Cordelia's Honor

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  "You can't fire that thing indoors," Droushnakovi objected to the plasma arc.

  "You never know," shrugged Bothari.

  After a moment's thought, Cordelia added the swordstick, tightening a loop of her belt around its grip. A serious weapon it wasn't, but it had proved an unexpectedly useful tool on this trip. For luck. Then from the last depths of the satchel, Cordelia pulled what she privately considered to be the most potent weapon of all.

  "A shoe?" said Droushnakovi blankly.

  "Gregor's shoe. For when we make contact with Kareen. I rather fancy she still has the other." Cordelia nested it deeply in the inner pocket of one of Drou's Vorbarra-crested boleros, worn over Cordelia's dress to complete the picture of an inner Residence worker.

  When their preparations were as complete as possible, Drou led them again into narrowing darkness. "Now we're under the Residence itself," she whispered, turning sideways. "We go up this ladder, between the walls. It was added after, there's not much space."

  This proved an understatement. Cordelia sucked in her breath and climbed after her, sandwiched flat between two walls, trying not to accidently touch or thump. The ladder was made, naturally, of wood. Her head throbbed with exhaustion and adrenaline. She mentally measured the width. Getting the uterine replicator back down this ladder was going to be a bitch. She told herself sternly to think positively, then decided that was positive. Why am I doing this? I could be back at Tanery Base with Aral right now, letting these Barrayarans kill each other all day long, if it is their pleasure. . . .

  Above her, Drou stepped aside onto some sort of tiny ledge, a mere board. When Cordelia came up beside her, she gestured "stop" and extinguished her hand-light. Drou touched some silent latch mechanism, and a wall panel swung outward before them. Clearly, everything had been kept well oiled right up to Ezar's death.

  They looked out into the old Emperor's bedchamber. They had expected it to be empty. Drou's mouth opened in a voiceless O of dismay and horror.

  Ezar's huge old carved wooden bed, the one he'd for-God's-sake died in, was occupied. A shaded light, dimmed to an orange glow, cast highlight and shadow across two bare-torsoed, sleeping forms. Even in this foreshortened view, Cordelia instantly recognized the dish-face and moustache of Vidal Vordarian. He sprawled across four-fifths of the bed, his heavy arm flung possessively across Princess Kareen. Her dark hair was tumbled on the pillow. She slept in a tight, tiny ball in the upper corner of the bed, facing outward, white arms clutched to her chest, nearly in danger of falling out.

  Well, we're reached Kareen. But there's a hitch. Cordelia shivered with the impulse to shoot Vordarian in his sleep. But the energy discharge must set off alarms. Until she had Miles's replicator in her hand, she was not ready to run for it. She motioned Drou to close the panel again, and breathed "Down," to Bothari, waiting beneath her. They reversed their painstaking four-flight climb. Back in the tunnel, Cordelia turned to face the girl, who was crying quite silently.

  "She's sold out to him," Droushnakovi whispered, her voice shaking with grief and revulsion.

  "If you'll explain to me what power-base you imagine she has to resist the man right now, I'd be interested to hear it," said Cordelia tartly. "What do you expect her to do, fling herself out a window to avoid a fate worse than death? She did fates worse than death with Serg, I don't think they hold any more emotion for her."

  "But if only we'd got here sooner, I might—we might have saved her."

  "We still might."

  "But she's really sold out!"

  "Do people lie in their sleep?" asked Cordelia. At Drou's confused look, she explained. "She didn't look like a lover to me. She lay like a prisoner. I promised we'd try for her, and we will." Time. "But we'll go for Miles first. Let's try the second exit."

  "We'll have to pass through more monitored corridors," Droushnakovi warned.

  "Can't be helped. If we wait, this place will start waking up, and we'll hit more people."

  "They're coming on duty in the kitchens right now," sighed Drou. "I used to stop in for coffee and hot pastries, some days."

  Alas, a commando raid could not knock off for breakfast. This was it. Go or no-go? Was it bravery, or stupidity, that drove her on? It couldn't be bravery, she was sick with fear, the same hot acid nausea she'd felt just before combat during the Escobar war. Familiarity with the sensation didn't help. If I do not act, my child will die. She would simply have to do without courage. "Now," Cordelia decided. "There will be no better chance."

  Up the narrow ladder again. The second panel opened in the old Emperor's private office. To Cordelia's relief it still remained dark and unused, untouched since it had been cleaned out and locked after Ezar's death last spring. His comconsole desk, with all its Security overrides, was disconnected, wiped of secrets, dead as its owner. The windows were still dark, with the tardy winter morning.

  Kou's stick banged against Cordelia's calf as she strode across the room. It did look odd, hitched to her waist too obviously like a sword. On a bureau in the office was a wide antique tray holding a flat ceramic bowl, typical of the knickknacks that cluttered the Residence. Cordelia laid the stick across the tray and lifted it solemnly, servant-fashion.

  Droushnakovi nodded approval. "Carry it halfway between your waist and your chest," she whispered. "And keep your spine straight, they always told me."

  Cordelia nodded. They closed the panel behind them, straightened themselves, and entered the lower corridor of the north wing.

  Two Residence serving women and a security guard. At first glance, they looked perfectly natural in this setting, even in these troubled times. A guard corporal standing duty at the foot of the Petite Stairway at the corridor's west end came to attention at the sight of Bothari's ImpSec and rank tabs; they exchanged salutes. They were passing out of sight up around the stairs' curve before he looked again, harder. Cordelia steeled herself not to break into a panicked run. A subtle piece of misdirection; the two women couldn't be a threat, they were already guarded. That their guard could be the threat, might escape the corporal for minutes yet.

  They turned into the upper corridor. There. Behind that door, according to the loyalists' reports, Vordarian kept the captured replicator. Right under his eye. Perhaps as a human shield; any explosive dropped on Vordarian's quarters must kill tiny Miles as well. Or did the Barrayaran think of her damaged child as human?

  Another guard stood outside that door. He stared at them suspiciously, his hand touching his sidearm. Cordelia and Droushnakovi walked on by without turning their heads. Bothari's exchanged salute flowed smoothly into a clip to the man's jaw that snapped his head back into the wall. Bothari caught him before he dropped. They swung the door open and dragged the guard inside; Bothari took his place in the corridor. Silently, Drou closed the door.

  Cordelia stared wildly around the little chamber, looking for automatic monitors. The room might formerly have been a bedroom of the sort once slept in by bodyservants to be near their Vorish masters, or perhaps an unusually large wardrobe; it didn't even have a window overlooking some dull inner court. The portable uterine replicator sat on a cloth-covered table in the exact center of the room. Its lights still glowed their reassuring greens and ambers. No feral red eyes warned of malfunction yet. A breath half-agony, half-relief, tore from Cordelia's lips at the sight of it.

  Droushnakovi gazed around the room unhappily.

  "What's wrong, Drou?" whispered Cordelia.

  "Too easy," the girl muttered.

  "We're not done yet. Say 'easy' an hour from now." She licked her lips, shaken by secret subliminal agreement with Droushnakovi's evaluation. No help for it. Grab and go. Speed, not secrecy, was their hope now.

  She set the tray down on the table, reached for the replicator's carrying handle, and stopped. Something, something wrong . . . she stared more closely at the readouts. The oxygenation monitor wasn't even functioning. Though its indicator light glowed green, the nutrient fluid level read 00.00. Empty.

&
nbsp; Cordelia's mouth opened in a silent wail. Her stomach churned. She leaned closer, eyes devouring all the illogical hash of false readouts. Her hagridden nightmare, made suddenly and horribly real—had they dumped it on the floor, into a drain, down a toilet? Had Miles died quickly, mercifully smashed, or had they let the tiny infant, bereft of life-support, twitch to death in agony while they watched? Perhaps they hadn't even bothered to watch. . . .

  The serial number. Look at the serial number. A hopeless hope, but . . . she forced her blurring eyes to focus, her racing mind to try and remember. She had fingered that number, pensively, back in Vaagen and Henri's lab, meditating upon this piece of technology and the distant world that had created it—and this number didn't match. Not the same replicator, not Miles's! One of the sixteen others, used to bait this trap.

  Her heart sank. How many other traps were laid? She pictured herself running frantically from replicator to replicator, like a distraught child in some cruel game of keep-away, searching. . . . I shall go mad.

  No. Wherever the real replicator was, it was near to Vordarian's person. Of that, she was sure. She knelt beside the table, putting her head down a moment to fight the blood-drained black balloons that clouded her vision and threatened to empty her mind of consciousness. She lifted the cloth. There. A pressure-sensor. Was this Vordarian's own clever idea? Slick and vicious. Drou bent to follow her gesture.

  "A trap," whispered Cordelia. "Lift the replicator, and the alarms go off."

  "If we disarm it—"

  "No. Don't bother. It's false bait. Not the right replicator. It's an empty, with the controls buggered to make it look like it's running." Cordelia tried to think clearly through the pounding in her skull. "We'll have to retrace our steps. Back down, and up. I hadn't expected to encounter Vordarian here. But I guarantee he'll know where Miles is. A little old-fashioned interrogation. We'll be working against time. When the alarm goes up—"

  Footsteps thudded in the corridor, and shouts. The chirping buzz of stunner fire. Swearing, Bothari flung himself backward through the door. "That's done it. They've spotted us."

  When the alarm goes up, it's all over, Cordelia's thought completed itself, in a vertigo of loss. No window, one door, and they'd just lost control of their only exit. Vordarian's trap had worked after all. May Vidal Vordarian rot in hell. . . .

  Droushnakovi clutched her stunner. "We won't surrender you, Milady. We'll fight to the end."

  "Rubbish," snapped Cordelia. "There's nothing our deaths would buy here but the deaths of a few more of Vordarian's goons. Meaningless."

  "You mean we should just quit?"

  "Suicidal glory is the luxury of the irresponsible. We're not giving up. We're waiting for a better opportunity to win. Which we can't take if we're stunned or nerve-fried." Of course, if that had been the real replicator on the table . . . she was insane enough by now to sacrifice these people's lives for her son's, Cordelia reflected ruefully, but not yet mad enough to trade them for nothing. She hadn't grown that Barrayaran yet.

  "You give yourself to Vordarian as a hostage," Bothari warned.

  "Vordarian has held me hostage since the day he took Miles," Cordelia said sadly. "This changes nothing."

  A few minutes of shouted negotiations through the door accomplished their surrender, despite the hair-trigger nerves of the security guards. They tossed out their weapons. The guards ran a scan for power packs to be sure, then four of them piled into the little room to frisk their new prisoners. Two more waited outside as backup. Cordelia made no sudden moves to startle them. A guard frowned puzzlement when the interesting lump in Cordelia's vest turned out to be only a child's shoe. He laid it on the table next to the tray.

  The commander, a man in the maroon and gold Vordarian livery, spoke into his wrist comm. "Yes. We're secured here. Tell m'lord. No, he said to wake him. You want to explain why you didn't? Thank you."

  The guards did not prod them into the corridor, but waited. The still-unconscious man Bothari had clipped was dragged out. The guards placed Cordelia, arms outstretched to the wall and legs straddled, in a row with Bothari and Droushnakovi. She was dizzy with despair. But Kareen would come to her sometime, even as a prisoner. Must come to her. All she needed was thirty seconds with Kareen, maybe less. When I see Kareen, you are a dead man, Vordarian. You may walk and talk and give orders, unconscious of your demise for weeks, but I'll seal your fate as surely as you've sealed my son's.

  The reason for the wait materialized at last; Vordarian himself, in green uniform trousers and slippers, bare-chested, shouldered his way through the doorway. He was followed by Princess Kareen, clutching a dark red velvet robe around her. Cordelia's heart hammered at a doubled rate. Now?

  "So. The trap worked," Vordarian began complacently, but added a genuinely shocked "Huh!" as Cordelia pushed away from the wall and turned to face him. A hand signal stopped a guard from shoving her back into position. The shock on Vordarian's face gave way to a wolfish grin. "My God, did it work! Excellent!" Kareen, hovering behind him, stared at Cordelia in bewildered astonishment.

  MY trap worked, Cordelia thought, stunned with her opportunity. Watch me. . . .

  "That's the thing, my lord," said the liveried man, not at all happily. "It didn't work. We didn't pick this party up at the outer perimeter of the Residence and clear their way, they just bloody turned up—without triggering anything. That shouldn't have happened. If I hadn't come along looking for Roget, we might not have spotted 'em."

  Vordarian shrugged, too delighted by the magnitude of his prey to issue some trifling censure. "Fast-penta that frill," he pointed at Droushnakovi, "and I imagine you'll find out how. She used to work in Residence Security."

  Droushnakovi glowered over her shoulder at Princess Kareen in hurt accusation; Kareen unconsciously pulled her robe up more closely about her neck, her dark eyes full of equally hurt question.

  "Well," said Vordarian, still smiling at Cordelia, "is my Lord Vorkosigan so thin of troops he sends his wife to do their work? We cannot lose." He smiled at his guards, who smiled back.

  Damn, I wish I'd shot this lout in his sleep. "What have you done with my son, Vordarian?"

  Vordarian said through his teeth, "An outworlder frill will never gain power on Barrayar by scheming to give a mutant the Imperium. That, I guarantee."

  "Is that the official line, now? I don't want power. I just object to idiots having power over me."

  Behind Vordarian, Kareen's lips quirked sadly. Yes, listen to me, Kareen!

  "Where's my son, Vordarian?" Cordelia repeated doggedly.

  "He's Emperor Vidal now," Kareen remarked, her glance going back and forth between them, "if he can keep it."

  "I will," Vordarian promised. "Aral Vorkosigan has no better a blood-claim than my own. And I will protect where Vorkosigan's party has failed. Protect and preserve the real Barrayar." His head shifted; apparently this assertion was directed over his shoulder to Kareen.

  "We have not failed," Cordelia whispered, meeting Kareen's eyes. Now. She lifted the shoe from the table, and stretched out her arm with it; Kareen's eyes widened. She darted forward and grabbed it. Cordelia's hand spasmed like a dying runner's giving up the baton in some mortal relay race. Fierce certainty bloomed like fire in her soul. I have you now, Vordarian. The sudden movement sent a ripple through the armed guards. Kareen examined the shoe with passionate intensity, turning it in her hands. Vordarian's brows rose in bafflement, then he dismissed Kareen from his attention and turned to his liveried guard commander.

  "We'll keep all three of these prisoners here in the Residence. I'll personally attend the fast-penta interrogations. This is a spectacular opportunity—"

  Kareen's face, when she lifted it again to Cordelia, was terrible with hope.

  Yes, thought Cordelia. You were betrayed. Lied to. Your son lives; you must move and think and feel again, no more the walking numbness of a dead spirit beyond pain. This is no gift I've brought you. It is a curse.

  "Kareen," sa
id Cordelia softly, "where is my son?"

  "The replicator is on a shelf in the oak wardrobe, in the old Emperor's bedchamber," Kareen replied steadily, locking her eyes to Cordelia's. "Where is mine?"

  Cordelia's heart melted in gratitude for her curse, live pain. "Safe and well, when I last saw him, as long as this pretender," she jerked her head at Vordarian, "doesn't find out where. Gregor misses you. He sends his love." Her words might have been spikes, pounded into Kareen's body.

  That got Vordarian's attention. "Gregor is at the bottom of a lake, killed in the flyer crash with that traitor Negri," he said roughly. "The most insidious lie is the one you want to hear. Guard yourself, my lady Kareen. I could not save him, but I will avenge him. I promise you that."

  Uh-oh. Wait, Kareen. Cordelia bit her lip. Not here. Too dangerous. Wait your best opportunity. Wait till the bastard's asleep, at least—but if even a Betan hesitated to shoot her enemy sleeping, how much less a Vor? She is true Vor. . . .

  An unfriendly smile crinkled Kareen's lips. Her eyes were alight. "This has never been immersed," she said softly.

  Cordelia heard the murderous undertones ringing like a bell; Vordarian, apparently, only heard the breathiness of some girlish grief. He glanced at the shoe, not grasping its message, and shook his head as if to clear it of static. "You'll bear another son someday," he promised her kindly. "Our son."

  Wait, wait, wait, Cordelia screamed inside.

  "Never," whispered Kareen. She stepped back beside the guard in the doorway, snatched his nerve disruptor from his open holster, aimed it point-blank at Vordarian, and fired.

  The startled guard knocked her hand up; the shot went wide, crackling into the ceiling. Vordarian dove behind the table, the only furniture in the room, rolling. His liveried man, in pure spinal reflex, snapped up his nerve disruptor and fired. Kareen's face muscles locked in death-agony as the blue fire washed around her head; her mouth pulled open in a last soundless cry. Wait, Cordelia's thought wailed.

  Vordarian, utterly horrified, bellowed "No!", scrambled to his feet, and tore a nerve disruptor from the hand of another guard. The liveried man, realizing the enormity of his error, tossed his weapon away as if to divorce himself from his action. Vordarian shot him.