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 are an Elder, I assume?"
"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."
TWENTY-ONE :
For a long minute the Chahwyn just gazed across the room at me. "How did you learn this?" he asked at last.
At least he wasn't going to waste my time with a useless bluff. I had to give him points for that one. "Lots of little things," I said. "In retrospect, I'm surprised it took me as long as it did."
I nodded behind me. "For starters, this business of melding species together is your trademark trick, not the Modhri's. It's the same thing you did with Bayta. In fact, Rebekah even pointed that out. Does she know, by the way?"
"Rebekah does not know," the Chahwyn said. "None of the Melding does."
"Nice to know she's not as accomplished a liar as I was starting to think," I said. "The next clue was that Rebekah told us the Melding had a secret place where they'd all gone to hide. You don't get anywhere in this galaxy, certainly not by
Quadrail, without Spider cooperation. In a case like this, Spider cooperation means Chahwyn cooperation. QED."
His eye-ridge tufts quivered. "QED?"
"Quod erat demonstrandum," I explained. "It's from an old Earth language and means that which was to have been proved. In this case, Chahwyn knowledge implies Chahwyn complicity." I cocked an eyebrow. "Where exactly is the Melding hiding place, by the way?"
"In an uninhabited system near Sibbrava which the Cimmaheem are thinking about developing," the Chahwyn said. "There is a temporary Quadrail stop there which services only their exploration teams."
"But of course there's no official station yet," I said, nodding. "Which means no manned support services, no resident personnel, and no transfer station with its contingent of nosy Customs agents. Give the Melding a transport or two, and they can go anywhere."
"They have such a transport."
"Again, QED," I said. "There was also your rather ham-handed attempt to protect the coral—or what you thought was the coral—from the Modhri on the train into Jurskala. There was no reason for his walkers to have moved the crate all the way to the last cargo car. You did that, probably sending your Spiders across from this very tender to get it out of their reach. When the walkers came looking for it, you let them get into the second car and popped the roof."
"Yes," the Chahwyn said. "I did not expect him to blame you for that."
"I'm sure I appreciate the thought." I reached into my pocket and pulled out the kwi Rebekah had given me. "But this was the real clincher," I continued, holding it up. "At the critical moment in our fight, Rebekah was able to get this to me. She told me afterward that she'd found it in one of the walkers' pockets."
"You don't believe that to be the truth?"
"I know it isn't." I reached into my other pocket. "Because this is my kwi."
For a moment he gazed at the two weapons, his eye-ridge tufts again quivering. "What will you tell Bayta?" he asked.
"That depends," I said. "In retrospect, I can see that from the moment Lorelei showed up in my apartment this whole thing was designed to get Bayta and me to help sneak Rebekah off New Tigris and to safety."
"She was trapped and alone," the Chahwyn said, a note of quiet pleading in his voice. "Our Spiders could not help her, not on a Human world far from the Tube. You were the only ones we could turn to."
"In principle, I have no problem with that," I said. "We do work for you, after all." I let my face harden. "But that's hardly the whole story. You wanted us to help Rebekah …but yet you didn't want us to know you were also involved with her. Still don't, for that matter. I want to know why."
He exhaled softly, a sound that was almost a whistle but not quite. "Because we were afraid," he said, his voice low and earnest and even a little ashamed. "We were afraid of what you would think."
"What would we think?" I countered. "That you were trying to find a way to infuse the Modhri with a calmer, gentler, less aggressive form of himself? As a matter of fact, I brought up that exact idea myself."
"Yet you were extremely angry when you first learned what we had done to create the Human/Chahwyn symbiont that is Bayta," he reminded me. "Your anger nearly caused you to turn your back on us instead of choosing to support us."