Lois Bujold - Memory

"The worm plague has to have been the most disgusting in recent history," Miles agreed. "But it wasn't very lethal, as plagues go. Let me look. Was it on the Weapons Room listing?"

"Oh, yes, right where it should be. They think."

"So it's got to be a weapon. Maybe." Miles marked his place and re-filed the poisons list he'd been examining on the Evidence Rooms' library comconsole, and pulled up that of the weapons section instead. The "Komarran virus" had a code classification that blocked access to its description and history to any but men of the very highest security clearances. ImpSec HQ was crammed with such men. Miles smiled slightly, and overrode the lockout with his Auditor's seal.

He hadn't read more than the first three lines before he began to laugh, very softly. He would swear, but he couldn't think of any invective foul enough.

"What?" snapped Ivan, craning around to peer over Miles's shoulder.

"Not a virus, Ivan. Somebody in Classification needs a lecture from Dr. Weddell. It's a bioengineered apoptotic prokaryote. A little bug that eats things, specifically, neurochip proteins. The prokaryote, Illyan's prokaryote. It's no danger to you at all, unless you've acquired a neurochip I don't know about. Oh, God. This is where it came from … or rather, this is where it came from last." He settled in and began to read; Ivan, hanging over the back of his station chair, knocked his hand aside when he tried to advance screens before Ivan had finished too.

This was it, hidden in plain sight, buried in an inventory of tens of thousands of other items. It had been sitting here demurely in Bin Twenty-Seven, Shelf Nine, collecting dust for nearly five years, ever since the day it was delivered to the ImpSec Evidence Room by an officer from Komarran Affairs. It had been picked up at that time by Imperial Counter-intelligence right here in Vorbarr Sultana, on an arrest-sweep of Komarran terrorist cells associated with . . . the late Ser Galen, killed on Earth while trying to launch his last complicated, dramatic, and futile plot for bringing down the Barrayaran Imperium and freeing Komarr. The plot for which Galen had created Miles's clone-brother Mark.

"Oh, hell," said Ivan. "Has your damned clone got something to do with this?"

"Brother," corrected Miles, swallowing the same fear. "I don't see how. He's been on Beta Colony for almost the last half-year. My Betan grandmother can confirm it."

"If you want confirmation," said Ivan, "then you must be thinking what I'm thinking. Could he have been pretending to be you again?"

"Not without going on one hell of a crash diet."

Ivan grunted half-assent. "Could be done, with the right drugs."

"I don't think so. I promise you, the last thing Mark wants is to be me, ever again. I'll have his whereabouts formally checked anyway, just to stop everyone from galloping down a blind alley. The ImpSec office at the embassy on Beta Colony keeps him in their sights just because Mark is … who he is."

Miles read on. The Jacksonian connection was quite real too. The chip-eating prokaryote had indeed been made to order there for the Komarran terrorists, by one of the Houses Minor more usually known for its tailored drugs. And Illyan had been its intended target from the beginning; the disruption of ImpSec had been timed to coincide with the assassination of then-Prime Minister Count Aral Vorkosigan. The ImpSec investigation of five years ago had traced the prokaryote right back to its building of origin, and the Komarran payment to the Jacksonian biochem team's bank accounts. The new search, just launched, must sooner or later turn up the exact same data: later, if they had to totally reconstruct the first tedious investigation; sooner, if the organization overcame its collective amnesia and spotted the data in its own files. Three to eight weeks, depending, Miles estimated.

"This explains . . . the frame, at least," Miles muttered.

Ivan cocked an eyebrow. "How so?"

"I came at it in the wrong order. My ersatz visit here was meant to be found, yes, inevitably, but it wasn't meant to be found first. This data . . ."—Miles waved at the comconsole—"when it finally arrived here, would have focused attention on the Evidence Rooms. Instead of starting with the comconsole records, and then checking the inventory, the investigators would have begun with Bin Twenty-Seven and then checked the security records of people going in and out. Where they would have been quite pleased with themselves for finding me, a recently cashiered officer with no business here. Gone at that way, it would have been a much more convincing frame."

Miles sat for a moment, ordering his thoughts. Then he called ImpSec Forensics and requisitioned the senior officer on call. After that he put through a call to Dr. Vaughn Weddell's home console.

The machine blocked him, and tried to take a message; Weddell didn't care to have his beauty sleep interrupted, it appeared. He tried once more, with the same results, waited a full three seconds to recover his patience, and then called the Imperial Guards. Miles had the duty officer dispatch a couple of their largest uniformed men to Weddell's flat with instructions to wake him up by whatever means were required, and bring him at once to ImpSec HQ, carried bodily if necessary.

It still seemed an eternity—almost dawn outside, Miles gauged—before Miles had his team assembled, and marched them all before him into Weapons Room IV. Weddell was still whining under his breath about being awakened so rudely in the middle of the night; as long as he prudently kept his complaints sotto voce, Miles chose to ignore them. Neither he nor Ivan had gotten any sleep at all, not that Miles was the least tired right now.

The forensics man was given first crack at the exterior of the little sealed biocontainer.

"It's been moved a few times," he reported. "Some fingerprints, some smudges, none very fresh . . ." He duly recorded them by laser-scan, for cross-match with Evidence Rooms personnel, and the rest of the population of the Empire if necessary. "The screamer-signal circuit to detect the container's removal from the Evidence Rooms has never been activated. No hairs or fibers. I wouldn't expect much dust, given the air filters here. That's all I can say. It's all yours, gentlemen."

He stepped back; Ivan stepped forward, drew the box from its shelf, and positioned it on the lighted examination board brought in for the purpose. The box was sealed with the simplest of numeric code-locks, designed more to keep it from popping open if accidentally dropped than for any real security—for one thing, the access-code was listed right in the inventory description. Ivan referred to the flimsy, and tapped in the sequence. The little lid swung up.

"Right," drawled Ivan, peering inside, and then at his inventory-flimsy again. The box was lined with a shock-proof gel-pack, scored by six parallel slots. Three slots were filled with tiny brown capsules, small enough for a child to swallow. The other three were empty. "Six sealed vector-delivery units—that's what they're called on here, anyway—to start with, one taken out for examination five years ago and listed as destroyed. Five supposedly left—only now there are three." He opened his hand with a flourish; the forensics man again stepped forward, and bent over the box to begin checking the seal from the inside.

Right, right! Miles howled inwardly, with a small mental reservation for that one capsule removed five years back. That was going to complicate things, but perhaps the laboratory records would help, once retrieved.

"You mean," moaned Weddell, "I racked my brains for a week reassembling that damned crap, and a whole undamaged sample was sitting downstairs all that time?"