Captain Vorpatril's alliance mv-14

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  “And isn’t talking to you, you said. That’s actually rather convenient, right now. At least you know it’s not personal.”

  Ivan wasn’t so sure.

  “Which means the Arquas are under the gun to solve their visa extension problem, or they’ll never make it to the engineering ones. I am so tempted to help with that…”

  Afraid your game will be over too soon, Simon?

  In any case, Simon had apparently decided that it was time for this chat to be over, for he slid the conversation into amenities, and then somehow, a few minutes later, Ivan found himself and By being amiably escorted to the door. Ivan, calculating how soon his mother was likely to be back, allowed the eviction without protest.

  “That was reassuring,” said Byerly, as they settled themselves in Ivan’s two-seater once more. “Illyan is on top of it. Might have known.”

  Ivan’s lips twisted. “Eh…”

  By glanced aside at him. “I didn’t notice anything addled about any of that. Did you?”

  “No,” Ivan admitted. Addled isn’t exactly the problem, here. Where would Tej fall, if things played out the way Simon pictured—or if they didn’t, for that matter, but in any case, if she was forced to take sides? If she and Ivan each were?

  By buckled up in a pointed manner; Ivan aimed his car out of the garage and turned into the street, and said, “Where do you want me to drop you? Your flat? Or back to the hotel?”

  “No, I shan’t put any more Arquas to the trouble of finding new circles to lead me in tonight.” By sighed. “My flat, I suppose.”

  Ivan took the turn that would lead on to the shabby-trendy parts of Old Town Vorbarr Sultana. By put his head back and closed his eyes, although, given the lack of any white-knuckled grips anywhere, presumably not at Ivan’s driving, which was if not sedate was at least equally fatigued. After a few minutes, apropos some unguessable chain of thought, By remarked, “I don’t usually get attached to my surveillance subjects.”

  “Considering your usual crowd, I can see why,” said Ivan.

  “Mm,” said By, not disagreeing. And after another minute, “Ivan, you’ve had a lot of girlfriends—”

  Byerly Vorrutyer is about to ask me for relationship advice? Ivan didn’t know whether to be flattered or appalled. Or to distract his passenger with a few evasive lightflyer moves, somewhat impeded by being in a ground vehicle.

  “—seems like every time I saw you, you had a different one hanging on your arm.”

  “They weren’t all girlfriends. Mamere always made me do a lot of diplomatic and social escort duty.” Actual real take-to-bed girlfriends had been less abundant, though Ivan wasn’t about to explain this to By.

  “You made them all look like girlfriends.”

  “Well, sure.”

  “How did you keep them all happy?”

  The light-spangled night rain flickered by outside the canopy. The wet streets wanted background music, some soulful lament to urban loneliness…“You know,” and somehow, probably because of the damned rain, Ivan’s mouth went off on its own: “I’ve always wondered why nobody ever notices that lots and lots of girlfriends entail lots and lots of breakups.” Enough to learn all the road signs by heart, yeah.

  By’s eyes opened; his brows climbed. “Huh. You never seemed to point up that part.”

  “No.”

  A lot of his troubles had seemed to start, come to think, with oblique or not-so-oblique pressure for a high Vor wedding, even from a couple of the women who were already married, which Ivan had naively thought would put a sock in the issue. He’d never had those troubles with Tej, hah. If he’d known how relaxing being married—as opposed to getting married—could be, he might have done this years ago, except then it wouldn’t have been with Tej, so it wouldn’t have been like this, now would it? He contemplated this paradox glumly.

  By leaned back in his seat with a tired sigh. “Well, at least parting with Tej should be no challenge for you.”

  Ivan could not, he supposed, stop his car in the middle of traffic and strangle an ImpSec agent, no matter how personally annoying the man was. Fortunately, By’s block came up before temptation overcame prudence. By bade him thanks and farewell with his usual boneless wave.

  Ivan wondered whether Tej would be home yet. Or not. And then couldn’t decide whether to speed up or slow down, an irresolution that kept him tepidly at the speed limit all the way back to his building’s garage.

  * * *

  Ivan spent the next two days chasing Tej around the clock. She returned from the hotel very late, Rishless, when Ivan was already half comatose and shrinking from the thought of tomorrow morning’s alarm. The workweek resumed; Ivan’s shift ran over due to what seemed an unending stream of minor Ops cockups and stupidities eliciting a return of memos running a short range from the tart to the sarcastic, and had Ivan mentally composing a whole new level of the latter, searing. In any case, he missed dinner, and Tej, who was out doing more driving.

  Ivan’s preemptive strike for the next evening—dinner reservations at a restaurant for Tej and her family, for which she’d have to show up if only because she’d have to ferry the rest of them—resulted in less than a quorum of Arquas, but still more than enough to prevent any serious personal discussions. Vapid tourist talk dominated the table. The public venue had been a bad idea. Ivan should invite them to his flat for the sort of intimate conclave he wanted—preferably with fast-penta served with the soup. Or maybe the predinner drinks. Alas that the truth drug could not be administered orally.

  No private talk with Tej that night, either, nor even sex as a substitute, an evasion for which Ivan was beginning to think he might be willing to settle. Since the evening ended with Rish back on Ivan’s couch, presumably By’s bed-luck was equally dire, but it seemed an insufficient consolation. And in the morning, Tej let him oversleep too much—deliberately?—so that he had to rush off for his day of arm-wrestling with Ops’s finest idiots without talk, kisses, breakfast, or coffee.

  This can’t go on.

  * * *

  The Mycoborer was misbehaving.

  Tej adjusted her mask—a simple hospital filter mask, without electronic components, acquired by Amiri from who-knew-where—yanked on her plastic gloves, and prepared to follow Amiri, Grandmama, and Jet on the none-too-solid flex-ladder down the meter-wide black shaft. The chemical cold lights hooked to everyone’s belts bobbed as they descended, making a bright but unsteady illumination.

  She had to admit, the results of the first three days of Mycoborer penetration were impressive. After that initial visit, Amiri and Jet had found their way to the garage on their own, by different routes each time, for once-a-day checks and repositionings of new myco-sticks as the old ones successively pooped out. But Tej was afraid Grandmama was going to have to report to her Earth friend that his straight route and uniform diameter goals were still a hope for the future. The black walls of the shaft wavered—and not just from her wobbling light—widened and constricted irregularly, and bent away. Tej arrived at a kind of foyer Amiri had made at the bottom of the shaft to store the bulk of their supplies, straightened, and caught her breath.

  Amiri held a finger to his mask. “As little talking as possible, from here on,” he whispered. Jet and Tej nodded dutifully. They’d left their wristcoms in the locked utility room, and traded shoes for soft, muffling slippers. Tej’s had bunny faces on the toes, and Grandmama’s had kittens, which was what they got for letting Em do the shopping, she supposed. The floor felt odd, through them—rubbery, not solid.

  The tunnel leading away toward the park was just wide enough to stand upright in, though Grandmama had to bend her head, except where it occasionally constricted, and they all had to duck through. Worse, it turned, randomly. Twice, they had to sit and slide around complete bends. It seemed less like traveling a tunnel than like crawling through a giant intestine.

  Continuing the comparison, the tube also seemed to be growing appendixes. Most were no larger in diameter than Tej
’s arm; she felt no impulse to stick her hand in, glove or no, but Jet, having taken a possessive attitude toward it all, demonstrated that one could. Tej made a face at him. Jet stopped at another irregular wide spot, his eyes bright over his mask.

  Amiri was leading Grandmama on toward an inspection of the working face; he cast a look of irritation over his shoulder, but could not, of course, yell at them. Their lights bobbed away.

  “Here!” Jet whispered, pointing with his light to his prize, or surprise, as he’d resolutely refused to tell his sister what the wildly wonderful thing that he’d found was.

  A pale, skeletal foot was sticking through the wall, at about waist height.

  Tej jumped back, and glared at her odd-brother. Even-brothers, odd-brothers, all brothers were the same. He apparently found it hilarious that she wasn’t allowed to scream, choking instead. She drew a calming breath, deciding that an unruffled front would be the best revenge. “Well, that’s one Barrayaran who won’t be bothering us.”

  Jet snickered, and drew a long, folding steel knife from his jacket pocket. He opened it and held the point to the rubbery wall beside the foot, leaning in. After a moment of resistance, it poked through.

  “What are you doing?” Tej demanded in a tight whisper, as he began to saw.

  “The walls harden up after a couple of days, as they cure,” he whispered back. “Won’t be able to do this tomorrow without making noise. It’s now or never.”

  Tej could see the logic of that, though she didn’t see the problem with never. Or at least, somebody else, much later. Jet, finding that he couldn’t pull the foot out of the wall even after he’d cut a small circle around it, started on a much larger circle. When he peeled that away, entirely too much dirt came through, and Tej wondered if she should run, and which way, but the stream trailed off. Jet dug a bit more, then stood up with his hand stuck through out of sight and a surprised expression on his face. “There’s space past here!”

  “Another tunnel, maybe?” asked Tej. “That poor fellow has to have got all the way down here somehow.”

  Jet knelt again, digging with canine enthusiasm. And style. After too much more dirt, he bent and wriggled through his opening. His voice came back after a moment: “Wow, you should see this!”

  Tej wasn’t sure that was true, but…she couldn’t let her little brother go off exploring in a dangerous place on his own, now, could she? She nearly had a responsibility to follow him.

  She stuffed her hair down her jacket collar, donned her knit hat, and wriggled after Jet.

  He was crouching in a small, smelly space seemingly held upright by some bowed-looking timber supports. Not very much farther along, some other supports were crushed very flat. Had a cave-in trapped their corpse?

  A long time ago, or the space would smell much worse. About half of the body was uncovered, face-down, skeletal arms out as if clawing. A tiny wisp of hair still clung to the skull, but otherwise most of the organics seemed to have decomposed, including some of his clothing. The synthetics still held up, shabbily; some woven straps, most of a backpack of some sort, flung out before him as if by his bony hands. Some metal bits were blobs of corrosion or rust, others still shiny, including those eye-pins she’d seen on the ImpSec men and a strange necklace around the skeleton’s neck. Tej worked it loose, to find a metal tag at the end with incised letters: an unfamiliar prole name, Abelard, V., the rank of sergeant—assuming that was what the abbreviation Ssgt. translated to—and a long alphanumeric string. “It looks like he was a Barrayaran soldier,” murmured Tej. “So what was he doing down here?”

  She looked up to find Jet opening the backpack.

  “Don’t touch that!” she said in a fierce whisper.

  “Why not?” asked Jet, folding back the cover.

  “I think it’s a bomb.”

  Even Jet paused at this. He brought his cold light closer to reveal a wad of corroded and uncorroded but in any case dead electronics, and an even more mysterious gray mass. “Er,” he said, and backed up a little.

  Tej pocketed the necklace and crawled over to look more closely. The gray mass, several kilos’ worth, was slumping, and old wires led into it. “Plastic explosive of some kind?” Tej hazarded.

  Jet’s brow wrinkled. “Some really old kind. Maybe it’s deteriorated by now.”

  “Maybe it’s not.”

  “Um.”

  A frightened whisper, Amiri’s voice, came from their hole. “Tej? Jet?”

  Jet rolled over, stuck his head down, and whispered back, “Amiri, you have to come see this!”

  “I told you to leave that damned foot alone.”

  “Yes, but it’s attached to a whole guy! You’re the doctor—you might be able to tell how old he is!”

  Some muffled swearing was followed, a few minutes later, by Amiri wriggling through their makeshift passage. Anger at his more adventurous siblings warred with curiosity, in his expression; with a visible mental IOU, curiosity won, temporarily. Amiri’s gloved fingers danced over the visible portions of the corpse, probing, pulling, checking.

  “Can’t be sure without knowing more about Barrayaran soil ecology,” he whispered. “But it’s not very dry down here. Not less than twenty years. Not more than forty. A local forensics expert could likely date it more precisely.” His eye at last fell on the backpack, stretched out beyond the skeletal fingers. “Oh, crap. Don’t even touch that!”

  Jet tried for an innocent grin, defeated by his medical mask.

  “Told you,” whispered Tej.

  “It might be too old to go off, though,” Jet suggested. “Maybe we should, like…try to take a little sample to analyze.”

  This approach plainly appealed to the researcher in Amiri, but he did stick his head down their hole to whisper, “Grandmama! You’re more of a chemist than I am. Do plastic explosives deteriorate over time?”

  “Some do,” her voice came back.

  “Ah.” Amiri unceremoniously plucked the knife from Jet’s hand, knelt, and gently tried to carve out a few grams of gray blob. It had apparently hardened with the decades.

  “…some become unstable,” Grandmama’s voice continued.

  Amiri abruptly desisted.

  “I vote we leave it alone,” said Tej. “Or at least come back later when everything else is done. If there’s time.”

  “Yes,” said Amiri, reluctantly folding the knife up. He didn’t give it back to Jet.

  Jet didn’t protest.

  From the same pocket, Amiri withdrew a child’s toy compass, a very simple analog tool indeed. He held up his cold light and squinted at the quivering needle. “I wonder where he was heading?”

  “Depends on if he was coming or going?” said Tej.

  Amiri sighed, and pocketed the compass again. “I need to get down here and hand-draw a meter-by-meter map, so we don’t waste time sending the Mycoborer in the wrong direction. Some more.”

  They wiggled after him back through their unauthorized hole to find Grandmama waiting, scowling at the pile of dirt.

  “Jet, you will have to clean this up,” she said, pointing. “Thoroughly, or everyone will be tracking it all over. And put something over this hole you made. The idea!”

  “But Grandmama, it was a dead body!”

  “Barrayaran graveyards are full of them, if you want more,” she said unsympathetically. “And very unsanitary they are, too. Cremation is much better.”

  That was the Cetagandan custom, certainly.

  Leaving the two boys to clean up, Grandmama gestured Tej back along the tunnel. Amiri didn’t deserve the chore, but it was plain someone had to watch Jet.

  As they went along, Tej studied the ceiling more warily. Was it bending down, at any point?

  They arrived back in the vestibule and doffed their masks and gloves. “What was wrong at the tunnel face?” Tej asked.

  “The Mycoborer split around an inclusion. Went off in four perfectly useless directions. We started another.”

  “What kind of inclusion?�
��

  “Mm, storm sewer, I would hypothesize. It was a cylindrical pipe, anyway, and we could hear water running on the other side.”

  “This deep?”

  “We are actually close to level with the river, at this stratum. Though it wasn’t Barrayaran work—far too well made. I think it probably dated back to the Ninth Satrapy.”

  “Grandmama—could our tunnel collapse? Like on the poor Barrayaran…” bomber? Tej tested that word-string in her mind, trying to decide if it made sense. Yeah, probably. Even if the fellow had been a suicide bomber, that had to have been a horrid death. She fingered the identity necklace in her pocket, and wondered if Ivan Xav owned a similar one. She’d not seen it among his things.

  “Certainly, in due course.” Grandmama frowned back down their tunnel. “You have to understand, a perfectly circular pipe is in effect two arches supporting each other—an extremely strong shape. I saw such arches back on Earth, built only of simple stones, that have survived three millennia, and that despite it being such a tectonically active planet.”

  “But our tunnel isn’t perfectly circular. It’s more sort of…intestinal.”

  “Yes, pity. Fortunately, it doesn’t have to last the ages, only a week or two.”

  But what if it collapses on somebody? Tej wanted to ask, but Grandmama was already climbing the rickety flex-ladder. She sighed and followed the carefully-moving kitty-slippers.

  * * *

  That night, by some miracle, Ivan found himself and Tej both awake and in the same place at the same time; and better yet, it was his bedroom. Tej was restless, though, wandering about the place. She opened the top drawer of Ivan’s dresser, into which he swept all his miscellaneous junk, and peered curiously, turning an item over now and then.

  “What are you looking for?”

  “I was just wondering…do you have any kind of military identification necklace? I’ve never seen you wear one.”

  “Necklace? Oh, dog tags.”

  “What do dogs have to do with it?”

  “Nothing, that’s just what they’re called. I dunno why. They’ve always been called that. Plural, though they only issue you the one. I suppose that’s what they are, but necklace probably sounded too girly for the grunts.”