"Ah, yes. It's time." He hated to let the precious cube out of his sight. But it seemed he was still Naismith in Thorne's eyes.
Thorne pursed its lips. "Now that it's time to brief the crew, don't you think it would be a good idea to put the Ariel on a communications blackout?"
An outstanding idea, though one he'd been afraid to suggest as too suspicious and strange. Maybe it wasn't so unusual, on these covert ops. He'd had no certain idea as to when the real Naismith was supposed to return to the Dendarii fleet, but from the mercenaries' easy acceptance of him, it had to have been expected soon. He'd lived for the past three days in fear of frantic orders arriving by tight-beam and jump-courier from the real Admiral, telling the Ariel to turn around. Give me a few more days. Just a few more days, and I'll redeem it all. "Yes. Do so."
"Very good, sir." Thorne hesitated. "How are you feeling, now? Everybody knows these black miasmas of yours can run for weeks. But if only you'll rest properly, I trust you'll be your usual energetic self in time for the drop mission. Shall I pass the word to leave you alone?"
"I . . . would appreciate that, Bel." What luck! "But keep me informed, eh?"
"Oh, yes. You can count on me. It's a straightforward raid, except for handling that herd of kids, in which I defer to your superior expertise."
"Right." With a smile and a cheery salute, he fled across the corridor to the safe isolation of his own cabin. The pulsing combination of elation and his tension headache made him feel as if he were floating. When the door sealed behind him, he fell across his bed and gripped the coverings to hold himself in place. It's really going to happen!
Later, diligently scanning ship's logs on his cabin comconsole, he finally found the four-year-old records of the Ariel's previous visit to Jackson's Whole. Such as they were. They started out with utterly boring details about an ordnance deal, inventory entries regarding a cargo of weapons to be loaded from House Fell's orbital transfer station. Completely without preamble, Thorne's breathless voice made a cryptic entry, "Murka's lost the Admiral. He's being held prisoner by Baron Ryoval. I'm going now to make a devil's bargain with Fell."
Then records of an emergency combat-drop shuttle trip downside, followed by the Ariel's abrupt departure from Fell Station with cargo only half loaded. These events were succeeded by two fascinating, unexplained conversations between Admiral Naismith, and Baron Ryoval and Baron Fell, respectively. Ryoval was raving, sputtering exotic death threats. He studied the baron's contorted, handsome face uneasily. Even in a society that prized ruthlessness, Ryoval was a man whom other Jacksonian power-brokers stepped wide around. Admiral Naismith appeared to have stepped right in something.
Fell was more controlled, a cold anger. As usual, all the really essential information, including the reason for the visit in the first place, was lost in Naismith's verbal orders. But he did manage to gather the surprising fact that the eight-foot-tall commando, Sergeant Taura, was a product of House Bharaputra's genetics laboratories, a genetically-engineered prototype super-soldier.
It was like unexpectedly meeting someone from one's old home town. In a weird wash of homesickness, he longed to look her up and compare notes. Naismith had apparently stolen her heart, or at least stolen her away, although that did not seem to be the offense Ryoval was foaming about. It was all rather incomprehensible.
He did garner one other unpleasant fact. Baron Fell was a would-be clone consumer. His old enemy Ryoval in a move of vendetta had apparently arranged to have Fell's clone murdered before the transplant could take place, trapping Fell in his aging body, but the intent was there. Regardless of Bel Thorne's contingency planning, he resolved he would have nothing to do with Baron Fell if he could help it.
He blew out his breath, shut down the comconsole, and went back to practicing simulations with the command headset helmet, a manufacturer's training program that happily had never been deleted from its memory. I'm going to bring this off. Somehow.
CHAPTER FOUR
"No reply from the Ariel from this courier-hop either, sir," Lieutenant Hereld reported apologetically.
Miles's fists clenched in frustration. He forced his hands flat again along his trouser seams, but the energy only flowed to his feet, and he began to pace from wall to wall in the Triumph's Nav and Com room. "That's the third—third? You have been repeating the message with every courier?"
"Yes, sir."
"The third no-reply. Dammit, what's holding Bel up?"
Lieutenant Hereld shrugged helplessly at this rhetorical question.
Miles re-crossed the room, frowning fiercely. Damn the time-lag. He wanted to know what was happening right now. Tight-beam communications crossed a local-space region at the speed of light, but the only way to get information through a wormhole was to physically record it, put it on a jumpship, and jump it through to the next relay station, where it was beamed to the next wormhole and jumped again, if it was economically worthwhile to maintain such a service. In regions of heavy message traffic, such couriers jumped as often as every half-hour or even oftener. Between Escobar and Jackson's Whole, the couriers maintained an every-four-hours schedule. So on top of the delay from the speed of light limitation, was added this other, arbitrary human one. Such a delay could be quite useful sometimes, to people playing complex games with interstellar finances, exchange rates, and futures. Or to independent-minded subordinates wishing to conceal excess information about their activities from their superior officers—Miles had occasionally used the lag for that purpose himself. A couple of clarification requests, and their replies, could buy enough time to bring off all sorts of events. That was why he'd made certain his recall order to the Ariel was personal, forceful, and crystal-clear. But Bel had not returned some counterfeit-demure What do you mean by that, sir? Bel had not replied at all.
"It's not some fault in the courier system, is it? Other traffic—is other traffic on the route getting their messages through?"
"Yes, sir. I checked. Information flow is normal all the way through to Jackson's Whole."
"They did file a flight plan to Jackson's Whole, they did actually jump through that exit-point—"
"Yes, sir."
Four bleeding days ago, now. He considered his mental picture of the wormhole nexus. No mapped jumps leading off this standard shortest route from Escobar to Jackson's Whole had ever been discovered to go anywhere of interest. He could not imagine Bel choosing this moment to play Betan Astronomical Survey and go exploring. There was the very rare ship that jumped through some perfectly standard route but never materialized on the other side . . . converted to an unrecoverable smear of quarks in the fabric of space-time by some subtle malfunction in the ship's Necklin rods or the pilot's neurological control system. The jump couriers kept track of traffic on such a heavily commercialized route as this, though, and would have reported such a disappearance promptly.
He came—was driven—to decision, and that alone heated his temper a few more degrees. He had grown unaccustomed of late to being chivvied into any action by events not under his own control. This was not in my plans for the day, blast it. "All right, Sandy. Call me a staff meeting. Captain Quinn, Captain Bothari-Jesek, Commodore Jesek, in the Triumph's briefing room, as soon as they can assemble."
Hereld raised her brows at the list of names even as her hands moved over the comconsole interface to comply. Inner Circle all. "Serious shit, sir?"
He managed an edged smile, and tried to lighten his voice. "Seriously annoying only, Lieutenant."
Not quite. What had his idiot baby brother Mark in mind to do with that commando squad he'd requisitioned? A dozen fully-equipped Dendarii troopers were not trivial firepower. Yet, compared to the military resources of, say, House Bharaputra . . . enough force to get into a hell of a lot of trouble, but not enough force to shoot their way back out. The thought of his people—Taura, God!—blindly following the ignorant Mark into some tactical insanity, trustingly thinking it was him, drove him wild inside. Klaxons howled and red lights fl
ashed in his head. Bel, why aren't you answering?
Miles found himself pacing in the Triumph's main briefing room, too, around and around the big main tac display table, until Quinn raised her chin from her hands to growl, "Will you please sit down?" Quinn was not as anxious as he; she was not biting her fingernails yet. The ends remained neat, un-eclipsed half-moons. He found that faintly reassuring. He swung into a station chair. One of his booted feet began tapping on the friction matting. Quinn eyed it, frowned, opened her mouth, closed it, and shook her head. He stilled the foot and bared his teeth at her in a quick false grin. Happily, before his nervous energy could materialize into some even more irritating compulsive twitch, Baz Jesek arrived.
"Elena is podding over from the Peregrine right now," Baz reported, seating himself in his usual station chair, and by habit calling up the fleet engineering ops interface from the comconsole. "She should be along in just a few minutes."
"Good, thanks." Miles nodded.
The engineer had been a tall, thin, dark-haired, tensely unhappy man in his late twenties when Miles had first met him, almost a decade ago, at the birth of the Dendarii Mercenaries. The outfit had then consisted only of Miles, his Barrayaran bodyguard, his bodyguard's daughter, one obsolete freighter slated for scrap and its suicidally depressed jump pilot, and an ill-conceived get-rich-quick arms-smuggling scheme. Miles had sworn Baz in as a liege-man to Lord Vorkosigan before Admiral Naismith had even been invented. Now in his late thirties, Baz remained just as thin, with slightly less dark hair, and just as quiet, but possessed of a serene self-confidence. He reminded Miles of a heron, stalking in some reedy lake-margin, all long stillnesses and economical motions.
As promised, Elena Bothari-Jesek entered the chamber shortly thereafter and seated herself beside her engineer-husband. Both being on duty, they limited the demonstration of their reunion to the exchange of a smile and a quick hand-touch under the table. She spared a smile for Miles, too. Secondly.
Of all the Dendarii Inner Circle who knew him as Lieutenant Lord Vorkosigan, Elena was surely the deepest inside. Her father, the late Sergeant Bothari, had been Miles's liege-sworn armsman and personal protector from the day Miles had been born. Age mates, Miles and Elena had been practically raised together, since Countess Vorkosigan had taken a maternal interest in the motherless girl. Elena knew Admiral Naismith, Lord Vorkosigan, and just-plain-Miles as thoroughly—perhaps more thoroughly—as anyone in the universe.
And had chosen to marry Baz Jesek instead . . . Miles found it comforting and useful to think of Elena as his sister. Foster-sister she nearly was in truth. She was as tall as her tall husband, with cropped ebony hair and pale ivory skin. He could still see the echo of borzoi-faced Sergeant Bothari in the aquiline bones of her features, Bothari's leaden ugliness transmuted to her golden beauty by some genetic alchemy. Elena, I still love you, dammit . . . he clipped off the thought. He had Quinn now. Or anyway, the Admiral Naismith half of him did.
As a Dendarii officer, Elena was his finest creation. He'd watched her grow from a shy, angry, off-balance girl, barred from military service on Barrayar by her gender, to squad leader to covert operative to staff officer to ship-master. The retired Commodore Tung had once named her his second-best military apprentice ever. Miles sometimes wondered how much of his on-going maintenance of the Dendarii Mercenaries was really service to Imperial Security, how much was the wild self-indulgence of a very questionable aspect of his own faceted—or fractured—personality, and how much was a secret gift to Elena Bothari. Bothari-Jesek. The true springs of history could be murky indeed.
"There's still no word from the Ariel," Miles began without preamble; no formalities required with this group. Deep insiders all, he could dare to think out loud in front of them. He could feel his mind relax, re-blending Admiral Naismith and Lord Vorkosigan. He could even let his accent waver from Naismith's strict Betan drawl, and allow a few Barrayaran gutterals to slip in with the swear words. There were going to be swear words, this staff meeting, he was fairly sure. "I want to go after them."
Quinn drummed her nails on the table, once. "I expected you would. Therefore, could little Mark be expecting it too? He's studied you. He's got your number. Could this be a trap? Remember how he diddled you the last time."
Miles winced. "I remember. The possibility that this is some kind of set-up has crossed my mind. That's one reason I didn't take off after them twenty hours ago." Right after the embarrassing, hastily-dismissed full staff meeting. He'd been in the mood for fratricide on the spot. "Assuming, as seems reasonable, that Bel was fooled at first—and I don't see why not, everybody else was—the time-lag might have given Mark a chance to slip up, and Bel to see the light. But in that case the recall order should have brought the Ariel back."
"Mark does do an awfully good you," Quinn observed, from personal experience. "Or at least he did two years ago. If you're not expecting the possibility of a double, he seems just like you on one of your off days. His exterior appearance was perfect."
"But Bel does know of the possibility," Elena put in.
"Yes," said Miles. "So maybe Bel hasn't been fooled. Maybe Bel's been spaced."
"Mark would need the crew, or a crew, to run the ship," said Baz. "Though he might have had a new crew waiting, farside."
"If he'd been planning such outright piracy and murder, he'd hardly have taken a Dendarii commando squad along to resist it." Reason could be very reassuring, sometimes. Sometimes. Miles took a breath. "Or maybe Bel has been suborned."
Baz raised his brows; Quinn unconsciously closed her teeth upon, but did not bite through, the little fingernail of her right hand.
"Suborned how?" said Elena. "Not by money." Her smile twisted up. "D'you figure Bel's finally given up trying to seduce you, and is looking for the next best thing?"
"That's not funny," Miles snapped. Baz converted a suspicious snort into a careful cough, and met his glare blandly, but then lost it and sniggered.
"At any rate, it's an old joke," Miles conceded wearily. "But it depends upon what Mark is up to, on Jackson's Whole. The kind of . . . hell, outright slavery, practiced by the various Jacksonian body-sculptors, is a deep offense to Bel's progressive Betan soul. If Mark is thinking of taking some kind of bite out of his old home planet, he just might talk Bel into going along with it."
"At Fleet expense?" Baz inquired.
"That does . . . verge on mutiny," Miles agreed reluctantly. "I'm not accusing, I'm just speculating. Trying to see all the possibilities."
"In that case, is it possible Mark's destination isn't Jackson's Whole at all?" said Baz. "There are four other jumps out of Jacksonian local space. Maybe the Ariel is just passing through."
"Physically possible, yes," said Miles. "Psychologically . . . I've studied Mark, too. And while I can't say that I have his number, I know Jackson's Whole looms large in his life. It's only a gut-feeling, but it's a strong gut-feeling." Like a bad case of indigestion.
"How did we get blindsided by Mark this time?" Elena asked. "I thought ImpSec was supposed to be keeping track of him for us."
"They are. I get regular reports from Illyan's office," Miles said. "The last report, which I read at ImpSec headquarters not three weeks ago, put Mark still on Earth. But it's the damned time-lag. If he left Earth, say, four or five weeks ago, that report is still in transit from Earth to Illyan on Barrayar and back to me. I'll bet you Betan dollars to anything you please that we get a coded message from HQ in the next few days earnestly warning us that Mark has dropped out of sight. Again."
"Again?" said Elena. "Has he dropped out of sight before?"
"A couple of times. Three, actually." Miles hesitated. "You see, every once in a while—three times in the last two years—I've tried to contact him myself. Invited him to come in, come to Barrayar, or at least to meet with me. Every time, he's panicked, gone underground and changed his identity—he's rather good at it, from all the time he spent as a prisoner of the Komarran terrorists—and it takes Illyan's
people weeks or months to locate him again. Illyan's asked me not to try to contact Mark any more without his authorization." He brooded. "Mother wants him to come in so much, but she won't have Illyan order him kidnapped. At first I agreed with her, but now I wonder."
"As your clone, he—" began Baz.
"Brother," Miles corrected, instantly. "Brother. I reject the term 'clone' for Mark. I forbid it. 'Clone' implies something interchangeable. A brother is someone unique. And I assure you, Mark is unique."
"In guessing . . . Mark's next moves," Baz began again, more carefully, "can we even use reason? Is he sane?"
"If he is, it's not the Komarrans' fault." Miles rose and began pacing again around the table, despite Quinn's exasperated look. He avoided her eyes and watched his boots, gray on gray against the friction matting, instead. "After we finally discovered his existence, Illyan had his agents do every kind of background check on him they could. Partly to make up for the acute embarrassment of ImpSec's having missed him all these years, I think. I've seen all the reports. Trying and trying to get inside Mark's mind." Around the corner, down the other side, and back.
"His life in Bharaputra's clone-crèche didn't seem too bad—they coddle those bodies—but after the Komarran insurgents picked him up, I gather it got pretty nightmarish. They kept training him to be me, but every time they thought they'd got it, I'd do something unexpected and they had to start over. They kept changing and elaborating their plans. The plot dragged on for years after the time they'd first hoped to bring it off. They were a small group, operating on a shoestring anyway. Their leader, Ser Galen, was half-mad himself, I think." Around and around.
"Part of the time Galen would treat Mark like the great hope for a Komarran uprising, or pet him and set him up with the idea that they were going to make him Emperor of Barrayar in a coup. But part of the time Galen would slip a cog, and see Mark as the personal genetic representative of our father, and make him whipping-boy for all his hatred of the Vorkosigans and Barrayar. Disguising the most ferocious punishments, tortures really—from himself, and maybe even from Mark—as 'training discipline.' Illyan's agent had some of this from a rather illegal fast-penta interrogation of an ex-subordinate of Galen's, so it's flat truth." Around and around.
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