Lois Bujold - Diplomatic Immunity

Roic, who had begun to look alarmed, relaxed again. “Good thinking, m'lord,” he murmured gratefully.

“Sounds like a golden opportunity to sleep, to me,” opined Bel.

Miles, to his irritation, was finding Bel's yawns contagious. Miles had never quite mastered their old mercenary colleague Commodore Tung's formidable ability to sleep anywhere, any time a break in the action permitted. He was sure he was still too keyed up to doze. “A nap, maybe,” he granted grudgingly.

Bel, intelligently, at once seized the chance to go home to Nicol for a time. Overriding the herm's argument that it was a bodyguard, Miles made Bel take a quaddie patroller along. Regretfully, Miles decided to wait until he had heard back from the surgeon to call and wake up Chief Venn; he could not afford mistakes in quaddie eyes. He cleaned up and lay down himself in his tiny cabin for whatever sleep he could snatch. If he had a choice between a good night's uninterrupted sleep, and early news, he'd prefer news.

Venn would presumably let him know at once if Security effected an arrest of the quaddie with the rivet gun. Some space transfer stations were deliberately designed to be hard to hide in. Unfortunately, Graf wasn't one of them. Its architecture could only be described as an agglomeration. It had to be full of forgotten crannies. Best chance of catching the fellow would be if he attempted to leave; would he be cool enough to go to some den and lie low, instead? Or, having missed his target the first time—whoever his target had been—hot enough to circle back for another pass? Smolyani had disengaged the Kestrel from its lock and taken up position a few meters off the side of the station, just in case, while the Lord Auditor slept.

Replacing the question of who would want to shoot a harmless elderly Betan herm shepherding, well, sheep, with the question of who would want to shoot a Cetagandan ba smuggling a secret human—or superhuman—cargo of inestimable value, at least to the Star Cr?che . . . opened up the range of possible complications in an extremely disturbing fashion. Miles had already quietly decided that Passenger Firka was due for an early rendezvous with fast-penta, with quaddie cooperation if Miles could get it, or without. But, upon reflection, it was doubtful that the truth drug would work on a ba. He entertained brief, wistful fantasies of older interrogation methods. Something from the ancestral era of Mad Emperor Yuri, perhaps, or great-great-grandfather Count Pierre “Le Sanguinaire” Vorrutyer.

He rolled over in his narrow bunk, conscious of how lonely the silence of his cabin was without the reassuring rhythmic breath of Ekaterin overhead. He had gradually become used to that nightly presence. This marriage thing was getting to be a habit, one of his better ones. He touched the chrono on his wrist, and sighed. She was probably asleep by now. Too late to call and wake her just to listen to his blither. He counted over the days to Aral Alexander and Helen Natalia's decanting. Their travel margin was narrowing each day he fooled around here. His brain was putting together a twisted jingle to an old nursery tune, something about fast-penta and puppy dog tails early in the morning, when he mercifully drifted off.

* * *

“M'lord?”

Miles snapped alert at Roic's voice on the cabin intercom. “Yes?”

“The Prince Xav 's surgeon is on the secured comconsole. I told him to hold, you'd wish to be wakened.”

“Yes.” Miles glanced at the glowing numerals of the wall chrono; he'd been asleep about four hours. Plenty enough for now. He reached for his jacket. “On my way.”

Roic, again—no, still—in uniform, waited in the increasingly familiar little wardroom.

“I thought I told you to get some sleep,” Miles said. “Tomorrow—today, it is now, could be a long one.”

“I was checking through the Rudra 's security vids, m'lord. Think I might have something.”

“All right. Show me them after this, then.” He slid into the station chair, powered up the security cone, and activated the com vid image.

The senior fleet surgeon, who by the collar tabs on his green uniform held a captain's rank, looked to be one of the young and fit New Men of Emperor Gregor's progressive reign; by his bright, excited eyes, he wasn't regretting his lost night's sleep much. “My Lord Auditor. Captain Chris Clogston here. I have your blood work.”

“Excellent. What have you found?”

The surgeon leaned forward. “The most interesting was the stain on that handkerchief of yours. I'd say it was Cetagandan haut blood, without question, except that the sex chromosomes are decidedly odd, and instead of the extra pair of chromosomes where they usually assemble their genetic modifications, there are two extra pairs.”

Miles grinned. Yes! “Quite. An experimental model. Cetagandan haut indeed, but this one is a ba—genderless—and almost certainly from the Star Cr?che itself. Freeze a portion of that sample and mark it top secret, and send it along home to ImpSec's biolabs by the first available courier, with my compliments. I'm sure they'll want it on file.”

“Yes, my lord.”

No wonder Dubauer had tried to retrieve that bloodied handkerchief. Quite aside from blowing its cover, high-level Star Cr?che gene work was not the sort of thing the haut ladies cared to have circulating at large, not unless they'd released it themselves, filtered through a few select Cetagandan ghem clans via their haut trophy wives and mothers. Granted, the haut ladies saved their greatest vigilance for the genes they gated in to their well-guarded genome, generations-long work of art that it was. Miles wondered how tidy a profit one might make, offering pirate copies of those cells he'd inadvertently collected. Or maybe not—this ba wasn't, clearly, their latest work. A near-century out of date, in fact.

Their latest work lay in the hold of the Idris . Urk .

“The other sample,” Clogston went on, “was Solian II—that is, Lieutenant Solian's synthesized blood. Identical to the earlier specimen—same batch, I'd say.”

“Good! Now we're getting somewhere.” Where, for God's sake? “Thank you, Captain. This is invaluable. Go get some sleep, you've earned it.”

The surgeon, disappointment writ plainly on his face at this dismissal without further explication, signed off.

Miles turned back to Roic in time to catch him stifling a yawn. The armsman looked embarrassed, and sat up straighter.

“So what do we have?” Miles prompted.

Roic cleared his throat. “The passenger Firka actually joined the Rudra after it was first due to leave, during that delay for repairs.”

“Huh. Suggests it wasn't part of a long-laid itinerary, then . . . maybe. Go on.”

“I've filtered out quite a few records of the fellow passing on and off the ship, before it was impounded and the passengers evicted. Using his cabin as his hostel, it seems, which a lot of folks do to save money. Two of his trips bracket times Lieutenant Solian was away from the Idris —one overlaps his last routine cargo inspection, and t'other exactly brackets that last forty minutes we can't account for.”

“Oh, very nice. So what does this self-declared amphibian look like?”

Roic fiddled a moment with the console and brought up a clear full-length shot from the Rudra 's lock vid records.

The man was tall, with pale unhealthy-looking skin and dark hair shaved close to his skull in a patchy, unflattering fuzz, like lichen on a boulder. Big nose, small ears, a lugubrious expression on his rubbery face—he looked strung out, actually, eyes dark and ringed. Long, skinny arms and legs; a loose tunic or poncho concealed the details of his big upper torso. His hands and feet were especially distinctive, and Miles zoomed in for close-ups. One hand was half-concealed in a cloth glove with the fingertips cut out, which hid the webs from a casual glance, but the other was ungloved and half-raised, and the webs showed distinctly, a dark rose color between the over-long fingers. The feet were concealed in soft boots or buskins, tied at the ankles, but they too were about double the length of a normal foot, though no wider. Could the fellow spread his webbed toes, when in the water, as he spread his webbed fingers, to make a broad flipper?