Bayta’s eyes defocused. “There’s a local leaving in forty minutes, or an express leaving in two hours. Both of them stop at both Homshil and Jurskala.”
“Let’s try for the express,” I told her. “Three first-class seats.”
“You don’t want a double compartment for us?”
“Homshil’s less than a day away by express,” I reminded her. “Hardly seems worth tying up two compartments for.”
“I’d rather we had compartments.”
I shrugged. “Fine. Whatever you want.”
“Thank you.” She paused. “By the way, Mr. Künstler didn’t exactly say he trusted you,” she said. “He said ‘he hates you.’”
“Which is something we should probably avoid mentioning to Morse,” I warned. “In case you hadn’t noticed, he’s the only one around who makes no bones about the fact that he hates me.”
Bayta glanced over her shoulder. “You have any idea why?”
“I wish I did,” I said. “Maybe I was part of some Westali operation that stepped on ESS toes.”
But deep down, I knew that wasn’t it. Morse’s antagonism was way more personal than just misplaced professional rivalry.
Maybe there was a way to find out. “Can you get the Spiders to encode a message and send it to Earth?” I asked Bayta.
“If it’s simple enough,” Bayta said. “They’d prefer you to go to the message center and do it yourself.”
“I’d rather not be seen at the message center right now,” I told her. “Too many people might notice and wonder who I’m writing notes to. I just want a simple message sent to Losutu: ‘Verify Ackerley Morse’s bona fides—reply via Spiders.’ Sign my name and send it.”
“I suppose they can do that,” Bayta said, a little doubtfully.
There was the sound of footsteps behind us, and I turned to see Morse hurrying down the corridor. “No need to rush,” I called. “We’ve got your seat.”
His expression darkened. “I told you not to do that,” he growled. “You’re not coming with me.”
“No,
you’re
coming with
us
,” I clarified for him. “At least, if you want to catch up with Penny Auslander before she gets to Ian-apof.”
His eyes narrowed. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“We’re getting her pulled off the train at either Homshil or Jurskala.” I told him. “Our train—”
“You’re
getting her pulled off?”
“Our train leaves in two hours,” I went on, ignoring the question. “That gives us all time to get something to eat and compare notes a little.”
For another few seconds Morse continued to eye me. Then, his lip twitched. “You’ve already seen most of my notes,” he said. “And I don’t especially care about yours. You really booked me a seat?”
“The ticket can be picked up at the stationmaster’s office,” Bayta said.
“You’re not on this case,” Morse warned. “This is official EuroUnion business, and you aren’t involved in any way, shape, or form. Make
very
sure you understand that.”
“We’re just on the way to meet up with a friend,” I said, stifling a sigh. There was something about Morse’s attitude that was just plain tiring. “We just happen to be traveling on the same train as you, that’s all.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Imagine that,” he said in mock surprise. “Frank Compton actually has a friend.”
With that, he brushed past me and strode through the lobby to the exit. A moment later, he was gone.
I turned back to find Bayta gazing at me, a look of compassion on her face. “What?” I demanded. I didn’t need friends, I certainly didn’t need Morse, and the last thing I wanted right now was sympathy.
Fortunately for her. she got the message. “Nothing,” she said, her expression going back to its usual neutral.
“Good,” I growled. “The stationmaster get that message encoded?”
“It’ll go out on the next scheduled laser transmission to Earth.”
“Good,” I said again. “I’m hungry. Let’s get something to eat.” I started us toward the door, putting my hand in my side pocket as I walked.
And stopped. “Well, well,” I said. “What?” Bayta asked.
“Clever,” I said, feeling my stomach tighten. No wonder I’d gotten away so easily with picking that Halka’s pocket.
“What’s clever?” Bayta asked.
“The Modhri,” I said, pulling my hand out of my pocket. “I’d been wondering where I got my newly improved pickpocket skills. Now I know. Turns out the Modhri didn’t actually care about Morse’s ultrasecret ESS reading material after all.
“The data chip with Fayr’s message.” I opened up my empty hand. “It’s gone.”
Morse was waiting at the platform when we arrived there an hour and a half later. Our Quadrail was visible in the distance, the red glow of the laserlike beams flashing between the train’s front bumper and the Coreline and turning the Coreline’s already impressive light show into something frighteningly manic. The lasers winked out, the train angled down the Tube’s sloping side into the wider section that was the station, and a few minutes later it rolled to a brake-squealing halt beside us.
Our double compartment was, as usual, in the first car behind the engine. Morse’s seat was three cars back, just behind the first-class dining car.
Bayta and I stayed close to home during the trip, emerging from our compartments only for meals, to stretch our legs, and occasionally to check on Morse. As far as I could tell, he too seemed to be keeping mostly to himself in the midst of all that noisy first-class camaraderie.
I made a couple of attempts to wheedle the other data chip out of him, the one that had been hidden in his pocket. But it was a waste of effort. Now that he was finally on the Quadrail and had Bayta’s assurance that we could link him up with Penny and her friends, he wasn’t making even an effort to be civil to me anymore.
I spent the rest of my limited time outside my compartment eyeing the other first-class passengers and wondering which of them might be walkers. That was even more of a waste of effort. As long as the Modhri colony inside a person stayed dormant, there was no way, barring serious micro-level surgery, to know it was in there.
Twenty-one hours after leaving Terra, precisely on time, we pulled into Homshil Station.
Most Quadrail stations carried between ten and forty sets of tracks, spaced more or less evenly around the inside of the Tube. Homshil was different. Though its main purpose was to provide service to the Jurian colony world of Homshiltristia, it also happened to be one of the fifty or sixty node points in the Quadrail system where the Spiders had brought several different lines together. One of the most important was a set of cross-galaxy tracks that headed out of our spiral arm entirely and traversed a wide swath of relatively empty space before skirting the edge of the galactic core and Fibibib space and heading across to the Pirkarli, Shorshian, and Filiaelian territories in the other spiral arm. For anyone traveling to those empires, shifting lines at Homshil could cut two or more weeks off their transit time.
As a result, Homshil carried a lot of traffic, and the Spiders had built accordingly. The station was half again bigger than the usual Quadrail station’s diameter, with no fewer than sixty sets of tracks running along the floor. Between the platforms were dozens of restaurants, shops, waiting areas, and three full-service hotels for travelers who wanted to take a break before continuing their journeys. The stationmaster’s office had been expanded into a four-building complex that included the office itself, separate booking and message centers, and a small computer library where newcomers to this spiral arm could grab up-to-date information on the worlds and cultures they would be visiting.
Between and around the various buildings, the Juriani who were responsible for maintaining the service structures had set up planters and air-vine hedges, providing decoration, agreeable aromas for those species who went in for that sort of thing, and a modicum of badly needed pedestrian traffic control.
Across from the main passenger areas, looking upside down as you gazed up past the Coreline, the station’s cargo facilities were equally crowded, except that instead of restaurants and shops the space was filled with cranes and sidings and transfer pallets. Through it all bustled dozens of drudge Spiders, looking like seven-legged ants crawling on a distant ceiling as they shifted crates back and forth between freight cars and cargo hatchways. At both ends of the five-kilometer-long station, away from the passenger and cargo unloading areas in the middle, were the maintenance and assembly areas.
Once again, we found Morse already on the platform when we disembarked from our car. The man was nothing if not quick on his feet. “You told me she’d be here,” he said. “Where?”
“Over there,” Bayta said, pointing to a long, low waiting room with classic Jurian architectural curlicues at the roof line.
Morse grunted. “Would have been safer to put her in the stationmaster’s office.”
“It might also have clued her in that there was something serious going on,” I countered. “Her and anyone else who might have been paying attention.”
The waiting room was comfortably full. Most of the passengers sitting around reading or chatting or playing cards were aliens, but there was a fair scattering of Humans as well. Despite the crowd, Penny Auslander was easy to spot. She was seated in a far corner of the room, the only person in that entire block of seats, flanked by a pair of watchful conductor Spiders.
We made our way through the aisles, dodging Juriani balancing frothing cups of pale yellow ale and Pirks carrying containers of some of the horrible things they liked to eat. Penny lifted her glare from the floor in front of her as we approached and transferred it to us. “About time,” she said stiffly. “What took you so long?”
“My apologies for the delay, Ms. Auslander,” Morse said, inclining his head in polite old-world manner.
“Apologies are cold comfort to the lost and vacant hour,” she countered.
I winced to myself. Light-stick aphorisms, especially deep pithy light-stick aphorisms, always left me cold.
“I understand your distress,” Morse said, still politely. Apparently he had a higher tolerance to brainless philosophy than I did. “But I think I can clear this up.” He pulled out his badge wallet and flipped it open. “My name is Morse; EuroUnion Security Service.”
Penny’s glare slipped a little. “You’re not with the Terran consulate?”
“No, ma’am,” Morse said, tucking the wallet away.
Penny’s eyes flicked to me, then Bayta, and finally back to Morse. “What’s going on?” she asked.
“We’re looking for your friend Daniel Stafford,” Morse said. “We need to ask him a few questions.”
He launched into a standard police-style explanation, a spiel tailored to evoke sympathy and cooperation without giving away any actual information. Listening with half an ear, I touched Bayta’s arm and took a casual step backward. “Check with those conductors,” I murmured to her. “Has she been alone this whole time?”
“They don’t know,” she murmured back. “They only came on duty fifteen minutes ago, replacing the others who’d been watching her. She was definitely alone then.”
“Then find the ones who were here earlier and ask
them
,” I said. “Her eyes shifted just a fraction to her left when Morse mentioned her friend Daniel.”
Bayta shook her head. “I can’t. They just left on one of the trains.”
I swallowed a curse, looking around the waiting room. The Spiders
really
needed some training in proper police procedure. “Get everyone in the station looking for another Human,” I ordered, pulling up my mental picture of Daniel Stafford. “Dark hair, mid-twenties, slender build—”
“Most Spiders don’t know how to estimate Human ages,” she interrupted.
“Then just go with dark hair and slender build,” I said impatiently as I looked around the waiting room. All the Humans I could see were either older, bigger, or female. “At this point, I’ll take any Human who’s even close.”
Morse was still trying to sell Penny on the idea that she could trust him. Penny still wasn’t buying. I looked around the waiting room again, wondering if I ought to give up on the Spiders and start a search of my own.
“Got it,” Bayta announced suddenly. “There’s a dark-haired Human male at the TrinTrinTril restaurant carry-away counter. He’s dressed in red and blue.”
I’d noticed the TrinTrinTril on our way in. It was the direction Penny’s eyes had flicked a minute ago. “Tell the Spiders I’m on my way,” I told Bayta.
“Do you want me to come with you?”
“I’d rather you keep an eye on Morse and Ms. Auslander,” I said. Confirming that neither of the other two was paying attention to me at the moment, I slipped away and headed through the milling passengers toward the door closest to the TrinTrinTril. I made sure to watch the other doors as I did so, just in case my quarry decided to come in through one of those instead.
No dark-haired Human males had appeared by the time I reached the far side of the room. I stepped outside, nearly getting run down by a Fibibib and a Nemut who were on their way in, and craned my neck to look over at the TrinTrinTril.
There he was, exactly as advertised: a youngish dark-haired kid in his early or mid twenties, wearing a red and blue ski outfit and holding a carry tray containing a pair of cups and a small closed box. He was talking earnestly with a well-dressed, smooth-skinned Shorshian, whose protruding dolphin snout was partially obscuring the kid’s face.
Or rather, the kid was
listening
earnestly—the Shorshian seemed to be doing all the talking. Dodging around a pair of older Humans with double-knotted bankers’ scarves, I headed over. I saw the boy’s eyes flick past the Shorshian’s head and lock on to me.
And to my astonishment, he dropped the carry tray and took off like all of hell was after him.
“Wait!” I shouted. “We just want to talk!”
The assurance was a waste of breath. If anything, the kid just ran faster.
And now that his back was to me, I could see for the first time the long backpack slung securely over his shoulders.
A long backpack just about the size of the Nemuti Lynx. Cursing feelingly, I took off after him.
In theory, running from the law inside a Quadrail station was an exercise in futility. There was literally nowhere to go where you couldn’t eventually be tracked down. In practice, though, it was clear that the kid was intent on giving it a really good try.
He couldn’t have picked a better station for it, either. With its maze of buildings and decorative shrubbery, Homshil was definitely a runners paradise. Wishing now that I’d invited Bayta to join this party, I concentrated on keeping him in sight without bowling over any innocent bystanders in the process.
It was as I rounded one of the shops and nearly shinned myself on someone’s luggage chat I suddenly realized that the boy and I weren’t the only ones on the move. On the fringes of my vision I could see two Halkas and three Juriani moving swiftly through the crowd in the same direction I was. None of them, as far as I could see, had any luggage with them.
No one simply abandoned their luggage in a Quadrail station. Not without a damn good reason.
Apparently, the Modhri wanted Daniel Stafford, too.
For the moment, though, the walkers weren’t making any effort to close with the kid, apparently content to merely parallel the chase. Meanwhile, I had other troubles to deal with. My near miss with the luggage had cost me a couple of seconds, and as I came around another corner I saw that my quarry had gained some distance on me. He was nearing the end of the public areas, where he would have only three options: to keep going into the Spider maintenance section, head cross-country toward the cargo platforms, or double back and try to get past me.
“Where is he?”
I half turned to see Morse come up beside me. “Where’s Ms. Auslander?” I countered.
“The Spiders have her,” he said. “Bayta said Stafford was running.”
“There,” I said, nodding toward the distant figure. “Don’t know… where he’s… going.”
“Wonder where he’s—damn; there he goes,” Morse said.
The kid had apparently decided on Option B and was angling toward the edge of the passenger platforms and the cargo areas beyond. Morse and I reached the edge of the hedge we were paralleling and turned to match his new direction. “Can you sic the Spiders on him?” Morse asked.
“They don’t need… me to… tell them.” I said, silently cursing Morse the lung capacity that let him run and talk at the same time. ESS apparently made its agents do laps every morning.
“Well, they’d better get to it,” Morse warned. “Lot of places over there where he can go to ground.”
“Only temp… orarily,” I said. Our Juriani and Halkan friends, I noted uneasily, had changed course as well. “We’ve also… got outriders.”
Morse glanced to both sides. “Damned amateurs,” he rumbled. “Looks like he’s making for that warehouse.”
He was right. The kid had shifted direction again and was heading for one of the big maintenance buildings. “It’s a… maintenance… building,” I corrected.
“Whatever,” Morse said impatiently. “Come
on
, old man. Run.”
But it was too late. Even as Morse started to pull ahead of me, the kid ahead reached the closest of the maintenance building’s doors, pulled it open, and vanished inside.
“I’m going in,” Morse shouted over his shoulder. “You circle around in case he comes out the other side.” Without waiting for a reply, he put on a burst of speed and left me in the dust.
I scowled as I veered to my right, heading for the nearest edge of the building. How I was supposed to cover all four sides of a warehouse-sized building by myself he hadn’t said.
But there was nothing to do but try. The outriders were still paralleling me, I saw, apparently no more interested in following Morse into the maintenance building than they had been in converging on the kid out in the open air.
Only now, where there had been five outriders, there were only four.
One of the Halkas had disappeared.
I turned my eyes forward again, scanning the area. He might have simply run out of air and dropped out of the race. But I would hate to bet on that. I’d already seen how the Modhri presence inside a walker could push its host beyond normal limits of stamina and strength.
I was nearly to the corner of the building when the kid flashed into view, emerging from one of the side doors and running toward the next building over, a much smaller repair shop. He crossed the open space in a mad dash and disappeared inside.
I swore under my breath and changed direction. My walker escort had turned the same time I had, and unless I put on a pretty respectable burst of speed the two Halkas on that side were going to get to the door before I did.