Diplomatic Immunity

CHAPTER TWELVE

“Where?” Miles asked.

“Number Two Freight Bay,” the spokes-quaddie answered. “He was trying to get Pramod Sixteen, here”—his nod indicated one of the husky quaddies holding an end of the pipe, who nodded back in confirmation—”to take him out in a pod around the security zone to the galactic jumpship docks. So you can add attempted bribery of an airseal tech to violate regs to his list of charges, I'd say.”

Ah, ha. Another way to get around Bel's customs barriers . . . Miles's mind jumped back to the missing Solian.

“Pramod told him he was making arrangements, and slipped out and called me. I rounded up the boys, and we made sure he'd come along and explain himself to you.” The spokes-quaddie gestured to Chief Venn, who'd floated in hastily from the office corridor and was taking in the scene with unsurprised satisfaction.

The web-fingered downsider made a plaintive noise, beneath his electrical tape, but Miles took it more for protest than explanation.

Nicol put in urgently, “Did you see any sign of Bel?”

“Oh, hi, Nicol.” The spokes-quaddie shook his head in regret. “We asked the fellow, but we didn't get an answer. If you all don't have better luck with him, we have a few more ideas we can try.” His scowl suggested that these might run to the illicit utilization of airlocks, or perhaps innovative applications of freight-handling equipment definitely not covered in the manufacturer's warranties. “I bet we could make him stop screaming and start talking before his air ran out.”

“I think we can take it from here, thanks,” Chief Venn assured him. He glanced without favor at Firka, wriggling on his pole. “Although I'll keep your offer in mind.”

“Do you know Portmaster Thorne?” Miles asked the Docks and Locks quaddie. “Do you work together?”

“Bel's one of our best supervisors,” the quaddie replied. “About the most sensible downsider we've ever gotten. We don't care to lose it, eh?” He gave Nicol a nod.

She ducked her head in mute gratitude.

The citizens' arrest was duly recorded. The quaddie patrollers who'd assembled looked cautiously over the long, squirming captive, and elected to take him pole and all, for the moment. The Docks and Locks crew, with justifiable self-satisfaction, also presented the duffel bag Firka had been carrying.

So here was Miles's most wanted suspect, if not presented on a platter, at least en brochette . Miles itched to tear that tape off his rubbery face and start squeezing.

Sealer Greenlaw arrived while this was going forth, accompanied by a new quaddie man, dark-haired and fit-looking though not especially young. He wore neat, subdued garb much like that of Boss Watts and Bel, but black instead of slate blue. She introduced him as Adjudicator Leutwyn.

“So,” said Leutwyn, staring curiously at the tape-secured suspect. “This is our one-man crime wave. Do I understand he, too, came in with the Barrayaran fleet?”

“No, Adjudicator,” said Miles. “He joined the Rudra here on Graf Station, at the last minute. Actually, he didn't sign aboard until after the ship had originally been due to leave. I'd very much like to know why. I strongly suspect him of synthesizing and planting the blood in the loading bay, of attempting to assassinate . . . someone, in the hostel lobby yesterday, and of attacking Garnet Five and Bel Thorne last night. Garnet Five, at least, had a fairly close look at him, and should be able to confirm that identification shortly. But by far the most urgent question is, what has happened to Portmaster Thorne? Hot pursuit of a kidnap victim in danger is sufficient pretext for nonvoluntary penta interrogations in most jurisdictions, surely.”

“Here as well,” the adjudicator admitted. “But a fast-penta examination is a delicate undertaking. I've found, in the half dozen I've monitored, that it's not nearly the magic wand most people think it is.”

Miles cleared his throat in fake diffidence. “I am tolerably familiar with the techniques, Adjudicator. I've conducted or sat in on over a hundred penta-assisted interrogations. And I've had it given to me twice.” No need to go into his idiosyncratic drug reaction that had made those two events such dizzyingly surreal and notably uninformative occasions.

“Oh,” said the quaddie adjudicator, sounding impressed despite himself, possibly especially with that last detail.

“I'm keenly aware of the need to keep the examination from being a mob scene, but you also need the right leading questions. I believe I have several.”

Venn put in, “We haven't even processed the suspect yet. Me, I want to see what he's got in that bag.”

The adjudicator nodded. “Yes, carry on, Chief Venn. I'd like further clarification, if I can get it.”

Mob scene or no, they all followed the quaddie patrollers who maneuvered the unfortunate Firka, pole and all, into a back chamber. A pair of the patrollers, after first clapping proper restraints around the bony wrists and ankles, recorded retinal patterns and took laser scans of the fingers and palms. Miles had one curiosity satisfied when they also pulled off the prisoner's soft boots; the finger-length toes, prehensile or nearly so, flexed and stretched, revealing wide rose-colored webs between. The quaddies scanned them, too—of course the quaddies would routinely scan all four extremities—then cut through the bulky lashings of tape.

Meanwhile another patroller, assisted by Venn, emptied and inventoried the duffel. They removed an assortment of clothes, mostly in dirty wads, to find a large new chef's knife, a stunner with a dubiously corroded discharged power pack but no stunner permit, a long crowbar, and a leather folder full of small tools. The folder also contained a receipt for an automated hot riveter from a Graf Station engineering supply store, complete with incriminating serial numbers. It was at this point that the adjudicator stopped looking so carefully reserved and started to look grim instead. When the patroller held up something that looked at first glance to be a scalp, but when shaken out proved a brassy short blond wig of no particular quality, the evidence seemed almost redundant.

Of more interest to Miles was not one, but a dozen sets of identifying documentation. Half of them proclaimed their bearers to be natives of Jackson's Whole; the others were from local space systems all adjoining the Hegen Hub, a wormhole-rich, planet-poor system that was one of the Barrayaran Empire's nearest and most strategically important Nexus neighbors. Jump routes from Barrayar to both Jackson's Whole and the Cetagandan Empire passed, via Komarr and the independent buffer polity of Pol, through the Hub.

Venn ran the handful of IDs through a holovid station affixed to the chamber's curving wall, his frown deepening. Miles and Roic both maneuvered to watch over his shoulder.

“So,” Venn growled after a bit, “which one really is the fellow?”

Two sets of documentation for “Firka” included physical vid shots of a man very different in appearance from their moaning captive: a big, bulky, but perfectly normal human male from either Jackson's Whole, no House affiliation, or Aslund, another Hegen Hub neighbor, depending on which—if either—ID was to be believed. Yet a third Firka ID, the one the present Firka seemed to have used to travel from Tau Ceti to Graf Station, portrayed the prisoner himself. Finally, his vid shots also matched up with the IDs of a person named Russo Gupta, also hailing from Jackson's Whole and lacking a proper House affiliation. That name, face, and associated retina scans came up again on a jumpship engineer's license that Miles recognized as originating from a certain Jacksonian organization of the sub-economy he had dealt with in his covert ops days. Judging from the long file of dates and customs stamps appended, it had passed as genuine elsewhere. And recently. A record of his travels, good!

Miles pointed. “That is almost certainly a forgery.”

The clustering quaddies looked genuinely shocked. Greenlaw said, “A false engineer's license? That would be unsafe .”

“If it's from the place I think, you could get a false neurosurgeon's license to go with it. Or any other job you cared to pretend to have, without going through all that tedious training and testing and certification.” Or, in this case, really have—now, there was a disturbing thought. Although on-the-job apprenticeship and self-teaching might cover some of the gaps over time . . . someone had been clever enough to modify that hot riveter, after all.

Under no circumstances could this pale, lanky mutie pass for a stout, pleasantly ugly, red-haired woman named either Grace Nevatta of Jackson's Whole—no House affiliation—or Louise Latour of Pol, depending on which set of IDs she favored. Nor for a short, head-wired, mahogany-skinned jumpship pilot named Hewlet.

“Who are all these people?” Venn muttered in aggravation.

“Why don't we just ask?” suggested Miles.

Firka—or Gupta—had finally stopped struggling and just lay in midair, nostrils flexing with his panting above the blue rectangle of tape over his mouth. The quaddie patroller finished recording his last scans and reached for a corner of the tape, then paused uncertainly. “I'm afraid this is going to hurt a bit.”

“He's probably sweated enough underneath the tape to loosen it,” Miles offered. “Take it in one quick jerk. It'll hurt less in the long run. That's what I'd want, if I were him.”

A muffled mew of disagreement from the prisoner turned into a shrill scream as the quaddie followed this plan. All right, so, the frog prince hadn't sweated as much around the mouth as Miles had guessed. It was still better to have the damned tape off than on.

But despite the noises he'd been making the prisoner did not follow up this liberation of his lips with outraged protests, swearing, complaints, or raving threats. He just kept panting. His eyes were peculiarly glassy—a look Miles recognized, of a man who'd been wound up far too tight for far too long. Bel's loyal stevedores might have roughed him up a bit, but he hadn't acquired that look in the brief time he'd been in quaddie hands.

Chief Venn held up a double handful, left and left, of IDs before the prisoner's eyes. “All right. Which one are you really? You may as well tell us the truth. We'll be cross-checking it all anyway.”

With surly reluctance, the prisoner muttered, “I'm Guppy.”

“Guppy? Russo Gupta?”

“Yeah.”

“Who are these others?”

“Absent friends.”

Miles wasn't quite sure if Venn had caught the intonation. He put in, “Dead friends?”

“Yeah, that too.” Guppy/Gupta stared away into a distance Miles calculated as light-years.

Venn looked alarmed. Miles was torn between anxiety to proceed and an intense desire to sit down and study the place and date stamps on all those IDs, real and fake, before decanting Gupta. A world of revelation lay therein, he was fairly sure. But greater urgencies drove the sequencing now.

“Where is Portmaster Thorne?” Miles asked.

“I told those thugs before. I never heard of him.”

“Thorne is the Betan herm you sprayed with knockout mist last night in a utility passage off Cross Corridor. Along with a blond quaddie woman named Garnet Five.”

The surly look deepened. “Never seen either of 'em.”

Venn turned his head and nodded to a patroller, who flitted off. A few moments later she returned through one of the chamber's other portals, ushering Garnet Five. Garnet's color looked vastly better now, Miles was relieved to note, and she had obviously managed to obtain whatever female grooming equipment she used to touch herself back up to her high-visibility norm.

“Ah!” she said cheerfully. “You caught him! Where's Bel?”

Venn inquired formally, “Is this the downsider who committed chemical assault on you and the portmaster, and released illicit volatiles into the public atmosphere last night?”

“Oh, yes,” said Garnet Five. “I couldn't possibly mistake him. I mean, look at the webs.”

Gupta clenched his lips, his fists, and his feet, but further pretense was clearly futile.

Venn lowered his voice to a quite nicely menacing official growl. “Gupta, where is Portmaster Thorne?”

“I don't know where the blighted nosy herm is! I left it in the bin right next to hers. It was all right then. I mean, it was breathing and all. They both were. I made sure. The herm's probably still sleeping it off in there.”

“No,” said Miles. “We checked all the bins in the passage. The portmaster was gone.”

“Well, I don't know where it went after that.”

“Would you be willing to repeat that assertion under fast-penta, and clear yourself of a kidnapping charge?” Venn inquired cannily, angling for a voluntary interrogation.

Gupta's rubbery face set, and his eyes shifted away. “Can't. I'm allergic to the stuff.”

“Is that so?” said Miles. “Let's just check, shall we?” He dug in his trouser pocket and drew out the strip of test patches he'd borrowed earlier from the Kestrel 's ImpSec supplies, in anticipation of just such an opportunity. Granted, he hadn't anticipated the added urgency of Bel's alarming vanishing act. He held up the strip and explained to Venn and the adjudicator, who was monitoring all this with a judicial frown, “Security-grade penta allergy skin test. If the subject has any of the six kinds of artificially induced anaphylaxes or even a mild natural allergy, the welt pops right up.” By way of reassurance to the quaddie officials, he peeled off one of the burr-like patches and slapped it on the back of his own wrist, displaying it with a heartening wriggle of his fingers. The sleight of hand was sufficient that no one except the prisoner protested when he leaned over and pressed another to Gupta's arm. Gupta let out a yowl of horror that won him only stares; he reduced it to a pitiable whimper under the bemused eyes of the onlookers.

Miles peeled off his own patch to reveal a distinct reddish prickle. “As you see, I do have a slight endogenous sensitivity.” He waited a few moments longer, to drive home the point, then reached over and peeled the patch off Gupta. The rather sickly natural—mushrooms were natural, right?—skin tone was unaffected.

Venn, getting into the rhythm of the thing like an old ImpSec hand, leaned toward Gupta and said, “That's two lies, so far, then. You can stop lying now. Or you can stop lying shortly. Either way will do.” He raised narrowed eyes to his fellow quaddie official. “Adjudicator Leutwyn, do you rule that we have sufficient cause for an involuntary chemically assisted interrogation of this transient?”

The adjudicator looked less than wholly enthusiastic, but he replied, “In light of his admitted connection to the worrisome disappearance of a valued Station employee, yes, there can be no question. I do remind you that subjecting detainees in your charge to unnecessary physical discomfort is against regs.”

Venn glanced at Gupta, hanging miserably in air. “How can he be uncomfortable? He's in free fall.”

The adjudicator pursed his lips. “Transient Gupta, aside from your restraints, are you in any special discomfort at this time? Do you require food, drink, or downsider sanitary facilities?”

Gupta jerked his wrists against their soft bonds, and shrugged. “Naw. Well, yes. My gills are getting dry. If you're not gonna let me loose, I need somebody to spray them. The stuff's in my bag.”

“This?” The female quaddie patroller held out what appeared to be a perfectly ordinary plastic sprayer, of the sort that Miles had seen Ekaterin use to mist some of her plants. She wriggled it, and it gurgled.

“What's in it?” asked Venn suspiciously.

“Water, mostly. And a bit of glycerin,” said Gupta.

“Go ahead and check it,” said Venn aside to his patroller. She nodded and floated out; Gupta watched her depart with some mistrust, but no particular alarm.

“Transient Gupta, it appears you're going to be our guest for a while,” said Venn. “If we remove your restraints, are you going to give us any trouble, or are you going to behave yourself?”

Gupta was silent a moment, then vented an exhausted sigh. “I'll behave. Much good it'll do me either way.”

A patroller floated forward and unshackled the prisoner's wrists and ankles. Only Roic seemed less than pleased with this unnecessary courtesy, tensing with a hand on a wall grip and one foot planted to a bit of bulkhead not occupied by equipment, ready to launch himself forward. But Gupta only chafed his wrists and bent to rub his ankles, and looked grudgingly grateful.

The patroller returned with the bottle, handing it to her chief. “The lab's chemical sniffer says it's inert. Should be safe,” she reported.

“Very well.” Venn pitched the bottle to Gupta, who despite his odd long hands caught it readily, with little downsider clumsiness, a fact Miles was sure the quaddie noted.

“Um.” Gupta gave the crowd of onlookers a slightly embarrassed glance, and hitched up his loose poncho. He stretched and inhaled, and the ribs on his big barrel chest drew apart; flaps of skin parted to reveal red slashes. The substance beneath seemed spongy, rippling in the misting like densely laid feathers.

God almighty. He really does have gills under there. Presumably, the bellows-like movement of the chest helped pump water through, when the amphibian was immersed. Dual systems. So did he hold his breath, or did his lungs shut down involuntarily? By what mechanism was his blood circulation switched from one oxygenating interface to the other? Gupta pumped the bottle and sprayed mist into the red slits, handing it back and forth from right side to left, and seemed to draw some comfort thereby. He sighed, and the slits closed back down, his chest appearing merely ridged and scarred. He smoothed the drifting poncho back into place.

“Where are you from?” Miles couldn't help asking.

Gupta grew surly again. “Guess.”

“Well, Jackson's Whole, by the weight of the evidence, but which House made you? Ryoval, Bharaputra, another? And were you a one-off, or part of a set? First-generation gengineered, or from a self-reproducing line of, of water people?”

Gupta's eyes widened in surprise. “You know Jackson's Whole?”

“Let's say, I've had several painfully educational visits there.”

The surprise became edged with faint respect, and a certain lonely eagerness. “House Dyan made me. I was part of a set, once—we were an underwater ballet troupe.”

Garnet Five blurted in unflattering astonishment, “You were a dancer?”

The prisoner hunched his shoulders. “No. They made me to be submersible stage crew. But House Dyan suffered a hostile takeover by House Ryoval—just a few years before Baron Ryoval was assassinated, pity that didn't happen sooner. Ryoval broke up the troupe for other, um, tasks, and decided he had no alternate use for me, so I was out of a job and out of protection. Could have been worse. He mighta kept me. I drifted around and took what tech jobs I could get. One thing led to another.”

In other words, Gupta had been born into Jacksonian techno-serfdom, and dumped out on the street when his original owner-creators had been engulfed by their vicious commercial rival. Given what Miles knew of the late, unsavory Baron Ryoval, Gupta's fate was perhaps happier than that of his mer-cohort. By the known date of Ryoval's death, that last vague remark about things leading to things covered at least five years, maybe as many as ten.

Miles said thoughtfully, “You weren't shooting at me at all yesterday, then, were you. Nor at Portmaster Thorne.” Which left . . .

Gupta blinked at him. “Oh! That's where I saw you before. Sorry, no.” His brow corrugated. “So what were you doing there, then? You're not one of the passengers. Are you another Stationer squatter like that officious bloody Betan?”

“No. My name is”—he made an instant, almost subliminal decision to drop all the honorifics—”Miles. I was sent out to look after Barrayaran concerns when the quaddies impounded the Komarran fleet.”

“Oh.” Gupta grew uninterested.

What the devil was keeping that fast-penta? Miles softened his voice. “So what happened to your friends, Guppy?”

That fetched the amphibian's attention again. “Double-crossed. Subjected, injected, infected . . . rejected. We were all taken in. Damned Cetagandan bastard. That wasn't the Deal.”

Something inside Miles went on overdrive. Here's the connection, finally. His smile grew charming, sympathetic, and his voice softened further. “Tell me about the Cetagandan bastard, Guppy.”

The hovering mob of quaddie listeners had stopped rustling, even breathing more quietly. Roic had drawn back to a shadowed spot opposite Miles. Gupta glanced around at the Graf Stationers, and at Miles and himself, the only legged persons now in view in the center of the circle. “What's the use?” The tone was not a wail of despair, but a bitter query.

“I am Barrayaran. I have a special stake in Cetagandan bastards. The Cetagandan ghem-lords left five million of my grandfather's generation dead behind them, when they finally gave up and pulled out of Barrayar. I still have his bag of ghem-scalps. For certain kinds of Cetagandans, I might know a use or two you'd find interesting.”

The prisoner's wandering gaze snapped to his face and locked there. For the first time, he'd won Gupta's total attention. For the first time, he'd hinted he might have something that Guppy really wanted. Wanted? Burned for, lusted for, desired with mad obsessive hunger. His glassy eyes were ravenous for . . . maybe revenge, maybe justice—in any case, blood. But the frog prince clearly lacked personal expertise in retribution. The quaddies didn't deal in blood. Barrayarans . . . had a more sanguinary reputation. Which, for the first time this mission, might actually prove some use.

Gupta took a long breath. “I don't know what kind this one was. Is. He was like nothing I'd ever met before. Cetagandan bastard. He melted us.”

“Tell me,” Miles breathed, “everything. Why you?”

“He came to us . . . through our usual cargo agents. We thought it would be all right. We had a ship. Gras-Grace and Firka and Hewlet and me had this ship. Hewlet was our pilot, but Gras-Grace was the brains. Me, I had a knack for fixing things. Firka kept the books, and fixed regs, and passports, and nosy officials. Gras-Grace and her three husbands, we called us. We were a collection of rejects, but maybe we added up to one real spouse for her, I don't know. One for all and all for one, because it was damn sure that a crew of refugee Jacksonians, without a House or a Baron, wasn't going to get a break from anyone else in the Nexus.”

Gupta was getting wound up in his story. Miles, listening with utmost care, prayed Venn would have the sense not to interrupt. Ten people hovered around them in this chamber, yet he and Gupta, mutually hypnotized by the increasing intensity of his confession, might almost be floating in a bubble of time and space altogether removed from this universe. “So where did you pick up this Cetagandan and his cargo, anyway?”

Gupta glanced up, startled. “You know about the cargo?”

“If it's the same one now aboard the Idris , yes, I've had a look. I found it rather disturbing.”

“What's he got in there, really? I only saw the outsides.”

“I'd rather not say, at this time. What did he,” Miles elected not to go into the confusions of ba gender just now, “tell you it was?”

“Gengineered mammals. Not that we asked questions. We got paid extra for not asking questions. That was the Deal, we thought.”

And if there was anything that the ethically elastic inhabitants of Jackson's Whole held nearly sacred, it was the Deal. “A good bargain, was it?”

“Looked like. Two or three more runs like that, we could have paid off the ship and owned it free and clear.”

Miles took leave to doubt that, if the crew was in debt for their jumpship to a typical Jacksonian financial House. But perhaps Guppy and his friends had been terminal optimists. Or terminally desperate .

“The gig looked easy enough. Just take a little mixed-freight run through the fringes of the Cetagandan Empire. We jumped in through the Hegen Hub, via Vervain, and skirted round to Rho Ceta. All those arrogant, suspicious bastard inspectors who boarded us at the jump points turned up nothing to hold against us, though they'd have liked to, because there wasn't anything aboard but what our filed manifest said. Gave old Firka a good chuckle. Till we were heading out for the last jumps, for Rho Ceta through those empty buffer systems just before the route splits to Komarr. We made one little mid-space rendezvous there that didn't appear on our flight plan.”

“What kind of ship did you rendezvous with? Jumpship, or just a local space crawler? Could you tell for sure, or was it disguised or camouflaged?”

“Jumpship. I don't know what else it might have really been. It looked like a Cetagandan government ship. It had lots of fancy markings, anyway. Not big, but fast—fresh and classy. The Cetagandan bastard moved his cargo all by himself, with float pallets and hand tractors, but he sure didn't waste any time. The moment the locks were closed, they went off.”

“Where? Could you tell?”

“Well, Hewlet said they had an odd trajectory. It was that uninhabited binary system a few jumps out from Rho Ceta, I don't know if you know it—”

Miles nodded in encouragement.

“They went inbound, deeper into the grav well. Maybe they were planning to swing around the suns and approach one of the jump points from a disguised trajectory, I don't know. That would make sense, given all the rest of it.”

“Just the one passenger?”

“Yeah.”

“Tell me more about him.”

“Not much to tell—then. He kept to himself, ate his own rations in his own cabin. He didn't talk to me at all. He had to talk to Firka, on account of Firka was fixing his manifest. By the time we reached the first Barrayaran jump point inspection, it had a whole new provenance. He was somebody else by then, too.”

“Ker Dubauer?”

Venn twitched at this first mention of the familiar name in his hearing, and opened his mouth and inhaled, but closed it again without diverting Guppy's flow. The unhappy amphibian was in full spate now, pouring out his troubles.

“Not yet, he wasn't. He musta become Dubauer during his layover on the Komarran transfer station, I figure. I didn't track him by his identity, anyway. He was too good for that. Fooled you Barrayarans, didn't he?”

Indeed . An apparent Cetagandan agent of the highest caliber had passed through Barrayar's key Nexus trade crossroad like so much smoke. ImpSec would have a seizure when this report arrived. “How did you follow him here, then?”

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.”