At each stop I stood at the compartment window, watching the arriving passengers and trying to gauge which of them might be Modhran walkers. It was a pretty futile exercise; if the walkers themselves didn’t know what they were, I didn’t have much hope of figuring it out. Still, Bayta had suggested it was the rich and powerful who were first targeted, and the farther we got from Jurskala the more infrequent the first-class travelers seemed to become.
Unfortunately, there was enough traffic in the corridor outside our door to show that the first-class compartments remained full, and first-class passengers of any species were automatically suspect.
And then, of course, there was McMicking.
I had had serious reservations about sharing my compartment with him right from the start, but once the Quadrail left the station there wasn’t much I could do about it. Our dramatic entrance to the train might have been quickly forgotten by the rest of the passengers; but on the other hand, it might not. I couldn’t simply cut McMicking loose after he’d publicly attached himself to us the way he had, particularly since he probably didn’t have a ticket for any of the other seats on the train. We were stuck with each other until we got to Terra Station, and would just have to make the best of it.
Not that he was a particularly unpleasant guest. On the contrary, once I got over my initial annoyance at being scammed I found him to be a reasonable enough traveling companion. He made a point of taking walks several times a day, going up and down the train to keep tabs on what was happening, at the same time giving Bayta and me a little breathing space. Occasionally, when we were all together and the right mood struck him, he would tell a story about his life as a bounty hunter.
Three days later, we pulled into Kerfsis Station, the last big colony system before Earth. Given the trouble we’d had the last time through, I half expected to find Major Tas Busksha waiting on the platform with a warrant in hand for my arrest. But we pulled out again without incident, and I finally began to feel some of the tension draining away. After Kerfsis came Homshil, a transfer point where several cross-galaxy lines intersected, and beyond that there were only two more stops in Jurian space, both of them small outpost colonies not much further along in their development than New Tigris or Yandro. Twenty-three hours and five stops from now, we would be pulling into Terra Station and as safe a haven as we were likely to find anymore in the galaxy.
We were two hours short of Homshil when it all went straight to hell.
“… and a bowl of frisjis-broth soup,” I told the Spider at the dining car carry-away counter. I was, in fact, getting royally sick of frisjis, and I’d only had it three times since leaving Jurskala. But the medical section of my encyclopedia said it helped promote tissue regeneration in Jurian burn victims, which meant we were pretty well stuck with it.
The Spider dipped its globular body slightly in acknowledgment and headed back into the service area. I stepped away from the counter and took a seat at an empty table nearby. Now that we were almost to Earth, it was time to start thinking about what we were going to do once we got there. The Modhri may have been content to leave humanity alone up to now, but my guess was that that neglect was about to come to an abrupt end.
The problem was that the very quality that had made me a good candidate for the Spiders in the first place was now going to work against me. I had no close contacts, personal or professional, with anyone in the government, certainly no one who would listen to me. Hardin was the only influential person I knew, and I could just hear what he would say if I trotted an insane story like this in front of him.
Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a glimpse of movement as someone stepped to my side. Sighing, I settled my face into kindly physician mode and ran my concerned-physician spiel through a quick update. Most of the Jurskala passengers who had seen me bring Bayta aboard were long gone, but there were still a few aboard, at least one of whom cornered me for updates whenever he spotted me out and about. “Yes?” I asked mildly as I looked up.
But it wasn’t an inquisitive passenger. It was, in fact, the last person I would have expected to see.
“Well, well,” Losutu growled, his voice dark and sarcastic as he glared down at me like a summer thundercloud. “Look who we have here.”
“Director Losutu?” I gasped, scrambling quickly to my feet. Beyond his glare I saw Applegate hurrying toward us from the bar section, a look of consternation on his face. “What are you doing here?”
“I could ask you the same question,” he bit back. “I’d have thought the Halkas would have you strapped to a torture rack by now.”
I just shook my head, my brain frozen with the impossibility of it. Fayr had gotten us to Sistarrko Station in time to catch the first Quadrail out of the system, and even with the extra three-hour delay in our departure from Jurskala there was no way Losutu and Applegate could have caught up with us via a later connection from Modhra.
Which meant they must have been aboard the same trains with us the whole way. But how could they have gotten to Sistarrko Station ahead of our borrowed torchferry?
“I don’t know what possessed you to participate in such an insane venture,” Losutu was saying, in full chew-out mode now. “Applegate told me you—”
“Sir, please,” Applegate cut him off urgently as he came up to him. “Not here. I told you—”
“And I’m tired of listening,” Losutu snapped, sparing him a brief glare before turning his attention back to me. “I’m waiting, Compton. Give me a reason why I shouldn’t turn you over to High Commissioner JhanKla right here and now.”
I felt my heart try to seize up. “High Commissioner JhanKla?”
“We just left his Peerage car,” Losutu said, and even through his anger I could hear the self-satisfaction that he’d been afforded such an honor. “He was kind enough to give us a ride from Sistarrko Station after Superintendent Prif Klas ordered us off Modhra.”
“And who then called the other warship in from the transfer station to take you to the Tube,” I said as it finally came together. No wonder we hadn’t had any trouble with that second Halkan warship; it had been pressed into transport duty to get Losutu and Applegate to the Quadrail in time to shadow us. And of course, sneaking up around the back of the Tube as we had, we hadn’t seen that it was missing from its post.
“And thanks to you, we’ll be lucky if the Halkas don’t block our purchase of those Chaftas,” Applegate put in indignantly. “You’ve wrecked an entire diplomatic initiative—”
“Forget the Chaftas,” Losutu cut him off. “I’m still waiting for Compton’s explanation about Modhra.”
“Yes, sir,” Applegate said. “But again, we shouldn’t be discussing this out in the open. Perhaps the High Commissioner would permit us to continue the discussion in the Peerage car.”
“I’m sure he would,” I said, my brain finally starting to kick into gear. “But there’s no reason for us to go all the way back there. I have a very comfortable compartment two cars forward.”
“No,” Applegate said sharply before Losutu could answer.
A UN deputy director, I suspected, was not used to having his decisions made by underlings. “What did you say?” Losutu asked ominously.
Applegate flicked a look at me, the wrinkles around his eyes deepening briefly as if he were just as startled as Losutu that he’d spoken out of turn. “My apologies, sir,” he said. “But the High Commissioner needs to be a part of any conversation that deals with the Modhran attack.”