Night Train to Rigel by Timothy Zahn Read Free Book Online

reader to my pocket. In the absence of any move against me during the voyage from Earth, I’d begun to wonder if his death might have been a bizarre coincidence, the result of some random crime that had nothing to do with me.
    Now it was looking like whoever was behind his murder had simply been biding his time.
    Only here it wouldn’t be just me who went down. Depending on what percentage of the packing material was Saarix-5, there could be enough there to kill every oxygen-breather within ten meters. If my assailant set it off in the enclosed space of a Quadrail car, the effects would go even farther.
    Which led to another interesting question. Namely, how had this little conjuring trick been performed in the first place? The only time the bags had been out of my sight after leaving the transfer station was right after we’d docked, as the passengers climbed up the ladder and the shuttle’s conveyer system pulled the luggage from the racks and shoved them up into the Tube after us. The sheer mechanics required for someone to insert a pair of booby traps in such a brief time was bad enough. What was worse was why the Spiders’ sensors hadn’t picked up on it.
    Or maybe they had picked up on it. Maybe that was why that drudge had swooped down on me and walked off with the bags. But then why hadn’t they detained me, or kicked me off the Quadrail, or at least removed the Saarix?
    Unless it was the drudge itself that had gimmicked them.
    I stared at the bags, a hard knot forming in my stomach. The Spiders had been running the Quadrail with quiet efficiency for at least the past seven hundred years. In all that time there had never been a report of conflict among them, which had naturally led to the conclusion that they were a monolithic culture with no factions, disagreements, or rivalries.
    But what if that wasn’t true? What if there were factions, only one of which wanted me to investigate this impending interstellar war? In that case, there might be another group seriously opposed to the idea of airing their secrets to a lowly human, especially a lowly human whose own government wanted nothing to do with him.
    They might even be opposed enough to look for a permanent way to make sure that didn’t happen.
    Gathering up the material I’d scraped out. I began stuffing it back beneath the grip. Bayta could return at any moment, and if she didn’t already know about the Saarix this wasn’t the time to break the news to her. If she did know, it was even more vital that she didn’t find out I was on to the scheme. It would have been nice if I could have disabled the receiver or capacitor, but a properly designed detonator came with built-in diagnostics, and I didn’t have the equipment to trick the gadget into giving itself false readings. If my would-be poisoner found out I’d neutralized this particular threat he would just come up with a different one, and it was always better to face a trap you knew about than one you didn’t.
    I was sitting in the lounge chair, skimming through a colorful computer brochure on Quadrail history, when Bayta returned with the onion rings.
    “Thanks,” I said, taking the basket from her. The aroma reminded me of a batch I’d had once in San Antonio. “Have one?”
    “No, thank you,” she said, stepping back to the middle of the floor. “Have you come up with a plan yet?”
    “I’m still in the information-gathering phase,” I said, crunching into one of the rings. They tasted like the San Antonio ones, too. “For starters, I want you to ask the Spiders for a list of situations under which weapons are allowed aboard Quadrails.”
    “I can answer that one,” she said. “Personal weapons like Belldic status guns can be put in lockboxes at the transfer station, which are then stowed in inaccessible storage bins beneath the cars. Larger weapons and weapons systems can be sent by cargo Quadrail only with special governmental permits.”
    “Yes, I know the official