An unpleasant tingle went up my back. The Nemuti FarReach. The place Smith's last-gasp Lynx had come from. This was definitely starting to push the edges of coincidence. "When does their Quadrail leave?" I asked.
She glanced at one of the holodisplay clocks hovering in various spots around the station. "Thirty minutes, from Platform Ten. It's an express."
"Get us a compartment on it"
She shook her head. "I can't," she said. "All the compartments are booked."
I scowled at the nearest Spider as he strode purposefully across the station on his seven slender legs, his central metallic globe reflecting the colors of the Coreline's light show. As recently as a few months ago. the Spiders had made a point of keeping a double compartment open for us on all trains in our vicinity.
Still, to be fair, we had been heading the opposite direction. "Can you pull rank or something?" I asked.
"There's nothing left," Bayta said with the impatient tone of someone who's already answered the question. "They were all booked three weeks ago."
I frowned. "By our fifteen nervous Bellidos?"
"They—" She broke off. "Actually, yes, they were," she continued, her impatience fading away. "There's one Juri who's continuing on from Misfar, but the rest are all new Belldic passengers."
And all of them heading to a Nemuti world. "What about ordinary first-class seats?" I asked. "Can you get us a couple of them?"
"You mean …just seats?" she echoed warily. "With walkers aboard?"
"Does that really make a difference?" I countered. "You know as well as I do that if they really want us a compartment door isn't going to hold them for long."
She swallowed. "I suppose not," she said in a low voice.
"Don't worry, the Modhri's not going to throw away any of his walkers just for a little revenge," I soothed. "With his homeland wrecked, he can't afford to waste any of his resources without a damn good reason, and that includes his walkers. As long as we don't bother him, I don't think he'll bother us."
"You assume."
"Okay, yes, I assume," I conceded. "But either way, this is too intriguing to pass up."
She nodded, still looking unhappy at the prospect of sharing a Quadrail car with an unknown number of Modhran walkers. "All right. We have seats."
"Good girl." I glanced at my watch. "As long as the Spiders are tracking down our mysterious Daniel Mice anyway, they might also see what they can find about this Nemuti Lynx. It'll be fairly obscure—I already searched my encyclopedia and came up dry."
"Mine didn't have anything, either," Bayta confirmed. "I doubt anyone here will know. Can they put the information in a data chip and deliver it to us somewhere down the line?"
"That should work," I said. "But make sure they put a high-priority stamp on it. This is no time to be flying blind."
"They'll get it to us as quickly as they can," she assured me.
I looked back across the station at the train we'd just left, where a pair of drudges were crowding close beside the door of the first-class compartment car. Morse was there, too, standing off to the side. Lady Dorchester near him. Even at this distance I could see they both looked stiff and unhappy.
And as we all watched, the Spiders maneuvered a covered stretcher out through the door and onto the platform.
No weapons were allowed aboard the Spiders' nice, clean, safe Quadrail. So someone had simply beaten a middle-aged man to death.
Whoever was playing this game, they were playing it for keeps.
FOUR :
Of the twelve civilizations served by the Quadrail system—people-groups which the Spiders liked to refer to as empires—seven had been riding the rails since the beginning. The rest of us had dribbled into the club over the centuries since then, with Humans being the most recent to join, three decades ago.
Our people-group, of course, consisted of Earth and four pathetic little colony systems, while at the other end of the spectrum the Shorshians had literally thousands of worlds to call their own. Nevertheless, to the Spiders we both qualified as galactic empires.
A lot of Humans tended to strut a little over that alleged equality. I had no idea what the Shorshians thought of the whole thing. Probably they just accepted it as one of the Spiders' peculiarities and ignored us as best they could.
The Spiders had a lot of peculiarities, and a lot of secrets. I knew more about them than most people, and even I didn't have anything close to a complete picture. All I really knew was that the Spiders were being directed from behind the scenes by the Chahwyn, a below-the-radar alien race who had survived the galaxy's rebellion against the Shonkla-raa.
I also knew that, strictly speaking, the Quadrail was a fraud.
A benevolent fraud, perhaps, but a fraud nonetheless. The trains, the thousands of light-years of four-railed track, the whole damn Tube system—none of it had anything to do with the light-year-per-minute speeds the galaxy was privileged to enjoy.
The effect was due solely to the Coreline that ran down the center of each Tube. Lurking inside the light-show window dressing the Spiders had set up was some kind of exotic quantum thread. An object moving parallel to the Thread at close range picked up terrific speed, with that speed increasing the closer to the Thread the object got.
That was how the message cylinders that carried the galaxy's information managed to travel so much faster than the trains themselves. Once out of the station and away from prying eyes, an outgoing train would kick its cylinder up into the loose mesh that surrounded the Coreline, where it zipped along until kicked back down to another train coming into the next station along the way.
A cynically minded person might assume the Spiders maintained the fraud in order to rake in the money the rest of us had to pay for interstellar transport. But there was more to it than that. A lot more. With the Tube severely limiting access to the Thread's vicinity, the Spiders could maintain tight control over everything that traveled between the stars. Specifically, they could restrict war-class weapons, limiting such transfers to legitimate governments, and then only in order to beef up the defenses at those governments' own colony worlds.
Which meant that anyone who wanted to make trouble on someone else's turf would end up going against warships with the military equivalent of popguns. With the Tube in place, and the Spiders controlling the Tube, interstellar war was impossible.
With the Tube gone, all bets would be off. Anyone would be able to build warships and troop transports and self-guiding weapons and send them zipping along the Thread to the next empire down the line.
And they would. I knew enough about alien psychology, and more than enough about the Human version, to know that if interstellar travel was open and unrestricted we would soon have the sort of massive power struggles that had plagued Earth for most of its history. The Thread had enabled the Shonkla-raa to enslave most of the galaxy, and the Spiders and Chahwyn were determined not to let it happen again.
They'd been doing a pretty good job of it, too, until the Modhri showed up.
The first-class car Bayta and I found ourselves in was identical to all the others I'd seen during the months I'd been working with the Spiders. The seats were large and comfortable, with automatic cushion adjustments that could accommodate the full range of passenger rear ends. Each seat had its own reading light, drink holder, and music system, plus an eyeshade and sonic neutralizer for when the occupant grew tired of the genteel party atmosphere that usually pervaded first class and wanted to get some sleep. The chairs here were also mobile, and could be moved around to create conversation or game circles, swiveled for a view of whatever was playing on each of the car's display windows, or just moved off into a corner for reading or quiet contemplation.
The passenger roster was also pretty typical of what I'd seen before, consisting of the rarefied upper crust of a variety of the galaxy's species. In second and third class, travelers tended to segregate themselves by species. Not so in first. Juriani and Halkas, Bellidos and Pirks, Humans and Cimmaheem—we were all just one big happy family.