Galeni smiled bleakly, sat up, and took to tapping the pen on the desk as Miles entered. "I've been thinking it over, Vorkosigan. I'm afraid we may not be able to avoid calling in the local authorities in this."
"I wish you wouldn't do that, sir." Miles pulled up a chair and sat astride it, arms athwart its back. "Involve them, and the consequences pass beyond our control."
"It will take a small army, to find those two on Earth now."
"I have a small army," Miles reminded him, "which had just demonstrated its effectiveness for this sort of thing, I think."
"Ha. True."
"Let the embassy hire the Dendarii Mercenaries to find our . . . missing persons."
"Hire? I thought Barrayar was already paying for them!"
Miles blinked innocently. "But sir, it's part of their covert status that that relationship is unknown even to the Dendarii themselves. If the embassy hires them in a formal contract for this job, it—covers the cover, so to speak."
Galeni raised his brows sardonically. "I see. And how do you propose to explain your clone to them?"
"If necessary, as a clone—of Admiral Naismith."
"Three of you, now?" said Galeni dubiously.
"Just set them to find your—find Ser Galen. Where he is, the clone will be too. It worked once."
"Hm," said Galeni.
"There's just one thing," Miles added. He ran one finger thoughtfully along the top of the chair back. "If we do succeed in catching them—just what is it that we plan to do with "em?"
The light pen tapped. "There are," said Galeni, "only two or three possibilities. One, they can be arrested, tried, and incarcerated for the crimes committed here on Earth."
"During the course of which," Miles observed seriously, "Admiral Naismith's cover as a supposedly independent operator will almost certainly be compromised, his true identity publicly revealed. I can't pretend the Barrayaran Empire will stand or fall on the Dendarii Mercenaries, but Security has found us useful in the past. Command may—I hope may—regard this as a poor trade. Besides, has my clone in fact committed any crimes he can be held for? I think he may even be a minor, by Eurolaw rules."
"Second alternative," Galeni recited. "Kidnap them and returned them secretly to Barrayar for trial, evading Earth's non-extradition status. If we had an order from on high, my guess is this would be it, the minimum proper paranoid Security response."
"For trial," said Miles, "or to be held indefinitely in some oubliette . . . For my—brother, that might not turn out as bad as he'd at first think. He has a friend in a very high place. If he can escape being secretly murdered by some—overexcited underling first, en route." Galeni and Miles exchanged glances. "But nobody's going to intercede for your father. Barrayar has always taken the killings in the Komarr Revolt to be civil crimes, not acts of war, and he never submitted to the loyalty oath and amnesty. He'll be up on capital charges. His execution will inevitably follow."
"Inevitably." Galeni pursed his lips, staring down at the toes of his boots. "The third possibility being—as you said—an order coming down for their secret assassination."
"Criminal orders can be successfully resisted," Miles observed, "if you have a strong enough stomach for it. High command isn't as free with that sort of thing as they were back in Emperor Ezar's day, fortunately. I submit a fourth possibility. It might be better not to catch these—awkward relatives—in the first place."
"Bluntly, Miles, if I fail to produce Ser Galen, my career will be smoke. I must already be suspect, for having failed to turn him up any time these last two years. Your suggestion skirts—not insubordination, that seems to be your normal mode of operation—but something worse."
"What about your predecessor here, who failed to discover him in five years? And if you do produce him now, will your career be any better off? You'll be suspect anyway, in the minds of those who are determined to be suspicious."
"I wish," Galeni's face had an inward look, deathly calm, his voice a reflective murmur, "I wish he had stayed dead in the first place. His first death was a much better one, glorious in the heat of battle. He had his place in history, and I was alone, past pain, without mother or father to torment me. How fortunate that science hasn't cracked human immortality. It's a great blessing that we can outlive old wars. And old warriors."
Miles mulled over the dilemma. In jail on Earth, Galen destroyed both Galeni's career and Admiral Naismith's, but lived. Shipped to Barrayar, he died; Galeni's career would be a little better off, but Galeni himself—would not be quite sane, Miles rather thought. The patricide would not have the rooted serenity to serve Komarr's complex future needs, certainly. But Naismith would live, his thought whispered temptingly. Left loose, the persistent Galen and Mark remained a threat of unknown, and so intolerable, proportion; if Miles and Galeni did nothing, high command would most certainly take the choice from them, issuing who-knew-what orders sealing the fate of their perceived enemies.
Miles loathed the thought of sacrificing Galeni's promising career to this crabbed old revolutionary who refused to give up. Yet Galen's destruction would also damage Galeni, just as certainly. Dammit, why couldn't the old man have pensioned himself off to some tropical paradise, instead of hanging around making trouble for the younger generation on the grounds, no doubt, that it was good for 'em? Mandatory retirement for revolutionaries, that's what they needed now.
What do you choose when all choices are bad?
"This choice is mine," said Galeni. "We have to go after them."
They stared at each other, both very tired.
"Compromise," suggested Miles. "Send the Dendarii Mercenaries out to locate, track, and monitor them. Don't attempt to pick them up yet. This will permit you to put all the embassy's resources to work on the problem of the courier, a purely Barrayaran-internal matter on any scale."
There was a silence. "Agreed," Galeni said at last. "But whatever finally happens—I want to get it over with quickly."
"Agreed," said Miles.
Miles found Elli sitting alone in the embassy cafeteria, leaning tired and a little blank over the remains of her dinner, ignoring the covert stares and hesitant smiles of various embassy personnel. He grabbed a snack and tea and slid into the seat across from her. Their hands gripped briefly across the table, then she rested her chin on her cupped palms again, elbows propped.
"So, what's next?" she asked.
"What's the traditional reward for a job well done in this man's army?"
Her dark eyes crinkled. "Another job."
"You got it. I've persuaded Captain Galeni to let the Dendarii mercenaries find Galen, just as you found us. How did you find us, by the way?"
"Lotta damn work, that's how. We started by crunching through that awful pile of data you beamed up from the embassy files about Komarrans. We eliminated the well-documented ones, the young children, and so on. Then we put the Intelligence computer team downside to break into the economic net and pull out credit files, and into the Eurolaw net—that was tricky—and pull out criminal files, and started looking for anomalies. That's where we found the break. About a year ago, the Earth-born son of a Komarran expatriate was picked up by the Eurolaw cops on some minor misdemeanor and found to have an unregistered stunner in his possession. Not being a deadly weapon, it merely cost him a fine, and as far as Eurolaw was concerned, that was that. But the stunner wasn't of Earth manufacture. It was old Barrayaran military issue.
"We began following him, both physically and through the computer net, finding out who his friends were, people who weren't in the embassy's computer. We were following up several other leads at the same time that failed to pan out. But this is where I got a compelling hunch. One of this kid's frequent contacts, a man named Van der Poole, was registered as an immigrant to Earth from the planet Frost IV. Now, during that investigation I did a couple of years back involving the stolen genes, I passed through Jackson's Whole—"
Miles nodded in memory.
"So I knew you could b
uy documented pasts there—one of the little high-profit-margin services certain laboratories sell to go along with the new faces and voices and finger– and retina-prints they offer. One of the planets they frequently use for this is Frost IV, on account of the tectonic disaster having wrecked their computer net—not to mention the rest of the place—twenty-eight years ago. A lot of perfectly legitimate people who left Frost IV then have uncheckable documentation. If you're over twenty-eight years old, Jackson's Whole can fit you right in. So whenever I see somebody above a certain age who claims to be from Frost IV, I'm automatically suspicious. Van der Poole was Galen, of course."
"Of course. My clone was another fine product of Jackson's Whole, by the way."
"Ah. It all fits, how nice."
"My congratulations to you and the whole Intelligence department. Remind me to make that an official commendation, when I next make it back to the Triumph."
"Which is when?" She crunched a piece of ice from the bottom of her glass and swirled the remainder around, trying to look only professionally interested.
Her mouth would taste cool, and tangy. . . . Miles blinked back into professional mode himself, conscious of the curious eyes of embassy personnel upon them. "Dunno. We're sure not done here yet. We should certainly transfer all the new data the Dendarii collected back to embassy files. Ivan's working now on what we pulled from Galen's comconsole. It's going to be harder this time. Galen—Van der Poole—will be hiding. And he's had a lot of experience at serious disappearing. But if and when you do turn him up—ah—report directly to me. I'll report to the embassy."
"Report what to the embassy?" Elli inquired, alert to his undertones.
Miles shook his head. "I'm not sure yet. I may be too tired to think straight, I'll see if it seems to make any more sense in the morning." Elli nodded and rose.
"Where are you going?" asked Miles in alarm.
"Back to the Triumph, to put the mass in motion, of course."
"But you can tight-beam—Who's on duty up there right now?"
"Bel Thorne."
"Right, all right. Let's go find Ivan, we can tight-beam the data swap right from here, and the orders as well." He studied the dark circles under her luminous eyes. "And how long have you been on your feet, anyway?"
"Oh, about the last, um," she glanced at her chrono, "thirty hours."
"Who has trouble delegating work, Commander Quinn? Send the orders, not yourself. And take a sleep shift before you start making mistakes too. I'll find you a place to bunk here at the embassy—" she met his eyes, suddenly grinning, "if you like," Miles added hastily.
"Will you, now?" she said softly. "I'd like that fine."
They paid a visit to Ivan, harried at his comconsole, and made the secured data link to the Triumph. Ivan, Miles noted happily, had lots and lots of work left to do. He escorted Elli up the lift tubes to his quarters.
Elli dove for the bathroom by right of first dibs. While hanging up his uniform Miles found his cat blanket bunged lumpily into a dark corner of his closet, doubtless where his terrified clone had thrown it his first night. The black fur broke into ecstatic rumbling when he picked it up. He spread it out carefully on his bed, patting it into place. "There."
Elli emerged from the shower in remarkably few minutes, fluffing her short wet curls out with her fingers, a towel slung attractively around her hips. She spotted the cat blanket, smiled, and hopped up and wriggled her bare toes in it. It shivered and purred louder.
"Ah," sighed Miles, contemplating them both in perfect contentment. Then doubt snaked through his garden of delight. Elli was looking around his room with interest. He swallowed. "Is this, ah, the first time you've been up here?" he asked in what he hoped was a casual tone.
"Uh-huh. I don't know why I was expecting something medieval. Looks more like an ordinary hotel room than what I would have expected of Barrayar."
"This is Earth," Miles pointed out, "and the Time of Isolation has been over for a hundred years. You have some odd ideas about Barrayar. But I just wondered, if my clone had, uh . . . are you sure you never sensed any difference at all during the four days? He was that good?" He smiled wretchedly, hanging on her answer. What if she'd noticed nothing? Was he really so transparent and simple that anyone could play him? Worse, what if she had noticed a difference—and liked the clone better . . . ?
Elli looked embarrassed. "Noticed, yes. But to jump from sensing there was something wrong with you, to realizing it wasn't you . . . maybe if we'd had more time together. We only talked by comm link, except for one two-hour trip downtown to spring Danio and his merry men from the locals, during which I thought you'd lost your mind. Then I decided you must have something up your sleeve, and just weren't telling me 'cause I'd …" her voice went suddenly smaller, "fallen out of favor, somehow."
Miles calculated, and breathed relief. So the clone hadn't had time to … ahem. He smiled wryly up at her.
"You see, when you look at me," she went on to explain, "it makes me feel—well—good. Not in the warm and fuzzy sense, though there's that too—"
"Warm and fuzzy," sighed Miles happily, leaning on her.
"Stop it, you goof, I'm serious," But she slipped her arms around him. Firmly, as if prepared to do immediate battle with any wight who might attempt to snatch him away again. "Good, like—I can do. Competent. You make me unafraid. Unafraid to try, unafraid of what others might think. Your—clone, good gods what a relief to know that—made me start wondering what was wrong with me. Though when I think how easily they took you, that night in the empty house, I could—"
"Sh, sh," Miles stopped her lips with one finger. "There is nothing wrong with you, Elli," he said, pleasantly muffled. "You are most perfectly Quinn." His Quinn . . .
"See what I mean? I suppose it saved your life. I'd been meaning to keep you—him—up to date on the hunt for Galeni, even it if was just an interim no-progress report. Which would have been his first tip-off that there was a hunt going on."
"Which he would have ordered stopped."
"Precisely. But then, when the break in the case came, I—thought I'd better be sure. Save it up, surprise you with the final result all wrapped up in a big bow—win back your regard, to be frank. In a way, he kept me from reporting to him."
"If it's any consolation, it wasn't dislike. You terrified him. Your face—not to mention the rest of you—has that effect on some men."
"Yes, the face …" Her hand touched one cheek, half-consciously, then fell more tenderly to ruffle his hair, "I think you've put your finger on it, what felt so wrong. You knew me when I had my old face, and no face, and the new face, and for you alone, it was all the same face."
His unbandaged hand traced over the arch of her brows, perfect nose, paused at her lips to collect a kiss, then down the ideal angle of her chin and velvet skin of her throat. "Yes, the face … I was young and dumb then. It seemed like a good idea at the time. It was only later that I realized it could be a handicap for you."
"Me, too," sighed Elli. "For the first six months, I was delighted. But the second time a soldier made a pass at me instead of following an order, I knew I definitely had a problem. I had to discover and teach myself all kinds of tricks, to get people to respond to the inside of me, and not the outside."
"I understand," said Miles.
"By the gods, you would." She looked at him for a moment as if seeing him for the very first time, then dropped a kiss on his forehead. "I just now realized how many of those tricks I learned from you. How I love you!"
When they came up for air from the loss that followed, Elli offered, "Rub you?"
"You're a drunkard's dream, Quinn." Miles flopped down with his face in the fur and let her have her way with him. Five minutes at her strong hands parted him from all ambitions but two. Those satisfied, they both slept like stones, untroubled by any vile dream that Miles could later remember.
Miles woke muzzily to the sound of knocking at the door.
"Go 'way, Ivan," Miles moaned i
nto the flesh and fur he clutched. "Go sleep on a bench somewhere, hunh . . . ?"
The flesh shook him loose decisively. Elli hit the light, swung out of bed, slipping into her black T-shirt and grey uniform trousers, and padded to the door, ignoring Miles's mumbled "No, no, doan' let 'im in . . ." The knocking grew louder and more insistent. – "Miles!" Ivan fell through the door. "Oh, hi, Elli. Miles!" Ivan shook him by the shoulder.
Miles tried to burrow underneath his fur. "All right, y'can have your bed," he muttered. "Y'don't need me to tuck you in . . ."
"Get up, Miles!"
Miles stuck his head out, eyes scrunched against the light. "Why? What time is it?"
"About midnight."
"Ergh." He went back under. Three hours sleep hardly counted, after what he'd been through the last four days. Displaying a cruel and ruthless streak Miles would never have suspected, Ivan pulled the live far from his twitching hands and tossed it aside.
"You have to get up," Ivan insisted. "Dressed. Peel off the face fungus. I hope you've got a clean uniform in here somewhere—" Ivan was rooting through his closet. "Here!"
Miles clutched numbly at the green cloth Ivan flung at him. ''Embassy on fire?" he inquired.
"Damn near. Elena Bothari-Jesek just blew in from Tau Ceti. I didn't even know you'd sent her!"
"Oh!" Miles came awake. Quinn was by now fully dressed, including boots, and checking her stunner in its holster. "Yes. Gotta get dressed, sure. She won't mind the beard, though."
"Not being subject to beard burn," Elli muttered under her breath, scratching a thigh absently. Miles suppressed a grin; one of her eyelids shivered at him.
"Maybe not," said Ivan grimly, "but I don't think Commodore Destang will be too thrilled by it."
"Destang's here?" Miles came fully awake. He still had a little adrenalin left, apparently. "Why?" Then he thought back over some of the suspicions he'd included in his report sent with Elena, and realized why the Sector Two Security chief might have been inspired to investigate in person. "Oh, God . . . gotta get him straightened out before he shoots poor Galeni on sight—"
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