The first smile-like expression Miles had seen on the rubbery face ghosted across Gupta's lips. "I was ship's engineer. I tracked him by his cargo's mass. It was kind of distinctive, when I went to look, later."
The ghastly smile faded into a black frown. "When we dumped him and his pallets off on the Komarran transfer station's loading bay, he seemed happy. Downright cordial. He went around to each of us for the first time, and gave us our no-problems bonuses personally. He shook Hewlet's and Firka's hands. He asked to see my webbing, so I spread my fingers for him, and he leaned over and gripped my arm and seemed real interested, and thanked me. He gave Gras-Grace a pat on her cheek, and smiled at her in this sappy way. He smirked as he touched her. Knowing. Since she was holding the bonus chit in her hand, she sort of smiled back and didn't deck him, though I could see it was a near thing. And then we bailed out. Hewlet and I wanted to take station leave and spend some of our bonus, but Gras-Grace said we could party later. And Firka said the Barrayaran Empire wasn't a healthy place for the likes of us to linger in." A distracted laugh that had nothing to do with humor puffed from his lips. So. That startling scream when Miles had touched the test patch to Guppy's skin hadn't been overreaction, exactly. It had been a flashback. Miles suppressed a shudder. Sorry, sorry.
"It was six days out from Komarr, past the jump to Pol, before the fevers began. Gras-Grace guessed it first, from the way it started. She always was the quickest of us. Four little pink wheals, like some kind of bug bites, on the backs of Hewlet and Firka's hands, on her cheek, on my arm where the Cetagandan bastard had touched me. They swelled up to the size of eggs, and throbbed, though not as much as our heads. It only took an hour. My head hurt so bad I could hardly see, and Gras-Grace, who wasn't doing any better, helped me to my cabin so's I could get into my tank."
"Tank?"
"I'd rigged up a big tank in my cabin, with a lid I could lock down from the inside, because the gravity on that old ship wasn't any too reliable. It was really comfortable to rest in, my own kind of water bed. I could stretch all the way out, and turn around. Good filtration system on the water, nice and clean, and extra oxygen sparkling up through it from a bubbler I'd rigged, all pretty with colored lights. And music. I miss my tank." He heaved a sigh.
"You . . . appear to have lungs, as well. Do you hold your breath underwater, or what?"
Gupta shrugged. "I have these extra sphincter muscles in my nose and ears and throat that shut down automatically, when my breathing switches over. That's always kind of an awkward moment, the switch; my lungs don't always seem to want to stop. Or start again, sometimes. But I can't stay in my tank forever, or I'd end up pissing in the water I breathe. That's what happened then. I floated in my tank for . . . hours, I'm not sure how many. I don't think I was quite in my right mind, I hurt so bad. But then I had to piss. Really bad. So I had to get out.
"I damn near passed out when I stood. I threw up on the floor. But I could walk. I made it to my cabin's head, finally. The ship was still running, I could feel the right vibrations through my feet, but it had gone all quiet. Nobody talking or arguing or snoring, no music. No laughing. I was cold and wet. I put on a robe—it was one of hers that Gras-Grace had given me, because she claimed being fat made her hot, and I was always too cold. She said it was because my designers gave me frog genes. For all I know, that might be true.
"I found her body . . ." He stopped. The light-years-gone look in his eyes intensified. "About five steps down the corridor. At least, I thought it was her. It was her braid, floating on the . . . At least, I thought it was a body. The size of the puddle seemed about right. It stank like . . . What kind of hell-disease liquefies bones?"
He inhaled, and continued unsteadily, "Firka had made it to the infirmary, for all the good it had done him. He was all flaccid, like he was deflating. And dripping. Over the side of the bunk. He stank worse than Gras-Grace. And he was steaming.
"Hewlet—what was left of him—was in his pilot's chair in Nav and Com. I don't know why he crawled up there, maybe it was a comfort to him. Pilots are strange that way. His pilot's headset kind of held his skull braced, but his face . . . his features . . . they were just sliding off. I thought he might have been trying to send an emergency message, maybe. Help us. Biocontamination aboard. But maybe not, because nobody ever came. Later I thought maybe he'd sent too much, and the rescuers stayed away on purpose. Why should the good citizens risk anything for us? Just Jacksonian smuggler scum. Better off dead. Saves the trouble and expense of prosecution, eh?" He looked at no one, now.
Miles feared he was falling silent, spent. But there was so much more, desperately important, to know . . . He dared to play out a lead—"So. No shit, there you were, trapped on a drifting ship with three dissolving corpses including a dead jump pilot. How did you get away?"
"The ship . . . the ship was no good to me now, not without Hewlet. And the others. Let the bastard financers have it, biocontamination and all. Murdered dreams. But I figured I was everybody's heir, by that time. Nobody had anybody else, not to speak to. I would've wanted them to have my stuff, if it had been the other way around. I went round and collected everybody's movables, spare cash, credit chits—Firka had a huge cache. He would. And he had all our doctored IDs. Gras-Grace, well, she probably gave hers away, or lost it gambling, or spent it on toys, or let it slip through her fingers somehow. Which made her smarter than Firka, in the long run. Hewlet, I guess he'd drunk most of his. But there was enough. Enough to travel to the ends of the Nexus, if I was clever about it. Enough to catch up with that Cetagandan bastard, stern chase or no. With that heavy cargo, I didn't figure he'd be traveling all that fast.
"I took it all and loaded it in an escape capsule. Decontaminated it all, and me, a dozen times first, trying to get that horrible death smell off. I wasn't . . . I wasn't at my best and brightest, I don't think, but I wasn't that far gone. Once I was in the capsule, it wasn't so hard. They're designed to get injured idiots to safety, automatically following the local space beacons . . . I got picked up three days later by a passing ship, and told a bullshit story about our ship coming apart—they believed that when they looked up the Jacksonian registry. I'd stopped crying by then." Tears were glistening at the corners of his eyes now. "Didn't mention the bio-shit, or they'd have jugged me good. They dropped me at the nearest Polian jump point station. From there I slipped away from the safety investigators and got me on the first ship I could bound for Komarr. I tracked the Cetagandan bastard's cargo by its mass to the Komarran trade fleet that had just pulled out. Ran a search to find a route that would catch me up to it at the first possible place. Which was here." He stared around, blinking at his quaddie audience as if surprised to find them all still in the room.
"How did Lieutenant Solian get sucked into it?" Miles had been waiting with nerves stretched to twanging to ask that one.
"I thought I could just lie in wait and ambush the Cetagandan bastard as soon as he came off the Idris. But he never came off. Stayed holed up in his cabin, I guess. Smart scum. I couldn't get through customs or the ship's security—I wasn't a registered passenger or a guest of one, though I tried to butter up a few. Scared the shit out of me when the fellow I tried to bribe to get me on board threatened to turn me in. Then I got smart and got me a berth on the Rudra, to at least get me legal entry past customs into those loading bays. And to be sure I'd be able to follow along if the fleet pulled out suddenly, which it was overdue to do by then. I wanted to kill him myself, for Gras-Grace and Firka and Hewlet, but if he was going to get away, I thought, if I turned him in to the Barrayarans as a Cetagandan spy, maybe . . . something interesting might happen, anyway. Something he wouldn't like. I didn't want to leave my trace on the vid call record, so I caught the Idris's security officer in person when he was out in the loading bay. Tipped him off. I wasn't sure if he believed me or not, but I guess he went to check." Gupta hesitated. "He musta run into the Cetagandan bastard. I'm sorry. I'm afraid I got him melted. Like Gras-Grace and . . .
" His litany ended in a shaken gulp.
"Is that when Solian had the nose bleed? When you were tipping him off?" Miles asked.
Gupta stared. "What are you, some kind of psychic?"
Check. "Why the faked blood on the docking bay floor?"
"Well . . . I'd heard the fleet was pulling out. They were saying that the poor bugger I'd got melted was supposed to have deserted, and they were writing him off, just like . . . like he didn't have a House or a Baron to put up any stake for him, and nobody cared. But I was afraid the Cetagandan bastard would pull another mid-space transfer, and I'd be stuck on the Rudra, and he'd get away . . . I thought it would focus attention back on the Idris, and what might be on it. I didn't dream those military morons would attack the quaddie station!"
"There were concatenating circumstances," Miles said primly, made conscious, for the first time in what seemed a small eternity of evoked horrors, of the hovering quaddie officialdom. "You certainly triggered events, but you could not possibly have anticipated them." He, too, blinked and looked around. "Er . . . did you have any questions, Chief Venn?"
Venn was giving him a most peculiar stare. He shook his head, slowly, from side to side.
"Uh . . ." A young quaddie patroller Miles had barely noticed enter during Guppy's urgent soliloquy held out a small, glittering object to his chief. "I have the fast-penta dose you ordered, sir . . . ?"
Venn took it and gazed over at Adjudicator Leutwyn.
Leutwyn cleared his throat. "Remarkable. I do believe, Lord Auditor Vorkosigan, that is the first time I've ever seen a fast-penta interrogation conducted without the fast-penta."
Miles glanced at Guppy, curled around himself in air, shivering a little. Smears of water still glistened at the corners of his eyes. "He . . . really wanted to tell somebody his story. He's been dying to for weeks. There was just no one in the entire Nexus he could trust."
"Still isn't," gulped the prisoner. "Don't get a swelled head, Barrayaran. I know nobody's on my side. But I missed my one shot, and he saw me. I was safe when he thought I was melted like the others. I'm a dead frog now, one way or another. But if I can't take him with me, maybe somebody else can."
Chapter 13
Chief Venn said, "So . . . this Cetagandan bastard Gupta here is raving about, that he says killed three of his friends and maybe your Lieutenant Solian—you really think this is the same as the Betan transient, Dubauer, that you wanted us to pick up last night? So is he a herm, or a man, or what?"
"Or what," answered Miles. "My medical people established from a blood sample I accidentally collected yesterday that Dubauer is a Cetagandan ba. The ba are neither male, female, nor hermaphrodite, but a genderless servant . . . caste, I guess is the best word, of the Cetagandan haut lords. More specifically, of the haut ladies who run the Star Crèche, at the core of the Celestial Garden, the Imperial residence on Eta Ceta." Who almost never left the Celestial Garden, with or without their ba servitors. So what's this ba doing way out here, eh? Miles hesitated, then went on, "This ba appears to be conducting a cargo of a thousand of what I suspect are the latest genetically modified haut fetuses in uterine replicators. I don't know where, I don't know why, and I don't know who for, but if Guppy's telling us the straight story, the ba has killed four people, including our missing security officer, and tried to kill Guppy, to keep its secret and cover its tracks." At least four people.
Greenlaw's expression had grown stiff with dismay. Venn regarded Gupta, frowning. "I guess we'd better put out a public arrest call on Dubauer, then, too."
"No!" Miles cried in alarm.
Venn raised his brows at him.
Miles explained hastily, "We're talking about a possible trained Cetagandan agent who may be carrying sophisticated bioweapons. It's already extremely stressed by the delays into which this dispute with the trade fleet has plunged it. It's just discovered it's made one bad mistake at least, because Guppy here is still alive. I don't care how superhuman it is, it has to be rattled by now. The last thing you want to do is send a bunch of feckless civilians up against it. Nobody should even approach the ba who doesn't know exactly what they're doing and what they're facing."
"And your people brought this creature here, onto my station?"
"Believe me, if any of my people had known what the ba was before this, it would never have made it past Komarr. The trade fleet are dupes, innocent carriers, I'm sure." Well, he wasn't that sure—checking that airy assertion was going to be a high-priority problem for counterintelligence, back home.
"Carriers . . ." Greenlaw echoed, looking hard at Guppy. All the quaddies in the room followed her stare. "Could this transient still be carrying that . . . whatever it was, infection?"
Miles took a breath. "Possibly. But if he is, it's too damned late already. Guppy has been running all over Graf Station for days, now. Hell, if he's infectious, he's just spread a plague along a route through the Nexus touching half a dozen planets." And me. And my fleet. And maybe Ekaterin too. "I see two points of hope. One, by Guppy's testimony, the ba had to administer the thing by actual touch."
The patrollers who'd handled the prisoner looked apprehensively at each other.
"And secondly," Miles went on, "if the disease or poison is something bioengineered by the Star Crèche, it's likely to be highly controlled, possibly deliberately self-limiting and self-destructing. The haut ladies don't like to leave their trash lying around for anyone to pick up."
"But I got better!" cried the amphibian.
"Yes," said Miles. "Why? Obviously, something in your unique genetics or situation either defeated the thing, or held it at bay long enough to keep you alive past its period of activity. Putting you in quarantine is about useless by now, but the next highest priority after nailing the ba has got to be running you through the medical wringer, to see if what you have or did can save anyone else." Miles drew breath. "May I offer the facilities of the Prince Xav? Our medical people do have some specific training in Cetagandan bio-threats."
Guppy blurted to Venn in panic, "Don't give me to them! They'll dissect me!"
Venn, who had brightened at this offer, shot the prisoner an exasperated look, but Greenlaw said slowly, "I know something of the ghem and the haut, but I've never heard of these ba, or the Star Crèche."
Adjudicator Leutwyn added warily, "Cetagandans of any stripe haven't much come in my way."
Greenlaw continued, "What makes you think their work is so safe, so restricted?"
"Safe, no. Controlled, maybe." How far did he need to back up his explanation to make the dangers clear to them? It was vital that the quaddies be made to understand, and believe. "The Cetagandans . . . have this two-tiered aristocracy that is the bafflement of non-Cetagandan military observers. At the core are the haut lords, who are, in effect, one giant genetics experiment in producing the post-human race. This work is conducted and controlled by the haut women geneticists of the Star Crèche, the center where all haut embryos are created and modified before being sent back to their haut constellations—clans, parents—on the outlying planets of the empire. Unlike most prior historical versions of this sort of thing, the haut ladies didn't start by assuming they'd reached the perfected end already. They do not, at present, believe themselves to be done tinkering. When they are—well, who knows what will happen? What are the goals and desires going to be of the true post-human? Even the haut ladies don't try to second-guess their great-great-great-whatever grandchildren. I will say, it makes it uncomfortable to have them as neighbors."
"Didn't the haut try to conquer you Barrayarans, once?" asked Leutwyn.
"Not the haut. The ghem-lords. The buffer race, if you will, between the haut and the rest of humanity. I suppose you could think of the ghem as the haut's bastard children, except that they aren't bastards. In that sense, anyway. The haut leak selected genetic lines into the ghem via trophy haut wives—it's a complicated system. But the ghem-lords are the military arm of the empire, always anxious to prove their worth to their haut maste
rs."
"The ghem, I've seen," said Venn. "We get them through here now and then. I thought the haut were, well, sort of degenerate. Aristocratic parasites. Afraid to get their hands dirty. They don't work." He gave a very quaddie sniff of disdain. "Or fight. You have to wonder how long the ghem-soldiers will put up with them."
"On the surface, the haut appear to dominate the ghem through pure moral suasion. Overawe by their beauty and intelligence and refinement, and by making themselves the source of all kinds of status rewards, culminating in the haut wives. All this is true. But beneath that . . . it is strongly suspected that the haut hold a biological and biochemical arsenal that even the ghem find terrifying."
"I haven't heard of anything like that being used," said Venn in a tone of skepticism.
"Oh, you bet you haven't."
"Why didn't they use it on you Barrayarans, back then, if they had it?" said Greenlaw slowly.
"That is a problem much studied, at certain levels of my government. First, it would have alarmed the neighborhood. Bioweapons aren't the only kind. The Cetagandan Empire apparently wasn't ready to face a posse of people scared enough to combine to burn off their planets and sterilize every living microbe. More importantly, we think it was a question of goals. The ghem-lords wanted the territory and the wealth, the personal aggrandizement that would have followed successful conquest. The haut ladies just weren't that interested. Not enough to waste their resources—not resources of weapons per se, but of reputation, secrecy, of a silent threat of unknown potency. Our intelligence services have amassed maybe half a dozen cases in the past thirty years of suspected use of haut-style bioweapons, and in every instance, it was a Cetagandan internal matter." He glanced at Greenlaw's intensely disturbed face and added in what he hoped didn't sound like hollow reassurance, "There was no spread or bio-backsplash from those incidents that we know of."