Miles, Mystery & Mayhem - Lois McMaster Bujold [238]
Her extra arm length was all that was needed—the catches surrendered to her big hands with a squeak of protest.
"What do you see?" Miles whispered.
"Big dark room. Maybe a lab."
"Makes sense. Climb back down and put that lower panel back on. No sense advertising where we went."
Miles slipped through the hatch into the darkened laboratory while Taura accomplished her chore. He dared not switch on a light in the windowless room, but a few instrument readouts on the benches and walls gave enough ghostly glow for his dark-adapted eyes that at least he didn't trip over anything. One glass door led to a hallway. A heavily electronically-monitored hallway. With his nose pressed to the glass Miles saw a red shape flit past a cross-corridor; guards here. What did they guard?
Taura oozed out of the access hatch to the column—with difficulty—and sat down heavily on the floor, her face in her hands. Concerned, Miles nipped back to her. "You all right?"
She shook her head. "No. Hungry."
"What, already? That was supposed to be a twenty-four-hour rat—er, ration bar." Not to mention the two or three kilos of meat she'd had for an appetizer.
"For you, maybe," she wheezed. She was shaking.
Miles began to see why Canaba dubbed his project a failure. Imagine trying to feed a whole army of such appetites. Napoleon would quail. Maybe the raw-boned kid was still growing. Daunting thought.
There was a refrigerator at the back of the lab. If he knew lab techs . . . ah, ha. Indeed, in among the test tubes was a package with half a sandwich and a large, if bruised, pear. He handed them to Taura. She looked vastly impressed, as if he'd conjured them from his sleeve by magic, and devoured them at once, and grew less pale.
Miles foraged further for his troop. Alas, the only other organics in the fridge were little covered dishes of gelatinous stuff with unpleasant multi-colored fuzz growing in them. But there were three big shiny walk-in wall freezers lined up in a row. Miles peered through a glass square in one thick door, and risked pressing the wall pad that turned on the light inside. Within were row on row on row of labelled drawers, full of clear plastic trays. Frozen samples of some kind. Thousands—Miles looked again, and calculated more carefully—hundreds of thousands. He glanced at the lighted control panel by the freezer door. The temperature inside was that of liquid nitrogen. Three freezers . . . Millions of. . . . Miles sat down abruptly on the floor himself. "Taura, do you know where we are?" he whispered intensely.
"Sorry, no," she whispered back, creeping over.
"That was a rhetorical question. I know where we are."
"Where?"
"Ryoval's treasure chamber."
"What?"
"That," Miles jerked his thumb at the freezer, "is the baron's hundred-year-old tissue collection. My God. Its value is almost incalculable. Every unique, irreplaceable, mutant bizarre bit he's begged, bought, borrowed or stolen for the last three-fourths of a century, all lined up in neat little rows, waiting to be thawed and cultured and cooked up into some poor new slave. This is the living heart of his whole human biologicals operation." Miles sprang to his feet and pored over the control panels. His heart raced, and he breathed open-mouthed, laughing silently, feeling almost as if he was about to pass out. "Oh, shit. Oh, God." He stopped, swallowed. Could it be done?
These freezers had to have an alarm system, monitors surely, piped up to Security Ops at the very least. Yes, there