Miles, Mystery & Mayhem - Lois McMaster Bujold [189]
"Oh, yes," chorused Teki helpfully. "We use it to seal suspected contaminants, to store them for later analysis. It's under the wet bench. I sealed my shoes up once, on a slow day. I tried to seal water, to make balloons to drop down the lift tubes, but it didn't work—"
"Shut up, Teki!" snarled Helda desperately.
"It's not as bad as what Vernon did with the white mice—"
"Stop," growled Millisor in exasperation out of the corner of his mouth. Teki subsided and sat blinking.
Ethan spread his hands and asked Helda more gently and urgently, "Why? I have to understand."
The concentrated venom in her posture broke into speech almost despite her will. "Why? You even need to ask why? It was to cut you motherless unnatural bastards off, that's why. I meant to get the next shipment too, if there was one, and the next, and the next, until—" She was choking now. On her rage? No, Ethan realized, his buoyant intellectual triumph turning sickly-sour in his stomach; on tears. "Until I'd hooked Simmi out of there, and he came to his senses and came home and got a real woman, I swear I wouldn't criticize a hair on her head this time, I'll never be allowed to even see my own grandchildren on that dreadful dirty planet . . ." She turned her back and stood stiff-legged, defiant but for her hands over her red, smeared face, ugly and helpless and snorting.
Ethan thought he understood how a propaganda-stuffed young soldier must feel the first time in combat, stumbling by some sudden chance over his enemy's human face. He had gloried for a red moment in his power to break her. Now he stood foolishly with the pieces in his hands. Not at all heroic.
"Ye gods," muttered the Security man, in awe touched with glee, "I have to arrest an eco-cop . . . ?"
Teki giggled. The other ecotech, clearly taken aback by Helda's confession, looked as though he didn't know whether to argue or try to become invisible.
"But what did you do with the other?" Millisor rocked forward, teeth clenched.
"Other what?" Helda sniffed.
"The frozen human ovarian cultures you took out of the boxes for Athos," Millisor ground out, carefully, like a man speaking in words of one syllable to a mutant.
"Oh. I threw them out."
The veins stood out on the Cetagandan's forehead. Ethan could name each one. Millisor seemed to be having trouble breathing. "Idiot bitch," he panted. "Idiot bitch, do you know what you've done . . . ?"
Quinn's laughter rang over them all like morning bells. "Admiral Naismith will love it!"
The ghem-colonel's steel self-control broke at last. "Idiot bitch!" he screamed, and launched himself toward Helda, clawed hands outstretched. Both Quinn's and the Security man's stunner beams caught him in a neat cross-fire, and he crashed as trees do.
Rau just stood shaking his head and muttering over and over, "Shit. Shit. Shit . . ."
"Attempted assault," the Security man paused to croon over his report panel, "on a Biocontrol Warden carrying out her duties . . ."
Rau sidled toward the door.
"Don't forget breaking Detention," Quinn added helpfully. "This here's the fellow," she gestured at Rau, "that you were all looking for who evaporated out of C-9 the other day. And I bet if you search this room you'll find all sorts of military goodies that Kline Station Customs never authorized."
"Quarantine first," said the other ecotech, after a nervous glance at his still emotionally incapacitated superior.
"But surely Ambassador Urquhart will wish to lay charges for the admitted theft and destruction of Athosian property," suggested Quinn. "Who's going to arrest whom?"
"We're all gonna go to Quarantine, where I can make you all hold still till I get to the bottom of this," said the Security man firmly. "People who disappear out of C-9 will find that slipping Quarantine is quite another matter."
"Too true," murmured Quinn.
Rau's lip rippled silently as another pair of heavily-armed Security officers appeared in the doorway, cutting off retreat. The room seemed suddenly crowded. Ethan hadn't seen the burly Security man call for