“This was his third,” Bayta said, nodding at the glass.
“Which he never touched,” I commenced, rubbing my chin. “I wonder why he decided to abandon it.”
“Maybe he was feeling better,” Bayta suggested.
“Or decided that the first two hadn’t done him any good anyway,” I said, something prickly running up my back as I eyed the glass. If someone had poisoned the drink …
I snorted under my breath. No—that one was pure paranoia. Even if Kennrick was the killer, he’d have to be crazy to poison Givvrac at a time when we knew they were having a drink together.
Still, it couldn’t do any harm to check. “Bayta, can you have the server in the dispensary bring me one of those little vials from the sampling kit?” I asked.
“Yes, of course,” she said, her voice suddenly uncertain. “You think there’s something in Usantra Givvrac’s drink?”
“No, but we might as well be thorough about this.” I picked up my fork. “Meanwhile, this isn’t getting any warmer. Let’s eat.”
The meal was up to the usual Quadrail standards. Unfortunately, it was impossible for me to properly enjoy it with my gut rumbling the way it was. Halfway through, I gave up and pushed the plate away.
Bayta was either feeling better than I was or else was stubbornly committed to not wasting any of the food her Spider friends had hauled across the galaxy for our benefit. She made it all the way through her vegetable roll, chewing silently but determinedly.
She was just finishing off her lemonade when a server Spider appeared and set a sampling vial and a small hypo on the table beside my plate.
“Thank you,” I said. Taking the hypo, I extracted a couple of milliliters of Givvrac’s drink and injected it into the vial. “I said thank you,” I repeated, looking at the Spider.
“He’s waiting for you to give back the hypo,” Bayta explained.
“Ah,” I said, reversing the instrument and holding it up. The Spider extended a leg and took it, then folded the leg up beneath his globe and tapped his way back out of the dining area. “Any news on the air filter?” I asked Bayta.
“It’s nearly done,” she said. “It should be ready by the time we get back there.”
“Good,” I said, standing up and slipping the sample vial into my pocket. “Let’s go.”
EIGHT
It was getting toward train’s evening, and the third-class passengers were starting to drift back to their seats after a busy day in the entertainment car, the exercise area, or the bar.
Which meant there was a large and curious audience already in place when Bayta and I moved toward the rear of the car and the disassembled air filter system waiting there for us.
I’d never asked Bayta what exactly the disassembly procedure entailed. Now, as we joined a group of knee-high mite Spiders and a pair of the larger conductors, I could see why the job had taken this long. A section of ceiling nearly a meter square had been taken down, probably with the help of the two conductors, and was currently hanging by thin support wires attached to its four corners at about throat level over the back row of seats. The occupants of those seats, not surprisingly, had found somewhere else to be for the moment.
“We couldn’t bring in a couple of cameras so the whole train could watch?” I grumbled as we passed our third knot of rubberneckers.
“I thought you’d want to take the sample yourself,” Bayta countered, a slight edge to her voice. Clearly, she didn’t like having the Quadrail’s innards exposed to the paying customers this way any more than I did, and she didn’t appreciate me getting on her case about it. “There’s no way you could have reached the filter while it was still in place.”
And given the tight tolerances of Quadrail floor space, there was probably nowhere more private where they could have lugged the filter assembly for the procedure. “I suppose,” I conceded.
We reached the hanging plate, and I took a moment to study its upper side. The filter assembly consisted of about a dozen boxes of various sizes and shapes scattered across the plate, all of them marked with incomprehensible dot codes. They were connected to each other by a bewildering and colorful spaghetti of tubes, ducts, cables, and wires. Other tubes and conduits, carefully sealed off, ran to the edges of the plate, where presumably they connected to equipment tucked away above the rest of the ceiling. The plate itself had sixteen connectors, four per side, for fastening it to the rest of the ceiling. The connectors, I noted, were accessible only from above. It was pretty clear that no one was going to tamper with the system without Spider help. “Which one do I want?” I asked Bayta.
“That one,” she said, pointing to the largest of the boxes. “The Spiders will take off the cover for you.”
“Thanks,” I said, looking down at the mites grouped around us like shiny seven-legged lap dogs. “Do they need a boost?”
“No,” Bayta said, and I quickly stepped back as a pair of fist-sized twitters appeared from inside the ceiling and deftly slid down the corner lines onto the exposed machinery. Picking their way across the miniature landscape, they reached the box Bayta had indicated and started removing one of its sides.
“Here,” Bayta said, pressing a pair of sample vials into my hand. “Will you need a hypo or scraper?”
“Got one, thanks,” I said, pulling out my multitool and selecting one of the blades. The twitters got the filter’s side off, and I leaned in for a closer look.
I’d expected to find some sort of thin but tangible layer of fluffiness, the sort of thing you might find in an office building air filter that hadn’t been replaced for a few weeks. But the dimpled white material sitting in front of me looked as clean and fresh as if it had come right out of the box.
It looked, in fact, like some industrious Spider had given it a thorough cleaning sometime in the past few hours. And if one of them had, this whole thing was going to be a complete waste of time. “You did warn the Spiders not to clean it, didn’t you?”
“Of course,” Bayta said. “It hasn’t been touched since Homshil.”
“Looks pretty clean to me,” I pointed out.
“It’s the third-stage filter,” she said. “It always looks clean.”
I suppressed a grimace. Of course it did. All the larger dust and lint particles would have been captured by a larger-mesh filter somewhere upstream in the system. But it was this filter that would have a shot at trapping impurities the size of cadmium atoms and compounds. “Just making sure,” I said, trying to salvage a little dignity.
Experimentally, I gently scraped the multitool blade along one edge of the filter. A small cascade of fine white powder appeared and drifted slowly downward. Moving the blade to a different part of the filter. I held one of the vials in position and scraped more of the white powder into it. I waited until the dust had settled and then handed the vial to Bayta for sealing. I repeated the operation on a third section of the filter, again handing the vial to Bayta when I was done. “That should do it.” I told her. Folding the blade back into the multitool, I turned around.
And stopped short. Standing three meters away, right in the center of the ring of gawkers, was the Filly I’d had the brief tussle with earlier that day in the third-class bar. He was Staring at me with an intensity I didn’t at all care for. “Can I help you?” I asked.
“What do you do here?” the Filly asked, his long nose pointing toward the filter assembly.
“Just a routine maintenance sampling,” I said in my best authoritative-but-soothing voice. “Nothing you need to be concerned about.”
I’d used that voice to good advantage many times over the years. Unfortunately, this particular Filly wasn’t buying it. “Is there danger in the air?” he demanded. “Is there risk to us all?”