Her eyes widened, and her lips parted, moving in some subvocalization.
"Not least likely?" Miles hazarded. "It would surely be the most difficult, but ... it crosses my mind that maybe someone didn't think you would be getting it back from me. If it's a counterfeit, maybe it was meant to be on its way to Barrayar in a diplomatic pouch right now. Or ... or something." No, that didn't quite make sense, but . . .
She sat utterly still, her face tense with panic, her hands clutching the rod.
"Milady, talk to me. If it's a duplicate, it's obviously a very good duplicate. You now have it, to turn over at the ceremony. So what if it doesn't work? Who's going to check the function of some obsolete piece of electronics?"
"The Great Key is not obsolete. We used it every day."
"It's some kind of data link, right? You have a time-window, here. Nine days. If you think it's been compromised, wipe it and re-program it from your backup files. If that thing in your hand is some kind of a non-working dummy, you've maybe got time to make a real duplicate, and re-program it." But don't just sit there with death in your lovely eyes. "Talk to me!"
"I must do as Ba Lura did," she whispered. "The Ba was right. This is the end."
"No, why?! It's just a, a thing, who cares? Not me!"
She held up the rod, her arctic-blue eyes fixing on his face at last. Her gaze made him want to scuttle into the shadows like a crab, to hide his merely human ugliness, but he held fast before her. "There is no backup," she said. "This is the sole key."
Miles felt faint, and it wasn't just from her perfume. "No backup?" he choked. "Are you people crazy?"
"It is a matter of ... control."
"What does the damn thing really do, anyway?"
She hesitated, then said, "It is the data-key to the haut gene bank. All the frozen genetic samples are stored in a randomized order, for security. Without the key, no one knows what is where. To re-create the files, someone would have to physically examine and re-classify each and every sample. There are hundreds of thousands of samples—one for every haut who has ever lived. It would take an army of geneticists working for a generation to re-create the Great Key."
"This is a real disaster, then, huh?" he said brightly, blinking. His teeth gritted. "Now I know I was framed." He climbed to his feet, and threw back his head, defying the onslaught of her beauty. "Lady, what is really going on here? I'll ask you one more time, with feeling. What in God's green ninety hells was the Ba Lura ever doing with the Great Key on a space station?"
"No outlander may—"
"Somebody made it my business! Sucked me right into it. I don't think I could escape now if I tried. And I think . . . you need an ally. It took you a day and a half just to arrange this second meeting with me. Nine days left. You don't have time to go it alone. You need ... a trained security man. And for some strange reason, you don't seem to want to get one from your own side."
She rocked, just slightly, in frozen misery, in a faint rustle of fabrics.
"If you don't think I'm worthy of being let in on your secrets," Miles went on wildly, "then explain to me how you think I could possibly make things any worse than they are right now!"
Her blue eyes searched him, for he knew not what. But he thought if she asked him to open his veins for her, right here and now, the only thing he'd say would be How wide?
"It was my Celestial Lady's desire," she began fearfully, and stopped.
Miles clutched at his shredded self-control. Everything she'd spilled so far was either obviously deducible, or common knowledge, at least in her milieu. Now she was getting to the good stuff, and knew it. He could tell by the way she'd stalled out.
"Milady." He chose his words with extreme care. "If the Ba did not commit suicide, it was certainly murdered." And we both have good reason to prefer the second scenario. "Ba Lura was your servitor, your colleague . . . dare I guess, friend? I saw its body in the rotunda. A very dangerous and daring person arranged that hideous tableau. There was ... a deep mischief and mockery in it."
Was that pain, in those cool eyes? So hard to tell. . .
"I have old and very personal reasons to particularly dislike being made the unwitting target of persons of cruel humor. I don't know if you can understand this."
"Perhaps ..." she said slowly.
Yes. Look past the surface. See me, not this joke of a body. . . . "And I am the one person on Eta Ceta you know didn't do it. It's the only certainty we share, so far. I claim a right to know who's doing this to us. And the only chance in hell I have to figure out who, is to know exactly why."
Still she sat silent.
"I already know enough to destroy you," Miles added earnestly. "Tell me enough to save you!"
Her sculpted chin rose in bleak decision. When she blessed him with her outward attention at last, it was total and terrifying. "It was a long-standing disagreement." He strained to hear, to keep his head clear, to concentrate on the words and not just on the enchanting melody of her voice. "Between the Celestial Lady and the Emperor. My Lady had long thought that the haut gene bank was too centralized, in the heart of the Celestial Garden. She favored the dispersal of copies, for safety. My Lord favored keeping it all under his personal protection—for safety. They both sought the good of the haut, each in their own way."
"I see," Miles murmured, encouraging her with as much delicacy as he could muster. "All good guys here, right."
"The Emperor forbade her plan. But as she neared the end of her life . . . she came to feel that her loyalty to the haut must outweigh her loyalty to her son. Twenty years ago, she began to have copies made, in secret."
"A large project," Miles said.
"Huge, and slow. But she brought it to fruition."
"How many copies?"
"Eight. One for each of the planetary satraps."
"Exact copies?"
"Yes. I have reason to know. I have been the Celestial Lady's supervisor of geneticists for five years, now."
"Ah. So you are something of a trained scientist. You know about . . . extreme care. And scrupulous honesty."
"How else should I serve my Lady?" she shrugged.
But you don't know much, I'll bet, about covert ops chicanery. Hm. "If there are eight exact copies, there must be eight exact Great Keys, right?"
"No. Not yet. My Lady was saving the duplication of the key to the last moment. A matter of—"
"Control," Miles finished smoothly. "How did I guess?"
A faint flash of resentment at his humor sparked in her eyes, and Miles bit his tongue. It was no laughing matter to haut Rian Degtiar.
"The Celestial Lady knew her time was drawing near. She made me and the Ba Lura the executors of her will in this matter. We were to deliver the copies of the gene bank to each of the eight satrap governors upon the occasion of her funeral, which they would be certain to all attend together. But . . . she died more suddenly than she had expected. She had not yet made arrangements for the duplication of the Great Key. It was a problem of considerable technical and cipher skill, as all of the Empire's resources went into its original creation. Ba Lura and I had all her instructions for the banks, but nothing for how the key was to be duplicated and delivered, or even when she had planned this to happen. The Ba and I were not sure what to do."