Miles, Mutants, and Microbes

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  "Ha," muttered Vorpatril. "Maybe this will change Watts's mind." His voice lowered, as if directed away from his audio pickup, or behind his hand. "What, Lieutenant?" Then murmured, "Excuse me," Miles was not certain to whom.

  So, only Barrayarans left aboard now. Plus Bel—on the ImpSec payroll, therefore an honorary Barrayaran for all mortal accounting purposes. Miles smiled briefly despite it all as he considered Bel's probable outraged response to such a suggestion. The best time to insert a strike force would be before the ship started to move, rather than to attempt to play catch-up in mid-space. At some point, Vorpatril was probably going to stop waiting for quaddie permission to launch his men. At some point, Miles would agree.

  Miles returned his attention to the problem of spying on Nav and Com. If the ba had knocked out the monitor the way the passing quaddies just had, or even merely thrown a jacket over the vid pickup, Miles would be out of luck . . . ah. Finally. An image of Nav and Com formed over his vid plate. But now he had no sound. Miles gritted his teeth and bent forward.

  The vid pickup was apparently centered over the door, giving a good view over the half dozen empty station chairs and their dark consoles. The ba was there, still dressed in the Betan garb of its discarded alias, jacket and sarong and sandals. Although a pressure suit—one—abstracted from the Idris's supplies lay nearby, flung over the back of a station chair. Corbeau, still vulnerably naked, was seated in the pilot's chair, but had not yet lowered his headset. The ba held up a hand, said something; Corbeau frowned fiercely, and flinched, as the ba pressed a hypospray briefly against the pilot's upper arm and stepped back with a flash of satisfaction on its strained face.

  Drugs? Surely even the ba was not mad enough to drug a jump pilot upon whose neural function it would shortly be betting its life. Some disease inoculation? The same problem applied, although something latent might do—Cooperate, and later I will let you have the antidote. Or pure bluff, a shot of water, perhaps. The hypospray seemed altogether too crude and obvious as a Cetagandan drug administration method; it hinted at bluff to Miles's mind, though perhaps not to Corbeau's. One had no choice but to turn control over to the pilot when he lowered his headset and plugged the ship into his mind. It made pilots hard to effectively threaten.

  It did rather put paid to Vorpatril's paranoid fear that Corbeau had turned traitor, volunteering for this as a way to get a free ride out of his quaddie detention cell and his dilemmas. Or did it? Regardless of prior or secret agreements, the ba would not simply trust when it could, it would think, guarantee.

  Over his wrist com, muffled as from a distance, Miles heard a sudden, startling bellow from Admiral Vorpatril: "What? That's impossible. Have they gone mad? Not now . . ."

  After a few more moments passed without further enlightenment, he murmured, "Um, Ekaterin? Are you still there?"

  Her breath drew in. "Yes."

  "What's going on?"

  "Admiral Vorpatril was called away by his communications officer. Some sort of priority message from Sector Five headquarters just arrived. It seems to be something very urgent."

  On the vid image in front of him, Miles watched as Corbeau began to run through preflight checks, moving from station to station under the hard, watchful eyes of the ba. Corbeau made sure to move with disproportional care; apparently, from the movement of his rather stiff lips, explaining each move before he touched a console. And slowly, Miles noted. Rather more slowly than necessary, if not quite slowly enough to be obvious about it.

  Vorpatril's voice, or rather, Vorpatril's heavy breathing, returned at last. The admiral appeared to have run out of invective. Miles found that considerably more disturbing than his previous naval bellowing.

  "My lord." Vorpatril hesitated. His voice dropped to a sort of stunned growl. "I have just received Priority One orders from Sector Five HQ to marshal my escort ships, abandon the Komarran fleet, and head for fleet rendezvous off Marilac at maximum possible speed."

  Not with my wife, you don't, was Miles's first gyrating thought.

  Then he blinked, freezing in his seat.

  The other function of the military escorts Barrayar donated to the Komarran trade fleets was to quietly and unobtrusively maintain an armed force dispersed through the Nexus. A force that could, in the event of a truly dire emergency, be collected rapidly so as to present a convincing military threat at key strategic points. In a crunch it might otherwise be too slow, or even diplomatically or militarily impossible, to get any force from the homeworlds through the wormhole jumps of intervening local space polities to the mustering places where it could do Barrayar some good. But the trade fleets were out there already.

  The planet of Marilac was a Barrayaran ally at the back door of the Cetagandan Empire, from Barrayar's point of view, in the complex web of wormhole jump routes that strung the Nexus together. A second front, as Rho Ceta's immediate neighborly threat to Komarr was considered the first front. Granted, the Cetagandans had the shorter lines of communication and logistics between the two points of contact. But the strategic pincer still beat hell out of the sound of one hand clapping, particularly with the potential addition of Marilacan forces. The Barrayarans would only be marshaling at Marilac in order to offer a threat to Cetaganda.

  Except that, when Miles and Ekaterin had left Barrayar on this belated honeymoon trip, relations between the two empires had been about as—well, cordial was perhaps not quite the right term—about as unstrained as they had been in years. What the hell could have changed that, so profoundly, and so quickly?

  Something has stirred up the Cetagandans around Rho Ceta, Gregor had said.

  A few jumps out from Rho Ceta, Guppy and his smuggler friends had off-loaded a strange live cargo from a Cetagandan government ship, one with lots of fancy markings. A screaming-bird pattern, perhaps? Along with one, and only one person—one survivor? After which the ship had tilted away, on a dangerous in-bound course for the system's suns. What if that trajectory hadn't been a swing around? What if it had been a straight dive, with no return?

  "Sonuvabitch," breathed Miles.

  "My lord?" said Vorpatril. "If—"

  "Quiet," snapped Miles.

  The admiral's silence was shocked, but it held.

  Once a year, the most precious cargoes of the haut race left the Star Crèche on the capital world of Eta Ceta. Eight ships, bound each for one of the planets of the Empire so curiously ruled by the haut. Each carrying that year's cohort of haut embryos, genetically modified and certified results of all the contracts of conception so carefully negotiated, the prior year, between the members of the great constellations, the clans, the carefully cultivated gene-lines of the haut race. Each load of a thousand or so nascent lives conducted by one of the eight most important haut ladies of the Empire, the planetary consorts who were the steering committee of the Star Crèche. All most private, most secret, most never-to-be-discussed with outsiders.

  How was it that a ba agent could not go back for more copies, if it lost such a cargo of future haut lives in transit?

  When it wasn't an agent at all. When it was a renegade.

  "The crime isn't murder," Miles whispered, his eyes widening. "The crime is kidnapping."

  The murders had come subsequently, in an increasingly panicked cascade, as the ba, with good reason, attempted to bury its trail. Well, Guppy and his friends had surely been planned to die, as eyewitnesses to the fact that one person had not gone down with the rest on the doomed ship. A ship hijacked, if briefly, before its destruction—all the best hijackings were inside jobs, oh, yes. The Cetagandan government must be going insane over this.

  "My lord, are you all right—?"

  Ekaterin's voice, in a fierce whisper: "No, don't interrupt him. He's thinking. He just makes those funny leaking noises when he's thinking."

  From the Celestial Garden's point of view, a Star Crèche child-ship had disappeared on what should have been a safe route to Rho Ceta. Every rescue force and intelligence agent the Cetagandan empire owned
would have been flung into the case. If it were not for Guppy, the tragedy might have passed as some mysterious malfunction that had sent the ship tumbling, out of control and unable to signal, to its fiery doom. No survivors, no wreckage, no loose ends. But there was Guppy. Leaving a messy trail of wildly suggestive evidence behind him with every flopping footfall.

  How far behind could the Cetagandans be, by now? Too close for the ba's comfort, obviously; it was a wonder, when Guppy had popped up on the hostel railing, that the ba hadn't just died of heart failure without any need for the rivet gun. But the ba's trail, marked by Guppy with blazing flares, led straight through from the scene of the crime to the heart of a sometimes-enemy empire—Barrayar. What were the Cetagandans making of it all?

  Well, we have a clue now, don't we?

  "Right," breathed Miles, then, more crisply, "Right. You're recording all this, I trust. So my first order in the Emperor's Voice, Admiral, is to countermand your rendezvous orders from Sector Five. That was what you were about to ask for, yes?"

  "Thank you, my Lord Auditor, yes," said Vorpatril gratefully. "Normally, that would be a call I would rather die than disregard, but . . . given our present situation, they are going to have to wait a little." Vorpatril wasn't self-dramatizing; this was delivered as a plain statement of fact. "Not too long, I hope."

  "They are going to have to wait a lot. This is my next order in the Emperor's Voice. Clear copy everything—everything—you have on record here from the past twenty-four hours and squirt it back on an open channel, at the highest priority, to the Imperial Residence, to the Barrayaran high command on Barrayar, to ImpSec HQ, and to ImpSec Galactic Affairs on Komarr. And," he took a breath, and raised his voice to override Vorpatril's outraged cry of Clear copy! At a time like this? "marked from Lord Auditor Miles Vorkosigan of Barrayar to the most urgent, personal attention of ghem-General Dag Benin, Chief of Imperial Security, the Celestial Garden, Eta Ceta, personal, urgent, most urgent, by Rian's hair this one's real, Dag. Exactly those words."

  "What?" screamed Vorpatril, then hastily lowered his tone to an anguished repeat, "What? A rendezvous at Marilac can only mean imminent war with the Cetagandans! We can't hand them that kind of intelligence on our position and movements—gift-wrapped!"

  "Obtain the complete, unedited Graf Station Security recording of the interrogation of Russo Gupta and send it along too, as soon as you possibly can. Sooner."

  New terror shook Miles, a vision like a fever dream: the grand façade of Vorkosigan House, in the Barrayaran capital of Vorbarr Sultana, with plasma fire raining down upon it, its ancient stone melting like butter; two fluid-filled canisters exploding in steam. Or a fog of plague, leaving all the House's protectors dead in heaps in the halls, or fled to die in the streets; two almost ripe replicators running down unattended, stopping, slowly chilling, their tiny occupants dying for lack of oxygen, drowning in their own amniotic fluid. His past and his future, all destroyed together . . . Nikki, too—would he be swept up with the other children in some frantic rescue, or left uncounted, unmissed, fatally alone? Miles had fancied himself growing into a good stepfather to Nikki—that was called into deep question now, eh? Ekaterin, I'm sorry . . .

  It would be hours—days—before the new tight-beam could get back to Barrayar and Cetaganda. Insanely upset people could make fatal mistakes in mere minutes. Seconds . . . "And if you are a praying man, Vorpatril, pray that no one will do anything stupid before it gets there. And that we will be believed."

  "Lady Vorkosigan," Vorpatril whispered urgently. "Could he be hallucinating from the disease?"

  "No, no," she soothed. "He's just thinking too fast, and leaving out all the intervening steps. He does that. It can be very frustrating. Miles, love, um . . . for the rest of us, would you mind unpacking that a little more?"

  He took a breath—and two or three more—to stop his trembling. "The ba. It's not an agent on a mission. It's a criminal. A renegade. Perhaps insane. I believe it hijacked the annual haut child-ship to Rho Ceta, sent the vessel into the nearest sun with all aboard—probably murdered already—and made off with its cargo. Which trans-shipped through Komarr, and which left the Barrayaran Empire on a trade ship belonging to Empress Laisa personally—and just how incriminating that particular detail is going to look to certain minds inside the Star Crèche, I shrink to imagine. The Cetagandans think we stole their babies, or colluded in the theft, and, dear God, murdered a planetary consort, and so they are about to make war on us by mistake!"

  "Oh," said Vorpatril blankly.

  "The ba's whole safety lay in perfect secrecy, because once the Cetagandans got on the right trail they would never rest till they tracked this crime down. But the perfect plan cracked when Gupta didn't die on schedule. Gupta's frantic antics drew Solian in, drew you in, drew me in . . ." His voice slowed. "Except, what in the world does the ba want those haut infants for?"

  Ekaterin offered hesitantly, "Could it be stealing them for someone else?"

  "Yes, but the ba aren't supposed to be subornable."

  "Well, if not for pay or some bribe, maybe blackmail or threat? Maybe threat to some haut to whom the ba is loyal?"

  "Or maybe some faction in the Star Crèche," Miles supplied. "Except . . . the ghem-lords do factions. The haut lords do factions. The Star Crèche has always moved as one—even when it was committing arguable treason, a decade ago, the haut ladies took no separate decisions."

  "The Star Crèche committed treason?" echoed Vorpatril in astonishment. "This certainly didn't get out! Are you sure? I never heard of any mass executions that high in the Empire back then, and I should have." He paused, and added in a baffled tone, "How could a bunch of haut-lady baby-makers commit treason, anyway?"

  "It didn't quite come off. For various reasons." Miles cleared his throat.

  "Lord Auditor Vorkosigan. This is your com link, yes? Are you there?" a new voice, and a very welcome one, broke in.

  "Sealer Greenlaw!" Miles cried happily. "Have you made it to safety? All of you?"

  "We are back aboard Graf Station," replied the Sealer. "It seems premature to call it safety. And you?"

  "Still trapped aboard the Idris. Although not totally without resources. Or ideas."

  "I urgently need to speak to you. You can override that hothead Vorpatril."

  "Ah, my com link is sustaining an open audio link with Admiral Vorpatril now, ma'am. You can speak to both of us at once, if you like," Miles put in hastily, before she could express herself even more freely.

  She hesitated only fractionally. "Good. We absolutely need Vorpatril to hold, repeat, hold any strike force of his. Corbeau confirms the ba does have some sort of a remote control or deadman switch on his person, apparently linked back to the biohazard it has hidden aboard Graf Station. The ba is not bluffing."

  Miles glanced up in surprise at his silent vid of Nav and Com. Corbeau was seated now in the pilot's station chair, the control headset lowered over his skull, his expressionless face even more absent. "Corbeau confirms! How? He was stark naked—the ba is watching him every second! Subcutaneous com link?"

  "There was no time to find and insert one. He undertook to blink the ship's running lights in a prearranged code."

  "Whose idea was that?"

  "His."

  Quick colonial boy. The pilot was on their side. Oh, but that was good to know. . . . Miles's shivering was turning to shudders.

  "Every adult quaddie on Graf Station not on emergency duty is out looking for the bio-bomb now," Greenlaw continued, "but we have no idea what it looks like, or how big it is, or if it is disguised as something else. Or if there is more than one. We are trying to evacuate as many children as possible into what ships and shuttles we have on hand, and seal them off, but we can't even be sure of them, really. If you people do anything to set this mad creature off—if you launch an unauthorized strike force before this vicious threat is found and safely neutralized—I swear I will give our militia the order to shoot them out of space myself. Do you
copy, Admiral? Confirm."

  "I hear you," said Vorpatril reluctantly. "But ma'am—the Imperial Auditor himself has been infected with one of the ba's lethal bio-agents. I cannot—I will not—if I have to sit here and do nothing while listening to him die—"

  "There are fifty thousand innocent lives on Graf Station, Admiral—Lord Auditor!" Her voice failed for a second; returned stiffly. "I am sorry, Lord Vorkosigan."

  "I'm not dead yet," Miles replied rather primly. A new and most unwelcome sensation struggled with the tight fear grinding in his belly. He added, "I'm going to switch off my com link for just a moment. I'll be right back."

  Motioning Roic to keep still, Miles opened the door to the security office, stepped into the corridor, opened his faceplate, leaned over, and vomited onto the floor. No help for it. With an angry swipe, he turned his suit temperature back up. He blinked back the green dizziness, wiped his mouth, went back inside, seated himself again, and called his link back on. "Continue."