“Too bad,” I said, lifting my bottle with one hand as I surreptitiously slipped the data chip into my jacket pocket with the other “The important thing is that they had the Jack Daniel’s. Let’s get back to the others.”
“I’m afraid you’ll have to begin without me,” Rastra said regretfully “I’ve been informed that one of the first-class passengers has a problem that needs to be dealt with. As senior Resolver aboard, I must see if I can help.” The scales around his eyes and beak crinkled slightly. “Try to remember to save me some.”
“No problem,” I said, a creepy feeling rippling across the skin between my shoulder blades. “Don’t be long.”
“I won’t.”
I watched until he’d passed through the door into the vestibule leading forward. Then, for no particular reason, I looked back over at the corner table.
The Bellido’s drink was still there. The Bellido himself was gone.
I looked around the room, the creepy feeling turning into a full-fledged unpleasant tingle. The way he’d been moving earlier, he should have had trouble even finding the door, let alone moving stealthily enough to slip out without me noticing. Like the two Halkas before him, he’d apparently decided that the best way to fool a Human was to pretend to be drunk. Unlike the Halkas, he’d had all the nuances of the role down cold.
Which strongly implied he wasn’t simply a social pretender, either. So what the hell was he?
I didn’t know; but suddenly I wasn’t feeling very good about hanging around here anymore. Trying to watch every direction at once, I headed back toward the Peerage car.
No one accosted me as I passed through the first- and second-class cars. I paid special attention to the Bellidos scattered among the passengers, but none of them seemed the least bit interested in me.
Which actually wasn’t all that surprising. There was no way the fake drunk could have gotten past me while I was talking to Rastra, which meant he was still behind me somewhere in the forward part of the train. Comms didn’t work aboard Quadrails, or anywhere else inside the Tube for that matter, which meant there also wasn’t any way for him to have communicated with any confederates he might have farther back.
Unless, of course, he didn’t need to communicate with them because they already had their orders. Trying not to look too much like I was hurrying, I left the last second-class car and crossed the vestibule into the third-class section.
I hadn’t focused on the passengers on my way forward, but to the best of my memory nothing much seemed to have changed since then. Again, I paid special attention to the Bellidos; again, they didn’t seem to be paying any attention back.
I was midway through the last of the passenger cars when my eyes fell on a set of three empty seats in the last row.
There had been occasional empty seats on my way forward, their occupants presumably either out having dinner or else communing with nature in one of the pair of restrooms at the front of each car. But there hadn’t been any threesomes in the second/third-class dining car just now, and the chances of three passengers in the same row deciding to hit the head at the same time had to be pretty small.
Much smaller, I suspected, than the chances that those same three passengers had drifted off to the privacy of one of the baggage cars to arrange some kind of unpleasant surprise. Still, unless I wanted to wait for the fake drunk to catch up and turn three-to-one odds into four-to-one odds, there was nothing to do but keep going.
But like I’d told Bayta earlier, alcohol was a good equalizer. As my playmates were about to learn, that equalizing capability also extended to nonsocial events.
Anywhere in the galaxy except aboard a Quadrail, there would have been no question about how I would do that. A typical glass whiskey bottle made a natural club, which was probably why the Spiders were careful to package all their beverages in this flimsy plastic instead. One good thump, and the bottle would split along its tear lines and dump its contents all over the floor.
But the warped minds at Westali had been mulling over this for a few years, and they’d come up with a couple of tricks. With luck, maybe I could give any waiting footpads a surprise of their own.
I reached the end of the car and stepped through the door into the vestibule. There, momentarily shielded from view from either direction, I pulled the stopper from the bottle and replaced it just tightly enough to keep it closed. Now, with a good squeeze, I could send the stopper flying straight into an assailant’s face, with a slosh of whisky right behind it. I couldn’t remember how Bellido eyes reacted to alcohol, but even if it didn’t temporarily blind him it should at least slow him down long enough for me to be faced with only two-to-one odds. Still not good, but better than nothing. Holding the bottle at its base, I opened the door and stepped into the first baggage car.
My natural instinct was to pause there, peering down the stacks of safety-webbed crates and listening for some clue as to where they might be hiding. But I overrode the reflex. Showing I was aware of their presence would only make them treat me with professional respect, and I would rather they assume I was stupid and oblivious and hopefully let their guard down a little. Without breaking stride, I headed in, trusting in my peripheral vision to give me enough warning for whatever was about to happen.
It didn’t. I was halfway down the car when something exploded against the side of my head and the universe went black.
NINE:
I woke with an ache behind my right ear, an unpleasant half pain across the whole right side of my face, and the odd sensation that I’d been sleeping standing up.
For another minute I stayed as I was, listening for any signs of activity around me. But all I could hear was the rhythmic clicking of the Quadrail’s wheels. Apparently, my assailant or assailants were already gone. Carefully, I opened my eyes.
My inner ear hadn’t been lying to me. I was indeed standing up, my back pressed solidly up against something hard, my head turned to my left. From the faint light seeping in from below me, I could see I was inside one of the taller crates, which had had a narrow space cleared out for me. The mystery of how I had managed to stay upright while still unconscious was quickly solved: My playmates had simply worked the crate’s access panel free—probably sliding it upward—manhandled me in face-first against the safety webbing already stretched around this group of crates, then slid the panel back in place behind me.
It was, I had to admit, a quick and creative way of putting an opponent temporarily out of action. The first person who really focused on the arrangement would instantly spot the webbing anomaly, but people doing a quick search for a wayward Human could easily miss such details.
Still, clever or not, they’d missed an obvious bet: They’d forgotten to gag me. Once the search reached my vicinity, a good shout would bring my rescuers straight to the spot. Experimentally, I started to take a deep breath.
They hadn’t missed a bet after all. The webbing was tight enough that I couldn’t expand my chest that far. Short, shallow breaths were unfortunately going to be the order of the day.
The little knife in my multitool could cut through this stuff with ease, of course. But the multitool was in my right pocket, and my captors had thoughtfully positioned me close enough to the right wall that I couldn’t bend my elbow far enough to get my hand into that pocket.
I studied the cargo pressed up against me, or at least the small percentage of it I could see with my head turned to the side. It was too dark to read any of the labels, or even to tell what language they were in, but from the delicate aromas I guessed they were mostly exotic spices. No chance of identifying my assailants by unexplained quantities of merchandise in their possession, then—spices were one of those items that could easily be flushed down the nearest toilet, with their packaging shredded and dumped out the same way. There was no way of knowing my crate’s destination, but if my attackers had done their job right it would be someplace far down the line, past Jurian territory and possibly out of Halkan space as well. If they’d been feeling generous, they might have arranged things so that I’d be found before I died of thirst. I wasn’t ready to bet on that, though.