The Domino Pattern

“Jumping a Quadrail is a pretty pricey way of escaping Mom and Dad,” I reminded her. “On the other hand, without access to the Spiders’ station-based records, there’s no way to know the circumstances of her coming aboard.”

“No, there’s not,” Bayta murmured thoughtfully. “Do you suppose that’s why the killer chose a cross-galactic express? So that we wouldn’t be able to get anyone’s records?”

“Could be,” I said. “Or so we wouldn’t be able to call for help, get quick and complete autopsies, or get out of his line of fire. Pick one.”

Bayta shivered. “You think he’s planning more killings, then?”

“I would hope that two dead bodies would be enough for anyone,” I said soberly. “But I wouldn’t bet the rent money on it.”

“No.” She took a deep breath, and for just a moment her mask dropped away to reveal something tired and anxious. It was a side of her that I didn’t see very often, and there was something about it that made me want to take her hand and tell her, don’t worry, it’ll be all right.

But I didn’t. I didn’t dare. Among his other tricks, the Modhri employed something called thought viruses, suggestions that could be sent telepathically from a walker to an uninfected person. In one of the lowest ironies of this whole miserable business, thought viruses traveled best along the lines of trust between friends, close colleagues, or lovers.

Which meant that once the Modhri had established a colony in one person, the walker’s entire circle of friends was usually soon to follow, lemming-like, in the act of touching some Modhran coral and starting their own Modhran polyp colonies. The Modhri had used that technique to infiltrate business centers, industrial directorates, counterintelligence squads, and even whole governments.

Bayta and I were close. We had to be, working and fighting alongside each other the way we were. But at the same time, we had to struggle to maintain as much emotional distance between us as we possibly could. Otherwise, if the Modhri ever got to one of us, he would inevitably get the other one, too.

Bayta knew that as well as I did. The moment of vulnerability passed, her mask came back up, and I once again forced my protective male instincts into the background. “So what’s our next move?” she asked.

“Exactly what I told Kennrick.” I yawned again. “I’m going to get some sleep. You coming?”

“I think I’ll wander around a little longer,” she said. “Maybe go watch the air system disassembly. I don’t think I could sleep just now.”

I eyed her, that brief flicker of vulnerability coming back to mind. But her professional self was back in charge, cool and confident and competent.

And it wasn’t like she would be alone out here. Not with hundreds of people milling around and other hundreds of Spiders watching her every move. “Okay,” I said, pushing myself off the bar stool. “Just be careful. And let me know if anything happens.”

“What if what happens isn’t especially interesting?” she asked.

“This is a murder investigation,” I reminded her grimly. “Everything is interesting.”

———

This time I got nearly four hours of sleep before I was awakened by a growling stomach, the realization that I hadn’t eaten since last night, and the delectable aroma of onion rings.

“I thought you might be hungry,” Bayta said as she carefully balanced the onion rings and a cup of iced tea on the edge of my computer desk’s swivel table.

“Very,” I confirmed, sniffing at the plate with mild surprise. Offhand, I couldn’t think of any other time when Bayta had brought me something to eat purely on her own initiative. Either she was finally getting the hang of this girl-Friday stuff, or else I was looking even more old and decrepit and pitiable than usual lately. “Thanks. Have a bite?”

“No, thank you.” she said, her cheek twitching. “My stomach’s been bothering me a little today.”

“You’re probably just hungry,” I suggested as I sat down and took a sip of the tea. It was strong and sweet, just the way I liked it.

“No, I had a vegetable roll a couple of hours ago,” she said. “I’m just feeling a little odd today, that’s all.”

I frowned at her as I bit into one of the onion rings. “Odd enough to have you checked over by one of the doctors?”

“Oh, no, it’s nothing like that,” she assured me. “Like I said, my stomach’s just a little sensitive.”

“Okay,” I said, making a mental note to keep tabs on her digestive rumblings. With two confirmed poisonings, and Terese German apparently heaving her guts on a regular basis, I wasn’t ready yet to chalk up Bayta’s oddness to normal travel indigestion. “Any news on the air filter?”

“It’s almost ready,” she said. “Another hour, maybe.”

“Good,” I said, biting a third out of the next onion ring in line and washing it down with a swig of tea. “You didn’t happen to bump into either Kennrick or Dr. Witherspoon while you were wandering around, did you?”

“I didn’t spot either of them,” Bayta said. “But I wasn’t really looking. I was mostly talking to Tas Krodo.”

“Who?”

“Master Colix’s other seatmate,” she said. “The one Ms. German said he mostly talked to.”

I frowned at her. “You talked to him? Alone?”

“Not alone, no,” she said evenly. “There were other passengers in the car.”

“That’s not what I meant,” I said, setting down a half-eaten onion ring. Was that what the unexpected tea service had been all about? Some kind of preemptive peace offering? “Interrogation is an art, Bayta.”

“It wasn’t an interrogation,” she said, her voice stiff. “We were just two people having a conversation.”

I took a careful breath, the old phrase poisoning the well flashing to mind. Putting potential witnesses on their guard—or worse, accidentally planting suggestions as to what you wanted to hear— could wreck an entire session. Especially when aliens and alien cultures were involved. “Bayta—”

“I’m not a child, Frank,” she snapped. “Don’t talk to me as if I were. I’ve watched you enough times to know the kinds of questions to ask.”

“All right,” I said as calmly as I could. A fight right now wouldn’t help either of us, or the situation, in the slightest. “What kinds of questions did you ask?”

“I first confirmed that he did talk a great deal with Master Colix,” she said. Her tone was a near-perfect copy of a junior Westali agent reporting to a superior. “I also confirmed that Master Colix was able to speak both English and Juric. Apparently, Master Colix spent a lot of time talking to Tas Krodo about the Path of Onagnalhni.”

“The—? Oh, right.” I nodded. “Kennrick’s Path of the Unpronounceable and Untranslatable. Not entirely unpronounceable, I see.”

“Pretty close, though,” Bayta said, relaxing slightly. For all her stubbornly defiant talk about doing her own bit of investigating, she really had been worried about how mad I would be at her. “He also said that Master Colix had a dark brown bag of what he thought were some kind of fruit snacks.”

“He tasted one?”

“No, Master Colix never offered to share,” Bayta said. “But they had a fruity scent.”

“Sounds harmless enough,” I said.

“Yes, it does,” Bayta said. “But when I went to look for them in the overhead and underseat storage compartments, I couldn’t find them.”

I frowned. “The locked overhead and underseat compartments?”

“Those compartments, yes.” she said grimly. “Only by the time I got to them they weren’t locked anymore.”

“Well, now, that’s very interesting,” I murmured, picking up another onion ring and chewing thoughtfully at it. “Did you notice anything unusual about the locks? Any damage to the catches or scratch marks anywhere?”

“I didn’t see anything.” Bayta’s lips compressed briefly. “But I probably don’t know what to look for, do I?”

“You’d have noticed if the locks had been forced,” I assured her. “That’s usually pretty obvious. But the differences between key and keypick aren’t nearly so blatant.”

“Keypicks don’t work on Quadrail locks,” Bayta said.