Diplomatic Immunity (8 page)

"That's . . . nice," said Miles.
Where are you taking me, Bel?
 

"But if I
do
take an oath of citizenship here—and I've been thinking hard about it for a while—I want to take it honestly. I can't offer them a false oath, or divided loyalties."

"Your Betan citizenship never interfered with your career in the Dendarii Mercenaries," Miles pointed out.

"You never asked me to operate on Beta Colony," said Bel.

"And if I had?"

"I . . . would have faced a dilemma." Bel's hand stretched in urgent entreaty. "I want a clean start, with no secret strings attached. You claim ImpSec is your personal utility now. Miles—can you please fire me again?"

Miles sat back and chewed on his knuckle. "Cut you loose from ImpSec, you mean?"

"Yes. From all old obligations."

He blew out his breath.
But you're so valuable to us here!
"I . . . don't know."

"Don't know if you have the power? Or don't know if you want to use it?"

Miles temporized, "This power business has proved a lot stranger than I anticipated. You'd think more power would bring one more freedom, but I've found it's brought me less. Every word that comes out of my mouth has this
weight
that it never had before, when I was babbling Mad Miles, hustler of the Dendarii. I never had to watch my mass like this. It's . . . damned uncomfortable, sometimes."

"I'd have thought
you'd
love it."

"I'd have thought that too."

Bel leaned back, easing off. It would not make the request again, not soon, anyway.

Miles drummed his fingers on the cool, reflective surface of the table. "If there is anything more behind this mess than overexcitement and bad judgment—not that that isn't enough—it hinges on the evaporation of that Komarran fleet security fellow, Solian—"

Miles wrist com chimed, and he raised it to his lips. "Yes?"

"M'lord," came Roic's apologetic voice. "We're in dock again now."

"Right. Thanks. We'll be out directly." He rose from the table, saying, "You must meet Ekaterin properly, before we go back out there and have to play dumb again. She and Roic have full Barrayaran security clearances, by the way—they have to, to live this close to me. They both need to know who you are, and that they can trust you."

Bel hesitated. "Do they really need to know I'm ImpSec? Here?"

"They might, in an emergency."

"I would particularly like the quaddies not to know I've been selling intelligence to downsiders, you see. Maybe it would be safer if you and I were mere acquaintances."

Miles stared. "But Bel, she knows perfectly well who you are. Or were, anyway."

"What, have you been telling covert ops war stories to your wife?" Clearly disconcerted, Bel frowned. "Those rules always applied to someone else, didn't they?"

"Her clearance was earned, not just granted," Miles said a little stiffly. "But Bel, we sent you a wedding invitation! Or . . . did you get it? ImpSec notified me it was delivered—"

"Oh," said Bel, looking confused. "That. Yes. I did get it."

"Was it delivered too late? It should have included a travel voucher—if someone pocketed that, I'll have his hide—"

"No, the voucher came through all right. About a year and a half ago, yes? I could have made it, if I'd scrambled a bit. It just arrived at an awkward period for me. Kind of a low point. I'd just left Beta for the last time, and I was in the middle of a little job I was doing for ImpSec. Arranging a substitute would have been difficult. It was just effort, at a time when more effort . . . I wished you well, though, and hoped you'd finally got lucky." A wry grin flashed. "Again."

"Finding the right Lady Vorkosigan . . . was a bigger, rarer kind of luck than any I'd had before." Miles sighed. "Elli Quinn didn't come either. Though she sent a present and a letter." Neither especially demure.

"Hm," said Bel, smiling a little. And added rather slyly, "And Sergeant Taura?"

"
She
attended." Miles's lips curled up, unwilled. "Spectacularly. I had a burst of genius, and put my Aunt Alys in charge of getting her dressed civilian-style. It kept them both happily occupied. The old Dendarii contingent all missed you. Elena and Baz were there—with their new baby girl, if you can imagine it—and Arde Mayhew, too. So the very beginning of it all was fully represented. It was as well that the wedding was small. A hundred and twenty people is small, yes? It was Ekaterin's second, you see—she was a widow." And profoundly stressed thereby. Her tense, distraught state the night before the wedding had reminded Miles forcibly of a particular species of precombat nerves he'd seen in troops facing, not their first, but their second battle. The night after the wedding, now—that had gone much better, thank God.

Longing and regret had shadowed Bel's face during this recitation of old friends lifting a glass to new beginnings. Then the herm's expression sharpened. "Baz Jesek, back on Barrayar?" said Bel. "Someone must have worked out his little problems with the Barrayaran military authorities, eh?"

And if Someone could arrange Baz's relationship with ImpSec, maybe that same Someone might arrange Bel's? Bel didn't even need to make the point out loud. Miles said, "The old desertion charges made too good a cover when Baz was active in ops to allow them to be rescinded, but the need had become obsolete. Baz and Elena are both out of the Dendarii too, now. Hadn't you heard? We're all getting to be history."
All of us who made it out alive, anyway.
 

"Yes," sighed Bel. "There is a deal of sanity to be saved in letting the past go, and moving on." The herm glanced up. "If the past will let you go too, that is. So let's keep this as simple as possible with your people, please?"

"All right," Miles agreed reluctantly. "For now, we'll mention the past, but not the present. Don't worry—they'll be, ah—discreet." He deactivated the security cone above the little conference table and unlocked the doors. Raising his wrist com to his lips, he murmured, "Ekaterin, Roic, could you step over to the wardroom, please."

When they had both arrived, Ekaterin smiling expectantly, Miles said, "We've had a piece of undeserved good fortune. Although Portmaster Thorne works for the quaddies now, the herm's an old friend of mine from an organization I worked with in my ImpSec days. You can rely on what Bel has to say."

Ekaterin held out her hand. "I'm so glad to meet you at last, Captain Thorne. My husband and his old friends have spoken highly of you. I believe you were much missed from their company."

Looking decidedly bemused, but rising to the challenge, Bel shook her hand. "Thank you, Lady Vorkosigan. But I don't go by that old rank here. Portmaster Thorne, or just call me Bel."

Ekaterin nodded. "And please call me Ekaterin. Oh—in private, I suppose." She looked a silent inquiry at Miles.

"Ah, right," said Miles. His gesture took in Roic, who looked attentive. "Bel knew me under another identity then. As far as Graf Station is concerned, we've just met. But we've hit it off splendidly, and Bel's talent for dealing with difficult downsiders is paying off for them."

Roic nodded. "Got it, m'lord."

Miles shepherded them into the hatch bay where the
Kestrel
's engineer waited to pipe them back aboard Graf Station. He reflected that yet another reason Ekaterin's security clearance needed to be as high as his own was that, according to several persons' historical reports and her own witness, he talked in his sleep. Until Bel grew less nervy over the situation, he decided he'd probably better not mention this.

Two quaddie Station Security men waited for them in the freight loading bay. This being the section of Graf Station supplied with artificially generated gravitational fields for the comfort and health of its downsider visitors and residents, the pair hovered in personal float chairs with Station Security markings emblazoned on the sides. The floaters were stubby cylinders, barely larger in diameter than a man's shoulders, and the general effect was of people riding in levitating washtubs, or maybe the Baba Yaga's magic flying mortar from Barrayaran folklore. Bel gave the quaddie sergeant a nod and a murmured greeting as they emerged into the echoing cavern of the loading bay. The sergeant returned the nod, evidently reassured, and turned his close attention to the dangerous Barrayarans. Since the dangerous Barrayarans were frankly gawking like tourists, Miles hoped the tough-looking fellow would soon grow less twitchy.

"This personnel lock here," Bel pointed back to the one by which they'd just entered, "was the one that was opened by the unauthorized person. The blood trail ended in it, in a smeary smudge. It started," Bel walked across the bay toward the wall to the right, "a few meters away, not far from the door to the next bay. This is where the large pool of blood was found."

Miles walked after Bel, studying the deck. It had been cleaned up in the several days since the incident. "Did you see this yourself, Portmaster Thorne?"

"Yes, about an hour after it was first found. The mob had arrived by then, but Security had been pretty good about keeping the area uncontaminated."

Miles had Bel walk him around the bay, detailing all exits. It was a standard sort of place, utilitarian, undecorated, efficient; a few pieces of freight-handling equipment stood silently in the opposite end, near a darkened, airsealed control booth. Miles had Bel unlock it and give him a look inside. Ekaterin too walked about, clearly glad to have room to stretch her legs after several days cooped up in the
Kestrel
. Her expression, gazing about the cool, echoing space, was thoughtfully reminiscent, and Miles smiled in appreciation.

They returned to the spot where the blood implied Lieutenant Solian's throat had been cut, and discussed the details of the spatter marks and smears. Roic observed with keen professional interest. Miles had one of the quaddie guards give up his float tub; scooped out of his shell, he sat up on the deck on his haunches and lower arms, looking a bit like a large, disgruntled frog. Quaddie locomotion in a gravity field without a floater was rather disturbing to watch. They either went on all fours, only slightly more mobile than a person on hands and knees, or managed a sort of forward-leaning, elbows-out, upright chicken-walk on their lower hands. Either mode looked very wrong and ungainly, compared to their grace and agility in zero gee.

With Bel, whom Miles judged to be about the right size for a Komarran, cooperatively playing the part of the corpse, they experimented with the problem of a person in a float chair shifting seventy or so kilos of inert meat the several meters to the airlock. Bel wasn't as slim and athletic as formerly, either; the added, ah, masses made it harder for Miles to fall back into his old subconscious default habit of thinking of Bel as male. Probably just as well. Miles found it extremely difficult, legs folded awkwardly in a seat not designed for them, trying to keep one hand on the float chair controls at roughly crotch level and also maintain a grip on Bel's clothing. Bel tried trailing either an arm or a leg artistically over the side; Miles stopped short of pouring water down Bel's sleeve to try to duplicate the smears. Ekaterin did little better than he did, and Roic, surprisingly, worse. His superior strength was counteracted by the awkwardness of squeezing his greater size into the cup-like space, his knees sticking up, and trying to work the hand controls in the constricted clearances. The quaddie sergeant managed it handily, but glowered at Miles afterwards.

Floaters, Bel explained, were not hard to come by, being considered shared public property, although quaddies who spent a lot of time on the grav side sometimes owned their own personalized models. The quaddies kept racks of floaters by the access ports between the grav and the free fall sections of the station, for any quaddie to grab and use, and drop off again upon returning. They were numbered for maintenance record purposes, but not tracked otherwise. Anyone could obtain one by simply walking up and getting in, apparently, even drunken Barrayaran soldiers on leave.

"When we came into that first docking cradle around on the other side, I noticed a lot of personal craft puttering around the outside of the station—pushers, personnel pods, in-system flitters," Miles said to Bel. "It occurs to me that someone could have picked up Solian's body within a short time of its being ejected from the airlock, and removed it damned near tracelessly. It could be anywhere by now, including still stored in a pod airlock or put through a disposer in one-kilo lumps or tucked away to mummify in some random asteroid crevice. Which offers an alternate explanation of why it hasn't been found floating out there. But that scenario requires either two persons, with prior planning, or one spontaneous murderer who moved very quickly. How much time would a single person have had between the throat-cutting and the pickup?"

Bel, straightening uniform and hair after the last drag across the loading bay, pursed its lips. "There were maybe five or ten minutes between the time the lock cycled, and the time the security guard arrived to check it. Maybe twenty minutes max after that before all sorts of people were looking around outside. In thirty minutes . . . yes, one person could just about have dumped the body, run to another bay and jumped in a small craft, zipped around, and collected it again."

"Good. Get me a list of everything that went out a lock in that period." For the sake of the listening quaddie guards he remembered to add a formal, "If you please, Portmaster Thorne."

"Certainly, Lord Auditor Vorkosigan."

"Seems damned odd to go to all that trouble to remove the body but leave the blood, though. Timing? Tried to get back to clean up, but it was too late? Something very, very strange to hide about the body?"

Maybe just blind panic, if the murder had not been planned in advance. Miles could imagine someone who was not a spacer shoving a body out an airlock, and only then realizing what poor concealment it really was. That didn't exactly jibe with a subsequent swift and handy outside pickup, though. And no quaddie qualified as not-a-spacer.

He sighed. "This is not getting us much forwarder. Let's go talk to my idiots."