Miles, Mutants, and Microbes

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  "He's probably sweated enough underneath the tape to loosen it," Miles offered. "Take it in one quick jerk. It'll hurt less in the long run. That's what I'd want, if I were him."

  A muffled mew of disagreement from the prisoner turned into a shrill scream as the quaddie followed this plan. All right, so, the frog prince hadn't sweated as much around the mouth as Miles had guessed. It was still better to have the damned tape off than on.

  But despite the noises he'd been making the prisoner did not follow up this liberation of his lips with outraged protests, swearing, complaints, or raving threats. He just kept panting. His eyes were peculiarly glassy—a look Miles recognized, of a man who'd been wound up far too tight for far too long. Bel's loyal stevedores might have roughed him up a bit, but he hadn't acquired that look in the brief time he'd been in quaddie hands.

  Chief Venn held up a double handful, left and left, of IDs before the prisoner's eyes. "All right. Which one are you really? You may as well tell us the truth. We'll be cross-checking it all anyway."

  With surly reluctance, the prisoner muttered, "I'm Guppy."

  "Guppy? Russo Gupta?"

  "Yeah."

  "Who are these others?"

  "Absent friends."

  Miles wasn't quite sure if Venn had caught the intonation. He put in, "Dead friends?"

  "Yeah, that too." Guppy/Gupta stared away into a distance Miles calculated as light-years.

  Venn looked alarmed. Miles was torn between anxiety to proceed and an intense desire to sit down and study the place and date stamps on all those IDs, real and fake, before decanting Gupta. A world of revelation lay therein, he was fairly sure. But greater urgencies drove the sequencing now.

  "Where is Portmaster Thorne?" Miles asked.

  "I told those thugs before. I never heard of him."

  "Thorne is the Betan herm you sprayed with knockout mist last night in a utility passage off Cross Corridor. Along with a blond quaddie woman named Garnet Five."

  The surly look deepened. "Never seen either of 'em."

  Venn turned his head and nodded to a patroller, who flitted off. A few moments later she returned through one of the chamber's other portals, ushering Garnet Five. Garnet's color looked vastly better now, Miles was relieved to note, and she had obviously managed to obtain whatever female grooming equipment she used to touch herself back up to her high-visibility norm.

  "Ah!" she said cheerfully. "You caught him! Where's Bel?"

  Venn inquired formally, "Is this the downsider who committed chemical assault on you and the portmaster, and released illicit volatiles into the public atmosphere last night?"

  "Oh, yes," said Garnet Five. "I couldn't possibly mistake him. I mean, look at the webs."

  Gupta clenched his lips, his fists, and his feet, but further pretense was clearly futile.

  Venn lowered his voice to a quite nicely menacing official growl. "Gupta, where is Portmaster Thorne?"

  "I don't know where the blighted nosy herm is! I left it in the bin right next to hers. It was all right then. I mean, it was breathing and all. They both were. I made sure. The herm's probably still sleeping it off in there."

  "No," said Miles. "We checked all the bins in the passage. The portmaster was gone."

  "Well, I don't know where it went after that."

  "Would you be willing to repeat that assertion under fast-penta, and clear yourself of a kidnapping charge?" Venn inquired cannily, angling for a voluntary interrogation.

  Gupta's rubbery face set, and his eyes shifted away. "Can't. I'm allergic to the stuff."

  "Is that so?" said Miles. "Let's just check, shall we?" He dug in his trouser pocket and drew out the strip of test patches he'd borrowed earlier from the Kestrel's ImpSec supplies, in anticipation of just such an opportunity. Granted, he hadn't anticipated the added urgency of Bel's alarming vanishing act. He held up the strip and explained to Venn and the adjudicator, who was monitoring all this with a judicial frown, "Security-grade penta allergy skin test. If the subject has any of the six kinds of artificially induced anaphylaxes or even a mild natural allergy, the welt pops right up." By way of reassurance to the quaddie officials, he peeled off one of the burr-like patches and slapped it on the back of his own wrist, displaying it with a heartening wriggle of his fingers. The sleight of hand was sufficient that no one except the prisoner protested when he leaned over and pressed another to Gupta's arm. Gupta let out a yowl of horror that won him only stares; he reduced it to a pitiable whimper under the bemused eyes of the onlookers.

  Miles peeled off his own patch to reveal a distinct reddish prickle. "As you see, I do have a slight endogenous sensitivity." He waited a few moments longer, to drive home the point, then reached over and peeled the patch off Gupta. The rather sickly natural—mushrooms were natural, right?—skin tone was unaffected.

  Venn, getting into the rhythm of the thing like an old ImpSec hand, leaned toward Gupta and said, "That's two lies, so far, then. You can stop lying now. Or you can stop lying shortly. Either way will do." He raised narrowed eyes to his fellow quaddie official. "Adjudicator Leutwyn, do you rule that we have sufficient cause for an involuntary chemically assisted interrogation of this transient?"

  The adjudicator looked less than wholly enthusiastic, but he replied, "In light of his admitted connection to the worrisome disappearance of a valued Station employee, yes, there can be no question. I do remind you that subjecting detainees in your charge to unnecessary physical discomfort is against regs."

  Venn glanced at Gupta, hanging miserably in air. "How can he be uncomfortable? He's in free fall."

  The adjudicator pursed his lips. "Transient Gupta, aside from your restraints, are you in any special discomfort at this time? Do you require food, drink, or downsider sanitary facilities?"

  Gupta jerked his wrists against their soft bonds, and shrugged. "Naw. Well, yes. My gills are getting dry. If you're not gonna let me loose, I need somebody to spray them. The stuff's in my bag."

  "This?" The female quaddie patroller held out what appeared to be a perfectly ordinary plastic sprayer, of the sort that Miles had seen Ekaterin use to mist some of her plants. She wriggled it, and it gurgled.

  "What's in it?" asked Venn suspiciously.

  "Water, mostly. And a bit of glycerin," said Gupta.

  "Go ahead and check it," said Venn aside to his patroller. She nodded and floated out; Gupta watched her depart with some mistrust, but no particular alarm.

  "Transient Gupta, it appears you're going to be our guest for a while," said Venn. "If we remove your restraints, are you going to give us any trouble, or are you going to behave yourself?"

  Gupta was silent a moment, then vented an exhausted sigh. "I'll behave. Much good it'll do me either way."

  A patroller floated forward and unshackled the prisoner's wrists and ankles. Only Roic seemed less than pleased with this unnecessary courtesy, tensing with a hand on a wall grip and one foot planted to a bit of bulkhead not occupied by equipment, ready to launch himself forward. But Gupta only chafed his wrists and bent to rub his ankles, and looked grudgingly grateful.

  The patroller returned with the bottle, handing it to her chief. "The lab's chemical sniffer says it's inert. Should be safe," she reported.

  "Very well." Venn pitched the bottle to Gupta, who despite his odd long hands caught it readily, with little downsider clumsiness, a fact Miles was sure the quaddie noted.

  "Um." Gupta gave the crowd of onlookers a slightly embarrassed glance, and hitched up his loose poncho. He stretched and inhaled, and the ribs on his big barrel chest drew apart; flaps of skin parted to reveal red slashes. The substance beneath seemed spongy, rippling in the misting like densely laid feathers.

  God almighty. He really does have gills under there. Presumably, the bellows-like movement of the chest helped pump water through, when the amphibian was immersed. Dual systems. So did he hold his breath, or did his lungs shut down involuntarily? By what mechanism was his blood circulation switched from one oxygenatin
g interface to the other? Gupta pumped the bottle and sprayed mist into the red slits, handing it back and forth from right side to left, and seemed to draw some comfort thereby. He sighed, and the slits closed back down, his chest appearing merely ridged and scarred. He smoothed the drifting poncho back into place.

  "Where are you from?" Miles couldn't help asking.

  Gupta grew surly again. "Guess."

  "Well, Jackson's Whole, by the weight of the evidence, but which House made you? Ryoval, Bharaputra, another? And were you a one-off, or part of a set? First-generation gengineered, or from a self-reproducing line of, of water people?"

  Gupta's eyes widened in surprise. "You know Jackson's Whole?"

  "Let's say, I've had several painfully educational visits there."

  The surprise became edged with faint respect, and a certain lonely eagerness. "House Dyan made me. I was part of a set, once—we were an underwater ballet troupe."

  Garnet Five blurted in unflattering astonishment, "You were a dancer?"

  The prisoner hunched his shoulders. "No. They made me to be submersible stage crew. But House Dyan suffered a hostile takeover by House Ryoval—just a few years before Baron Ryoval was assassinated, pity that didn't happen sooner. Ryoval broke up the troupe for other, um, tasks, and decided he had no alternate use for me, so I was out of a job and out of protection. Could have been worse. He mighta kept me. I drifted around and took what tech jobs I could get. One thing led to another."

  In other words, Gupta had been born into Jacksonian techno-serfdom, and dumped out on the street when his original owner-creators had been engulfed by their vicious commercial rival. Given what Miles knew of the late, unsavory Baron Ryoval, Gupta's fate was perhaps happier than that of his mer-cohort. By the known date of Ryoval's death, that last vague remark about things leading to things covered at least five years, maybe as many as ten.

  Miles said thoughtfully, "You weren't shooting at me at all yesterday, then, were you. Nor at Portmaster Thorne." Which left . . .

  Gupta blinked at him. "Oh! That's where I saw you before. Sorry, no." His brow corrugated. "So what were you doing there, then? You're not one of the passengers. Are you another Stationer squatter like that officious bloody Betan?"

  "No. My name is"—he made an instant, almost subliminal decision to drop all the honorifics—"Miles. I was sent out to look after Barrayaran concerns when the quaddies impounded the Komarran fleet."

  "Oh." Gupta grew uninterested.

  What the devil was keeping that fast-penta? Miles softened his voice. "So what happened to your friends, Guppy?"

  That fetched the amphibian's attention again. "Double-crossed. Subjected, injected, infected . . . rejected. We were all taken in. Damned Cetagandan bastard. That wasn't the Deal."

  Something inside Miles went on overdrive. Here's the connection, finally. His smile grew charming, sympathetic, and his voice softened further. "Tell me about the Cetagandan bastard, Guppy."

  The hovering mob of quaddie listeners had stopped rustling, even breathing more quietly. Roic had drawn back to a shadowed spot opposite Miles. Gupta glanced around at the Graf Stationers, and at Miles and himself, the only legged persons now in view in the center of the circle. "What's the use?" The tone was not a wail of despair, but a bitter query.

  "I am Barrayaran. I have a special stake in Cetagandan bastards. The Cetagandan ghem-lords left five million of my grandfather's generation dead behind them, when they finally gave up and pulled out of Barrayar. I still have his bag of ghem-scalps. For certain kinds of Cetagandans, I might know a use or two you'd find interesting."

  The prisoner's wandering gaze snapped to his face and locked there. For the first time, he'd won Gupta's total attention. For the first time, he'd hinted he might have something that Guppy really wanted. Wanted? Burned for, lusted for, desired with mad obsessive hunger. His glassy eyes were ravenous for . . . maybe revenge, maybe justice—in any case, blood. But the frog prince clearly lacked personal expertise in retribution. The quaddies didn't deal in blood. Barrayarans . . . had a more sanguinary reputation. Which, for the first time this mission, might actually prove some use.

  Gupta took a long breath. "I don't know what kind this one was. Is. He was like nothing I'd ever met before. Cetagandan bastard. He melted us."

  "Tell me," Miles breathed, "everything. Why you?"

  "He came to us . . . through our usual cargo agents. We thought it would be all right. We had a ship. Gras-Grace and Firka and Hewlet and me had this ship. Hewlet was our pilot, but Gras-Grace was the brains. Me, I had a knack for fixing things. Firka kept the books, and fixed regs, and passports, and nosy officials. Gras-Grace and her three husbands, we called us. We were a collection of rejects, but maybe we added up to one real spouse for her, I don't know. One for all and all for one, because it was damn sure that a crew of refugee Jacksonians, without a House or a Baron, wasn't going to get a break from anyone else in the Nexus."

  Gupta was getting wound up in his story. Miles, listening with utmost care, prayed Venn would have the sense not to interrupt. Ten people hovered around them in this chamber, yet he and Gupta, mutually hypnotized by the increasing intensity of his confession, might almost be floating in a bubble of time and space altogether removed from this universe. "So where did you pick up this Cetagandan and his cargo, anyway?"

  Gupta glanced up, startled. "You know about the cargo?"

  "If it's the same one now aboard the Idris, yes, I've had a look. I found it rather disturbing."

  "What's he got in there, really? I only saw the outsides."

  "I'd rather not say, at this time. What did he," Miles elected not to go into the confusions of ba gender just now, "tell you it was?"

  "Gengineered mammals. Not that we asked questions. We got paid extra for not asking questions. That was the Deal, we thought."

  And if there was anything that the ethically elastic inhabitants of Jackson's Whole held nearly sacred, it was the Deal. "A good bargain, was it?"

  "Looked like. Two or three more runs like that, we could have paid off the ship and owned it free and clear."

  Miles took leave to doubt that, if the crew was in debt for their jumpship to a typical Jacksonian financial House. But perhaps Guppy and his friends had been terminal optimists. Or terminally desperate.

  "The gig looked easy enough. Just take a little mixed-freight run through the fringes of the Cetagandan Empire. We jumped in through the Hegen Hub, via Vervain, and skirted round to Rho Ceta. All those arrogant, suspicious bastard inspectors who boarded us at the jump points turned up nothing to hold against us, though they'd have liked to, because there wasn't anything aboard but what our filed manifest said. Gave old Firka a good chuckle. Till we were heading out for the last jumps, for Rho Ceta through those empty buffer systems just before the route splits to Komarr. We made one little mid-space rendezvous there that didn't appear on our flight plan."

  "What kind of ship did you rendezvous with? Jumpship, or just a local space crawler? Could you tell for sure, or was it disguised or camouflaged?"

  "Jumpship. I don't know what else it might have really been. It looked like a Cetagandan government ship. It had lots of fancy markings, anyway. Not big, but fast—fresh and classy. The Cetagandan bastard moved his cargo all by himself, with float pallets and hand tractors, but he sure didn't waste any time. The moment the locks were closed, they went off."

  "Where? Could you tell?"

  "Well, Hewlet said they had an odd trajectory. It was that uninhabited binary system a few jumps out from Rho Ceta, I don't know if you know it—"

  Miles nodded in encouragement.

  "They went inbound, deeper into the grav well. Maybe they were planning to swing around the suns and approach one of the jump points from a disguised trajectory, I don't know. That would make sense, given all the rest of it."

  "Just the one passenger?"

  "Yeah."

  "Tell me more about him."

  "Not much to tell—then. He kept to himself, ate h
is own rations in his own cabin. He didn't talk to me at all. He had to talk to Firka, on account of Firka was fixing his manifest. By the time we reached the first Barrayaran jump point inspection, it had a whole new provenance. He was somebody else by then, too."

  "Ker Dubauer?"

  Venn twitched at this first mention of the familiar name in his hearing, and opened his mouth and inhaled, but closed it again without diverting Guppy's flow. The unhappy amphibian was in full spate now, pouring out his troubles.

  "Not yet, he wasn't. He musta become Dubauer during his layover on the Komarran transfer station, I figure. I didn't track him by his identity, anyway. He was too good for that. Fooled you Barrayarans, didn't he?"

  Indeed. An apparent Cetagandan agent of the highest caliber had passed through Barrayar's key Nexus trade crossroad like so much smoke. ImpSec would have a seizure when this report arrived. "How did you follow him here, then?"