Judgment at Proteus (34 page)

But that threat was long since past. Even if it hadn’t been, Minnario hardly held the controlling interest in the Modhran mind segment that had already been here on Proteus when he came over from the Quadrail.

Or was that even how it worked? The group mind concept sounded simple enough in theory, with the makeup of each mind segment continually changing as new walkers moved into or out of range, with each new bit of experience and information eventually rippling out to reach every segment as travelers carrying that information moved back and forth across the galaxy.

But the more I thought about the actual mechanics of how such a mind worked, the more tangled the whole thing got. Bayta and I were pretty sure the Modhri had established a new homeland on the Human world of Yandro, and we’d speculated that there was some kind of overall strategic or planning area centered in the mind segment there. But the details of how that actually worked were still pretty vague.

There was another possibility, of course, namely that the Modhri wasn’t actually on my side at all, but that this was some elaborate game designed to run us in circles until we dropped. But as I’d already told Bayta, I couldn’t for the life of me see any point in that. If the Modhri was working with the Shonkla-raa, Wandek and his buddies could have had us any time they wanted. They could certainly have snatched Bayta while she was sitting at Terese’s bedside with Minnario and Dr. Aronobal.

Besides, there was still the fact that if they wanted Bayta under their control, the simplest of all possible solutions was to scratch her with a piece of Modhran coral. Once a polyp colony had formed beneath her brain, they could sing their Modhri siren song and have her just walk into their lab, with no fuss, bother, or questions asked. No, whatever the Shonkla-raa knew about the Modhri in general, they had no idea that he was aboard Proteus.

But that blissful ignorance was about to come to an abrupt end. Even if my improvised explanation for the Modhri’s massed watchdog attack had managed to fool them, they were certainly already thinking and wondering. Add to it the soon-to-be-circulating tale of another watchdog miraculously pulling a semiconscious Nemut from an elevator to an emergency node, and that wondering would blossom into full-blown suspicion.

And once
that
happened, all one of them would have to do would be to find the nearest watchdog and hum his siren song. The Modhri might not want to draw attention to himself by activating all four hundred sixty-eight of his watchdog walkers, but I doubted the Shonkla-raa would be so worried about rocking the boat that far.

Bayta and I might be able to elude a couple dozen Shonkla-raa, or however many were aboard the station. There was no way we could elude them
and
four hundred watchdogs besides. An hour or two after Minnario arrived at the node, the Shonkla-raa would suddenly have themselves a brand-new army.

We absolutely had to be off Proteus before then.

I was still gnawing at the edges of the problem when Minnario’s comm suddenly vibrated in my pocket.

It was Emikai. An oddly confused-sounding Emikai. “Are you certain you are under suspicion of a crime?” he asked.

“I was spotted leaving the scene of a murder,” I said. “I also shot a
santra
with a couple of snoozers. Either one of those should have done the trick.”

“Apparently not,” he said. “Your name is not on any of the patroller search-and-detain lists.”

I frowned at Doug, who was back on his feet looking alertly up at me. “That’s impossible,” I said. “You sure you didn’t just miss it?”

“I did not miss anything,” he said sternly. “Nor did I have to. Your records and Bayta’s would have been automatically opened to patroller access as soon as your name was listed. Since those records are still blocked, you are clearly not on the list.”

I grimaced, feeling like a fool. Of course Wandek had kept me off the patroller lists. The last thing he wanted right now was for the patrollers to pick me up and hear my side of what had happened in Hchchu’s office. “So you got nothing?”

“Not entirely,” Emikai said. “Though I could not access individual records, I could search for all messages going through the system at the time she made her call.”

“Any torchferry reservations in the mix?”

“No,” he said. “Most of the messages were official notifications or internal equipment activations. The only one that struck me as being of interest was a message that had been sent to the laser for transmission to the Tube.”

I felt my blood go suddenly cold. Of course. Bayta hadn’t just booked us standby passage on the next torchferry, where the Shonkla-raa would undoubtedly be waiting for us to show up. She’d instead sent a message to the Spiders, telling them to come and get us.

Only it wouldn’t be ordinary Spiders who arrived on Proteus’s doorstep. Ordinary Spiders were genetically incapable of any sort of fighting, and with us trapped in the middle of a Shonkla-raa stronghold, Bayta would have called for someone who could fight.

Which meant she’d called for some defender Spiders.

I stared down at Doug, my stomach hardening into a knot. Back at the beginning of this war, I’d seen a large number of freshly created Modhran walkers take out a whole trainful of Spiders. More recently, on the super-express, I’d seen a single Shonkla-raa freeze a pair of defenders where they stood, while simultaneously taking on three Modhran walkers and Bayta and me and nearly killing all of us. If the Shonkla-raa tumbled to the Modhri’s presence on Proteus, not even a group of defenders would have a chance against them.

The Shonkla-raa had wanted Bayta and her symbiotic Chahwyn to experiment on. Now, it appeared, they were going to get a few Spiders as well.

And once they had controlling tones for the Spiders, the Modhri, and the Chahwyn, there would be nothing in the galaxy that could stand in their way. Nothing.

“Compton?”

I shook myself, forcing away that last image. It was a three-hour trip from the Tube to Proteus, with at least two and a half hours left since Bayta’s emergency message. We had that long to come up with a plan.

And maybe, just maybe, I had one. “Yes, I’m here,” I confirmed. “Are you still willing to help me?”

“In whatever way I can,” Emikai promised grimly. “Shall I have the patrollers launch a search for Bayta?”

I looked at Doug, raising my eyebrows questioningly. He gave a low woof and shook his head side to side. “Not worth it,” I told Emikai. “The people who took her will have long since gone to ground. Do you know if Proteus has any docking ports besides the thirty-three big torchliner docking stations around the edge?”

“Yes, there are also over two hundred small service ports scattered around the perimeter of the station,” he said. “They are designed to handle maintenance and construction vehicles.”

“And as the ports themselves are smaller than the docking stations, I assume the bays they open into are also smaller?”

“Again, correct.”

“Good,” I said. “Then here’s what I want you to do. You’ll need to start by going to Sector 25-C and Tech Yleli’s old neighborhood.”

I told him what it was I wanted him to do. To say he was dubious about the whole thing would have been a serious understatement. “I wish to help you,” he said stiffly when I’d finished. “I do not consider it help to be sent on a fool’s errand designed merely to keep me out of the way.”

“It’s not a fool’s errand,” I assured him. “It is an absolutely vital part of my plan.”

“Is it then designed to draw your enemies away from you?”

I took a deep breath. “Look, we don’t have time for long explanations. If you don’t want to help me, just say so, and I’ll do it myself.”

He rumbled into the comm. “I will do it,” he said.

“Thank you,” I said. “Now. I’m guessing Bayta’s sent for a transport to come from the Tube to get us. Obviously, it’s going to want to avoid all the fuss and bother of the main docking stations, which is why I asked about service bays.”

“How will we know which docking station it will arrive at?”

I grinned tightly. That one, at least, was now obvious. “It’ll be Bay 39,” I told him. “After you dump the package from Yleli’s in there, I want you to check up on Minnario. He should be in an emergency node on Floor 142, Sector 16-J, right down the hall from the local security nexus. If he’s able to travel, bring him to the docking bay and wait there for Bayta and me. Got all that?”

“Yes,” he said. “I trust you will eventually tell me meaning of all this?”

“If we make it through, you’ll get the full explanation,” I promised. “If we don’t, it won’t matter anyway. Get going, and watch yourself.”

“You, as well,” he said. “Farewell.”

I keyed off the comm and looked at Doug. “Well? You know where she is?”

He woofed and bobbed his head. “Good,” I said as I stood up. “Let’s go get her.”

SEVENTEEN

In theory, now that I knew I wasn’t on the Jumpsuits’ hunt-and-bag list, it should be safe for me to go back down to the public areas of the station, where there were bullet trains and glideways and all the other conveniences of home.

In actual practice, I had no intention of reentering polite society until I absolutely had to. Wherever Wandek had Bayta stashed, he would be sure to have someone planted in the local security nexus to watch the displays and alert him the minute I showed my face.

And so, with Doug leading the way, we set off across our nice, cozy jungle of pipes, filters, tanks, and high ceilings.

It was slow going. The walkways were designed to give convenient access to the equipment, not to facilitate cross-station travel, and there were a number of times when a path I was following simply dead-ended in a supporting wall or large piece of equipment. At each such T-junction I tried to figure out logically which direction would work best, but I quickly discovered that a flip of a coin would probably do equally well. The Modhri, who I gathered had never had any of his walkers in this particular part of the station, was no better at picking routes than I was.

But he was useful in other ways. Doug was all over the place, scouting ahead, sniffing out the various Fillies on duty and guiding me away from them, and making sure we stayed out of view of the occasional security camera.

Finally, we arrived at a single elevator that had been wedged like an afterthought between a pair of thruster-driven portable extension cranes. Again, Doug’s claws weren’t strong enough to push the proper floor buttons, but he was able to get up on his hind legs and indicate which ones we wanted. I pressed them, and we headed down. Two minutes later, the doors opened on a narrow, much lower-ceilinged version of the service area we’d just left. A between-floors maintenance crawlspace, I guessed. Doug led the way along a couple more walkways, between consoles and equipment that seemed considerably grimier than the ones upstairs, and we arrived at last beside a horizontal, two-meter-diameter cylinder raised another half meter up off the floor. Its metal surface exhibited the kind of steady vibration that suggested there were one or more fans operating inside. Yet another part of the ventilation system, apparently.

Doug continued on along a narrow pathway paralleling the cylinder. Ten meters later, we reached an outwardly curved wall with a small ventilation grille in it. Doug gave an expectant-sounding woof, and I went up to the wall and pressed my face to the grille.

And felt my throat tighten. Spread out fifteen meters below me were the cedar-covered roofs of a small collection of EuroUnion-style ski chalets. Directly across from my peephole, on the far side of the dome, I could see the wall painting of rugged Alpine mountains.

We were back at the medical dome.

Doug gave a soft, questioning woof. “Sure, why not?” I replied. “With Wandek’s planned frame-up no longer pinning me down, he’s trying to get back to his preferred approach of stealth and secrecy. But he’s also running on borrowed time, and he knows it.”

I leaned back and forth around the grille, studying the buildings and surrounding landscape as best I could from my current vantage point. As usual, there were a few Fillies moving between the buildings, but I could also see a couple of figures loitering within view of Terese’s old Building Eight. “That’s because he has no idea when I’ll pop up and try to take her away from him,” I continued, turning away from the peephole and looking around the area I was in.

Against one of the side walls I spotted a row of storage cabinets and headed over to check them out. “Or worse, I might manage to get Director
Usantra
Nstroo interested enough to call out the whole Jumpsuit contingent and start hunting them down. Ergo, rather than tuck her away in some anonymous apartment somewhere, he’s opted to get right to work figuring out what makes her tick. The only place with the proper equipment is a medical facility; and the only place where a Human patient won’t raise eyebrows and unwelcome curiosity is
this
medical facility.”

I reached the storage cabinets and opened the first. Inside was a collection of spare valves and fittings, plus a section devoted to replacement control cards. “Unfortunately, Wandek in a tearing hurry means we’re in a tearing hurry, too,” I said, moving to the next cabinet in line. Flexible ductwork in this one. “It also means we may have to wreck the whole building they’ve got her in if we’re going to make sure they don’t get away with any data worth having.” I went to the third cabinet and opened it.

Bingo. The entire upper section of the cabinet was crammed to the brim with tightly coiled power cables. “Okay, we’re in business,” I said, pulling out one of the coils. There was at least thirty meters there, I estimated. Perfect. “Now all we have to do is find a way through this wall,” I said, running my eye over the curved metal.

Unfortunately, the only opening I could see that was big enough for me to fit through was currently occupied by the far end of the two-meter cylinder. The one with all the driving fans inside it.

I chewed at the inside of my cheek. I could try working my way around the dome and see if I could find a more obvious way in. Alternatively, I could go down to the public area and just walk in past the receptionist. But the former would take time I didn’t have, and the latter would give the Shonkla-raa more warning than I could afford.