Miles in Love

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  "All right, Captain Vorgier," Miles interrupted. "Hold your plan as a possible last resort."

  "To be implemented under what circumstances, my Lord Auditor?"

  Over my dead body, Miles did not reply. Vorgier might not understand it wasn't a joke. "Before we start blowing walls down, I want to try to negotiate with Soudha and his friends."

  "These are Komarran terrorists. Madmen—you can't negotiate with them!"

  The late Baron Ryoval had been a madman. The late Ser Galen had been a madman, without question. And the late General Metzov hadn't exactly been rowing with both oars in the water, either, come to think of it. Miles had to admit, there had been a definite negative trend to all those negotiations. "I'm not without experience in the problem, Vorgier. But I don't think Dr. Soudha is a madman. He's not even a mad scientist. He's merely a very upset engineer. These Komarrans may in fact be the most sensible revolutionaries I've ever met."

  He stood a moment, staring unseeing at Vorgier's colorful, ominous tactical display, the logistics of the station evacuation warring in his head with guesses about the Komarrans' state of mind. Delusion, political passion, personality, judgment . . . visions of Ekaterin's terror and despair spun in his back-brain. If so spacious a containment as a Komarran dome gave her claustrophobia . . . stop it. He pictured a thick sheet of glass sliding down between him and that personal maelstrom of anxiety. If his authority here was absolute, so was his obligation to keep his thinking clear.

  "Every hour buys lives. We'll play for time. Get me a channel to the military station's commander," Miles ordered. "After that, we'll see whether Soudha will answer his comconsole."

  The deliberately blank chamber in which Miles sat might as easily have been on the nearby military station, or a ship lying several thousand kilometers off-station, as the few hundred meters from the Southport bay it actually was. Soudha's location, when his face formed at last over the vid-plate, was not so anonymous; he sat in the same glass-walled control booth from which Ekaterin had sent her alarm. Miles wondered what techs were monitoring the corridors for moves on ImpSec's part, and who was keeping a nervous finger on the personnel airlock's outer door control. Had they arranged it as a dead-man's switch?

  Soudha's face was drawn and sincerely weary, no more the bland bluff liar. Lena Foscol sat tensely to the right of his station chair on a rolling stool, looking like some frumpy vizier. Madame Radovas too looked on, her face half-shadowed behind him, and Cappell stood off to the side, almost out of focus. Good. A Komarran stockholders' voting quorum, if he read the signs right. At least they honored his Imperial Auditor's authority to that extent.

  "Good evening, Dr. Soudha," Miles began.

  "You're out here?" Soudha's brows rose as he took in the lack of transmission lag.

  "Yes, well, unlike Administrator Vorsoisson, I got out of my chains at the experiment station alive. I still don't know if you intended me to survive."

  "He didn't really die, did he?" Foscol interrupted.

  "Oh, yes." Miles made his voice deliberately soft. "I got to watch, just as you arranged. Every filthy minute of it. It was a remarkably ugly death."

  She fell silent; Soudha said, "This is all beside the point now. The only message we want to receive from you people is that you have the jumpship ready to transport us to the nearest neutral space—Pol, or Escobar—whereupon you will get your Vor ladies back. If it's not that, I'm cutting this com."

  "I have a few pieces of free information for you, first," said Miles. "I don't think they're ones you anticipate."

  Soudha's hand hovered. "Go on."

  "I'm afraid your wormhole-collapser no longer qualifies as a secret weapon. We caught up with your specs on file at Bollen Design. Professor Vorthys invited Dr. Riva, of Solstice University, in to consult. Are you aware of her reputation?"

  Soudha nodded warily; Cappell's eyes widened. Madame Radovas stared wearily. Foscol looked deeply suspicious.

  "Well, putting together your specs, the data from the soletta accident, and Riva's physics—there was a mathematician by the name of Dr. Youell in there too, if the name means anything to you—the Empire's top failure analyst and the Empire's top five-space expert have concluded that you did not, in fact, manage to invent a wormhole-collapser. What you managed to invent was a wormhole-boomerang. Riva says that when the five-space waves amplified the wormhole's resonance past its phase boundaries, instead of collapsing, the wormhole returned the energy to three-space in the form of a gravitational pulse. Tangling with this pulse was what destroyed the soletta array and the ore ship, and—I'm sorry, Madame Radovas—killed Dr. Radovas and Marie Trogir. The probable-cause crew finally found her body a few hours ago, I regret to report, wrapped up in some of the wreckage they'd retrieved almost a week back."

  Only a puff of breath from Cappell marked his grief, but water glittered in his eyes. Check, thought Miles. I thought he'd protested too much. Nobody looked surprised, merely oppressed.

  "So if you succeed in getting your thing working, what you will actually do is destroy this station, the five thousand or so people aboard, and yourselves. And tomorrow morning, Barrayar will still be there." Miles let his voice fall to a near whisper. "All for nothing, and less than nothing."

  "He lies," said Foscol fiercely into the shocked silence. "He lies."

  Soudha gave a weird snort, ran his hands through his hair, and shook his head. Then, to Miles's dismay, he laughed out loud.

  Cappell stared at his colleague. "Do you really think that's why? That it malfunctioned like that?"

  "It would explain," began Soudha. "It would explain . . . oh, God." He trailed off. "I thought it was the ore ship," he said at last. "Interfering somehow."

  "I should also mention," Miles put in, still uneasily watching Soudha's odd reaction, "that ImpSec has arrested all the Waste Heat personnel and their families you left back at the Southport Transport facility at Solstice. And then there are all your other relatives and friends, the innocents who knew nothing. The hostage game is a bad game, a sad and ugly game that's a lot easier to start than end. The worst versions I've seen ended up with neither side in control, or getting anything they wanted. And the people who stand to lose the most in it frequently aren't even playing."

  "Barrayaran threats." Foscol lifted her chin. "Do you think, after all this, we can't stand up to you?"

  "I'm sure you can, but for what reason? There aren't too many prizes left in this mess. The biggest one is gone; you can't shut off Barrayar. You can't keep your secret or shield anyone you left behind on Komarr. About the only thing you can do now is kill more innocent people. Great goals can call for great sacrifices, yes, but your possible rewards are steadily shrinking." Yes, that was it; don't raise the pressure, lower the wall.

  "We did not," husked Cappell, rubbing his eyes with the back of his hand, "go through all this just to deliver the weapon of the century straight into Barrayaran hands."

  "It's already there. As a weapon, it appears to have some fundamental defects, so far. But Riva says there's evidence you got more power out of the wormhole than you put into it. This suggests possible future peaceful, economic uses, when the phenomena are better understood."

  "Really?" said Soudha, sitting up. "How did she figure? What are her numbers?"

  "Soudha!" said Foscol reprovingly. Madame Radovas winced, and Soudha subsided, albeit reluctantly, staring at Miles through narrowed eyes.

  "On the other hand," Miles continued, "until further research assures us that collapsing a wormhole is indeed quite impossible, none of you are going anywhere, and especially not to any other planetary government. It's one of those ugly military decisions, y'know? And I'm afraid it's mine." The Vor ladies are not expendable, he'd told Vorgier. Was he lying then, or now? Well, if he couldn't figure it out, maybe the Komarrans wouldn't either.

  "You are all headed, inexorably, for a Barrayaran prison," he went on. "The devil's bargain part about being Vor, which a lot of people including some Vor overlook, is tha
t our lives are made for sacrifice. There is no threat, no torture, no slow murder you can apply to two Barrayaran women that will change your outcome."

  Was this the right tack? Above the vid-plate their listening images were undersized, a little ghostly, hard to read. Miles wished he were having this conversation face-to-face. Half the subliminal clues, of body language, of the subtle nuances of expression and voice, were washed out in transmission and unavailable to his instincts. But handing himself over to them in person to augment their hostage collection could only have served to stiffen their wavering resolve. The memory of a woman's hand, slipping through his fingers into a screaming fog, flickered through his mind; his fists clenched helplessly in his lap. Never again, you said. Not expendable, you said. He watched the Komarrans' faces intently for all flickers of expression he could get, reflections of truth, lies, belief, suspicion, trust.

  "There are advantages to prisons," he went on persuasively. "Some of them are comfortably furnished, and unlike graves, sometimes, eventually, you can get out of them again. Now, I am willing, in exchange for your peaceful surrender and cooperation, to personally guarantee your lives. Not, note, your freedom—that will have to wait. But time passes, old crises are succeeded by new ones, people change their minds. Live ones do, anyway. There are always those amnesties, in celebration of this or that public event—the birth of an Imperial heir, for instance. I doubt any of you will be forced to spend as much as a full decade in prison."

  "Some offer," said Foscol bitterly.

  Miles let his brows rise. "It's an honest one. You have a better hope of amnesty than Tien Vorsoisson does. That ore freighter pilot will enjoy no visits from her children. I reviewed her autopsy, did I mention? All the autopsies. If I have a moral qualm, it's that I'm bargaining away the rights of the dead soletta-keepers' families to any justice for their slain. There ought to be civil trials for manslaughter over this."

  Even Foscol looked away at these words.

  Good. Go on. The more time he burned, the better, and they were tracking his arguments; as long as he could keep Soudha from cutting the com, he was making some twisty sort of progress. "You bitch endlessly about Barrayaran tyranny, but somehow I don't think you folks took a vote of all Komarran planetary shareholders, before you attempted to seal—or steal—their future. And if you could have, I don't think you would have dared. Twenty years ago, even fifteen years ago, maybe you could have counted on majority support. By ten years ago, it was already too late. Would your fellows really want to close off their nearest market now, and lose all that trade? Lose all their relatives who've moved to Barrayar, and their half-Barrayaran grandchildren? Your trade fleets have found their Barrayaran military escorts bloody useful often enough. Who are the true tyrants here—the blundering Barrayarans who seek, however awkwardly, to include Komarr in their future, or the Komarran intellectual elitists who seek to exclude all but themselves from it?" He took a deep breath to control the unexpected anger which had boiled up with his words, aware he was teetering on the edge with these people. Watch it, watch it. "So all that remains for us is to try and salvage as many lives as possible from the wreckage."

  After a little time, Madame Radovas asked, "How would you guarantee our lives?" They were the first words she had spoken, though she had listened intently throughout.

  "By my order, as an Imperial Auditor. Only Emperor Gregor himself could gainsay it."

  "So . . . why won't Emperor Gregor gainsay it?" asked Cappell skeptically.

  "He's not going to be happy about any of this," Miles answered frankly. And I'm going to have to give him the report, God help me. "But . . . if I lay my word on the line, I don't think he'll deny me." He hesitated. "Or else I will have to resign."

  Foscol snorted. "How nice for us, to know that after we are dead, you will resign. What a consolation."

  Soudha rubbed his lips, watching Miles . . . watching his truncated image, Miles reminded himself. He was not the only one missing body cues. The engineer was silent, thinking . . . what?

  "Your word?" Cappell grimaced. "Do you know what a Vorkosigan's word means to us?"

  "Yes," said Miles levelly. "Do you know what it means to me?"

  Madame Radovas tilted her head, and her quiet stare became, if possible, more focused.

  Miles leaned forward into the vid pickup. "My word is all that stands between you and ImpSec's aspiring heroes coming through your walls. They don't need the corridors, you know. My word went down on my Auditor's oath, which holds me at this moment unblinking to a duty I find more horrific than you can know. I only have one name's oath. It cannot be true to Gregor if it is false to you. But if there's one thing my father's heartbreaking experience at Solstice taught, it's that I'd better not put my word down on events I do not control. If you surrender quietly, I can control what happens. If ImpSec has to detain you by force, it will be up to chance, chaos, and the reflexes of some overexcited young men with guns and gallant visions of thwarting mad Komarran terrorists."

  "We are not terrorists," said Foscol hotly.

  "No? You've succeeded in terrifying me," Miles said bleakly.

  Her lips thinned, but Soudha looked less certain.

  "If you unleash ImpSec, the consequences will be your doing," said Cappell.

  "Almost correct," Miles agreed. "If I unleash ImpSec, the consequences will be my responsibility. It's that devil's distinction between being in charge and being in control. I'm in charge; you're in control. You can imagine how much this thrills me."

  Soudha snorted. One corner of Miles's mouth tilted up in unwilling response. Yeah, Soudha knows all about that one, too.

  Foscol leaned forward. "This is all a smoke screen. Captain Vorgier said they were sending for a jumpship. Where is it?"

  "Vorgier was lying for time, which was his clear duty. There will not be a jumpship." Shit, that did it. There were only two ways this could go now. There were only two ways it could go before.

  "We have a pair of hostages. Do we have to space one of them to prove we're serious?"

  "I believe you are deathly serious. Which one gets to watch, the aunt or the niece?" Miles asked softly, settling back again. "You claim to not be mad terrorists, and I believe you. You're not. Yet. You are also not murderers; I actually accept that all the deaths you've left in your wake were accidents. So far. But I also know that line gets easier to slip over with practice. Please observe that you have now gone as far as you can without turning yourselves into a perfect replica of enemy you set out to oppose."

  He let those last words hang in the air for a time, for emphasis.

  "Vorkosigan's right, I think," said Soudha unexpectedly. "We've come to the end of our choices. Or to the beginning of another set. One that isn't the set I signed up for."

  "We have to stick together, or it's no good," said Foscol urgently. "If we have to space one of them, I vote for that hell-cat Vorsoisson."

  "Would you do it with your own hands?" said Soudha slowly. "Because I think I decline."

  "Even after what she did to us?"

  What in God's name did gentle Ekaterin do to you? Miles kept his expression as blank as he could, his body still.

  Soudha hesitated. "Seems it made no difference after all."

  Cappell and Madame Radovas both began to speak at once, but Soudha held up a restraining hand. He blew out his breath like a man in pain. "No. Let us continue as we began. The choice is plain. Stop now—unconditional surrender—or call Vorkosigan's bluff. Now, it's no secret to you I thought the time to go into hiding for a later try was before we ever left Komarr."

  "I'm sorry I voted against you the last time," Cappell said to Soudha.

  Soudha shrugged. "Yeah, well . . . If we're going to quit, the time's come."

  No, it hasn't, Miles thought frantically. This was too abrupt. There was time for another ten hours of chit chat at the very least. He wanted to slide them to surrender, not stampede them to suicide. Or murder. If they believed him about the defects of their device, a
s they appeared to, it must soon occur to them that they could hold the whole station hostage, if they didn't mind the self-immolating aspect. Well, if they weren't going to think of that themselves, far be it from him to point it out. He leaned back in his station chair, and chewed on the side of his finger, and watched, and listened.

  "There's no benefit in waiting, either way," Soudha went on. "The risk increases every minute. Lena?"

  "No surrender," said Foscol sturdily. "We go on." And more bleakly, "Somehow."