Miles, Mutants, and Microbes

  The brief interviews were of dubious value. A bold murderer would surely lie, but a smart one might simply not come forward at all. Three of the passengers were wary and curt, but dutifully precise. The others were eager and full of theories to share, none consonant with the blood on the docking bay deck being a plant. Miles wistfully considered the charms of a wholesale fast-penta interview of every passenger and crew person aboard the Idris. Another task Venn, or Vorpatril, or both together should have done already, dammit. Alas, the quaddies had tedious rules about such invasive methods. These transients on Graf Station were off-limits to the more abrupt Barrayaran interrogation techniques; and the Barrayaran military personnel, with whose minds Miles might make free, were much farther down his current list of suspects. The Komarran civilian crew was a more ambiguous case, Barrayaran subjects now on quaddie—well, not soil—and under quaddie custody.

  While this was going forth, Bel returned to Dubauer, waiting quietly by the side of the room with its hands folded, and murmured, "I can personally escort you aboard the Idris to service your cargo as soon as the Lord Auditor is finished here."

  Miles cut short the last crime-theory enthusiast and sent him on his way. "I'm done," he announced. He glanced at the chrono in his wrist com. Could he catch up with Ekaterin for lunch? It seemed doubtful, by this hour, but on the other hand, she could spend unimaginable amounts of time looking at vegetation, so maybe there was still a chance.

  The three exited the conference chamber together and mounted the broad stairs to the spacious lobby. Neither Miles nor, he supposed, Bel ever entered a room without running a visual sweep of every possible vantage for aim, a legacy of years of unpleasant shared learning experiences. Thus it was that they spotted, simultaneously, the figure on the balcony opposite hoisting a strange oblong box onto the railing. Dubauer followed his glance, eyes widening in astonishment.

  Miles had a flashing impression of dark eyes in a milky face beneath a mop of brass-blond curls, staring down intently at him. He and Bel, on either side of Dubauer, reached spontaneously and together for the startled Betan's arms and flung themselves forward. Bright bursts from the box chattered with a loud, echoing, tapping noise. Blood spattered from Dubauer's cheek as the herm was yanked along; something like a swarm of angry bees seemed to pass directly over Miles's head. Then they were, all three, sliding on their stomachs to cover behind the wide marble drums holding the flowers. The bees seemed to follow them; pellets of safety glass exploded in all directions, and chips of marble fountained in a wide spray. A vast vibrato filled the room, shook the air, the thunderous thrumming noise sliced with screams and cries.

  Miles, trying to raise his head for a quick glance, was crushed down again by Bel diving over the intervening Betan and landing on him in a smothering clutch. He could only hear the aftermath: more yells, the sudden cessation of the hammering, a heavy clunk. A woman's voice sobbed and hiccoughed in the startling silence, then was choked down to a spasmodic gulping. His hand jerked at a soft, cool kiss, but it was only a few last shredded leaves and flower petals sifting gently down out of the air to settle all around them.

  Chapter 8

  Miles said in a muffled voice, "Bel, will you please get off my head?"

  There was a brief pause. Then Bel rolled away and, cautiously, sat up, head hunched into collar. "Sorry," said Bel gruffly. "Thought for a moment there I was about to lose you. Again."

  "Don't apologize." Miles, his heart still racing and his mouth very dry, pushed up and sat, his back pressed to a now-shorter marble drum. He spread his fingers to touch the cool synthetic stone of the floor. A little beyond the narrow, irregular arc of space shielded by the table pillars, dozens of deep gouges scored the pavement. Something small and bright and brassy rolled past, and Miles's hand reached for it, then sprang back at its branding heat.

  The elderly herm, Dubauer, also sat up, hand going to pat its face where blood trickled. Miles's glance took quick inventory: no other hits, apparently. He shifted and drew his Vorkosigan-monogrammed handkerchief from his trouser pocket, folded it, and silently handed it across to the bleeding Betan. Dubauer swallowed, took it, and mopped at the minor wound. It held the pad out a moment to stare at its own blood as if in surprise, then pressed the cloth back to its hairless cheek.

  In a way, Miles thought shakily, it was all rather flattering. At least someone figured he was competent and effective enough to be dangerous. Or maybe I'm onto something. I wonder what the hell it is?

  Bel placed its hands upon the shattered drum top, peered cautiously over, then slowly pulled itself to its feet. A downsider in the uniform of the hostel staff scurried, a little bent over, around the ex-centerpiece and asked in a choked voice, "Are you people all right?"

  "I think so," said Bel, glancing around. "What was that?"

  "It came from the balcony, sir. The, the person up there dropped it over the side and fled. The door guard went after him."

  Bel didn't bother to correct the gender of the honorific, a sure sign of distraction. Miles rose too, and nearly passed out. Still hyperventilating, he crunched around their bulwark through the broken glass pellets, marble chips, half-melted brass slugs, and flower salad. Bel followed in his path. On the far side of the lobby, the oblong box lay on its side, notably dented. They both knelt to stare.

  "Automated hot riveter," said Bel after a moment. "He must have disconnected . . . quite a few safety devices, to make it do that."

  A slight understatement, Miles felt. But it did explain their assailant's uncertain aim. The device had been designed to throw its slugs with vast precision a matter of millimeters, not meters. Still . . . if the would-be assassin had succeeded in framing Miles's head for even a short burst—he glanced again at the shattered marble—no cryo-revival ever invented could have brought him back this time.

  Ye gods—what if he hadn't missed? What would Ekaterin have done, this far from home and help, a messily decapitated husband on her hands before her honeymoon trip was even over, with no immediate support but the inexperienced Roic— If they're shooting at me, how much danger is she in?

  In belated panic, he slapped his wristcom. "Roic! Roic, answer me!"

  It was at least three agonizing seconds before Roic's drawl responded, "My lord?"

  "Where are—never mind. Drop whatever you're doing and go at once to Lady Vorkosigan, and stay with her. Get her back aboard—" he clipped off the Kestrel. Would she be safer there? By now, any number of people knew that was where to look for Vorkosigans. Maybe aboard the Prince Xav, standing off a good safe distance from the station, surrounded by troops—Barrayar's finest, God help us all—"Just stay with her, till I call again."

  "My lord, what's happening?"

  "Someone just tried to rivet me to the wall. No, don't come here," he overrode Roic's beginning protest. "The fellow ran off, and anyway, quaddie security is beginning to arrive." Two uniformed quaddies in floaters were entering the lobby even as he spoke. At a hostel employee's gesticulations, one rose smoothly up over the balcony; the other approached Miles and his party. "I have to deal with these people now. I'm all right. Don't alarm Ekaterin. Don't let her out of your sight. Out."

  He glanced up to see Dubauer unbend from examining a rivet-chewed marble drum, face very strained. The herm, hand still pressed to cheek, was visibly shaken as it walked over to glance at the riveter. Miles rose smoothly to his feet.

  "My apologies, honorable herm. I should have warned you never to stand too close to me."

  Dubauer stared at Miles. Its lips parted in momentary bewilderment, then made a small circle, Oh. "I believe you two gentlepersons saved my life. I . . . I'm afraid I didn't see anything. Until that thing—what was it?—hit me."

  Miles bent and picked up a loose rivet, one of hundreds, now cooled. "One of these. Have you stopped bleeding?"

  The herm pulled the pad away from its cheek. "Yes, I think so."

  "Here, keep it for a souvenir." He held out the gleaming brass slug. "Trade you for my handk
erchief back." Ekaterin had embroidered it by hand, for a present.

  "Oh—" Dubauer folded the pad over the bloodstain. "Oh, dear. Is it of value? I'll have it cleaned, and return it to you."

  "Not necessary, honorable herm. My batman takes care of such things."

  The elderly Betan looked distressed. "Oh, no—"

  Miles ended the argument by reaching over and plucking the fine cloth from the clutching fingers, and stuffing it back in his pocket. The herm's hand jerked after it, and fell back. Miles had met diffident people, but never before one who apologized for bleeding. Dubauer, unused to personal violence on low-crime Beta Colony, was on the edge of distraught.

  A quaddie security patrolwoman hovered anxiously in her floater. "What the hell happened here?" she demanded, snapping open a recorder.

  Miles gestured to Bel, who took over describing the incident into the recorder. Bel was as calm, logical, and detailed as at any Dendarii debriefing, which possibly took the woman more aback than the crowd of witnesses who clustered eagerly around trying to tell the tale in more excited terms. To Miles's intense relief, no one else had been hit except for a few minor clips from ricocheting marble chips. The fellow's aim might have been imperfect, but he apparently hadn't intended a general massacre.

  Good for public safety on Graf Station, but not, upon reflection, so good for Miles. . . . His children might have been orphaned, just now, before they'd even had a chance to be born. His will was spot up to date, the size of an academic dissertation complete with bibliography and footnotes. It suddenly seemed entirely inadequate to the task.

  "Was the suspect a downsider or a quaddie?" the patrolwoman asked Bel urgently.

  Bel shook its head. "I couldn't see the lower half of his body below the balcony rail. I'm not even sure it was male, really."

  A downsider transient and the quaddie waitress who'd been serving his drink on the lounge level chimed in with the news that the assailant had been a quaddie, and had fled down an adjoining corridor in his floater. The transient was sure he'd been male, although the waitress, now that the question was raised, grew less certain. Dubauer apologized for not having glimpsed the person at all.

  Miles prodded the riveter with his toe, and asked Bel in an under-voice, "How hard would it be to carry something like that through Station Security checkpoints?"

  "Easy," said Bel. "No one would even blink."

  "Local manufacture?" It looked quite new.

  "Yes, that's a Sanctuary Station brand. They make good tools."

  "First job for Venn, then. Find out where the thing was sold, and when. And who to."

  "Oh, yeah."

  Miles was nearly dizzy with a weird combination of delight and dismay. The delight was partly adrenaline high, a familiar and dangerous old addiction, partly the realization that having been potshotted by a quaddie gave him a stick to beat back Greenlaw's relentless attack on his Barrayaran brutality. Quaddies were killers too, hah. They just weren't as good at it. . . . He remembered Solian, and took back that thought. Yeah, and if Greenlaw didn't set me up for this herself. Now there was a nice, paranoid theory. He set it aside to reexamine when his head had cooled. After all, a couple of hundred people, both quaddies and transients—including all of the fleet's galactic passengers—must have known he'd be coming here this morning.

  A quaddie medical squad arrived, and on their heels—immediately after them, Chief Venn. The security chief was instantly deluged with excited descriptions of the spectacular attack on the Imperial Auditor. Only the erstwhile victim Miles was calm, standing in wait with a certain grim amusement.

  Amusement was an emotion notably lacking in Venn's face. "Were you hit, Lord Auditor Vorkosigan?"

  "No." Time to put in a good word—we may need it later. "Thanks to the quick reactions of Portmaster Thorne, here. But for this remarkable herm, you—and the Union of Free Habitats—would have one hell of a mess on your hands just now."

  A babble of confirmation solidified this view, with a couple of people breathlessly describing Bel's selfless defense of the visiting dignitary with the shield of its own body. Bel's eye glinted briefly at Miles, though whether with gratitude or its opposite Miles was not just sure. The portmaster's modest protests served only to firmly affix the picture of this heroism in the eyewitnesses' minds, and Miles suppressed a grin.

  One of the quaddie security patrollers who had gone in pursuit of the assailant now returned, floating back over the balcony to jerk to a halt before Chief Venn and report breathlessly, "Lost him, sir. We've put all duty personnel on alert, but we don't have much of a physical description."

  Three or four people attempted to supplement this lack, in vivid and contradictory terms. Bel, listening, frowned more deeply.

  Miles nudged the herm. "Hm?"

  Bel shook its head and murmured back, "Thought for a moment he looked like someone I'd seen recently, but that was a downsider, so—no."

  Miles considered his own brief impression. Bright-haired, light-skinned, a trifle bulky, of indeterminate age, probably male—this could cover some several hundred quaddies on Graf Station. Laboring under intense emotion, but by that time, Miles had been too. Seen once, at that distance, under such circumstances, Miles didn't think even he could reliably pick the fellow out of a group of similar physical types. Unfortunately, none of the transients had happened just then to be doing a vid scan of the lobby décor or each other to show the folks back home. The waitress and her patron weren't even quite sure when the fellow had arrived, though they thought he'd been in position for a few minutes, upper hands resting casually upon the balcony railing, as if waiting for some last straggler from the passengers' meeting to mount the stairs. And so he was.

  The still-shaken Dubauer fended off the medtechs, insisting it could treat the clotted rivet-graze itself and, reiterating a lack of anything to add to the testimonies, begged to be let go back to its room to lie down.

  Bel said to its fellow Betan, "Sorry about all this. I may be tied up for a while. If I can't get away myself, I'll have Boss Watts send another supervisor to escort you aboard the Idris to take care of your critters."

  "Thank you, Portmaster. That would be very welcome. You'll call my room, yes? It really is most urgent." Dubauer withdrew hastily.

  Miles couldn't blame Dubauer for fleeing, for the quaddie news services were arriving, in the persons of two eager reporters in floaters emblazoned with the logo of their journalistic work gang. An array of little vidcam floaters bobbed after them. The vidcams darted about, collecting scans. Sealer Greenlaw followed hurriedly in their wake, and wove her floater determinedly through the growing mob to Miles's side. She was flanked by two quaddie bodyguards in Union Militia garb, with serious weapons and armor. However useless against assassins, they at least had the salutary effect of making the babbling bystanders back off.

  "Lord Auditor Vorkosigan, were you hurt?" she demanded at once.

  Miles repeated to her the assurances he'd made to Venn. He kept one eye on the robot vidcams floating up to him and recording his words, and not just to be sure his good side was turned to them. But none appeared to be mini-weapons-platforms in disguise. He made sure to loudly mention Bel's heroics again, which had the useful effect of turning them in pursuit of the Betan portmaster, now on the other side of the lobby being grilled in more detail by Venn's security people.

  Greenlaw said stiffly, "Lord Auditor Vorkosigan, may I convey my profound personal apologies for this untoward incident. I assure you, all of the Union's resources will be turned to tracking down what I am certain must be an unbalanced individual and danger to us all."

  Danger to us all indeed. "I don't know what's going on, here," said Miles. He let his voice sharpen. "And clearly, neither do you. This is no diplomatic chess game any more. Someone seems to be trying to start a damned war in here. They nearly succeeded."

  She took a deep breath. "I am certain the person was acting alone."

  Miles frowned thoughtfully. The hotheads are always wit
h us, true. He lowered his voice. "For what? Retaliation? Did any of the quaddies injured by Vorpatril's strike force suddenly die last night?" He'd thought they all were on the recovering list. It was hard to imagine a quaddie relative or lover or friend taking bloody revenge for anything short of a fatality, but . . .

  "No," said Greenlaw, her voice slowing as she considered this hypothesis. Regretfully, her voice firmed. "No. I would have been told."

  So, Greenlaw was wishing for a simple explanation, too. But honest enough not to fool herself, at least.

  His wrist com gave its high priority beep; he slapped it. "Yes?"

  "My Lord Vorkosigan?" It was Admiral Vorpatril's voice, strained.

  Not Ekaterin or Roic after all. Miles's heart climbed back down out of his throat. He tried not to let his voice go irritable. "Yes, Admiral?"