Which was, of course, the part that really drove the experts crazy. Nowhere along our journey would the Quadrail ever top a hundred kilometers per hour relative to the Tube itself. That much had been proved with accelerometers and laser Doppler measurements off the Tube wall.

Yet when we pulled into Yandro Station some fourteen hours from now, we would find that our speed relative to the rest of the galaxy had actually been almost exactly one light-year per minute.

No one knew how it worked, not even the six races who claimed to have been with the Quadrail since its inception seven hundred years ago. They couldn’t even agree on whether speeds in this strange hyperspace were accelerated or whether it was the distances themselves that were somehow shortened.

In the past, I’d always thought the argument mostly a waste of effort. The system worked, the Spiders kept it running on time, and up to now that was all that had mattered.

But that had been before everything that had happened at the New Pallas Towers a week ago.

And, of course, before the Spiders had lost my carrybags. I could only hope they’d ended up somewhere else aboard the train and that I would find them waiting when I got off at Yandro.

Tilting my chair back, I pulled out my reader and one of the book chips from my pocket. A little reading while everyone got settled, and then I would take a trip through the rest of the third-class coaches to the second/third-class dining car. There was a chance my unknown benefactor was aboard the train with me, planning to make contact once we got off, and it would be a good idea to run as many of the passengers as I could through my mental mug file.