Timothy Zahn - Night Train to Rigel

Nothing. So what was it that had set off my mental alarms?

And then, suddenly, I had it. The steady rhythm of the clacking rails beneath me was changing, gradually slowing down. The Quadrail was coming into station.

I opened my eyes to slits. My chin was resting against my breastbone, my arms folded across my chest with my watch visible on my wrist. Two hours had passed since our departure from Terra Station: an hour longer man I should have slept, three hours less than it took to get to New Tigris.

So why—and where—were we stopping?

Carefully, I lifted my head and opened my eyes all the way. When I’d gone to sleep there had been six other passengers besides me in the car. All six had disappeared.

Or perhaps not. No one was visible, but in front of the stack of crates on my right, in the narrow space leading to the exit, I caught a slight movement of shadow. Someone, apparently, was standing by the car’s door.

The Bellido?

I slid sideways out of my seat, my heartbeat doing a nice syncopation with me click-clack of the wheels, and started forward. Theoretically, the Spiders didn’t permit weapons aboard passenger Quadrails. But theoretically, there weren’t any stops between Earth and New Tigris, either.

I’d covered about half the distance to the door when, with the usual muffled squeal of brakes, we rolled to a halt. The shadow shifted again, and I crouched down behind the nearest seat as the figure stepped into view.

It wasn’t the Bellido. It was The Girl.

“Hello, Mr. Compton,” she said. “Would you come with me, please?”

“Come with you where?” I asked carefully.

“Outside,” she replied, gesturing to the door beside her. “The Spiders would like to speak with you.”

The door opened, and because I doubted I really had a choice, I followed her out onto the platform.

At first glance it seemed to be your standard, plain-vanilla Quadrail station. But the second glance showed that there was not, in fact, anything standard about it.

For one thing, there were only four sets of tracks spaced around the inside of the cylinder instead of the usual thirty. The station itself was far shorter than usual, too, probably only a single kilometer long. Finally, instead of the standard mix of maintenance and passenger-support buildings, the spaces between the tracks were filled with purely functional structures, ranging in size from small office-type buildings to monstrosities the size of airplane hangars, with whole mazes of extra track leading between them and the main lines.

“This way,” The Girl said, setting off toward one of the smaller buildings.

I watched her go, my feet momentarily refusing to move. I could think of only one reason the Spiders would possibly want to talk to me, and it wasn’t a particularly pleasant thought.

And for them to have been willing to stop a whole train to do so made it that much worse. I glanced back over my shoulder, wondering what they were going to tell the rest of the passengers.

They weren’t going to tell the rest of the passengers anything for the simple fact that there weren’t any other passengers. The rest of the Quadrail had vanished. My car, conveniently emptied of all its occupants except me, plus the baggage car behind it, stood together on the track in front of another engine that had apparently pushed us here.

“Mr. Compton?”

I turned back. The Girl had reached the building and was standing expectantly beside the door. “Right,” I said, forcing my feet to move. She waited until I caught up with her, and together we went inside.

Beyond the door was a small room as drably functional as the building’s exterior, its furnishings consisting entirely of three chairs set in a triangle arrangement facing each other. One of the seats was already occupied by an amazingly fat middle-aged man dressed in shades of blue and sporting a contrasting skullcap of gray hair. Standing behind him was a Spider midway in size between a conductor and a drudge. A stationmaster, possibly, though this one seemed slightly bigger and didn’t carry the usual identifying pattern of white dots across its sphere.

“Good day, Mr. Compton,” the man greeted me gravely. His voice carried an oddly bubbling quality, as if he were talking half underwater. “My name is Hermod. Please, sit down.”

“Thank you,” I said, stepping forward and settling into one of the two remaining chairs as The Girl took the third. “Do I get to know where I am?”

“You’re in a maintenance and storage facility off the main Tube,” he said. “Its actual location is not important.”

“I thought all maintenance work was done in the stations themselves.”

Hermod’s massive shoulders shrugged slightly. “Most of it is,” he said. “The Spiders don’t advertise the existence of these other facilities.”

“Well, this should certainly make up for that,” I pointed out. “Or don’t you think New Tigris is going to wonder when their incoming Quadrail comes up two cars short?”

“Give the Spiders a little more credit than that,” Hermod said dryly. “They would hardly have gone to all this trouble to speak privately with you and then let something so obvious ruin it. No, you’ll be rejoining the rest of the train well before it reaches New Tigris.”

“Ah,” I said, making a conscious effort to sit back in my chair as if I were feeling all relaxed, which I definitely was not. So not only did the Spiders want a chat, they wanted a very private chat. This just got better and better. “So what’s this all about?”

“The Spiders have a problem,” Hermod said gravely. “One which may well determine the future of the entire galaxy. They thought you might be able to help them with it.”

“What makes you think that?” I asked, feeling sweat popping out all over my body.

“You’re a well-trained observer, investigator, and analyst,” he said. “Trained by one of the best, in fact: Western Alliance Intelligence.”

“Who sacked me over a year ago,” I reminded him, passing over for the moment the question of whether Westali really was one of the best.

“But not for lack of ability,” Hermod reminded me right back. “Merely for—what did they call it? Professional indiscretion?”

“Something like that,” I agreed evenly. That was what the dismissal papers had called it, anyway. Professional indiscretion , like I’d been caught stealing hotel towels or something. I’d sparked a major furor in the press, been responsible for a handful of political scapegoats having their heads handed to them in the hallowed halls of the United Nations, and earned myself the permanent loathing of both the secretary-general and the Directorate in the process.

And all they’d had the guts to call it was professional indiscretion.

But I let that one pass, too. “There are plenty of other ex-Westali people around who are as good as I am and a lot more respectable,” I said instead. “So again: Why me?”

Hermod’s forehead wrinkled. “Your reticence puzzles me, Mr. Compton,” he said. “I would think that, considering your present circumstances, you’d jump at the chance for employment.”

My present circumstances . On the surface, an innocent enough expression. Nearly as innocent, in fact, as professional indiscretion .

Did he and the Spiders know about my new job? It was hard to imagine how they could, not after all the paranoid-level convolutions we’d gone through to keep it secret.

On the other hand, it was equally hard to imagine how they could not know. Their messenger had been right there, after all, right outside the New Pallas Towers the evening the whole thing had been finalized.