"Maybe the quaddies are up to something. What do they say?"
Vorpatril hesitated, then spat, "Watts cut me out of the loop a few minutes ago. We were having an argument over whose strike team should go in, ours or the quaddie militia's, and when. And under whose orders. Both at once with no coordination struck me as a supremely bad idea."
"Indeed. One perceives the potential hazards." The ba was beginning to seem a trifle outnumbered. But then there were its bio-threats . . . Miles's nascent sympathy died as his vision blurred again. "We are guests in their polity . . . hang on. Something seems to be happening at one of the outer airlocks."
Miles enlarged the security vid image from the lock that had suddenly come alive. Docking lights framing the outer door ran through a series of checks and go-aheads. The ba, he reminded himself, was probably looking at this same view. He held his breath. Were the quaddies, under the mask of delivering the demanded jump pilot, about to attempt to insert their own strike force?
The airlock door slid open, giving a brief glimpse of the inside of a tiny, one-person personnel pod. A naked man, the little silver contact circles of a jump pilot's neural implant gleaming at mid-forehead and temples, stepped through into the lock. The door slid shut again. Tall, dark-haired, handsome but for the thin pink scars running, Miles could now see, all over his body in a winding swathe. Dmitri Corbeau. His face was pale and set.
"The jump pilot has just arrived," Miles told Vorpatril.
"Dammit. Human or quaddie?"
Vorpatril was really going to have to work on his diplomatic vocabulary. . . . "Downsider," Miles answered, in lieu of any more pointed remark. He hesitated, then added, "It's Lieutenant Corbeau."
A stunned silence: then Vorpatril hissed, "Son-of-a-bitch . . . !"
"H'sh. The ba is finally coming on." Miles adjusted the volume, and opened his faceplate again so that Vorpatril could overhear too. As long as Roic kept his suit sealed, it was . . . no worse than ever. Yeah, and how bad is that, again?
"Turn toward the security module and open your mouth," the ba's voice instructed coolly and without preamble over the lock vid monitor. "Closer. Wider." Miles was treated to a fair view of Corbeau's tonsils. Unless Corbeau harbored a poison-filled tooth, no weapons were concealed therein.
"Very well . . ." The ba continued with a chill series of directions for Corbeau to go through a humiliating sequence of gyrations which, while not as thorough as a body cavity search, gave at least some assurance that the jump pilot carried nothing there, either. Corbeau obeyed precisely, without hesitation or argument, his expression rigid and blank.
"Now release the pod from the docking clamps."
Corbeau rose from his last squat and stepped through the lock to the personnel hatch entry area. A chink and a clank—the pod, released but unpowered, drifted away from the side of the Idris.
"Now listen to these instructions. You will walk twenty meters toward the bow, turn left, and wait for the next door to open for you."
Corbeau obeyed, still almost expressionless, except for his eyes. His gaze darted about, as if he searched for something, or was trying to memorize his route. He passed out of sight of the lock vids.
Miles considered the peculiar pattern of old worm scars across Corbeau's body. He must have rolled, or been rolled, across a bad nest. A story seemed written in those fading hieroglyphs. A young colonial boy, perhaps the new boy in camp or town—tricked or dared or maybe just stripped and pushed? To rise again from the ground, crying and frightened, to the jangle of some cruel mockery . . .
Vorpatril swore, repetitively, under his breath. "Why Corbeau? Why Corbeau?"
Miles, who was frantically wondering the same thing, hazarded, "Perhaps he volunteered."
"Unless the bloody quaddies bloody sacrificed him. Instead of risking one of their own. Or . . . maybe he's figured out another way to desert."
"I . . ." Miles held his words for a long moment of thought, then let them out on a breath, "think that would be doing it the hard way." It was a sticky suspicion, though. Just whose ally might Corbeau prove?
Miles caught Corbeau's image again as the ba walked him through the ship toward Nav and Com, briefly opening and closing airseal doors. He passed through the last barrier and out of vid range, straight-backed, silent, bare feet padding quietly on the deck. He looked . . . cold.
Miles's attention was jerked aside by the flicker of another airlock sensor alarm. Hastily, he called up the image of another lock—just in time to see a quaddie in a green biotainer suit whap the vid monitor mightily with a spanner while beyond, two more green figures sped past. The image shattered and went dark. He could still hear, though—the beep of the lock alarm, the hiss of a lock door opening—but no hiss when it closed. Because it did not close, or because it closed on vacuum? Air, and sound, returned as the lock cycled. The lock, therefore, had opened on vacuum; the quaddies had made their getaway into space around the station.
That answered his question about their biotainer suits—unlike the Idris's cheaper issue, they were vacuum-rated. In Quaddiespace, that made all kinds of sense. Half a dozen station locks offered refuge within little more than a few hundred meters; the fleeing quaddies would have their pick, in addition to whatever pods or shuttles hovered nearby able to swoop down on them and take them inboard.
"Venn and Greenlaw and Leutwyn just escaped out an airlock," he reported to Vorpatril. "Good timing." Shrewd timing, to go just when the ba was both distracted by the arrival of its pilot and, with the real possibility of a getaway now in hand, less inclined to carry out the station-ramming threat. It was exactly the right move, to leak hostages from the enemy's grip at every opportunity. Granted, this use of Corbeau's arrival was ruthlessly calculated in the extreme. Miles could not be sorry. "Good. Excellent! Now this ship is entirely cleared of civilians."
"Except for you, m'lord," Roic pointed out, started to say something else, intercepted the dark look Miles cast over his shoulder, and ran down in a mumble.
"Ha," muttered Vorpatril. "Maybe this will change Watts's mind." His voice lowered, as if directed away from his audio pickup, or behind his hand. "What, Lieutenant?" Then murmured, "Excuse me," Miles was not certain to whom.
So, only Barrayarans left aboard now. Plus Bel—on the ImpSec payroll, therefore an honorary Barrayaran for all mortal accounting purposes. Miles smiled briefly despite it all as he considered Bel's probable outraged response to such a suggestion. The best time to insert a strike force would be before the ship started to move, rather than to attempt to play catch-up in mid-space. At some point, Vorpatril was probably going to stop waiting for quaddie permission to launch his men. At some point, Miles would agree.
Miles returned his attention to the problem of spying on Nav and Com. If the ba had knocked out the monitor the way the passing quaddies just had, or even merely thrown a jacket over the vid pickup, Miles would be out of luck . . . ah. Finally. An image of Nav and Com formed over his vid plate. But now he had no sound. Miles gritted his teeth and bent forward.
The vid pickup was apparently centered over the door, giving a good view over the half dozen empty station chairs and their dark consoles. The ba was there, still dressed in the Betan garb of its discarded alias, jacket and sarong and sandals. Although a pressure suit—one—abstracted from the Idris's supplies lay nearby, flung over the back of a station chair. Corbeau, still vulnerably naked, was seated in the pilot's chair, but had not yet lowered his headset. The ba held up a hand, said something; Corbeau frowned fiercely, and flinched, as the ba pressed a hypospray briefly against the pilot's upper arm and stepped back with a flash of satisfaction on its strained face.
Drugs? Surely even the ba was not mad enough to drug a jump pilot upon whose neural function it would shortly be betting its life. Some disease inoculation? The same problem applied, although something latent might do—Cooperate, and later I will let you have the antidote. Or pure bluff, a shot of water, perhaps. The hypospray seemed altogether too crude and obvious as
a Cetagandan drug administration method; it hinted at bluff to Miles's mind, though perhaps not to Corbeau's. One had no choice but to turn control over to the pilot when he lowered his headset and plugged the ship into his mind. It made pilots hard to effectively threaten.
It did rather put paid to Vorpatril's paranoid fear that Corbeau had turned traitor, volunteering for this as a way to get a free ride out of his quaddie detention cell and his dilemmas. Or did it? Regardless of prior or secret agreements, the ba would not simply trust when it could, it would think, guarantee.
Over his wrist com, muffled as from a distance, Miles heard a sudden, startling bellow from Admiral Vorpatril: "What? That's impossible. Have they gone mad? Not now . . ."
After a few more moments passed without further enlightenment, he murmured, "Um, Ekaterin? Are you still there?"
Her breath drew in. "Yes."
"What's going on?"
"Admiral Vorpatril was called away by his communications officer. Some sort of priority message from Sector Five headquarters just arrived. It seems to be something very urgent."
On the vid image in front of him, Miles watched as Corbeau began to run through preflight checks, moving from station to station under the hard, watchful eyes of the ba. Corbeau made sure to move with disproportional care; apparently, from the movement of his rather stiff lips, explaining each move before he touched a console. And slowly, Miles noted. Rather more slowly than necessary, if not quite slowly enough to be obvious about it.
Vorpatril's voice, or rather, Vorpatril's heavy breathing, returned at last. The admiral appeared to have run out of invective. Miles found that considerably more disturbing than his previous naval bellowing.
"My lord." Vorpatril hesitated. His voice dropped to a sort of stunned growl. "I have just received Priority One orders from Sector Five HQ to marshal my escort ships, abandon the Komarran fleet, and head for fleet rendezvous off Marilac at maximum possible speed."
Not with my wife, you don't, was Miles's first gyrating thought.
Then he blinked, freezing in his seat.
The other function of the military escorts Barrayar donated to the Komarran trade fleets was to quietly and unobtrusively maintain an armed force dispersed through the Nexus. A force that could, in the event of a truly dire emergency, be collected rapidly so as to present a convincing military threat at key strategic points. In a crunch it might otherwise be too slow, or even diplomatically or militarily impossible, to get any force from the homeworlds through the wormhole jumps of intervening local space polities to the mustering places where it could do Barrayar some good. But the trade fleets were out there already.
The planet of Marilac was a Barrayaran ally at the back door of the Cetagandan Empire, from Barrayar's point of view, in the complex web of wormhole jump routes that strung the Nexus together. A second front, as Rho Ceta's immediate neighborly threat to Komarr was considered the first front. Granted, the Cetagandans had the shorter lines of communication and logistics between the two points of contact. But the strategic pincer still beat hell out of the sound of one hand clapping, particularly with the potential addition of Marilacan forces. The Barrayarans would only be marshaling at Marilac in order to offer a threat to Cetaganda.
Except that, when Miles and Ekaterin had left Barrayar on this belated honeymoon trip, relations between the two empires had been about as—well, cordial was perhaps not quite the right term—about as unstrained as they had been in years. What the hell could have changed that, so profoundly, and so quickly?
Something has stirred up the Cetagandans around Rho Ceta, Gregor had said.
A few jumps out from Rho Ceta, Guppy and his smuggler friends had off-loaded a strange live cargo from a Cetagandan government ship, one with lots of fancy markings. A screaming-bird pattern, perhaps? Along with one, and only one person—one survivor? After which the ship had tilted away, on a dangerous in-bound course for the system's suns. What if that trajectory hadn't been a swing around? What if it had been a straight dive, with no return?
"Sonuvabitch," breathed Miles.
"My lord?" said Vorpatril. "If—"
"Quiet," snapped Miles.
The admiral's silence was shocked, but it held.
Once a year, the most precious cargoes of the haut race left the Star Crèche on the capital world of Eta Ceta. Eight ships, bound each for one of the planets of the Empire so curiously ruled by the haut. Each carrying that year's cohort of haut embryos, genetically modified and certified results of all the contracts of conception so carefully negotiated, the prior year, between the members of the great constellations, the clans, the carefully cultivated gene-lines of the haut race. Each load of a thousand or so nascent lives conducted by one of the eight most important haut ladies of the Empire, the planetary consorts who were the steering committee of the Star Crèche. All most private, most secret, most never-to-be-discussed with outsiders.
How was it that a ba agent could not go back for more copies, if it lost such a cargo of future haut lives in transit?
When it wasn't an agent at all. When it was a renegade.
"The crime isn't murder," Miles whispered, his eyes widening. "The crime is kidnapping."
The murders had come subsequently, in an increasingly panicked cascade, as the ba, with good reason, attempted to bury its trail. Well, Guppy and his friends had surely been planned to die, as eyewitnesses to the fact that one person had not gone down with the rest on the doomed ship. A ship hijacked, if briefly, before its destruction—all the best hijackings were inside jobs, oh, yes. The Cetagandan government must be going insane over this.
"My lord, are you all right—?"
Ekaterin's voice, in a fierce whisper: "No, don't interrupt him. He's thinking. He just makes those funny leaking noises when he's thinking."
From the Celestial Garden's point of view, a Star Crèche child-ship had disappeared on what should have been a safe route to Rho Ceta. Every rescue force and intelligence agent the Cetagandan empire owned would have been flung into the case. If it were not for Guppy, the tragedy might have passed as some mysterious malfunction that had sent the ship tumbling, out of control and unable to signal, to its fiery doom. No survivors, no wreckage, no loose ends. But there was Guppy. Leaving a messy trail of wildly suggestive evidence behind him with every flopping footfall.
How far behind could the Cetagandans be, by now? Too close for the ba's comfort, obviously; it was a wonder, when Guppy had popped up on the hostel railing, that the ba hadn't just died of heart failure without any need for the rivet gun. But the ba's trail, marked by Guppy with blazing flares, led straight through from the scene of the crime to the heart of a sometimes-enemy empire—Barrayar. What were the Cetagandans making of it all?
Well, we have a clue now, don't we?
"Right," breathed Miles, then, more crisply, "Right. You're recording all this, I trust. So my first order in the Emperor's Voice, Admiral, is to countermand your rendezvous orders from Sector Five. That was what you were about to ask for, yes?"
"Thank you, my Lord Auditor, yes," said Vorpatril gratefully. "Normally, that would be a call I would rather die than disregard, but . . . given our present situation, they are going to have to wait a little." Vorpatril wasn't self-dramatizing; this was delivered as a plain statement of fact. "Not too long, I hope."
"They are going to have to wait a lot. This is my next order in the Emperor's Voice. Clear copy everything—everything—you have on record here from the past twenty-four hours and squirt it back on an open channel, at the highest priority, to the Imperial Residence, to the Barrayaran high command on Barrayar, to ImpSec HQ, and to ImpSec Galactic Affairs on Komarr. And," he took a breath, and raised his voice to override Vorpatril's outraged cry of Clear copy! At a time like this? "marked from Lord Auditor Miles Vorkosigan of Barrayar to the most urgent, personal attention of ghem-General Dag Benin, Chief of Imperial Security, the Celestial Garden, Eta Ceta, personal, urgent, most urgent, by Rian's hair this one's real, Dag. Exactly those words
."
"What?" screamed Vorpatril, then hastily lowered his tone to an anguished repeat, "What? A rendezvous at Marilac can only mean imminent war with the Cetagandans! We can't hand them that kind of intelligence on our position and movements—gift-wrapped!"
"Obtain the complete, unedited Graf Station Security recording of the interrogation of Russo Gupta and send it along too, as soon as you possibly can. Sooner."
New terror shook Miles, a vision like a fever dream: the grand façade of Vorkosigan House, in the Barrayaran capital of Vorbarr Sultana, with plasma fire raining down upon it, its ancient stone melting like butter; two fluid-filled canisters exploding in steam. Or a fog of plague, leaving all the House's protectors dead in heaps in the halls, or fled to die in the streets; two almost ripe replicators running down unattended, stopping, slowly chilling, their tiny occupants dying for lack of oxygen, drowning in their own amniotic fluid. His past and his future, all destroyed together . . . Nikki, too—would he be swept up with the other children in some frantic rescue, or left uncounted, unmissed, fatally alone? Miles had fancied himself growing into a good stepfather to Nikki—that was called into deep question now, eh? Ekaterin, I'm sorry . . .
It would be hours—days—before the new tight-beam could get back to Barrayar and Cetaganda. Insanely upset people could make fatal mistakes in mere minutes. Seconds . . . "And if you are a praying man, Vorpatril, pray that no one will do anything stupid before it gets there. And that we will be believed."
"Lady Vorkosigan," Vorpatril whispered urgently. "Could he be hallucinating from the disease?"
"No, no," she soothed. "He's just thinking too fast, and leaving out all the intervening steps. He does that. It can be very frustrating. Miles, love, um . . . for the rest of us, would you mind unpacking that a little more?"
He took a breath—and two or three more—to stop his trembling. "The ba. It's not an agent on a mission. It's a criminal. A renegade. Perhaps insane. I believe it hijacked the annual haut child-ship to Rho Ceta, sent the vessel into the nearest sun with all aboard—probably murdered already—and made off with its cargo. Which trans-shipped through Komarr, and which left the Barrayaran Empire on a trade ship belonging to Empress Laisa personally—and just how incriminating that particular detail is going to look to certain minds inside the Star Crèche, I shrink to imagine. The Cetagandans think we stole their babies, or colluded in the theft, and, dear God, murdered a planetary consort, and so they are about to make war on us by mistake!"