Diplomatic Immunity (36 page)

Roic pointed to himself, to the door; Miles shook his head and motioned him to bend closer. They touched helmets.

"Me first. Gotta grab that case before the ba can react. 'Sides, I need
you
to pull back the door."

Roic looked around, inhaled, and nodded.

Miles motioned him back down to touch helmets one more time. "And, Roic? I'm glad I didn't bring Jankowski."

Roic smiled. Miles stepped aside.

Now.
Delay was no one's friend.

Roic bent, splayed his gloved hands across the door, pressed, and pulled. The servos in his suit whined at the load. The door creaked unwillingly aside.

Miles slipped through. He didn't look back, or up. His world had narrowed to one goal, one object. The freezer case—there, still on the floor beside the absent communication officer's station chair. He pounced, grabbed, lifted it up, clutched it to his chest like a shield, like the hope of his heart.

The ba was turning, yelling, lips drawn back, eyes wide, its hand snaking for a pocket. Miles's gloved fingers felt for the catches. If locked, toss the case toward the ba. If unlocked . . . 

The case snapped open. Miles yanked it wide, shook it hard, swung it.

A silver cascade, the better part of a thousand tiny tissue-sampling cryo-storage needles, arced out of the case and bounced randomly across the deck. Some shattered as they struck, making tiny crystalline singing noises like dying insects. Some spun. Some skittered, disappearing behind station chairs and into crevices. Miles grinned fiercely.

The yell became a scream; the ba's hands shot out toward Miles as if in supplication, in denial, in despair. The Cetagandan began to stumble toward him, gray face working in shock and disbelief.

Roic's power-suited hands locked down over the ba's wrists and hoisted. Wrist bones crackled and popped; blood spurted between the tightening gloved fingers. The ba's body convulsed as it was lifted up. Wild eyes rolled back. The scream transmuted into a weird wail, trailing away. Sandal-clad feet kicked and drummed uselessly at the heavy shin plating of Roic's work suit; toenails split and bled, without effect. Roic stood stolidly, hands up and apart, racking the ba helplessly in the air.

Miles let the freezer case fall from his fingers. It hit the deck with a thump. With a whispered word, he called back the outgoing audio in his com link. "We've taken the ba prisoner. Send relief troops. In biotainer suits. They won't need their guns now. I'm afraid the ship's an unholy mess."

His knees were buckling. He sank to the deck himself, giggling uncontrollably. Corbeau was rising from his pilot's chair; Miles motioned him away with an urgent gesture. "Stay back, Dmitri! I'm about to . . ."

He wrenched his faceplate open in time. Barely. The vomiting and spasms that wrung his stomach this time were much worse.
It's over. Can I please die now?
 

Except that it wasn't over, not nearly. Greenlaw had played for fifty thousand lives. Now it was Miles's turn to play for fifty million.

Miles arrived back in the
Idris
's infirmary feet first. He was carried by two of the men from Vorpatril's strike force, which had been hastily converted to, mostly, a medical relief team, and as such cleared by the quaddies. His porters almost fell down the unsightly hole Roic had left in the floor. Miles seized back personal control of his locomotion long enough to stand up, under his own power, and lean rather unsteadily against the wall by the door to the bio-isolation ward. Roic followed, carefully holding the ba's remote trigger in a biotainer bag. Corbeau, stiff-faced and pale, brought up the rear dressed in a loose medical tunic and drawstring pants, and shepherded by a medtech with the ba's hypospray in another biotainer sack.

Captain Clogston came out through the buzzing blue barriers and looked over his new influx of patients and assistants. "Right," he announced, glowering at the gap in the deck. "This ship is so damned befouled, I'm declaring the whole thing a Level Three Biocontamination Zone. So we may as well spread out and get comfortable, boys."

The techs made a human chain to pass the analyzing equipment quickly to the outer chamber. Miles snared the chance for a few brief, urgent words with the two men with medical markings on their suits who stood apart from the rest—the
Prince Xav
's military interrogation officers. Not really in disguise, merely discreet—and, Miles had to allow, they
were
medically trained.

The second ward was declared a temporary holding cell for their prisoner, the ba, who followed in the procession, bound to a float pallet. Miles scowled as the pallet drifted past, towed on its control lead by a watchful, muscular sergeant. The ba was strapped down tightly, but its head and eyes rolled oddly, and its saliva-flecked lips writhed.

Above almost anything else, it was essential to keep the ba in Barrayaran hands. Finding where the ba had hidden its filthy bio-bomb on Graf Station was the first priority. The haut race had some genetically engineered immunity to the most common interrogation drugs and their derivatives; if fast-penta didn't work on this one, it would give the quaddies very little in the way of interrogation procedures to fall back upon that would pass Adjudicator Leutwyn's approval. In this emergency, military rules seemed more appropriate than civilian ones.
In other words, if they'll just leave us alone we'll pull out the ba's fingernails
for
them.
 

Miles caught Clogston by the elbow. "How is Bel Thorne doing?" he demanded.

The fleet surgeon shook his head. "Not well, my Lord Auditor. We thought at first the herm was improving, as the filters cut in—it seemed to return to consciousness. But then it became restless. Moaning and trying to talk. Out of its head, I think. It keeps crying for Admiral Vorpatril."

Vorpatril? Why?
Wait— "Did Bel say Vorpatril?" Miles asked sharply. "Or just,
the Admiral
?"

Clogston shrugged. "Vorpatril's the only admiral around right now, although I suppose the portmaster could be hallucinating altogether. I hate to sedate anyone so physiologically distressed, especially when they've just fought their way
out
of a drug fog. But if that herm doesn't calm down, we'll have to."

Miles frowned and hurried into the isolation ward. Clogston followed. Miles pulled off his helmet, fished his wrist com back out of it, and clutched the vital link safely in his hand. A tech was making up the hastily cleared second bunk, readying it for the infected Lord Auditor, presumably.

Bel now lay on the first bunk, dried off and dressed in a pale green Barrayaran military-issue patient tunic, which seemed at first heartening progress. But the herm was gray-faced, lips purple-blue, eyelids fluttering. An IV pump, not dependent upon potentially erratic ship's gravity, infused yellow fluid rapidly into Bel's right arm. The left arm was strapped to a board; plastic tubing filled with blood ran from under a bandage and into a hybrid appliance bound around with quantities of plastic tape. A second tube ran back again, its dark surface moist with condensation.

" 'S balla," Bel moaned. " 'S balla."

The fleet surgeon's lips pursed in medical displeasure behind his faceplate. He edged forward to glance at a monitor. "Blood pressure's way up, too. I think it's time to knock the poor bugger back out."

"Wait." Miles elbowed to the edge of Bel's bunk to put himself in Bel's line of sight, staring down at the herm in wild hope. Bel's head jerked. The eyelids flickered up; the eyes widened. The blue lips tried to move again. Bel licked them, took a long inhalation, and tried once more. "Adm'ral! Portent. 'S basti'd hid it in the balla. Tol' me. Sadist'c basti'd."

"Still going on about Admiral Vorpatril," Clogston muttered in dismay.

"Not Admiral Vorpatril. Me," breathed Miles. Did that witty mind still exist, in the bunker of its brain? Bel's eyes were open, shifting to try to focus on him, as if Miles's image wavered and blurred in the herm's sight.

Bel knew a portent. No. Bel was trying to say something important. Bel wrestled death for the possession of its own mouth to try to get the message out. Balla? Ballistic? Balalaika? No—ballet!

Miles said urgently, "The ba hid its bio-bomb at the ballet—in the Minchenko Auditorium? Is that what you're trying to say, Bel?"

The straining body sagged in relief. "Yeh. Yeh. Get 's word out. In the lights, I thin'."

"Was there only one bomb? Or were there more? Did the ba say, could you tell?"

"Don' know. 'S homemade, I thin'. Check. Purch'ses . . ."

"Right, got it! Good work, Captain Thorne."
You always were the best, Bel
. Miles turned half away and spoke forcefully into his wrist com, demanding to be patched through to Greenlaw, or Venn, or Watts, or
somebody
in authority on Graf Station.

A ragged female voice finally replied, "Yes?"

"Sealer Greenlaw? Are you there?"

Her voice steadied. "Yes, Lord Vorkosigan? Do you have something?"

"Maybe. Bel Thorne reports the ba said that it hid the bio-bomb somewhere in the Minchenko Auditorium. Possibly behind some lights."

Her breath drew in. "Good. We'll concentrate our trained searchers in there."

"Bel also thinks the bomb was something the ba rigged itself, recently. It may have made purchases on Graf Station in the persona of Ker Dubauer that could give you a clue as to how many it could have devised."

"Ah! Right! I'll get Venn's people on it."

"Note, Bel's in pretty bad shape. Also, the ba could have been lying. Get back to me when you know something."

"Yes. Yes. Thank you." Hastily, she cut her com. It occurred to Miles to wonder if she was locked down in protective bio-isolation right now too, as he was about to be, trying to shape the critical moment at a similar frustrating remove.

"Basti'd," Bel muttered. "Paralyzed me. Put me in s' damn bod pod. Tol' me.
Then
zipped it up. Left me to die, 'magining . . . Knew . . . it knew about Nicol 'n me. Saw my vid cube. Where's m' vid cube?"

"Nicol is safe," Miles assured Bel. Well, as much as any quaddie on Graf Station at the moment—if not safe, at least
warned
. Vid cube? Oh, the little imager full of Bel's hypothetical children. "Your vid cube is put away safely." Miles had no idea if this last was true or not—the cube might be still in Bel's pocket, destroyed with the herm's contaminated clothes, or stolen by the ba. But the assertion gave Bel ease. The exhausted herm's eyes closed again, and its breathing steadied.

In a few hours, I'm going to look like that. 

Then you'd better not waste any time now, eh? 

With a vast distaste, Miles suffered a hovering tech to help him off with his pressure suit and underwear—to be taken away and incinerated, Miles supposed. "If you're tying me down here, I want a comconsole set up by my bunk immediately. No, you can't have that." Miles fended off the tech, who was now trying to pry loose his com link, then paused to swallow. "And something for nausea. All right, put it around my
right
arm, then."

Horizontal was scarcely better than vertical. Miles smoothed down his own pale green tunic and gave up his left arm to the surgeon, who personally attended to piercing his vein with some medical awl that felt the size of a drinking straw. On the other side a tech pressed a hypospray against his right shoulder—a potion that would kill the dizziness and the cramping in his stomach, he hoped. But he didn't yelp until the first spurt of filtered blood returned to his body. "
Crap
, that's cold. I
hate
cold."

"Can't be helped, my Lord Auditor," Clogston murmured soothingly. "We have to lower your body temperature at least three degrees. It will buy time."

Miles hunched, uncomfortably reminded that they didn't have a fix for this yet. He stifled a gush of terror, escaping under pressure from the place he'd kept it locked for the past hours. Not for one second would he allow himself to believe that there was no cure to be had, that this bio-shit would drag him under and this time he wouldn't come back up . . . "Where's Roic?" He raised his right wrist to his lips. "Roic?"

"I'm in the outer chamber, m'lord. I'm afraid to carry this triggering device through the bio-barrier till we're sure it's disarmed."

"Right, good thinking. One of those fellows out there should be the bomb disposal tech I requested. Find him and give it to him. Then ride herd on the interrogation for me, will you?"

"Yes, m'lord."

"Captain Clogston."

The doctor glanced down from where he fiddled with the jury-rigged blood filter. "My lord?"

"The moment you have a medtech—no, a doctor. The moment you have some qualified men free, send them to the cargo hold where the ba has the replicators. I want them to run samples, try to see if the ba has contaminated or poisoned them in any way. Then make sure the equipment's all running all right. It's
very important
that the haut infants all be kept alive and well."

"Yes, Lord Vorkosigan."

If the haut babies were inoculated with the same vile parasites presently rioting through his own body, might the replicators' temperature be turned down to chill them all, and slow the disease process? Or would such cold stress the infants, damage them . . . he was borrowing trouble, reasoning in advance of his data. A trained agent, conditioned to the correct disconnect between action and imagination, might have performed such an inoculation, cleaning up every bit of incriminating high-haut DNA before abandoning the scene. But this ba was an amateur. This ba had another sort of conditioning altogether.
Yes, but that conditioning must have gone very wrong somehow, or this ba wouldn't have got this far . . . 
 

Miles added as Clogston turned away, "And give me word on the condition of the pilot, Corbeau, as soon as you have it." The retreating suited figure raised a hand in acknowledgment.

In a few minutes, Roic entered the ward; he had doffed the bulky powered work suit, and now wore more comfortable military-issue Level Three biotainer garb.