Timothy Zahn - Judgment at Proteus

Maybe his words had been prophetic. Maybe he’d just been trying to flatter me into staying on their payroll.

But suddenly, I realized he was right. We were the unknown quantity, the big bright-orange monkey wrench in the Shonkla-raa’s carefully planned grand scheme to once again dominate the galaxy. If anyone could stop them, it was going to be Bayta, me, and the men and women who’d been sitting in this room tonight.

Two thousand years ago, the original Shonkla-raa had ignored Earth because we hadn’t been telepathic enough for easy conquest and they’d been too lazy to use the old-fashioned brute-force approach on us.

It was time we showed them just how big a mistake that had been.

I took a deep breath, inhaling the subtle scent of the woman in my arms, and with that some of the swirling demons faded away. “Come on,” I murmured, gently disengaging from our hug. “We need to be up early if we’re going to see Morse off. We should get some sleep.”

“Yes,” she agreed. She hesitated, then leaned close and kissed me. “We should.”

I was lying alone on my bed, staring at the ceiling with Sam and Carl standing their silent watch over me, when my alarm signaled that it was time to get up.

* * *

The schedule McMicking and I had worked out had the various twenty-man groups dribbling out into the Quadrails over a ten-day period, with Bayta, McMicking, and me bringing up the rear. Right on time, a day after the last group left Terra Station, the three of us boarded our train and headed out to join them.

Recent events had understandably given me a somewhat paranoid view of Quadrail travel. But as we rolled along at our brisk light-year per minute, somewhat to my surprise, nothing happened.

Not just nothing threatening, but nothing . No Shonkla-raa stared at me from across the bar or dining car, no suspicious-looking Juriani or Halkas lurked around corners or paced back and forth in front of our compartment doors, no one tried to pass me messages. Best of all, no one aboard died a strange or violent death. Even the scrawny Fillies I’d grown accustomed to seeing everywhere we went were conspicuous by their absence. It was as if the Shonkla-raa had been genuinely taken in by my ridiculously transparent long-distance correspondence with Riijkhan, and were waiting patiently at Jurskala for us to come to an agreement.

I didn’t believe it for a minute. Neither did Bayta. Neither, presumably, did McMicking, though I was careful not to approach him closely enough to actually ask. Wrapped inside his new face and identity, he was my last and best wild card, and I had no intention of doing anything to compromise that.

Bayta and I had traveled this route before, over a year ago, back when the Modhri had been chasing down the last of a group of sculptures which, when properly assembled in groups of three, became highly deadly weapons. As a bonus, those weapons were also undetectable by the Spiders’ sophisticated Tube sensor arrays. We’d won that particular battle, and while we’d destroyed most of the weapons, I knew there were probably a few of the components still buried under the dirt in the Ten Mesas region of Veerstu.

I couldn’t help thinking that, with our other weapons and equipment waiting for us at that same world, it would have been awfully nice to have an undetectable weapon in hand right now. Something that, unlike the kwi , I didn’t need Bayta or a functioning Spider to activate for me.

We changed trains at Homshil, and as we crossed the platform we passed by a Juri at a candied flower stand who was also surreptitiously giving every passing walker a scratch from the Melding coral he had hidden in his cold-water storage tank. Serious scratches, too, from the one instance I saw, the kind that would put enough polyps into the walker’s bloodstream to influence the original Modhran colony within an hour or two.

Bayta and I stopped to buy a sample of the vendor’s wares. The Modhri told us there had been two Shonkla-raa in the station three days earlier, who had spent a few hours watching the trains come and go before leaving on a train headed in the same direction we were. Bayta checked with the stationmaster and learned they’d bought tickets for Ghonsilya, a three-day journey past the Trivsdal stop where we would be switching to the Claremiado Loop and heading into Nemuti territory.

Of course, having tickets for Ghonsilya didn’t mean the Shonkla-raa would actually be getting off there. It would be trivial for them to change tickets somewhere along the way, someplace where they thought they might not be as noticeable. We thanked the Modhri and moved on, and I made a mental note to keep an eye out as we got close to Trivsdal.

From Homshil we passed through Jurskala, the source of the messages I was still getting from Riijkhan about our pending deal. None of the walkers in the station had spotted him, though, or seen any other Shonkla-raa for at least a week.

Two days beyond Jurskala was Ian-apof, and a change to one of the lines that passed along the edge of the Nemuti FarReach and into the Tra’hok Unity. Two days after that we reached Trivsdal and switched once last time, this time to the Claremiado Loop.

Four days later, we arrived at the Veerstu Quadrail station.

The entry procedure was quick and efficient, and if the Nemuti manning the customs desks were surprised by the unusually high numbers of Humans that had been coming to their world over the past couple of weeks they hid their bemusement well.

Or maybe that avenue of curiosity was simply being overshadowed by the novelty of having a pair of Spiders on the passenger side of the station. Usually, the only Spiders aboard were those picking up or dropping off the lockboxes or handling other sensitive or secured cargo.

In fact, the situation was unprecedented enough that they were initially at a loss on how exactly to proceed. Sam and Carl obviously had no IDs or other official documents, and at first the station director wasn’t going to let them through. I finally had to declare them as part of my luggage, a solution that didn’t exactly thrill the director and probably irritated the defenders themselves.

But finally we were through.

The lockboxes where McMicking and I had stored our guns had been delivered. With my Glock once again snugged beneath my jacket and his Beretta under his, we headed for the torchyacht rental desk.

Along the way, we picked up the special equipment that the Spiders had been quietly holding for us at the station.

It was a five-day trip from the transfer station to the planet itself. We spent most of our time checking our gear, discussing the plan and last-minute thoughts that each of us had had, and otherwise just preparing ourselves for the upcoming task.

Bayta and I also spent a lot of time together. McMicking was perceptive enough to give us as much privacy as he could in the somewhat cramped quarters. Sam and Carl, naturally, didn’t.

Veerstu had only two spaceports that could handle torchships. The last time Bayta and I had taken this trip we’d tried to mask our destination by landing at the port farthest from the Ten Mesas region. Now, with the long procession of human travelers making subterfuge largely moot, we chose the closer one instead. We rented an aircar, loaded everything aboard, and headed out. Two hours short of our destination, we put down in a secluded area and changed into our desert camo outfits, heavy-duty jumpsuits with thin armor plates already sewn into pockets around the torso and groin areas. With another few kilos’ worth of gun belts and weapons vests loaded on top of that, we were ready.

Five minutes later, with our final task complete, we were once again in the air.

The Ten Mesas was a group of large rock formations, up to two kilometers long each, that rose up from the Veerstu desert amid a sea of smaller buttes, rock spines, and occasional clusters of vegetation, the whole thing overlaid by a light dusting of feathery, waist-high brown grass. Three of the mesas were of particular interest: a bit over two kilometers long, each one rose more or less gradually to a sudden and startling ten-meter-tall spike at one end. The Ten Mesas were the premier tourist attraction of the region, as desert tourist attractions went, with those particular three garnering most of the appreciation and photos.