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not,” she said in a low voice.
    “Don’t worry, the Modhri’s not going to throw away any of his walkers just for a little revenge,” I soothed. “With his homeland wrecked, he can’t afford to waste any of his resources without a damn good reason, and that includes his walkers. As long as we don’t bother him, I don’t think he’ll bother us.”
    “You assume.”
    “Okay, yes, I assume,” I conceded. “But either way, this is too intriguing to pass up.”
    She nodded, still looking unhappy at the prospect of sharing a Quadrail car with an unknown number of Modhran walkers. “All right. We have seats.”
    “Good girl.” I glanced at my watch. “As long as the Spiders are tracking down our mysterious Daniel Mice anyway, they might also see what they can find about this Nemuti Lynx. It’ll be fairly obscure—I already searched my encyclopedia and came up dry.”
    “Mine didn’t have anything, either,” Bayta confirmed. “I doubt anyone here will know. Can they put the information in a data chip and deliver it to us somewhere down the line?”
    “That should work,” I said. “But make sure they put a high-priority stamp on it. This is no time to be flying blind.”
    “They’ll get it to us as quickly as they can,” she assured me.
    I looked back across the station at the train we’d just left, where a pair of drudges were crowding close beside the door of the first-class compartment car. Morse was there, too, standing off to the side. Lady Dorchester near him. Even at this distance I could see they both looked stiff and unhappy.
    And as we all watched, the Spiders maneuvered a covered stretcher out through the door and onto the platform.
    No weapons were allowed aboard the Spiders’ nice, clean, safe Quadrail. So someone had simply beaten a middle-aged man to death.
    Whoever was playing this game, they were playing it for keeps.
    Chapter Four
    Of the twelve civilizations served by the Quadrail system—people-groups which the Spiders liked to refer to as empires—seven had been riding the rails since the beginning. The rest of us had dribbled into the club over the centuries since then, with Humans being the most recent to join, three decades ago.
    Our people-group, of course, consisted of Earth and four pathetic little colony systems, while at the other end of the spectrum the Shorshians had literally thousands of worlds to call their own. Nevertheless, to the Spiders we both qualified as galactic empires.
    A lot of Humans tended to strut a little over that alleged equality. I had no idea what the Shorshians thought of the whole thing. Probably they just accepted it as one of the Spiders’ peculiarities and ignored us as best they could.
    The Spiders had a lot of peculiarities, and a lot of secrets. I knew more about them than most people, and even I didn’t have anything close to a complete picture. All I really knew was that the Spiders were being directed from behind the scenes by the Chahwyn, a below-the-radar alien race who had survived the galaxy’s rebellion against the Shonkla-raa.
    I also knew that, strictly speaking, the Quadrail was a fraud.
    A benevolent fraud, perhaps, but a fraud nonetheless. The trains, the thousands of light-years of four-railed track, the whole damn Tube system—none of it had anything to do with the light-year-per-minute speeds the galaxy was privileged to enjoy.
    The effect was due solely to the Coreline that ran down the center of each Tube. Lurking inside the light-show window dressing the Spiders had set up was some kind of exotic quantum thread. An object moving parallel to the Thread at close range picked up terrific speed, with that speed increasing the closer to the Thread the object got.
    That was how the message cylinders that carried the galaxy’s information managed to travel so much faster than the trains themselves. Once out of the station and away from prying eyes, an outgoing train would kick its cylinder up into the loose mesh that