Lois Bujold - Diplomatic Immunity

“I think we can take it from here, thanks,” Chief Venn assured him. He glanced without favor at Firka, wriggling on his pole. “Although I'll keep your offer in mind.”

“Do you know Portmaster Thorne?” Miles asked the Docks and Locks quaddie. “Do you work together?”

“Bel's one of our best supervisors,” the quaddie replied. “About the most sensible downsider we've ever gotten. We don't care to lose it, eh?” He gave Nicol a nod.

She ducked her head in mute gratitude.

The citizens' arrest was duly recorded. The quaddie patrollers who'd assembled looked cautiously over the long, squirming captive, and elected to take him pole and all, for the moment. The Docks and Locks crew, with justifiable self-satisfaction, also presented the duffel bag Firka had been carrying.

So here was Miles's most wanted suspect, if not presented on a platter, at least en brochette . Miles itched to tear that tape off his rubbery face and start squeezing.

Sealer Greenlaw arrived while this was going forth, accompanied by a new quaddie man, dark-haired and fit-looking though not especially young. He wore neat, subdued garb much like that of Boss Watts and Bel, but black instead of slate blue. She introduced him as Adjudicator Leutwyn.

“So,” said Leutwyn, staring curiously at the tape-secured suspect. “This is our one-man crime wave. Do I understand he, too, came in with the Barrayaran fleet?”

“No, Adjudicator,” said Miles. “He joined the Rudra here on Graf Station, at the last minute. Actually, he didn't sign aboard until after the ship had originally been due to leave. I'd very much like to know why. I strongly suspect him of synthesizing and planting the blood in the loading bay, of attempting to assassinate . . . someone, in the hostel lobby yesterday, and of attacking Garnet Five and Bel Thorne last night. Garnet Five, at least, had a fairly close look at him, and should be able to confirm that identification shortly. But by far the most urgent question is, what has happened to Portmaster Thorne? Hot pursuit of a kidnap victim in danger is sufficient pretext for nonvoluntary penta interrogations in most jurisdictions, surely.”

“Here as well,” the adjudicator admitted. “But a fast-penta examination is a delicate undertaking. I've found, in the half dozen I've monitored, that it's not nearly the magic wand most people think it is.”

Miles cleared his throat in fake diffidence. “I am tolerably familiar with the techniques, Adjudicator. I've conducted or sat in on over a hundred penta-assisted interrogations. And I've had it given to me twice.” No need to go into his idiosyncratic drug reaction that had made those two events such dizzyingly surreal and notably uninformative occasions.

“Oh,” said the quaddie adjudicator, sounding impressed despite himself, possibly especially with that last detail.

“I'm keenly aware of the need to keep the examination from being a mob scene, but you also need the right leading questions. I believe I have several.”

Venn put in, “We haven't even processed the suspect yet. Me, I want to see what he's got in that bag.”

The adjudicator nodded. “Yes, carry on, Chief Venn. I'd like further clarification, if I can get it.”

Mob scene or no, they all followed the quaddie patrollers who maneuvered the unfortunate Firka, pole and all, into a back chamber. A pair of the patrollers, after first clapping proper restraints around the bony wrists and ankles, recorded retinal patterns and took laser scans of the fingers and palms. Miles had one curiosity satisfied when they also pulled off the prisoner's soft boots; the finger-length toes, prehensile or nearly so, flexed and stretched, revealing wide rose-colored webs between. The quaddies scanned them, too—of course the quaddies would routinely scan all four extremities—then cut through the bulky lashings of tape.

Meanwhile another patroller, assisted by Venn, emptied and inventoried the duffel. They removed an assortment of clothes, mostly in dirty wads, to find a large new chef's knife, a stunner with a dubiously corroded discharged power pack but no stunner permit, a long crowbar, and a leather folder full of small tools. The folder also contained a receipt for an automated hot riveter from a Graf Station engineering supply store, complete with incriminating serial numbers. It was at this point that the adjudicator stopped looking so carefully reserved and started to look grim instead. When the patroller held up something that looked at first glance to be a scalp, but when shaken out proved a brassy short blond wig of no particular quality, the evidence seemed almost redundant.

Of more interest to Miles was not one, but a dozen sets of identifying documentation. Half of them proclaimed their bearers to be natives of Jackson's Whole; the others were from local space systems all adjoining the Hegen Hub, a wormhole-rich, planet-poor system that was one of the Barrayaran Empire's nearest and most strategically important Nexus neighbors. Jump routes from Barrayar to both Jackson's Whole and the Cetagandan Empire passed, via Komarr and the independent buffer polity of Pol, through the Hub.

Venn ran the handful of IDs through a holovid station affixed to the chamber's curving wall, his frown deepening. Miles and Roic both maneuvered to watch over his shoulder.

“So,” Venn growled after a bit, “which one really is the fellow?”

Two sets of documentation for “Firka” included physical vid shots of a man very different in appearance from their moaning captive: a big, bulky, but perfectly normal human male from either Jackson's Whole, no House affiliation, or Aslund, another Hegen Hub neighbor, depending on which—if either—ID was to be believed. Yet a third Firka ID, the one the present Firka seemed to have used to travel from Tau Ceti to Graf Station, portrayed the prisoner himself. Finally, his vid shots also matched up with the IDs of a person named Russo Gupta, also hailing from Jackson's Whole and lacking a proper House affiliation. That name, face, and associated retina scans came up again on a jumpship engineer's license that Miles recognized as originating from a certain Jacksonian organization of the sub-economy he had dealt with in his covert ops days. Judging from the long file of dates and customs stamps appended, it had passed as genuine elsewhere. And recently. A record of his travels, good!

Miles pointed. “That is almost certainly a forgery.”

The clustering quaddies looked genuinely shocked. Greenlaw said, “A false engineer's license? That would be unsafe .”

“If it's from the place I think, you could get a false neurosurgeon's license to go with it. Or any other job you cared to pretend to have, without going through all that tedious training and testing and certification.” Or, in this case, really have—now, there was a disturbing thought. Although on-the-job apprenticeship and self-teaching might cover some of the gaps over time . . . someone had been clever enough to modify that hot riveter, after all.

Under no circumstances could this pale, lanky mutie pass for a stout, pleasantly ugly, red-haired woman named either Grace Nevatta of Jackson's Whole—no House affiliation—or Louise Latour of Pol, depending on which set of IDs she favored. Nor for a short, head-wired, mahogany-skinned jumpship pilot named Hewlet.

“Who are all these people?” Venn muttered in aggravation.

“Why don't we just ask?” suggested Miles.

Firka—or Gupta—had finally stopped struggling and just lay in midair, nostrils flexing with his panting above the blue rectangle of tape over his mouth. The quaddie patroller finished recording his last scans and reached for a corner of the tape, then paused uncertainly. “I'm afraid this is going to hurt a bit.”