Timothy Zahn - Night Train to Rigel

Now it was looking like whoever was behind his murder had simply been biding his time.

Only here it wouldn’t be just me who went down. Depending on what percentage of the packing material was Saarix-5, there could be enough there to kill every oxygen-breather within ten meters. If my assailant set it off in the enclosed space of a Quadrail car, the effects would go even farther.

Which led to another interesting question. Namely, how had this little conjuring trick been performed in the first place? The only time the bags had been out of my sight after leaving the transfer station was right after we’d docked, as the passengers climbed up the ladder and the shuttle’s conveyer system pulled the luggage from the racks and shoved them up into the Tube after us. The sheer mechanics required for someone to insert a pair of booby traps in such a brief time was bad enough. What was worse was why the Spiders’ sensors hadn’t picked up on it.

Or maybe they had picked up on it. Maybe that was why that drudge had swooped down on me and walked off with the bags. But then why hadn’t they detained me, or kicked me off the Quadrail, or at least removed the Saarix?

Unless it was the drudge itself that had gimmicked them.

I stared at the bags, a hard knot forming in my stomach. The Spiders had been running the Quadrail with quiet efficiency for at least the past seven hundred years. In all that time there had never been a report of conflict among them, which had naturally led to the conclusion that they were a monolithic culture with no factions, disagreements, or rivalries.

But what if that wasn’t true? What if there were factions, only one of which wanted me to investigate this impending interstellar war? In that case, there might be another group seriously opposed to the idea of airing their secrets to a lowly human, especially a lowly human whose own government wanted nothing to do with him.

They might even be opposed enough to look for a permanent way to make sure that didn’t happen.

Gathering up the material I’d scraped out. I began stuffing it back beneath the grip. Bayta could return at any moment, and if she didn’t already know about the Saarix this wasn’t the time to break the news to her. If she did know, it was even more vital that she didn’t find out I was on to the scheme. It would have been nice if I could have disabled the receiver or capacitor, but a properly designed detonator came with built-in diagnostics, and I didn’t have the equipment to trick the gadget into giving itself false readings. If my would-be poisoner found out I’d neutralized this particular threat he would just come up with a different one, and it was always better to face a trap you knew about than one you didn’t.

I was sitting in the lounge chair, skimming through a colorful computer brochure on Quadrail history, when Bayta returned with the onion rings.

“Thanks,” I said, taking the basket from her. The aroma reminded me of a batch I’d had once in San Antonio. “Have one?”

“No, thank you,” she said, stepping back to the middle of the floor. “Have you come up with a plan yet?”

“I’m still in the information-gathering phase,” I said, crunching into one of the rings. They tasted like the San Antonio ones, too. “For starters, I want you to ask the Spiders for a list of situations under which weapons are allowed aboard Quadrails.”

“I can answer that one,” she said. “Personal weapons like Belldic status guns can be put in lockboxes at the transfer station, which are then stowed in inaccessible storage bins beneath the cars. Larger weapons and weapons systems can be sent by cargo Quadrail only with special governmental permits.”

“Yes, I know the official exceptions,” I said. “I want to know the un official ones.”

She shook her head. “There aren’t any.”

“That you know about.”

“There aren’t any,” she repeated, more firmly this time.

I took a careful breath, willing myself to be calm. Dogmatic statements always drove me crazy. “Ask the Spiders anyway,” I said. “I also want to know everything about the Tube’s sensors. How they work, what they look for, and what exactly they do and don’t detect”

She seemed a bit taken aback. “I’m not sure the Spiders will be willing to give you that kind of information,” she warned.

“They’re not being offered a choice,” I said. “ They’re the ones who asked me in on this, remember? Either I get what I need or I’m walking.”

Her mouth twitched. “All right, I’ll ask,” she said. “But none of the conductors will have that kind of information.”

Another dogmatic statement. This one, though, I believed. “Fine. Who will?”

“It’ll have to go through a stationmaster,” she said, her forehead wrinkled in thought.

“Is that a problem?” I asked. “I assumed you could talk to all the Spiders.”

“Yes, I can,” she said. “But there aren’t very many of them at Yandro Station. Probably not enough for a clear relay to the stationmaster’s building.”

“A clear what?”

“My… communication… method has a limited range,” she said reluctantly. “For longer distances a message can be relayed between Spiders, but only if the Spiders are physically close enough to each other.”

“I see,” I said, nodding. So apparently she didn’t even have to look at a Spider to communicate, as I’d first thought. Some form of telepathy, then?

Problem was, as far as I knew no human being had ever demonstrated genuine, reproducible telepathic abilities. Also as far as I knew, neither had any of the galaxy’s other known species.

Which made Bayta… what?

“On the other hand, we’re only in the station for fifteen minutes,” I reminded her. “That’s not much time.”

“No, but I’ll only need to deliver that one short request,” she pointed out. “The information itself will have to be gathered and sent to us farther down the line.”

“I suppose that’ll work,” I said, thinking it through. Cargo and passengers traveled at the Quadrails’ standard light-year-per-minute, but the news and mail in those message cylinders somehow managed the trick of crossing the galaxy over a thousand times faster. The most popular theory was that once the Quadrail got up to speed, the Spiders used the dish antenna in front of the message cylinder slot to transmit everything to a train farther up the line, using the Tube itself as a gigantic wave-guide.

The messaging apparatus was supposedly sealed and self-contained, impossible for even the Spiders to reach while the Quadrail was in transit. But of course that didn’t stop the conspiracy theorists. The more paranoid among them were convinced that the Spiders read everything, encrypted or otherwise, before they transmitted it.

If we were dealing with two different factions, the question of Spider eavesdropping might be a highly important one. Unfortunately, I couldn’t think of anything I could do about it one way or the other. “I presume you can arrange for them to deliver the data to us aboard whatever train we’re on at the time?” I asked.

Bayta nodded. “I’ll tell the stationmaster when I put in the request.”

“Good,” I said. “Tell him to deliver it to us at Kerfsis.” She drew back a little. “Kerfsis? The Jurian colony world?”

“Regional capital, actually,” I corrected her. “Why? You have a problem with Juriani?”

“No but—” She seemed to flounder a moment. “I assumed we’d be transferring to a cross-galactic express at Homshil and heading straight to Filiaelian space. That’s where the attack is supposed to take place.”

With a sigh, I popped the last onion ring into my mouth and stood up. “Come on,” I said, brushing off my hands.