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perfectly, but somehow I doubted that was what it was.
    “Here it is,” Bayta announced, swiveling the display around. “But I thought you ate at Terra Station.”
    “A good traveler learns to eat whenever he gets the chance,” I said, stepping to her side and paging quickly through the menu. “I don’t suppose first-class has delivery privileges.”
    “Not usually,” she said. “Do you want me to ask one of the servers or conductors if he’ll bring you something?”
    “No, thanks,” I said. “That’s what I’ve got you for. Be a good girl and go get me an order of onion rings, will you?”
    In the past, I’d found the be-a-good-girl line to be a remarkably effective way of getting a quick reading on a woman’s temperament. Unlike most of those I’d tried it on, Bayta didn’t even bat an eye. “As you wish,” she said, sliding out of the chair. Crossing the compartment, she touched the door control to open it and disappeared into the corridor.
    I went over to the door and made sure it was locked. Then, returning to the bed, I hauled down the other carrybag. In a galaxy where self-propelled luggage was the norm, I doubted that one in a hundred travelers had more than a vague idea what their handles really felt like. The only reason I’d caught the alteration so quickly was because of my carrybags’ chronic motor problems, the very problems I’d been cursing five hours ago.
    There was a lesson there, or at least a bit of irony, but at the moment I couldn’t be bothered with either. Like the smaller carrybag, the larger one’s handle had also been padded out. Pulling out my pocket multitool, I extended the fingertip-sized blade—the biggest knife permitted aboard a Quadrail—and began digging carefully beneath the grip.
    My first guess was that the Spiders had decided to backstop their watchdog by planting a tracer or transmitter on me. But as I scraped millimeter after millimeter away without finding anything except whisker-thin embedded wires, that idea began to fade. I kept at it; and finally, two centimeters in, I struck something familiar.
    Only it wasn’t a transmitter. It was, instead, a short-range receiver connected to a small pulse capacitor, which was in turn connected to the whisker wires buried in the material.
    The sort of setup you might find in a remotely triggered antipersonnel bomb.
    Pulling out my reader, I selected a data chip from my collection marked Encyclopaedia Britannica . So Bayta had a specially-gimmicked reader, did she? Fine. So did I. Plugging in the chip, I touched the reader’s activation control and held one corner close to the material I’d scraped out of the handle.
    It was not, in fact, a bomb, antipersonnel or otherwise. This sensor was the most advanced bit of technology in the Terran Confederation, a gadget any Westali field director would probably give his best friend’s right arm for, and it wasn’t picking up even a hint of the fast-burning chemicals all explosives had in common. I retuned the sensor twice, just to be sure, then switched to scanning for poisons. Again, nothing.
    But nothing in the case of poisons could merely mean that the stuff was too well disguised for a normal scan. Fortunately, there were ways of teasing such things into the open. Pulling out my lighter, I flipped the thumb guard around, swinging it over the flame jet where it would serve as a specimen holder. I put a single grain of the mystery material on top, set the sensor at the proper reading distance, and ignited the lighter. The flame hissed out, clean and blue-white, and there was a brief burst of pale smoke as the grain burned as well. Shutting off the lighter, I set it aside and keyed for analysis.
    And this time, the sensor finally found the active ingredient carefully buried beneath the inert containment matrix.
    Saarix-5 nerve gas.
    The image of the Spiders’ dead messenger rose unpleasantly in front of my eyes as I unplugged the data chip and returned it and the