Night Train to Rigel (22 page)

He pointed to the smoking rubble that had once been a Chafta starfighter. “Their own actions prove it,” he said. “Do you think the Modhri would have attacked that way unless he’d suddenly realized we knew the truth, and that the genuine coral fields were under threat?”

“I meant do you have any
other
proof of this name switch?”

His eyes bored into my face. “You are a curious species, Human,” he said. “You base many of your actions on strange leaps of illogic and hunch, beyond even those of the Shorshians. Yet in the same moment you demand proofs and evidences far beyond that which others would declare sufficient.”

“We’re a mass of contradictions, all right,” I agreed. “Do you have independent confirmation, or don’t you?”

“We have,” he said, his voice starting to sound a little strained. Maybe he was regretting saving us from the coral, after all. “The Modhri was clever enough to alter official records and even historical documents. But he neglected to change the early oceanographic data. A careful study of the depth charts clearly shows that the other moon is the one formerly called Modhra I, and the source of the coral.”

I nodded as the pieces started to finally fall together. So that was why Fayr had absconded with one of the lodge’s submarines and gone to all the trouble of bringing it up through the ice instead of simply purchasing one of his own and flying it here along with his guns and other equipment. He’d been deliberately playing the Modhri’s game, pretending he’d bought into the moons’ name switch. “So does the whole Modhri know they’re—it’s—in trouble yet?” I asked. “Or is it only the local group?”

“No, the homeland branch knows,” Fayr said, his eyes on the operation going on below us. “There are several walkers here who carry large colonies within them, plus there are many coral outposts in various parts of the resort. This mind segment can easily unite with the homeland branch.”

He gave me a sideways look. “Which is probably why you were invited to come here,” he added ominously. “An agent of the Spiders is a rarity the Modhri would certainly wish to study. Before he enslaved you.”

My stomach tightened. “Instant spy, huh?”

“It’s worse than that,” he said. “A Modhran colony normally stays in the background, but in need it can push the walker’s own personality aside and take complete control of the body.”

I thought about the two Halkas back at Kerfsis. “Complete enough to make the walker attempt theft or murder?”

“The wishes or scruples of the walker are completely irrelevant at such a point,” he said. “The walker’s own personality is suppressed and experiences a total blackout. If the Modhran colony is clever enough, the walker may never even realize anything has happened.”

“And that lodge is filled with Modhran walkers?”

He snorted. “The lodge is filled with the rich and powerful of the galaxy,” he said. “That makes your question redundant.”

I looked toward the lodge, half expecting to see the traditional dit rec horrorific mob coming at us with pitchforks and torches.

But the ice was empty. Anyway, torches wouldn’t work in the thin atmosphere. “What kind of reception can we expect at the main base?” I asked.

“The harvesting complex has ten small submarines and fifty divers at its disposal,” Fayr said. “They also have perhaps fifty other vehicles, including ten or twelve lifters and other small flyers.”

“Not to mention whatever’s still at the garrison.”

“They have no more than five vehicles left, now that the troop carrier and Chaftas have been disabled,” Fayr said. “And with many of the soldiers already here, they may not have the trained personnel to operate them.”

“Unless they commandeer the rest of the resort’s lifters and take the troops back home,” I pointed out, glancing up at the sky. Nothing was coming at us from that direction, either.

“The resort has no more spaceworthy flyers,” Fayr assured me. “Their long-range communications have been dealt with, as well.”

“That helps,” I said. “How about ground-based defenses?”

“The harvesting complex has antiair weapons in place,” he said. “Fortunately, we won’t land within range of them. We’ll open a hole in the ice at a safe distance from the complex, and from there our submarine will travel along the coral beds, using sonic disruptors and small explosives to destroy them.”

“How do we retrieve them afterward?”

“We don’t,” Fayr said. “For those two, this has always been a suicide mission.”

I felt my stomach tie itself into an extra-tight knot. I had always hated suicide missions.

Fayr apparently had no trouble reading my face on that one. “I don’t like it any better than you do,” he said grimly. “But I see no other alternatives.”

“Let me work on it,” I said.

“Do so.” He gestured. “They are ready.”

I looked down. The lifter and sub were connected together now, and the Bellidos were hurrying in our direction. “We’ll take the others aboard,” Fayr said, notching back on the thrusters and lowering us to the surface. “We will then melt the submarine free and be on our way.”

I gave one last look at the sky. Still clear. “Sounds a little too easy,” I warned.

“Perhaps we have taken the Modhri by surprise,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said. “Maybe.”

Three minutes later, with the commandos aboard and the sub freed, we were on our way.

The torchferry flew in front, with the lifter/sub combo riding our aft starboard flank like a baby whale staying close to mama. No one challenged us as we made our way across the short distance separating the two moons. The harvesting operation was on the far side, Fayr informed me, out of sight of any curious eyes from the resort, and he kept us low to the surface as we headed in that direction. As promised, he stopped us well short of the complex, picking a spot where a past meteor impact had made the ice relatively thin.

Relatively
being the operative term, of course. With a limit to how hot we could run the drive without sending the torchferry skittering out into space, it was going to take a while to burn our way through.

We had made it about halfway when our opponents finally made their move.

We spotted them in the distance, sixty flyers and ground vehicles lumbering across the ice en masse like the proverbial lemmings heading for the cliff. At first glance they seemed to all be civilian craft, but our lifter, detached now from the sub and flying high cover, reported a handful of armed military roamers scattered throughout the convoy. Maybe they were hoping we wouldn’t notice the ringers in the crowd, or maybe they thought we would hesitate to shoot through civilians to get to them.

If that was their strategy, it didn’t work. The civilian craft pressing in close around them limited their own combat capabilities, and the Bellido packet gunners riding the lifter had the necessary marksmanship to single out the military craft and destroy or disable them well before they got within their own firing range.

I hoped at that point the civilians would take the hint and back off. But the Modhri was apparently more interested in stopping us than in conserving troops. The vehicles kept coming, maneuvering around the piles of debris but otherwise seemingly oblivious to the destruction going on around them. The Bellidos responded by first taking out the rest of the flyers, then dropping shatter charges in front of the ground vehicles to try to block their path.

But they kept coming. With a complete slaughter of the civilians as the only other option, Fayr reluctantly broke off our digging project and took the torchferry to a spot well ahead of the lead vehicles. There he used the drive to carve a trench in the ice in hopes of blocking any further advance.

It was a noble move, and it nearly cost us our lives. The Bellido gunners had indeed taken out all the military vehicles, but the Modhri had been crafty enough to hide a pair of Halkan soldiers in one of the civilian transports. I looked up from our work just in time to see them lean out from opposite sides with a pair of missile launchers.

I was also just in time to see their transport blown into shrapnel before they could bring the launchers to bear. Fortunately for our side, the Bellidos in the lifter knew all the tricks, too.

We finished the trench without further incident and headed back. “I wonder what they expected that to accomplish,” I commented as we resumed our attack on the ice.

“Obviously not to stop us,” Fayr muttered. “It can only have been to delay us while he prepares his submarines for defense of the coral.”

“It’s going to be ten-to-one odds down there, isn’t it?” I agreed soberly. “Not to mention whatever mischief the divers can cause. You
have
planned for that, I hope?”

“No fears,” Fayr assured me. I’d never heard that peculiar phrase from a Bellido before, but Fayr had apparently adopted it for his own. “The submarine has been equipped with sensor decoys and other countermeasures. I also expect the ongoing destruction of the coral to have a certain confusing effect on the defending walkers, as well.”

“But you don’t know for sure.”

“No,” he conceded. “To the best of my knowledge, an attack on the Modhri has never before been attempted, much less successfully.”

“Mm,” I murmured, gazing out in the direction of the now-stalled ground vehicles. “So after we drop the sub into the water, you’re planning to just leave?”

“Do not misunderstand,” Fayr said, his voice tight. “I do not wish to leave anyone behind. But we cannot assume that no messages were sent before we dealt with the resort’s transmitter. The Halkan warships at the Tube transfer station could be here in four hours, and it will take the submarine at least two and two-thirds to destroy the coral between here and the harvesting complex. If we wait the extra two-thirds hour for them to make the return trip, we could find ourselves trapped with little margin for error.”

“Okay, but what if we go to the harvesting complex and meet the sub there?” I suggested. “That would at least save us that last two-thirds hour.”

“And could end matters even more quickly,” Fayr countered. “Or had you forgotten the ground-based weapons at the complex?”

“Not at all,” I said. “It just seems to me there are a couple of points that may make it worth considering.” I gestured out at the horizon. “For one thing, I’m wondering how well those weapons will be manned, given how many of the residents are sitting out there in that convoy.”

“Possibly not as fully as usual,” Fayr conceded. “Certainly with his flyers destroyed he will have less capability against ground troops.” He eyed me curiously. “I find it interesting that you would care so much about two Belldic lives.”

“I don’t like wasting lives, human or otherwise,” I told him. “But I’m also thinking it might also be a good idea to take a good, hard look at the records they have in there.”

“What sorts of records?”

“All sorts,” I said. “I’m still wondering why the Modhri threw all the workers at us just now like cannon fodder, but didn’t do the same with the guests at the resort.”

“Those at the resort are the rich and powerful,” Fayr reminded me. “Perhaps the Modhri feared the repercussions that would follow such a high number of important deaths.”

“Yes, but why?” I persisted. “Isn’t this place right here his must-win stand?”

“It is his homeland and the center of his intellect and power,” Fayr agreed thoughtfully. “But as I said earlier, he has many outposts across the galaxy, and many, many walkers. Perhaps he still feels he can stop us here without risking his secret.”

“How secret can it be?” I pointed out. “
Your
government at least seems to know all about this. Don’t they?”

“Do they?” he said bitterly. “Like many others, my government has been enslaved. What is actually known of the Modhri, and what has been carefully suppressed, I cannot say.”

“But I thought—” I floundered.

“That we represent an official Belldic mission?” Fayr shook his head. “No. On this point, at least,
Apos
Mahf spoke the truth: My squad and I
are
renegades. We recognized that something was amiss and from various records were able to piece together the truth. But we have no official orders or sanction for what we do.”

His whiskers twitched. “In fact, any of us who survive will undoubtedly be brought before a military court upon our return.”

I grimaced. But it was not, I reflected, all that different from the reception I was likely to get when I got back to Earth. “I still want some answers,” I said. “And the harvesting complex is still the place to get them.”

“Perhaps,” he said. “You said there were two reasons you thought it would be worth the risk?”

I nodded. “You seemed concerned earlier about the idea of flying into a place guarded by antiair defenses. Right?”

“Correct.”

“But assuming you’re right about this whole setup being designed by the Modhri for his own benefit, where are those defenses likely to be centered? On the administration center, which holds the records we’re looking for? Or on the access to the harvesting areas, where the coral is?”

“Mmm,” he murmured. “Interesting.”

“Of course, once we’re down you’ll still have to get to the admin areas on foot,” I went on. “You’ll also have to neutralize enough of the weaponry around the access areas to get your people out once they’ve brought in the sub. But as you’ve already pointed out, the Halkas have lost most or all of their air power, which is usually the trickiest part.”

For a long minute Fayr gazed at me, his striped face expressionless. “You humans are without a doubt the most hunch-driven species in the galaxy.”

“Probably,” I agreed. “But for us, it works.”

“It does indeed,” he said, his whiskers stiffening in a tight smile. “Very well. Let us do it.”

We finished blasting our hole and lowered the sub in. It took off with a will, diving deep toward the coral beds and the Halkan subs no doubt already arrayed in its path.

But those defenders would be mostly civilians, whether they had some bizarre group mind helping them or not. The attackers were warriors, and I had no doubt that the Bellidos would make it through.

Especially with us throwing in a double helping of chaos at the other end of the rabbit hole. With the lifter again hugging our flank we took off, flew past the mass of ground vehicles still uselessly trying to get to us, and made for the harvesting complex.

My first thought as we approached was that someone must have seriously overestimated the importance of the place as well as the amount of profit coming out of it. All that was visible was a modest trio of single-story buildings set around a docking and under-ice access area.

It wasn’t until we were nearly on top of it that I realized the truth. The three buildings were merely the front of the operation, a deliberately deceptive façade designed to throw off inquisitive eyes and minds. The rest of the complex had been built almost invisibly into the ice, probably constructed on the surface with ice then layered over it.

The true access to the coral beds was camouflaged even better. The only way we knew where it was, in fact, was by backtracking the antiair fire that erupted in our direction as we approached.

But my hunch paid off. The defenses were geared toward protecting the coral beds, with the workers’ safety running a distant second. As a probably unintended consequence, several of the larger ice-sheathed buildings lay squarely in one line of fire or another, creating a whole set of kill-zone shadows in the outer parts of the complex. Fayr landed us in the most convenient of them, and with weapons at the ready he and the rest of his team headed off into battle.

Bayta and I stayed behind in the torchferry. Our vac suits didn’t have the protective armor and heavy-duty puncture-sealant systems their chameleon suits did, and I doubted either of us had the training and stamina to keep up with a commando squad, anyway.

Besides which, it was time she and I had a little talk.

“So,” I commented, swiveling around in my seat to face her. We had taken off our helmets so that Fayr and his squad couldn’t listen in, keeping them handy in case of trouble. “Interesting theory, isn’t it?”

“What is?” she asked cautiously.

“Fayr’s fever dream about malevolent coral that wants to rule the universe,” I said, watching her closely. “Malevolent telepathic coral, yet. Crazy, huh?”

Her eyes slipped away from my gaze. “Very interesting,” she agreed, her voice studiously neutral.

“Never heard anything like it, myself,” I continued conversationally. “How about you?”

She didn’t answer. “There never was any vision of an attack on the Fillies, was there?” I asked, letting my voice harden. “In fact, this whole thing has been a scam from square one, hasn’t it?”

“No,” she protested, her eyes coming up to meet mine. Her lips compressed, and she again dropped her gaze to the floor. “No, there
is
a threat to the galaxy. A terrible threat.”

“From power-crazed coral?”

She glared at me. “You shouldn’t make jokes about things you don’t understand.”

“So enlighten me,” I countered. “Starting with what exactly my role was in all this.”

“What do you mean?” she asked, her voice gone cautious again. “You were hired to help us in the war against the Modhri.”

“No, I was hired to be your diversion,” I said bluntly. “Your Spider friends knew all about Fayr and his private little battle plan. You wanted to give him the best shot you could; and since you knew the enemy was watching, you brought me in to give them someone handy to watch.”

Her lip twitched. “It wasn’t like that.”

“Wasn’t it?” I bit out. “You have a drudge accost me and walk off with my carrybags in front of God and everyone at Terra Station. Then you throw everyone else off my car midway to New Tigris with the flimsiest excuse possible and hustle me off to a meeting on a secret Quadrail siding. And
then
you march both of us up from third-class steerage to a first-class compartment. You might as well have pinned a sign on my back that said
Spider Agent—Kill Me
in three languages.”

Her face looked like she was getting ready to cry. “We didn’t expect him to try to kill you,” she said earnestly. “You have to believe me. We thought he would think you were our latest attempt to find him and just watch you. That’s all. Just watch.”

“That’s very comforting,” I growled. “Unfortunately, good intentions don’t feed the bulldog. They knew about Fayr, too, or at least suspected something was in the works.” I paused, studying the shame and self-reproach in her face and feeling a small twinge of conscience. “And for whatever it’s worth, I don’t think those two Halkas back at Kerfsis were really trying to kill me,” I added reluctantly. “That incident was mainly designed to give Rastra and JhanKla an excuse to get us aboard the Peerage car.”

She shivered. “To try and make friends with us, so that they could bring us here.”

There it was, that whole friend thing again. “You keep talking about friends,” I said. “What do friends have to do with it?”

“There are natural emotional barriers between people that tend to block thought viruses,” she said. “Only between friends or trusted associates are there the emotional connections that allow the thought virus to pass.”

“Uh-
huh
,” I said, a few more pieces falling into place. “Which is why Mahf tried to pretend we’d met before that afternoon in the casino.
And
why you kept asking if Rastra or Applegate were friends of mine.”

She nodded. “I didn’t know if either of them was a walker. But if they were, I was afraid you’d trust them enough for a thought virus to get through.”

“Is that why you picked me for this job in the first place?” I asked. “Because you figured I’d become something of a loner?”

“Partly,” she admitted. “Mostly it was because you’d been ostracized by all your former official Terran government contacts. That was the pattern the Modhri followed with all the other species: An officially sanctioned team would go in to investigate, be infected by the Modhri, then go home to infect and conquer the rest of the upper military and government levels. With thought viruses passing freely between close friends and associates, it can happen very quickly.”

She gave me a wan smile. “Humans are almost the last ones left unconquered. We didn’t want to risk your people by getting someone who was still involved with important government officials.”

“And so you picked me,” I said, a small part of me appreciating the potentially lethal irony of the situation. If only they knew who I
was
involved with. “Why didn’t you tell me all this last night when I asked?”

She looked away from me. “I wasn’t sure I could trust you.” “And now?”

She shrugged noncommittally.

Which was pretty damn ungrateful, I thought, especially after all I’d done for her and her Spider friends. A surge of annoyance threatened to wash over me; ruthlessly, I forced it back. A combat situation was no place for stray emotional reactions. “What makes you think humanity hasn’t been conquered yet?”

“The Spiders have been watching the top levels of Human government very closely,” she said, clearly relieved to be back on less personal ground. “So far, they’ve seen no sign of Modhran influence.”

“Only you said the people themselves don’t even know when they’re carrying a colony,” I pointed out. “You have some kind of Rorschach test?”

“I wish we did,” she said ruefully. “But since the colony usually stays in the background of the walker’s mind, there usually isn’t anything that would show up on psychological tests.”

“Or emotional or skin/eye reaction tests, either, I suppose,” I said. “That just leaves straight-out physical tests.”

“Which also aren’t usually very helpful,” she said. “The polyps tend to gather in hidden areas, especially around and beneath the brain. It would take a very careful microscopic examination to spot them.”

“Is that why JhanKla insisted those two dead Halkas be cremated?”

“Yes, though of course he himself wouldn’t have known the true reason,” she said. “He would have had his own set of perfectly good excuses. And we’ve never found a scanning technique that can pick the polyps out from the organism they’ve attached themselves to.”

“So again, what makes you think Earth hasn’t been infiltrated?”

“There are patterns of behavior and decision that can be seen, especially on a group level,” she explained. “Neither the UN nor any of your nation-state governments have shown signs of such behavior.”

“We just too small for the Modhri to bother with?”

“The reasons are probably more practical,” she said. “For one thing, you have no coral outposts on your worlds, which by itself would make conquest difficult. There’s also your political structure, with its many nation-states and lack of a truly central governing body. That holds challenges they won’t have found elsewhere among the Twelve Empires.”

I’d never before thought of Earth’s political chaos as being a possible military asset. Usually just the opposite, in fact. “What would have happened if I’d touched the coral last night? I’d be a walker now, too?”

“Not yet,” she said. “It takes days or weeks for an implanted hook to grow into a polyp and then to reproduce enough to form a complete colony.”

“Okay, so back to current events,” I said, picking up the logic trail again. “We had Fayr and his commandos on one hand, and us on the other. The Modhri knew about both of us; but he
didn’t
know what the connection was. So he maneuvered us here, hoping we would trip over Fayr’s scheme and expose it for him.” I lifted my eyebrows. “Damn near worked, too, didn’t it?”

She grimaced. “I know,” she murmured.

“So if this is their homeland, why don’t the Spiders just lock them in? They have to travel by Quadrail like everybody else, don’t they?”

“Yes, of course,” she said. “But all we knew at first was that various leaders were being controlled and governments were being corrupted. It was a long time before we learned the mechanism and, later, where it was coming from.”

“But you know now,” I said. “So why not just keep the coral off the Quadrails?”

“Because the sensors can’t detect it,” she said. “I mean, they
can
, but the chemical composition is so close to a hundred other things that it would require hand searches.” She shrugged uncomfortably. “Besides, by now the coral’s been distributed so widely that locking down Sistarrko system wouldn’t gain us anything.”

And with that, the final, ugly piece dropped into place. Modhran outposts all over the galaxy, accessible only via the Spiders’ own Quadrail system… “You didn’t hire me to find out how to stop a war,” I said quietly. “You hired me to figure out how to
start
one.”

She turned her face away from me. “You have to understand,” she said, her voice suddenly very tired. “We’d finally learned where the enemy was located, but we knew the same limitations that keep one empire from attacking another would also keep us from taking any action against them. We suspected Fayr was up to something, but we assumed he was still just investigating. And here especially the Modhri would make sure that the warships guarding the Tube transfer station were exclusively manned by walkers. We needed a way to break the stalemate.”

Involuntarily, I glanced back out the canopy. I’d forgotten all about those warships, and the fact that they might be burning space on their way here at this very moment. I hoped Fayr wasn’t taking time to smell the flowers. “You could have saved all of us a lot of time if you’d been up front with me in the first place,” I told her. “I could have told you that you do exactly what Fayr did: Bring in stuff to sell and then buy or create your weapons there in the target system.”

She sighed. “I understand that now,” she said. “But the Spiders thought the story of an attack on the Filiaelians would be the only way to get your attention.”

“Especially since Fayr’s technique wouldn’t work on the Fillies,” I conceded. “No weapons black market, and too many genetically loyal soldiers wandering around watching everything.”

“Yes.” Bayta ran a hand through her hair. “But at least now it’s almost over.”

“Maybe,” I said. “Maybe not.”

She frowned at me. But before she could ask, there was a ping from my helmet. “Compton?” a voice called faintly.

I picked up the helmet and slipped it over my head. “Here,” I said.

“We have the records and are moving to support the half squad at the dock,” Fayr reported. “Estimate arrival and retrieval in one and two-thirds hours, return one-third later. Hostiles?”

“No sign,” I said, looking out the canopy and giving the displays a quick check. “I think all the unfriendlies must be on your side of the fence.”

“Acknowledged,” he said. “Be watchful.”

“You, too.”

He clicked off, and I took my helmet off again. “He says they’ll be back in about two hours,” I told Bayta. “Then maybe we’ll find out whether it’s over or not.”