One of her eyebrows twitched. “Six weeks locked inside a Quadrail?” she countered pointedly.

I looked back at the incoming train, suppressing a grimace. I knew I didn’t look worried—I had better control of my face than that. But Bayta had been with me long enough to be able to read beneath the surface.

“We don’t have to do this,” she went on quietly. “There are regular express trains that travel mostly through the inhabited regions. We could just stick to those.”

“And double the transit time?” I shook my head. “No. Six weeks is bad enough as it is.”

She didn’t reply. But then, she didn’t have to. I’d been with her long enough to know how to read her, too, and I knew we were thinking the same unpleasant thoughts.

Because our enemy in this war, the group mind that called himself the Modhri, also liked to ride the Quadrail. He also typically targeted the galaxy’s rich and powerful, which meant there was likely to be a Modhran mind segment in the first-class section of the train we were about to board.

And the Modhri very much wanted both Bayta and me dead.

I couldn’t really blame him. The Modhri was, bottom line, nothing more or less than a sentient weapon, designed a millennium and a half ago to be the ultimate infiltrator/spy/saboteur/ fifth-columnist by a slaver race called the Shonkla-raa, who had been in absolute control of the galaxy and its sentient inhabitants for nearly a thousand years.

Though at the time of the Modhri’s creation, they hadn’t been much in control of anything. In fact, they had been fighting for their survival against a carefully crafted rebellion being carried out by an alliance of their slaves.

Unfortunately for the Shonkla-raa, the revolt had ended in their destruction before the Modhri could be deployed. Unfortunately for the rest of us, the Modhri hadn’t simply died off. He’d lived on, waiting patiently until the Halkas had stumbled on his homeworld a couple of hundred years ago and found the exotic coral in which lurked the polyps that comprised his physical structure.