Carefully, Miles brought the suit back around the outside of the ship to the nearest lock to Engineering, on the outboard side of one of the Necklin rod nacelles, the same lock from which it had exited. Opened the lock, brought the suit inside. Its servos kept it upright. The light reflected from its faceplate, concealing whatever was within. Miles did not open the interior lock door.
"Now what?" he said to the room at large.
Venn glanced at Roic. "Your armsman and I have stunners, I believe. If you control the suit, you control the prisoner's movements. Bring it in, and we'll arrest the bastard."
"The suit has manual capacities, too. Anyone in it who was . . . alive and conscious should have been able to fight me." Miles cleared a throat thick with worry. "I was just wondering if Brun's searchers checked inside these suits when they were looking for Solian, that first day he went missing. And, um . . . what he's like—what condition his body might be in by now."
Roic made a small noise, and emitted an undervoiced, plaintive protest of M'lord! Miles wasn't sure of the exact interpretation, but he thought it might have something to do with Roic wanting to keep his last meal in his stomach, and not all over the inside of his helmet.
After a brief, fraught pause, Venn said, "Then we'd better go have a look. Sealer, Adjudicator—wait here."
The two senior officials didn't argue.
"Would you like to stay with 'em, m'lord?" Roic suggested tentatively.
"We've all been looking for that poor bastard for weeks," Miles replied firmly. "If this is him, I want to be the first to know." He did allow Roic and Venn to precede him from engineering through the locks into the Necklin field generator nacelle, though.
At the lock, Venn drew his stunner and took position. Roic peered through the port on the airlock's inner door. Then his hand swept down to the lock control, the door slid open, and he strode in. He reappeared a moment later, half-dragging the heavy toppling work suit. He laid it faceup on the corridor floor.
Miles ventured closer and stared down at the faceplate.
The suit was empty.
Chapter 15
"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 wi
th 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 Crèche. 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?
Miles, Mutants, and Microbes Page 63