Mirror Dance b-9

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  “We’ll tell Baron Fell he’s in the shower. That’ll be true enough.”

  A shower. Food. He was so ravenous as to be almost beyond hunger, numb in the belly, listless in the flesh. And cold.

  “All I can say,” said Quinn, “is that he’s a damn poor imitation of the real Miles Vorkosigan.”

  Yes, that’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.

  Bothari-Jesek shook her head in, presumably, exasperated agreement. “Come on,” she said to him.

  She escorted him to an officer’s cabin, small but thank-God private. It was disused, blank and clean, military-austere, the air a little stale. He supposed Thorne must now be similarly housed nearby.

  “I’ll get some clean clothes sent over for you from the Ariel. And send some food.”

  “Food first—please?”

  “Sure.”

  “Why are you being nice to me?” His voice came out plaintive and suspicious, making him sound weak and paranoid, he feared.

  Her aquiline face went introspective. “I want to know … who you are. What you are.”

  “You know. I’m a manufactured clone. Manufactured right here on Jackson’s Whole.”

  “I don’t mean your body.”

  He hunched in an automatic defensive posture, though he knew it emphasized his deformities.

  “You are very closed,” she observed. “Very alone. That’s not at all like Miles. Usually.”

  “He’s not a man, he’s a mob. He’s got a whole damned army trailing around after him.” Not to mention the harrowing harem. “I suppose he likes it like that.”

  Her lips curved in an unexpected smile. It was the first time he’d seen her smile. It changed her face. “He does, I think.” Her smile faded. “Did.”

  “You’re doing this for him, aren’t you. Treating me like this because you think he’d want it.” Not in his own right, no, never, but all for Miles and his damned brother-obsession.

  “Partly.”

  Right.

  “But mostly,” she said, “because someday Countess Vorkosigan will ask me what I did for her son.”

  “You’re planning to trade Baron Bharaputra for him, aren’t you?”

  “Mark …” her eyes were dark with a strange … pity? irony? He could not read her eyes. “She’ll mean you.”

  She turned on her heel and left him by himself, sealed in the cabin.

  He showered in the hottest water the tiny unit would yield, and stood for long minutes in the heat of the dryer-blast, till his skin flushed red, before he stopped shivering. He was dizzy with exhaustion. When he finally emerged, he found someone had been and gone and left clothes and food. He hastily pulled on underwear, a black Dendarii T-shirt, and a pair of his progenitor’s ship-knit grey trousers, and fell upon the dinner. It wasn’t a dainty Naismith-special-diet this time, but rather a tray of standard ready-to-eat rations designed to keep a large and physically active trooper going strong. It was far from gourmet fare, but it was the first time he’d had enough food on s plate for weeks. He devoured it all, as if whatever fairy had delivered it might reappear and snatch it away again. Stomach aching, he crawled into bed and lay on his side. He no longer shivered as if from cold, nor felt drained and sweating and shaky from low blood sugar, yet a kind of psychic reverberation still rolled like a black tide through is body.

  At least you got the clones out.

  No. Miles got the clones out.

  Dammit, dammit, dammit …

  This half-baked disaster was not the glorious redemption of which he’d dreamed. Yet what had he expected the aftermath to be? In all is desperate plotting, he’d planned almost nothing past his projected return to Escobar with the Ariel. To Escobar, grinning, with the clones under his wing. He’d imagined himself dealing with an enraged Miles then, but then it would have been too late for Miles to stop him, too late to take his victory from him. He’d half-expected to be arrested, but to go willingly, whistling. What had he wanted?

  To be free of survivor guilt? To break that old curse? Nobody you knew back then is still alive… . That was the motive he’d thought of as driving him, when he thought at all. Maybe it wasn’t so simple, he’d wanted to free himself from something. … In the last two years, reed of Ser Galen and the Komarrans by the actions of Miles Vorkosigan, freed again altogether by Miles on a London street at dawn, he had not found the happiness he’d dreamed of during his slavery to he terrorists. Miles had broken only the physical chains that bound him; others, invisible, had cut so deep that flesh had grown around hem.

  What did you think? That if you were as heroic as Miles, they’d lave to treat you like Miles? That they would have to love you?

  And who were they? The Dendarii? Miles himself? Or behind Stiles, those sinister, fascinating shadows, Count and Countess Vorkosigan?

  His image of Miles’s parents was blurred, uncertain. The unbalanced Galen had presented them, his hated enemies, as black villains, he Butcher of Komarr and his virago wife. Yet with his other hand he’d required Mark to study them, using unedited source materials, heir writings, their public speeches, private vids. Miles’s parents were Nearly complex people, hardly saints, but just as clearly not the foaming sadistic sodomite and murderous bitch of Galen’s raving paranoias.

  In the vids Count Aral Vorkosigan appeared merely a grey-haired, thick-set man with oddly intent eyes in his rather heavy face, with a rich, raspy, level voice. Countess Cordelia Vorkosigan spoke less often, a tall woman with red-roan hair and notable grey eyes, too powerful to be called pretty, yet so centered and balanced as to seem beautiful even though, strictly speaking, she was not.

  And now Bothari-Jesek threatened to deliver him to them …

  He sat up, and turned on the light. A quick tour of the cabin revealed nothing to commit suicide with. No weapons or blades—the Dendarii had disarmed him when he’d come aboard. Nothing to hang a belt or rope from. Boiling himself to death in the shower was not an option, a sealed fail-safe sensor turned it off automatically when it exceeded physiological tolerances. He went back to bed.

  The image of a little, urgent, shouting man with his chest exploding outward in a carmine spray replayed in slow motion in his head. He was surprised when he began to cry. Shock, it had to be the shock that Bothari-Jesek had diagnosed. I hated the little bugger when he was alive, why am I crying? It was absurd. Maybe he was going insane.

  Two nights without sleep had left him ringingly numb, yet he could not sleep now. He only dozed, drifting in and out of near-dreams and recent, searing memories. He half-hallucinated about being in a rubber raft on a river of blood, bailing frantically in the red torrent, so that when Quinn came to get him after only an hour’s rest, it was actually a relief.

  Chapter Nine

  “Whatever you do,” said Captain Thorne, “don’t mention the Betan rejuvenation treatment.

  Mark frowned. “What Betan rejuvenation treatment? Is there one?”

  “No.”

  “Then why the hell would I mention it?”

  “Never mind, just don’t.”

  Mark gritted his teeth, swung around in his station chair square to he vid plate, and pressed the keypad to lower his seat till his booted feet were flat to the floor. He was fully kitted in Naismith’s officer’s greys. Quinn had dressed him as though he were a doll, or an idiot child. Quinn, Bothari-Jesek, and Thorne had then preceded to fill his lead with a mass of sometimes-conflicting instructions on how to play Miles in the upcoming interview. As if I didn’t know. The three captains now each sat in station chairs out of range of the vid pick-up in he Peregrine’s tac room, ready to prompt him through an ear-bug, and he’d thought Galen was a puppet master. His ear itched, and he wriggled the bug in irritation, earning a frown from Bothari-Jesek. Quinn had never stopped scowling.

  Quinn had never stopped. She still wore her blood-soaked fatigues, her sudden inheritance of command of this debacle had allowed her no rest. Thorne had cleaned up and changed to ship greys, but obviously had not slept yet. Bot
h their faces stood out pale in the shadows, too sharply lined. Quinn had made Mark take a stimulant when, getting him dressed, she’d found him too muzzy-mouthed for her taste, and he did not quite like its effects. His head and eyes were almost too clear, but his body felt beaten. All the edges and surfaces of the tac room seemed to stand out with unnatural clarity. Sounds and voices in his ears seemed to have a painful serrated quality, sharp and blurred at once. Quinn was on the stuff too, he realized, watching her wince at a high electronic squeal from the comm equipment.

  (“All right, you’re on,”) said Quinn through the ear-bug as the vid plate in front of him began to sparkle. They all shut up at last.

  The image of Baron Fell materialized, and frowned at him too. Georish Stauber, Baron Fell of House Fell, was unusual for the leader of a Jacksonian Great House in that he still wore his original body. An old man’s body. The Baron was stout, pink of face, with a shiny liver-spotted scalp fringed by white hair trimmed short. The silk tunic he wore in his House’s particular shade of green made him look like a hypothyroid elf. But there was nothing elfin about his cold and penetrating eyes. Miles was not intimidated by a Jacksonian Baron’s power, Mark reminded himself. Miles was not intimidated by any power backed by less than three entire planets. His father the Butcher of Komarr could eat Jacksonian Great Houses for breakfast.

  He, of course, was not Miles.

  Screw that. I’m Miles for the next fifteen minutes, anyway.

  “So, Admiral,” rumbled the Baron. “We meet again after all.”

  “Quite.” Mark managed not to let his voice crack.

  “I see you are as presumptuous as ever. And as ill-informed.”

  “Quite.”

  (“Start talking, dammit,”) Quinn’s voice hissed in his ear.

  Mark swallowed. “Baron Fell, it was not a part of my original battle plan to involve Fell Station in this raid. I am as anxious to decamp with my forces as you are to have us leave. To that end, I request your help as a go-between. You … know that we’ve kidnapped Baron Bharaputra, I trust?”

  “So I’m told.” One of Fell’s eyelids tic’d. “You’ve rather overreached your available back-up, have you not?”

  “Have I?” Mark shrugged. “House Fell is in a state of vendetta with House Bharaputra, are you not?”

  “Not exactly. House Fell was on the verge of ending the vendetta with House Bharaputra. We’ve found it mutually unprofitable, of late. I’m now suspected of collusion in your raid.” The Baron’s frown deepened.

  “Uh …” his thought was interrupted by Thorne whispering, (“Tell him Bharaputra’s alive and well.”)

  “Baron Bharaputra is alive and well,” said Mark, “and can remain so, for all I care. As a go-between, it seems to me you would be well-placed to demonstrate your good faith to House Bharaputra by helping to get him back. I only wish to trade him—intact—for one item, and then we’ll be gone.”

  “You are optimistic,” Fell said dryly.

  Mark plowed on. “A simple, advantageous trade. The Baron for my clone.”

  (“Brother,”) Thorne, Quinn, and Bothari-Jesek all corrected in unison in his ear-bug.

  “—brother,” Mark continued, edged. He unset his teeth. “Unfortunately, my … brother, was shot in the melee downside. Fortunately, he was successfully frozen in one of our emergency cryo-chambers. Um, unfortunately, the cryo-chamber was accidentally left behind in the scramble to get off. A live man for a dead one; I fail to see the difficulty.”

  The Baron barked a laugh, which he muffled in a cough. The three Dendarii faces across from Mark in the shadows were chill and stiff and not amused. “You’ve been having an interesting visit, Admiral. What do you want with a dead clone?”

  (“Brother,”) Quinn said again. (“Miles insists, always.”)

  (“Yes,”) seconded Thorne. (“That’s how I first knew you weren’t Miles, back on the Ariel, when I called you a clone and you didn’t jump down my throat.”)

  “Brother,” Mark repeated wearily. “There was no head-wound, and the cryo-treatment was begun almost instantly. He has good hope of revival, as such things go.”

  (“Only if we get him back,”) Quinn growled.

  “I have a brother,” remarked Baron Fell. “He inspires no such emotions in me.”

  I’m right with you, Baron, Mark thought.

  Thorne piped up in Mark’s ear, (“He’s talking about his half-brother, Baron Ryoval of House Ryoval. The original axis of this vendetta was between Fell and Ryoval. Bharaputra got dragged in later.”)

  I know who Ryoval is, Mark wanted to snap, but could not.

  “In fact,” Baron Fell went on, “my brother will be quite excited to learn you are here. After you so reduced his resources on your last visit, he is alas limited to small-scale attacks. But I suggest you watch your back.”

  “Oh? Do Ryoval’s agents operate so freely on Fell Station?” Mark purred.

  Thorne approved, (“Good one! Just like Miles.”)

  Fell stiffened. “Hardly.”

  Thorne whispered, (“Yes, remind him you helped him with his brother.”)

  What the hell had Miles done here, four years ago? “Baron. I helped you with your brother. You help me with mine, and we can call it square.”

  “Hardly that. The apples of discord you threw among us on your last departure took far too much time to sort out. Still … it’s true you dealt Ry a better blow that I could have.” Was there a tiny glint of approval in Fell’s eye? He rubbed his round chin. “Therefore, I will give you one day to complete your business and depart.”

  “You’ll act as go-between?”

  “The better to keep an eye on both parties, yes.”

  Mark explained the Dendarii’s best guess as to the approximate location of the cryo-chamber, and gave its description and serial numbers. “Tell the Bharaputrans, we think it may have been hidden or disguised in some way. Please emphasize, we wish it returned in good condition. And their Baron will be too.”

  (“Good,”) Bothari-Jesek encouraged. (“Let ’em know it’s too valuable to destroy, without letting ’em guess they could hold us up for more ransom.”)

  Fell’s lips thinned. “Admiral, you are an acute man, but I don’t think you altogether understand how we do things on Jackson’s Whole.”

  “But you do, Baron. That’s why we’d like to have you on our side.”

  “I am not on your side. That is perhaps the first thing you don’t understand.”

  Mark nodded, slowly; Miles would have, he thought. Fell’s attitude was strange. Faintly hostile. Yet he acts like he respects me.

  No. He respected Miles. Hell. “Your neutrality is all I ask.”

  Fell shot him a narrow glance from under his white eyebrows. “What about the other clones?”

  “What about them?”

  “House Bharaputra will be inquiring.”

  “They do not enter into this transaction. Vasa Luigi’s life should be sufficient and more.”

  “Yes, the trade seems uneven. What is so valuable about your late clone?”

  Three voices chorused in his ear, (“Brother!”) Mark yanked the ear-bug out and slapped it to the counter beside the vid plate. Quinn nearly choked.

  “I cannot trade back fractions of Baron Bharaputra,” snapped Mark. “Tempted as I am to start doing so.”

  Baron Fell raised a placating plump palm. “Calm, Admiral. I doubt it will be necessary to go so far.”

  “I hope not.” Mark trembled. “It’d be a shame if I had to send him back without his brain. Like the clones.”

  Baron Fell apparently read the absolute personal sincerity of his threat, for he opened both palms. “I’ll see what I can do, Admiral.”

  “Thank you,” whispered Mark.

  The Baron nodded; his image dissolved. By some trick of the holovid or the stimulant, Fell’s eyes seemed to linger for one last unsettling stare. Mark sat frozen for several seconds till he was certain they were gone.

  “Huh,” said Bothar
i-Jesek, sounding surprised. “You did that rather well.”

  He did not bother to answer that one.

  “Interesting,” said Thorne. “Why didn’t Fell ask for a fee or a cut?”

  “Dare we trust him?” asked Bothari-Jesek.

  “Not trust, exactly.” Quinn ran the edge of her index finger along her white teeth, nibbling. “But we must have Fell’s cooperation to transit Jumppoint Five. We dare not offend him, not for any money. I thought he would be more pleased with our bite out of Bharaputra, at the strategic situation seems to have changed since your last visit here, Bel.”

  Thorne sighed agreement.

  Quinn continued, “I want you to see what you can find out about the current balance of power here. Anything that may affect our operations, anything we can use to help. Houses Fell, Bharaputra and Ryoval, and anything coming up on the blindside. There’s something bout all this that’s making me feel paranoid as hell, though it may be just the drugs I’m on. But I’m too damned tired to see it right now.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.” Thorne nodded and withdrew.

  When the door hissed shut behind Thorne, Bothari-Jesek asked Quinn, “Have you reported all this to Barrayar yet?”

  “No.”

  “Any of it?”

  “No. I don’t want to send this one over any commercial comm channel, not even in code. Illyan may have a few deep cover agents here, but I don’t know who they are or how to access them. Miles would have known. And …”

  “And?” Bothari-Jesek raised an eyebrow.

  “And I’d really like to have the cryo-chamber back first.”

  “To shove under the door along with the report? Quinnie, it wouldn’t fit.”

  Quinn shrugged one defensive shoulder.

  After a moment Bothari-Jesek offered, “I agree with you about not sending anything through the Jacksonian jump-courier system, though.”

  “Yes, from what Illyan’s said, it’s riddled with spies, and not just the Great Houses checking up on each other, either. There’s nothing Barrayar could do to help us in the next day-cycle anyway.”

  “How long,” Mark swallowed, “is that how long I have to go on laying Miles?”