Miles, Mutants, and Microbes

  Venn said, "Ensign Corbeau, this is the Barrayaran Imperial Auditor, Lord Vorkosigan. Your emperor sent him out as the official diplomatic envoy to represent your side in negotiations with the Union. He wishes to interview you."

  Corbeau's lips parted in alarm, and he scrambled to his feet and bobbed his head nervously at Miles. It made their height differential rather spring to the eye, and Corbeau's brow wrinkled in increased confusion.

  Venn added, not so much kindly as punctiliously, "Due to the charges lodged against you, as well as your petition for asylum still pending for review, Sealer Greenlaw will not permit him to remove you from our custody at this time."

  Corbeau exhaled a little, but still stared at Miles with the expression of a man introduced to a poisonous snake.

  Venn added, a sardonic edge in his voice, "He has undertaken not to order you to shoot yourself, either."

  "Thank you, Chief Venn," said Miles. "I'll take it from here, if you don't mind."

  Venn took the hint, and his leave. Roic took up his silent guard stance by the cell door, which hissed closed.

  Miles gestured at the bunk. "Sit down, Ensign." He seated himself on the bunk across from the young man and cocked his head in brief study as Corbeau refolded himself. "Stop hyperventilating," he added.

  Corbeau gulped, and managed a wary, "My lord."

  Miles laced his fingers together. "Sergyaran, are you?"

  Corbeau glanced down at his arms and made an abortive move to roll down his sleeves. "Not born there, my lord. My parents emigrated when I was about five years old." He glanced at the silent Roic in his brown-and-silver uniform, and added, "Are you—" then swallowed whatever he'd been about to say.

  Miles could fill in the blank. "I'm Viceroy and Vicereine Vorkosigan's son, yes. One of them."

  Corbeau managed an unvoiced Oh. His look of suppressed terror did not diminish.

  "I have just interviewed the two fleet patrollers sent to retrieve you from your station leave. In a moment, I'd like to hear your version of that event. But first—did you know Lieutenant Solian, the Komarran fleet security officer aboard the Idris?"

  The pilot's thoughts were so clearly focused on his own affairs that it took him a moment to parse this. "I met him once or twice at some of our prior stops, my lord. I can't say as I knew him. I never went aboard the Idris."

  "Do you have any thoughts or theories about his disappearance?"

  "Not . . . not really."

  "Captain Brun thinks he might have deserted."

  Corbeau grimaced. "Brun would."

  "Why Brun especially?"

  Corbeau's lips moved, halted; he looked still more miserable. "It would not be appropriate for me to criticize my superiors, my lord, or to comment on their personal opinions."

  "Brun is prejudiced against Komarrans."

  "I didn't say that!"

  "That was my observation, Ensign."

  "Oh."

  "Well, let's leave that for the moment. Back to your troubles. Why didn't you answer your wrist com recall order?"

  Corbeau touched his bare left wrist; the Barrayarans' com links had all been confiscated by their quaddie captors. "I'd taken it off and left it in another room. I must have slept through the beep. The first I knew of the recall order was when those two, two . . ." He struggled for a moment, then continued bitterly, "thugs came pounding at Garnet Five's door. They just pushed her aside—"

  "Did they identify themselves properly, and relay your orders clearly?"

  Corbeau paused, his glance at Miles sharpening. "I admit, my lord," he said slowly, "Sergeant Touchev announcing, 'All right, mutie-lover, this show's over,' did not exactly convey 'Admiral Vorpatril has ordered all Barrayaran personnel back to their ships' to my mind. Not right away, anyway. I'd just woken up, you see."

  "Did they identify themselves?"

  "Not—not verbally."

  "Show any ID?"

  "Well . . . they were in uniform, with their patrol armbands."

  "Did you recognize them as fleet security, or did you think this was a private visit—a couple of comrades taking out their racial offense on their own time?"

  "It . . . um . . . well—the two aren't exactly mutually exclusive, my lord. In my experience."

  The kid has that one straight, unfortunately. Miles took a breath. "Ah."

  "I was slow, still half asleep. When they shoved me around, Garnet Five thought they were attacking me. I wish she hadn't tried to . . . I didn't slug Touchev till he dumped her out of her float chair. At that point . . . everything sort of went down the disposer." Corbeau glowered at his feet, encased in prison-issue friction slippers.

  Miles sat back. Throw this boy a line. He's drowning. He said mildly, "You know, your career is not necessarily cooked yet. You aren't, technically, AWOL as long as you are involuntarily confined by the Graf Station authorities, any more than Brun's strike patrol here is. For a little while yet, you're in a legal limbo. Your jump pilot's training and surgery would make you a costly loss, from command's viewpoint. If you make the right moves, you could still get out of this pretty cleanly."

  Corbeau's face screwed up. "I don't . . ." He trailed off.

  Miles made an encouraging noise.

  Corbeau burst out, "I don't want my damned career any more. I don't want to be part of"—he waved around inarticulately—"this. This . . . idiocy."

  Suppressing a certain sympathy, Miles asked, "What's your present status—how far along are you in your enlistment?"

  "I signed up for one of the new five-year hitches, with the option to reenlist or go to reserve status for the next five. I've been in three years, two still to go."

  At age twenty-three, Miles reminded himself, two years still seemed a long time. Corbeau could be barely more than an apprentice junior pilot at this stage of his career, although his assignment to the Prince Xav implied a superior rating.

  Corbeau shook his head. "I see things differently these days, somehow. Attitudes I used to take for granted, jokes, remarks, just the way things are done—they bother me now. They grate. People like Sergeant Touchev, Captain Brun—God. Were we always this awful?"

  "No," said Miles. "We used to be much worse. I can personally testify to that one."

  Corbeau stared searchingly at him.

  "But if all the progressive-minded men had opted out then, as you are proposing to do now, none of the changes I've seen in my lifetime could have happened. We've changed. We can change some more. Not instantly, no. But if all the decent folks quit and only the idiots are left to run the show, it won't be good for the future of Barrayar. About which I do care." It startled him to realize how passionately true that statement had become, of late. He thought of the two replicators in that guarded room in Vorkosigan House. I always thought my parents could fix anything. Now it's my turn. Dear God, how did this happen?

  "I never imagined a place like this." Corbeau's jerky wave around, Miles construed, now meant Quaddiespace. "I never imagined a woman like Garnet Five. I want to stay here."

  Miles had a bad sense of a desperate young man making permanent decisions for the sake of temporary stimuli. Graf Station was attractive at first glance, certainly, but Corbeau had grown up in open country with real gravity, real air—would he adapt, or would the techno-claustrophobia creep up on him? And the young woman for whom he proposed to throw his life over, was she worthy, or would Corbeau prove a passing amusement to her? Or, over time, a bad mistake? Hell, they'd known each other bare weeks—no one could know, least of all Corbeau and Garnet Five.

  "I want out," said Corbeau. "I can't stand it any more."

  Miles tried again. "If you withdraw your request for political asylum in the Union before the quaddies reject it, it might still be folded into your present legal ambiguity and made to disappear, without further prejudice to your career. If you don't withdraw it first, the desertion charge will certainly stick, and do you vast damage."

  Corbeau looked up and said anxiously, "Doesn't this firefight that B
run's patrol had with the quaddie security here make it in the heat? The Prince Xav's surgeon said it probably did."

  In the heat, desertion in the face of the enemy, was punishable by death in the Barrayaran military code. Desertion in peacetime was punishable by long stretches of time in some extremely unpleasant stockades. Either seemed excessively wasteful, all things considered. "I think it would require some pretty convoluted legal twisting to call this episode a battle. For one thing, defining it so runs directly counter to the Emperor's stated desire to maintain peaceful relations with this important trade depot. Still . . . given a sufficiently hostile court and ham-handed defense counsel . . . I shouldn't call court-martial a wise risk, if it can possibly be avoided." Miles rubbed his lips. "Were you drunk, by chance, when Sergeant Touchev came to pick you up?"

  "No!"

  "Hm. Pity. Drunk is a wonderfully safe defense. Not politically or socially radical, y'see. I don't suppose . . . ?"

  Corbeau's mouth tightened in indignation. Suggesting Corbeau lie about his chemical state would not go over well, Miles sensed. Which gave him a higher opinion of the young officer, true. But it didn't make Miles's life any easier.

  "I still want out," Corbeau repeated stubbornly.

  "The quaddies don't much like Barrayarans this week, I'm afraid. Relying on them granting your asylum to pluck you out of your dilemma seems to me to be a grave mistake. There must be half a dozen better ways to solve your problems, if you'd open your mind to wider tactical possibilities. In fact, almost any other way would be better than this."

  Corbeau shook his head, mute.

  "Well, think about it, Ensign. I suspect the situation will remain murky until I find out what happened to Lieutenant Solian. At that point, I hope to unravel this tangle quickly, and the chance to change your mind about really bad ideas could run out abruptly."

  He climbed wearily to his feet. Corbeau, after a moment of uncertainty, rose and saluted. Miles returned an acknowledging nod and motioned to Roic, who spoke into the cell's intercom and obtained their release.

  He exited, frowning thoughtfully, to encounter the hovering Chief Venn. "I want Solian, dammit," Miles said grouchily to him. "This remarkable evaporation of his doesn't reflect any better on the competence of your security than it does on ours, y'know."

  Venn glowered at him. But he didn't contradict this remark.

  Miles sighed and raised his wrist com to his lips to call Ekaterin.

  She insisted on having him rendezvous with her back at the Kestrel. Miles was just as glad for the excuse to escape the depressing atmosphere of Security Post Three. He couldn't call it moral ambiguity, alas. Worse, he couldn't call it legal ambiguity. It was quite clear which side was in the right; it just wasn't his side, dammit.

  He found her in their little cabin, just hanging his brown-and-silver House uniform out on a hook. She turned and embraced him, and he tilted his head back for a long, luxurious kiss.

  "So, how did your venture into Quaddiespace with Bel go?" he inquired, when he had breath to spare again.

  "Very well, I thought. If Bel ever wants a change from being a portmaster, I believe it could go into Union public relations. I think I saw all the best parts of Graf Station that could be squeezed into the time we had. Splendid views, good food, history—Bel took me deep down into the free fall sector to see the preserved parts of the old jumpship that first brought the quaddies to this system. They have it set up as a museum—when we arrived it was full of quaddie schoolchildren, bouncing off the walls. Literally. They were incredibly cute. It almost reminded me of a Barrayaran ancestor-shrine." She released him and indicated a large box decorated with shiny, colorful pictures and schematics, occupying half the lower bunk. "I found this for Nikki in the museum shop. It's a scale model of the D-620 Superjumper, modified with the orbital habitat configured on, that the quaddies' forebears escaped in."

  "Oh, he'll like that." Nikki, at eleven, had not yet outgrown a passion for spaceships of every kind, but especially jumpships. It was still too early to guess whether the enthusiasm would turn into an adult avocation or fall by the wayside, but it certainly hadn't flagged yet. Miles peered more closely at the picture. The ancient D-620 had been an amazingly ungainly looking beast of a ship, appearing in this artist's rendition rather like an enormous metallic squid clutching a collection of cans. "Large-scale replica, I take it?"

  She glanced rather doubtfully at it. "Not especially. It was a huge ship. I wonder if I should have chosen the smaller version? But it didn't come apart like this one. Now that I have it back here I'm not quite sure where to put it."

  Ekaterin in maternal mode was quite capable of sharing her bunk with the thing all the way home, for Nikki's sake. "Lieutenant Smolyani will be happy to find a place to stow it."

  "Really?"

  "You have my personal guarantee." He favored her with a half-bow, hand over his heart. He wondered briefly if he ought to snag a couple more for little Aral Alexander and Helen Natalia while they were here, but the conversation with Ekaterin about age-appropriate toys, several times repeated during their sojourn on Earth, probably did not need another rehearsal. "What did you and Bel find to talk about?"

  She smirked. "You, mostly."

  Belated panic came out as nothing more self-incriminating than a brightly inquiring, "Oh?"

  "Bel was wildly curious as to how we'd met, and obviously racking its brains to figure out how to ask without being rude. I took pity and told a little about meeting you on Komarr, and after. With all the classified parts left out, our courtship sounds awfully odd, do you know?"

  He acknowledged this with a rueful shrug. "I've noticed. Can't be helped."

  "Is it really true that the first time you met, you shot Bel with a stunner?"

  The curiosity hadn't all run one way, evidently. "Well, yes. It's a long story. From a long time ago."

  Her blue eyes crinkled with amusement. "So I understand. You were an absolute lunatic when you were younger, by all accounts. I'm not sure, if I'd met you back then, whether I'd have been impressed, or horrified."

  Miles thought it over. "I'm not sure, either."

  Her lips curled up again, and she stepped around him to lift a garment bag from the bunk. She drew from it a heavy fall of fabric in a blue-gray hue matching her eyes. It resolved itself into a jumpsuit of some swinging velvety stuff gathered to long, buttoned cuffs at the wrists and ankles, which gave the trouser legs a subtly sleeve-like look. She held it up to herself.

  "That's new," he said approvingly.

  "Yes, I can be both fashionable in gravity and demure in free fall." She laid the garment back down and stroked its silky nap.

  "I take it Bel blocked any unpleasantness due to your being Barrayaran, when you two were out and about?"

  She straightened. "Well, I didn't have any problems. Bel was accosted by one odd-looking fellow—he had the longest, narrowest hands and feet. Something funny about his chest, too, rather oversized. I wondered if he was genetically engineered for anything special, or if it was some sort of surgical modification. I suppose one meets all kinds, out here on the edge of the Nexus. He badgered Bel to tell how soon the passengers were to be let back aboard, and said there was a rumor someone had been allowed to take off their cargo, but Bel assured him—firmly!—that no one had been let on the ships since they were impounded. One of the passengers from the Rudra, worrying about his goods, I gather. He implied the seized cargoes were subject to rifling and theft by the quaddie dockhands, which didn't go over too well with Bel."

  "I can imagine."

  "Then he wanted to know what you were doing, and how the Barrayarans were going to respond. Naturally, Bel didn't say who I was. Bel said if he wanted to know what Barrayarans were doing, he'd do better to ask one directly, and to get in line to make an appointment with you through Sealer Greenlaw like everyone else. The fellow wasn't too happy, but Bel threatened to have him escorted back to his hostel by Station Security and confined there if he didn't give over pest
ering, so he shut up and went scurrying to find Greenlaw."

  "Good for Bel." He sighed, and hitched his tight shoulders. "I suppose I'd better deal with Greenlaw again next."

  "No, you shouldn't," Ekaterin said firmly. "You've done nothing but talk with committees of upset people since the first thing this morning. The answer, I expect, is no. The question is, did you ever stop to eat lunch, or take any sort of break?"