happen to defiant prisoners.
Well, it had all been very long ago. Metzov himself would probably be retiring in another five years, with his status as a double-twenty-years-man and a pension, to merge into the population of unpleasant old men. Not so much a problem to be solved as to be outlived, at least by Miles. His ultimate purpose at Lazkowski Base, Miles reminded himself, was to escape Lazkowski Base, silently as smoke. Metzov would be left behind in time.
In the next weeks Miles settled into a tolerable routine. For one thing, the grubs arrived. All five thousand of them. Miles's status rose on their shoulders, to that of almost-human. Lazkowski Base suffered its first real snow of the season, as the days shortened, plus a mild Wah-wah lasting half a day, both of which Miles managed to predict accurately in advance.
Even more happily, Miles was completely displaced as the most famous idiot on the island (an unwelcome notoriety earned by the scat-cat sinking) by a group of grubs who managed one night to set their barracks on fire while lighting fart-flares. Miles's strategic suggestion at the officers' fire-safety meeting next day that they tackle the problem with a logistical assault on the enemy's fuel supply, i.e., eliminate red-bean stew from the menu, was shot down with one icy glower from General Metzov. Though in the hallway later, an earnest captain from Ordnance stopped Miles to thank him for trying. So much for the glamour of the Imperial Service. Miles took to spending long hours alone in the weather office, studying chaos theory, his readouts, and the walls. Three months down, three to go. It was getting darker.
5
Miles was out of bed and half dressed before it penetrated his sleep-stunned brain that the galvanizing klaxon was not the wah-wah warning. He paused with a boot in his hand. Not fire or enemy attack, either. Not his department, then, whatever it was. The rhythmic blatting stopped. They were right, silence was golden.
He checked the glowing digital clock. It claimed midevening. He'd only been asleep about two hours, having fallen into bed exhausted after a long trip up-island in a snow storm to repair wind damage to Weather Station Eleven. The comm link by his bed was not blinking its red call light to inform him of any surprise duties he must carry out. He could go back to bed.
Silence was
He pulled on the second boot and stuck his head out his door. A couple of other officers had done the same, and were speculating to each other on the cause of the alarm. Lieutenant Bonn emerged from his quarters and strode down the hall, jerking on his parka. His face looked strained, half-worry, half-annoyance.
Miles grabbed his own parka and galloped after him. 'You need a hand, Lieutenant?'
Bonn glanced down at him, and pursed his lips. 'I might,' he flowed.
Miles fell in beside him, secretly pleased by Bonn's implicit judgment that he might in fact be useful. 'So what's up?'
'Some sort of accident in a toxic stores bunker. If it's the one I think, we could have a real problem.'
They exited the double-doored heat-retaining vestibule from the officers' quarters into a night gone crystal cold. Fine snow squeaked under Miles's boots and swept along the ground in a faint east wind. The brightest stars overhead held their own against the base's lights. The two men slid into Bonn's scat-cat, their breath smoking until the canopy-defrost cut in. Bonn headed west out of the base at high acceleration.
A few kilometers past the last practice fields, a row of turf-topped barrows hunched in the snow. A cluster of vehicles was parked at the end of one bunker—a couple of scat-cats, including the one belonging to the base fire marshall, and medical transport. Hand-lights moved among them. Bonn slewed in and pulled up, and popped his door. Miles followed him, crunching rapidly across the packed ice.
The surgeon was directing a pair of corpsmen, who were loading a foil-blanketed shape and a second coverall-clad soldier who shivered and coughed onto the med transport. 'All of you, put everything you're wearing into the destruct bin when you hit the door,' he called after them. 'Blankets, bedding, splints, everything. Full decontamination showers for you all before you even start to worry about that broken leg of his. The pain-killer will hold him through it, and if it doesn't, ignore him and keep scrubbing. I'll be right behind you.' The surgeon shuddered, turning away, whistling dismay through his teeth.
Bonn headed for the bunker door. 'Don't open that!' the surgeon and the fire marshall called together. 'There's nobody left inside,' the surgeon added. 'All evacuated now.'
'What exactly happened?' Bonn scrubbed with a gloved hand at the frosted window set in the door, in an effort to see inside.
'Couple of guys were moving stores, to make room for a new shipment coming in tomorrow,' the fire marshall, a lieutenant named Yaski, filled him in rapidly. 'They dumped their loader over, one got pinned underneath with a broken leg.'
'That . . . took ingenuity,' said Bonn, obviously picturing the mechanics of the loader in his mind.
'They had to have been horsing around,' said the surgeon impatiently. 'But that's not the worst of it. They took several barrels of fetaine over with them. And at least two broke open. The stuffs all over the place in there. We've sealed the bunker as best we could.
Clean-up,' the surgeon exhaled, 'is your problem. I'm gone.' He looked like he wanted to crawl out of his own skin, as well as his clothes. He waved, making quickly for his scat-cat to follow his corps-men and their patients through medical decontamination.
'Fetaine!' Miles exclaimed in startlement. Bonn had retreated hastily from the door. Fetaine was a mutagenic poison invented as a terror weapon but never, so far as Miles knew, used in combat. 'I thought that stuff was obsolete. Off the menu.' His academy course in Chemicals and Biologicals had barely mentioned it.
'It is obsolete,' said Bonn grimly. 'They haven't made any in twenty years. For all I know this is the last stockpile on Barrayar. Dammit, those storage barrels shouldn't have broken open even if you'd dropped 'em out a shuttle.'
'Those storage barrels are at least twenty years old, then,' the marshall pointed out. 'Corrosion?'
'In that case,' Bonn craned his neck, 'what about the rest of them?'
'Exactly,' nodded Yaski.
'Isn't fetaine destroyed by heat?' Miles asked nervously, checking to make sure they were standing around discussing this upwind of the bunker. 'Chemically dissociated into harmless components, I heard.'
'Well, not exactly harmless,' said Lieutenant Yaski. 'But at least they don't unravel all the DNA in your balls.'
'Are there any explosives stored in there, Lieutenant Bonn?' Miles asked.
'No, only the fetaine.'
'If you tossed a couple of plasma mines through the door, would the fetaine all be chemically cracked before the roof melted in?'
'You wouldn't want the roof to melt in. Or the floor. If that stuff ever got loose in the permafrost . . . But if you set the mines on slow heat release, and threw a few kilos of neutral plas-seal in with 'em, the bunker might be self-sealing.' Bonn's lips moved in silent calculation. '. . . Yeah, that'd work. In fact, that could be the safest way to deal with that crap. Particularly if the rest of the barrels are starting to lose integrity too.'
'Depending on which way the wind is blowing,' put in Lieutenant Yaski, looking back toward the base and then at Miles.
'We're expecting a light east wind with dropping temperatures till about 0700 tomorrow morning,' Miles answered his look. 'Then it'll shift around to the north and blow harder. Potential wah-wah conditions starting around 1800 tomorrow night.'
'If we're going to do it that way, we'd better do it tonight, then,' said Yaski.
'All right,' said Bonn decisively. 'I'll round up my crew, you round up yours. I'll pull the plans for the bunker, calculate the charges' release-rate, and meet you and the ordnance chief in Admin in an hour.'
Bonn posted the fire marshall's sergeant as guard to keep everyone well away from the bunker. An unenviable duty, but not unbearable in present conditions, and the guard could retreat inside his scat-cat when the temperature dropped, toward midnight. Miles rode back with Bonn to the base Administration building to double- check his promises about wind direction at the weather office.
