Lois Bujold - Diplomatic Immunity

“Thank you. I promise you won't have any trouble recognizing him. I can download IDs and some vid shots to you from here, if you wish.”

She allowed as how that would be useful, and the task was done.

Miles hesitated, mulling over the even more disturbing dilemma of Dubauer. There was not, to be sure, any obvious connection between the two problems. Yet. Perhaps the interrogation of Firka would reveal one?

Leaving Venn's myrmidon to get on with it, Miles cut the com. He leaned back in his station chair for a moment, then brought up the vids of Firka and reran them a couple of times.

“So,” he said after a time. “How the devil did he keep those long, floppy feet out of the blood puddles?”

Roic stared over his shoulder. “Floater?” he finally said. “He'd have to be damned near double-jointed to fold those legs up in one, though.”

“He looks damned near double-jointed.” But if Firka's toes were as long and prehensile as his fingers suggested, might he have been able to manipulate the joystick controls, designed for quaddie lower hands, with his feet? In this new scenario, Miles needn't picture the person in the floater horsing a heavy body around, merely emptying his gurgling liter jugs overboard and supplying some artistic smears with a suitable rag.

After a few cross-eyed moments trying to imagine this, Miles dumped Firka's vid shots into an image manipulator and installed the fellow in a floater. The supposed amphibian didn't quite have to be double-jointed or break his legs to fit in. Assuming his lower body was rather more flexible than Miles's or Roic's, it folded pretty neatly. It looked a bit painful, but possible.

Miles stared harder at the image above the vid plate.

The first question one addressed in describing a person on Graf Station wasn't “man or woman”? It was “quaddie or downsider”? The very first cut, by which one discarded half or more of the possibilities from further consideration.

He pictured a blond quaddie in a dark jacket, speeding up a corridor in a floater. He pictured that quaddie's belated pursuers, whizzing past a shaven-headed downsider in light garb, walking the other way. That was all it would take, in a sufficiently harried moment. Step out of the floater, turn one's jacket inside out, stuff the wig in a pocket, leave the machine with a couple of others sitting waiting, stroll away . . . It would be much harder to work it the other way around, of course, for a quaddie to impersonate a downsider.

He stared at Firka's hollow, dark-ringed eyes. He pulled up a suitable mop of blond ringlets from the imager files and applied it to Firka's unhandsome head.

A fair approximation of the dark-eyed barrel-chested quaddie with the rivet gun? Glimpsed for a fraction of a second, at fifteen meters range, and truth to tell most of Miles's attention had been on the spark-spitting, chattering, hot-brass-chucking object in his hands . . . had those hands been webbed?

Fortunately, he could draw upon a second opinion. He called up Bel Thorne's home code from the comconsole.

Unsurprisingly, at this ungodly hour, the visual didn't come on when Nicol's sleepy voice answered. “Hello?”

“Nicol? Miles Vorkosigan here. Sorry to drag you out of your sleep sack. I need to talk to your housemate. Boot it out and make it come to the vid. Bel's had more sleep than I have, by now.”

The visual came up. Nicol righted herself and drew a fluffy lace garment closer about her with a lower hand; this section of the apartment she shared with Bel was evidently on the free fall side. It was too dim to make out much beyond her floating form. She rubbed her eyes. “What? Isn't Bel with you?”

Miles's stomach went into free fall, for all that the Kestrel 's grav was in good working order. “No . . . Bel left over six hours ago.”

Her frown sharpened. The sleep drained from her face, to be replaced by alarm. “But Bel didn't come home last night!”

Graf Station Security Post One, housing most of the security police administrative offices including Chief Venn's, lay entirely on the free fall side of the station. Miles and Roic, trailed by a flustered quaddie guard from the Kestrel 's lock, floated into the post's radially arranged reception space, from which tubular corridors led off at odd angles. The place was still night-quiet, although shift change was surely due soon.

Nicol had beaten Miles and Roic there, but not by much. She was still awaiting the arrival of Chief Venn under the concerned eye of a uniformed quaddie whom Miles took to be the equivalent of a night desk sergeant. The quaddie officer's wariness increased when they entered, and one lower hand moved unobtrusively to touch a pad on his console; as if casually, and very promptly, another armed quaddie officer drifted down from one of the corridors to join his comrade.

Nicol wore a plain blue T-shirt and shorts, hastily donned with no artistic touches. Her face was pale with worry. Her lower hands clenched each other. She returned a short grateful nod to Miles's under-voiced greeting.

Chief Venn arrived at last and gave Miles a look unloving but resigned. He had apparently slept, if not enough, and had pessimistically dressed for the day; no secret hope of getting back into the sleep sack showed in his neat attire. He waved off the armed guard and gruffly invited the Lord Auditor and company to follow him to his office. The third-shift supervisor Miles had spoken with a while ago—might as well start calling it last night —brought coffee bulbs along with her end-of-shift report. Meticulously, she handed the bulbs out to the downsiders, instead of launching them through the air and expecting them to be caught the way she served her crew chief and Nicol. Miles turned the bulb's thermal control to the limit of the red zone and sucked the hot bitter brew with gratitude, as did Roic.

“This panic may be premature,” Venn began after his own first swallow. “Portmaster Thorne's nonappearance may have some very simple explanation.”

And what were the top three complicated explanations in Venn's mind right now? The quaddie wasn't sharing, but then, neither was Miles. Bel had been missing for over six hours, ever since it had dismissed its quaddie guard at a bubble-car stop near its home. By now this panic might just as easily be posthumous, but Miles didn't care to say so aloud in front of Nicol. “I am extremely concerned.”

“Thorne could be asleep somewhere else.” Venn glanced somewhat enigmatically at Nicol. “Have you checked with likely friends?”

“The portmaster stated explicitly that it was heading home to Nicol to rest, when it left the Kestrel about midnight,” said Miles. “A well-earned rest by that time, I might add. Your own guards should be able to confirm the exact time of Thorne's departure from my ship.”

“We will, of course, provide you with another liaison officer to assist you in your inquiries, Lord Vorkosigan.” Venn's voice was a little distant; buying time to think, was how Miles read him. He might be playing deliberately obtuse as well. Miles did not mistake him for actually obtuse, not when he'd cut his sleep shift short and come in for this within little more than minutes.

“I don't want another. I want Thorne. You mislay too damned many downsiders around here. It's beginning to seem bloody careless.” Miles took a deep breath. “It has to have crossed your mind by now, as it has mine, that there were three persons in the line of fire in the hostel lobby yesterday afternoon. We all assumed that I was the obvious target. What if it was something less obvious? What if it was Thorne?”

Teris Three made a stemming motion at him with an upper hand, and interjected, “Speaking of that, the trace on that hot riveter came in a few hours ago.”