“To bed,” I repeated, leaning a little on the last word as I touched my ear in warning.
She swallowed visibly. “All right,” she said. Turning off the dit rec, she disappeared into the bedroom.
I shut off the lights and opaqued the walls and floor in the main room, then double-checked that the door was triple-locked. By the time I joined her she had similarly opaqued the bedroom wall and floor and was lying rigidly in the middle of the bed with the blanket and overblanket pulled up to her chin. I turned off the light, took off my shoes, and crawled in from the near side. “Mm—you smell good tonight,” I commented aloud for the benefit of listening ears as I maneuvered close to her.
She didn’t say anything, but just lay silently, her body as rigid as a board. Like me, she was still fully clothed. “Sorry about this,” I whispered in her ear. “But the bugs are still active. The ones in this room are over by the bathroom and closet, so we should be able to talk here without them listening in.”
“What do you want to talk about?” she whispered back.
“Let me start by telling you about my evening.”
I recounted everything that had happened, from the dinner to the play to my unplanned detour into the casino. When I had finished, she was silent so long that I wondered if she’d fallen asleep. Then she turned her head to put her lips by my ear. “Are you sure you didn’t touch the coral?”
“I’m positive,” I assured her.
“How can you be?” she demanded. “You said you blacked out for a second. Could you have touched it, then dried your hand on your jacket?”
I shook my head. “The coral where I was standing was deep enough for my cuff to have gone into the water, too. There’s no way I could have dried that off.” I turned my head a little and gazed down at the top of her head. “I think it’s about time you told me just what the hell is going on here, Bayta. Especially what the hell is going on with the coral.”
I felt her body stiffen. “I can’t tell you,” she said, the words coming out almost too quiet to hear. “Not yet. I’m sorry.”
“You may be sorrier than you think,” I warned. “I can’t protect you against danger I don’t understand.”
She hesitated, and I held my breath. But no. “The coral’s not dangerous if you don’t touch it,” she said. “That’s all I can say right now.”
Earlier, up on the surface, I’d thought about simply walking out on this mess. Now, after the eeriness of the casino, I was even more inclined to do so. And to take Bayta with me, whether she wanted to go or not.
But down deep, I knew it wouldn’t work. Whoever our mysterious enemies were, we were already in their sights. One way or another, we had to see this through. “Have it your way,” I said. “Just remember that your neck’s on the line here, too.”
She shivered. “I know,” she murmured. “What are we going to do?”
“We’re going to stick with Plan A, and try to get a look at what the Bellidos have been up to,” I said.
“Before or after you go to Modhra II with your friends to see the starfighters?”
It was usually hard to distinguish emotions in a whisper, but I had no trouble hearing the harshness in hers. “They’re not my friends, and I don’t give a damn about the starfighters,” I growled back. “What have you got against friends, anyway? Or do you just like to rub in the fact that I don’t have any?”
For a moment she didn’t speak. “How are you going to do it?” she asked at last.
I grimaced. For a moment there… But that was all right. I didn’t particularly want her friendship, either. “There’s an employees-only door up in the lodge near the airlocks that’s probably a ready room. I’ll sneak in after the main work force has left and get a suit.”
“Won’t that be dangerous?”
“Depends on whether the whole resort staff is in on the conspiracy or if it’s just the upper-crust elite who come here to play,” I said. “Anyway, assuming I get that far, and further assuming I have enough time in that bend of the tunnel with no one watching, I should be able to poke a small hole through the ice, take a quick look, seal it up, and be back in time for my ten o’clock appointment with Losutu.”
“And then you are going with him to Modhra II?”
“At the moment, I can’t see any plausible way to get out of it,” I said regretfully. “But I’ll say all the things he wants to hear and get back here as quickly as I can. With luck, we’ll be able to grab the afternoon torchferry to the Tube.”
She hissed out a sigh. Clearly, she wasn’t happy with any of this. “What do you want me to do?”
“That’s up to you,” I said. “You can stay here, or you can join the tour group and go ahead of me to the Balercomb Formations. That’s where Losutu’s going to drop me off, so if you do that we can ride back together on the bus.”
“I’ll go on the tour, I guess,” she said. “When does it leave?”
“Seven-half from the lodge,” I said. “I’ll already be gone, so you’ll have to get there on your own. You think you can handle it?”
“I made it to Earth and back on my own,” she said a little tartly.
“I know,” I said. “But everyone on Earth wasn’t out to get you.”
She shivered again. “I’ll be all right.”
“Good girl,” I said. “Did you get that message off to the Spiders?”
She nodded, her hair brushing against my cheek. “But we won’t get an answer before tomorrow.”
“Understood,” I said. “Where is it? I’d like to take a look.”
“On my reader, in the outgoing message folder.”
“Okay,” I said, gathering myself to slide back to the edge of the bed. “Try to get some sleep.”
“Are you coming back?” she asked.
“Of course,” I said, trying for a confidence I didn’t feel. “I was trained by one of the best, remember?”
“No,” she said hesitantly. “I meant… are you coming back now?”
I frowned in the darkness. “What?”
Her sigh was a breath of warm air against my skin. “I’m afraid,” she said simply. “I don’t want to be alone.”
I looked down again at the top of her head, wondering how much it had cost her pride to admit something like that.
Still, now that she mentioned it, I realized I didn’t especially want to be alone right now, either. “It’s okay,” I assured her, groping beneath the sheets to find and squeeze her hand. For once, she didn’t pull it away. “I’ll look at the message and check on a couple of other things, and then I’ll be right back.”
Her reader was on the desk by the computer. I turned it on, went through the convoluted access procedure she’d taught me, and found the message. I glanced over it, noting with approval that it was exactly what I’d asked her to send, then scrolled down to the encrypted version. Pulling out my own reader, I scanned her message in and keyed for an analysis. I watched the procedure long enough to confirm that it wasn’t a Halkan military encryption, then turned on the room’s computer and again skulked my way into the hotel’s food service records.
As with the previous day, only two Belldic breakfasts and midday meals had been ordered. The evening meals, however, were a different story. A total of twelve had been ordered and consumed, nine of them via room service.
Either Anos Mahf had suddenly developed an enormous appetite, or else our wayward Bellidos had finally arrived.
By the time I returned to my reader it had finished its analysis. Bayta’s code wasn’t related to anything Halkan, military or civilian, or to any of the known Cimman or Jurian or Human systems.
It was, however, the same pattern as the laser-code system I’d spotted and recorded aboard the Quadrail. The system the Bellidos had been using.
The suite’s refreshment center was well stocked with beverages of all sorts, all of them in nice sturdy glass bottles. Selecting two with a good size and heft, I turned off the computer and readers and returned to the bedroom.