Timothy Zahn - Night Train to Rigel

There were sixteen cars in this particular train, each with a single door near the front. The doors irised open simultaneously and each disgorged a conductor Spider, a more or less Human-sized version of the drudge who’d made off earlier with my luggage. The conductors moved to the sides of the doors and stood there like Buckingham Palace sentries as lines of Humans and aliens maneuvered their carrybags out onto the platform and headed for either the waiting rooms or the glowing hatchways marking the spots where shuttles were waiting. At the rear, drudges were busily removing larger pieces of luggage from the baggage car for transfer to the shuttles, while on the far side of the train I knew other drudges would be doing likewise with the various undercar storage compartments.

I looked toward the front of the train, where a pair of drudges had reached the engine. One of them set its feet into a line of embedded rings and climbed partially up the side to a slightly lumpy box set into the engine’s roof just behind a compact dish antenna. Two of the spindly legs reached up and popped the box lid open, delicately removing a flattened message cylinder and handing it down to the other drudge waiting below. The second Spider accepted the cylinder and passed up one of its own, which the first then replaced in the box. Deceptively compact, those cylinders were packed with the most current news from around the galaxy, along with private electronic messages and encrypted data of all sorts.

Passengers, cargo, and mail, the ultimate hat trick of any civilization. All of it running via the Quadrail.

All of it under the control of the Spiders.

A few minutes later the outward flow of passengers ended, and the line of conductors took a multilegged step forward. “All aboard Trans-Galactic Quadrail 339216, to New Tigris, Yandro, the Jurian Collective, the Cimmal Republic, and intermediate transfer nodes,” they announced in unison, verbalizing the information that was also being given by a multilanguage holodisplay suspended over the train. “Departure in twenty-three minutes.”

The crowd surged forward as the Spiders repeated the announcement in Juric and Mahee, rather a waste of time since there weren’t any Juriani or Cimmaheem waiting for this particular Quadrail. But procedure was procedure, as I’d learned during my years of government service, and not to be trifled with merely because it didn’t happen to make sense. Circling around the back of the crowd, I headed for Car Fifteen, the last one before the baggage car.

My ticket had come edged in copper, which had already indicated it was one of the lower-class seats. But it wasn’t until I climbed through the door and stepped past a stack of safety-webbed cargo crates into the aisle that I realized just how far down the food chain I actually was. Car Fifteen was a hybrid: basically a baggage carrier, stacked three-deep on both sides with secured cargo crates, with a single column of thirty seats shoehorned like an afterthought between the aisle and the wall of boxes to the right.

A half dozen nonhumans were already seated: Cimmaheem, Juriani, and a lone Bellido, none of them paying any attention to me as I worked my way down the aisle. The Juriani, looking like upright iguanas with hawk beaks and three-toed clawed feet, had the unpolished scales of commoners, while the pear-shaped Cimmaheem wore their shaggy yarnlike hair loose instead of in the elaborate braids of the higher social classes.

I paid particular attention to the Bellido as I approached him, checking for the prominently displayed shoulder holsters and handguns that typically conveyed status in their culture. Actual weapons weren’t allowed inside the Tube, but the Bellidos had adapted to the Spiders’ rules by replacing their real guns with soft plastic imitations when they traveled.

To me, the aliens always came off looking rather ridiculous, like tiger-striped, chipmunk-faced children playing soldier with toy guns. Given that outside the Quadrail their guns were real, I’d made it a point to keep such opinions to myself.

But this particular Bellido’s shoulders were unadorned, which was again pretty much as I’d expected. Interstellar steerage, the whole lot of us. Whoever my unknown benefactor was, he was apparently pretty tight with a dollar.

Still, this car would get me to Yandro as fast as the first-class seats up front. And for once, at least, I wouldn’t have to worry about a seatmate of excessive with or questionable personal hygiene.

And then, as I passed the Bellido, he gave me a look.

It wasn’t much of a look, as looks go: a casual flick upward of his eyes, and an equally casual flick back down again. But there was something about it, or about him, that sent a brief tingle across the back of my neck.

But it was nothing I could put my finger on, and he made no comment or move, and I continued on back to my seat. Thirteen minutes later I heard a series of faint thuds as the brakes were released. A few seconds after that, with a small jolt, the train began moving forward. A rhythmic clicking began from beneath me as the wheels hit the expansion gaps in the railing, a rhythm whose tempo steadily increased as the train picked up speed. My inner ear caught the slight upward slope as we left the station area and angled up into the narrower part of the main Tube. A moment later we leveled out again, and were on our way to Yandro. A total of eight hundred twenty light-years, a nice little overnight train ride away.

Which was, of course, the part that really drove the experts crazy. Nowhere along our journey would the Quadrail ever top a hundred kilometers per hour relative to the Tube itself. That much had been proved with accelerometers and laser Doppler measurements off the Tube wall.

Yet when we pulled into Yandro Station some fourteen hours from now, we would find that our speed relative to the rest of the galaxy had actually been almost exactly one light-year per minute.

No one knew how it worked, not even the six races who claimed to have been with the Quadrail since its inception seven hundred years ago. They couldn’t even agree on whether speeds in this strange hyperspace were accelerated or whether it was the distances themselves that were somehow shortened.

In the past, I’d always thought the argument mostly a waste of effort. The system worked, the Spiders kept it running on time, and up to now that was all that had mattered.

But that had been before everything that had happened at the New Pallas Towers a week ago.

And, of course, before the Spiders had lost my carrybags. I could only hope they’d ended up somewhere else aboard the train and that I would find them waiting when I got off at Yandro.

Tilting my chair back, I pulled out my reader and one of the book chips from my pocket. A little reading while everyone got settled, and then I would take a trip through the rest of the third-class coaches to the second/third-class dining car. There was a chance my unknown benefactor was aboard the train with me, planning to make contact once we got off, and it would be a good idea to run as many of the passengers as I could through my mental mug file.

But even as I started in on my book, I found my vision wavering. It had been a long trip from Earth, and I was suddenly feeling very tired. A quick nap, I decided, and I’d be in better shape to go wandering off memorizing faces. Tucking my reader away, I set my watch alarm for an hour. With one final look at the back of the Bellido’s head, I snuggled back as best I could into my seat and closed my eyes.

I awoke with a start, my head aching, my body heavy with the weight of too much sleep, my skin tingling with the sense that something was wrong.

I kept my eyes shut, my ears straining for clues, my nose sifting the air for odd scents, my face and hands alert for the telltale brush of a breeze that would indicate someone or something was moving near me.