Timothy Zahn - The Domino Pattern

But there was something about the compartment that seemed subtly different. I took a couple of turns around the small room, studying the bed, the lounge chair and swivel computer, the curve couch, and the half-bath as I tried to figure it out.

And then it hit me. The compartment smelled fresher. Fresher, cleaner, and somehow more sprightly.

I stepped to the display window and looked out. The tracks in the super-express Tube were arranged slightly differently from those in ordinary Tubes. There were only six main tracks, for one thing, with the Tube itself being correspondingly somewhat narrower. A set of auxiliary service tracks paralleled each of the main tracks about five meters to the right, which the official brochure said were for tenders and other emergency equipment. That made a certain amount of sense, given the thousands of light-years we were about to traverse without a single station along the way.

Still, I couldn’t help feeling an ominous undertone to the emergency-vehicle idea. I’d never heard of a Quadrail engine failing during a run, but just because it never had didn’t mean it never would, and with my luck it would probably happen on a train I happened to be aboard at the time. It would be bad enough riding for six weeks with a Modhran mind segment without throwing in an extra week sitting dead on the tracks waiting for a new engine to be brought up.

There was a subtle puff of displaced air, and I turned to see the wall separating my compartment from Bayta’s sliding open. The curve couches on either side folded into the wall as it collapsed, the whole thing depositing itself neatly into the narrow space between our half-baths.

Bayta was standing by the computer chair in her compartment, gazing out the display window at the crowds milling around Homshil Station’s platforms. “What do you think?” she asked.

“About the compartment?” I asked. “Very nice. Smells fresh off the assembly line. Do they just build these trains from scratch when they need one?”

“There are a few hours scheduled between cross-galactic arrivals and departures,” she said, still looking out the window. “The Spiders need time to unload and reload the cargo cars and to restock the food and supply areas. Because of that, there’s time for a complete cleaning of the passenger spaces instead of just making do with the regular self-cleaning systems.”

She turned to look at me. “But that wasn’t what I meant. I meant what do you think of this idea now?”

“What do you want me to say?” I asked. “That I suddenly feel happy to be aboard? I don’t. But I still don’t see any practical alternative.”

“Not even with that man aboard?” she asked. “The one who recognized you?”

I grimaced. “I was hoping you’d missed that.”

Her eyebrows went up. “You were hoping I’d missed it?”

“Only because I knew you’d worry, and that there was nothing we could do about it,” I hastened to assure her.

“Except maybe find out from the Spiders who he is before we leave the station?” she countered tartly.

“Touché,” I admitted. “Okay. Who is he?”

She took a deep breath, and I could see her forcing herself to calm down. Even that mild touch of annoyance was more of an emotional display than she usually seemed comfortable with. “His ticket’s under the name Whitman Kennrick,” she told me. “He boarded the Quadrail at Terra Station, ultimate destination the Filiaelian Assembly system of Rentis Tarlay Birim.”

“What about his four Filly buddies?” I asked, pulling out my reader and plugging in the encyclopedia data chip. “Did they all come aboard together, or did he meet up with them somewhere between Terra and Homshil?”

Bayta’s eyes went distant, and I took the opportunity to punch Rentis Tarlay Birim into my reader and give the resulting page a quick skim. Back in Western Alliance Intelligence, where I’d once worked, there had been people—mostly the pompous and control-freak ones—who’d felt it necessary to create permanent links to their phones or data feeds. The affectation had always irritated me, especially when they went blank in the middle of intense conversations, and I sometimes wondered why Bayta’s version of the same thing wasn’t equally irritating.

Probably because it was a completely different situation. Bayta hadn’t chosen to be wired into the Spiders’ telepathic network; it was just something that came with the fact that she was a Human/Chahwyn melding. She could no more shut off that link than she could stop breathing.

Besides, the ability not only provided us with useful information but had saved our lives more than once. When you had an ace up your sleeve, it was the epitome of pettiness to complain that it chafed a little against your skin.

“The Filiaelians also came aboard at Terra,” Bayta reported, her eyes coming back to focus. “Though that doesn’t necessarily mean all of them already knew each other.”

“True,” I agreed. First-class Quadrail cars were one of the galaxy’s great social mixers. Kennrick and the Fillies could easily have struck up a conversation and ended up twenty-one hours later as best-friend traveling companions, especially once they’d discovered they were all going cross-galaxy together. “What’s the Fillies’ destination?”

“The same place,” Bayta said. “The same system, anyway. They could be traveling to entirely different places inside that system once they leave the Tube.”

“There are certainly enough for them to choose from,” I commented, gesturing toward my reader. “Rentis Tarlay Birim is a major industrial and manufacturing system, with three inhabited planets, five orbiting space colonies, and a truckload of minable asteroids. No way to know what Kennrick might be looking for there.”

“You know who he is, then?” Bayta asked.

“Not a clue,” I admitted, shutting off the reader and putting it away.

“Someone from your past, maybe?”

“What’s this, the old ‘your past coming back to haunt you’ routine?” I scoffed. “That works okay in old dit rec dramas, but not so much in real life. As long as you’ve got the stationmaster on the line, how about checking to see if any of the passengers are planning to change trains to the Ilat Dumar Covrey system like we are alter we hit Venidra Carvo.”

Bayta’s eyes defocused again. “No, no one,” she reported. “At least, no one’s carrying a multiple-leg ticket for that station.”

“Good enough,” I said. Though with thousands of Filly systems to choose from, the odds that someone on our train would be matching our ultimate destination had been pretty slim in the first place. “Thanks.”

“You’re welcome,” she said. “ Do you think Mr. Kennrick could be someone from your past?”

“I suppose that’s possible,” I said. So much for trying to deflect her interest away from Kennrick. I should have known it wouldn’t work. “I wouldn’t worry about it, though.”

“You really mean that?” Bayta asked pointedly. “Or are you saying that I shouldn’t worry about it?”

“Neither of us should worry,” I said firmly. “Besides, we’ll know soon enough who he is and what he’s doing here.”

Bayta gave me a wary look. “What are you going to do?”

“Don’t worry, I’m not going to kick in his door or crash his next dinner party,” I assured her. “But hey, we’re all here on the same train. Sooner or later, I’m sure an opportunity will present itself.”

But for the first two weeks, it didn’t.

That alone was surprising. Surprising, and more than a little ominous. Quadrail trains, while larger than their Terran counterparts, were hardly the size of Class AA torchliners. More significantly, they were laid out linearly, without the kind of multiple pathways that could allow a couple of torchliner passengers to endlessly chase each other in circles.