bodies are biochemically destroyed immediately after the theft? But not quite enough cadavers, eh Helda, before it was time for the census courier to leave for Athos? Hence the cow ovaries, thrown in out of desperation to make up the numbers, and the short-changed boxes, and the empty box.' Ethan paused, panting.
'You're insane,' choked Helda. Her face had gone from white to red to white again. Millisor's stunned eyes devoured her. Quinn looked like a woman taken by a beatific vision. The Security's man's fingers were locked on his report panel in a sort of overloaded paralysis.
'Not as crazy as you are,' said Ethan. 'What did you hope to accomplish?'
'Redundant question,' snapped Millisor. 'We know what she accomplished. Forget the window-dressing, and find out where—' A sharp gesture from Quinn's stunner reminded him that his status had been reversed from interrogator to prisoner.
'You're all coming to Quarantine—'
'It's over, Helda,' said Ethan. 'I bet if I look around your Assimilation Station I'll even find a shrink-wrap sealer.'
'Oh, yes,' chorused Teki helpfully. 'We use it to seal suspected contaminants, to store them for later analysis. It's under the wet bench. I sealed my shoes up once, on a slow day. I tried to seal water, to make balloons to drop down the lift tubes, but it didn't work—'
'Shut up, Teki!' snarled Helda desperately.
'It's not as bad as what Vernon did with the white mice—'
'Stop,' growled Millisor in exasperation out of the corner of his mouth. Teki subsided and sat blinking.
Ethan spread his hands and asked Helda more gently and urgently, 'Why? I have to understand.'
The concentrated venom in her posture broke into speech almost despite her will. 'Why? You even need to ask why? It was to cut you motherless unnatural bastards off, that's why. I meant to get the next shipment too, if there was one, and the next, and the next, until—' She was choking now. On her rage? No, Ethan realized, his buoyant intellectual triumph turning sickly-sour in his stomach; on tears. 'Until I'd hooked Simmi out of there, and he came to his senses and came home and got a real woman, I swear I wouldn't criticize a hair on her head this time, I'll never be allowed to even see my own grandchildren on that dreadful dirty planet…' She turned her back and stood stiff-legged, defiant but for her hands over her red, smeared face, ugly and helpless and snorting.
Ethan thought he understood how a propaganda-stuffed young soldier must feel the first time in combat, stumbling by some sudden chance over his enemy's human face. He had gloried for a red moment in his power to break her. Now he stood foolishly with the pieces in his hands. Not at all heroic.
'Ye gods,' muttered the Security man, in awe touched with glee, 'I have to arrest an eco-cop… ?'
Teki giggled. The other ecotech, clearly taken aback by Helda's confession, looked as though he didn't know whether to argue or try to become invisible.
'But what did you do with the other?' Millisor rocked forward, teeth clenched.
'Other what?' Helda sniffed.
'The frozen human ovarian cultures you took out of the boxes for Athos, ' Millisor ground out, carefully, like a man speaking in words of one syllable to a mutant.
'Oh. I threw them out.'
The veins stood out on the Cetagandan's forehead. Ethan could name each one. Millisor seemed to be having trouble breathing. 'Idiot bitch,' he panted. 'Idiot bitch, do you know what you've done… ?'
Quinn's laughter rang over them all like morning bells. 'Admiral Naismith will love it!'
The ghem-colonel's steel self-control broke at last. 'Idiot bitch!' he screamed, and launched himself toward Helda, clawed hands outstretched. Both Quinn's and the Security man's stunner beams caught him in a neat cross- fire, and he crashed as trees do.
Rau just stood shaking his head and muttering over and over, 'Shit. Shit. Shit…'
'Attempted assault,' the Security man paused to croon over his report panel, 'on a Biocontrol Warden carrying out her duties…'
Rau sidled toward the door.
'Don't forget breaking Detention,' Quinn added helpfully. 'This here's the fellow,' she gestured at Rau, 'that you were all looking for who evaporated out of C-9 the other day. And I bet if you search this room you'll find all sorts of military goodies that Kline Station Customs never authorized.'
'Quarantine first,' said the other ecotech, after a nervous glance at his still emotionally incapacitated superior.
'But surely Ambassador Urquhart will wish to lay charges for the admitted theft and destruction of Athosian property,' suggested Quinn. 'Who's going to arrest whom?'
'We're all gonna go to Quarantine, where I can make you all hold still till I get to the bottom of this,' said the Security man firmly. 'People who disappear out of C-9 will find that slipping Quarantine is quite another matter.'
'Too true,' murmured Quinn.
Rau's lip rippled silently as another pair of heavily-armed Security officers appeared in the doorway, cutting off retreat. The room seemed suddenly crowded. Ethan hadn't seen the burly Security man call for reinforcements, but it must have been some time earlier. His estimation of the slow-seeming man went up a notch.
'Yes, sir?' said one of the new officers.
'Took you long enough,' said the Security man. 'Search that one,' he pointed to Rau, 'and then you can help us run 'em all to Quarantine. These three are accused of vectoring communicable disease. That one's been fingered as the jail break from C-9. This one's accused of theft by that one, who appears to be wearing a Station code-uniform to which he is not entitled, and who also claims that one over there was kidnapped. I'll have a printout as long as I am tall of charges for the one out cold on the floor when he wakes up. Those three are all gonna need first aid—'
Ethan, reminded, slipped up to Teki and pressed the hypospray of fast-penta antagonist into his arm. He felt almost sorry for the young man as his foolish grin was rapidly replaced by the expression of a man with a terminal hangover. The Security team in the meanwhile were shaking all sorts of glittering mysterious objects out of the unresisting Rau.
'—and the pretty lady in the grey outfit who seems to know so much about everybody else's business I'm holding as a material witness,' the Security man concluded. 'Ah—where is she?'
CHAPTER TWELVE
In Quarantine, Rau followed the supine form of his still-stunned superior off for whatever short-arm inspection Biocontrol demanded without a word. He had said nothing, in fact, since they'd left the hostel room under heavy guard, but had remained close to Millisor with a sort of grim loyalty, like a dog refusing to leave its encoffined master.
Ethan wasn't sure what tests were required for detecting Alpha-S-D-plasmid-2—or its mythical mutation- 3—but from the dour look on Rau's face he suspected they were rather invasive. He'd have felt better if Rau had shown the least sign of possessing a sense of humor. The light in Rau's eyes as he glanced back one last time at Ethan was like reflections off knife blades.
Ethan was in turn carried off to an office for a long, long talk with Security in the persons of the burly arresting officer and a female officer who was apparently his administrative superior. Partway through they were joined by a third Security man, introduced as Captain Arata, a neurasthenic Eurasian type with lank black hair, pale skin, and eyes like needles, who said little and listened much.
Ethan's first impulse to tell all and throw himself upon their mercy was blunted almost at once by the problem of Okita. He managed not to mention Okita. Cetaganda's psionics breakthrough was modified, under the wilting effect of those three pairs of Stationer eyes, to the vaguer news that 'a culture in Athos's ovarian shipment had been doctored on Jackson's Whole with some altered genetic material stolen from Cetaganda.' Ethan avoided touching on Cee altogether. It would have made things so complicated….
'Then,' said the Security woman, 'Ecotech Helda actually did Athos a favor, albeit unintentionally. She saved your gene pool from contamination, in fact.'
