain for the ten-year-old girl I'd seen only briefly in all our time together. What lofty goal was it, I wondered distantly, that deprived a child of her childhood? 'Yes, we're safe,' I said. 'It's all over.' Without waiting for a reply, I turned away.
Because it wasn't over. Not by a long shot.
At least, not for me.
The car was similar to the ones Bayta and I had traveled in a couple of times before. It was laid out like a double Quadrail compartment, only without the central dividing wall and with a food storage and prep area taking the space where the second bathroom would be. There were two beds at each end, and it wasn't long before all three of us had claimed our bunks and collapsed into them. Bayta and Rebekah were exhausted, and it wasn't long before they were fast asleep.
I wasn't in any better shape than they were, and I could feel fatigue tugging at my eyelids. But I couldn't go to sleep. Not yet. I waited until their breathing had settled down into a slow rhythm, then gave it another five minutes just to be sure. Then, getting up from my bed, I crossed to the car's rear door It opened at a touch of the control, and I stepped through the vestibule into the next car back.
It was a cargo car, unfurnished, unadorned, and mostly empty. The only cargo were the seventeen coral lockboxes we'd spirited off New Tigris, sitting together in the middle of the floor. At the far end was a door leading into the tender's third passenger car.
Standing beside the car's rear door like a Buckingham Palace guard was the white-dotted Spider who had carried us across the gap to safety. The same white-dotted Spider I'd run into before, in fact, the one I'd privately christened Spot.
I walked the length of the car, feeling a creepy sense of unfriendly eyes watching my every move. Spot stirred as I approached the door, moving sideways to stand in my way. 'I need to see him,' I said, coming to a halt a couple of steps away.
'He will not see you,' Spot said.
'I think he will,' I said. 'Tell him I know everything.'
There was a short pause. 'He will not see you,' Spot repeated.
So he was calling my bluff. I'd expected nothing less. 'He has two choices,' I said. 'He can see me now, alone, or I can walk back to our car and wake up Bayta, and he can see the two of us together.'
There was another pause, a longer one this time. I waited; and then, slowly, Spot sidled back to his place beside the door. Stepping past him, I touched the door release, crossed the vestibule, and opened the door behind it.
'Good day, Frank Compton,' a melodic voice called as I stepped into the car.
Melodic, but with an unpleasant edge beneath it. Anger? Annoyance?
Fear?
'Hello, Elder of the Chahwyn,' I said, nodding to the slender, pale-skinned being seated on a chair in the middle of the room between a pair of Spiders. 'You
'I am,' he confirmed.
Good—someone with authority. 'Elder of the Chahwyn, we need to talk,' I said.
'About what?'
'About this fraud you've perpetrated on us,' I said. 'This fraud called the Melding.'
There was a stiffening of the cat-like whiskers on the ridges above his eyes. 'There is no fraud,' he insisted. 'The Melding is as Rebekah has described it.'
'Except for one small but critical fact,' I said. 'The small fact that the Modhri didn't create the Melding.'
I leveled a finger at him. 'You did.'
