He knelt to the side of Bel's bod pod and opened the access panel to the pressurization control unit. Roic handed down a length of plastic tubing and strips of tape. Miles wrapped, prayed, and turned assorted valve controls. The air pump vibrated gently. The pod's round outline softened and slumped. The second pod expanded, after a flaccid, wrinkled fashion. He closed valves, cut lines, sealed, wished for a few liters of disinfectant to splash around. He held the fabric up away from the lump that was Bel's head as Roic lifted the herm onto the pallet.
The pallet moved at a brisk walking pace; Miles longed to run. They maneuvered the load into the infirmary, into the small ward. As close as possible to the rather cramped bathroom.
Miles motioned Roic to bend close again.
“All right. This is as far as you go. We don't both need to be in here for this. I want you to exit the room and turn on the molecular barriers. Then stand ready to assist the medics from the Prince Xav as needed.”
“M'lord, are you sure you wouldn't rather we do it t'other way around?”
“I'm sure. Go!”
Roic exited reluctantly. Miles waited till the lines of blue light indicating that the barriers had been activated sprang into being across the doorway, then bent to unzip the pod and fold it back from Bel's tensed, trembling body. Even through his gloves, Bel's bare skin felt scorching hot.
Edging both the pallet and himself into the bathroom involved some awkward clambering, but at last he had Bel positioned to shift into the waiting vat of ice and water. Heave, slide, splash. He cursed the pallet and lunged over it to hold Bel's head up. Bel's body jerked in shock; Miles wondered if his shakily theorized palliative would instead give the victim heart failure. He shoved the pallet back out the door, and out of the way, with one foot. Bel was now trying to curl into a fetal position, a more heartening response than the open-eyed coma Miles had observed so far. Miles pulled the bent limbs down one by one and held them under the ice water.
Miles fingers grew numb with the cold, except where they touched Bel. The herm's body temperature seemed scarcely affected by this brutal treatment. Unnatural indeed. But at least Bel stopped growing hotter. The ice was melting noticeably.
It had been some years since Miles had last glimpsed Bel nude, in a field shower or donning or divesting space armor in a mercenary warship locker room. Fifty-something wasn't old, for a Betan, but still, gravity was clearly gaining on Bel. On all of us . In their Dendarii days Bel had taken out its unrequited lust for Miles in a series of half-joking passes, half-regretfully declined. Miles repented his younger sexual reticence altogether, now. Profoundly.We should have taken our chances back then, when we were young and beautiful and didn't even know it. And Bel had been beautiful, in its own ironic way, living and moving at ease in a body athletic, healthy, and trim.
Bel's skin was blotched, mottled red and pale; the herm's flesh, sliding and turning in the ice bath under Miles's anxious hands, had an odd texture, by turns swollen tight or bruised like crushed fruit. Miles called Bel's name, tried his best old Admiral Naismith Commands You voice, told a bad joke, all without penetrating the herm's glazed stupor. It was a bad idea to cry in a biotainer suit, almost as bad as throwing up in a pressure suit. You couldn't blot your eyes, or wipe your snot.
And when someone touched you unexpectedly on the shoulder, you jumped as though shot, and they looked at you funny, through their faceplate and yours.
“Lord Auditor Vorkosigan, are you all right?” said the Prince Xav 's biotainer-swaddled surgeon, as he knelt beside him at the vat's edge.
Miles swallowed for self-control. “I'm fine, so far. This herm's in a very bad way. I don't know what they've told you about all this.”
“I was told that I might be dealing with a possible Cetagandan-designed bioweapon in hot mode, that had killed three so far with one survivor. The part about there being a survivor made me really wonder about the first assertion.”
“Ah, you didn't get a chance to see Guppy yet, then.” Miles took a breath and ran through a brief recap of Gupta's tale, or at least the pertinent biological aspects of it. As he spoke, his hands never stopped shoving Bel's arms and legs back down, or ladling watery ice cubes over the herm's burning head and neck. He finished, “I don't know if it was Gupta's amphibian genetics, or something he did, that allowed him to survive this hell-shit when his friends didn't. Guppy said their dead flesh steamed . I don't know what all this heat's coming from, but it can't be just fever. I couldn't duplicate the Jacksonian's bioengineering, but I thought I could at least duplicate the water tank trick. Wild-assed empiricism, but I didn't think there was much time.”
A gloved hand reached past him to raise Bel's eyelids, touch the herm here and there, press and probe. “I see that.”
“It's really important ”—Miles took another gulp of air to stabilize his voice—”it's really important that this patient survive. Thorne's not just any stationer. Bel was . . .” He realized he didn't know the surgeon's security clearance. “Having the portmaster die on our watch would be a diplomatic disaster. Another one, that is. And . . . and the herm saved my life yesterday. I owe—Barrayar owes—”
“My lord, we'll do our best. I have my top squad here; we'll take over now. Please, my Lord Auditor, if you could please step out and let your man decontaminate you?”
Another suited figure, doctor or medtech, appeared through the bathroom door and held out a tray of instruments to the surgeon. Perforce Miles moved aside, as the first sampling needle plunged past him into Bel's unresponsive flesh. No room left in here even for his shortness, he had to admit. He withdrew.
The spare ward bunk had been turned into a lab bench. A third biotainer-clad figure was rapidly shifting what looked a promising array of equipment from boxes and bins piled high on a float pallet onto this makeshift surface. The second tech returned from the bathroom and started feeding bits of Bel into the various chemical and molecular analyzers on one end of the bunk even as the third man arranged more devices on the other.
Roic's tall, pressure-suited figure stood waiting just past the molecular barriers across the ward door. He was holding a high-powered laser-sonic decontaminator, familiar Barrayaran military issue. He raised an inviting hand; Miles returned the acknowledgment.
Nothing further was to be gained in here by dithering more at the medical squad. He'd just distract them and get in their way. He suppressed his unstrung urge to explain to them Bel's superior right, by old valor and love, to survive. Futile. He might as well rail at the microbes themselves. Even the Cetagandans had not yet devised a weapon that triaged for virtue before slaughtering its victims.
I promised to call Nicol. God, why did I promise that? Learning Bel's present status would surely be more terrifying for her than knowing nothing. He would wait a little longer, at least till he received the first report from the surgeon. If there was hope by then, he could impart it. If there was none . . .
He stepped slowly through the buzzing molecular barrier, raising his arms to turn about beneath the even stronger sonic-scrubber/laser-dryer beam from Roic's decontaminator. He had Roic treat every part of him, including palms, fingers, the soles of his feet, and, nervously, the insides of his thighs. The suit protected him from what would otherwise be a nasty scorching, leaving skin pink and hair exploded off. He didn't motion Roic to desist till they'd gone over each square centimeter. Twice.