Diplomatic Immunity

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

“Don't open it!” cried Venn in alarm.

“Wasn't planning to,” Miles replied mildly. Not for any money.

Venn floated closer, stared down over Miles's shoulder, and swore. “The bastard's got away already! But to the station, or to a ship?” He edged back, tucked his stunner away in a pocket of his green suit, and began to gabble into his helmet com, alerting both Station Security and the quaddie militia to pursue, seize, and search anything—ship, pod, or shuttle—that had so much as shifted its parking zone off the side of the station in the past three hours.

Miles envisioned the escape. Might the ba have ridden the repairs suit back aboard the station before Greenlaw had called down the quarantine? Yes, maybe. The time window was narrow, but possible. But in that case, how had it returned the suit to the hiding place outside the Idris ? It would make more sense for the ba to have been picked up by a personnel pod—plenty enough of them zipping around out there at all hours—and have prodded the suit back to its concealment with a tractor beam, or had it towed there by someone in another powered suit and tucked out of sight.

But the Idris , like all the other Barrayaran and Komarran ships, was under surveillance by the quaddie militia. How cursory was that outside guard? Surely not that inattentive. Yet a person, a tall person, sitting in that engineering control booth manipulating the joysticks, might well have walked the suit out this airlock and quickly around the nacelle, popping it away out of sight deftly enough to evade notice by the militia guardians. Then risen from the station chair, and . . . ?

Miles's palms itched, maddeningly, inside his gloves, and he rubbed them together in a futile attempt to gain relief. He'd have traded blood for the chance to rub his nose. “Roic,” he said slowly. “Do you remember what this,” he prodded the repair suit with his toe, “had in its hand when it went out the airlock?”

“Um . . . nothing, m'lord.” Roic twisted slightly and shot Miles a puzzled look, through his faceplate.

“That's what I thought.” Right.

If Miles was guessing correctly, the ba had turned aside from the imminent murder of Gupta to seize the chance of using Bel to get back aboard the Idris and do—what?—with its cargo. Destroy it? It would surely not have taken the ba this long to inoculate the replicators with some suitable poison. It might even have been able to do them twenty at a time, introducing the contaminant into the support system of each rack. Or—even more simply, if all it had wanted was to kill its charges—it might have just turned off all the support systems, a work of mere minutes. But taking and marking individual cell samples for freezing, yes, that could well have taken all night, and all day too. If the ba had risked everything to do that, would it then leave the ship without its freezer case firmly in hand?

“The ba's had over two hours to effect an escape. Surely it wouldn't linger . . .” muttered Miles. But his voice lacked conviction. Roic, at least, caught the quaver at once; his helmet turned toward Miles, and he frowned.

They needed to count pressure suits, and check every lock to see if any of the vid monitors had been manually disabled. No, too slow—that would be a fine evidence-collecting task to delegate if one had the manpower, but Miles felt painfully bereft of minions just now. And in any case, so what if another suit was found to be gone? Pursuing loose suits was a job that the quaddies around the station were already turning to, by Venn's order. But if no other suit was gone . . .

And Miles himself had just turned the Idris into a trap.

He gulped. “I was about to say, we need to count suits, but I've a better idea. I believe we should return to Nav and Com, and shut the ship down in sections from there. Collect all the weapons at our disposal, and do a systematic search.”

Venn jerked around in his float chair. “What, do you think this Cetagandan agent could still be aboard?”

“M'lord,” said Roic in an uncharacteristically sharp voice, “what t'matter with your gloves ?”

Miles stared down, turning up his hands. His breath congealed in his chest. The thin, tough fabric of his biotainer gloves was shredding away, hanging loose in strings; beneath the lattice, his palms showed red. Their itching seemed to redouble. His breath let loose again in a snarl of “Shit! ”

Venn bobbed closer, took in the damage with widening eyes, and recoiled.

Miles held his hands up, and apart. “Venn. Go collect Greenlaw and Leutwyn and take over Nav and Com. Secure yourselves and the infirmary, in that order. Roic. Go ahead of me to the infirmary. Open the doors for me.” He choked back an unnecessary scream of Run! ; Roic, with an indrawn breath audible over the suit com, was already moving.

He dodged through the half-dark ship in Roic's long-legged wake, touching nothing, expecting every lumping heartbeat to rupture inside him. Where had he collected this hellish contamination? Was anyone else affected? Everyone else?

No. It had to have been the power-suit control joysticks. They'd slid greasily under his gloved hands. He had gripped them tighter, intent upon the task of bringing the suit back inboard. He'd taken the bait . . . Now, more than ever, he was certain the ba had walked an empty suit out the airlock. And then set a snare for any smartass who figured it out too soon.

He plunged through the door to the infirmary, past Roic, who stood aside, and straight on through the blue-lit inner door to the bio-sealed ward. A medtech's suited form jumped in surprise. Miles called up Channel 13 and rapped out, “Someone please . . .” then stopped. He'd meant to cry, Turn on the water for me! and hold his hands under the sluice of a sink, but where did the water then go ? “Help,” he finished in a smaller voice.

“What is it, my Lord Audi—” the chief surgeon began, stepping from the bathroom; then his glance took in Miles's upraised hands. “What happened? ”

“I think I hit a booby trap. As soon as you have a free tech, have Armsman Roic take him down to Engineering and collect a sample from the repair suit remote controller there. It appears to have been painted with some powerful corrosive or enzyme and . . . and I don't know what else.”

“Sonic scrubber,” Captain Clogston snapped over his shoulder to the tech monitoring the makeshift lab bench. The man hastened to rummage among the stacks of supplies. He turned back, powering on the device; Miles held out both his burning hands. The machine roared as the tech ran the directed beam of vibration over the afflicted areas, its powerful vacuum sucking the loosened detritus both macroscopic and microscopic into the sealed collection bag. The surgeon leaned in with a scalpel and tongs, slicing and tearing away the remaining shreds of gloves, which were also sucked into the receptacle.

The scrubber seemed effective; Miles's hands stopped feeling worse, though they continued to throb. Was his skin breached? He brought his now-bare palms closer to his faceplate, impeding the surgeon, who hissed under his breath. Yes. Red flecks of blood welled in the creases of the swollen tissue. Shit. Shit. Shit. . . .

Clogston straightened and glanced around, lips drawn back in a grimace. “Your biotainer suit's compromised all to hell, my lord.”

“There's another pair of gloves on the other suit,” Miles pointed out. “I could cannibalize them.”

“Not yet.” Clogston hurried to slather Miles's hands with some mystery goo and wrap them in biotainer barriers, sealed to his wrists. It was like wearing mittens over handfuls of snot, but the burning pain eased. Across the room, the tech was scraping fragments of contaminated glove into an analyzer. Was the third man in with Bel? Was Bel still in the ice bath? Still alive?

Miles took a deep, steadying breath. “Do you have any kind of a diagnosis on Portmaster Thorne yet?”

“Oh, yes, it came up right away,” said Clogston in a somewhat absent tone, still sealing the second wrist wrap. “The instant we ran the first blood sample through. What the hell we can do about it is not yet obvious, but I have some ideas.” He straightened again, frowning deeply at Miles's hands. “The herm's blood and tissues are crawling with artificial—that is, bioengineered—parasites.” He glanced up. “They appear to have an initial, latent, asymptomatic phase, where they multiply rapidly throughout the body. Then, at some point—possibly triggered by their own concentration—they switch over to producing two chemicals in different vesicles within their own cellular membrane. The vesicles engorge. A rise in the victim's body temperature triggers the bursting of the sacs, and the chemicals in turn undergo a violently exothermic reaction with each other—killing the parasite, damaging the host's surrounding tissues, and stimulating more nearby parasites to go off. Tiny, pin-point bombs all through the body. It's”—his tone went reluctantly admiring—”extremely elegant. In a hideous sort of way.”

“Did—did my ice-water bath treatment help Thorne, then?”

“Yes, absolutely. The drop in core temperature stopped the cascade in its tracks, temporarily. The parasites had almost reached critical concentration.”

Miles's eyes squeezed shut in brief gratitude. And opened again. “Temporarily?”

“I still haven't figured out how to get rid of the damned things. We're trying to modify a surgical shunt into a blood filter to both mechanically remove the parasites from the patient's bloodstream, and chill the blood to a controlled degree before returning it to the body. I think I can make the parasites respond selectively to an applied electrophoresis gradient across the shunt tube, and pull them right on out of the bloodstream.”

“Won't that do it, then?”

Clogston shook his head. “It doesn't get the parasites lodged in other tissues, reservoirs of reinfection. It's not a cure, but it might buy time. I think. The cure must somehow kill every last one of the parasites in the body, or the process will just start up again.” His lips twisted. “Internal vermicides could be tricky. Injecting something to kill already-engorged parasites within the tissues will just release their chemical loads. A very little of that micro-insult will play hell with circulation, overload repair processes, cause intense pain—it's . . . it's tricky.”

“Destroy brain tissue?” Miles asked, feeling sick.

“Eventually. They don't seem to cross the blood-brain barrier very readily. I believe the victim would be conscious to a, um, very late phase of the dissolution.”

“Oh.” Miles tried to decide whether that would be good, or bad.

“On the bright side,” offered the surgeon, “I may be able to downgrade the biocontamination alarm from Level Five to Level Three. The parasites appear to need direct blood-to-blood contact to effect transference. They don't seem to survive long outside a host.”

“They can't travel through the air?”

Clogston hesitated. “Well, maybe not until the host starts coughing blood.”

Until , not unless . Miles noted the word choice. “I'm afraid talk of a downgrade is premature anyway. A Cetagandan agent armed with unknown bioweapons—well, unknown except for this one, which is getting too damned familiar—is still on the loose out there.” He inhaled, carefully, and forced his voice to calm. “We've found some evidence suggesting that the agent still may be hiding aboard this ship. You need to secure your work zone from a possible intruder.”

Captain Clogston cursed. “Hear that, boys?” he called to his techs over his suit com.

“Oh, great,” came a disgusted reply. “Just what we need right now.”

“Hey, at least it's something we can shoot ,” another voice remarked wistfully.

Ah, Barrayarans. Miles's heart warmed. “On sight,” he confirmed. These were military medicos; they all bore sidearms, bless them.

His eye flicked over the ward and the infirmary chamber beyond, summing weak points. Only one entry, but was that weakness or strength? The outer door was definitely the vantage to hold, protecting the ward beyond; Roic had taken up station there quite automatically. Yet traditional attack by stunner, plasma arc, or explosive grenade seemed . . . insufficiently imaginative. The place was still on ship's air circulation and ship's power, but this of all sections had to have its own emergency reservoirs of both.

The military-grade Level Five biotainer suits the medicos wore also doubled as pressure suits, their air circulation entirely internal. The same was not true of Miles's cheaper suit, even before he'd lost his gloves; his atmosphere pack drew air from the environs, through filters and cookers. In the event of a pressurization loss, his suit would turn into a stiff, unwieldy balloon, perhaps even rupture at a weak point. There were bod pod lockers on the walls, of course. Miles pictured being trapped in a bod pod while the action went on without him.

Given that he was already exposed to . . . whatever, peeling out of his biotainer suit long enough to get into something tighter couldn't make things any worse, could it? He stared at his hands and wondered why he wasn't dead yet. Could the glop he'd touched have been only a simple corrosive?

Miles clawed his stunner out of his thigh pocket, awkwardly with his mittened hand, and walked back through the blue bars of light marking the bio-barrier. “Roic. I want you to dash back down to Engineering and grab me the smallest pressure suit you can find. I'll guard this point till you get back.”

“M'lord,” Roic began in a tone of doubt.

“Keep your stunner out; watch your back. We're all here, so if you see anything move that isn't quaddie green, shoot first.”

Roic swallowed manfully. “Yes, well, see that you stay here, m'lord. Don't go haring off on your own without me!”

“I wouldn't dream of it,” Miles promised.

Roic departed at the gallop. Miles readjusted his awkward grip on the stunner, made sure it was set to maximum power, and took a stance partly sheltered by the door, staring up the central corridor at his bodyguard's retreating form. Scowling.

I don't understand this.

Something didn't add up, and if he could just get ten consecutive minutes not filled with lethal new tactical crises, maybe it would come to him. . . . He tried not to think about his stinging palms, and what ingenious microbial sneak assault might even now be stealing through his body, maybe even making its way into his brain.

An ordinary imperial servitor ba ought to have died before abandoning a charge like those haut-filled replicators. And even if this one had been trained as some sort of special agent, why spend all that critical time taking samples from the fetuses that it was about to desert or maybe even destroy? Every haut infant ever made had its DNA kept on file back in the central gene banks of the Star Cr?che. They could make more, surely. What made this batch so irreplaceable?

His train of thought derailed itself as he imagined little gengineered parasites multiplying frenetically through his bloodstream, blip-blip-blip-blip .Calm down, dammit. He didn't actually know if he'd even been inoculated with the same evil disease as Bel. Yeah, it might be something even worse . Yet surely some Cetagandan designer neurotoxin—or even some quite ordinary off-the-shelf poison—ought to cut in much faster than this. Although if it's a drug to drive the victim mad with paranoia, it's working really well. Was the ba's repertoire of hell-potions limited? If it had any, why not many? Whatever stimulants or hypnotics it had used on Bel need not have been anything out of the ordinary, by the norms of covert ops. How many other fancy bio-tricks did it have up its sleeve? Was Miles about to personally demonstrate the next one?

Am I going to live long enough to say good-bye to Ekaterin? A good-bye kiss was right out, unless they pressed their lips to opposite sides of some really thick window of glass. He had so much to say to her; it seemed impossible to find where to start. Even more impossible by voice alone, over an open, unsecured public com link. Take care of the kids. Kiss them for me every night at bedtime, and tell them I loved them even if I never saw them. You won't be alone—my parents will help you. Tell my parents . . . tell them . . .

Was this damned thing starting up already, or were the hot panic and choking tears in his throat entirely self-induced? An enemy that attacked you from the inside out—you could try to turn yourself inside out to fight it, but you wouldn't succeed—filthy weapon! Open channel or not, I'm calling her now. . . .

Instead, Venn's voice sounded in his ear. “Lord Vorkosigan, pick up Channel Twelve. Your Admiral Vorpatril wants you. Badly.”

Miles hissed through his teeth and keyed his helmet com over. “Vorkosigan here.”

“Vorkosigan, you idiot—!” The admiral's syntax had shed a few honorifics sometime in the past hour. “What the hell is going on over there? Why don't you answer your wrist com?”

“It's inside my biotainer suit and inaccessible right now. I'm afraid I had to don the suit in a hurry. Be aware, this helmet link is an open access channel and unsecured, sir.” Dammit, where did that sir drop in from? Habit, sheer old bad habit. “You can ask for a brief report from Captain Clogston over his military suit's tight-beam link, but keep it short . He's a very busy man right now, and I don't want him distracted.”

Vorpatril swore—whether generally or at the Imperial Auditor was left nicely ambiguous—and clicked off.

Faintly echoing through the ship came the sound Miles had been waiting for—the distant clanks and hisses of airseal doors shutting down, sealing the ship into airtight sections. The quaddies had made it to Nav and Com, good! Except that Roic wasn't back yet. The armsman would have to get in touch with Venn and Greenlaw and get them to unseal and reseal his passage back up to—

“Vorkosigan.” Venn's voice sounded again in his ear, strained. “Is that you?”

“Is what me?”

“Shutting off the compartments.”

“Isn't it,” Miles tried, and failed, to swallow his voice back down to a more reasonable pitch. “Aren't you in Nav and Com yet ?”

“No, we circled back to the Number Two nacelle to pick up our equipment. We were just about to leave it.”

Hope flared in Miles's hammering heart. “Roic,” he called urgently. “Where are you?”

“Not in Nav and Com, m'lord,” Roic's grim voice returned.

“But if we're here and he's there, who's doing this ?” came Leutwyn's unhappy voice.

“Who do you think ?” Greenlaw ripped back. Her breath huffed out in anguish. “Five people, and not one of us thought to see the door locked behind us when we left—dammit!”

A small, bleak grunt, like a man being hit with an arrow, or a realization, sounded in Miles's ear: Roic.

Miles said urgently, “Anyone who holds Nav and Com has access to all these ship-linked com channels, or will, shortly. We're going to have to switch off.”

The quaddies had independent links to the station and Vorpatril through their suits; so did the medicos. Miles and Roic would be the ones plunged into communications limbo.

Then, abruptly, the sound in his helmet went dead. Ah. Looks like the ba has found the com controls. . . .

Miles leapt to the environmental control panel for the infirmary to the left of the door, opened it, and hit every manual override in it. With this outer door shut, they could retain air pressure, although circulation would be blocked. The medicos in their suits would be unaffected; Miles and Bel would be at risk. He eyed the bod pod locker on the wall without favor. The bio-sealed ward was already functioning on internal circulation, thank God, and could remain so—as long as the power stayed on. But how could they keep Bel cold if the herm had to retreat to a pod?

Miles hurried back into the ward. He approached Clogston, and yelled through his faceplate, “We just lost our ship-linked suit coms. Keep to your tight-beam military channels only.”

“I heard,” Clogston yelled back.

“How are you coming on that filter-cooler?”

“Cooler part's done. Still working on the filter. I wish I'd brought more hands, although there's scarcely room in here for more butts.”

“I've almost got it, I think,” called the tech, crouched over the bench. “Check that, will you, sir?” He waved in the direction of one of the analyzers, a collection of lights on its readout now blinking for attention.

Clogston dodged around him and bent to the machine in question. After a moment he murmured, “Oh, that's clever.”

Miles, crowding his shoulder close enough to hear this, did not find it reassuring. “What's clever?”

Clogston pointed at his analyzer readout, which now displayed incomprehensible strings of letters and numbers in cheery colors. “I didn't see how the parasites could possibly survive in a matrix of that enzyme that ate your biotainer gloves. But they were microencapsulated.”

“What?”

“Standard trick for delivering drugs through a hostile environment—like your stomach, or maybe your bloodstream—to the target zone. Only this time, used to deliver a disease. When the microencapsulation passes out of the unfriendly environment into the—chemically speaking—friendly zone, it pops open, releasing its load. No loss, no waste.”

“Oh. Wonderful. Are you saying I now have the same shit Bel has?”

“Um.” Clogston glanced up at a chrono on the wall. “How long since you were first exposed, my lord?”

Miles followed his glance. “Half an hour, maybe?”

“They might be detectable in your bloodstream by now.”

“Check it.”

“We'll have to open your suit to access a vein.”

“Check it now. Fast .”

Clogston grabbed a sampler needle; Miles peeled back the biotainer wrap from his left wrist, and gritted his teeth as a biocide swab stung and the needle poked. Clogston was pretty deft for a man wearing biotainer gloves, Miles had to concede. He watched anxiously as the surgeon delicately slipped the needle into the analyzer.

“How long will this take?”

“Now that we have the template of the thing, no time at all. If it's positive, that is. If this first sample shows negative, I'd want a recheck every thirty minutes or so to be sure.” Clogston's voice slowed, as he studied his readout. “Well. Um. A recheck won't be necessary.”

“Right,” Miles snarled. He yanked open his helmet and pushed back his suit sleeve. He bent to his secured wrist com and snapped, “Vorpatril!”

“Yes!” Vorpatril's voice came back instantly. Riding his com channels—he must be on duty in either the Prince Xav 's own Nav and Com, or maybe, by now, its tactics room. “Wait, what are you doing on this channel? I thought you had no access.”

“The situation has changed. Never mind that now. What's happening out there?”

“What's happening in there ?”

“The medical team, Portmaster Thorne, and I are holed up in the infirmary. For the moment, we're still in control of our environment. I believe Venn, Greenlaw, and Leutwyn are trapped in the Number Two freight nacelle. Roic may be somewhere in Engineering. And the ba, I believe, has seized Nav and Com. Can you confirm that last?”

“Oh, yes,” groaned Vorpatril. “It's talking to the quaddies on Graf Station right now. Making threats and demands. Boss Watts seems to have inherited their hot seat. I have a strike team scrambling.”

“Patch it in here. I have to hear this.”

A few seconds delay, then the ba's voice sounded. The Betan accent was gone; the academic coolness was fraying. “—name does not matter. If you wish to get the Sealer, the Imperial Auditor, and the others back alive, these are my requirements. A jump pilot for this ship, delivered immediately. Free and unimpeded passage from your system. If either you or the Barrayarans attempt to launch a military assault against the Idris , I will either blow up the ship with all aboard, or ram the station.”

Boss Watts's voice returned, thick with tension, “If you attempt to ram Graf Station, we'll blow you up ourselves .”

“Either way will do,” the ba's voice returned dryly.

Did the ba know how to blow up a jumpship? It wasn't exactly easy. Hell, if the Cetagandan was a hundred years old, who know what all it knew how to do? Ramming, now—with a target that big and close, any layman could manage it.

Greenlaw's stiff voice cut in; her com link presumably was patched through to Watts in the same way that Miles's was to Vorpatril. “Don't do it, Watts. Quaddiespace cannot let a plague-carrier like this pass through to our neighbors. A handful of lives can't justify the risk to thousands.”

“Indeed,” the ba continued after a slight hesitation, still in that same cool tone. “If you do succeed in killing me, I'm afraid you will win yourselves another dilemma. I have left a small gift aboard the station. The experiences of Gupta and Portmaster Thorne should give you an idea of what sort of package it is. You might find it before it ruptures, although I'd say your odds are poor. Where are your thousands now? Much closer to home.”

True threat or bluff? Miles wondered frantically. It certainly fit the ba's style as demonstrated so far—Bel in the bod pod, the booby trap with the suit-control joysticks—hideous, lethal puzzles tossed out in the ba's wake to disrupt and distract its pursuers. It sure worked on me, anyway.

Vorpatril cut in privately on the wrist com, in an unnecessarily lowered, tense tone, overriding the exchange between the ba and Watts. “Do you think the bastard's bluffing, m'lord?”

“Doesn't matter if it's bluffing or not. I want it alive . Oh, God do I ever want it alive. Take that as a top priority and an order in the Emperor's Voice, Admiral.”

After a small and, Miles hoped, thoughtful pause, Vorpatril returned, “Understood, my Lord Auditor.”

“Ready your strike team, yes . . .” Vorpatril's best strike force was locked in quaddie detention. What was the second best one like? Miles's heart quailed. “But hold it. This situation is extremely unstable. I don't have any clear sense yet how it will play out. Put the ba's channel back on.” Miles returned his attention to the negotiation in progress—no—winding up?

“A jump pilot.” The ba seemed to be reiterating. “Alone, in a personnel pod, to the Number Five B lock. And, ah—naked.” Horribly, there seemed to be a smile in that last word. “For obvious reasons.”

The ba cut the com.