“As long as I can remember,” she said, lowering her voice. “Is this really the right place for this?”
“Why not?” I countered. “I don’t especially like working with someone I know next to nothing about.”
She pursed her lips. “If it comes to that, I don’t know much about you, either.”
“Your friends seem to have the full inside track on me.”
“That doesn’t mean I do.” Her forehead creased slightly. “The Bellidos have all gone to one of the waiting rooms by the Grakla Spur platform.”
Passing up a possible chance to eavesdrop in favor of not taking the risk of being spotted and spooking the quarry. They certainly seemed to know what they were doing. “So what do you want to know?”
“About…?”
“About me.”
She studied my face, her forehead creased, clearly wondering if I was just baiting her. “All right. What did you do to get fired from Westali?”
I felt my throat tighten. I should have guessed she’d pick that particular knife to twist. “What, you’ve been asleep the past two years?” I growled.
The corner of her lip twitched. “I’d really like to know.”
I looked away from her, letting my eyes sweep slowly around the restaurant. Most of the patrons were Juriani, but there were a few Halkas and Cimmaheem as well.
And, of course, there was us. A pair of Humans, strutting around the galaxy as if we owned it. “Do you know how humanity got to be number twelve on the Spiders’ Twelve Empires list?”
“I presume the same way everyone else did,” she said. “When a race colonizes enough systems, the Spiders confer that designation.”
“You colonize four of them, to be exact,” I told her, Colonel Applegate’s words from a few days ago echoing through my brain. And Yandro makes five. “Which gives you a total of five, including your home system. Yandro was the colony that put Earth over the bar and got us invited into the club.”
“And there was a problem with that?”
I sighed. “The problem, Bayta, is that there’s nothing of value there. Nothing. A few varieties of spice, some decorative hardwoods, a few animals we may or may not be able to domesticate someday, and that’s it.”
“And?”
“What do you mean, ‘and’?” I bit out. “The UN Directorate dumped a trillion dollars down the drain for that Quadrail station, for no better reason than so they could pretend they were important when they traveled around the galaxy.”
Her eyes widened with sudden understanding. “You’re the one who blew the whistle, aren’t you?”
“Damn straight I did,” I growled. “Between the faked resource reports and the carefully prepped enthusiasm of the colonists, you’d have thought Yandro was the next Alaska. I couldn’t let them get away with that.”
“Alaska?”
“The northernmost state of the Western Alliance,” I told her. “Formerly called ‘Seward’s Folly’ after the man who purchased it a couple of centuries ago for a lot of cash that most people thought was being thrown down a frozen mud hole. The ridicule lasted right up until they discovered all the gold and oil reserves.”
“You don’t think that could happen with Yandro?”
I shook my head. “The reports they released to the public were masterfully done. But I got hold of the real ones, and you could literally hear the increasing desperation of the evaluators as they came closer and closer to the end of their survey and still couldn’t find anything valuable enough to make it worth exporting in any serious quantities.”
“I can see why the UN would be upset with you,” she murmured.
“Oh, they were upset, all right,” I agreed bitterly. “And the public was pretty upset with them right back. For a while. Problem was, they weren’t upset long enough for anything to actually get done about it. The Directorate made a big show of firing a few scapegoats, denied personal responsibility six ways from Sunday, and waited for the ruckus to die down for lack of interest. Then they quietly went ahead and signed up for the station anyway. With their friends and supporters getting most of the contracts for the materials and construction modules, I might add.”
“And then they made sure you paid for your opposition,” she said quietly. “I’m sorry.”
I shrugged, forcing my throat to relax. “It’s okay,” I assured her. “I’m over it.”
Which was a lie, of course. Even after all this time, just talking about it was enough to twist my blood vessels into macramé.
A Spider stepped up to our table, holding a tray with the frothy soda crèmes I’d ordered. “We’ve got raspberry and Jurian shisshun,” I told Bayta as I lifted the tall glasses onto the table. “Which one do you want?”
She chose the raspberry, and we settled down to eat in silence I wasn’t in the mood for more conversation, and she was either feeling likewise or was too busy communing with her Spider friends to spare me any attention.
It wasn’t until we were heading back toward the platform that I belatedly noticed that her question about my career had completely sidetracked my plan to find out something about her.
The train bound for the Grakla Spur was, not surprisingly, considerably shorter than the one we’d taken to Jurskala, reflecting the smaller volume of traffic and cargo involved. The Spiders had another double first-class compartment set aside for us, and we were settling in when the door chimed and a conductor paused in the doorway long enough to hand Bayta a data chip. “That the information on Rastra and JhanKla?” I asked as she pulled out her reader.
“The conductor didn’t know, but I assume so,” she said, plugging in the chip and peering at the display. “Yes, it is,” she said, handing it to me.
I glanced down the directory. “I don’t see anything here on the two Halkas who jumped me in the interrogation room.”
“They probably haven’t had time to pull that together yet.”
I grimaced. Still, half a loaf, and all that. “What’s happening with the Bellidos?”
“Two of them have the compartment just behind ours,” she said slowly “The other three have gone to the last of the third-class coaches.”
“We’ll want their profiles and history too,” I said. “Better add that to the Spiders’ things-to-do list.”
“All right,” she said, swaying momentarily for balance as the Quadrail started up. I looked past her at the display window, but there were only a few wandering drones on that side of our track. “I can talk to the stationmaster at the next stop,” she went on. “But it’s only four days to Sistarrko. They may not be able to get the data collected before then.”
“That’s all right,” I said, sitting down in the lounge chair. “I’ve got plenty to read already. You want to join me?”
“No, thank you,” she said, turning toward the door. “I’ll be in my compartment if you need me.”
“Hold it,” I said, reaching over and touching the switch that opened the wall between our rooms. “Let’s not use the corridor any more than necessary, okay? There are nosy neighbors down the hall.”
“Oh,” she said. “Right.” Stepping past me, she went into her compartment, pointedly tapping the control on her own wall as she passed it. I waited until the wall had closed; then, changing my mind, I got up from the chair and crossed over to the bed instead. Throwing my carrybags up onto the rack, I dimmed the lights, propped myself comfortably on the pillow, and started to read.
Given the haste with which the Spiders had thrown together the information package, I hadn’t expected anything too extensive or startling. I wasn’t disappointed. Rastra had been born to a good if not really highly placed family and had risen through the ranks of Guardians until he showed talent in mediating conflicts, at which point he’d been promoted to Resolver. He’d risen through the ranks there, too, being assigned to increasingly important posts until he’d been promoted to Falc and been given his current Resolver-at-large position, going wherever his government needed him. The Spiders had included his last five years’ worth of Quadrail travel, which confirmed he’d spent the past three months on the road with JhanKla, no doubt smoothing the High Commissioner’s path through the murky labyrinth of Jurian protocol.