Free Night Train to Rigel by Timothy Zahn Page A

between us.
    And if she didn’t know about it, at least whoever wanted to kill me would get a two-for-one deal. For whatever comfort that was worth.
    Chapter Six
    The traffic at Kerfsis Station, though light by Jurian standards, was still far more impressive than that of any of the human stations we’d passed through, including Terra. A good sixty of us filed off the various cars of our Quadrail, with an equal number on the platform waiting to board. Most were Juriani, but there were a handful of other species as well. Bayta and I were the only two humans in sight.
    We were heading across the platform toward the first-class shuttle when I spotted a pair of Halkas emerging from one of the third-class cars at the far end of the train. They were too far away for me to see the subtleties of their faces, but their rolling gait definitely reminded me of my late-night visitors. Taking Bayta’s arm, I angled us through the crowd in their direction.
    “Where are we going?” Bayta asked. “We’re supposed to take the first-class shuttle.”
    “I know,” I said, picking up my pace a little.
    But either the Halkas spotted me on their tail or else they were in a hurry of their own. Before we’d covered even half the distance, they reached the third-class shuttle and disappeared down the hatchway.
    “We need to take the first-class shuttle,” Bayta repeated, more emphatically this time.
    For a moment I toyed with the idea of ignoring protocol and staying with the Halkas instead. But the Juriani were sticklers for their particular rules of etiquette and protocol, and they looked very disconcertingly down those hawk beaks of theirs at anyone who dared to break those rules. Bayta and I were first-class passengers, and we belonged on the first-class shuttle, and there would be genteel hell to pay if we tried to hitch a ride elsewhere. It didn’t seem worth that kind of grief, especially since all the passengers would be regrouping a few minutes from now anyway in the transfer station’s customs area. “Right,” I said, and turned us back toward our shuttle.
    Like everyone else in the galaxy who could afford them, the Juriani used Shorshic vectored force thrusters for their artificial gravity. That meant an actual stairway inside the shuttle, which meant I could hang on to my carrybags instead of handing them over to an automated system that would leave my hands free to maneuver down a ladder. Considering what had happened to my luggage the last time they’d been out of my sight, I was just as glad to be able to keep track of them this time.
    I’d been looking for signs of the Spiders’ sensor array as I climbed into the Tube back at Terra Station. I looked just as closely now as I went down the stairs into our shuttle, with no better success. Wherever the Spiders were hiding it, they were hiding it well.
    The Jurian sensor system, in contrast, was at the complete other end of the subtlety scale. As our three shuttles glided toward the transfer station, we passed beneath a pair of compact battle platforms, each with a massive sensor array and a matched set of docked starfighters standing ready in case of trouble.
    Fortunately, there wasn’t any. Our shuttle docked with the station, and a few minutes later we filed into the entry-point lounge. “Are we going through?” Bayta asked, craning her neck to look over the crowd at the customs tables at the far end.
    I studied the wide exit doorways in the wall behind the tables. There were almost certainly layered sets of fine-scan sensors up there, and I wondered briefly whether they would be good enough to pick up the Saarix hidden in my bags.
    Fortunately, we weren’t going to have to find out just yet. “No need,” I told her. “We’re not staying, remember?”
    “I thought you wanted to see the security procedures.”
    “I’ve seen enough,” I said, scowling as I looked around. There was no sign of the two Halkas I’d been trying to chase down earlier. Had their