“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 gloves ?”
Miles stared down, turning up his hands. His breath congealed in his chest. The thin, tough fabric of his biotainer gloves was shredding away, hanging loose in strings; beneath the lattice, his palms showed red. Their itching seemed to redouble. His breath let loose again in a snarl of “Shit! ”
Venn bobbed closer, took in the damage with widening eyes, and recoiled.
Miles held his hands up, and apart. “Venn. Go collect Greenlaw and Leutwyn and take over Nav and Com. Secure yourselves and the infirmary, in that order. Roic. Go ahead of me to the infirmary. Open the doors for me.” He choked back an unnecessary scream of Run! ; Roic, with an indrawn breath audible over the suit com, was already moving.
He dodged through the half-dark ship in Roic's long-legged wake, touching nothing, expecting every lumping heartbeat to rupture inside him. Where had he collected this hellish contamination? Was anyone else affected? Everyone else?
No. It had to have been the power-suit control joysticks. They'd slid greasily under his gloved hands. He had gripped them tighter, intent upon the task of bringing the suit back inboard. He'd taken the bait . . . Now, more than ever, he was certain the ba had walked an empty suit out the airlock. And then set a snare for any smartass who figured it out too soon.
He plunged through the door to the infirmary, past Roic, who stood aside, and straight on through the blue-lit inner door to the bio-sealed ward. A medtech's suited form jumped in surprise. Miles called up Channel 13 and rapped out, “Someone please . . .” then stopped. He'd meant to cry, Turn on the water for me! and hold his hands under the sluice of a sink, but where did the water then go ? “Help,” he finished in a smaller voice.
“What is it, my Lord Audi—” the chief surgeon began, stepping from the bathroom; then his glance took in Miles's upraised hands. “What happened? ”
“I think I hit a booby trap. As soon as you have a free tech, have Armsman Roic take him down to Engineering and collect a sample from the repair suit remote controller there. It appears to have been painted with some powerful corrosive or enzyme and . . . and I don't know what else.”
“Sonic scrubber,” Captain Clogston snapped over his shoulder to the tech monitoring the makeshift lab bench. The man hastened to rummage among the stacks of supplies. He turned back, powering on the device; Miles held out both his burning hands. The machine roared as the tech ran the directed beam of vibration over the afflicted areas, its powerful vacuum sucking the loosened detritus both macroscopic and microscopic into the sealed collection bag. The surgeon leaned in with a scalpel and tongs, slicing and tearing away the remaining shreds of gloves, which were also sucked into the receptacle.
The scrubber seemed effective; Miles's hands stopped feeling worse, though they continued to throb. Was his skin breached? He brought his now-bare palms closer to his faceplate, impeding the surgeon, who hissed under his breath. Yes. Red flecks of blood welled in the creases of the swollen tissue. Shit. Shit. Shit. . . .
Clogston straightened and glanced around, lips drawn back in a grimace. “Your biotainer suit's compromised all to hell, my lord.”
“There's another pair of gloves on the other suit,” Miles pointed out. “I could cannibalize them.”
“Not yet.” Clogston hurried to slather Miles's hands with some mystery goo and wrap them in biotainer barriers, sealed to his wrists. It was like wearing mittens over handfuls of snot, but the burning pain eased. Across the room, the tech was scraping fragments of contaminated glove into an analyzer. Was the third man in with Bel? Was Bel still in the ice bath? Still alive?
Miles took a deep, steadying breath. “Do you have any kind of a diagnosis on Portmaster Thorne yet?”
“Oh, yes, it came up right away,” said Clogston in a somewhat absent tone, still sealing the second wrist wrap. “The instant we ran the first blood sample through. What the hell we can do about it is not yet obvious, but I have some ideas.” He straightened again, frowning deeply at Miles's hands. “The herm's blood and tissues are crawling with artificial—that is, bioengineered—parasites.” He glanced up. “They appear to have an initial, latent, asymptomatic phase, where they multiply rapidly throughout the body. Then, at some point—possibly triggered by their own concentration—they switch over to producing two chemicals in different vesicles within their own cellular membrane. The vesicles engorge. A rise in the victim's body temperature triggers the bursting of the sacs, and the chemicals in turn undergo a violently exothermic reaction with each other—killing the parasite, damaging the host's surrounding tissues, and stimulating more nearby parasites to go off. Tiny, pin-point bombs all through the body. It's”—his tone went reluctantly admiring—”extremely elegant. In a hideous sort of way.”
“Did—did my ice-water bath treatment help Thorne, then?”
“Yes, absolutely. The drop in core temperature stopped the cascade in its tracks, temporarily. The parasites had almost reached critical concentration.”
Miles's eyes squeezed shut in brief gratitude. And opened again. “Temporarily?”
“I still haven't figured out how to get rid of the damned things. We're trying to modify a surgical shunt into a blood filter to both mechanically remove the parasites from the patient's bloodstream, and chill the blood to a controlled degree before returning it to the body. I think I can make the parasites respond selectively to an applied electrophoresis gradient across the shunt tube, and pull them right on out of the bloodstream.”