Diplomatic Immunity

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  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 THIRTEEN

  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.

  "Carr
iers . . ." 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 masters."

  "The ghem, I've seen," said Venn. "We get them through here now and then. I though 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."

  Venn looked at Greenlaw. "So do we take this prisoner to a clinic, or to a cell?"

  Greenlaw was silent for a few moments, then said, "Graf Station University clinic. Straight to the infectious isolation unit. I think we want our best experts in on this, and as quickly as possible."

  Gupta objected, "But I'll be an open target! I was hunting the Cetagandan bastard—now he—it, whatever—will be hunting me!"

  "I agree with this evaluation," Miles said quickly. "Wherever you take Gupta, the location should be kept absolutely secret. The fact that he's even been taken into custody should be suppressed—dear God, this arrest hasn't gone out on your news services already, has it?" Piping the word of Gupta's location to every nook of the station . . .

  "Not formally," said Venn uneasily.

  It scarcely mattered, Miles supposed. Dozens of quaddies had seen the web-fingered man brought in, including everybody that Bel's crew of roustabouts had passed on the way. The Docks and Locks quaddies would certainly brag of their catch to everyone they knew. The gossip would be all over.

  "I strongly urge—beg!—you to put out word of his daring escape, then. Complete with follow-up bulletins asking all the citizens to keep an eye out for him again." The ba had killed four to keep its secret—would it be willing to kill fifty thousand?

  "A disinformation campaign?" Greenlaw's lips pursed in repugnance.

  "The lives of everyone on the station might well depend on it. Secrecy is your best hope of safety. And Gupta's. After that, guards—"

  "My people are already spread to their limit," Venn protested. He gave Greenlaw a beseeching look.

  Miles opened a hand in acknowledgment. "Not patrollers. Guards who know what they're doing, trained in bio-defense procedures."

  "We'll have to draw on Union Militia specialists," said Greenlaw in a decisive tone. "I'll put in the request. But it will take them . . . some time, to get here."

  "In the meanwhile," said Miles, "I can loan you some trained personnel."

  Venn grimaced. "I have a detention block full of your personnel. I'm not much impressed with their training."

  Miles suppressed a wince. "Not them. Military medical corps."

  "I will consider your offer," said Greenlaw neutrally.

  "Some of Vorpatril's senior medical men must have some expertise in this area. If you won't let us take Gupta out to the safety of one of our vessels, please, let them come aboard the station to help you."

  Greenlaw's eyes narrowed. "All right. We will accept up to four such volunteers. Unarmed. Under the direct supervision and command of our own medical experts."

  "Agreed," said Miles instantly.

 
; It was the best compromise he was likely to get, for the moment. The medical end of this problem, terrifying as it was, would have to be left to the specialists; it was out of Miles's range of expertise. Catching the ba before it could do any more damage, now . . .

  "The haut are not immune to stunner fire. I . . . recommend"—he could not order, he could not demand, most of all, he could not scream—"you quietly inform all of your patrollers that the ba—Dubauer—be stunned on sight. Once it's down, we can sort things out at our leisure."

  Venn and Greenlaw exchanged looks with the adjudicator. Leutwyn said in a constricted voice, "It would be against regs to so ambush the suspect if it is not in process of a crime, resisting arrest, or fleeing."

  "Bioweapons?" muttered Venn.

  The adjudicator swallowed. "Make damned sure your patrollers don't miss their first shot."

  "Your ruling is noted, sir."

  And if the ba stayed out of sight? Which it had certainly managed to do for most of the past twenty-four hours. . . .

  What did the ba want? Its cargo freed, and Guppy dead before he could talk, presumably. What did the ba know, at this point? Or not know? It didn't know that Miles had identified its cargo . . . did it? Where the hell is Bel?

  "Ambush," Miles echoed. "There are two places where you could set up an ambush for the ba. Wherever you take Guppy—or better still, wherever the ba believes you've taken Guppy. If you don't want to put it about that he's escaped, then take him to a concealed location, with a second, less secret one set up for bait. Then, another trap at the Idris. If Dubauer calls in requesting permission to go aboard again, which the last time we met, it fully intended to do, you should grant the petition. Then nail it as it enters the loading bay."

  "That's what I was going to do," put in Gupta in a resentful voice. "If you people had just let well enough alone, this could have been all over by now."