Ethan of Athos by Lois McMaster Bujold Page A

minutes work returned him to his normal reassuringly squeaky-clean neatness; merely tired, not degraded. There was even a sonic scrubber that cleaned his clothes while he showered.
    He emerged to find Commander Quinn occupying the room's sole float chair, her jacket off, feet propped up and luxuriating in their decompression. She opened her eyes and gestured him toward the bed. He stretched himself out nervously, the pillow to his back; but there was no other choice of seating. He found a fresh beer and a tray of edibles, anonymous Stationer tidbits, ready to hand. He tried not to think about the food's possible sources.
    “So,” she began. “There seems to be an awful lot of interest focused on this shipment of biologicals Athos ordered. Suppose you start there.”
    Ethan swallowed a bite and gathered all his resolve. “No. We trade information. Suppose you start there.” His burst of assertiveness ran down in the face of her bland raised eyebrows, and he added weakly, “If you don't mind.”
    She cocked her head and smiled. “Very well.” She paused to wash down a bite of her own. “Your order was filled, apparently, by Bharaputra Laboratories' top genetics team. They spent a couple of months at it, under need-to-know security. This probably saved several lives, later. The order was sent off on a non-stop freight run to Kline Station, where it sat in a warehouse for two months waiting for the yearly census courier to take it to Athos. Nine big white freezer boxes --” she described them in precise detail, right down to the serial numbers. “Is that what you got?”
    Ethan nodded grimly.
    She went on. “Just about the time the shipment was leaving Kline Station for Athos, Millisor and his team arrived on Jackson's Whole. They went through Bharaputra's lab like -- well, professionally speaking, it was a very successful commando raid.” Her lips closed on some angrier private judgement. “Millisor and his team escaped right through House Bharaputra's private army, vaporizing the laboratory and all its contents behind them. The contents included most of the genetics team, quite a few innocent bystanders, and the technical records of the work done on your shipment. I gather they must have spent some time questioning the Bharaputra people before they crisped them, because they got it all. Pausing only to murder the wife and burn down the house of one of the geneticists, Millisor and company vanished from the planet, to turn up under new identities here just three weeks too late to catch your shipment.
    “So then I arrived on Jackson's Whole, innocently asking questions about Athos. House Bharaputra Security about had a colonic spasm. Fortunately, I was finally able to persuade them I had no connection with Millisor. In fact, they think I'm working for them, now,” she smiled slowly.
    “The Bharaputrans?”
    Her smile became a grimace. “Yes. They hired me to assassinate Millisor and his team. A lucky break for me, since now I'm not racing one of their own hit squads to the target. I seem to have made a start in spite of myself. They'll be so pleased.” She sighed, and drank again. “Your turn, Doctor. What was in those boxes to be worth all those lives?”
    “Nothing!” He shook his head in bewilderment. “Valuable, yes, but not worth killing for. The Population Council had ordered 450 live ovarian cultures, to produce egg cells, you know, for children --”
    “I know how children are produced, yes,” she murmured.
    “They were to be certified free of genetic defects, and taken only from sources in the top 20 intelligence percentiles. That's all. A week's routine work for a good genetics team such as you describe. But what we got was trash!” He detailed the shipment received with increasingly irate fervor, until she cut him off.
    “All right, Doctor! I believe you. But what left Jackson's Whole was not trash, but something very special. Somebody therefore took your shipment somewhere in transit and