“What did you see?”
“Pale shape. It flickered back into the brush.”
“Feral animal?” Feral dogs, cats, pigs, goats, chickens, red deer, ponies, black-and-white rats, and other escapees from human settlements were known to roam the Barrayaran wilderness, if only in areas where Earth-descended plants had first made a dent; almost no Barrayaran vegetation was edible to Earth-descended animals of any kind, humans included. So the feral populations tended to be sparse and starving. The notion of hungry feral chickens—which could fly, certainly over a half-meter-high force screen—gave Ekaterin a new and alarming idea of what might have happened to the disappearing radbugs. Loaded radbugs in the food chain were a horrifying notion. But people in the Vorkosigan’s District were careful about wild-caught food, at least in these days when rad scanners were cheap and abundant enough to be shared around freely.
“Too tall. Too quiet.” Miles squeezed his eyes open and shut a few times. “I did not see—”
“Did not see what?” Ekaterin prodded as he stalled out.
“I did not just see a wood-elf,” Miles said, very firmly. If in an undertone. He either underscored or undercut this certainty with a few jabs of his cane into the leaf litter. He raised his voice. “Vadim!”
The tall ranger arrived, striding up out of a dell. “My lord?”
“I saw something strange moving over thataway.” Miles pointed with his cane.
Vadim’s head turned. “Nothing’s there, my lord.”
“Still. Take a reconnaissance, see if you notice anything.”
The ranger cast him a dutiful salute and moved off into the growing shadows. The radbugs should be even easier to spot in the dimness, Ekaterin thought, gleaming in the gloaming, but she glimpsed none.
It was several minutes before Vadim returned to report, “I didn’t find anything, my lord.”
Miles scowled.
“Could it have been a little hallucination? They say dusk is the trickiest light of the day,” offered Enrique.
“I’ve had hallucinations,” said Miles shortly. “I know what they look like. Not… that.”
“Medication allergy,” Ekaterin explained to the ranger’s startled stare. And Miles was not, to her certain knowledge, on any of those medications now.
Enrique turned slowly around, squinting into the gathering gloom. “This won’t do. I need more data.”
“But not tonight, sir,” said the ranger firmly. “It’s time we were leaving.” He tapped his dosimeter significantly.
With reluctance, the party allowed themselves to be escorted off to the lift van.
Ekaterin accompanied Enrique back to the plot the next morning to help get his more-data. They didn’t need to add to the zone ranger’s lifetime rad-dosage sum for this, and Miles was tied up in meetings in Hassadar, so she and the Escobaran spent the next hour tacking live-feed vidcams up on the trees by themselves.
“I should have thought of this earlier,” Enrique grumbled, as she handed him up the last of the cams—cheap commercial models, bought in a bulk bundle in town last night. Miles had offered to scrounge some of Imperial Security’s finest equipment, but there was such a thing as overkill, Ekaterin had pointed out frugally. Miles tended not to think frugally on any scale smaller than a district budget.
“How were you to know?” Ekaterin consoled the scientist. “Anyway, the purpose of the first test plot is to find problems; it’s certainly working for that.”
Enrique spoke into his wristcom to his partner back in the hundred-kilometers-safely-distant Hassadar lab: “Do you have the signal, Martya?”
“Yes, locked in,” Martya’s voice returned cheerfully. “You’ve pretty much got the whole plot cross-covered now. I’m getting very fine detail on the close-up zooms—I can count the legs. And compare the brightness.”
Enrique nodded satisfaction and stepped down off the ladder with a grunt. Ekaterin went to set it in the little shelter with the growing collection of to-be-left-in-the-zone tools.
“If our bug thieves turn out to be feral chickens or rats,” she said, returning, “is there some way you could make the next batch of bugs especially bad-tasting to them?”
“I shouldn’t think they were very yummy to start with,” said Enrique, “but yes. It would be a trivial modification, though I expect we’d best buy a few actual chickens for the lab to test the options. That’s another thing I should have thought of, I suppose. But I was focused on tuning the microbe suite.”
“As well you should have been,” said Ekaterin. “Miles was really pleased with the concentration you obtained.”
Enrique brightened. “Yes. It may be time to bring the robotic collection scheme forward.”
“We certainly can’t be sending out squads of proles with shovels,” said Ekaterin. “That would have been too Time-of-Isolation even for the Time of Isolation.” She hesitated. “Though operating the remote collectors might be a reasonable employment for district people, if it would get the system up sooner.”
Enrique nodded. “I expect we’ll be training the bugs to stockpile it in removable grids in some kind of hutches, like the original butterbugs. Let’s do another head-count.”
They split the plot to make a more detailed survey than last night’s rough estimate. It came out only three more; no hundred-bug hoards, or hordes, were found under anything.
Enrique pressed his lips together in frustration. “I think the next batch of bugs should be individually numbered. Maybe with some sort of little tracer built into the tags.”
Applying tiny tags to the bugs was going to be a tedious task for some lab tech, but Ekaterin could only nod agreement. “So—have you done a plant survey?”
“Ah,” said Enrique, after a slight hesitation. “Good thinking.”
Ekaterin, who’d been about to ask for a look at it, gave him a mildly reproachful glance. “After eighty years, all the contamination that could wash away easily, mostly has. The rest is locked up in the biota or down in the subsoil. It would be good to know which plants were drawing up the most rads from the subsoil. And which ones the bugs have a preference for, if any. If there turns out to be some optimum combination, seeding the zone might be a way to help speed things along.”
“I’d need more people…”
“Or you might be able to get some help from Hassadar District College,” Ekaterin suggested. “Botany, Agronomy, any of those departments might welcome the project.” Come to think, there had to have been some such botanical surveys done already, sometime, by somebody. She knew the rangers kept up-to-date radiation plots, but then, those could be mapped from the air. Next stop, Hassadar College.
“We’d been keeping the radbugs, if not exactly secret, very closely held,” said Enrique. “So as not to raise false hopes, your husband said.”
Or false fears. “I think most of the hopes were his, but yes. We might disclose them soon. Maybe,” she modified this prudently. “Everything in the district competes for resources. The best solution is to make more resources, Miles claims.”
She fell in beside Enrique as he walked one last circuit of the perimeter, staring around for bugs, or anything forgotten, or maybe just ideas.
“What does Miles plan to use this land for, anyway?” he asked, as they made the far turn and started back. “Not that the radbug project hasn’t been intrinsically interesting, as both pure and applied science. But it’s not as if your district is overpopulated even yet—Martya claims you’ve been losing people to the capital for decades, and, now, all that emigration to Sergyar. Why not just let it all sit there and look pretty?”