Diplomatic Immunity

Gupta blinked at him. “Oh! That's where I saw you before. Sorry, no.” His brow corrugated. “So what were you doing there, then? You're not one of the passengers. Are you another Stationer squatter like that officious bloody Betan?”

“No. My name is”—he made an instant, almost subliminal decision to drop all the honorifics—”Miles. I was sent out to look after Barrayaran concerns when the quaddies impounded the Komarran fleet.”

“Oh.” Gupta grew uninterested.

What the devil was keeping that fast-penta? Miles softened his voice. “So what happened to your friends, Guppy?”

That fetched the amphibian's attention again. “Double-crossed. Subjected, injected, infected . . . rejected. We were all taken in. Damned Cetagandan bastard. That wasn't the Deal.”

Something inside Miles went on overdrive. Here's the connection, finally. His smile grew charming, sympathetic, and his voice softened further. “Tell me about the Cetagandan bastard, Guppy.”

The hovering mob of quaddie listeners had stopped rustling, even breathing more quietly. Roic had drawn back to a shadowed spot opposite Miles. Gupta glanced around at the Graf Stationers, and at Miles and himself, the only legged persons now in view in the center of the circle. “What's the use?” The tone was not a wail of despair, but a bitter query.

“I am Barrayaran. I have a special stake in Cetagandan bastards. The Cetagandan ghem-lords left five million of my grandfather's generation dead behind them, when they finally gave up and pulled out of Barrayar. I still have his bag of ghem-scalps. For certain kinds of Cetagandans, I might know a use or two you'd find interesting.”

The prisoner's wandering gaze snapped to his face and locked there. For the first time, he'd won Gupta's total attention. For the first time, he'd hinted he might have something that Guppy really wanted. Wanted? Burned for, lusted for, desired with mad obsessive hunger. His glassy eyes were ravenous for . . . maybe revenge, maybe justice—in any case, blood. But the frog prince clearly lacked personal expertise in retribution. The quaddies didn't deal in blood. Barrayarans . . . had a more sanguinary reputation. Which, for the first time this mission, might actually prove some use.

Gupta took a long breath. “I don't know what kind this one was. Is. He was like nothing I'd ever met before. Cetagandan bastard. He melted us.”

“Tell me,” Miles breathed, “everything. Why you?”

“He came to us . . . through our usual cargo agents. We thought it would be all right. We had a ship. Gras-Grace and Firka and Hewlet and me had this ship. Hewlet was our pilot, but Gras-Grace was the brains. Me, I had a knack for fixing things. Firka kept the books, and fixed regs, and passports, and nosy officials. Gras-Grace and her three husbands, we called us. We were a collection of rejects, but maybe we added up to one real spouse for her, I don't know. One for all and all for one, because it was damn sure that a crew of refugee Jacksonians, without a House or a Baron, wasn't going to get a break from anyone else in the Nexus.”

Gupta was getting wound up in his story. Miles, listening with utmost care, prayed Venn would have the sense not to interrupt. Ten people hovered around them in this chamber, yet he and Gupta, mutually hypnotized by the increasing intensity of his confession, might almost be floating in a bubble of time and space altogether removed from this universe. “So where did you pick up this Cetagandan and his cargo, anyway?”

Gupta glanced up, startled. “You know about the cargo?”

“If it's the same one now aboard the Idris , yes, I've had a look. I found it rather disturbing.”

“What's he got in there, really? I only saw the outsides.”

“I'd rather not say, at this time. What did he,” Miles elected not to go into the confusions of ba gender just now, “tell you it was?”

“Gengineered mammals. Not that we asked questions. We got paid extra for not asking questions. That was the Deal, we thought.”

And if there was anything that the ethically elastic inhabitants of Jackson's Whole held nearly sacred, it was the Deal. “A good bargain, was it?”

“Looked like. Two or three more runs like that, we could have paid off the ship and owned it free and clear.”

Miles took leave to doubt that, if the crew was in debt for their jumpship to a typical Jacksonian financial House. But perhaps Guppy and his friends had been terminal optimists. Or terminally desperate .

“The gig looked easy enough. Just take a little mixed-freight run through the fringes of the Cetagandan Empire. We jumped in through the Hegen Hub, via Vervain, and skirted round to Rho Ceta. All those arrogant, suspicious bastard inspectors who boarded us at the jump points turned up nothing to hold against us, though they'd have liked to, because there wasn't anything aboard but what our filed manifest said. Gave old Firka a good chuckle. Till we were heading out for the last jumps, for Rho Ceta through those empty buffer systems just before the route splits to Komarr. We made one little mid-space rendezvous there that didn't appear on our flight plan.”

“What kind of ship did you rendezvous with? Jumpship, or just a local space crawler? Could you tell for sure, or was it disguised or camouflaged?”

“Jumpship. I don't know what else it might have really been. It looked like a Cetagandan government ship. It had lots of fancy markings, anyway. Not big, but fast—fresh and classy. The Cetagandan bastard moved his cargo all by himself, with float pallets and hand tractors, but he sure didn't waste any time. The moment the locks were closed, they went off.”

“Where? Could you tell?”

“Well, Hewlet said they had an odd trajectory. It was that uninhabited binary system a few jumps out from Rho Ceta, I don't know if you know it—”

Miles nodded in encouragement.

“They went inbound, deeper into the grav well. Maybe they were planning to swing around the suns and approach one of the jump points from a disguised trajectory, I don't know. That would make sense, given all the rest of it.”

“Just the one passenger?”

“Yeah.”

“Tell me more about him.”

“Not much to tell—then. He kept to himself, ate his own rations in his own cabin. He didn't talk to me at all. He had to talk to Firka, on account of Firka was fixing his manifest. By the time we reached the first Barrayaran jump point inspection, it had a whole new provenance. He was somebody else by then, too.”

“Ker Dubauer?”

Venn twitched at this first mention of the familiar name in his hearing, and opened his mouth and inhaled, but closed it again without diverting Guppy's flow. The unhappy amphibian was in full spate now, pouring out his troubles.

“Not yet, he wasn't. He musta become Dubauer during his layover on the Komarran transfer station, I figure. I didn't track him by his identity, anyway. He was too good for that. Fooled you Barrayarans, didn't he?”

Indeed . An apparent Cetagandan agent of the highest caliber had passed through Barrayar's key Nexus trade crossroad like so much smoke. ImpSec would have a seizure when this report arrived. “How did you follow him here, then?”

The first smile-like expression Miles had seen on the rubbery face ghosted across Gupta's lips. “I was ship's engineer. I tracked him by his cargo's mass. It was kind of distinctive, when I went to look, later.”

The ghastly smile faded into a black frown. “When we dumped him and his pallets off on the Komarran transfer station's loading bay, he seemed happy. Downright cordial. He went around to each of us for the first time, and gave us our no-problems bonuses personally. He shook Hewlet's and Firka's hands. He asked to see my webbing, so I spread my fingers for him, and he leaned over and gripped my arm and seemed real interested, and thanked me. He gave Gras-Grace a pat on her cheek, and smiled at her in this sappy way. He smirked as he touched her. Knowing . Since she was holding