The Third Lynx Read Online Free PDF

later, I still hadn’t thought of anything.
    Morse, unfortunately, had.
    He was waiting on the platform with a pair of well-dressed Bellidos as Bayta and I disembarked from our car. The Bellidos were looking very solemn, their dark eyes staring hard at me out of their striped chipmunk faces.
    The typical Bellido was shorter than the typical Human, which meant they were looking up at me. But that particular stare had an amazingly effective leveling effect.
    Standing a few paces behind them was the lady politician who’d discovered Smith’s body, still looking a little shaken. “There he is,” Morse said to the Bellidos, pointing at me. “That’s Mr. Frank Compton.”
    “Can I help you?” I asked, giving the Bellidos a quick once-over as Bayta and I walked up to the group. Along with their expensive clothing, each of the two aliens was wearing a double shoulder holster on each arm, making a total of eight small-caliber handguns between them.
    Not real guns, of course. The Spiders banned weapons of any sort aboard their trains, and had a highly sophisticated layered sensor array in every Tube station to enforce that edict. The Bellidos’ real guns were safely secured in lockboxes beneath the cars, which the drudge Spiders were busy packing aboard one of the outgoing cargo shuttles for shipment to the transfer station floating in space a hundred kilometers away.
    But guns were an indication of Belldic social rank, and the soft plastic substitute guns currently riding the Bellidos’ holsters were no less valid a mark of their status than were the real things.
    Four guns apiece implied that status was pretty high. Whatever Morse had up his sleeve, I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to like it.
    I was right. “Mr. Compton is under suspicion of felony murder.” Morse informed the aliens. “I’m going to go and speak to the stationmaster about having him officially handed into my custody for return to the Terran Confederation. But in case I can’t persuade him, I wanted to lodge a formal warning with the Bellidosh Estates-General as to who and what this man is.”
    “Who he is and what he might be,” I corrected stiffly. “Mr. Morse has absolutely no evidence against me.”
    “Mr. Compton had both opportunity and ability,” Morse countered. “Belldic law, if I’m not mistaken, allows extradition or temporary confinement under such indicators while an investigation is launched.”
    “It does,” one of the Bellidos confirmed, eyeing me thoughtfully.
    I eyed him right back with all the innocence I could dredge up at such short notice, and sent a few mental daggers in Morse’s direction. I’d already decided we weren’t going to Bellis, but there had still been the option of getting off somewhere else in the Estates-General and backtracking again after the uproar over Smith’s murder had died down.
    Now, that option was also down the plumbing. The minute I stepped onto a shuttle and headed for any Belldic transfer station I would be out of Spider jurisdiction. If Morse could persuade the Bellidos to arrest me and extradite me over to him, he could bypass the Spiders completely.
    A little obfuscation was clearly called for. “What Mr. Morse fails to mention is that everyone with a compartment on this train had the same level of opportunity that I had,” I pointed out.
    “A moot point, since everyone else is continuing on,” Morse said before either of the Bellidos could respond. “All we can do here is to send a warning on ahead to the various Belldic stations down the line.” He looked expectantly at me, and I could tell he was dying for me to also bring up the passengers in the other two first-class coaches as possible suspects.
    Fat chance. I already knew from Bayta and her eavesdropping conductor that no one in either car remembered seeing anybody leave the compartment car during the hour before Smith’s body had been discovered.
    Obviously, they’d simply forgotten. People did that a lot, and every