Miles, Mutants, and Microbes

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  Venn looked at Greenlaw. "So do we take this prisoner to a clinic, or to a cell?"

  Greenlaw was silent for a few moments, then said, "Graf Station University clinic. Straight to the infectious isolation unit. I think we want our best experts in on this, and as quickly as possible."

  Gupta objected, "But I'll be an open target! I was hunting the Cetagandan bastard—now he—it, whatever—will be hunting me!"

  "I agree with this evaluation," Miles said quickly. "Wherever you take Gupta, the location should be kept absolutely secret. The fact that he's even been taken into custody should be suppressed—dear God, this arrest hasn't gone out on your news services already, has it?" Piping the word of Gupta's location to every nook of the station . . .

  "Not formally," said Venn uneasily.

  It scarcely mattered, Miles supposed. Dozens of quaddies had seen the web-fingered man brought in, including everybody that Bel's crew of roustabouts had passed on the way. The Docks and Locks quaddies would certainly brag of their catch to everyone they knew. The gossip would be all over.

  "I strongly urge—beg!—you to put out word of his daring escape, then. Complete with follow-up bulletins asking all the citizens to keep an eye out for him again." The ba had killed four to keep its secret—would it be willing to kill fifty thousand?

  "A disinformation campaign?" Greenlaw's lips pursed in repugnance.

  "The lives of everyone on the station might well depend on it. Secrecy is your best hope of safety. And Gupta's. After that, guards—"

  "My people are already spread to their limit," Venn protested. He gave Greenlaw a beseeching look.

  Miles opened a hand in acknowledgment. "Not patrollers. Guards who know what they're doing, trained in bio-defense procedures."

  "We'll have to draw on Union Militia specialists," said Greenlaw in a decisive tone. "I'll put in the request. But it will take them . . . some time, to get here."

  "In the meanwhile," said Miles, "I can loan you some trained personnel."

  Venn grimaced. "I have a detention block full of your personnel. I'm not much impressed with their training."

  Miles suppressed a wince. "Not them. Military medical corps."

  "I will consider your offer," said Greenlaw neutrally.

  "Some of Vorpatril's senior medical men must have some expertise in this area. If you won't let us take Gupta out to the safety of one of our vessels, please, let them come aboard the station to help you."

  Greenlaw's eyes narrowed. "All right. We will accept up to four such volunteers. Unarmed. Under the direct supervision and command of our own medical experts."

  "Agreed," said Miles instantly.

  It was the best compromise he was likely to get, for the moment. The medical end of this problem, terrifying as it was, would have to be left to the specialists; it was out of Miles's range of expertise. Catching the ba before it could do any more damage, now . . .

  "The haut are not immune to stunner fire. I . . . recommend"—he could not order, he could not demand, most of all, he could not scream—"you quietly inform all of your patrollers that the ba—Dubauer—be stunned on sight. Once it's down, we can sort things out at our leisure."

  Venn and Greenlaw exchanged looks with the adjudicator. Leutwyn said in a constricted voice, "It would be against regs to so ambush the suspect if it is not in process of a crime, resisting arrest, or fleeing."

  "Bioweapons?" muttered Venn.

  The adjudicator swallowed. "Make damned sure your patrollers don't miss their first shot."

  "Your ruling is noted, sir."

  And if the ba stayed out of sight? Which it had certainly managed to do for most of the past twenty-four hours. . . .

  What did the ba want? Its cargo freed, and Guppy dead before he could talk, presumably. What did the ba know, at this point? Or not know? It didn't know that Miles had identified its cargo . . . did it? Where the hell is Bel?

  "Ambush," Miles echoed. "There are two places where you could set up an ambush for the ba. Wherever you take Guppy—or better still, wherever the ba believes you've taken Guppy. If you don't want to put it about that he's escaped, then take him to a concealed location, with a second, less secret one set up for bait. Then, another trap at the Idris. If Dubauer calls in requesting permission to go aboard again, which the last time we met, it fully intended to do, you should grant the petition. Then nail it as it enters the loading bay."

  "That's what I was going to do," put in Gupta in a resentful voice. "If you people had just let well enough alone, this could have been all over by now."

  Miles privately agreed, but it would hardly do to say so out loud; someone might point out just who had put on the pressure for Gupta's arrest.

  Greenlaw was looking grimly thoughtful. "I wish to inspect this alleged cargo. It is possible that it violates enough regs to merit impoundment quite separately from the issue of its carrier ship."

  The adjudicator cleared his throat. "That could grow legally complex, Sealer. More complex. Cargoes not off-loaded for transfer, even if questionable, are normally allowed to pass through without legal comment. They're considered to be the territorial responsibility of the polity of registration of the carrier, unless they are an imminent public danger. A thousand fetuses, if that's what they are, constitute . . . what menace?"

  Impounding them could prove a horrific danger, Miles thought. It would certainly lock Cetagandan attention upon Quaddiespace. Speaking from both historical and personal experience, this was not necessarily a good thing.

  "I want to confirm this for myself, too," said Venn. "And give my guards their orders in person, and figure out where to place my sharpshooters."

  "And you need me along, to get into the cargo hold," Miles pointed out.

  Greenlaw said, "No, just your security codes."

  Miles smiled blandly at her.

  Her jaw tightened. After a moment, she growled, "Very well. Let's go, Venn. You too, Adjudicator. And," she sighed briefly, "you, Lord Auditor Vorkosigan."

  Gupta was wrapped in bio-barriers by the two quaddies who had handled him before—a logical choice, if not much to their liking. They donned wraps and gloves themselves and towed him out without allowing him to touch anything else. The amphibian suffered this without protest. He looked utterly exhausted.

  Garnet Five left with Nicol for Nicol's apartment, where the two quaddie women planned to support each other while awaiting word of Bel. "Call me," Nicol pleaded in an under-voice to Miles as they floated out. Miles nodded his promise, and prayed silently that it would not prove to be one of those hard calls.

  His brief vid call out to the Prince Xav and Admiral Vorpatril was hard enough. Vorpatril was almost as white as his hair by the time Miles had finished bringing him up to date. He promised to expedite a selection of medical volunteers at emergency speed.

  The procession to the Idris finally included Venn, Greenlaw, the adjudicator, two quaddie patrollers, Miles, and Roic. The loading bay was as dim and quiet as—had it only been yesterday? One of the two quaddie guards, watched bemusedly by the other, was out of his floater and crouched on the floor. He was evidently playing a game with gravity involving a scattering of tiny bright metal caltrops and a small rubber ball, which seemed to consist of bouncing the ball off the floor, catching it again, and snatching up the little caltrops between bounces. To make it more interesting for himself, he was switching hands with each iteration. At the sight of the visitors, the guard hastily pocketed the game and scrambled back into his floater.

  Venn pretended not to see this, simply inquiring after any events of note during their shift. Not only had no unauthorized persons attempted to get past them, the investigation committee was the first live persons the bored men had seen since relieving the prior shift. Venn lingered with his patrollers to make his arrangements for the stunner ambush of the ba, should it appear, and Miles led Roic, Greenlaw, and the adjudicator aboard the ship.

  The gleaming rows of replicator racks in Dubauer's leased cargo hold app
eared unchanged from yesterday. Greenlaw grew tense about the lips, guiding her floater around the hold on an initial overview, then pausing to stare down the aisles. Miles thought he could almost see her doing the multiplication in her head. She and Leutwyn then hovered by Miles's side as he activated a few control panels to demonstrate the replicators' contents.

  It was almost a repeat of yesterday, except . . . a number of the readout indicators showed amber instead of green. Closer examination revealed them as measures of an array of stressor-signals, including adrenaline levels. Was the ba right about the fetuses reaching some sort of biological limit in their containers? Was this the first sign of dangerous overgrowth? As Miles watched, a couple of the light bars dropped back on their own from amber to a more encouraging green. He went on to call up the vid monitor images of the individual fetuses for Greenlaw's and the adjudicator's views. The fourth one he activated showed amniotic fluid cloudy with scarlet blood when the lights came on. Miles caught his breath. How . . . ?

  That surely wasn't normal. The only possible source of blood was the fetus itself. He rechecked the stressor levels—this one showed a lot of amber—then stood on tiptoe and peered more closely at the image. The blood appeared to be leaking from a small, jagged gash on the twitching haut infant's back. The low red lighting, Miles reassured himself uneasily, made it look worse than it was.

  Greenlaw's voice by his ear made him jump. "Is there something wrong with that one?"

  "He appears to have suffered some sort of mechanical injury. That . . . shouldn't be possible, in a sealed replicator." He thought of Aral Alexander, and Helen Natalia, and his stomach knotted. "If you have any quaddie experts in replicator reproduction, it might not be a bad idea to get them in here to look at these." He doubted this was a specialty where the military medicos from the Prince Xav were likely to be much help.

  Venn appeared at the door of the hold, and Greenlaw repeated most of Miles's orienting patter for his benefit. Venn's expression was most disturbed as he regarded the replicators. "That frog fellow wasn't lying. This is very strange."

  Venn's wrist com buzzed, and he excused himself to float to the side of the room and engage in some low-voiced conversation with whatever subordinate was reporting in. At least, it began as low-voiced, until Venn bellowed, "What? When?"

  Miles abandoned his worried study of the injured haut infant and edged over to Venn.

  "About 0200, sir," a distressed voice responded from the wrist com.

  "This wasn't authorized!"

  "Yes, it was, Crew Chief, duly. Portmaster Thorne authorized it. Since it was the same passenger it had brought on board yesterday, the one who had that live cargo to tend, we didn't think anything was odd."

  "What time did they leave?" Venn asked. His face was a mask of dismay.

  "Not on our shift, sir. I don't know what happened after that. I went straight home and went to bed. I didn't see the search bulletin for Portmaster Thorne on the news stream till I got up for breakfast just a few minutes ago."

  "Why didn't you pass this on in your end-of-shift report?"

  "Portmaster Thorne said not to." The voice hesitated. "At least . . . the passenger suggested we might want to leave this off the record, so that we wouldn't have to deal with all the other passengers demanding access too if they heard about it, and Portmaster Thorne nodded and said Yes."

  Venn winced, and took a deep breath. "It can't be helped, Patroller. You reported as soon as you knew. I'm glad you at least picked up the news right away. We'll take it from here. Thank you." Venn cut the channel.

  "What was that all about?" asked Miles. Roic had strolled up to loom over his shoulder.

  Venn clutched his head with his upper hands, and groaned, "My night-shift guard on the Idris just woke up and saw the news bulletin about Thorne being missing. He says Thorne came here last night about oh-two-hundred and passed Dubauer through the guards."

  "Where did Thorne go after that?"

  "Escorted Dubauer aboard, apparently. Neither of them came off while my night-shift crew was watching. Excuse me. I need to go talk to my people." Venn grabbed his floater control and swung hastily out of the cargo hold.

  Miles stood stunned. How could Bel have gone from an uncomfortable, but relatively safe, nap in a recycling bin to this action in little more than an hour? Garnet Five had taken six or seven hours to wake up. His high confidence in his judgment of Gupta's account was suddenly shaken.

  Roic, eyes narrowing, asked, "Could your herm friend have gone renegade, m'lord? Or been bribed?"

  Adjudicator Leutwyn looked to Greenlaw, who looked sick with uncertainty.

  "I would sooner doubt . . . myself," said Miles. And that was slandering Bel. "Although the portmaster might have been bribed with a nerve disruptor muzzle pressed to its spine, or something equivalent." He wasn't sure he wanted to even try to imagine the ba's bioweapon equivalent. "Bel would play for time."

  "How could this ba find the portmaster when we couldn't?" asked Leutwyn.

  Miles hesitated. "The ba wasn't hunting Bel. The ba was hunting Guppy. If the ba had been closing in last night when Guppy counterattacked his shadowers . . . the ba might have come along immediately after, or even been a witness. And allowed itself to be diverted, or swapped its priorities, in the face of the unexpected opportunity to gain access to its cargo through Bel."

  What priorities? What did the ba want? Well, Gupta dead, certainly, doubly so now that the amphibian was witness to both its initial clandestine operation, and to the murders by which the ba had attempted to completely erase its trail. But for the ba to have been so close to its target, and yet veer off, suggested that the other priority was overwhelmingly more important to it.

  The ba had spoken of utterly destroying its purportedly animal cargo; the ba had also spoken of taking tissue samples for freezing. The ba had spoken lie upon lie, but suppose this was the truth? Miles wheeled to stare down the aisle of racks. The image formed itself in his mind: of the ba working all day, with relentless speed and concentration. Loosening the lid of each replicator, stabbing through membrane, fluid, and soft skin with a sampling needle, lining the needles up, row on row, in a freezer unit the size of a small valise. Miniaturizing the essence of its genetic payload to something it could carry away in one hand. At the cost of abandoning their originals? Destroying the evidence?

  Maybe it has, and we just can't see the effects yet. If the ba could make adult-sized bodies steam away their own liquids within hours and turn to viscous puddles, what could it do with such tiny ones?

  The Cetagandan wasn't stupid. Its smuggling scheme might have gone according to plan, but for the slipup with Gupta. Who had followed the ba here, and drawn in Solian—whose disappearance had led to the muddle with Corbeau and Garnet Five, which had led to the bungled raid on the quaddie security post, which had resulted in the impoundment of the fleet, including the ba's precious cargo. Miles knew exactly how it felt to watch a carefully planned mission slide down the toilet in a flush of random mischance. How would the ba respond to that sick, heart-pounding desperation? Miles had almost no sense of the person, despite meeting it twice. The ba was smooth and slick and self-controlled. It could kill with a touch, smiling.

  But if the ba was paring down its payload to a minimum mass, it certainly wouldn't saddle its escape with a prisoner.

  "I think," said Miles, and had to stop and clear a throat gone dry. Bel would play for time. But suppose time and ingenuity ran out, and no one came, and no one came, and no one came . . . "I think Bel might still be aboard the Idris. We must search the ship. At once."

  Roic stared around, looking daunted. "All of it, m'lord?"

  He started to cry Yes! but his laggard brain converted it to, "No. Bel had no access codes beyond quaddie control of the airlock. The ba had codes only for this hold and its own cabin. Anything that was locked before, should still be. For the first pass, check unsecured spaces only."

  "Shouldn't we wait for Chief Venn's patrollers?" asked Leu
twyn uneasily.

  "If anyone even tries to come aboard who hasn't been exposed already, I swear I'll stun them myself before they can get through the airlock. I'm not fooling." Miles's voice was husky with conviction.