Night Train to Rigel Read Free

already snugged up to them, ready to pick up incoming passengers. Another ten or twelve of the cargo hatches were similarly occupied, which meant there must be at least one freight train arriving soon as well. Cargo was the true economic backbone of the operation, of course, given that the Quadrail carried every gram of trade that passed among the galaxy’s thousands of inhabited star systems. Passenger transport was nice to have, but in the larger scheme of things I suspected all of us together barely registered as a footnote on the Spiders’ balance sheet.
    Our shuttle eased past a drifting maintenance skiff and zeroed in on a hatch marked with bright lavender lights, rolling over to press its upper surface against the alien metal. There was a click of lockseals, and the shuttle’s dorsal hatch slid open. Sensing the presence of air against it, the station’s hatch irised open in response, and the passengers unfastened their restraints and floated their way into a civilized line at the ladder.
    The information cards everyone received with their tickets emphasized the fact that, unlike the transfer station’s rotational pseudogravity or the Shorshic-style vectored force thrusters that everyone else in the galaxy used, the Tube’s system of artificial gravity began right at the inner edge of the entrance hatch. But there was always one idiot per shuttle who hadn’t bothered to read the directions. Ours was six people ahead of me, floating with brisk confidence up alongside the ladder and then abruptly changing direction as his head poked through the hatch and the Tube’s gravity grabbed him and shoved him straight back down again. On his next try, he made sure to hang on to the ladder the whole way up like he was supposed to.
    And a minute later, for the first time in over two years, I was standing inside the greatest engineering feat the universe had ever known.
    The station’s general layout was prosaic enough, and aside from the fact that it was built into the inside of a huge cylinder, it would have felt right at home beside any Earth-bound train or monorail yard. There were thirty sets of four-railed tracks spaced evenly around the surface, with groups of elegantly designed buildings set between them that functioned as service centers, maintenance facilities, restaurants, and waiting rooms for passengers transferring between different lines.
    Why four rails were needed per track was one more mystery in the Quadrail’s stack of unanswered questions. Two rails this size were required for physical stability, and a third could be explained if power was being run to the trains from an external source. But no one could figure out why the system needed a fourth.
    Most people probably never even wondered about it. In fact, at this point in their journey, most people didn’t even know the tracks were there. The first thing everyone noticed when they first entered the Tube was the Coreline.
    The official rundown on the Quadrail described the Coreline as an optically coruscating pipe inside the Quadrail Tube of unknown composition and purpose, which was rather like describing a bird of paradise as a flying thing with colors. Ten meters in diameter, glowing and sparkling and flashing with every color in the spectrum—including deep infrared and ultraviolet—the Coreline was like a light show on caffeine overdose. At apparently random intervals the pattern changes increased in speed and intensity, and most people swore they could see the thing writhing like an overtensioned wire getting ready to snap. The loose wire meshwork that encased the Coreline another dozen meters out added to the illusion, looking like a protective safety screen put there to protect passengers from shrapnel if and when the thing finally blew.
    Fortunately, sensor measurements had long since proved that the writhing was just another optical illusion. Those same measurements had also confirmed that the aptly named Coreline did indeed run along the