Captain Vorpatril's Alliance

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  They each grabbed a coin case—even Jet gave a little grunt, lifting it to his shoulder—and, stepping over the high threshold, filed out the oval hole in the wall.

  “Some of it is bound to be trash,” murmured Udine, giving her husband a steadying hand as he stepped down off his makeshift podium. “Those would be wasted trips as well.”

  “Mm, true. Well, if the next room down is like this one, we’re going to need more than one van. And more than one night. We can take the obvious items tonight, and leave some of us in here tomorrow during the day to triage the rest.”

  She nodded.

  Shiv herded more of his children into shifting the coin cases from their stack through the hole in the wall to a staging area in the Mycoborer vestibule. Lady ghem Estif, meanwhile, straightened up from a cupboard on the far side of the room with an “Ah!” of surprised satisfaction. Both Ivan’s and Udine’s heads swiveled around.

  “What did you find, Mother?” Udine inquired, zigzagging over to her. Ivan and Tej followed.

  Lady ghem Estif held up what might have been a really, really elegant combat utility belt. “My old biotainer girdle. I wonder if it still works?” And, in a bemusing womanly addendum, “I wonder if it still fits?” She slipped out of her coat and cinched it about her waist, and a sincerely delighted smile illuminated her face as she found that yes, it did still fit. One hand went up to fluff her short hair, and the smile twisted.

  Her long fingers danced over what was evidently a control panel on the left side. Ivan jumped back as a flickering force-field abruptly sprang out around her, shoving over a stack of boxes, which slid and fell with a few dull thumps; she touched another control, and its spherical shape became a more form-fitting tall oval. She looked as if she were standing inside a narrow, translucent egg.

  “Hey, what about no electronic signatures?” Ivan cried in panic. Wait, no, wrong. He wanted them to be surprised by ImpSec, didn’t he? In some way that he had nothing whatsoever to do with, in order to keep his word to Tej. This could be perfect.

  Lady ghem Estif glanced upward. “Oh, no one will pick up anything through these walls.”

  Crap, thought Ivan. Nonetheless, she turned the sputtering field back off.

  Ivan narrowed his eyes in belated recognition. “Wait. I saw something like that before, back on Eta Ceta. When Miles and I had to go as the Barrayaran diplomatic representatives to the late Cetagandan empress’s funeral, twelve, thirteen years ago. The haut-lady bubbles. All the haut women traveled around in these float chairs, with personal shields a lot like that one.”

  Lady ghem Estif looked at him in surprise. “Indeed. The biotainer girdles were made a symbol of haut status. Personally, I disapproved of fitting them onto the float chairs—robbing them of their original purpose in pursuit of display. Really, I do sometimes wonder if my old caste is becoming effete. I begin to believe I was well out of it. Young people these days, no sense of the right robust relation of form and function. And they call themselves artists!”

  “So,” said Ivan, taken aback to have the formerly settled insides of his head so abruptly rearranged, “the haut-lady bubbles actually started as biotainers? But they don’t work as suits anymore?”

  “Oh, of course they still do that,” murmured Lady ghem Estif, and headed purposefully for the stairs.

  Udine shrugged and picked up the nearest case, turning toward the hole in the wall. “Tej, Ivan Xav”—a warmer drop in her voice at his name acknowledged his volunteer status—“time to start hauling. Quickly, now.”

  Tej dutifully picked up the next crate down, and Ivan, more dubiously, followed suit—its weight tried to pull his arms out of their sockets. What the hell should he be doing down here? It had been all too easy to get sucked into the general excitement and forget that, no, his aims were not those of the rest of the people in this place. Maybe some opportunity would come as he helped lug all this stuff through that damned twisty tunnel—dark and confined, true, but he’d hardly be alone. They’d be just like a line of ants, or termites, or one of those other Earth social insects in their little burrows. But once he’d carried his first load to the access well, he might lay hands on his wristcom again, and then—his eye fell on Tej—then he would have a real dilemma.

  Amiri, pausing at the new doorway, called over his shoulder to his sire, “Do you think it will be more efficient to each carry these all the way, or pass them along?”

  “Pass along,” Shiv replied without hesitation, also now lugging a case. “Space yourselves evenly as to time, though, not distance. Those switchbacks are going to make slow spots.”

  Amiri nodded and stepped through.

  Hell, thought Ivan. But he might still work his way back to the access well, just not as directly. Ivan was now almost as reluctant to leave this treasure vault, so barely explored, as he had been to enter it. If he could just—

  Amiri stepped backward through the ragged oval aperture, his empty hands reaching out above his head. What was he doing, stretching? No one had yet had time to become that fatigued—

  A total stranger with a stunner in his hand, trained on Amiri’s midsection, stepped through after.

  Ivan’s heart jumped in his chest; he stumbled to a halt.

  Then Pearl, who’d also stepped out to the vestibule, came through likewise walking backward. And then another stunner-armed man, much older, and a third.

  Not ImpSec in plainclothes—Ivan wasn’t sure what subliminal signs his backbrain was processing, besides the general absence of Byerly Vorrutyer, though God knew he’d looked up close at enough ImpSec men in his life—but he was sadly sure of it. Ordinary garage security guards? No, they wore uniforms. Very gently, Ivan set down the case he was carrying on the nearest stack, to free his hands, and eased in front of Tej, who had stopped short in shock.

  “Do you know what this is?” Ivan murmured to her, almost voicelessly.

  “Ser Imola. Dada just hired him to be our carrier. But . . .”

  But the stunners, right. Not a whole lot of doubt about which way they were aimed, either. With only the briefest hiccup, Ivan translated the Jacksonian carrier to the more forthright Barrayaran smuggler. It was a measure of the night’s distractions that Ivan hadn’t even begun to wonder how Shiv had planned to shift all this treasure off-world. The question would have occurred to him eventually, he supposed.

  “Oh, hell,” said Shiv Arqua in a tone of boundless disgust, slowly setting down his own case. The stunner in the older man’s hand swiveled to point at him. “Imola, you damned fool.”

  “I think not, Shiv,” the older man said affably.

  Shiv rolled his eyes. “First of all, your timing is terrible. The least application of thought might have told you that the time to go for us would be tomorrow night, after we’d emptied the vault for you. And you could have caught us and the cargo both. I’ve wondered about you Komarrans ever since the Conquest, really I have.”

  “Got the drop on you all, didn’t we? Tomorrow night, you’d have been more on your guard.” Imola glanced around the chamber. “Although I begin to think you were holding out on me after all. Maybe, after we send you on your way, we’ll come back and clear this place out by ourselves.”

  “Oh,” breathed Shiv, his anguished glance darting over their assailants’ power weapons and wristcoms, “you won’t be by yourselves. I guarantee it.”

  “What a sinful waste of an opportunity,” mourned Udine, sliding up behind her husband. “I could just cry.” Or spit, it looked like. Venom.

  “Hello there, Udine,” said Imola, with a nod of greeting and a slight, prudent shift of his aim. “You’ve held up well, I must say. Shiv said you were along. He probably shouldn’t have mentioned you. It was just cruel, to tempt a man like that. Do you have any idea what House Prestene is now offering for Arquas, delivered to their doorstep? Individually or in bulk?”

  “Less than your fifteen percent would have been,” said Shiv growled. “Now you’ll get nothing. And so will we.”

 
“Oh, no,” whispered Tej in Ivan’s ear. “I bet he wants to cryofreeze us. That’s how he smuggles people, to keep them from fighting back. Horrid!”

  Ivan could see that temptation; Arquas all over the chamber were shifting about, trying to look unthreatening and not succeeding.

  Pearl said uncertainly, “Should we make them stun us, to slow them down?”

  “By all means,” said Imola, grinning. “Then we won’t have to listen to you complain. Your transport awaits—my ground-van will hold you all with room to spare. So convenient of you to arrange it for us.”

  “That won’t be necessary,” said Lady ghem Estif, in a loud but quavery voice. “All of you, just hold still. Someone might be hurt.” She emerged from the stairwell and made her way in a newly tottery manner toward the doorway. Her hand, held out, trembled like that of a frail old woman on the verge of collapse.

  “Who’s that?” muttered one of the big goons backing Imola—a few cuts below even budget ninjas, in Ivan’s quick appraisal, but dangerous nonetheless when they were armed with distance weapons and you weren’t. One of them, he saw with indignation, held Ivan’s own good military stunner, no doubt lifted off the bench in the entry vestibule in passing. The grip of the cheap civilian model he’d traded up for peeked from a pocket.

  “My grandmother,” said Amiri, suddenly watching hard. “She’s a hundred and thirty years old. You don’t need to hurt her or kidnap her—I bet Prestene doesn’t even have her on their list. She’s of no value to you! You leave her alone!”

  “They don’t,” Imola began, then his eyes narrowed suddenly. “Wait, is that Udine’s haut-woman mother—”

  His caution fell a moment too late. Ivan poised on the balls of his feet as Lady ghem Estif meandered up to the men and her shaky hand wandered to her belt. With a deep, spluttering snarl, her force-field sprang out at full power and spherical diameter, knocking one man off his feet and pinning the shrieking Imola up against the wall by the door.

  Ivan had his target all picked out, the big bastard who’d stolen his stunner. The man tightened his finger on the trigger and fanned the room; nothing happened, except for Ivan hitting him with all the force of his full weight in launch mode and knocking him back through the doorway. The fellow was strong and nasty and . . . kind of slow, compared to Ivan’s usual sparring partners. Some knuckles to his windpipe, a few nerve jabs; Goon Two willingly gave up the useless stunner to Ivan’s wresting fingers in order to gather himself for a lunge that would put his outweighed opponent on the bottom of the pile, and was thoroughly, if briefly, surprised when the stun beam hit his head at point-blank range instead.

  Ivan pushed himself up, breathing, well, not too hard—it was more the adrenaline than the exertion—to find Tej looking down at him with vast approval. The metal bar gripped in her hand was redundant to need, but might have proven a very well-chosen accessory to a Vor lady’s evening garb. He grinned back in sudden exhilaration. His filter mask had been torn off in the struggle; he didn’t bother to try to reaffix it.

  “And you said you were just a desk pilot,” murmured Tej.

  “But it’s a Barrayaran desk,” he murmured back, and scrambled to his feet. Together, they looked over Ivan’s victim, lying on his back with his legs bent over the jagged doorway. They each took an ankle and dragged him through into the chamber, and out of the path; Tej did not concern herself unduly with his head thumping over the threshold, Ivan was proud to note.

  “That was either really brave or really stupid,” said Tej, her admiration tinged by faint doubt, “jumping him unarmed like that.”

  Ivan was tempted to claim the first, but was afraid of being tarred with the second. Sheepishly, he admitted the truth instead: “Neither. I could see he had filched my stunner. It’s one of the new issue, with the personally coded grips. Only the upper ranks have theirs so far. They’re still arguing over whether to give them to the grunts or not.”

  “Oh, good,” said Udine in passing. “Your mother told me she didn’t think you could be an idiot.”

  Imola and his other partner had been overpowered and disarmed. Imola was still whimpering from his contact with the force-field. It must have been just like running up against a really big shock-stick. Driven by a really angry haut woman. Her teeth bared and tight, Lady ghem Estif turned off her antique biotainer field again; with a last blurt of protest, it powered down.

  Pidge, now in possession of one of the other stunners, bent to give the struggling Goon One, whom Emerald and Amiri together were barely holding down, a buzz to the back of his neck; he jerked and lay still. Em and Amiri then combined to haul up the shaking older man that Tej had named Imola and push him to the wall.

  “I’d be delighted to test the Mycoborer on him,” said Lady ghem Estif in a precisely measured voice, “but I suspect the results would be too slow. Perhaps I can find something faster downstairs.”

  “No need,” said Shiv, padding closer to this old friend-enemy. “We’ll do something lower tech.”

  Imola watched Shiv approach him with fearful fascination; he realized his new mistake when the taller Udine whirled, grabbed him by the neck, lifted him off his feet, and pressed him to the wall with all her half-haut strength.

  “Where are my children, you worthless sack of greed?”

  “Glp!” he replied, eyes bulging.

  Shiv’s voice in his other ear dropped to a tiger’s purr. “Star, Jet, Rish. You have to have passed them, coming in. What did you do with them?”

  Ah, a quick round of good-Cordonah-bad-Cordonah, Ivan recognized. Or bad-Cordonah-worse-Cordonah. He suspected the roles were interchangeable between the two at need. He wouldn’t have interfered for worlds.

  “How many more men do you have out there?” Shiv continued.

  Udine permitted Imola a breath of air. Prudently, he used the exhalation to gasp, “Only saw one! Tall girl!”

  She waited a little, and permitted him another.

  “Really! M’boys took her down—put her in the van!”

  Another long pause.

  “Four, waiting on stragglers! Crossfire, no escape!”

  Udine, after another pause that Imola no doubt found quite lengthy, let him drop. He crumpled to the floor, frantically rubbing his neck.

  “If that’s so,” said Em in doubt, watching all this, “where are Jet and Rish?”

  Tej’s hand had found Ivan’s, during this show; it tightened in alarm.

  “And how do we get out, if they’re laying for us at the only exit?” asked Amiri a bit plaintively.

  “Oh,” said Shiv sadly, “I imagine all we have to do is sit down and wait a bit. Ivan Xav’s stepda will be along. To collect on his bet.” He added after a tight-jawed moment, “Dammit. We were so close.”

  “Who the hell is Ivan Xav?” said Imola, clearly bewildered by these additions to the play list. “Or his stepda?”

  Ivan hunkered down in front of the man. “I am,” he told Imola, with false geniality. “My stepda used to run that big building”—not being quite sure how the lab was turned in relation to ImpSec HQ, or which side the erratic Mycoborer had put them in on, Ivan made his wave vague but generally upward—“full of humorless men whom everybody but you has gone to great pains to not attract. But that’s all right. I’m sure you’ll be getting to know them really well, really soon. And vice versa.”

  Ivan thought Imola had processed the ImpSec is coming for you part of this, which really wasn’t much of a stretch at this point, but not the rest. He stared at Ivan in personal bewilderment, then back at Shiv.

  “In that case,” he croaked, “maybe we should team up again, huh?”

  Shiv just snorted.

  “I don’t know, Dada,” said Pidge, tapping the captured stunner thoughtfully in her palm. “Perhaps we should reexamine our op—”

  It felt as if a giant’s hands had cupped Ivan and pressed inward at all points at once. He didn’t exactly hear the boom, because his hearing had gone wonky in that instant, but he felt it in his
bones. Tej may have yelped; in any case, her mouth moved.

  Ivan fell back on his butt. A couple of cases thudded to the floor, knocked off their stacks.

  And it was over.

  All the Arquas were working their jaws, trying to get their eardrums to pop back. Imola cried, in a voice that sounded as if it were coming from a great distance, “What the hell was that?”

  Ivan climbed back up as far as his knees. “Sergeant Abelard’s time bomb,” he managed to get out, over the ringing and hissing and rumbling, most but worryingly not all of which seemed to be coming from inside his own head. “Running thirty-five years late.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Tej drew breath against the appalling concussion that had seemed for a moment to crush her lungs, and pushed herself upright from the stack of cases she’d stumbled against. She braced for an aftershock. But except for the humming in her ears, only silence came from the dark, open doorway into the tunnel.

  “Rish. Jet!” she gasped, and bolted for the aperture. She held up her cold light, making dull gleams race over the uneven black walls, and ran down the slope. Around the first, or last, bend.

  Behind her, she could hear Ivan Xav’s strained shout, “Tej, no!” and the thump of heavy, slippered feet. She didn’t look back.

  She dodged through the kink. Another straight, descending stretch. The next kink. She was almost back to the storm sewer pipe; the breach and the bomb hadn’t been much beyond that. What if Rish and Jet were trapped under some fall of dirt, tons of dirt, like the poor sergeant? Could they dig them out before they suffocated—if they weren’t crushed already—and were there any tools back in the lab for—she skidded to a halt.

  Filling the tunnel before her feet was a flat stretch of roiling, dark water. The downward slant of the tunnel, here, brought the roof to its level; the water lapped at the tunnel top. A sort of water seal—she could not make out any dirt- or rock-fall beyond it. Though the blast must have both broken open and collapsed the pipe, to dam and back its flow up into the Mycoborer maze. She put one foot into the icy water. How deep did it go? Could she swim through to the other side—or was there no other side, the tunnel over there flattened?