"Timothy Zahn - Night Train to Rigel" - читать интересную книгу автора (Zahn Timothy)

inserting the ends of its other two legs into the handles and lifting the bags
into the air like a weight lifter doing bending bicep curls. "They will be
returned," it added, and strode off toward one of the buildings beside the
track where my Quadrail was scheduled to arrive.
I watched it go, wondering like everyone else in the galaxy what the devil was
inside those dangling globes. But the Spiders' metallic skin was just as
effective at blocking sensor scans as the Coreline was. They could be robots,
androids, trained ducks, or something so weird that no one had even thought of
it yet. It disappeared-into the building, and with a sudden premonition, I
spun around.
The Girl was standing over by the pile of luggage, her carrybag at her feet,
watching me. For a second we held each other's gaze across the distance. Then,
as if she'd just realized that I was looking back at her, she lowered her
eyes.
Scowling, I turned and headed for me platform. If the Quadrail was on time and
I'd never heard of one being late it would pull into the station exacdy eight
minutes from now. Thirty minutes after that, it would pull out again, with me
on board.
The Spiders had until then to return my luggage, or there was going to be hell
to pay. *
Seven minutes later, far down the Tube, the telltale red glow of our Quadrail
appeared.
The rest of the passengers had gathered on the platform, and once again I
could hear the amazed and slightly nervous twitterings of the first-timers.
The train approached rapidly, the red glow resolving into a pair of brilliant
laserlike beams flashing between the engine's oversized front bumper and the
Coreline overhead. In the spots where the beams touched it, the Coreline's own
light show became even more agitated, and I amused myself by watching out of
the corner of my eye as several of the uninitiated eased a few steps backward.
The lasers winked out, and the dark mass resolved into a shiny silver engine
pulling a line of equally shiny silver cars, the whole thing decelerating
rapidly as it neared the platform. The engine and first few cars rolled past
us, and with a squeal of brakes the Quadrail came to a halt.
There were sixteen cars in this particular train, each with a single door near
the front. The doors irised open simultaneously and each disgorged a conductor
Spider, a more or less Human-sized version of the drudge who'd made off
earlier with my luggage. The conductors moved to the sides of the doors and
stood there like Buckingham Palace sentries as lines of Humans and aliens
maneuvered their carrybags out onto the platform and headed for either the
waiting rooms or the glowing hatchways marking the spots where shuttles were
waiting. At the rear, drudges were busily removing larger pieces of luggage
from the baggage car for transfer to the shuttles, while on the far side of
the train I knew other drudges would be doing likewise with the various
undercar storage compartments.
I looked toward the front of the train, where a pair of drudges had reached
the engine. One of them set its feet into a line of embedded rings and climbed
partially up the side to a slightly lumpy box set into the engine's roof just
behind a
compact dish antenna. Two of the spindly legs reached up and popped the box
lid open, delicately removing a flattened message cylinder and handing it down