Miles, Mutants and Microbes - Lois McMaster Bujold [263]
"Is that our suspect?" asked Leutwyn anxiously. "Where did he go?"
"What is the range on those heavy suits of yours, do you know, Lord Auditor?" asked Venn urgently.
"Those? Not sure. They're meant to allow men to work outside the ship for hours at a time, so I'd guess, if they were fully topped up with oxygen, propellant, and power . . . damned near the range of a small personnel pod." The engineering repair suits resembled military space armor, except with an array of built-in tools instead of built-in weapons. Too heavy for even a strong man to walk in, they were fully powered. The ba might have ridden in one around to any point on Graf Station. Worse, the ba might have ridden out to a mid-space pickup by some Cetagandan co-agent, or perhaps by some bribed or simply bamboozled local helper. The ba might be thousands of kilometers away by now, with the gap widening every second. Heading for entry to another quaddie habitat under yet another faked identity, or even for rendezvous with a passing jumpship and escape from Quaddiespace altogether.
"Station Security is on full emergency alert," said Venn. "I have all my patrollers and all of the Sealer's militia on duty out looking for the fellow—the person. Dubauer can't have gotten back aboard the station unobserved." A tremor of doubt in Venn's voice undercut the certainty of this statement.
"I've ordered the station onto a full biocontamination quarantine," said Greenlaw. "All incoming ships and vehicles have been waved off or diverted to Union, and none now in dock are cleared to leave. If the fugitive did get back aboard already—it isn't leaving." Judging by the sealer's congealed expression, she was by no means sure if this was a good thing. Miles sympathized. Fifty thousand potential hostages . . . "If it's fled somewhere else . . . if our people can't locate this fugitive promptly, I'm going to have to extend the quarantine throughout Quaddiespace."
What would be the most important task for the ba, now that the flag had been dropped? It had to realize that the tight secrecy it had relied on for protection thus far was irremediably ruptured. Did it realize how close on its heels its pursuers had come? Would it still wish to murder Gupta to assure the Jacksonian smuggler's silence? Or would it abandon that hunt, cut losses, and run if it could? Which direction was it trying to move, back in, or out?
Miles's eye fell on the vid image of the work suit, frozen above the plate. Did that suit have the kind of telemetry space armor did? More to the point—did it have the kind of remote control overrides some space armor did?
"Roic! When you were down in the engineering suit lockers hunting for that pressure suit, did you see an automated command-and-control station for these powered repair units?"
"I . . . there's a control room down there, yes, m'lord. I passed it. I don't know what all might be in it."
"I have an idea. Follow me."
He levered himself from the station chair and left Nav and Com at a sloppy jog, his biotainer suit sliding aggravatingly around him. Roic strode after; the curious quaddies followed in their floaters.
The control room was scarcely more than a booth, but it featured a telemetry station for exterior maintenance and repairs. Miles slid into its station chair, and cursed the tall person who'd fixed it at a height that left his boots dangling in air. On permanent display were several real-time vid shots of critical portions of the ship's outlying anatomy, including directional antenna arrays, the mass shield generator, and the main normal-space thrusters. Miles sorted through a bewildering mess of data from structural safety sensors scattered throughout the ship. Finally, the work suit control program came up.
Six suits in the array. Miles called up visual telemetry from their helmet vids. Five returned views of blank walls, the insides of their respective storage lockers. The sixth returned a lighter image, but more puzzling, of a curving wall. It remained as static as the vistas from the suits