Free The Domino Pattern by Timothy Zahn Page A

course.”
    Kennrick’s throat tightened. “You think this is funny, Compton?” he growled.
    “Not at all,” I assured him. “Which is Usantra Givvrac’s compartment?”
    “He hasn’t got one,” Kennrick said. “He’s in the first coach car behind the compartment cars.”
    I frowned, thinking back to our embarkation at Homshil Station. “And yet you escorted them aboard into a compartment car?” I asked. “Even though they had coach car seats?”
    “Into my compartment car. yes.” Kennrick said. “ Usantra Givvrac and a couple of the others had some documents they wanted stored in my compartment, and they wanted to drop them off on the way to their seats.”
    Which wasn’t proper procedure, since passengers were supposed to enter a Quadrail only through the door of their assigned car. Apparently, Kennrick and his Fillies didn’t have a problem with skirting the rules everyone else had to follow. “Whatever.” I said. “I’ll pick you up on my way back to talk to Tririn.”
    Silently, Kennrick left the compartment. As I closed the door behind him, I felt the movement of air that meant the connecting wall was opening. “You heard?” I asked, turning around.
    “Most of it.” Bayta said. She was dressed in her nightshirt and a thin robe, her dark hair tousled and unwashed. But her eyes were clear and awake. “He sounded upset.”
    “He looked upset, too,” I agreed. I let my eyes drop once to the figure semi-hidden beneath her robe, then forced my gaze back above her neckline where it belonged. Bayta was my colleague and ally in this war, nothing more, and I had damn well better not forget that. “What did you think of his suggestion that the cadmium might have been airborne?”
    She frowned. “Didn’t you already tell him that was ridiculous?”
    “In the way he was thinking about it, absolutely,” I agreed. “But he was trying to make it a careless accident. I’m wondering about it as a somewhat more careful murder.”
    “That still leaves the problem of why only Master Colix and Master Bofiv were affected,” she pointed out.
    “True, unless someone managed to uncork a bottle of eau de cadmium under the victims’ snouts,” I said. “Or maybe it was in the form of some cadmium compound that only Shorshians can absorb.”
    “I don’t know,” she said doubtfully. “There are toxins that target specific species, but those also get absorbed by everyone else. And most cadmium compounds are as toxic as the element itself, and to nearly all species to one level or another.”
    I raised my eyebrows. “Impressive.”
    She shrugged slightly. “I couldn’t sleep last night after I went to bed, so I did a little reading,” she explained. “The other problem is that since cadmium compounds are inherently poisonous, anything in a liquid or gaseous form should have been screened out by the station sensors.”
    “Maybe the killer brought the stuff aboard in component form,” I suggested. “The cadmium in, say, a battery or alloy, and the delivery chemical as something else.”
    “The sensors are supposed to watch for that sort of thing.”
    “ Supposed to being the key phrase.” I said. “Assuming something like that was done, could traces of it have gotten sucked into the car’s air filters?”
    “Certainly,” she said. “All the air in a car eventually travels through those filters.”
    I nodded. “It’s a long shot, but I think it’s worth checking out. What would it take to get into one of the air filters in that car?”
    “It’s not that simple,” Bayta said, her eyes unfocusing as she conferred with the Spiders. “There’s a whole mechanism that will have to be disassembled. I’ve sent four mites to start the job, but it’ll take a few hours.”
    “That’s okay,” I said. “Have them contact you when they’re almost done.”
    “All right,” she said. “Are we going to go talk to Master Tririn now?”
    “Or we could stop and have some breakfast first,” I