Miles, Mutants, and Microbes

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  "You'll have to ask the officer in charge, sir," the quaddie guard replied, exasperation leaking into his service-issue neutral tone. "I only just got here with you."

  Miles stared at the doors and their key pads in frustration. He couldn't very well go down the row trying them all, not unless the scanner man was finished. He returned to the bin.

  "Finding anything?" he inquired.

  "Not—" The medical quaddie glanced aside at the officer in charge. "Was this area swept before I got here?"

  "Not as far as I know, ma'am," said the officer.

  "Why do you ask?" Miles inquired instantly.

  "Well, there isn't very much. I would have expected more."

  "Try further away," suggested the scanner tech.

  She cast him a somewhat bemused look. "That's not quite the point. In any case, after you." She gestured down the corridor, and Miles hurriedly confided his worries about the doors to the officer in charge.

  The crew dutifully scanned everything, including, at Miles's insistence, the ductwork above, where the assailant might have braced himself in near-concealment to drop upon his victims. They tried each door. Fingers tapping impatiently on his trouser seam, Miles followed them up and down the corridor as they completed their survey. All doors proved locked . . . at least, they were now. One hissed open as they passed, and a blinking shopkeeper with legs poked his head through; the quaddie officer interrogated him briefly, and he in turn helped rouse his neighbors to cooperate in the search. The quaddie woman collected lots of little plastic bags of nothing much. No unconscious hermaphrodite was discovered in any bin, hallway, utility closet, or shop adjoining the passageway.

  The utility corridor ran for about another ten meters before opening discreetly into a broader cross-corridor lined with shops, offices, and a small restaurant. The scene would have been quieter partway into third shift last night, but by no means reliably deserted, and just as well lit. Miles pictured the lanky Firka lugging or dragging Bel's compact but substantial form down the public way . . . wrapped in something for concealment? It would almost have to be. It would take a strong man to lug Bel far. Or . . . someone in a floater. Not necessarily a quaddie.

  Roic, looming at his shoulder, sniffed. The spicy smells wafting into the corridor, into which the eatery cannily vented its bakery ovens, reminded Miles of his duty to feed his troops. Troop. The disgruntled quaddie guard could fend for himself, Miles decided.

  The place was small, clean, and cozy, the sort of cheap café where the local working people ate. It was evidently past the breakfast rush and not yet time for lunch, because it was occupied only by a couple of legged young men who might be shop assistants, and a quaddie in a floater who, judging by her crowded tool belt, was an electrician on break. They stared covertly at the Barrayarans—more at tall Roic in his not-from-around-here brown-and-silver uniform than at short Miles in his unobtrusive gray civvies. Their quaddie security guard distanced himself slightly—with their party but not of it—and ordered coffee in a bulb.

  A legged woman doubled as server and cook, assembling food on the plates with practiced speed. The spicy breads, apparently a specialty of the place, appeared handmade, the slices of vat protein unexceptionable, and the fresh fruit startlingly exquisite. Miles selected a large golden pear, its skin touched with a rose blush, unblemished; its flesh, when he cut into it, proved pale, perfect, and dripping with perfumed juice. If only they had more time, he'd love to sic Ekaterin onto the local agriculture—whatever plant-like matrix this had grown from had to have been genetically engineered to thrive in free fall. The Empire's space stations could use such stocks—if the Komarran traders hadn't snagged them already. Miles's plan to slip seeds into his pocket to smuggle home was thwarted by the fruit being seedless.

  A holovid in the corner with the sound turned low had been mumbling to itself, ignored by everyone, but a sudden rainbow of blinking lights advertised an official safety bulletin. Heads turned briefly, and Miles followed the stares to find being displayed the shots of Passenger Firka from the Rudra's locks that he had downloaded earlier to Station Security. He didn't need the sound to guess the content of the serious-looking quaddie woman's speech that followed: suspect wanted for questioning, may be armed and dangerous, if you see this dubious downsider call this code at once. A couple of shots of Bel followed, as the putative kidnapping victim, presumably; they were taken from yesterday's interviews after the assassination attempt in the hostel, which a newscaster came on to re-cap.

  "Can you turn it up?" Miles asked belatedly.

  The newscaster was just winding down; even as the café server aimed her remote, her image was replaced with an advertisement for an impressive selection of work gloves.

  "Oh, sorry," said the server. "It was a repeat anyway. They've been showing it every fifteen minutes for the past hour." She provided Miles with a verbal summary of the alarm, which matched Miles's guess in most particulars.

  So, on just how many holovids all over the station was this now appearing? It would be an order of magnitude harder for a wanted man to hide, with an order of magnitude more pairs of eyes looking for him . . . but was Firka himself seeing this? If so, would he panic, becoming more hazardous to anyone who crossed him? Or perhaps turn himself in, claiming it was all some sort of misunderstanding? Roic, studying the vid, frowned and drank more coffee. The sleep-deprived armsman was holding up all right for the moment, but Miles figured he would be dragging dangerously by mid-afternoon.

  Miles had an unpleasant sensation of sinking in a quicksand of diversions and losing his grip on his initial mission. Which had been what? Oh, yes, free the fleet. He suppressed an internal snarl of Screw the fleet, where the hell's Bel? But if there was any way to use this disturbing development to pry his ships from quaddie hands, it was not apparent to him right now.

  They returned to Security Post One to find Nicol waiting for them in the front reception space with the air of a hungry predator at a water hole. She pounced on Miles the moment he appeared.

  "Did you find Bel? Did you see any sign?"

  Miles shook his head in regret. "Neither hide nor hair. Well, there might be hairs—we'll know when the forensics tech gets her analysis done—but that won't tell us anything we don't already know from Garnet Five's testimony." The truth of which Miles didn't doubt. "I do have a better mental picture of the possible course of events, now." He wished it made more sense. The first part—Firka wishing to delay or shake his pursuers—was sensible enough. It was the blank afterward that puzzled.

  "Do you think," Nicol's voice grew smaller, "he carried Bel away to murder someplace else?"

  "In that case, why leave a witness alive?" He tossed this off instantly for her reassurance; upon reflection, he found it reassuring too. Maybe. But if not murder, what? What did Bel have or know that someone else might want? Unless, like Garnet Five, Bel had come to consciousness on its own, and gone off. But . . . if Bel had wandered away in some state of dazed or sick confusion, it should have been picked up by the patrollers or some solicitous fellow stationers by now. And if it had gone in hot pursuit of something, it should have reported in. To me, at least, dammit . . .

  "If Bel was," Nicol began, and stopped. A startling crowd heaved through the main entry port, and paused for orientation.

  A pair of husky male quaddies in the orange work shirts and shorts of Docks and Locks managed the two ends of a three-meter length of pipe. Firka occupied the middle.

  The unhappy downsider's wrists and ankles were lashed to the pipe with swathes of electrical tape, bending him in a U, with another rectangle of tape plastered across his mouth, muffling his moans. His eyes were wide, and rolled in panic. Three more quaddies in orange, panting and rumpled, one with a red bruise starting around his eye, bobbed along beside as outriders.

  The work crew took aim and floated with their squirming burden through free fall to fetch up with a thump at the reception desk. A quartet of uniformed security quaddies appeared from another portal
to gather and stare at this unwilling prize; the desk sergeant hit his intercom, and lowered his voice to speak into it in a rapid undertone.

  The spokes-quaddie for the posse bustled forward, a smile of grim satisfaction on his bruised face. "We caught him for you."

  Chapter 12

  "Where?" Miles asked.

  "Number Two Freight Bay," the spokes-quaddie answered. "He was trying to get Pramod Sixteen, here"—his nod indicated one of the husky quaddies holding an end of the pipe, who nodded back in confirmation—"to take him out in a pod around the security zone to the galactic jumpship docks. So you can add attempted bribery of an airseal tech to violate regs to his list of charges, I'd say."

  Ah, ha. Another way to get around Bel's customs barriers . . . Miles's mind jumped back to the missing Solian.

  "Pramod told him he was making arrangements, and slipped out and called me. I rounded up the boys, and we made sure he'd come along and explain himself to you." The spokes-quaddie gestured to Chief Venn, who'd floated in hastily from the office corridor and was taking in the scene with unsurprised satisfaction.

  The web-fingered downsider made a plaintive noise, beneath his electrical tape, but Miles took it more for protest than explanation.

  Nicol put in urgently, "Did you see any sign of Bel?"

  "Oh, hi, Nicol." The spokes-quaddie shook his head in regret. "We asked the fellow, but we didn't get an answer. If you all don't have better luck with him, we have a few more ideas we can try." His scowl suggested that these might run to the illicit utilization of airlocks, or perhaps innovative applications of freight-handling equipment definitely not covered in the manufacturer's warranties. "I bet we could make him stop screaming and start talking before his air ran out."

  "I think we can take it from here, thanks," Chief Venn assured him. He glanced without favor at Firka, wriggling on his pole. "Although I'll keep your offer in mind."

  "Do you know Portmaster Thorne?" Miles asked the Docks and Locks quaddie. "Do you work together?"

  "Bel's one of our best supervisors," the quaddie replied. "About the most sensible downsider we've ever gotten. We don't care to lose it, eh?" He gave Nicol a nod.

  She ducked her head in mute gratitude.

  The citizens' arrest was duly recorded. The quaddie patrollers who'd assembled looked cautiously over the long, squirming captive, and elected to take him pole and all, for the moment. The Docks and Locks crew, with justifiable self-satisfaction, also presented the duffel bag Firka had been carrying.

  So here was Miles's most wanted suspect, if not presented on a platter, at least en brochette. Miles itched to tear that tape off his rubbery face and start squeezing.

  Sealer Greenlaw arrived while this was going forth, accompanied by a new quaddie man, dark-haired and fit-looking though not especially young. He wore neat, subdued garb much like that of Boss Watts and Bel, but black instead of slate blue. She introduced him as Adjudicator Leutwyn.

  "So," said Leutwyn, staring curiously at the tape-secured suspect. "This is our one-man crime wave. Do I understand he, too, came in with the Barrayaran fleet?"

  "No, Adjudicator," said Miles. "He joined the Rudra here on Graf Station, at the last minute. Actually, he didn't sign aboard until after the ship had originally been due to leave. I'd very much like to know why. I strongly suspect him of synthesizing and planting the blood in the loading bay, of attempting to assassinate . . . someone, in the hostel lobby yesterday, and of attacking Garnet Five and Bel Thorne last night. Garnet Five, at least, had a fairly close look at him, and should be able to confirm that identification shortly. But by far the most urgent question is, what has happened to Portmaster Thorne? Hot pursuit of a kidnap victim in danger is sufficient pretext for nonvoluntary penta interrogations in most jurisdictions, surely."

  "Here as well," the adjudicator admitted. "But a fast-penta examination is a delicate undertaking. I've found, in the half dozen I've monitored, that it's not nearly the magic wand most people think it is."

  Miles cleared his throat in fake diffidence. "I am tolerably familiar with the techniques, Adjudicator. I've conducted or sat in on over a hundred penta-assisted interrogations. And I've had it given to me twice." No need to go into his idiosyncratic drug reaction that had made those two events such dizzyingly surreal and notably uninformative occasions.

  "Oh," said the quaddie adjudicator, sounding impressed despite himself, possibly especially with that last detail.

  "I'm keenly aware of the need to keep the examination from being a mob scene, but you also need the right leading questions. I believe I have several."

  Venn put in, "We haven't even processed the suspect yet. Me, I want to see what he's got in that bag."

  The adjudicator nodded. "Yes, carry on, Chief Venn. I'd like further clarification, if I can get it."

  Mob scene or no, they all followed the quaddie patrollers who maneuvered the unfortunate Firka, pole and all, into a back chamber. A pair of the patrollers, after first clapping proper restraints around the bony wrists and ankles, recorded retinal patterns and took laser scans of the fingers and palms. Miles had one curiosity satisfied when they also pulled off the prisoner's soft boots; the finger-length toes, prehensile or nearly so, flexed and stretched, revealing wide rose-colored webs between. The quaddies scanned them, too—of course the quaddies would routinely scan all four extremities—then cut through the bulky lashings of tape.

  Meanwhile another patroller, assisted by Venn, emptied and inventoried the duffel. They removed an assortment of clothes, mostly in dirty wads, to find a large new chef's knife, a stunner with a dubiously corroded discharged power pack but no stunner permit, a long crowbar, and a leather folder full of small tools. The folder also contained a receipt for an automated hot riveter from a Graf Station engineering supply store, complete with incriminating serial numbers. It was at this point that the adjudicator stopped looking so carefully reserved and started to look grim instead. When the patroller held up something that looked at first glance to be a scalp, but when shaken out proved a brassy short blond wig of no particular quality, the evidence seemed almost redundant.

  Of more interest to Miles was not one, but a dozen sets of identifying documentation. Half of them proclaimed their bearers to be natives of Jackson's Whole; the others were from local space systems all adjoining the Hegen Hub, a wormhole-rich, planet-poor system that was one of the Barrayaran Empire's nearest and most strategically important Nexus neighbors. Jump routes from Barrayar to both Jackson's Whole and the Cetagandan Empire passed, via Komarr and the independent buffer polity of Pol, through the Hub.

  Venn ran the handful of IDs through a holovid station affixed to the chamber's curving wall, his frown deepening. Miles and Roic both maneuvered to watch over his shoulder.

  "So," Venn growled after a bit, "which one really is the fellow?"

  Two sets of documentation for "Firka" included physical vid shots of a man very different in appearance from their moaning captive: a big, bulky, but perfectly normal human male from either Jackson's Whole, no House affiliation, or Aslund, another Hegen Hub neighbor, depending on which—if either—ID was to be believed. Yet a third Firka ID, the one the present Firka seemed to have used to travel from Tau Ceti to Graf Station, portrayed the prisoner himself. Finally, his vid shots also matched up with the IDs of a person named Russo Gupta, also hailing from Jackson's Whole and lacking a proper House affiliation. That name, face, and associated retina scans came up again on a jumpship engineer's license that Miles recognized as originating from a certain Jacksonian organization of the sub-economy he had dealt with in his covert ops days. Judging from the long file of dates and customs stamps appended, it had passed as genuine elsewhere. And recently. A record of his travels, good!

  Miles pointed. "That is almost certainly a forgery."

  The clustering quaddies looked genuinely shocked. Greenlaw said, "A false engineer's license? That would be unsafe."

  "If it's from the place I think, you could get a false neurosurg
eon's license to go with it. Or any other job you cared to pretend to have, without going through all that tedious training and testing and certification." Or, in this case, really have—now, there was a disturbing thought. Although on-the-job apprenticeship and self-teaching might cover some of the gaps over time . . . someone had been clever enough to modify that hot riveter, after all.

  Under no circumstances could this pale, lanky mutie pass for a stout, pleasantly ugly, red-haired woman named either Grace Nevatta of Jackson's Whole—no House affiliation—or Louise Latour of Pol, depending on which set of IDs she favored. Nor for a short, head-wired, mahogany-skinned jumpship pilot named Hewlet.

  "Who are all these people?" Venn muttered in aggravation.

  "Why don't we just ask?" suggested Miles.

  Firka—or Gupta—had finally stopped struggling and just lay in midair, nostrils flexing with his panting above the blue rectangle of tape over his mouth. The quaddie patroller finished recording his last scans and reached for a corner of the tape, then paused uncertainly. "I'm afraid this is going to hurt a bit."