Miles, Mutants and Microbes - Lois McMaster Bujold [253]
Gupta was wrapped in bio-barriers by the two quaddies who had handled him before—a logical choice, if not much to their liking. They donned wraps and gloves themselves and towed him out without allowing him to touch anything else. The amphibian suffered this without protest. He looked utterly exhausted.
Garnet Five left with Nicol for Nicol's apartment, where the two quaddie women planned to support each other while awaiting word of Bel. "Call me," Nicol pleaded in an under-voice to Miles as they floated out. Miles nodded his promise, and prayed silently that it would not prove to be one of those hard calls.
His brief vid call out to the Prince Xav and Admiral Vorpatril was hard enough. Vorpatril was almost as white as his hair by the time Miles had finished bringing him up to date. He promised to expedite a selection of medical volunteers at emergency speed.
The procession to the Idris finally included Venn, Greenlaw, the adjudicator, two quaddie patrollers, Miles, and Roic. The loading bay was as dim and quiet as—had it only been yesterday? One of the two quaddie guards, watched bemusedly by the other, was out of his floater and crouched on the floor. He was evidently playing a game with gravity involving a scattering of tiny bright metal caltrops and a small rubber ball, which seemed to consist of bouncing the ball off the floor, catching it again, and snatching up the little caltrops between bounces. To make it more interesting for himself, he was switching hands with each iteration. At the sight of the visitors, the guard hastily pocketed the game and scrambled back into his floater.
Venn pretended not to see this, simply inquiring after any events of note during their shift. Not only had no unauthorized persons attempted to get past them, the investigation committee was the first live persons the bored men had seen since relieving the prior shift. Venn lingered with his patrollers to make his arrangements for the stunner ambush of the ba, should it appear, and Miles led Roic, Greenlaw, and the adjudicator aboard the ship.
The gleaming rows of replicator racks in Dubauer's leased cargo hold appeared unchanged from yesterday. Greenlaw grew tense about the lips, guiding her floater around the hold on an initial overview, then pausing to stare down the aisles. Miles thought he could almost see her doing the multiplication in her head. She and Leutwyn then hovered by Miles's side as he activated a few control panels to demonstrate the replicators' contents.
It was almost a repeat of yesterday, except . . . a number of the readout indicators showed amber instead of green. Closer examination revealed them as measures of an array of stressor-signals, including adrenaline levels. Was the ba right about the fetuses reaching some sort of biological limit in their containers? Was this the first sign of dangerous overgrowth? As Miles watched, a couple of the light bars dropped back on their own from amber to a more encouraging green. He went on to call up the vid monitor images of the individual fetuses for Greenlaw's and the adjudicator's views. The fourth one he activated showed amniotic fluid cloudy with scarlet blood when the lights came on. Miles caught his breath. How . . . ?
That surely wasn't normal. The only possible source of blood was the fetus itself. He rechecked the stressor levels—this one showed a lot of amber—then stood on tiptoe and peered more closely at the image. The blood appeared to be leaking from a small, jagged gash on the twitching haut infant's back. The low red lighting, Miles reassured himself uneasily, made it look worse than it was.
Greenlaw's voice by his ear made him jump. "Is there something wrong with that one?"
"He appears to have suffered some sort of mechanical injury. That . . . shouldn't be possible, in a sealed replicator." He thought of Aral Alexander, and Helen Natalia, and his stomach knotted. "If you have any quaddie experts in replicator reproduction, it might not be a bad idea to get them in here to look at these." He doubted this was a specialty where the military medicos