Cordelia's Honor - Lois McMaster Bujold [216]
Cordelia stood white and stricken; bad, bad attack of defective deja vu. She'd played the lab scene in her head already a thousand times, but she'd never seen Dr. Henri dead on the floor, nor Vaagen beaten senseless.
"Then they ripped into the lab. Everything, all the treatment records. All Henri's work on burns, gone. They didn't have to do that. All gone for nothing!" His voice cracked, hoarse with fury.
"Did they . . . find the replicator? Dump it out?" She could see it; she had seen it over and over, spilling. . . .
"They found it, finally. But then they took it. And then let me go." He shook his head from side to side.
"Took it," she repeated stupidly. Why? What sense, to take the technology and not the techs? "And let you go. To run to us, I suppose. To give us the word."
"You have it, Milady."
"Where, do you suppose? Where did they take it?"
Vorkosigan's voice spoke beside her. "The Imperial Residence, most likely. All the best hostages are being kept there. I'll put Intelligence right on it." He stood, feet planted, grey-faced. "It seems we're not the only side turning up the pressure."
Chapter Fifteen
Within two minutes of Vorkosigan's arrival at main portal Security, Captain Vaagen was flat on a float pallet and on his way to the infirmary, with the top trauma doctor on the base being paged for rendezvous. Cordelia reflected bitterly on the nature of chain of command; all truth and reason and urgent need were not enough, apparently, to lend causal power to one outside that chain.
Further interrogation of the scientist had to wait on his medical treatment. Vorkosigan used the time to put Illyan and his department on the new problem. Cordelia used the time to pace in circles in the infirmary's waiting area. Droushnakovi watched her in silent worry, not so foolish as to offer up reassurances they both knew to be empty.
At last the trauma man emerged from surgery to announce Vaagen conscious and oriented enough for a brief—he emphasized the brief—questioning. Aral came, trailing Koudelka and Illyan, and they all trooped in to find Vaagen in an infirmary bed, with his eye patched and an IV running fluids and meds.
Vaagen's hoarse and weary voice added a few horrific details, but nothing to change the word-picture he'd first given Cordelia.
Illyan listened with steady attention. "Our people at the Residence confirm," he reported when Vaagen ran down, depressed whisper trailing to silence. "The replicator was apparently brought in yesterday, and has been placed in the most heavily guarded wing, near Princess Kareen's quarters. Our loyalists don't know what it is, they think it's some kind of a device, maybe a bomb to take out the Residence and everyone in it in the final battle."
Vaagen snorted, coughed, and winced.
"Do they have anyone tending it?" Cordelia asked the question no one else had, so far. "A doctor, a medtech, anyone?"
Illyan frowned. "I don't know, Milady. I can try to find out, but every extra communication endangers our people up there."
"Mm."
"The treatment's interrupted anyway," Vaagen muttered. His hand fiddled with the edge of his sheet. "Bitched to hell."
"I realize you've lost your notes, but could you . . . reconstruct your work?" Cordelia asked diffidently. "If you got the replicator back, that is. Take up where you left off."
"It wouldn't be where we left off, by the time we got it back. And it wasn't all in my head. Some of it was in Henri's."
Cordelia took a deep breath. "As I recall, these Escobaran portable replicators run on a two-week service