“I assume so,” the Modhri said. “I’ve never actually tried.”
“How about sending a pre-stored message?” I asked. “Can that be done?”
“Yes, I believe so.”
I grimaced. So her last act before being kidnapped had been to send me a message. Unfortunately, if she’d sent it to our room computer, I wasn’t likely to be able to get to it any time soon.
Even worse, if she’d sent it to my comm, Wandek was probably reading it right now.
But Bayta wouldn’t have been that careless. Not with the way people were always taking our comms. Had she echoed it back to the one I’d just called her from? I pulled out Minnario’s comm, but there were no waiting messages. “I need to crack into the station’s comm system,” I said. “Do you have any of the access codes?”
“No,” the Modhri said. “Only senior communications techs and santra-class administrators have that access.”
I cocked an eyebrow. “Or patrollers?”
He was silent a moment. “I don’t know. Perhaps.”
It was a risk, I knew. A big risk. But I had no choice. Bayta had sent me a message, and I absolutely needed to find out what that message said. Trying to stifle my sense of misgiving, I punched in Emikai’s number.
“It’s Compton,” I said when he answered. “First of all, are you all right?”
“I am uninjured,” he said, his voice dark with anger and shame. “I am sorry, Compton. She was taken.”
“I know,” I said. “Don’t worry, we’re going to get her back. I’m told she made a call just after I talked to the two of you. Did you see who she called, or what the signal was, or anything about it?”
“I believe it was a call to the queue,” he said. “The part of the system where outgoing messages are stored for later transmission.”
“But you didn’t see who the message was being sent to?”
“The destination would be part of the outgoing message,” he said. “She would only have transmitted a pre-set code.”
I squeezed the phone. “Logra Emikai, I need to get a look at that message,” I said. “You’re an official Proteus Station patroller now. Is there any way you can get access to it?”
“Are you still under suspicion of murder?”
I grimaced. “Probably.”
“Then the answer is yes,” he said. “If you are a suspect in a major crime, all information concerning you or your associates is open to me, including any message records.”
“Terrific,” I said. “Get on it as soon as you can. And add in a search for the keyword Scotland. Let me know the minute you have something.”
“I will,” he promised. “Stay safe.”
“Bet on it.” I keyed off and dropped the comm back into my pocket. “Modhri?”
“Just ahead,” he said.
“I see them,” I said as I spotted a small bank of elevators. Releasing the chair control, I ran ahead and punched the call button, then returned and finished moving the chair to a halt in front of the elevators. “Just tell them you had an accident, that you hit your head on something,” I instructed him. “Do not say anything about someone hitting you. Am I going to need an access code to get off this floor?”
“No, only to enter it,” he assured me. “The floor you want is 142.”
The doors of the middle car opened, and the two watchdogs bounded inside. I followed with the chair, punched in the floor number, and started to turn the chair around to face forward—
Without warning, Doug grabbed my jacket sleeve in his jaws and yanked hard, pulling me off-balance and halfway through the open door. Before I could recover, the other watchdog threw his full weight against my back, sending me sprawling onto the floor outside the car.
“Save Bayta,” Minnario said, his voice whispery soft.
I had just enough time to turn around, and not nearly enough time to get my sleeve out of Doug’s grip, when the other watchdog leaped back inside and the doors slid closed.
And they were gone.
“No!” I shouted toward the closed door. “No! Damn you—” I broke off as Doug released my arm, and I shifted my glare to him. “Damn you, anyway,” I snarled, raising my fist in a flash of blind fury.
Doug didn’t move, but just stood there looking back at me. For a frozen second I continued to glare at him, my pulse pounding in my throat, my fist shaking with helpless rage.
And then the rage faded, and with another, quieter, curse I let my arm fall uselessly to my side. How could I take out my frustrations on an animal that didn’t even know what he was doing?
For that matter, how could I even be angry at the Modhri? He had the same facts that I did, and had simply come to a more practical and less emotion-driven conclusion as to our best strategy.
With a sigh, I climbed back to my feet, wondering briefly if I should try calling another car and following them down. But since the whole idea had been for me to be there to fend off anyone curious or meddlesome enough to interfere with the supposedly stray watchdog, riding down in a completely different car would be pretty useless. “So what now?” I asked.
Doug gave a little woof and settled back on his haunches. “Right,” I said with another sigh. “I guess we wait.”
* * *
Across the passageway from the elevators, tucked in behind some kind of forced-air filter, was yet another monitor station, currently unmanned like all the others we’d encountered. I pulled out the chair, dropped into it, and settled down to wait. Doug sat down again on his haunches in front of me. Then, perhaps knowing better than I did that we were in for the long haul, he lay all the way down, settling his head between his front paws.
I closed my eyes, a wave of weariness washing over me, my mind churning with fear and anger. Beneath the thunderclouds of emotion a colder part sifted through contingency plan after contingency plan, most of them completely impractical, all of them an utter waste of effort given that I didn’t even know where the Shonkla-raa had taken her, let alone what kind of defenses and safeguards they might have arranged.
And between all the worry and the grandiose plans, I thought about the Modhri.
Why was he helping us this way? True, aboard the super-express I’d had a temporary truce with the mind segment Minnario had been part of. But there had been good and urgent reasons for us to work together there, namely the presence of a shadowy murderer who seemed to be killing passengers at random, including some of the Modhri’s own walkers.
But that threat was long since past. Even if it hadn’t been, Minnario hardly held the controlling interest in the Modhran mind segment that had already been here on Proteus when he came over from the Quadrail.
Or was that even how it worked? The group mind concept sounded simple enough in theory, with the makeup of each mind segment continually changing as new walkers moved into or out of range, with each new bit of experience and information eventually rippling out to reach every segment as travelers carrying that information moved back and forth across the galaxy.
But the more I thought about the actual mechanics of how such a mind worked, the more tangled the whole thing got. Bayta and I were pretty sure the Modhri had established a new homeland on the Human world of Yandro, and we’d speculated that there was some kind of overall strategic or planning area centered in the mind segment there. But the details of how that actually worked were still pretty vague.
There was another possibility, of course, namely that the Modhri wasn’t actually on my side at all, but that this was some elaborate game designed to run us in circles until we dropped. But as I’d already told Bayta, I couldn’t for the life of me see any point in that. If the Modhri was working with the Shonkla-raa, Wandek and his buddies could have had us any time they wanted. They could certainly have snatched Bayta while she was sitting at Terese’s bedside with Minnario and Dr. Aronobal.