Night Train to Rigel Read Free Page B

In the spots where the beams touched it, the Coreline’s own light show became even more agitated, and I amused myself by watching out of the corner of my eye as several of the uninitiated eased a few steps backward. The lasers winked out, and the dark mass resolved into a shiny silver engine pulling a line of equally shiny silver cars, the whole thing decelerating rapidly as it neared the platform. The engine and first few cars rolled past us, and with a squeal of brakes the Quadrail came to a halt.
    There were sixteen cars in this particular train, each with a single door near the front. The doors irised open simultaneously and each disgorged a conductor Spider, a more or less Human-sized version of the drudge who’d made off earlier with my luggage. The conductors moved to the sides of the doors and stood there like Buckingham Palace sentries as lines of Humans and aliens maneuvered their carrybags out onto the platform and headed for either the waiting rooms or the glowing hatchways marking the spots where shuttles were waiting. At the rear, drudges were busily removing larger pieces of luggage from the baggage car for transfer to the shuttles, while on the far side of the train I knew other drudges would be doing likewise with the various undercar storage compartments.
    I looked toward the front of the train, where a pair of drudges had reached the engine. One of them set its feet into a line of embedded rings and climbed partially up the side to a slightly lumpy box set into the engine’s roof just behind a compact dish antenna. Two of the spindly legs reached up and popped the box lid open, delicately removing a flattened message cylinder and handing it down to the other drudge waiting below. The second Spider accepted the cylinder and passed up one of its own, which the first then replaced in the box. Deceptively compact, those cylinders were packed with the most current news from around the galaxy, along with private electronic messages and encrypted data of all sorts.
    Passengers, cargo, and mail, the ultimate hat trick of any civilization. All of it running via the Quadrail.
    All of it under the control of the Spiders.
    A few minutes later the outward flow of passengers ended, and the line of conductors took a multilegged step forward. “All aboard Trans-Galactic Quadrail 339216, to New Tigris, Yandro, the Jurian Collective, the Cimmal Republic, and intermediate transfer nodes,” they announced in unison, verbalizing the information that was also being given by a multilanguage holodisplay suspended over the train. “Departure in twenty-three minutes.”
    The crowd surged forward as the Spiders repeated the announcement in Juric and Mahee, rather a waste of time since there weren’t any Juriani or Cimmaheem waiting for this particular Quadrail. But procedure was procedure, as I’d learned during my years of government service, and not to be trifled with merely because it didn’t happen to make sense. Circling around the back of the crowd, I headed for Car Fifteen, the last one before the baggage car.
    My ticket had come edged in copper, which had already indicated it was one of the lower-class seats. But it wasn’t until I climbed through the door and stepped past a stack of safety-webbed cargo crates into the aisle that I realized just how far down the food chain I actually was. Car Fifteen was a hybrid: basically a baggage carrier, stacked three-deep on both sides with secured cargo crates, with a single column of thirty seats shoehorned like an afterthought between the aisle and the wall of boxes to the right.
    A half dozen nonhumans were already seated: Cimmaheem, Juriani, and a lone Bellido, none of them paying any attention to me as I worked my way down the aisle. The Juriani, looking like upright iguanas with hawk beaks and three-toed clawed feet, had the unpolished scales of commoners, while the pear-shaped Cimmaheem wore their shaggy yarnlike hair loose instead of in the elaborate braids of the