It smelled different from her Survey ship, colder, full of bare unpainted metal and cost-effective shortcuts taken out of comfort and decor, like the difference between a living room and a locker room. Their first destination was sickbay, to drop off Dubauer. It was a clean, austere series of rooms, much larger even proportionally than her Survey ship’s, prepared to handle plenty of company. It was nearly deserted now, but for the chief surgeon and a couple of corpsmen whiling away their duty hours doing inventory, and a lone soldier with a broken arm kicking his heels and kibitzing. Dubauer was examined by the doctor, whom Cordelia suspected was more expert at disruptor injuries than her own surgeon, and turned over to the corpsmen to be washed and bedded down.
“You’re going to have another customer shortly,” Cordelia told the surgeon, who was one of Vorkosigan’s four men over forty. “Your captain has a really filthy infection going on his shin. It’s gone systemic. Also, I don’t know what those little blue pills are you fellows have in your medkits, but by what he said the one he took this morning ought to be running out just about now.”
“That damned poison,” the doctor bitched. “Sure, it’s effective, but they could find something less wearing. Not to mention the trouble we have hanging on to them.”
Cordelia suspected this last was the crux of the matter. The doctor busied himself setting up the antibiotic synthesizer and preparing it for programming. Cordelia watched the expressionless Dubauer put to bed, the start, she saw, of an endless series of hospital days as straight and same as a tunnel to the end of his life. The cold whispering doubt of whether she had done him a service would be forever added to her inventory of night thoughts. She dawdled around him for a while, covertly waiting for the arrival of her other ex-charge.
Vorkosigan came in at last, accompanied, in fact supported, by a couple of other officers she had not yet met, and giving orders. He had obviously cut his timing too fine, for he looked frighteningly bad. He was white, sweating, and trembling, and Cordelia thought she could see where the lines on his face would be when he was seventy.
“Haven’t you been taken care of yet?” he asked when he saw her. “Where’s Koudelka? I thought I told him—oh, there you are. She’s to have the Admiral’s Cabin. Did I say that? And stop by stores and get her some clothes. And dinner. And a new charge for her stunner.”
“I’m fine. Hadn’t you better lie down yourself?” said Cordelia anxiously.
Vorkosigan, still on his feet, was wandering around in circles like a wind-up toy with a damaged mainspring. “Got to let Bothari out,” he muttered. “He’ll be hallucinating by now.”
“You just did that, sir,” reminded one of the officers. The surgeon caught his eye, and jerked his head meaningfully toward the examining table. Together they intercepted Vorkosigan in his orbit, propelled him semiforcibly to it, and made him lie down.
“It’s those damned pills,” the surgeon explained to Cordelia, taking pity on her alarmed look. “He’ll be all right in the morning, except for lethargy and a hell of a headache.”
The surgeon turned back to his task, to cut the taut trouser away from the swollen leg and swear under his breath at what he found beneath. Koudelka glanced over the surgeon’s shoulder, then turned back to Cordelia with a false smile pinned over a green face.
Cordelia nodded and reluctantly withdrew, leaving Vorkosigan in the hands of his professionals. Koudelka, seeming to enjoy his role as courier even though it had caused him to miss the show of his captain’s return on board, led her off to stores for clothing, disappeared with her stunner, and dutifully returned it fully charged. It seemed to go against his grain.
“There’s not a whole lot I could do with it anyway,” she said at the dubious look on his face.
“No, no, the old man said you were to have it. I’m not going to argue with him about prisoners. It’s a sensitive subject with him.”
“So I understand. I might point out, if it will help your perspective, that our two governments are not at war as far as I know, and that I am being unlawfully detained.”
Koudelka puzzled over this attempted readjustment of his point of view, then let it bounce harmlessly off his impermeable habits of thought. Carrying her new kit, he led her to her quarters.
Chapter Five
Stepping out of her cabin door next morning, she found a guard posted. The top of her head was level with his broad shoulders, and his face reminded her of an overbred borzoi, narrow, hook-nosed, with his eyes too close together. She realized at once where she had seen him before, at a distance in a dappled wood, and had a moment of residual fear.
“Sergeant Bothari?” she hazarded.
He saluted her, the first Barrayaran to have done so. “Ma’am,” he said, and fell silent.
“I want to go to sickbay,” she said uncertainly.
“Yes, ma’am.” His voice was a deep bass, monotonous in its cadence. He executed a neat turn and led off. Guessing that he had relieved Koudelka as her guide and keeper, she pattered after him. She was not quite ready to attempt light conversation with him, so asked him no questions en route. He offered her only silence. Watching him, it occurred to her that a guard on her door might be as much to keep others out as her in. Her stunner seemed suddenly heavy on her hip.
At sickbay she found Dubauer sitting up and dressed in insignialess black fatigues like the ones she had been issued. His hair had been cut, and he had been shaved. There was certainly nothing wrong with the physical care he was receiving. She spoke to him a while, until her own voice began to sound inane in her ears. He looked at her, but gave little other reaction.
She caught a glimpse of Vorkosigan in a private chamber off the main ward, and he motioned her to enter. He was dressed in plain green pajamas of the standard design, and was sitting up in bed stabbing away with a light pen at a computer interface swung over it. Curiously, although he was clothed almost civilian style, bootless and weaponless, her impression of him was unchanged. He seemed a man who could carry on stark naked, and only make those around him feel overdressed. She smiled a little at this private image, and greeted him with a sketchy wave. One of the officers who had escorted him to sickbay last night was standing by the bed.
“Commander Naismith, this is Lieutenant Commander Vorkalloner, my second officer. Excuse me a moment; captains may come and captains may go, but the administration goes on forever.”
“Amen.”
Vorkalloner looked very much the professional Barrayaran soldier; he might have stepped out of a recruiting advertisement. Yet there was a certain underlying humor in his expression that made her think him a tolerable preview of Ensign Koudelka in ten or twelve years time.
“Captain Vorkosigan speaks highly of you,” said Vorkalloner, making small talk. A slight frown from his captain at this opening escaped his notice. “I guess if we could only catch one Betan, you were the best choice.”
Vorkosigan winced. Cordelia gave him a slight shake of her head, signaling to let the gaffe pass. He shrugged, and began tapping out something on his keyboard.
“As long as all my people are safely on their way home, I’ll take it as a fair trade. Almost all of them, anyway.” Rosemont’s ghost breathed coldly in her ear, and Vorkalloner seemed suddenly less amusing. “Why were you all so anxious to put us in a bottle, anyway?”
“Why, orders,” said Vorkalloner simply, like an ancient fundamentalist who answers every question with the tautology, “Because God made it that way.” Then a little agnostic doubt began to creep over his face. “Actually, I thought we might have been sent out here on guard duty as some kind of punishment,” he joked.
The remark caught Vorkosigan’s humor. “For your sins? Your cosmology is too egocentric, Aristede.” Leaving Vorkalloner to unravel that, he went on to Cordelia, “Your detention was intended to be free of bloodshed. It would have been, too, but for that other little matter cropping up in the middle of it. It is a worthless apology for some”—and she knew he shared the memory of Rosemont’s burial
in the cold black fog—“but it is the only truth I can offer you. The responsibility is no less mine for that. As I am sure someone in the high command will point out when this arrives.” He smiled sourly and continued typing.
“Well, I can’t say I’m sorry to have messed up their invasion plans,” she said daringly. There, let’s see what that stirs up… .
“What invasion?” asked Vorkalloner, waking up.
“I was afraid you’d figure that out, once you saw the cache caverns,” said Vorkosigan to her. “It was still being hotly debated when we left, and the expansionists were waving the advantage of surprise as a big stick to beat the peace party. Speaking as a private person—well, I have not that right while in uniform. Let it go.”
“What invasion?” probed Vorkalloner hopefully.
“With luck, none,” answered Vorkosigan, allowing himself to be persuaded to partial frankness. “One of those was enough for a lifetime.” He seemed to look inward on private, unpleasant memories.
Vorkalloner plainly found this a baffling attitude from the Hero of Komarr. “It was a great victory, sir. With very little loss of life.”
“On our side.” Vorkosigan finished typing his report and signed it off, then entered a request for another form and began fencing at it with the light pen.
“That’s the idea, isn’t it?”
“It depends on whether you mean to stay or are just passing through. A very messy political legacy was left at Komarr. Not the sort of thing I care to leave in trust for the next generation. How did we get onto this subject?” He finished the last form.
“Who were they thinking of invading?” asked Cordelia doggedly.
“Why haven’t I heard anything about it?” asked Vorkalloner.
“In order, that is classified information, and it is not being discussed below the level of the general staff, the central committee of the two Councils, and the emperor. That means this conversation is to go no farther, Aristede.”
Vorkalloner glanced pointedly at Cordelia. “She’s not on the general staff. Come to think of it—”
“Neither am I, anymore,” Vorkosigan conceded. “As for our guest, I’ve told her nothing she couldn’t deduce for herself. As for myself, my opinion was requested on—certain aspects. They didn’t like it, once they’d got it, but they did ask for it.” His smile was not at all nice.
“Is that why you were shipped out of town?” asked Cordelia perceptively, feeling she was beginning to get the hang of how things were done on Barrayar. “So Lieutenant Commander Vorkalloner was right about pulling guard duty. Was your opinion requested by, uh, a certain old friend of your father’s?”
“It certainly wasn’t requested by the Council of Ministers,” said Vorkosigan, but refused to be drawn any further, and changed the subject firmly. “Have my men been treating you properly?”
“Quite well, yes.”
“My surgeon swears he will release me this afternoon, if I am good and stay in bed this morning. May I stop by your cabin to speak with you privately later? There are some things I need to make clear.”
“Sure,” she responded, thinking the request was phrased rather ominously.
The surgeon came in, aggrieved. “You’re supposed to be resting, sir.” He glared accusingly at Cordelia and Vorkalloner.
“Oh, very well. Send these off with the next courier, Aristede”— he pointed to the screen—“along with the verbals and the formal charges.”
The doctor herded them out, as Vorkosigan began typing again.
*
She wandered around the ship for the rest of the morning, exploring the limits of her parole. Vorkosigan’s ship was a confusing warren of corridors, sealable levels, tubes, and narrow doors designed, she realized at last, to be defensible from boarding parties in hand-to-hand combat. Sergeant Bothari kept pace with slow strides, looming silently as the shadow of death at her shoulder, except when she would begin to make a turn into some forbidden door or corridor, when he would halt abruptly and say, “No, ma’am.” She was not permitted to touch anything, either, as she found when she ran a hand casually over a control panel, eliciting another monotonous “No, ma’am,” from Bothari. It made her feel like a two-year-old being taken on a toddle.
She made one attempt to draw him out.
“Have you served Captain Vorkosigan long?” she inquired brightly.
“Yes, ma’am.”
Silence. She tried again. “Do you like him?”
“No, ma’am.”
Silence.
“Why not?” This at least could not have a yes-or-no answer. For a while she thought he wasn’t going to answer at all, but he finally came up with, “He’s a Vor.”
“Class conflict?” she hazarded.
“I don’t like Vors.”
“I’m not a Vor,” she suggested.
He stared through her glumly. “You’re like a Vor. Ma’am.”
Unnerved, she gave up.
*
That afternoon she made herself comfortable on her narrow bunk and began to explore the menu the library computer had to offer her. She picked out a vid with the unalarming grade-school title of “People and Places of Barrayar” and punched it up.
Its narration was as banal as the title had promised, but the pictures were utterly fascinating. It seemed a green, delicious, sunlit world to her Betan eyes. People went about without nose filters or rebreathers, or heat shields in the summer. The climate and terrain were immensely varied, and it had real oceans, with moon-raised tides, in contrast to the flat saline puddles that passed for lakes at home.
A knock sounded at her door. “Enter,” she called, and Vorkosigan appeared around it, greeting her with a nod. Odd hour of the day for him to be in dress uniform—but my word, he cleans up good. Nice, very nice. Sergeant Bothari accompanied him; he remained standing stolidly outside the half-opened door. Vorkosigan walked around the room for a moment as if searching for something. He finally emptied her lunch tray and used it to prop open the door a narrow crack. Cordelia raised her eyebrows at this.
“Is that really necessary?”
“I think so. At the current rate of gossip I’m bound to encounter some joke soon about the privileges of rank that I can’t pretend not to hear, and I’ll have to quash the unlucky, er, humorist. I have an aversion to closed doors anyway. You never know what’s on the other side.”
Cordelia laughed outright. “It reminds me of that old joke, where the girl says, ‘Let’s not, and tell everybody we have.’ “
Vorkosigan grimaced agreement and seated himself on the bolted-down swivel chair by the metal desk built into the wall, and swung to face her. He leaned back with his legs stretched out before him, and his face became serious. Cordelia cocked her head, half smiling. He began obliquely, nodding toward the screen swung over her bed. “What have you been viewing?”
“Barrayaran geography. It’s a beautiful place. Have you ever been to the oceans?”
“When I was a small boy, my mother used to take me to Bonsanklar every summer. It was a sort of upper-class resort town with a lot of virgin forest backing up to the mountains behind it. My father was away mostly, at the capital or with his corps. Midsummer’s Day was the old emperor’s birthday, and they used to have the most fantastic fireworks—at least, they seemed so to me at the time—out over the ocean. The whole town would turn out on the esplanade, nobody even armed. No duels were permitted on the Emperor’s Birthday, and I was allowed to run all over the place freely.” He looked at the floor, beyond the toes of his boots. “I haven’t been back there for years. I should like to take you there someday, for the Midsummer’s festival, should the opportunity present itself.”
“I’d like that very much. Will your ship be returning to Barrayar soon?”
“Not for some time, I’m afraid. You’re in for a long period as a prisoner. But when we return, in view of the escape of your ship, there should be no reason to continue your internment. You should be freed to present yourself at the Betan e
mbassy, and go home. If you wish.”
“If I wish!” She laughed a little, uncertainly, and sat back against her hard pillow. He was watching her face intently. His posture was a fair simulation of a man at his ease, but one boot was tapping unconsciously. His eye fell on it, he frowned, and it stopped. “Why shouldn’t I wish?”
“I thought, perhaps, when we arrive on Barrayar, and you are free, you might consider staying.”
“To visit—where you said, Bonsanklar, and so on? I don’t know how much leave I’ll have, but—sure, I like to see new places. I’d like to see your planet.”
“Not a visit. Permanently. As—as Lady Vorkosigan.” His face brightened with a wry smile. “I’m making a hash of this. I promise, I’ll never think of Betans as cowards again. I swear your customs take more bravery than the most suicidal of our boys’ contests of skill.”
She let her breath trickle out through pursed lips. “You don’t—deal in small change, do you?” She wondered where the phrase about hearts leaping up came from. It felt far more like the bottom dropping out of her stomach. Her consciousness of her own body shot up with a lurch; she was already overwhelmingly conscious of his.
He shook his head. “That’s not what I want, for you, with you. You should have the best. I’m hardly that, you must know by now. But at least I can offer you the best that I have. Dear C—Commander, am I too sudden, by Betan standards? I’ve been waiting for days, for the right opportunity, but there never seemed to be one.”
“Days! How long have you been thinking along these lines?”
“It first occurred to me when I saw you in the ravine.”
“What, throwing up in the mud?”
He grinned at that. “With great composure. By the time we finished burying your officer, I knew.”
She rubbed her lips. “Anybody ever tell you you’re a lunatic?”
“Not in this context.”
“I—you’ve confused me.”
“Not offended you?”
Shards of Honor (Vorkosigan Saga) Page 8
