My last act before crawling under the blankets was to set my reader on “record” and prop it up in the window. Just in case.
I slept long and deep and awoke ravenously hungry. I checked the other compartment, found Bayta already up. I had a quick shower and shave, and together we went back to the dining car.
None of the Bellidos were there at the moment. Bayta’s Spider friends reported to her that the two in first class had already eaten and returned to their compartment, while the ones back in third had eaten in shifts. I kept an eye on the handful of Halkas in the room wondering if JhanKla had put someone on our tail straight from the last station, or whether he’d just sent a message on ahead.
But no one seemed to be taking any particular interest in us. Which didn’t prove anything one way or the other, of course.
We finished eating and returned to my compartment, where we spent a few minutes sifting through the tourist brochures on the Modhra resort and discussing what exactly we would do when we got there.
Surprisingly, the choice of lodging turned out to be our biggest sticking point. Bayta wanted to take the lodge on the surface, where we would have a view of Modhra II and the gas giant Cassp, while I pushed equally hard for the underwater hotel JhanKla had mentioned. Eventually, Bayta gave in, though clearly not happily, and stalked back to her own compartment.
When the wall between us was closed again, I checked my reader to see if the Bellidos had transmitted any more secret messages during the night. They hadn’t.
The rest of the trip passed uneventfully. Bayta stayed alone in her compartment most of the time, joining me only for meals, and I did what I could to catch up on my sleep and healing.
It was only as I was repacking my carrybags in preparation for our arrival at Sistarrko that it belatedly occurred to me that information wasn’t the only thing I should have asked the Spiders for when this whole thing had started.
I should also have asked for a gun.
ELEVEN:
JhanKla had described Sistarrko as a minor colony system, but from the size and design of its transfer station I would have guessed it to be more along the lines of a regional capital like Kerfsis. From the size of the two warships that had silently escorted us in from the Tube, I would have put it even higher than that.
Of course, the system was the home of the famous Modhran coral, and an up-and-coming tourist center to boot. Maybe that explained it.
Maybe.
We made it through customs without incident, the Saarix in my carrybag grips whispering right past their sensors. I didn’t spot any of the Bellidos, but that wasn’t surprising. The Halkas had separate customs areas for the different traveling classes, and I’d already seen how this bunch shifted class and status without batting a whisker. They were probably two levels below us, working their humble way through the third-class stations.
And of course, after they did that, they’d be getting their genuine status guns out of their lockboxes. The next time I faced them, they would be fully armed.
What a lovely thought.
Like Quadrail Tubes everywhere in the galaxy, the Grakla Spur cut through Sistarrko’s outer system, in this case just outside Cassp’s orbit. That would put the Modhra resort at a considerable distance from the station for much of any given decade, which I suspected would cause trouble for the tourist logistics a few years down the line. Fortunately, at the moment the planet was nearly at its closest approach, which meant the travel time would be measured in hours rather than days. The transport rep directed us to the proper departure lounge, where we found a fifty-passenger short-haul torchferry waiting, and we climbed aboard with thirty fellow travelers. I’d expected at least one of the Bellidos to join the party, if only to keep an eye on us, but none of them did.
We took off in a blaze of superheated heavy-ion plasma, and five hours later reached the delicately ringed gas giant. Shutting down the drive well clear of Modhra I’s icy surface, we switched to Shorshic vectored force thrusters, and a few minutes later settled gently onto the light-rimmed landing pad.
The view was everything JhanKla had promised. Bulging up over the resort area’s horizon, Cassp had the same turbulent cloud bands and thousand-kilometer-wide storms as Jupiter and Saturn back in Sol system, but with a wider range of coloration than either of those two worlds. Its ring system was at least as impressive as Saturn’s, as well, with much of it extending well past us. Overhead, Modhra II moved across the sky, a glistening ball of stone and ice arcing its way along the Modhra Binary’s common orbit.
As an extra bonus, some quirk of celestial mechanics had put the Modhras’ combined orbit at right angles to Cassp’s ring system. That meant that as the two moons moved around their combined center of gravity, our view of the rings shifted from slightly above to a straight edge-on view to slightly below, then rose back through them again. It made for an ever-shifting, ever-changing panorama that all by itself would probably have justified the development of the place as a tourist getaway.
The lodge-style building we set down beside was a sprawling copy of an ancient Halkan High Mountain fortress, complete with distinctive star-shaped turrets. The modern airlock entrances spoiled the illusion a bit, but neither of the two moons was large enough to hold much atmosphere. Bayta and I joined the rest of the passengers in climbing into the torchferry’s vac suits, and a few minutes later we all headed out across the frozen surface.
The lodge’s interior décor was High Mountain style, too, with several centuries’ worth of Halkan armor replicas standing in front of equally ancient wall hangings. The motif was carried even to the check-in procedure, which was handled by desk clerks in half-scale mail instead of by self-serve computer terminals. When our turn came I asked about the underwater hotel and was directed to a bank of ornate elevators waiting across the entry foyer. We joined five of the other guests, and fifteen minutes later emerged into the hotel lobby and what could only be described as an undersea wonderland.
The whole place was decorated with a graceful mixture of wispy sea plants and multicolored rock, all overlaid with a filigree of ice and frozen sea foam. Large convex windows showcased the view here beneath Modhra’s ice cap, illuminated by an array of floodlights. JhanKla had said these oceans ran up to five kilometers deep, but the resort had been built in one of the shallower areas, and some of the famous Modhran coral ridges could be seen snaking their way across the ocean floor below.
The desk clerks here were dressed in outfits that looked vaguely mermaid and merman, though I couldn’t remember any such legends in any Halkan mythos. The single-room rates were outrageous enough, but the two-room suite we needed was astronomical, far beyond what I had in any of my cash sticks. The Spiders hadn’t thought to include any actual money with their Quadrail pass, which left me no option but to put the room on my credit tag. I did so without actually wincing, though I suspected there would be all sorts of unpleasant future ramifications for this kind of unauthorized usage.
But then, according to Bayta, odds were I’d be dying here anyway. No future; no future ramifications; no worries. I signed the authorization, and we were directed to the elevator for one final descent.
Our suite wasn’t quite as luxurious as JhanKla’s Peerage car. But it was lavish enough, and the view beat the car hands down. We were on the hotel’s lowest level, with a transparent floor and two transparent corner walls giving us a spectacular wraparound view of the rippling water and coral ridges below. In the center of the room a pair of couches faced each other over a glowing fire pit—artificial, of course, but very realistic. There were two comfortable lounge chairs and six carved wooden uprights, the latter group arranged around a similarly carved wooden dining/conference table. Set against the two nontransparent walls were a computer desk and a huge entertainment center.