Odd Girl Out by Timothy Zahn Read Free Book Online Page B

comfort for the person who gets to be the first blot on their record, is it?” I said icily.
    “No, sir, not really,” he conceded. “Let me call over to the stationmaster and get the Spiders looking for it over there.”
    Finally; the cue I’d been waiting for. “Don’t bother,” I growled. “We’ll go talk to him ourselves. Is the shuttle still at the docking station?”
    “Yes, sir,” the clerk said. “But there aren’t any outgoing passengers right now.”
    “It can make a special trip,” I said. “You owe me. Where can we leave our luggage?”
    “You can’t go back to the Tube,” the clerk said.
    “Why not?” I asked.
    For a second he fumbled, the mark of a man who had just said something that surprised even him and was searching madly for the reason why he’d said it. “Well, you’re here ,” he said at last. “I mean here , on this side of the station. You’ve already passed through Customs.”
    “So we’ll pass through again,” I said. “You don’t look all that busy.”
    “Well, no, sir, but that’s not the point. It’s just…” He trailed off, still looking confused.
    No doubt he was, and I could almost sympathize. Clearly, the man was a walker, a leftover from the days when the Modhri had actually cared about what happened in Yandro system. Just as clearly, the mind segment currently consisting of the polyp colonies in him and our fellow travelers didn’t want me out of his collective sight.
    Unfortunately for him, there wasn’t any official reason the official could point to forbidding me to go back to the Tube. And even the Modhri could only push his powers of rationalization so far. He could take over the man’s body, of course, but I didn’t think he was ready to go quite that far. “So where can we leave our luggage?” I asked again.
    The clerk’s lip’s compressed. “You can leave it here behind the counter,” he said, his face still working with the strange internal conflict going on inside him. “There’s no secure holding area this side of Customs.”
    “This’ll do fine,” I said. Shutting off my leash control, I picked up my bags and heaved them around the end of the counter, stacking them as far to the back as the narrow space allowed. “Give me your bags, Bayta.”
    Silently, she handed me her bags, and I added them to the pile. “Now you just need to check us back through,” I told the clerk.
    “Yes, sir.” Shutting down his terminal, he came out from behind the counter and crossed to the Customs counter five meters away. “I’ll need to see your IDs again.”
    We showed him our IDs and allowed his body scanner to do its work. “And we’ll want a double room when we get back,” I added as he reluctantly waved us through. “And sleeping rooms on the torchferry, of course.”
    “Of course,” the clerk said. His expression was mostly neutral, but there was a quiet watchfulness beneath it. Taking Bayta’s arm, I steered us through the doorway back into the outbound section of the transfer station.
    And as we did so, I threw a casual glance back at our fellow travelers.
    All six of them were watching us, their expressions a mix of concern and bemusement and sympathetic outrage for our unheard-of dilemma.
    But beneath it all, on every one of those faces, I could see a hint of the Customs official’s same quiet watchfulness.
    The Modhri wasn’t happy with me. Not a bit.
    Bayta was obviously thinking the same thing. “He knows what we’re up to, you know,” she murmured as we headed for the shuttle bay.
    “He thinks he knows what we’re up to,” I corrected. “The problem is, right now he can’t do anything about it.”
    “He could send his walkers after us,” she reminded me. “They all must have come up with rationalizations as to why they were getting off at Yandro in the first place. Surely they wouldn’t have any trouble coming up with equally good reasons to leave again.”
    “Right, but in order to do that, they’d have