The Domino Pattern

come up with a new strategy for cornering Kennrick, when I felt a subtle puff of air across my face.

My hand slipped reflexively beneath my pillow to grip the kwi I always kept within reach. The kwi was a weapon I’d conned out of the Chahwyn, a relic they’d dug up from the days of the Shonkla-raa war. An elegantly nonlethal weapon, it was capable of delivering three levels of pain, or three levels of unconsciousness, to anyone within its somewhat limited range.

There was, unfortunately, one catch: the kwi was telepathically activated, which meant I needed Bayta or a Spider to turn the damn thing on for me.

Which meant that if the puff of air I’d felt meant there was trouble coming through my door, I would need to bellow Bayta awake through our dividing wall and hope she got the message before someone tried to strangle me in my bed—

“Frank?” Bayta’s voice came out of the darkness, tense and hurried and scared. “Frank, there’s trouble. The Spiders want us in third class right away.”

“What is it?” I asked, feeling a flicker of relief as I swung my legs out from under the blanket and grabbed for my clothes.

“It’s one of the Shorshians,” she said. “He’s come down sick.”

I paused, shirt in hand. She’d barged in on me for this? “So have them call a doctor,” I growled.

“The doctors are already there,” she said, her voice shaking, “and they say he’s not just sick. He’s been poisoned.”

TWO

I’d been about to toss my shirt back onto my clothes stack. Now, instead, I started pulling it on.

Poisons couldn’t be brought aboard Quadrail trains. They just couldn’t. The same huge station-based sensor arrays that sniffed out weapons and weapon components did an equally efficient job of screening out poisons. All sorts of poisons, and all known varieties of poison-producing flora and fauna. The sensors also looked for every known type of dangerous bacteria, viruses, and other microorganisms. The Shorshian back there simply couldn’t have been poisoned.

But some doctor apparently thought he had. Either we had an incompetent quack aboard, or there was a serious problem.

All Quadrail trains came equipped with a couple of small dispensaries, typically tucked in at one end of the first-class and second/third-class dining cars. The server Spider on duty there could do little except dole out an assortment of general-purpose medicines, but there was usually at least one doctor aboard any given train who could be brought on in a medical emergency. In exchange for putting their names on the on-call list, doctors got a sizable discount on their tickets.

Here, instead of being an add-on to the dining car, the second/third dispensary took up a section of the exercise car. Like everything else on the super-express, it was also larger than usual. The glass-fronted drug cabinet was over twice the size of an ordinary one, and in place of the usual examination chair was a Fibibib- designed diagnostic/treatment table.

Bayta and I arrived to find a small crowd already assembled. There were a pair of Shorshians, hovering nervously in the back of the small room, their dolphin snouts silently opening and closing, their smooth skin rippling with little crescent-shaped goose bumps. At the back of the room on the other side, a petite server Spider was silently watching the proceedings. Standing on opposite sides of the treatment table were a white-haired Human male and a Filiaelian female with a graying brown blaze down her long face. The Human was holding a biosensor with one hand while he thumbed ampoules from a dispenser with the other. The Filly was taking the ampoules from him and feeding them into a hypo.

And in the center of attention, lying unnaturally still on the table, was the patient.

A person who had somehow dropped out of the sky from an entirely different galaxy and who had never seen a Shorshian in his life would still have recognized instantly that this one wasn’t well. Someone like me, who’d had the standard Western Alliance Intelligence course in Shorshic culture, psychology, and physiology could see just as instantly that he was in a seriously bad way.

In fact, unless the two doctors could pull a rabbit out of their hat, I was pretty sure he was dying.

I eased toward the table for a closer look. The Shorshian’s skin was mottled, its black/gray/off-white color scheme mixed together like tiny tiles that had been thrown randomly on the floor instead of forming the smooth, flowing patterns that were the Shorshic norm. His breathing was labored, and there was some kind of mucus seeping from his nostrils and the corners of his mouth. I took another step forward, trying for a closer look.

“Get back,” the Human doctor ordered me brusquely, not looking up from his work.

“Sorry,” I murmured, and retreated back to Bayta’s side. I looked over at the other two Shorshians, hoping to catch their attention. But they only had eyes for their downed comrade. Behind me, I heard a set of rapid footsteps approaching.

And I turned just as the elusive Whitman Kennrick hurried into the dispensary, his hair wild and unkempt, his clothes looking like they’d been thrown on by paint spreader, his eyes with the half-lidded look of someone not yet fully awake. His throat was tight, and he was breathing almost as heavily as the patient. His eyes flicked to the table, the doctors, and the other two Shorshians.

And then he spotted Bayta and me.

Back on the Homshil Station platform, it had taken him a couple of seconds to make a connection with my face. This time, there was no such delay. His puffy eyes widened, and he skidded to a halt, reversed direction, and vanished out into the corridor.

I nearly knocked Bayta over as I charged out of the dispensary after him. “Hold it!” I called softly at his retreating back. “Kennrick!”

For a half dozen steps I thought he was going to ignore me, and that I would have to literally run him down and tackle him. Then, reluctantly, he slowed to a halt and turned around. “What do you want?” he asked, his voice halfway between sullen and wary.

“For starters, a little decorum,” I said as I strode up to him. “Second-class passengers may not be as coddled as we are up in first, but they get just as cranky if they’re woken up by a footrace through their car.”

“What do you want?” he repeated.

“A couple of answers,” I said. “Let’s start with who exactly you are.”

A frown creased his forehead. “Whitman Kennrick,” he said. “You just said that, remember?”

“And it tells me nothing,” I said. “Let’s try again: who are you?”

He searched my face another couple of beats, as it looking for a trap he knew had to be in there somewhere. “Eleven years ago,” he said at last. “Shotoko Associates.”

“Okay.” I said. Shotoko Associates I remembered: an international law firm that had more or less unknowingly ended up as the base of operations of one of the more brazen spies Westali had taken down during my years with the agency. “So?”

A flicker of genuine surprise replaced his frown. “What do you mean, so? You were there. In fact, you were running the raid.”

“Hardly,” I said. “Senior Investigator Hartwell was the agent in charge. I was just one of the people she pulled in for rabbit-hole duty.”

“Really,” he said, again searching my face. “Well, you and your people missed one.”

“You?”

“Yes,” Kennrick said. “Not that I was anyone you actually wanted, of course.”

“Of course not,” I said. “You were just one of the dupes DuNoeva was using as cover for his operation.”

“Not exactly the way I would have put it,” Kennrick said sourly. “But basically correct.”

“So why did you run?” I asked. “I’m assuming here that you did run.”

“Of course I ran,” he growled. “I didn’t want to spend six months and a mountain of attorneys’ fees defending myself from false charges.”