"These things happen," Beatrice muttered numbly.
"You all right?"
"Of course I'm all right. These things happen. Inevitable. I am not a weepy wimp who folds under fire." She blinked rapidly, lifting her chin. "Give me . . . something to do. Anything."
Quickly, Miles added for her. Right. He pointed across the camp. "Go to Pel and Liant. Divide their remaining shuttle groups into blocks of thirty-three, and add them to each of the remaining third-wave shuttle groups. We'll have to send the third wave up over-loaded. Then report back to me. Go quick, the rest will be back in minutes."
"Yessir," she saluted. For her sake, not his; for order, structure, rationality, a lifeline. He returned the salute gravely.
"They were already overloaded," objected Tung as soon as she was out of earshot. "They're going to fly like bricks with 233 squeezed on board. And they'll take longer to load on here and unload topside."
"Yes. God." Miles gave up scratching figures in the useless mud. "Run the numbers through the computer for me, Ky. I don't trust myself to add two and two just now. How far behind will we be by the time the main body of the Cetagandans comes in range? Come close as you can, no fudge factors, please."
Tung mumbled into his headset, reeled off numbers, margins, timing. Miles tracked every detail with predatory intensity. Tung concluded bluntly. "At the end of the last wave, five shuttles are still going to be waiting to unload when the Cetagandan fire fries us."
A thousand men and women.
"May I respectfully suggest, sir, that the time has come to start cutting our losses?" added Tung.
"You may, Commodore."
"Option One, maximally efficient; only drop seven shuttles in the last wave. Leave the last five shuttle loads of prisoners on the ground. They'll be re-taken, but at least they'll be alive." Tung's voice grew persuasive on this last line.
"Only one problem, Ky. I don't want to stay here."
"You can still be on the last shuttle up, just like you said. By the way, sir, have I expressed myself yet, sir, on what a genuinely dumbshit piece of grandstanding that is?"
"Eloquently, with your eyebrows, a while ago. And while I'm inclined to agree with you, have you noticed yet how closely the remaining prisoners keep watching me? Have you ever watched a cat sneaking up on a horned hopper?"
Tung stirred uneasily, eyes taking in the phenomenon Miles described.
"I don't fancy gunning down the last thousand in order to get my shuttle into the air."
"Skewed as we are, they might not realize there were no more shuttles coming till after you were in the air."
"So we just leave them standing there, waiting for us?" The sheep look up, but are not fed . . .
"Right."
"You like that option, Ky?"
"Makes me want to puke, but—consider the 9,000 others. And the Dendarii fleet. The idea of dropping them all down the rat hole in a pre-doomed effort to pack up all these—miserable sinners of yours, makes me want to puke a lot more. Nine-tenths of a loaf is much better than none."
"Point taken. Let us go on to option two, please. The flight out of orbit is calculated on the speed of the slowest ship, which is . . . ?"
"The freighters."
"And the Triumph remains the swiftest?"
"Betcher ass." Tung had captained the Triumph once.
"And the best armored."
"Yo. So?" Tung saw perfectly well where he was being driven. His obtuseness was but a form of oblique balking.
"So. The first seven shuttles up on the last wave lock onto the troop freighters and boost on schedule. We call back five of the Triumph's fighter pilots and dump and destroy their craft. One's damaged already, right? The last five of these drop shuttles clamp to the Triumph in their place, protected from the now-arriving fire of the Cetagandan ships by the Triumph's full shielding. Pack the prisoners into the Triumph's corridors, lock shuttle hatches, boost like hell."
"The added mass of a thousand people—"
"Would be less than that of a couple of the drop shuttles. Dump and blow them too, if you have to, to fit the mass/acceleration window."
"—would overload life support—"
"The emergency oxygen will take us to the worm-hole jump point. After jump the prisoners can be distributed among the other ships at our leisure."
Tung's voice grew anguished. "Those combat-drop shuttles are brand new. And my fighters—five of them—do you realize how hard it will be to recoup the funds to replace 'em? It comes to—"
"I asked you to calculate the time, Ky, not the price tag," said Miles through his teeth. He added more quietly, "I'll tack them on to our bill for services rendered."
"You ever hear the term cost overrun, boy? You will. . . ." Tung switched his attention back to his headset, itself but an extension of the tactics room aboard the Triumph. Calculations were made, new orders entered and executed.
"It flies," sighed Tung. "Buys a damned expensive fifteen minutes. If nothing else goes wrong . . ." he trailed off in a frustrated mumble, as impatient as Miles himself with his inability to be three places at once.
"There comes my shuttle back," Tung noted aloud. He glanced at Miles, plainly unwilling to leave his admiral to his own devices, as plainly itching to be out of the acid rain and dark and mud and closer to the nerve center of operations.
"Get gone," said Miles. "You can't ride up with me anyway, it's against procedure."
"Procedure, hah," said Tung blackly.
With the lift-off of the third wave, there were barely 2,000 prisoners left on the ground. Things were thinning out, winding down; the armored combat patrols were falling back now from their penetration of the surrounding Cetagandan installations, back toward their assigned shuttle landing sites. A dangerous turning of the tide, should some surviving Cetagandan officer recover enough organization to harry their retreat.
"See you aboard the Triumph," Tung emphasized. He paused to brace Lieutenant Murka, out of Miles's earshot. Miles grinned in sympathy for the overworked lieutenant, in no doubt about the orders Tung was now laying on him. If Murka didn't come back with Miles in tow, he'd probably be wisest not to come back at all.
* * *
Nothing left now but a little last waiting. Hurry up and wait. Waiting, Miles realized, was very bad for him. It allowed his self-generated adrenaline to wear off, allowed him to feel how tired and hurt he really was. The illuminating flares were dying to a red glow.
There was really very little time between the fading of the labored thunder of the last third wave shuttle to depart, and the screaming whine of the first fourth wave shuttle plunging back. Alas that this had more to do with being skewed than being swift. The Marilacans still waited in their rat bar blocks, discipline still holding. Of course, nobody'd told them about the little problem in timing they faced. But the nervous Dendarii patrols, chivvying them up the ramps, kept things moving at a pace to Miles's taste. Rear guard was never a popular position to draw, even among the lunatic fringe who defaced their weapons with notches and giggled among themselves while speculating upon newer and more grotesque methods of blowing away their enemies.
Miles saw the semi-conscious Suegar carried up the ramp first. Suegar would actually reach the Triumph's sickbay faster in his company, Miles calculated, on this direct flight, than had he been sent on an earlier shuttle to one of the troop freighters and had to await a safe moment to transfer.
The arena they were leaving had grown silent and dark, sodden and sad, ghostly. I will break the doors of hell, and bring up the dead . . . there was something not quite right about the half-remembered quote. No matter.
This shuttle's armored patrol, the last, drew back out of the fog and darkness, electronically whistled in like a pack of sheepdogs by their master Murka, who stood at the foot of the ramp as liaison between the ground patrol and the shuttle pilot, who was expressing her anxiety to be gone with little whining revs on the engines.
Then from the darkness—plasma fire, sizzling throu
gh the rain-sodden, saturated air. Some Cetagandan hero—officer, troop, tech, who knew?—had crawled up out of the rubble and found a weapon—and an enemy to fire it at. Splintered afterimages, red and green, danced in Miles's eyes. A Dendarii patroller rolled out of the dark, a glowing line across the back of his armor smoking and sparking until quenched in the black mud. His armor legs seized up, and he lay wriggling like a frantic fish in an effort to peel out of it. A second plasma burst, ill-aimed, spent itself turning a few kilometers of fog and rain to superheated steam on a straight line to some unknown infinity.
Just what they needed, to be pinned down by sniper fire now. . . . A pair of Dendarii rear guards started back into the fog. An excited prisoner—ye gods, it was Pitt's lieutenant again—grabbed up the armor-paralyzed soldier's weapon and made to join them.
"No! Come back later and fight on your own time, you jerk!" Miles sloshed toward Murka. "Fall back, load up, get in the air! Don't stop to fight! No time!"
Some of the last of the prisoners had fallen flat to the ground, burrowing like mudpuppies, a sound sensible reflex in any other context. Miles dashed among them, slapping rumps. "Get aboard, up the ramp, go, go, go!" Beatrice popped up out of the mud and mimicked him, shakily driving her fellows before her.
Miles skidded to a stop beside his fallen Dendarii and snapped the armor clamps open left-handed. The soldier kicked off his fatal carapace, rolled to his feet, and limped for the safety of the shuttle. Miles ran close behind him.
Murka and one patrolman waited at the foot of the ramp.
"Get ready to pull in the ramp and lift on my mark," Murka began to the shuttle pilot. "R—" His words were lost in an explosive pop as the plasma beam sliced across his neck. Miles could feel the searing heat from it pass centimeters above his head as he stood next to his lieutenant. Murka's body crumpled.
Miles dodged, paused to yank off Murka's comm headset. The head came too. Miles had to brace it with his numb hand to pull the headset free. The weight of the head, its density and roundness, hammered into his senses. The precise memory of it would surely be with him until his dying day. He let it fall by Murka's body.
He staggered up the ramp, a last armored Dendarii pulling on his arm. He could feel the ramp sag peculiarly under their feet, glanced down to see a half-melted seam across it where the plasma arc that had killed Murka had passed on.
He fell through the hatchway, clutching the headset and yelling into it, "Lift, lift! Mark, now! Go!"
"Who is this?" came the shuttle pilot's voice back.
"Naismith."
"Yes, sir."
The shuttle heaved off the ground, engines roaring, even before the ramp had withdrawn. The ramp mechanism labored, metal and plastic complaining—then jammed on the twisted distortion of the melt.
"Get that hatch sealed back there!" the shuttle pilot's voice yowled over the headset.
"Ramp's jammed," Miles yowled back. "Jettison it!"
The ramp mechanism skreeled and shrieked, reversing itself. The ramp shuddered, jammed again. Hands reached out to thump on it urgently. "You'll never get it that way!" Beatrice, across the hatch from Miles, yelled fiercely, and twisted around to kick at it with her bare feet. The wind of their flight screamed over the open hatchway, buffeting and vibrating the shuttle like a giant blowing across the top of a bottle.
To a chorus of shouting, thumping, and swearing, the shuttle lurched abruptly onto its side. Men, women, and loose equipment tangled across the tilting deck. Beatrice kicked bloodily at a final buggered bolt. The ramp tore loose at last. Beatrice, sliding, fell with it.
Miles dove at her, lunging across the hatchway. If he connected, he never knew, for his right hand was a senseless blob. He saw her face only as a white blur as she whipped away into the blackness.
It was like a silence, a great silence, in his head. Although the roar of wind and engines, screaming and swearing and yelling, went on as before, it was lost somewhere between his ears and his brain, and went unregistered. He saw only a white blur, smearing into the darkness, repeated again and again, replaying like a looping vid.
He found himself crouched on his hands and knees, the shuttle's acceleration sucking him to the deck. They'd gotten the hatch closed. The merely human babble within seemed muffled and thin, now that the roaring voices of the gods were silenced. He looked up into the pale face of Pitt's lieutenant, crouched beside him still clutching the unfired Dendarii weapon he'd grabbed up in that other lifetime.
"You'd better kill a whole lot of Cetagandans for Marilac, boy," Miles rasped to him at last. "You better be worth something to somebody, 'cause I've sure paid too much for you."
The Marilacan's face twitched uncertainly, too cowed even to try to look apologetic. Miles wondered what his own face must look like. From the reflection in that mirror, strange, very strange.
Miles began to crawl forward, looking for something, somebody. . . . Formless flashes made yellow streaks in the corners of his vision. An armored Dendarii, her helmet off, pulled him to his feet.
"Sir? Hadn't you better come forward to the pilot's compartment, sir?"
"Yes, all right . . ."
She got an arm around him, under his arm, so he didn't fall down again. They picked their way forward in the crowded shuttle, through Marilacans and Dendarii mixed. Faces were drawn to him, marked him fearfully, but none dared an expression of any kind. Miles's eye was caught by a silver cocoon, as they neared the forward end.
"Wait . . ."
He fell to his knees beside Suegar. A hit of hope . . . "Suegar. Hey, Suegar!"
Suegar opened his eyes to slits. No telling how much of this he was taking in, through the pain and the shock and the drugs.
"You're on your way now. We made it, made the timing. With all ease. With agility and speed. Up through the regions of the air, higher than the clouds. You had the scripture right, you did."
Suegar's lips moved. Miles bent his head closer.
" . . . wasn't really a scripture," Suegar whispered. "I knew it . . . you knew it . . . don't shit me . . ."
Miles paused, cold-stoned. Then he leaned forward again. "No, brother," he whispered. "For though we went in clothed, we have surely come out naked."
Suegar's lips puffed on a dry laugh.
Miles didn't weep until after they'd made the wormhole jump.
FOUR
Illyan sat silent.
Miles lay back, pale and exhausted, a stupid trembling concealed in his belly making his voice shake. “Sorry. Thought I’d got over it. So much craziness has happened since then, no time to think, digest. . . .”
“Combat fatigue,” Illyan suggested.
“The combat only lasted a couple of hours.”
“Ah? I’d reckon it at six weeks, by that account.”
“Whatever. But if your Count Vorvolk wants to argue that I should have traded lives for equipment, well . . . I had maybe five minutes to make a decision, under enemy fire. If I’d had a month to study it, I’d have come to the same conclusion. And I’ll stand behind it now, in a court-martial or any goddamn arena he wants to fight me in.”
“Calm down,” Illyan advised. “I will deal with Vorvolk, and his shadow-advisors. I think . . . no, I guarantee their little plot will not intrude further on your recovery, Lieutenant Vorkosigan.” His eyes glinted. Illyan had served thirty years in Imperial Security, Miles reminded himself. Aral Vorkosigan’s Dog still had teeth.
“I’m sorry my . . . carelessness shook your confidence in me, sir,” said Miles. It was an odd wound that doubt had dealt him; Miles could feel it still, an invisible ache in his chest, slow to heal. So, trust was more of a feedback loop than he had ever realized. Was Illyan right, should he pay more attention to appearances? “I’ll try to be more intelligent in future.”
Illyan gave him an indecipherable look, his mouth set, neck oddly flushed. “So shall I, Lieutenant.”
The swish of the door, the sweep of skirts. Countess Vorkosigan was a tall woman, hair gone red-roan, w
ith a stride that had never quite accommodated itself to Barrayaran female fashions. She wore the long rich skirts of a Vor-class matron as cheerfully as a child playing dress-up, and about as convincingly.
“M’lady,” Illyan nodded, rising.
“Hello, Simon. Goodbye, Simon,” she grinned back. “That doctor you spooked begs me to use my superior firepower to throw you out. I know you officers and gentlemen have business, but it’s time to wrap it up. Or so the medical monitors indicate.” She glanced at Miles. A frown flickered across her easy-going features, a hint of steel.
Illyan caught it too, and bowed. “We’re quite finished, m’lady. No problem.”
“So I trust.” Chin lifted, she watched him out.
Miles, studying that steady profile, realized with a sudden lurch just why the death of a certain tall aggressive redhead might still be wringing his gut, long after his reconciliation to other casualties for which he was surely no less responsible. Ha. How late we come to our insights. And how uselessly. Still, a tightness eased in his throat as Countess Vorkosigan turned back to him.
“You look like a defrosted corpse, love.” Her lips brushed his forehead warmly.
“Thank you, Mother,” Miles chirped.
“That nice Commander Quinn who brought you in says you haven’t been eating properly. As usual.”
“Ah.” Miles brightened. “Where is Quinn? Can I see her?”
“Not here. She is excluded from classified areas, to wit this Imperial Military Hospital, on the grounds of her being foreign military personnel. Barrayarans!” That was Captain Cordelia Naismith’s (Betan Astronomical Survey, retired) favorite swear word, delivered with a multitude of inflections as the occasion demanded; this time with exasperation. “I took her to Vorkosigan House to wait.”
“Thank you. I . . . owe a lot to Quinn.”
“So I gather.” She smiled at him. “You can be at the long lake three hours after you delude that doctor into releasing you from this dismal place. I’ve invited Commander Quinn along—there, I thought that might motivate you to pay more serious attention to recovery.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Miles eased down into his covers. Sensation was beginning to return to his arms. Unfortunately, the sensation in question was pain. He smiled whitely. It was better than no sensation at all, oh yes.