The Domino Pattern

“Shall I order him to leave?” Sarge asked.

I squeezed my hand into a fist, emotion and logic doing a vicious tug-of-war with my soul. If this was a bluff, and I blinked, our best opportunity to nail Kennrick would be gone.

But if it wasn’t a bluff, Bayta was about to lose a hand.

“Compton?” Sarge asked again.

Abruptly, the decision was taken from me. “No,” Bayta’s voice came firmly from Sarge’s metal sphere. “Keep going. It’s our only chance.”

“Compton?” Kennrick’s voice demanded. “Compton? Call him off, damn you. You hear me?”

“Keep going,” Bayta said again.

“Compton? Compton?”

“He can’t do anything,” Bayta told him, her voice frightened and pleading. “Please—he can’t do any—”

Abruptly, her voice went silent. “Bayta!” I barked.

“She’s unhurt,” Sarge said. “He has shot her with the kwi.”

I braced myself. “What about her hand?”

“Also unhurt,” Sarge assured me. “The Human has opaqued the window again.”

“And?” I demanded.

“A moment.”

I rubbed a layer of sweat off my forehead, willing my heartbeat to slow down as the defender hanging on to the outside of the car did whatever changes were necessary to his sensor suite to let him see through an opaqued display window. “The Human has moved to the door and is working with some of the wires connected there,” Sarge reported.

“Which ones?”

“They appear to be the ones connected to Bayta’s neck,” Sarge said.

“It’s working,” the Modhri said.

“So far,” I agreed cautiously. It was still way too early for us to start congratulating ourselves. “What’s he doing now?”

“He has attached his reader to the motor fastened near the door,” Sarge said. “The wire from the motor reaches across the compartment to loop around Bayta’s neck.”

The automatic strangler Kennrick had warned me about. Our quarry was about to make a sortie out of his fortress.

“He is leaving the compartment,” Sarge said. “The door is closing …I can see no more.”

I took a deep breath. It was working. It was actually working. “Tell your partner to stop scraping,” I instructed Sarge. “Modhri, let me know the minute you hear movement outside Vevri’s compartment.”

“I will,” the Modhri promised, a note of what sounded like genuine awe in his voice. “You amaze me, Compton. How did you know he would behave in precisely this manner?”

“Because I have a good idea how people like that think,” I said. That, plus the fact that Kennrick had damn few options right now. If the Spider managed to break the seal around his window, his air would go rushing out into the near-vacuum of the Tube. Without keys to any of the other compartments, there was nowhere else he could relocate to, even if he was willing to leave his carefully laid defenses. Trying to camp out in the corridor wouldn’t be any better.

Which left him only one real option: buy himself some time, and hope he could figure out how to get the Spider off his window. Time, in this particular case, being oxygen.

And since he’d already used the tank in his own car to block the vestibule, he was going to have to go to the next car forward and steal theirs.

“You understand him, indeed,” the Modhri murmured. “My congratulations.”

“Let’s save the celebration until he actually gets to the tank,” I warned, still refusing to allow my hopes to get too high. “He could still decide to hunker down in the corridor while he tries to think up a new—”

“There!” the Modhri cut me off. “He’s outside the forward car stateroom, and has begun to unfasten the oxygen tank.”

And with Kennrick a car and a half away from all his audio sensors and alarms, it was time to go. “Your turn,” I said, gesturing Sarge toward the vestibule door.

The words were barely out of my mouth when two of the defender’s legs lanced forward, their tips spearing hard into the edge of the door. Before my ears could recover from the sound he hit the door again, with an even harder double blow than before.

And then, through the ringing in my ears, I heard the angry hiss of escaping air. The Spider had dented the door just enough to break the seal, releasing the pressure that had kept it locked.

I stepped forward and hit the release. The door opened halfway, then faltered as the deformed metal hung up on its rollers. I grabbed the edge, and with the defender joining my effort we shoved it the rest of the way open. I crossed the vestibule, stepping over the spent oxygen cylinder Kennrick had put there earlier, and touched the control at the other end.

The door opened into a deserted corridor. I stepped inside the car and headed forward at a fast jog. “How’s he doing?” I asked over my shoulder.

“The sounds of disassembly have just finished,” the Modhri reported. “The sounds now are those of one hefting a large object …he’s starting back along the corridor.”

Which meant our grace period was nearly at an end. “Thanks,” I said, picking up my pace. “Get back into the vestibule and make sure the door closes behind you.”

I reached Minnario’s compartment door, keyed it open, and slipped inside. Sarge was right behind me.

It wasn’t until the door slid shut again that I discovered that Qiddicoj had followed us in. “I told you to go back,” I snapped.

“You may need me,” he said.

I cursed under my breath. But it was too late for him to go back now. “Just stay quiet and out of my way,” I growled.

I crossed the room to where the divider sealed against the wall. Kennrick had undoubtedly locked it from his side after my last visit, and in theory I couldn’t unlock it from here.

But Bayta and I had run into this problem once before, and we’d come up with an answer to it. “Ready,” I said, nodding to Sarge. “Have the conductors cut power now.”

For three heartbeats nothing happened. Then, the compartment around us went dark. I counted out two more heartbeats, and the light came back on.

And with that, the divider returned to its default position of being unlocked.

“The Human’s footsteps have faded from my other Eye’s hearing,” the Modhri murmured. “Do we open the divider?”

“Not yet,” I said, kneeling on the curve couch and pressing my ear against the divider. “We have to wait until Kennrick gets back and disarms the automatic strangler setup. Defender, better have your partner start his scratching again.” I frowned as a sudden thought struck me. “He can’t actually dig all the way through the seal, can he?”

“No,” Sarge said. But I could hear the disapproval in his voice. Letting passengers aboard tenders was broken rule number one; even pretending to do damage to one of their own Quadrails was broken rule number two. In his place, I decided, I would probably be unhappy, too.

For almost two minutes nothing happened. I was starting to wonder if Kennrick had decided to make a camp out in the corridor after all when I half heard, half felt a faint thud. There was a short pause, another thud—

“He has returned,” Sarge confirmed as he picked up the commentary from the defender hanging outside the opaqued window. “He carries the oxygen tank with him.”

I started to breathe again. It was nearly over. Kennrick had jumped perfectly through every hoop I’d set in front of him. All he had to do now was disarm the automatic strangler, reconnect the door trip wires to guard against intrusion from that direction, and then take the oxygen tank to the bed and start rigging it for his use if and when the defender made it though his window seal. I pressed my ear a little harder against the divider, even though I knew I’d never pick up the subtle sound or vibration of Kennrick heaving the oxygen tank onto the bed.

Which meant I was completely unprepared for the sudden thump that bounced against the divider right beside my ear. “What was that?” I whispered urgently. “Defender? Where the hell—?”