Diplomatic Immunity

walls, the insides of their respective storage lockers. The sixth returned a lighter image, but more puzzling, of a curving wall. It remained as static as the vistas from the suits in storage.

Miles pinged the suit for full telemetry download. The suit was powered up but quiescent. The medical sensors were basic, just heart rate and respiration—and turned off. The life-support readouts claimed the rebreather was fully functional, the interior humidity and temperature were exactly on-spec, but the system appeared to be supporting no load.

“It can't be very far away,” Miles said over his shoulder to his hovering audience. “There's zero time lag in my com linkup.”

“That's a relief,” sighed Greenlaw.

“Is it?” muttered Leutwyn. “Who for?”

Miles stretched shoulders aching with tension, and bent again to the displays. The powered suit had to have an exterior control override somewhere; it was a common safety feature on these civilian models, in case its occupant should suddenly become injured, ill, or incapacitated . . . ah. There.

“What are you doing, m'lord?” asked Roic uneasily.

“I believe I can take control of the suit via the emergency overrides, and bring it back aboard.”

“Wit' t' ba inside? Is that a good idea?”

“We'll know in a moment.”

He gripped the joysticks, slippery under his gloves, gained control of the suit's jets, and tried a gentle puff. The suit slowly began to move, scraping along the wall and then turning away. The puzzling view resolved itself—he was looking at the outside of the Idris itself. The suit had been hidden, tucked in the angle between two nacelles. No one inside the suit fought back at this hijacking. A new and extremely disturbing thought crept up on Miles.

Carefully, Miles brought the suit back around the outside of the ship to the nearest lock to Engineering, on the outboard side of one of the Necklin rod nacelles, the same lock from which it had exited. Opened the lock, brought the suit inside. Its servos kept it upright. The light reflected from its faceplate, concealing whatever was within. Miles did not open the interior lock door.

“Now what?” he said to the room at large.

Venn glanced at Roic. “Your armsman and I have stunners, I believe. If you control the suit, you control the prisoner's movements. Bring it in, and we'll arrest the bastard.”

“The suit has manual capacities, too. Anyone in it who was . . . alive and conscious should have been able to fight me.” Miles cleared a throat thick with worry. “I was just wondering if Brun's searchers checked inside these suits when they were looking for Solian, that first day he went missing. And, um . . . what he's like—what condition his body might be in by now.”

Roic made a small noise, and emitted an undervoiced, plaintive protest of M'lord! Miles wasn't sure of the exact interpretation, but he thought it might have something to do with Roic wanting to keep his last meal in his stomach, and not all over the inside of his helmet.

After a brief, fraught pause, Venn said, “Then we'd better go have a look. Sealer, Adjudicator—wait here.”

The two senior officials didn't argue.

“Would you like to stay with 'em, m'lord?” Roic suggested tentatively.

“We've all been looking for that poor bastard for weeks,” Miles replied firmly. “If this is him, I want to be the first to know.” He did allow Roic and Venn to precede him from engineering through the locks into the Necklin field generator nacelle, though.

At the lock, Venn drew his stunner and took position. Roic peered through the port on the airlock's inner door. Then his hand swept down to the lock control, the door slid open, and he strode in. He reappeared a moment later, half-dragging the heavy toppling work suit. He laid it faceup on the corridor floor.

Miles ventured closer and stared down at the faceplate.

The suit was empty.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

“Don't open it!” cried Venn in alarm.

“Wasn't planning to,” Miles replied mildly. Not for any money.

Venn floated closer, stared down over Miles's shoulder, and swore. “The bastard's got away already! But to the station, or to a ship?” He edged back, tucked his stunner away in a pocket of his green suit, and began to gabble into his helmet com, alerting both Station Security and the quaddie militia to pursue, seize, and search anything—ship, pod, or shuttle—that had so much as shifted its parking zone off the side of the station in the past three hours.

Miles envisioned the escape. Might the ba have ridden the repairs suit back aboard the station before Greenlaw had called down the quarantine? Yes, maybe. The time window was narrow, but possible. But in that case, how had it returned the suit to the hiding place outside the Idris ? It would make more sense for the ba to have been picked up by a personnel pod—plenty enough of them zipping around out there at all hours—and have prodded the suit back to its concealment with a tractor beam, or had it towed there by someone in another powered suit and tucked out of sight.

But the Idris , like all the other Barrayaran and Komarran ships, was under surveillance by the quaddie militia. How cursory was that outside guard? Surely not that inattentive. Yet a person, a tall person, sitting in that engineering control booth manipulating the joysticks, might well have walked the suit out this airlock and quickly around the nacelle, popping it away out of sight deftly enough to evade notice by the militia guardians. Then risen from the station chair, and . . . ?

Miles's palms itched, maddeningly, inside his gloves, and he rubbed them together in a futile attempt to gain relief. He'd have traded blood for the chance to rub his nose. “Roic,” he said slowly. “Do you remember what this,” he prodded the repair suit with his toe, “had in its hand when it went out the airlock?”

“Um . . . nothing, m'lord.” Roic twisted slightly and shot Miles a puzzled look, through his faceplate.

“That's what I thought.” Right.

If Miles was guessing correctly, the ba had turned aside from the imminent murder of Gupta to seize the chance of using Bel to get back aboard the Idris and do—what?—with its cargo. Destroy it? It would surely not have taken the ba this long to inoculate the replicators with some suitable poison. It might even have been able to do them twenty at a time, introducing the contaminant into the support system of each rack. Or—even more simply, if all it had wanted was to kill its charges—it might have just turned off all the support systems, a work of mere minutes. But taking and marking individual cell samples for freezing, yes, that could well have taken all night, and all day too. If the ba had risked everything to do that, would it then leave the ship without its freezer case firmly in hand?

“The ba's had over two hours to effect an escape. Surely it wouldn't linger . . .” muttered Miles. But his voice lacked conviction. Roic, at least, caught the quaver at once; his helmet turned toward Miles, and he frowned.

They needed to count pressure suits, and check every lock to see if any of the vid monitors had been manually disabled. No, too slow—that would be a fine evidence-collecting task to delegate if one had the manpower, but Miles felt painfully bereft of minions just now. And in any case, so what if another suit was found to be gone? Pursuing loose suits was a job that the quaddies around the station were already turning to, by Venn's order. But if no other suit was gone . . .

And Miles himself had just turned the Idris into a trap.

He gulped. “I was about to say, we need to count suits, but I've a better idea. I believe we should return to Nav and Com, and shut the ship down in sections from there. Collect all the weapons at our disposal, and do a systematic search.”

Venn jerked around in his float chair. “What, do you think this Cetagandan agent could still be aboard?”

“M'lord,” said Roic in an uncharacteristically sharp voice, “what t'matter with your