Diplomatic Immunity

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  "He originally tried to get a berth on the Idris, but there wasn't room," Roic added.

  "Ah!" Or maybe that ought to be, Huh?

  Miles sat back in his station chair, eyes narrowing. Reasoning in advance of his beloved and much-longed-for fast-penta—posit that this peculiar individual had had some personal contact with Solian before the lieutenant went missing. Posit that he had acquired, somehow, a sample of Solian's blood, perhaps in much the same accidental way that Miles had acquired Dubauer's. Why, then, in the name of reason, would he have subsequently gone to the trouble of running up a fake sample of Solian's blood and dribbling it all over a loading bay and out the airlock?

  To cover up a murder elsewhere? Solian's disappearance had already been put down to desertion, by his own commanders. No cover needed: if a murder, it was already nearly the perfect crime at that point, with the investigation about to be abandoned.

  A frame? Meant to pin Solian's murder on another? Attractive, but in that case, shouldn't some innocent have been tracked and accused by now? Unless Firka was the innocent, it was a frame with no portrait in it, at present.

  To cover up a desertion? Might Firka and Solian be collaborating on Solian's defection? Or . . . when might a desertion not be a desertion? When it was an ImpSec covert ops scam, that's when. Except that Solian was Service Security, not ImpSec: a guard, not a spy or trained agent. Still . . . a sufficiently bright, loyal, highly motivated, and ambitious officer, finding himself in some complex imbroglio, might not wait for orders from on high to pursue a fast-moving long shot. As Miles had reason to know.

  Of course, taking risky chances like that could get such an officer killed. As Miles also had reason to know.

  Regardless of intent, what had the actual effect of the blood bait been? Or what would it have been if Corbeau and Garnet Five's star-crossed romance hadn't run afoul of Barrayaran prejudices and loutishness? The showy scarlet scenario on the loading bay deck would certainly have reaffixed official attention upon Solian's disappearance; it would almost certainly have delayed the fleet's departure, although not as spectacularly as the real events had. Assuming Garnet Five and Corbeau's problems had been accidental. She was an actress of sorts, after all. They had only Corbeau's word about his wrist com.

  He said wistfully, "I don't suppose we have a clear shot of this frog-man lugging out half a dozen liter jugs at any point?"

  "Afraid not, m'lord. He went back and forth with lots of packages and boxes at various times, though; they could well have been hid inside something."

  Gah. The acquisition of facts was supposed to clarify thought. This was just getting murkier and murkier. He asked Roic, "Has quaddie security from either of the hostels called yet? Are Dubauer or Firka back yet?"

  "No, m'lord. No calls, that is."

  Miles called both to cross-check; neither of his two passengers of interest had yet returned. It was over four hours after midnight, now, 0420 on the twenty-four-hour, Earth-descended clock that Quaddiespace still kept, generations after their ancestors' unmodified ancestors had departed the home world.

  After he'd cut the com, Miles asked querulously, "So where the hell have they gone, all night?"

  Roic shrugged. "If it was t' obvious thing, I wouldn't look for them to be back till breakfast."

  Miles considerately declined to take notice of Roic's distinct blush. "Our frog-man, maybe, but I guarantee the ba didn't go looking for feminine companionship. There's nothing obvious about any of this." Decisively, Miles reached for the call pad again.

  Instead of Chief Venn, the image of a quaddie woman in a Security gray uniform appeared against the dizzying radial background of Venn's office. Miles wasn't sure what her rank markings decoded to, but she looked sensible, middle-aged, and harried enough to be fairly senior.

  "Good morning," he began politely. "Where's Chief Venn?"

  "Sleeping, I hope." The expression on her face suggested she was going to do her loyal best to keep it that way, too.

  "At a time like this?"

  "The poor man had a double shift and a half yester . . ." She squinted at him, and seemed to come to some recognition. "Oh. Lord Auditor Vorkosigan. I'm Chief Venn's third-shift supervisor, Teris Three. Is there anything I can do for you?"

  "Night duty officer, eh? Very good. Yes, please. I wish to arrange for the detainment and interrogation, possibly with fast-penta, of a passenger from the Rudra. His name's Firka."

  "Is there some criminal charge you wish to file?"

  "Material witness, to start. I have found reason to suspect he may have something to do with the blood on the floor of the docking bay that started this mess. I want very much to find out for sure."

  "Sir, we can't just go around arresting and drugging anyone we please, here. We need a formal charge. And if the transient doesn't volunteer to be interrogated, you'll have to get an adjudicator's order for the fast-penta."

  That problem, Miles decided, he would bounce to Sealer Greenlaw. It sounded like her department. "All right, I charge him with suspected littering. Incorrect disposal of organics has to be some kind of illegal, here."

  Despite herself, the corner of her mouth twitched. "It's a misdemeanor. Yes, that would do," she admitted.

  "Any pretext that will fix it for you is all right by me. I want him, and I want him as quickly as you can lay hands on him. Unfortunately, he signed out of his hostel at about seventeen-hundred yesterday, and hasn't been seen since."

  "Our security work gang is seriously overstretched, here, on account of yesterday's . . . unfortunate incident. Can this wait till morning, Lord Auditor Vorkosigan?"

  "No."

  For a moment, he thought she was going to go all bureaucratic on him, but after screwing up her lips in a thoughtfully aggravated way for a moment, she relented. "Very well. I'll put out a detention order on him, pending Chief Venn's review. But you'll have to see to the adjudicator as soon as we pick him up."

  "Thank you. I promise you won't have any trouble recognizing him. I can download IDs and some vid shots to you from here, if you wish."

  She allowed as how that would be useful, and the task was done.

  Miles hesitated, mulling over the even more disturbing dilemma of Dubauer. There was not, to be sure, any obvious connection between the two problems. Yet. Perhaps the interrogation of Firka would reveal one?

  Leaving Venn's myrmidon to get on with it, Miles cut the com. He leaned back in his station chair for a moment, then brought up the vids of Firka and reran them a couple of times.

  "So," he said after a time. "How the devil did he keep those long, floppy feet out of the blood puddles?"

  Roic stared over his shoulder. "Floater?" he finally said. "He'd have to be damned near double-jointed to fold those legs up in one, though."

  "He looks damned near double-jointed." But if Firka's toes were as long and prehensile as his fingers suggested, might he have been able to manipulate the joystick controls, designed for quaddie lower hands, with his feet? In this new scenario, Miles needn't picture the person in the floater horsing a heavy body around, merely emptying his gurgling liter jugs overboard and supplying some artistic smears with a suitable rag.

  After a few cross-eyed moments trying to imagine this, Miles dumped Firka's vid shots into an image manipulator and installed the fellow in a floater. The supposed amphibian didn't quite have to be double-jointed or break his legs to fit in. Assuming his lower body was rather more flexible than Miles's or Roic's, it folded pretty neatly. It looked a bit painful, but possible.

  Miles stared harder at the image above the vid plate.

  The first question one addressed in describing a person on Graf Station wasn't "man or woman"? It was "quaddie or downsider"? The very first cut, by which one discarded half or more of the possibilities from further consideration.

  He pictured a blond quaddie in a dark jacket, speeding up a corridor in a floater. He pictured that quaddie's belated pursuers, whizzing past a shaven-headed downsider in light garb, walking t
he other way. That was all it would take, in a sufficiently harried moment. Step out of the floater, turn one's jacket inside out, stuff the wig in a pocket, leave the machine with a couple of others sitting waiting, stroll away . . . It would be much harder to work it the other way around, of course, for a quaddie to impersonate a downsider.

  He stared at Firka's hollow, dark-ringed eyes. He pulled up a suitable mop of blond ringlets from the imager files and applied it to Firka's unhandsome head.

  A fair approximation of the dark-eyed barrel-chested quaddie with the rivet gun? Glimpsed for a fraction of a second, at fifteen meters range, and truth to tell most of Miles's attention had been on the spark-spitting, chattering, hot-brass-chucking object in his hands . . . had those hands been webbed?

  Fortunately, he could draw upon a second opinion. He called up Bel Thorne's home code from the comconsole.

  Unsurprisingly, at this ungodly hour, the visual didn't come on when Nicol's sleepy voice answered. "Hello?"

  "Nicol? Miles Vorkosigan here. Sorry to drag you out of your sleep sack. I need to talk to your housemate. Boot it out and make it come to the vid. Bel's had more sleep than I have, by now."

  The visual came up. Nicol righted herself and drew a fluffy lace garment closer about her with a lower hand; this section of the apartment she shared with Bel was evidently on the free fall side. It was too dim to make out much beyond her floating form. She rubbed her eyes. "What? Isn't Bel with you?"

  Miles's stomach went into free fall, for all that the Kestrel's grav was in good working order. "No . . . Bel left over six hours ago."

  Her frown sharpened. The sleep drained from her face, to be replaced by alarm. "But Bel didn't come home last night!"

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Graf Station Security Post One, housing most of the security police administrative offices including Chief Venn's, lay entirely on the free fall side of the station. Miles and Roic, trailed by a flustered quaddie guard from the Kestrel's lock, floated into the post's radially arranged reception space, from which tubular corridors led off at odd angles. The place was still night-quiet, although shift change was surely due soon.

  Nicol had beaten Miles and Roic there, but not by much. She was still awaiting the arrival of Chief Venn under the concerned eye of a uniformed quaddie whom Miles took to be the equivalent of a night desk sergeant. The quaddie officer's wariness increased when they entered, and one lower hand moved unobtrusively to touch a pad on his console; as if casually, and very promptly, another armed quaddie officer drifted down from one of the corridors to join his comrade.

  Nicol wore a plain blue T-shirt and shorts, hastily donned with no artistic touches. Her face was pale with worry. Her lower hands clenched each other. She returned a short grateful nod to Miles's under-voiced greeting.

  Chief Venn arrived at last and gave Miles a look unloving but resigned. He had apparently slept, if not enough, and had pessimistically dressed for the day; no secret hope of getting back into the sleep sack showed in his neat attire. He waved off the armed guard and gruffly invited the Lord Auditor and company to follow him to his office. The third-shift supervisor Miles had spoken with a while ago—might as well start calling it last night—brought coffee bulbs along with her end-of-shift report. Meticulously, she handed the bulbs out to the downsiders, instead of launching them through the air and expecting them to be caught the way she served her crew chief and Nicol. Miles turned the bulb's thermal control to the limit of the red zone and sucked the hot bitter brew with gratitude, as did Roic.

  "This panic may be premature," Venn began after his own first swallow. "Portmaster Thorne's nonappearance may have some very simple explanation."

  And what were the top three complicated explanations in Venn's mind right now? The quaddie wasn't sharing, but then, neither was Miles. Bel had been missing for over six hours, ever since it had dismissed its quaddie guard at a bubble-car stop near its home. By now this panic might just as easily be posthumous, but Miles didn't care to say so aloud in front of Nicol. "I am extremely concerned."

  "Thorne could be asleep somewhere else." Venn glanced somewhat enigmatically at Nicol. "Have you checked with likely friends?"

  "The portmaster stated explicitly that it was heading home to Nicol to rest, when it left the Kestrel about midnight," said Miles. "A well-earned rest by that time, I might add. Your own guards should be able to confirm the exact time of Thorne's departure from my ship."

  "We will, of course, provide you with another liaison officer to assist you in your inquiries, Lord Vorkosigan." Venn's voice was a little distant; buying time to think, was how Miles read him. He might be playing deliberately obtuse as well. Miles did not mistake him for actually obtuse, not when he'd cut his sleep shift short and come in for this within little more than minutes.

  "I don't want another. I want Thorne. You mislay too damned many downsiders around here. It's beginning to seem bloody careless." Miles took a deep breath. "It has to have crossed your mind by now, as it has mine, that there were three persons in the line of fire in the hostel lobby yesterday afternoon. We all assumed that I was the obvious target. What if it was something less obvious? What if it was Thorne?"

  Teris Three made a stemming motion at him with an upper hand, and interjected, "Speaking of that, the trace on that hot riveter came in a few hours ago."

  "Oh, good," said Venn, turning to her with relief. "What have we got?"

  "It was sold for cash three days back, from an engineering supply store near the free fall docks. Carried out, not delivered. The purchaser didn't fill out the warranty questionnaire. The clerk wasn't sure which customer took it, because it was a busy hour."

  "Quaddie or downsider?"

  "He couldn't say. Could have been either, it seems."

  And if certain webbed hands had been covered with gloves as in the vid shot, they might well have been overlooked. Venn grimaced, his hopes for a break plainly frustrated.

  The night supervisor glanced at Miles. "Lord Vorkosigan here also called, to request that we detain one of the passengers from the Rudra."

  "Find him yet?" asked Miles.

  She shook her head.

  "Why do you want him?" asked Venn, frowning.

  Miles repeated his own night's news about his interrogation of the medtechs and finding traces of Solian's synthesized blood in the Rudra's infirmary.

  "Well, that explains why we were having no luck at the station hospitals and clinics," grumbled Venn. Miles imagined him totting up his department's wasted quaddie-hours from the fruitless search, and let the grumble pass.

  "I also flushed out one suspect, in the course of the conversation with the Rudra's tech. All circumstantial speculation so far, but fast-penta is the drug to cure that." Miles described the unusual Passenger Firka, his own insufficient but nagging sense of recognition, and his suspicions about the creative use of a floater. Venn looked grimmer and grimmer. Just because Venn reflexively resisted being stampeded by a Barrayaran dirtsucker, Miles decided, didn't mean he wasn't listening. What he made of it all, through his provincial Quaddiespace cultural filters, was much harder to guess.

  "But what about Bel?" Nicol's voice was tight with suppressed anguish.

  Venn was obviously less immune to a plea from a beautiful fellow quaddie. He met his night supervisor's inquiring look and nodded agreement.

  "Well, what's one more?" Teris Three shrugged. "I'll put out a call to all patrollers to start looking for Portmaster Thorne, too. As well as the fellow with the webs."

  Miles nibbled on his lower lip in worry. Sooner or later, that live cargo secreted aboard the Idris must draw the ba back to it. "Bel—Portmaster Thorne did get back to you people last night about resealing the Idris, did it not?"

  "Yes," said Venn and the night supervisor together. Venn gave her a short apologetic nod and continued, "Did that Betan passenger Thorne was trying to help get its animal fetuses taken care of all right?"

  "Dubauer. Um, yes. They're fine for now. But, ah . . . I think I
'd like to have you pick up Dubauer, as well as Firka."

  "Why?"

  "It left its hostel and vanished yesterday evening close to the same time that Firka went out, and also hasn't returned. And Dubauer was the third of our little triumvirate of targets yesterday. Let's just call it protective custody, for starters."

  Venn screwed up his lips for a moment, considering this, and eyed Miles with shrewd disfavor. He'd have to be less bright than he appeared not to suspect Miles wasn't telling him everything. "Very well," he said at last. He waved a hand at Teris Three. "Let's go ahead and collect the whole set."

  "Right." She glanced at the chrono on her left lower wrist. "It's oh-seven-hundred." Shift change, presumably. "Shall I stay?"

  "No, no. I'll take over. Get the new missing-person traces started, then go get some rest." Venn sighed. "Tonight may be no better."

  The night supervisor gave him an acknowledging thumbs-up with both lower hands and slipped out of the little office chamber.

  "Would you prefer to wait at home?" Venn said suggestively to Nicol. "You'd be more comfortable there, I'm sure. We'll undertake to call you as soon as we find your partner."

  Nicol took a breath. "I would rather be here," she said sturdily. "Just in case . . . just in case something happens soon."

  "I'll keep you company," Miles volunteered. "For a little while, anyway." There, let Venn try to shift his diplomatic mass.

  Venn at least managed to get them shifted out of his office by conducting them to a private waiting space, advertising it as more undisturbed. More undisturbed for Venn, anyway.

  Miles and Nicol were left regarding each other in troubled silence. What Miles most wanted to know was if Bel had any other ImpSec business in train at present that might have impinged unexpectedly last night. But he was almost certain Nicol knew nothing of Bel's second source of income—and risk. Besides, that was wishful thinking. If any business had impinged, it was most probably the current mess. Which was now messy enough to raise every hackle Miles owned to quivering attention.