Bayta’s eyes went distant, and I took the opportunity to punch Rentis Tarlay Birim into my reader and give the resulting page a quick skim. Back in Western Alliance Intelligence, where I’d once worked, there had been people—mostly the pompous and control-freak ones—who’d felt it necessary to create permanent links to their phones or data feeds. The affectation had always irritated me, especially when they went blank in the middle of intense conversations, and I sometimes wondered why Bayta’s version of the same thing wasn’t equally irritating.

Probably because it was a completely different situation. Bayta hadn’t chosen to be wired into the Spiders’ telepathic network; it was just something that came with the fact that she was a Human/Chahwyn melding. She could no more shut off that link than she could stop breathing.

Besides, the ability not only provided us with useful information but had saved our lives more than once. When you had an ace up your sleeve, it was the epitome of pettiness to complain that it chafed a little against your skin.

“The Filiaelians also came aboard at Terra,” Bayta reported, her eyes coming back to focus. “Though that doesn’t necessarily mean all of them already knew each other.”

“True,” I agreed. First-class Quadrail cars were one of the galaxy’s great social mixers. Kennrick and the Fillies could easily have struck up a conversation and ended up twenty-one hours later as best-friend traveling companions, especially once they’d discovered they were all going cross-galaxy together. “What’s the Fillies’ destination?”

“The same place,” Bayta said. “The same system, anyway. They could be traveling to entirely different places inside that system once they leave the Tube.”

“There are certainly enough for them to choose from,” I commented, gesturing toward my reader. “Rentis Tarlay Birim is a major industrial and manufacturing system, with three inhabited planets, five orbiting space colonies, and a truckload of minable asteroids. No way to know what Kennrick might be looking for there.”