Ethan of Athos b-6

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  "Oh," said Ethan, mollified. It almost made sense.

  He was just opening his mouth with a newly-marshalled objection when Quinn bundled him into the limited and inadequate concealment of a door niche. Coming down the corridor from the opposite end, toward the bulk freight lift, were three silhouettes leading a sealed passenger pallet with the Ecobranch logo of a stylized fern and water blazoned on the front. Passing into the soft, luxurious light—Ethan sensed someone had done some careful psychological studies of the response of the human brain to selected optical wavelengths—the three figures resolved into a burly Station Security man and two ecotechs, one male, one female.

  One bony, angular female whose very walk—stalk—radiated all the personal warmth and charm of a hatchet…

  "God the Father," squeaked Ethan, "It's Horrible Helda—"

  "Don't panic," Quinn hissed at him, pushing him back into the niche. It was scarcely 20 centimeters deep, not enough to hide one person, let alone two. "Just turn your back and pretend to be doing something normal and they'll scarcely notice you. Here, turn around, put your hand on the wall beside my head," she arranged him hastily, "lean in, keep your voice down—"

  "What am I pretending to be doing?"

  "Cuddling. Now shut up and let me listen. And don't look at me like that or I'll start giggling. Though a few well-placed giggles might add conviction…"

  Doing something normal? Ethan had never felt more abnormal in his life. His shoulder blades crawled in expectation of some lethal outburst from Millisor's room, just across the hall. It didn't help that he couldn't see what was coming. Quinn, of course, had a fine view, with the added bonus that her face was partly concealed by Ethan's arm and her body shielded from stray shots by his.

  "Only one Security troop for their back-up?" Quinn muttered, eyes glinting between fluttering eyelashes. "Glad we came."

  A muffled peeping sound broke from her jacket. Her hand dove to wring it to silence. She lifted her beeper just far enough out to eye the numeric readout. Her lip curled.

  "What is it?" whispered Ethan in her ear.

  "That bastard Millisor's room comconsole number," she murmured back sweetly, curling her other hand realistically around the back of Ethan's neck. "So, he squeezed my code out of Teki. Probably wants me to call him up so he can make threats at me. Let him sweat."

  Ethan, growing desperate, pressed artistically close to her, oozing around to one side and winning himself a better view.

  Ecotech Helda stabbed the door buzzer to Millisor's room and checked a report panel in her hand. "Ghem-lord Harman Dal? Transient Dal?"

  There was no response.

  "Is he home?" asked the other ecotech.

  For answer Helda pointed to a sealed panel in the wall. Ethan guessed its colored lights must encode some sort of life-support usage reading, for the other ecotech said, "Ah. And with company, too. Maybe this is for real."

  Helda buzzed again. "Transient Dal, this is Kline Station Biocontrol Warden Helda. I require you to open this door at once or find yourself in violation of Biocontrol Regulations 176b and 2a."

  "At least give him time to get his pants on," the other ecotech said. "I mean, this has gotta be embarrassing."

  "Let him be embarrassed," said Helda shortly. "The dirtsucker deserves it, bringing his filthy—" she struck the buzzer again.

  At the third no-response she pulled a device from her jacket and held it over the door locking mechanism. The device's lights twinkled; nothing happened.

  "Gods," said the other ecotech, startled, "they've blocked the emergency override circuits!"

  "Now that's a violation of fire-safety regulations," said the burly Security man happily, and tapped out a quick note on his report panel. At a look of inquiry from the other ecotech he explained his sudden good cheer. "You Biocontrol guys may be able to barge over every Transient civil rights guarantee on hearsay evidence but I gotta have documented justification or my tail goes on the line." He sighed envy.

  "Dal, unblock this door at once!" Helda yelled furiously into the intercom.

  "We could cut off his food service from down below," suggested the other ecotech. "He'd have to come out eventually."

  Helda ground her teeth. "I'm not waiting that long for some infected dirt-sucker to decide to get cooperative with me." She moved to a sealed locked panel a little farther down the wall marked FIRE CONTROL: AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY and stuck her ID card in its read-slot. Its transparent doors hissed obediently apart. They wouldn't have dared do otherwise, Ethan thought. She pressed a complex series of bright keypads.

  A muffled hissing roar, and faint cries, penetrated from the sealed door to Millisor's room. Helda smiled satisfaction.

  "What's she doing?" Ethan whispered in Quinn's shell-like ear.

  Quinn was grinning ferociously. "Fire control. Downside, you have automatic sprinkler systems that fling water on fires. Very inefficient. Here we seal the room and pump out the air. Real fast. No oxygen, no oxidation. Millisor either wasn't smart enough or wasn't stupid enough to sabotage the fire control vents…"

  "Er… isn't that rather hard on anyone trapped inside?"

  "Normally there's an alarm to evacuate the room first. Helda overrode it."

  The unlocking device pressed over the door mechanism by the other ecotech twinkled and beeped. Frantic pounding came from the interior.

  "Now Millisor wants to open it, and can't, because of the pressure differential, ' Quinn whispered.

  After a good long pause Helda reversed the airflow. The doorseals parted with an audible pop and whoosh. Millisor and Rau, noses bleeding, stumbled gasping into the corridor, swallowing and working their jaws in an effort to equalize inner-ear pressure.

  "Helda didn't even give the poor fellows a chance to tell her about their hostage," Quinn smirked. "Efficient lady…"

  Millisor finally got his breath. "Are you insane?" he snarled at the three Stationer officials. He focused on the Security man. "My diplomatic immunity—"

  The Security man jerked his thumb at Helda. "She's in charge here."

  "Where is your warrant?" cried Millisor angrily. I "This space is legally paid for and possessed, and I furthermore I hold a Class IV diplomatic waiver. You have no right to restrict or impede my movements for anything except a major felony charge—"

  Ethan could not tell if the bluster was feigned or real, Harman Dal or Ghem-colonel Millisor talking.

  "The rights you cite are for transients versus Security," said Helda sharply. "A biocontrol emergency abrogates them all. Now step into the float pallet."

  Ethan and Quinn had been playing the part of goggling bystanders. About this time Rau's eye fell on them; a hand on his superior's arm stemmed the next argument. Millisor's head swivelled, and his mouth shut with a snap. There was something chilling about so much rage being so abruptly controlled. Not quenched, but banished from the surface, conserved for some future moment. Thought boiled in Millisor's eyes.

  "Hey," the Security man said, sticking his head into the recently evacuated room, "there's a third guy in here. Tied to a chair, naked."

  "That's disgusting," said Helda. She treated Millisor to a withering glare.

  The glare failed its intended effect, bouncing off Millisor's furious introspection. Rau stirred nervously. His hand twitched toward his jacket, but both Millisor and Quinn shook their heads at him, each from their different perspective.

  "He's bleeding," said the Security man, advancing into the room and, with a glance back at Millisor and Rau, meditatively loosing his stunner in its holster.

  "It's the nose," called Helda. "Always makes it look like a slaughter, but I guarantee you nobody ever died of a bloody nose."

  "My friend here is a doctor," Quinn chirped, inserting herself into the group with a quick wriggle. "Can we help?"

  "Oh, yes," called the Security man, sounding relieved.

  Quinn grabbed Ethan by the hand and thrust him past her into the room, never taking her smiling gaze off Millisor and R
au. Her stunner had found its way into her other hand, somehow. The Security man glanced back at her and nodded gratefully. Helda grudgingly snapped on plastic gloves and followed to view the scene of debauch for herself.

  Ethan approached Millisor's trussed prey anxiously. The Security man knelt beside the chair and poked tentatively at the wires binding Teki's ankles. They had cut through and his skin oozed blood. Teki's clothes were laid out on the bed in the familiar search array. Wires also bound his wrists, and the skin puffed up redly along their tight lines. Blood from his nose masked his lower face. Teki's head lolled, but his eyes were open and smiling, unnaturally bright. He giggled as the Security man touched his ankle. The Security man jumped back in startlement, eyed him with growing grimness, and pulled out his report panel with the air of a swordsman unsheathing his steel. "I don't like the looks of this," he stated.

  Helda, coming up behind Ethan, stopped short. "By all the gods! Teki! I always thought you were an idiot, but this goes beyond all—"

  "I'm off-shift," said Teki in a small dignified voice. "I don't hafta put up with you off-shift, Helda." He twitched against his bonds, starting a new trickle of blood across his feet.

  Helda's voice stumbled to silence as she got a better view. But not for long. "What is this?"

  "Is he drugged, Doctor?" asked the Security man as Ethan knelt beside Teki. "What with? Was this a, a private act that got out of hand, or something chargeable?" His thick fingers poised hopefully over his report panel.

  "Drugged and tortured," said Ethan shortly, opening Quinn's medkit. "Kidnapped, too." There was a vibra-scalpel; a touch, and the ankle wires parted with a ping.

  "Raped?"

  "I doubt it."

  Helda, closing in, turned her head at the sound of Ethan's voice and stared at him. "You're no doctor," she gasped. "You're that moron from Docks and Locks again. My department wants a word with you!"

  Teki yelped with laughter, causing Ethan to drop the sterile sponge he'd been applying to his ankle. "Joke's on you, Helda! He really is a doctor." He leaned toward Ethan, nearly tipping the chair, and confided conspiratorially, "Don't let on you're an Athosian, or she'll pop an artery. She hates Athos." He nodded happily, then, exhausted, let his head loll sideways again.

  Helda recoiled. "An Athosian? Is this some kind of joke?" She glared anew at Ethan.

  Ethan, absorbed in his work, jerked his head at Teki. "Ask him, he's the one full of truth serum." Teki's pulse was racing, his extremities cold, but he was not quite shocky. Ethan released the wrists. Reassuringly, Teki did not fall over, but sat up on his own. "But for your information, madam, I am indeed Dr. Ethan Urquhart of Athos. Ambassador Doctor Urquhart, on a special mission for the Population Council."

  He hadn't really expected to impress her, but to his surprise she drew back whitely. "Oh?" she said in a neutral tone.

  "Don't tell her that, Doc," Teki urged anew. "Ever since her son sneaked off to Athos nobody dares to mention the place. She can't even nag him longdistance there—their censorship guys send back any vids from a woman. She can't get at him at all." Teki dissolved in giggles. "I bet he's happy as a clam."

  Ethan cringed at the thought of getting drawn into some family squabble. The Security man looked equally dubious, but asked, "How old was the boy?"

  "Thirty-two," Teki snickered.

  "Oh." The Security man lost interest.

  "Do you possess an antidote to that—so-called truth serum, Doctor?" Helda inquired frostily. "If so I suggest you administer it, and we'll sort the rest of this out down in Quarantine."

  Ethan slowed. His words fell from him one by one, like drops of cold honey. "Where you possess dictatorial powers, and where you…" He looked up to catch her frigid, frightened eyes. Time stopped. "You…"

  Time sprang forward. "Quinn!" Ethan bellowed.

  At her prompt appearance, herding Millisor and Rau before her with jabs from her stunner, Ethan jumped to his feet. He felt like running around in tight circles, or tearing his hair out in great clumps, or grabbing her by her grey-and-white jacket and shaking her until her teeth rattled. His clenched hands beat the air. His words tumbled over one another in his excitement.

  "I kept trying to tell you, but you never stopped to listen. Pretend you're the agent, or whatever, on Kline Station trying to grab Athos's shipment. You make an impromptu decision to replace the frozen tissues with substitute material. We know it's impromptu, because if it had been planned you could have brought real cultures with you and nobody would ever have known a switch had been made, right? Where, where, in God the Father's name even on Kline Station, are you going to come up with 450 human ovaries? Not even 450. Three hundred eighty-eight and six cows' ovaries. I don't think even you could pull 'em out of your jacket, Commander Quinn."

  Quinn opened her mouth, closed it, and looked extremely thoughtful. "Go on, Doctor."

  Millisor had dropped his Harmon Dal act and, oblivious now to Quinn's stunner, stood with his attention rapt on Ethan. Rau watched his leader anxiously for some signal to action. The other ecotech looked bewildered; the Security man, although his eyebrows were up in equal puzzlement, was absorbing every word.

  Ethan gabbled on. "Forget the 426 suspect ships. Trace backwards from one ship, the census courier to Athos. Method, motive, and opportunity, by God! Who has ready access to every corner and cubbyhole on Kline Station, who could pass in and out of a guarded transfer warehouse with no question asked? Who has access to human cadavers every day? Cadavers from which a few grams of selected tissues will never be missed, because the bodies are biochemically destroyed immediately after the theft? But not quite enough cadavers, eh Helda, before it was time for the census courier to leave for Athos? Hence the cow ovaries, thrown in out of desperation to make up the numbers, and the short-changed boxes, and the empty box." Ethan paused, panting.

  "You're insane," choked Helda. Her face had gone from white to red to white again. Millisor's stunned eyes devoured her. Quinn looked like a woman taken by a beatific vision. The Security's man's fingers were locked on his report panel in a sort of overloaded paralysis.

  "Not as crazy as you are," said Ethan. "What did you hope to accomplish?"

  "Redundant question," snapped Millisor. "We know what she accomplished. Forget the window-dressing, and find out where—" A sharp gesture from Quinn's stunner reminded him that his status had been reversed from interrogator to prisoner.

  "You're all coming to Quarantine—"

  "It's over, Helda," said Ethan. "I bet if I look around your Assimilation Station I'll even find a shrink-wrap sealer."

  "Oh, yes," chorused Teki helpfully. "We use it to seal suspected contaminants, to store them for later analysis. It's under the wet bench. I sealed my shoes up once, on a slow day. I tried to seal water, to make balloons to drop down the lift tubes, but it didn't work—"

  "Shut up, Teki!" snarled Helda desperately.

  "It's not as bad as what Vernon did with the white mice—"

  "Stop," growled Millisor in exasperation out of the corner of his mouth. Teki subsided and sat blinking.

  Ethan spread his hands and asked Helda more gently and urgently, "Why? I have to understand."

  The concentrated venom in her posture broke into speech almost despite her will. "Why? You even need to ask why? It was to cut you motherless unnatural bastards off, that's why. I meant to get the next shipment too, if there was one, and the next, and the next, until—" She was choking now. On her rage? No, Ethan realized, his buoyant intellectual triumph turning sickly-sour in his stomach; on tears. "Until I'd hooked Simmi out of there, and he came to his senses and came home and got a real woman, I swear I wouldn't criticize a hair on her head this time, I'll never be allowed to even see my own grandchildren on that dreadful dirty planet…" She turned her back and stood stiff-legged, defiant but for her hands over her red, smeared face, ugly and helpless and snorting.

  Ethan thought he understood how a propaganda-stuffed young soldier must feel the first time in combat,
stumbling by some sudden chance over his enemy's human face. He had gloried for a red moment in his power to break her. Now he stood foolishly with the pieces in his hands. Not at all heroic.

  "Ye gods," muttered the Security man, in awe touched with glee, "I have to arrest an eco-cop… ?"

  Teki giggled. The other ecotech, clearly taken aback by Helda's confession, looked as though he didn't know whether to argue or try to become invisible.

  "But what did you do with the other?" Millisor rocked forward, teeth clenched.

  "Other what?" Helda sniffed.

  "The frozen human ovarian cultures you took out of the boxes for Athos, " Millisor ground out, carefully, like a man speaking in words of one syllable to a mutant.

  "Oh. I threw them out."

  The veins stood out on the Cetagandan's forehead. Ethan could name each one. Millisor seemed to be having trouble breathing. "Idiot bitch," he panted. "Idiot bitch, do you know what you've done… ?"

  Quinn's laughter rang over them all like morning bells. "Admiral Naismith will love it!"

  The ghem-colonel's steel self-control broke at last. "Idiot bitch!" he screamed, and launched himself toward Helda, clawed hands outstretched. Both Quinn's and the Security man's stunner beams caught him in a neat cross-fire, and he crashed as trees do.

  Rau just stood shaking his head and muttering over and over, "Shit. Shit. Shit…"

  "Attempted assault," the Security man paused to croon over his report panel, "on a Biocontrol Warden carrying out her duties…"

  Rau sidled toward the door.

  "Don't forget breaking Detention," Quinn added helpfully. "This here's the fellow," she gestured at Rau, "that you were all looking for who evaporated out of C-9 the other day. And I bet if you search this room you'll find all sorts of military goodies that Kline Station Customs never authorized."

  "Quarantine first," said the other ecotech, after a nervous glance at his still emotionally incapacitated superior.

  "But surely Ambassador Urquhart will wish to lay charges for the admitted theft and destruction of Athosian property," suggested Quinn. "Who's going to arrest whom?"