Lois Bujold - Diplomatic Immunity

Up ahead in the dimness, the first airseal door across the corridor hissed quietly aside, revealing the cross-corridor to the other nacelles beyond. On the far side, the next door began to slide.

Roic started trotting. His steps were unavoidably heavy. Miles half-jogged behind. He tried to think how recently he had used his seizure-stimulator, how much at risk he was right now for falling down in a fit from a combination of bad brain chemistry and terror. Middling risky, he decided. No automatic weapons for him this trip anyway. No weapons at all, but for his wits. They seemed a meager arsenal, just at the moment.

The second pair of doors opened for them. Then the third. Miles prayed they were not walking into another clever trap. But he didn't think the ba would have any way of tapping, or even guessing, this oblique line of communication. Roic paused briefly, stepping behind the last door edge, and peered ahead. The door to Nav and Com was shut. He gave a short nod and continued forward, Miles in his shadow. As they drew closer, Miles could see that the control panel to the left of the door had been burned out by some cutting tool, cousin, no doubt, to the one Roic had used. The ba had gone shopping in Engineering, too. Miles pointed at it; Roic's face lightened, and a corner of his mouth turned up. Someone hadn't forgotten to lock the door behind them when they'd last left after all, it appeared.

Roic pointed to himself, to the door; Miles shook his head and motioned him to bend closer. They touched helmets.

“Me first. Gotta grab that case before the ba can react. 'Sides, I need you to pull back the door.”

Roic looked around, inhaled, and nodded.

Miles motioned him back down to touch helmets one more time. “And, Roic? I'm glad I didn't bring Jankowski.”

Roic smiled. Miles stepped aside.

Now. Delay was no one's friend.

Roic bent, splayed his gloved hands across the door, pressed, and pulled. The servos in his suit whined at the load. The door creaked unwillingly aside.

Miles slipped through. He didn't look back, or up. His world had narrowed to one goal, one object. The freezer case—there, still on the floor beside the absent communication officer's station chair. He pounced, grabbed, lifted it up, clutched it to his chest like a shield, like the hope of his heart.

The ba was turning, yelling, lips drawn back, eyes wide, its hand snaking for a pocket. Miles's gloved fingers felt for the catches. If locked, toss the case toward the ba. If unlocked . . .

The case snapped open. Miles yanked it wide, shook it hard, swung it.

A silver cascade, the better part of a thousand tiny tissue-sampling cryo-storage needles, arced out of the case and bounced randomly across the deck. Some shattered as they struck, making tiny crystalline singing noises like dying insects. Some spun. Some skittered, disappearing behind station chairs and into crevices. Miles grinned fiercely.

The yell became a scream; the ba's hands shot out toward Miles as if in supplication, in denial, in despair. The Cetagandan began to stumble toward him, gray face working in shock and disbelief.

Roic's power-suited hands locked down over the ba's wrists and hoisted. Wrist bones crackled and popped; blood spurted between the tightening gloved fingers. The ba's body convulsed as it was lifted up. Wild eyes rolled back. The scream transmuted into a weird wail, trailing away. Sandal-clad feet kicked and drummed uselessly at the heavy shin plating of Roic's work suit; toenails split and bled, without effect. Roic stood stolidly, hands up and apart, racking the ba helplessly in the air.

Miles let the freezer case fall from his fingers. It hit the deck with a thump. With a whispered word, he called back the outgoing audio in his com link. “We've taken the ba prisoner. Send relief troops. In biotainer suits. They won't need their guns now. I'm afraid the ship's an unholy mess.”

His knees were buckling. He sank to the deck himself, giggling uncontrollably. Corbeau was rising from his pilot's chair; Miles motioned him away with an urgent gesture. “Stay back, Dmitri! I'm about to . . .”

He wrenched his faceplate open in time. Barely. The vomiting and spasms that wrung his stomach this time were much worse. It's over. Can I please die now?

Except that it wasn't over, not nearly. Greenlaw had played for fifty thousand lives. Now it was Miles's turn to play for fifty million.

Miles arrived back in the Idris 's infirmary feet first. He was carried by two of the men from Vorpatril's strike force, which had been hastily converted to, mostly, a medical relief team, and as such cleared by the quaddies. His porters almost fell down the unsightly hole Roic had left in the floor. Miles seized back personal control of his locomotion long enough to stand up, under his own power, and lean rather unsteadily against the wall by the door to the bio-isolation ward. Roic followed, carefully holding the ba's remote trigger in a biotainer bag. Corbeau, stiff-faced and pale, brought up the rear dressed in a loose medical tunic and drawstring pants, and shepherded by a medtech with the ba's hypospray in another biotainer sack.

Captain Clogston came out through the buzzing blue barriers and looked over his new influx of patients and assistants. “Right,” he announced, glowering at the gap in the deck. “This ship is so damned befouled, I'm declaring the whole thing a Level Three Biocontamination Zone. So we may as well spread out and get comfortable, boys.”

The techs made a human chain to pass the analyzing equipment quickly to the outer chamber. Miles snared the chance for a few brief, urgent words with the two men with medical markings on their suits who stood apart from the rest—the Prince Xav 's military interrogation officers. Not really in disguise, merely discreet—and, Miles had to allow, they were medically trained.

The second ward was declared a temporary holding cell for their prisoner, the ba, who followed in the procession, bound to a float pallet. Miles scowled as the pallet drifted past, towed on its control lead by a watchful, muscular sergeant. The ba was strapped down tightly, but its head and eyes rolled oddly, and its saliva-flecked lips writhed.

Above almost anything else, it was essential to keep the ba in Barrayaran hands. Finding where the ba had hidden its filthy bio-bomb on Graf Station was the first priority. The haut race had some genetically engineered immunity to the most common interrogation drugs and their derivatives; if fast-penta didn't work on this one, it would give the quaddies very little in the way of interrogation procedures to fall back upon that would pass Adjudicator Leutwyn's approval. In this emergency, military rules seemed more appropriate than civilian ones. In other words, if they'll just leave us alone we'll pull out the ba's fingernails for them.

Miles caught Clogston by the elbow. “How is Bel Thorne doing?” he demanded.

The fleet surgeon shook his head. “Not well, my Lord Auditor. We thought at first the herm was improving, as the filters cut in—it seemed to return to consciousness. But then it became restless. Moaning and trying to talk. Out of its head, I think. It keeps crying for Admiral Vorpatril.”

Vorpatril? Why? Wait– “Did Bel say Vorpatril?” Miles asked sharply. “Or just, the Admiral ?”

Clogston shrugged. “Vorpatril's the only admiral around right now, although I suppose the portmaster could be hallucinating altogether. I hate to sedate anyone so physiologically distressed, especially when they've just fought their way out of a drug fog. But if that herm doesn't calm down, we'll have to.”

Miles frowned and hurried into the isolation ward. Clogston followed. Miles pulled off his helmet, fished his wrist com back out of it, and clutched the vital link safely in his hand. A tech was making up the hastily cleared second bunk, readying it for the infected Lord Auditor, presumably.