The Warrior's Apprentice

  Miles felt a slight change in gravity and vibration; they must be moving into attack formation. Time to get his helmet on, and make contact with Tung and Auson in the tactics room. Elena's tech fitted her helmet. She opened her faceplate, spoke to the tech; they collaborated on some minor adjustment.

  If Baz was keeping his schedule, this was surely Miles's last chance with her. With the engineer out of the way, there was no one to usurp his hero's role. The next rescue would be his. He pictured himself, blasting menacing Pelians right and left, pulling her out of some tactical hole—the details were vague. She would have to believe he loved her then. His tongue would magically untangle, he'd finally find the right words after so many wrong ones, her snowy skin would warm in the heat of his ardor and bloom again....

  Her face, framed by her helmet, was cold, austere in profile, the same blank winter landscape she had exhibited to the world since Bothari's death. Her lack of reaction worried Miles. True, she had had her Dendarii duties to distract her, keep her moving—not like the self-indulgent luxury of his own withdrawal. At least with Elena Visconti gone, she was spared those awkward meetings in the corridors and conference rooms, both women pretending fiercely to cold professionalism.

  Elena stretched in her armor, and gazed pensively into the black hole of her plasma arc muzzle built into the right arm of her suit. She slipped on her glove, covering the blue veins like pale rivers of ice in her wrist. Her eyes made Miles think of razors.

  He stepped to her shoulder, and waved away her tech. The words he spoke weren't any of the dozens he had rehearsed for the occasion. He lowered his voice to whisper.

  "I know all about suicide. Don't think you can fool me."

  She started, and flushed. Frowned at him in fierce scorn. Snapped her faceplate shut.

  Forgive, whispered his anguished thought to her. It is necessary.

  Arde lowered Miles's helmet over his head, connected his control leads, checked the connections. A lacework of fire netted, knotted, and tangled in Miles's gut. Damn, but it was getting hard to ignore.

  He checked his comm link with the tactics room. "Commodore Tung? Naismith here. Roll the vids." The inside of his faceplate blurred with color, duplicate readouts of the tactics room telemetry for the field commander. Only communications, no servo links this time. The captured Pelian armor had none, and the old Oseran armor was all safely on manual override. Just in case somebody else out there was learning from experience.

  "Last chance to change your mind," Tung said over the comm link, continuing the old argument. "Sure you wouldn't rather attack the Oserans after the transfer, farther from the Pelian bases? Our intelligence on them is so much more detailed...."

  "No! We have to capture or destroy the payroll before the delivery. Taking it after is strategically useless."

  "Not entirely. We could sure use the money."

  And how, Miles reflected glumly. It would soon take scientific notation to register his debt to the Dendarii. A mercenary fleet could hardly burn money faster if the ships ran on steam power and the funds were shoveled directly into their furnaces. Never had one so little owed so much to so many, and it grew worse by the hour. His stomach oozed around his abdominal cavity like a tortured amoeba, throwing out pseudopods of pain and the vacuole of an acid belch. You are a psychosomatic illusion, Miles assured it.

  The assault group formed up and marched to the waiting shuttles. Miles moved among them, trying to touch each person, call them by name, give them some personal word; they seemed to like that. He ordered their ranks in his mind, and wondered how many gaps there would be when this day's work was done. Forgive... He had run out of clever solutions. This one was to be done the old hard way, head-on.

  They moved through the shuttle hatch corridors into the waiting shuttle. This must surely be the worst part, waiting helplessly for Tung to deliver them like cartons of eggs, as fragile, as messy when broken. He took a deep breath, and prepared to cope with the usual effects of zero-gee.

  He was totally unprepared for the cramp that doubled him over, snatched his breath away, drained his face to a paper-whiteness. Not like this, it had never come on like this before—. He redoubled into a ball, gasping, lost his grasp on his grip-strap, floated free. Dear God, it was finally happening—the ultimate humiliation—he was going to throw up in a space suit. In moments, everyone would know of his hilarious weakness. Absurd, for a would-be Imperial officer to get space-sick. Absurd, absurd, he had always been absurd. He had barely the presence of mind to hit his ventilator controls to full power with a jerk of his chin, and kill his broadcast—no need to treat his mercenaries to the unedifying sound of their commander retching.

  "Admiral Naismith?" came an inquiry from the tactics room. "Your medical readouts look odd—telemetry check requested."

  The universe seemed to narrow to his belly. A wrenching rush, gagging and coughing, another, another. The ventilator could not keep up. He'd eaten nothing this day, where was it all coming from?

  A mercenary pulled him out of the air, tried to help him straighten his clenched limbs. "Admiral Naismith? Are you all right?"

  He opened Miles's faceplate, to Miles's gasp of "No! Not in here—"

  "Son-of-a-bitch!" The man jumped back, and raised his voice to a piercing cry. "Medtech!"

  You're overreacting, Miles tried to say; I'll clean it up myself.... Dark clots, scarlet droplets, shimmering crimson globules, floated past his confused eyes, his secret spilled. It appeared to be pure blood. "No," he whimpered, or tried to. "Not now . . ."

  Hands grasped him, passed him back to the shuttle hatch he had entered moments before. Gravity pressed him to the corridor deck—who the devil had upped it to three-gee?—hands pulled his helmet off, plucked at his carefully donned carapace. He felt like a lobster supper. His belly wrung itself out again.

  Elena's face, nearly as white as his now, circled above him. She knelt, tore off her servo glove and gripped his hand, flesh to flesh at last. "Miles!"

  Truth is what you make it... "Commander Bothari!" he croaked, as loud as he could. A ring of frightened faces huddled around him. His Dendarii. His people. For them, then. All for them. All. "Take over."

  "I can't!" Her face was pale with shock, terrified. God, Miles thought, I must look just like Bothari, spilling his guts. It's not that bad, he tried to tell her. Silver-black whorls sparkled in his vision, blotting out her face. No! Not yet-

  "Liege-lady. You can. You must. I'll be with you." He writhed, gripped by some sadistic giant. "You are true Vor, not I.... Must have been changelings, back there in those replicators." He gave her a death's-head grin. "Forward momentum—"

  She rose then, determination crowding out the hot terror in her face, the ice that had run like water transmuted to marble.

  "Right, my lord," she whispered. And more loudly, "Right! Get back there, let the medtechs do their job—" She drove away his admirers. He was flipped efficiently onto a float pallet.

  He watched his booted feet, dark and distant hillocks, waver before him as he was borne aloft. Feet first, it would have to be feet first. He barely felt the prick of the first IV in his arm. He heard Elena's voice, raised tremblingly behind him.

  "All right you clowns! No more games. We're going to win this one for Admiral Naismith!"

  Heroes. They sprang up around him like weeds. A carrier, he was seemingly unable to catch the disease he spread.

  "Damn it," he moaned. "Damn it, damn it, damn it..." He repeated this litany like a mantra, until the medtech's second sedative injection parted him from his pain, frustration, and consciousness.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  He wandered in and out of reality, like being lost in the Imperial Residence when he was a boy, trying various doors, some leading to treasures, others to broom closets, but none to familiarity. Once he awoke to Tung, sitting beside him, and worried about it; shouldn't the mercenary be in the tactics room?

  Tung eyed him with affectionate concern. "You know, son, if you're going t
o last in this business, you have to learn to pace yourself. We almost lost you there."

  It sounded like a good dictum; perhaps he'd have it calligraphied for the wall of his bedroom.

  Another time, Elena. How had she come to sickbay? He'd left her in the shuttle. Nothing stayed where you put it...

  "Damn it," he mumbled apologetically, "things like this never happened to Vorthalia the Bold."

  She raised a thoughtful eyebrow. "How do you know? The histories of those times were all written by minstrels and poets. You try and think of a word that rhymes with 'bleeding ulcer.'"

  He was still dutifully trying when the greyness swallowed him again.

  Once, he woke alone and called over and over for Sergeant Bothari, but the Sergeant didn't come. It's just like the man, he thought petulantly, underfoot all the time and then gone on long leave just when he needed him. The medtech's sedative ended that bout with consciousness, not in Miles's favor.

  It was an allergic reaction to the sedative, the surgeon told him later. His grandfather came, and smothered him with a pillow, and tried to hide him under the bed. Bothari, bloody-chested, and the mercenary pilot officer, his implant wires somehow turned inside out and waving about his head like some strange brachiated coral, watched. His mother came at last and shooed away the deadly ghosts like a farm wife clucking to her chickens. "Quick," she advised Miles, "calculate the value of e to the last decimal place, and the spell will be broken. You can do it in your head if you're Betan enough."

  Miles waited eagerly all day for his father, in this parade of hallucinatory figures; he had done something extremely clever, although he could not quite remember what, and he ached for a chance at last to impress the Count. But his father never came. Miles wept with disappointment.

  Other shadows came and went, the medtech, the surgeon, Elena and Tung, Auson and Thorne, Arde Mayhew, but they were distant, figures reflected on lead glass. After he had cried for a long time, he slept.

  When he woke again, the little private room off the sickbay of the Triumph was clear and unwavering in outline, but Ivan Vorpatril sat beside his bed.

  "Other people," Miles groaned, "get to hallucinate orgies and giant cicadas and things. What do I get? Relatives. I can see relatives when I'm conscious. It's not fair..."

  Ivan turned worriedly to Elena, who was perched on the end of the bed. "I thought the surgeon said the antidote would have cleared him out by now."

  Elena rose, and bent over Miles in concern, long white fingers across his brow. "Miles? Can you hear me?"

  "Of course I can hear you." He suddenly realized the absence of another sensation. "Hey! My stomach doesn't hurt."

  "Yes, the surgeon blocked off some nerves during the repair operation. You should be completely healed up inside within a couple of weeks."

  "Operation?" He attempted a surreptitious peek down the shapeless garment he seemed to be occupying, looking for he knew not what. His torso seemed to be as smooth, or lumpy, as ever, no important body parts accidently snipped off—"I don't see any dotted lines."

  "He didn't cut. It was all shoving things down your gullet, and hand-tractor work, except for installing the biochip on your vagus nerve. A bit grotesque, but very ingenious."

  "How long was I out?"

  "Three days. You were—"

  "Three days! The payroll raid—Baz—" He lunged convulsively upward; Elena pushed him back down firmly.

  "We took the payroll. Baz is back, with his whole group. Everything's fine, except for you almost bleeding to death."

  "Nobody dies of ulcers. Baz back? Where are we, anyway?"

  "Docked at the refinery. I didn't think you could die of ulcers either, but the surgeon says holes in your body with blood pouring out are the same whether they're on the inside or the outside, so I guess you can. You'll get a full report—" she pushed him back down again, looking exasperated, "but I thought you'd better see Ivan privately first, without all the Dendarii standing around."

  "Uh, right." He stared in bewilderment at his big cousin. Ivan was dressed in civilian gear, Barrayaran-style trousers, a Betan shirt, but Barrayaran regulation Service boots.

  "Do you want to feel me, to see if I'm real?" Ivan asked cheerfully.

  "It wouldn't do any good, you can feel hallucinations, too. Touch them, smell them, hear them..." Miles shivered. "I'll take your word for it. But Ivan—what are you doing here?"

  "Looking for you."

  "Did Father send you?"

  "I don't know."

  "How can you not know?"

  "Well, he didn't talk to me personally—look, are you sure Captain Dimir hasn't arrived yet, or got any messages to you, or anything? He had all the dispatches and secret orders and things."

  "Who?"

  "Captain Dimir. He's my commanding officer."

  "Never heard of him. Or from him."

  "I think he works out of Captain Illyan's department," Ivan added helpfully. "Elena thought you might have heard something that you didn't have time to mention, maybe."

  "No..."

  "I don't understand it," sighed Ivan. "They left Beta Colony a day ahead of me in an Imperial fast courier. They should have been here a week ago."

  "How was it you travelled separately?"

  Ivan cleared his throat. "Well, there was this girl, you see, on Beta Colony. She invited me home—I mean, Miles, a Betan! I met her right there in the shuttleport, practically the first thing. Wearing one of those sporty little sarongs, and nothing else—" Ivan's hands were beginning to wave in dreamy descriptive curves; Miles hastened to cut off what he knew could be a lengthy digression.

  "Probably trolling for galactics. Some Betans collect them. Like a Barrayaran getting banners of all the provinces." Ivan had such a collection at home, Miles recalled. "So what happened to this Captain Dimir?"

  "They left without me." Ivan looked aggrieved. "And I wasn't even late!"

  "How did you get here?"

  "Lieutenant Croye reported you'd gone to Tau Verde IV. So I hitched a ride with a merchant vessel bound for one of those neutral countries down there. The captain dropped me off here at this refinery."

  Miles's jaw dropped. "Hitched—dropped you off—do you realize the risks—"

  Ivan blinked. "She was very nice about it. Er—motherly, you know."

  Elena studied the ceiling, coolly disdainful. "That pat on the ass she gave you in the shuttle tube didn't look exactly maternal to me."

  Ivan reddened. "Anyway, I got here." He brightened. "And ahead of old Dimir! Maybe I won't be in as much trouble as I thought."

  Miles ran his hands through his hair. "Ivan—would it be too much trouble to begin at the beginning? Assuming there is one."

  "Oh, yeah, I guess you wouldn't know about the big flap."

  "Flap? Ivan, you're the first word we've had from home since we left Beta Colony. The blockade, you know—although you seem to have passed through it like so much smoke..."

  "The old bird was clever, I'll give her that. I never knew older women could—"

  "The flap," Miles rerouted him urgently.

  "Yes. Well. The first report we had at home, from Beta Colony, was that you had been kidnapped by some fellow who was a deserter from the Service—"

  "Oh, ye gods! Mother—what did Father—"

  "They were pretty worried, I guess, but your mother kept saying that Bothari was with you, and anyway somebody at the Embassy finally thought to talk with your Grandmother Naismith, and she didn't think you'd been kidnapped at all. That calmed your mother down a lot, and she, um, sat on your father—anyway, they decided to wait for further reports."

  "Thank God."

  "Well, the next reports were from some military agent here in Tau Verde local space. Nobody would tell me what was in them—well, nobody would tell my mother, I guess, which makes sense when you think about it. But Captain Illyan was running in circles between Vorkosigan House and General Headquarters and the Imperial Residence and Vorhartung Castle twenty-six hours a day
for while. It didn't help that all the information they got was three weeks out of date, either—"

  "Vorhartung Castle?" murmured Miles in surprise. "What does the Council of Counts have to do with this?"

  "I couldn't figure it either. But Count Henri Vorvolk was pulled out of class at the Academy three times to attend secret committee sessions at the Counts, so I cornered him—seems there was some fantastic rumor going around that you were in Tau Verde local space building up your own mercenary fleet, nobody knew why—at least, I thought it was a fantastic rumor—" Ivan stared around at the little sickbay cubicle, at the ship it implied. "Anyway, your father and Captain Illyan finally decided to send a fast courier to investigate."

  "Via Beta Colony, I gather. Ah—did you happen to run across a fellow named Tav Calhoun while you were there?"

  "Oh, yeah, the crazy Betan. He hangs around the Barrayaran Embassy—he has a warrant for your arrest, which he waves at whoever he can catch going in or out. The guards won't let him in anymore."

  "Did you actually talk to him?"

  "Briefly. I told him there was a rumor you'd gone to Kshatryia."

  "Really?"

  "Of course not. But it was the farthest place I could think of. The clan," Ivan said smugly, "should stick together."

  "Thanks..." Miles mulled this over. "I think." He sighed. "I guess the best thing to do is wait for your Captain Dimir, then. He might at least be able to give us a ride home, which would solve one problem." He looked up at his cousin. "I'll explain it all later, but I have to know some things now—can you keep your mouth shut a while? Nobody here is supposed to know who I really am." A horrid thought shook Miles. "You haven't been going around asking for me by name, have you?"

  "No, no, just Miles Naismith," Ivan assured him. "We knew you were travelling with your Betan passport. Anyway, I just got here last night, and practically the first person I met was Elena."