Miles, Mutants and Microbes - Lois McMaster Bujold [187]
"This personnel lock here," Bel pointed back to the one by which they'd just entered, "was the one that was opened by the unauthorized person. The blood trail ended in it, in a smeary smudge. It started," Bel walked across the bay toward the wall to the right, "a few meters away, not far from the door to the next bay. This is where the large pool of blood was found."
Miles walked after Bel, studying the deck. It had been cleaned up in the several days since the incident. "Did you see this yourself, Portmaster Thorne?"
"Yes, about an hour after it was first found. The mob had arrived by then, but Security had been pretty good about keeping the area uncontaminated."
Miles had Bel walk him around the bay, detailing all exits. It was a standard sort of place, utilitarian, undecorated, efficient; a few pieces of freight-handling equipment stood silently in the opposite end, near a darkened, airsealed control booth. Miles had Bel unlock it and give him a look inside. Ekaterin too walked about, clearly glad to have room to stretch her legs after several days cooped up in the Kestrel. Her expression, gazing about the cool, echoing space, was thoughtfully reminiscent, and Miles smiled in appreciation.
They returned to the spot where the blood implied Lieutenant Solian's throat had been cut, and discussed the details of the spatter marks and smears. Roic observed with keen professional interest. Miles had one of the quaddie guards give up his float tub; scooped out of his shell, he sat up on the deck on his haunches and lower arms, looking a bit like a large, disgruntled frog. Quaddie locomotion in a gravity field without a floater was rather disturbing to watch. They either went on all fours, only slightly more mobile than a person on hands and knees, or managed a sort of forward-leaning, elbows-out, upright chicken-walk on their lower hands. Either mode looked very wrong and ungainly, compared to their grace and agility in zero gee.
With Bel, whom Miles judged to be about the right size for a Komarran, cooperatively playing the part of the corpse, they experimented with the problem of a person in a float chair shifting seventy or so kilos of inert meat the several meters to the airlock. Bel wasn't as slim and athletic as formerly, either; the added, ah, masses made it harder for Miles to fall back into his old subconscious default habit of thinking of Bel as male. Probably just as well. Miles found it extremely difficult, legs folded awkwardly in a seat not designed for them, trying to keep one hand on the float chair controls at roughly crotch level and also maintain a grip on Bel's clothing. Bel tried trailing either an arm or a leg artistically over the side; Miles stopped short of pouring water down Bel's sleeve to try to duplicate the smears. Ekaterin did little better than he did, and Roic, surprisingly, worse. His superior strength was counteracted by the awkwardness of squeezing his greater size into the cup-like space, his knees sticking up, and trying to work the hand controls in the constricted clearances. The quaddie sergeant managed it handily, but glowered at Miles afterwards.
Floaters, Bel explained, were not hard to come by, being considered shared public property, although quaddies who spent a lot of time on the grav side sometimes owned their own personalized models. The quaddies kept racks of floaters by the access ports between the grav and the free fall sections of the station, for any quaddie to grab and use, and drop off again upon returning. They were numbered for maintenance record purposes, but not tracked otherwise. Anyone could obtain one by simply walking up and getting in, apparently, even drunken Barrayaran soldiers on leave.
"When we came into that first docking