Timothy Zahn - The Domino Pattern

“Were you the one who organized the conference?”

“I handled the details once the plan was up and running,” he said. “But only after the initial contacts had been made and the invitations sent out and accepted. I didn’t choose any of the contract team, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Who did?”

“The corporation’s CEO, Dr. Earl Messerly “ he said. “I imagine the board probably had some input, too.”

“You have their names?”

He eyed me as it I’d just turned a deep and fashionable purple. “Are you suggesting upstanding medical professionals would go to the trouble of bringing a couple of Shorshians all the way across the galaxy just to kill them?”

“You know for certain that none of your upstanding medical professionals is harboring a grudge against the Shorshians?” I countered.

He snorted. “You must be kidding,” he said. “I’ve been to full board meetings maybe three times in the seven years I’ve been with the company. I barely know their names.”

“In other words, you can’t vouch for any of them.” I keyed my reader for input. “So. Their names?”

Glaring at me, he ran through the list. There were twelve of them, plus CEO Messerly. I keyed in the names as he went, knowing full well that Kennrick was probably right about this being a waste of time.

Still, I had a few Who’s Who lists among my data chips, both the straightforward cultural ones and a rather more private set that had been assembled by the Confederation’s various law enforcement agencies. Running a check of Pellorian’s people against the latter might prove interesting.

But regardless of what the comparison turned up, Pellorian’s board was back on Earth, and we were here. “Thank you,” I said when Kennrick had finished. “Next question: did either Colix or Bofiv bring aboard any of their own food? Special treats or secret indulgences?”

“You’ll have to ask Master Tririn about that,” Kennrick said. “He was the one sitting with them.”

“He was the one sitting with one of them, anyway,” I said. “I trust he’s well this morning?”

“I actually haven’t checked,” Kennrick said. “You want me to go ask him if Master Bofiv had a private food supply?”

“Not until we can both be there,” I said. “Can you go off and amuse yourself while I shower and get dressed?”

He made a face. “It doesn’t qualify as amusement, but I do need to give Usantra Givvrac an update. He’s the head of the contract team.”

“At least you shouldn’t have any trouble waking him up at this hour,” I said. “Unless he’s been dipping into Bofiv’s secret stash, of course.”

Kennrick’s throat tightened. “You think this is funny, Compton?” he growled.

“Not at all,” I assured him. “Which is Usantra Givvrac’s compartment?”

“He hasn’t got one,” Kennrick said. “He’s in the first coach car behind the compartment cars.”

I frowned, thinking back to our embarkation at Homshil Station. “And yet you escorted them aboard into a compartment car?” I asked. “Even though they had coach car seats?”

“Into my compartment car. yes.” Kennrick said. “ Usantra Givvrac and a couple of the others had some documents they wanted stored in my compartment, and they wanted to drop them off on the way to their seats.”

Which wasn’t proper procedure, since passengers were supposed to enter a Quadrail only through the door of their assigned car. Apparently, Kennrick and his Fillies didn’t have a problem with skirting the rules everyone else had to follow. “Whatever.” I said. “I’ll pick you up on my way back to talk to Tririn.”

Silently, Kennrick left the compartment. As I closed the door behind him, I felt the movement of air that meant the connecting wall was opening. “You heard?” I asked, turning around.

“Most of it.” Bayta said. She was dressed in her nightshirt and a thin robe, her dark hair tousled and unwashed. But her eyes were clear and awake. “He sounded upset.”

“He looked upset, too,” I agreed. I let my eyes drop once to the figure semi-hidden beneath her robe, then forced my gaze back above her neckline where it belonged. Bayta was my colleague and ally in this war, nothing more, and I had damn well better not forget that. “What did you think of his suggestion that the cadmium might have been airborne?”

She frowned. “Didn’t you already tell him that was ridiculous?”

“In the way he was thinking about it, absolutely,” I agreed. “But he was trying to make it a careless accident. I’m wondering about it as a somewhat more careful murder.”

“That still leaves the problem of why only Master Colix and Master Bofiv were affected,” she pointed out.

“True, unless someone managed to uncork a bottle of eau de cadmium under the victims’ snouts,” I said. “Or maybe it was in the form of some cadmium compound that only Shorshians can absorb.”

“I don’t know,” she said doubtfully. “There are toxins that target specific species, but those also get absorbed by everyone else. And most cadmium compounds are as toxic as the element itself, and to nearly all species to one level or another.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Impressive.”

She shrugged slightly. “I couldn’t sleep last night after I went to bed, so I did a little reading,” she explained. “The other problem is that since cadmium compounds are inherently poisonous, anything in a liquid or gaseous form should have been screened out by the station sensors.”

“Maybe the killer brought the stuff aboard in component form,” I suggested. “The cadmium in, say, a battery or alloy, and the delivery chemical as something else.”

“The sensors are supposed to watch for that sort of thing.”

“ Supposed to being the key phrase.” I said. “Assuming something like that was done, could traces of it have gotten sucked into the car’s air filters?”

“Certainly,” she said. “All the air in a car eventually travels through those filters.”

I nodded. “It’s a long shot, but I think it’s worth checking out. What would it take to get into one of the air filters in that car?”

“It’s not that simple,” Bayta said, her eyes unfocusing as she conferred with the Spiders. “There’s a whole mechanism that will have to be disassembled. I’ve sent four mites to start the job, but it’ll take a few hours.”

“That’s okay,” I said. “Have them contact you when they’re almost done.”

“All right,” she said. “Are we going to go talk to Master Tririn now?”

“Or we could stop and have some breakfast first,” I said. “Your call.”

She hesitated, and I had the odd impression that she was searching my face looking for the right answer. “I’m not that hungry,” she said.

That was the answer, all right. “Me, neither,” I agreed. “Go get ready. We head out in fifteen minutes.”

Eighteen minutes later, we passed through the rear vestibule of the third compartment car and entered the first of the first-class coach cars.

I’d rather expected that Kennrick would still be deep in conversation with Usantra Givvrac, and I was right. The Human was sitting on the edge of a scat near the right-hand wall, talking earnestly with one of the four Fillies I’d seen him boarding with at Homshil Station.

And now that I was focusing on the Filly himself, I could see that he had the graying body hair of someone well advanced in years.

That alone was mildly surprising. Fillies of that age and rank usually stayed close to home and sent out their younger colleagues and subordinates on fact-finding and contract-making missions. I wondered what kind of lure Pellorian Medical had lobbed into the water to bring out someone of Givvrac’s standing.