Lois Bujold - Barrayar

Vaagen was alone in a holding room, pacing from wall to wall. He wore green uniform trousers and a brown-stained white shirt. He was terribly changed from the trim and energetic scientist she’d last seen in his lab at Imp Mil. Both his eyes were ringed with red-purple blotches, one lid swollen nearly shut; the slit glowed a frightening blood-scarlet. He moved bent-over. Bathless, sleepless, swollen lips …

“You get a medtech for that man!” Cordelia realized she’d yelled when Sircoj jumped.

“He’s been triaged. His condition is not life—threatening. We can start treating him just as soon as he’s security-cleared,” said Sircoj doggedly.

“Then you put him on-line with me,” Cordelia said through set teeth. “Drou, go back to the office, call Aral. Tell him what’s going on.”

Sircoj looked worried at this, but stuck valiantly to his procedures. More endless seconds, while someone went back to the prison-area and took Vaagen to a comconsole.

His face came up over the plate at last; Cordelia could see her own face reflected in the passionate intensity in his. Connected at last.

“Vaagen! What happened?”

“Milady!” His hands clenched, trembling, as he leaned on them toward the vid pickup. “The idiots, the morons, the ignorant, stupid—” he sputtered into helpless obscenities, then caught his breath and began again, quickly, concisely, as if her image might be snatched away again at any moment.

“We thought we might be all right at first, after the first two days’ fighting trailed off. We hid the replicator at ImpMil, but nobody came. We lay low, and took turns sleeping in the lab. Then Henri managed to smuggle his wife out of town, and we both stayed. We tried to continue the treatments in secret. Thought we might wait it out, wait till rescue. Things had to break, one way or another… .

“We’d almost stopped expecting them, but they came. Last—yesterday.” He rubbed a hand through his hair as if seeking some connection between real-time and nightmare-time, where clocks ran crazy. “Vordarian’s squad. Came looking for the replicator. We locked the lab, they broke in. Demanded it. We refused, refused to talk, they couldn’t fast-penta either of us. So they beat us up. Beat him to death, like street scum, like he was nobody, all that intelligence, all that education, all that promise wasted, dropped by some mumbling moron swinging a gun butt…” Tears were running down his face.

Cordelia stood white and stricken; bad, bad attack of defective deja vu. She’d played the lab scene in her head already a thousand times, but she’d never seen Dr. Henri dead on the floor, nor Vaagen beaten senseless.

“Then they ripped into the lab. Everything, all the treatment records. All Henri’s work on burns, gone. They didn’t have to do that. All gone for nothing!” His voice cracked, hoarse with fury.

“Did they … find the replicator? Dump it out?” She could see it; she had seen it over and over, spilling… .

“They found it, finally. But then they took it. And then let me go.” He shook his head from side to side.

“Took it,” she repeated stupidly. Why? What sense, to take the technology and not the techs? “And let you go. To run to us, I suppose. To give us the word.”

“You have it, Milady.”

“Where, do you suppose? Where did they take it?”

Vorkosigan’s voice spoke beside her. “The Imperial Residence, most likely. All the best hostages are being kept there. I’ll put Intelligence right on it.” He stood, feet planted, grey-faced. “It seems we’re not the only side turning up the pressure.”

Within two minutes of Vorkosigan’s arrival at main portal Security, Captain Vaagen was flat on a float pallet and on his way to the infirmary, with the top trauma doctor on the base being paged for rendezvous. Cordelia reflected bitterly on the nature of chain of command; all truth and reason and urgent need were not enough, apparently, to lend causal power to one outside that chain.

Further interrogation of the scientist had to wait on his medical treatment. Vorkosigan used the time to put Illyan and his department on the new problem. Cordelia used the time to pace in circles in the infirmary’s waiting area. Droushnakovi watched her in silent worry, not so foolish as to offer up reassurances they both knew to be empty.

At last the trauma man emerged from surgery to announce Vaagen conscious and oriented enough for a brief—he emphasized the brief—questioning. Aral came, trailing Koudelka and Illyan, and they all trooped in to find Vaagen in an infirmary bed, with his eye patched and an IV running fluids and meds.

Vaagen’s hoarse and weary voice added a few horrific details, but nothing to change the word-picture he’d first given Cordelia.

Illyan listened with steady attention. “Our people at the Residence confirm,” he reported when Vaagen ran down, depressed whisper trailing to silence. “The replicator was apparently brought in yesterday, and has been placed in the most heavily guarded wing, near Princess Kareen’s quarters. Our loyalists don’t know what it is, they think it’s some kind of a device, maybe a bomb to take out the Residence and everyone in it in the final battle.”

Vaagen snorted, coughed, and winced.

“Do they have anyone tending it?” Cordelia asked the question no one else had, so far. “A doctor, a medtech, anyone?”

Illyan frowned. “I don’t know, Milady. I can try to find out, but every extra communication endangers our people up there.”

“Mm.”

“The treatment’s interrupted anyway,” Vaagen muttered. His hand fiddled with the edge of his sheet. “Bitched to hell.”

“I realize you’ve lost your notes, but could you … reconstruct your work?” Cordelia asked diffidently. “If you got the replicator back, that is. Take up where you left off.”

“It wouldn’t be where we left off, by the time we got it back. And it wasn’t all in my head. Some of it was in Henri’s.”

Cordelia took a deep breath. “As I recall, these Escobaran portable replicators run on a two-week service cycle. When did you last recharge the power, and change the filters and add nutrients?”

“Power cell’s good for months,” Vaagen corrected. “Filters are more of a problem. But the nutrient solution will be the first limiting factor it’ll hit. At its hyped-up metabolic rate, the fetus would starve a couple of days before the system choked on its waste. Breakdown products might overload the filters pretty soon after lean-tissue metabolism began, though.”

She avoided Aral’s gaze and looked straight at Vaagen, who looked straight back with his one good eye, more than physical pain in his face. “And when did you and Henri last service the replicator?”

“The fourteenth.”

“Less than six days left,” Cordelia whispered, appalled.

“About … about that. What day is this?” Vaagen looked around in an uncharacteristic uncertainty that hurt Cordelia’s heart to watch.

“The time limit applies only if it’s not being properly taken care of,” Aral put in. “The Residence physician, Kareen and Gregor’s man—wouldn’t he realize something was needed?”

“Sir,” Illyan said, “the Princess’s physician was reported killed in the first day’s fighting at the Residence. Two cross-confirmations—I have to consider it certain.”

“They could let Miles die out of sheer ignorance up there,” Cordelia realized in dismay. “As well as on purpose.” Even one of their own secret loyalists, under the heroic impression he was defusing a bomb, could be a menace to her child.

Vaagen twisted in his sheets. Aral caught Cordelias eye, and jerked his head toward the door. “Thank you, Captain Vaagen. You have done us extraordinary service. Beyond duty.”