“We’re splitting up,” I explained, thinking hard. Unfortunately, with that many walkers still wandering the station, following my plan of hopping off the train as it pulled out wasn’t going to gain us anything.
We were going to have to play it a little trickier.
“My team will remain aboard and deal with the walkers here, while the three of us switch to a different train,” Fayr told her. “A classic deception—”
“Which isn’t going to work,” I cut him off. “Bayta, can you get the door open while we’re moving?”
Her eyes widened still further. “The door to the outside?”
“We’re going to jump?” Fayr demanded, sounding as surprised as she did.
“Yes, and yes, and we haven’t got a choice,” I told them, touching the control to opaque the window. “If we just go back out onto the platform, the rest of the walkers will be right on top of us. Can you open the door, or can’t you?”
“No,” Bayta said, still clearly struggling to catch up with me. “But a Spider might be able—”
“Get one to the car door right away,” I ordered, scooping up my carrybags. “And it’s not the three of us, Korak Fayr, just Bayta and me. Considering the number of walkers aboard, your team’s going to need you here.”
He gazed at me, and I braced myself for his protest. But to my relief, he merely nodded. The fewer people involved in this kind of stunt, the better the chances it would work, and we both knew it.
From beneath us came the multiple thud of brakes releasing, and the Quadrail started to move. “Very well,” Fayr said, lifting his arms with the wrists crossed in a Belldic military salute. The flourish ended with his hands on his upper set of guns; and suddenly he drew them, flipping them around so that their grips faced me. “Here,” he said. “You may need these.”
There wasn’t time to ask what on Earth I might want with a set of plastic toy guns. I stuffed them inside my jacket, nodded a quick good-bye, and made for the corridor.
I wondered if I would ever see him again.
There was a conductor waiting when we arrived at the outer door. The Quadrail was already going too fast for comfort, but it was still picking up speed and any delay would only make it worse. “Bayta?” I called.
She didn’t reply; but a second later the corridor suddenly filled with a swirling slipstream of air as the door reluctantly irised open. I tossed out my carrybags, grabbed Bayta’s, and threw it after them. Then, wondering whether this was the stupidest thing I’d ever done in my life or merely one of the top ten, I grabbed her wrist and jumped.
We hit hard, the next few seconds becoming a swirl of confusion and dizziness and agony as we tumbled and rolled along the station floor. Eventually we came to a halt with me on my back and Bayta lying half on top of me. “You all right?” I asked, doing a quick inventory of my own bones and joints. My knees were aching fiercely as was my left shin and elbow, and every bit of exposed flesh felt like I’d caught a bad sunburn. But nothing seemed sprained or broken.
“I think so,” she murmured back. With a muffled groan, she started to get to her feet.
“No—stay down,” I said, grabbing her forearm and pulling her back down. Beside us, the Quadrail was still roaring along, still picking up speed. The last baggage car shot past, and I watched as the train angled up the slope and disappeared into the darkness of the Tube. The usual light show from the Coreline faded away, and only then did I cautiously raise my head a few centimeters to assess our situation.
If I’d planned this whole thing deliberately, I couldn’t have done a better job of it. We were in one of the service areas of the station, similar to the one we’d back-doored our way into at the Sistarrko Station after our mad-dash escape from Modhra 1. Two sets of tracks away, a large service hangar sat conveniently just opposite us. Barely three meters past the spot where we’d ended our tumble was a crisscrossing of tracks that would probably have left us with multiple broken bones if we’d landed there instead of where we actually had.
Most important of all, the passenger platforms and all those brooding walkers were a good kilometer and a half away.
“What now?” Bayta asked.
Abruptly, I realized I was still holding her pressed beside me. “We need to get aboard another train and get out of here,” I said, letting go of her arm. “Any chance of talking the Spiders into rigging a private train and bringing it out here to pick us up?”
“I don’t think so,” she said. “There’s a certain amount of momentum needed to get up the slope and through the atmosphere barrier. It usually requires the entire distance from the platform for a train to make it.”
“Even if the train consists of just an engine and a single car?”
“Even then.” She hesitated. “And even if we could, I’m not sure it would do any good. The walkers would surely see the train stop, figure out what had happened, and send warning messages ahead. We’d just have to face the same trouble at the next station. Unless,” she added thoughtfully, “we don’t stop at any other stations.”
“No, that wouldn’t help,” I said, shaking my head. “We still have to go through those stations, even if we don’t stop there. The walkers would message ahead and have their buddies either destroy the rails or throw debris onto the tracks. Maybe even throw themselves.”
“That can’t be,” she insisted. “Surely he wouldn’t waste all those walkers just for revenge.” She gazed down the tracks toward the platform, at all those Halkan Peers still milling around. “Unless this isn’t about revenge.”
I sighed. “It was staring us in the face as far back as when we were melting the sub free,” I told her. “That was where the Modhri should have thrown everything he had to try and keep us from getting off Modhra II and within range of his homeland coral beds on Modhra I. But he didn’t.”
“Yes, you mentioned that at the time,” Bayta said, her voice dark.
“And then afterward, after we got away, we were locked into a Quadrail train for four days,” I went on. “If it was vengeance he was after, why didn’t the walkers get together to hit us then?”
“Not enough time to organize?”
“That was what I thought, too,” I said. “Right up until we got to Jurskala and saw the number of walkers he’d gathered here.”
I waved a hand toward the distant platform. “The fact of the matter, Bayta, is that he didn’t particularly care whether we destroyed the Modhra coral beds or not. Not until someone got into the harvesting complex and realized we’d taken their records.” I took a deep breath. “Their export records.”
She stared at me, her eyes suddenly gone dead. “Oh, no,” she breathed.
I nodded. “He was already gone from Modhra when we hit it Bayta. Not all of him, certainly, and I’m sure Fayr’s people hurt him terribly when they wiped out the coral that was left there. But he’s moved enough of it to establish himself a brand-new homeland.
“Only this time we don’t know where it is.”
It seemed like a long time that we lay there, each of us wrapped in our own thoughts. “What about the records?” Bayta asked at last. “He must think we can locate the new homeland that way or he wouldn’t be trying so hard to stop us.”
“Possible, but I doubt it,” I said. “Fayr couldn’t even track the stuff bound for the Estates-General, and the homeland data will be scrambled a lot more. My guess is that he simply doesn’t want to take the chance.”
“We can still try,” she said, a spark of renewed spirit sifting in through the despair in her voice. “And the first thing we have to do is get out of here.”
“Absolutely,” I agreed, an idea starting to work its way through my still-throbbing skull. “You think you can get the Spiders to bring a few items to that hangar over there?”