Timothy Zahn: Odd Girl Out

Zumurrud District, where Lorelei had said her sister was hanging out, was naturally one of those garden spots.

It was probably a good thing, I reflected more than once, that McMicking had given me that carry permit.

The permit, of course, didn't extend to the Quadrail station itself. The Spiders didn't allow weapons into their Tube, either obvious weapons or more subtle items that might easily be combined into instruments of mayhem. All such devices had to be put in lockboxes at the transfer station, which the Spiders would carry across in their own shuttles and subsequently stow in special compartments beneath the train cars where they'd be out of anyone's reach during the trip.

Agent of the Spiders though I might be, I still wasn't exempt from those particular rules. Mostly I wasn't, anyway So I put my Glock in a lockbox as directed, accepted my claim ticket from the Customs official, and headed through the door into the main part of the transfer station and the shuttle docking stations at the far end.

Quadrail passengers had the option of either going directly to the Tube and doing their waiting there, or else staying on the transfer station until their trains were called. Since I wasn't scheduled for any train in particular, I took the first available shuttle across the hundred-kilometer gap. With luck, I could touch base with the Spider stationmaster and use my special pass to book a seat or compartment on the next train for New Tigris.

With even more luck, Bayta would have gotten my message and be waiting for me.

For once, luck was indeed with me.

"I only arrived about two hours ago," Bayta said as we sat down at a table in one of the outdoor cafes. "I wasn't sure when you were due in, so when the stationmaster told me you had a data chip waiting I went ahead and picked it up." She handed me the chip.

"Thanks," I said, taking the chip and pulling out my reader, my eyes tracing the lines and contours of her face as I did so. Sometimes it wasn't until you got something back that you realized just how much you'd missed it.

To my surprise, and maybe a little to my consternation, I suddenly realized how much I'd missed Bayta. She'd become such a permanent part of my life and my work over the past eleven months that it had felt strange to spend a couple of weeks all alone without her.

But only because she was my colleague and ally, I told myself firmly. I needed her, and she needed me, in this shadowy war against the Modhri. There'd been a time once when she might have been drifting toward feeling something more than that for me. But that time was past. We were colleagues and allies. Nothing more.

"You all right?" Bayta asked.

To my embarrassment, I realized I'd been staring at her. "Just a bit tired," I said, lowering my eyes to my reader and plugging the chip into the reader's slot. "First things first. Were you able to figure out where all that coral was going?"

She shook her head. "As far as the Spiders' records go, it looks like no crates of their description ever made it to the Cimmal Republic. I'm sorry."

"Not your fault," I assured her, trying not to be too annoyed. It had been almost a month ago that the Modhri had dangled all that coral temptingly in front of us on the train ride between Ghonsilya and Bildim in the Tra'hok Unity. The choice had been clear: follow the crates and see where he was moving it, or stay with the mission we were already on.

We'd stayed with the mission, and it was probably just as well that we had. Still, I'd hoped we might get to have it both ways. "It was still worth a try," I said, keying the reader. The decryption program had done its magic, and there was Lorelei's Quadrail itinerary.

Some itinerary. Twenty days ago the woman had left New Tigris Station and headed to Earth. Adding in the torchliner trip, it looked like she'd gotten to my apartment only a couple of days before I had.

And that was it. There was no record of her arrival into the New Tigris system, or of her departure from anywhere else in the galaxy. The woman might have been born on New Tigris for all the travel data the Spiders had been able to dig up.

"What is that?" Bayta asked.

"Apparently, a huge waste of Spider time," I said, handing the reader to her. "You ever hear of this woman?"

"Lorelei Beach," Bayta murmured as she glanced over the report. "I don't think so. Should I have?"

McMicking's suggestion that Lorelei might have been another Spider agent flashed to mind. "Just thought you might have met her somewhere," I said. "She was killed in New York a little over a week ago."

"Was she a friend of yours?"

I shook my head. "I met her for the first time a few hours before she died. She was shot with one of my guns, by the way."

Bayta's eyes were steady on me. "I think you'd better start at the beginning."

I laid it all out for her, starting with the gun in my face and pausing only when the waiter brought over our lemonade and iced tea. Bayta listened in silence the whole time, not interrupting even once with a question or comment. Her knack for keeping quiet at the right time was one of her most endearing talents.

"So what are we going to do?" she asked when I had finished.

"Well, I'm going to go hunt up this sister of hers," I said. "Not sure what you're going to do."

"You don't want me with you?"

Her face was expressionless, the words nearly so. But just the same the hurt behind her eyes managed to make it out into the open. Another of her many talents. "Don't get me wrong," I assured her hastily. "Under normal circumstances I'd love to have you along. But this is likely to be dangerous."

She smiled wanly. "Like everything else we've done together hasn't been?"

"Point," I conceded. "But there's a particular edge of nasti-ness to this one. You didn't see what they did to Lorelei. I did."

"I thought you'd decided the Modhri did that to cover the fact that he needed to destroy the walker's polyp colony," she reminded me.

"That's one possibility," I said. "Problem is, he's never done anything like that before with any of the other walkers he's had to sacrifice for one reason or another. At least, not with anyone he's sacrificed in our presence. It seems out of character for him, and it's definitely a change of pattern. Either of those alone would be enough to worry me. Both of them together get my shivers up."

"What do you think it means?"

"I don't know," I said. "But I've had a few days to think, and a couple of possibilities have occurred to me."

I drank down half my iced tea in a single swallow. Talking about death and mutilation always made my throat dry. "One: the whole thing could have been staged for my benefit. A ploy to get my attention, but good, and make me curious enough to keep digging."

"Why?"

"I won't know that until I find something," I said. "Scenario two: framing me for a gruesome double murder was intended to put me out of circulation long enough for the Modhri to pull off some other stunt."

"Maybe related to all that coral he was moving?" Bayta suggested.

"Could be," I said. "Of course, that would require Lorelei to also have been a walker who went to my apartment to snag one of my guns. Scenario three is that the whole thing was a setup to get me to flush McMicking out into the open for him."

Bayta took a thoughtful sip of her lemonade. "You did say the walkers following you seemed more interested in him than in you."

"True," I agreed. "On the other hand, we could still be on scenarios one or two, and deciding to follow us was just something the Modhri decided on the fly after seeing McMicking bail me out."

"I don't know," Bayta said thoughtfully. "Something about the last two scenarios bothers me."

"Me, too," I said. "Starting with the fact that if Lorelei was a walker there was no reason for her to keep hanging around my apartment after she'd stolen my gun. There was certainly no reason for her to spin me that story about a kid sister in trouble."