Thorne's face went very bleak indeed. "Yes, ma'am," it said woodenly.
Quinn frowned. "Go clean up. We'll continue this later."
Except for Quinn and Bothari-Jesek, they all filed out. Mark tried to follow them. "Not you," said Quinn in a voice like a death bell. He sank back into his station chair and huddled there. As the last Dendarii cleared the chamber, Quinn reached over and turned off all recording devices.
Miles's women. Elena-the-childhood-sweetheart, now Captain Bothari-Jesek, Mark had studied back when the Komarrans had tutored him to play Lord Vorkosigan. Yet she was not quite what he had expected. Quinn the Dendarii had taken the Komarran plotters by surprise. The two women had a coincidental resemblance in coloration, both with short dark hair, fine pale skin, liquid brown eyes. Or was it so coincidental? Had Vorkosigan subconsciously chosen Quinn as Bothari-Jesek's substitute, when he couldn't have the real thing? Even their first names were similar, Elli and Elena.
Bothari-Jesek was the taller by a head, with long aristocratic features, and was more cool and reserved, an effect augmented by her clean officer's undress grays. Quinn, fatigue-clad and combat-booted, was shorter, though still a head taller than himself, rounder and hotter. Both were terrifying. Mark's own taste in women, if ever he should live to exercise it, ran more to something like that little blonde clone they'd pulled from under the bed, if only she'd been the age she looked to be. Somebody short, soft, pink, timid, somebody who wouldn't kill and eat him after they mated.
Elena Bothari-Jesek was watching him with a sort of appalled fascination. "So like him. Yet not him. Why are you shivering?"
"I'm cold," muttered Mark.
"You're cold!" Quinn echoed in outrage. "You're cold! You gods be-damned little sucker—" She turned her station chair abruptly around, and sat with her back to him.
Bothari-Jesek rose and walked around to his end of the table. Willow-wand woman. She touched his forehead, which was clammy; he flinched almost explosively. She bent and stared into his eyes. "Quinnie, back off. He's in psychological shock."
"He doesn't deserve consideration!" Quinn choked.
"He's still in shock, regardless. If you want results, you have to take it into account."
"Hell." Quinn turned back. New clean wet tracks ran down from her eyes across her red-and-white, dirt-and-dried-blood-smudged face. "You didn't see. You didn't see Miles lying there with his heart blown all over the room."
"Quinnie, he's not really dead. Is he? He's just frozen, and . . . and misplaced." Was there the faintest tinge of uncertainty, denial, in her voice?
"Oh, he's really dead all right. Very really frozen dead. And he's going to stay that way forever if we don't get him back!" The blood all over her fatigues, caked in the grooves of her hands, smeared across her face, was finally turning brown.
Bothari-Jesek took a breath. "Let's focus on the business to hand. The immediate question is, can Mark fool Baron Fell? Fell met the real Miles once."
"That's one of the reasons I didn't put Bel Thorne under close arrest. Bel was there, and can advise, I hope."
"Yes. And that's the curious thing . . ." She hitched a hip over the tabletop and let one long booted leg swing. "Shock or no shock, Mark hasn't blown Miles's deep-cover. The name Vorkosigan hasn't passed his lips, has it?"
"No," Quinn admitted.
Bothari-Jesek twisted up her mouth, and studied him. "Why not?" she asked suddenly.
He crouched down a little further in his station chair, trying to escape the impact of her stare. "I don't know," he muttered. She waited implacably for more, and he mustered in an only slightly louder voice, "Habit, I guess." Mostly Ser Galen's habit of beating the shit out of him whenever he'd screwed up, back in the bad old days. "When I do the part, I do the part. M-Miles would never have slipped on that one, so I don't either."
"Who are you when you're not doing the part?" Bothari-Jesek's gaze was narrowed, calculating.
"I . . . hardly know." He swallowed, and tried again for more volume in his voice. "What's going to happen to my—to the clones?"
As Quinn began to speak, Bothari-Jesek held up her hand, stopping her. Bothari-Jesek said instead, "What do you want to have happen to them?"
"I want them to go free. To be set free somewhere safe, where House Bharaputra can't kidnap them back."
"A strange altruism. I can't help wondering, why? Why this whole mission in the first place? What did you hope to gain?"
His mouth opened, but no sound came out. He couldn't answer. He was still clammy, weak and shaking. His head ached blackly, as though draining of blood. He shook his head.
"Peh!" snorted Quinn. "What a loser. What a, a damned anti-Miles. Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory."
"Quinn," said Bothari-Jesek quietly. There was a profound reproof in her voice, just in that single word, which Quinn heard and acknowledged with a shrug of her shoulder. "I don't think either one of us knows quite what we have hold of, here," Bothari-Jesek continued. "But I know when I'm out of my depth. However, I know someone who wouldn't be."
"Who?"
"Countess Vorkosigan."
"Hm." Quinn sighed. "That's another thing. Who's going to tell her about—" A downward jerk of her thumb indicated Jackson's Whole, and the fatal events that had just passed there. "And gods help me, if I'm really in command of this outfit now, I'm gonna have to report all this to Simon Illyan." She paused. "Do you want to be in command, Elena? As senior shipmaster present, now that Bel's under quasi-arrest, and all that. I just grabbed 'cause I had to, under fire."
"You're doing fine," said Bothari-Jesek with a small smile. "I'll support you." She added, "You've been more closely involved with intelligence all along, you're the logical choice."
"Yes, I know." Quinn grimaced. "You'll tell the family, if it comes to that?"
"For that," Bothari-Jesek sighed, "I am the logical choice. I'll tell the Countess, yes."
"It's a deal." But they both looked as if they wondered who had the better, or worse, half of it.
"As for the clones," Bothari-Jesek eyed Mark again, "how would you like to earn their freedom?"
"Elena," said Quinn warningly, "don't make promises. We don't know what we're going to have to trade yet, to get out of here. To get—" another gesture downward, "him back."
"No," Mark whispered. "You can't. Can't send them . . . back down there, after all this."
"I traded Phillipi," said Quinn grimly. "I'd trade you in a heartbeat, except that he . . . Do you know why we came downside on this bloody drop mission in the first place?" she demanded.
Wordlessly, he shook his head.
"It was for you, you little shit. The Admiral had a deal half-cut with Baron Bharaputra. We were going to buy out Green Squad for a quarter of a million Betan dollars. It wouldn't have cost much more than the drop mission, counting all the equipment we lost along with Thorne's shuttle. And the lives. But the Baron refused to throw you into the pot. Why he wouldn't sell you, I don't know. You're worthless to everybody else. But Miles wouldn't leave you!"
Mark stared down at his hands, which plucked at each other. He glanced up to see Bothari-Jesek studying him again as if he were some vital cryptogram.
"As the Admiral would not leave his brother," said Bothari-Jesek slowly, "so Mark will not leave the clones. Will you? Eh?"
He would have swallowed, but he'd run out of spit.
"You'll do anything to save them, eh? Anything we ask?"
His mouth opened and closed. It might have been a hollow, soundless yes.
"You'll play the part of the Admiral for us? We'll coach you, of course."
He half-nodded, but managed to blurt out, "What promise—?"
"We'll take all the clones with us when we go. We'll put them down somewhere House Bharaputra can't reach."
"Elena!" objected Quinn.
"I want," he did swallow this time, "I want the Barrayaran woman's word. Your word," he said to Bothari-Jesek.
Quinn sucked on her lower lip, but d
id not speak. After a long pause, Bothari-Jesek nodded. "All right. You have my word on it. But you give us your total cooperation, understood?"
"Your word as what?"
"Just my word."
" . . . Yes. All right."
Quinn rose and stared down at him. "But is he even fit to play the part right now?"
Bothari-Jesek followed her look. "Not in that condition, no, I suppose not. Let him clean up, eat, rest. Then we'll see what can be done."
"Baron Fell may not give us time to coddle him."
"We'll tell Baron Fell he's in the shower. That'll be true enough."
A shower. Food. He was so ravenous as to be almost beyond hunger, numb in the belly, listless in the flesh. And cold.
"All I can say," said Quinn, "is that he's a damned poor imitation of the real Miles Vorkosigan."
Yes, that's what I've been trying to tell you.
Bothari-Jesek shook her head in, presumably, exasperated agreement. "Come on," she said to him.
She escorted him to an officer's cabin, small but thank-God private. It was disused, blank and clean, military-austere, the air a little stale. He supposed Thorne must now be similarly housed nearby.
"I'll get some clean clothes sent over for you from the Ariel. And send some food."
"Food first—please?"
"Sure."
"Why are you being nice to me?" His voice came out plaintive and suspicious, making him sound weak and paranoid, he feared.
Her aquiline face went introspective. "I want to know . . . who you are. What you are."
"You know. I'm a manufactured clone. Manufactured right here on Jackson's Whole."
"I don't mean your body."
He hunched in an automatic defensive posture, though he knew it emphasized his deformities.
"You are very closed," she observed. "Very alone. That's not at all like Miles. Usually."
"He's not a man, he's a mob. He's got a whole damned army trailing around after him." Not to mention the harrowing harem. "I suppose he likes it like that."
Her lips curved in an unexpected smile. It was the first time he'd seen her smile. It changed her face. "He does, I think." Her smile faded. "Did."
"You're doing this for him, aren't you. Treating me like this because you think he'd want it." Not in his own right, no, never, but all for Miles and his damned brother-obsession.
"Partly."
Right.
"But mostly," she said, "because someday Countess Vorkosigan will ask me what I did for her son."
"You're planning to trade Baron Bharaputra for him, aren't you?"
"Mark . . ." her eyes were dark with a strange . . . pity? irony? He could not read her eyes. "She'll mean you."
She turned on her heel and left him by himself, sealed in the cabin.
He showered in the hottest water the tiny unit would yield, and stood for long minutes in the heat of the dryer-blast, till his skin flushed red, before he stopped shivering. He was dizzy with exhaustion. When he finally emerged, he found someone had been and gone and left clothes and food. He hastily pulled on underwear, a black Dendarii tee-shirt, and a pair of his progenitor's ship-knit gray trousers, and fell upon the dinner. It wasn't a dainty Naismith-special-diet this time, but rather a tray of standard ready-to-eat rations designed to keep a large and physically active trooper going strong. It was far from gourmet fare, but it was the first time he'd had enough food on his plate for weeks. He devoured it all, as if whatever fairy had delivered it might reappear and snatch it away again. Stomach aching, he rolled into bed and lay on his side. He no longer shivered as if from cold, nor felt drained and sweating and shaky from low blood sugar. Yet a kind of psychic reverberation still rolled like a black tide through his body.
At least you got the clones out.
No. Miles got the clones out.
Dammit, dammit, dammit . . .
This half-baked disaster was not the glorious redemption of which he'd dreamed. Yet what had he expected the aftermath to be? In all his desperate plotting, he'd planned almost nothing past his projected return to Escobar with the Ariel. To Escobar, grinning, with the clones under his wing. He'd imagined himself dealing with an enraged Miles then, but then it would have been too late for Miles to stop him, too late to take his victory from him. He'd half-expected to be arrested, but to go willingly, whistling. What had he wanted?
To be free of survivor guilt? To break that old curse? Nobody you knew back then is still alive. . . . That was the motive he'd thought was driving him, when he thought at all. Maybe it wasn't so simple. He'd wanted to free himself from something. . . . In the last two years, freed of Ser Galen and the Komarrans by the actions of Miles Vorkosigan, freed again altogether by Miles on a London street at dawn, he had not found the happiness he'd dreamed of during his slavery to the terrorists. Miles had broken only the physical chains that bound him; others, invisible, had cut so deep that flesh had grown around them.
What did you think? That if you were as heroic as Miles, they'd have to treat you like Miles? That they would have to love you?
And who were they? The Dendarii? Miles himself? Or behind Miles, those sinister, fascinating shadows, Count and Countess Vorkosigan?
His image of Miles's parents was blurred, uncertain. The unbalanced Galen had presented them, his hated enemies, as black villains, the Butcher of Komarr and his virago wife. Yet with his other hand he'd required Mark to study them, using unedited source materials, their writings, their public speeches, private vids. Miles's parents were clearly complex people, hardly saints, but just as clearly not the foaming sadistic sodomite and murderous bitch of Galen's raving paranoias. In the vids Count Aral Vorkosigan appeared merely a gray-haired, thick-set man with oddly intent eyes in his rather heavy face, with a rich, raspy, level voice. Countess Cordelia Vorkosigan spoke less often, a tall woman with red-roan hair and notable gray eyes, too powerful to be called pretty, yet so centered and balanced as to seem beautiful even though, strictly speaking, she was not.
And now Bothari-Jesek threatened to deliver him to them. . . .
He sat up and turned on the light. A quick tour of the cabin revealed nothing to commit suicide with. No weapons or blades—the Dendarii had disarmed him when he'd come aboard. Nothing to hang a belt or rope from. Boiling himself to death in the shower was not an option; a sealed fail-safe sensor turned it off automatically when it exceeded physiological tolerances. He went back to bed.
The image of a little, urgent, shouting man with his chest exploding outward in a carmine spray replayed in slow motion in his head. He was surprised when he began to cry. Shock, it had to be the shock that Bothari-Jesek had diagnosed. I hated the little bugger when he was alive, why am I crying? It was absurd. Maybe he was going insane.
Two nights without sleep had left him ringingly numb, yet he could not sleep now. He only dozed, drifting in and out of near-dreams and recent, searing memories. He half-hallucinated about being in a rubber raft on a river of blood, bailing frantically in the red torrent, so that when Quinn came to get him after only an hour's rest, it was actually a relief.
CHAPTER NINE
"Whatever you do," said Captain Thorne, "don't mention the Betan rejuvenation treatment.
Mark frowned. "What Betan rejuvenation treatment? Is there one?"
"No."
"Then why the hell would I mention it?"
"Never mind, just don't."
Mark gritted his teeth, swung around in his station chair square to the vid plate, and pressed the keypad to lower his seat till his booted feet were flat to the floor. He was fully kitted in Naismith's officer's grays. Quinn had dressed him as though he were a doll, or an idiot child. Quinn, Bothari-Jesek, and Thorne had then proceded to fill his head with a mass of sometimes-conflicting instructions on how to play Miles in the upcoming interview. As if I didn't know. The three captains now each sat in station chairs out of range of the vid pick-up in the Peregrine's tac room, ready to prompt him through an ear-bug. And he'd thought Galen was a
puppet master. His ear itched, and he wriggled the bug in irritation, earning a frown from Bothari-Jesek. Quinn had never stopped scowling.
Quinn had never stopped. She still wore her blood-soaked fatigues. Her sudden inheritance of command of this debacle had allowed her no rest. Thorne had cleaned up and changed to ship grays, but obviously had not slept yet. Both their faces stood out pale in the shadows, too sharply lined. Quinn had made Mark take a stimulant when, getting him dressed, she'd found him too muzzy-mouthed for her taste, and he did not quite like its effects. His head and eyes were almost too clear, but his body felt beaten. All the edges and surfaces of the tac room seemed to stand out with unnatural clarity. Sounds and voices in his ears seemed to have a painful serrated quality, sharp and blurred at once. Quinn was on the stuff too, he realized, watching her wince at a high electronic squeal from the comm equipment.
("All right, you're on,") said Quinn through the ear-bug as the vid plate in front of him began to sparkle. They all shut up at last.
The image of Baron Fell materialized, and frowned at him too. Georish Stauber, Baron Fell of House Fell, was unusual for the leader of a Jacksonian Great House in that he still wore his original body. An old man's body. The Baron was stout, pink of face, with a shiny liver-spotted scalp fringed by white hair trimmed short. The silk tunic he wore in his House's particular shade of green made him look like a hypothyroid elf. But there was nothing elfin about his cold and penetrating eyes. Miles was not intimidated by a Jacksonian Baron's power, Mark reminded himself. Miles was not intimidated by any power backed by less than three entire planets. His father the Butcher of Komarr could eat Jacksonian Great Houses for breakfast.
He, of course, was not Miles.
Screw that. I'm Miles for the next fifteen minutes, anyway.
"So, Admiral," rumbled the Baron. "We meet again after all."
"Quite." Mark managed not to let his voice crack.
"I see you are as presumptuous as ever. And as ill-informed."
"Quite."