Miles, Mystery & Mayhem - Lois McMaster Bujold [86]
"Ah . . . do you know who?"
"Not yet," Rian sighed. "Not yet. She is someone, I fear, who does not wholly understand the goal of haut. It is all of a piece. If we knew which governor, we could guess which haut-woman he has suborned; if we knew which woman . . . well."
Dammit, this triangulation had to break soon. Miles chewed on his lower lip, then said slowly, "Milady. Tell me—if you can—something about how your force-bubbles are keyed to their individual operators, and why everyone is so damned convinced they're dead-secure. The keypad on those control panels looks like a palm-lock, but it can't just be a palm-lock; you can get around palm-locks."
"I cannot give you the technical details, Lord Vorkosigan," said Rian.
"I don't expect you to. Just the general logic of it."
"Well . . . they are keyed genetically, of course. One brushes one's hand across the pad, leaving a few skin cells. These are sucked in and scanned."
"Does it scan your entire genome? Surely that would take a lot of time."
"No, of course not. It runs through a tree of a dozen or so critical markers that individually identify a haut-woman. Starting with the presence of an X chromosome pair, and going down a branching list until confirmation is achieved."
"How much chance is there of duplicating the markers in two or more individuals?"
"We do not clone ourselves, Lord Vorkosigan."
"I mean, just of the dozen factors, just enough to fool the machine."
"Vanishingly small."
"Even among closely related members of one's own constellation?"
She hesitated, exchanging a glance with Lady Pel, who raised her brows thoughtfully.
"There's a reason I ask," Miles went on. "When ghem-Colonel Benin interviewed me, he let slip that six haut-bubbles had entered the funeral rotunda during the time period the Ba Lura's body must have been placed at the foot of the bier, and that it presented him with a major puzzle. He didn't tell me which six, but I bet you could get him to disgorge the list. It's a brute-force triage of a major data dump, but—suppose you ran the markers of those six through your records, and checked for accidental duplicates among living haut-women. If the woman is serving the satrap governor, she might have served him in that murder, too. You might finger your traitoress without ever having to leave the Star Crèche."
Rian, momentarily alert, sat back with a weary sigh. "Your reasoning is correct, Lord Vorkosigan. We could do that—if we had the Great Key."
"Oh," said Miles. "Yeah. That." He reverted from an eager parade-rest to a deflated at-ease. "For what it's worth, my strategic analysis and what little physical evidence I've wrung from ghem-Colonel Benin so far suggests either Prince Slyke or the haut Ilsum Kety. With the haut Rond a distant third. But as Rho Ceta and Mu Ceta would bear the brunt of it if open conflict with Barrayar was actually engineered, my own choice has settled pretty firmly between Slyke and Kety. Recent . . . events point to Kety." He glanced again around the circle. "Is there anything any of the consorts have seen or heard, or overheard, that would help pin him more certainly?"
A murmur of negatives; "Unfortunately, no," said Rian. "We have discussed that problem already this evening. Please begin."
On your head be it, milady. Miles took a deep breath, and launched into the full true account, minus most of his opinions, of his experiences on Eta Ceta from the moment the Ba Lura lurched into their personnel pod. He paused occasionally, to give Rian a chance to hint him away from anything she wanted to conceal. She appeared to want to conceal nothing, instead drawing him on with skillful questions and prompts to disgorge every detail.
Rian had seen, he slowly realized, that the secrecy problem cut two ways. Lord X could assassinate Miles, maybe Rian as well. But even the most megalomanic Cetagandan politician