For the moment, at least, we were safe.
EIGHTEEN:
It was another four days back along the Grakla Spur to Jurskala, and for every minute of each of those days I fully expected the Modhri—or whatever was left of him—to make his move.
But the Quadrail made its stops, picked up and dropped off its passengers and moved on, and nothing happened. It was as if with the destruction of the homeland branch the other outposts and walkers had gone completely dormant.
Fayr didn’t believe it for a minute. “He’s planning something,” he declared two days into the trip as we pulled out of one of the Cimman stations on our way back toward Jurian space. “He surely won’t allow such an attack to succeed without at least an attempt at retribution.”
In principle, I agreed. Still, whatever desires for vengeance the Modhran remnant might be feeling, the fact was that we’d gotten out of the Sistarrko system about as fast as anyone could, and he was now up against the purely practical problem of coming up with a plan on the fly.
Of course, it wasn’t something he had to rush on. Even if Bayta was right about him not yet having infiltrated Earth and the Confederation, that still left damn few places where the walkers couldn’t get to us whenever they wanted to.
Still, while we continued to keep an eye over our shoulders, the four days ended up being completely uneventful. What the rest of the Bellidos back in second and third class did to fill the hours I never found out, but the three of us in first spent much of it listening to each other’s stories.
For Fayr, it had started several years earlier when the Belldic intelligence service had discovered secret dealings going on between the Spiders and the Tra’ho’sej. The Bellidos had investigated, eventually digging up a trail leading to the Modhra Binary and the discovery of some kind of influence emanating from it. The Tra’ho’sej themselves had been in the middle of setting up some kind of military operation when they suddenly and inexplicably abandoned it.
The Bellidos, now more than merely curious, had tried to pick up the operation. But instead of simply following their own leads, the heads of the investigation had made the fatal mistake of contacting their counterparts in the Tra’ho intelligence community in hopes of getting inside information. Naturally, they’d gone to the Tra’ho’sej with whom they had the closest professional and personal relationships, and Modhran thought-viruses had done the rest. In rapid succession the upper levels of Belldic intelligence had fallen to the silent invasion, followed by the military leaders who controlled them, followed by the political leaders to whom they all reported. For the Modhri, it was just one more conquest, one more potential threat that had been eliminated.
Or so he thought. What he hadn’t realized was that the Belldic intelligence service was a strongly compartmentalized organization, consisting of many independent groups that had for centuries maintained their own identities for historical reasons that were only vaguely remembered. Fayr had been in one of those groups, and as he and some of the others had noticed odd behavior and decisions from their superiors they had started a fact-finding mission of their own.
They’d also attempted to contact the Spiders. The Spiders hadn’t been very enthusiastic, apparently still smarting over their failure with the Tra’ho’sej. Still, they had given the group some logistical support, including the encryption system I’d seen Fayr use with his pulse laser communications aboard the Quadrail. The Bellidos had moved with careful deliberation, bringing spices and gourmet foods and high-end electronics to Sistarrko over a period of two years as they studied the situation, building up their network of trading partners and black market contacts in the system for the time when they would be ready to make their move. They’d also sent members of the team to the Modhran resort, who mingled with the rich and powerful and scouted out the battle zone.
Fortunately for them, many of the resort’s patrons were of the newly rich and powerful whom the Modhri hadn’t yet had a chance to infect, which meant the uninfected Bellidos didn’t completely stand out of the crowd. By the time Fayr launched Phase Two, the theft of the resort maintenance sub, the infiltrators had become so much a part of the general background that the Modhri apparently couldn’t even figure out which species had been responsible.
As for me, I’d caught Fayr’s attention on the very first leg of my Quadrail journey. He had taken a seat in the hybrid passenger/baggage car so that he could keep an eye on their final shipment of antique jewelry, and his suspicions had been aroused when the Spiders unceremoniously promoted everyone except me up to the next car. When he’d subsequently seen Bayta slip back there, then discovered the door to the car had been locked, his suspicions had turned to near-certainty. By the time we reached New Tigris and he saw us head straight up to first class, he had concluded that the Modhri had ferreted out his plot. When Bayta and I had disembarked at Kerfsis, he’d taken four of the group and followed, sending the rest of the team on ahead with the jewelry to make the final arrangements on Sistarrko. When we’d returned to the Quadrail in the company of a high Jurian official, he’d made sure to place his three commandos in the rear coach where they could alert him if I made any movement out of the Peerage car.
His theory had then done a screeching bootlegger reverse when he’d spotted the conductor slipping me that data chip in the first-class bar. That had quieted his fears that I was a Modhran walker, but now he was faced with the possibility that the Spiders were launching an operation of their own that could easily blunder into his plan and wreck them both. Rather than take that risk, he had me waylaid on my way back to the Peerage car and stuffed in the spice crate where I would hopefully be out of the way long enough for his team to finish their job.
It hadn’t worked, though, and from that point on we’d been rather informal and slightly problematic allies, right up to the moment when he’d eavesdropped on the conference room conversation via the remora transceiver still in my pocket and decided I was worth the risk of rescuing.
We also spent a lot of time going over the data chips his people had taken from the harvesting complex. There were three of them, all of a slightly non-standard size which only Bayta’s reader could accept. They were also copy-proofed, which meant we had to either take turns sifting through the numbers or else stare at them over each other’s shoulders.
None of the staring did us much good. The Halkas had been shipping out Modhran coral for nearly a hundred fifty years, though these particular records only went back the last ten of those. Even so, that turned out to be a lot of coral. Fayr, we now learned, had agreed to the data raid in the first place because he’d hoped there might be a way to identify the Belldic outpost and walker colonies. But there turned out to be so many transfers and middleman operations that we couldn’t even be sure where all the coral had gone, let alone who might have come in contact with it.
My reasons for wanting the data I kept to myself. There was no point in worrying the others until I was sure.
And so matters stood when we reached Jurskala. Again, I expected some sort of reception to be waiting. Again, the Modhri was apparently still a couple of steps behind us. If that held until we made it aboard our next Quadrail, maybe I could relax a little.
It was as we went to check the schedule that the secret I’d been carrying since the New Pallas Towers finally caught up with me.
“No,” Fayr said firmly, gesturing at the floating holodisplay. “Agreed, the Bellis Loop will take several extra days to bring you to your people. But it will depart from here in less than an hour, three hours earlier than the direct Quadrail to your own empire. Equally important, it will also permit us to stay together until we are clear of Jurian territory.”