Irresistible Forces

by Catherine Asaro

  “If that’s truly Quinn, then this”—he pointed at the pearls—“can’t be. Eh? Trust me. Trust your own judgment.”

  Slowly, with the deepest distress in her strange gold eyes, Taura wrapped the box in the cloth and handed it to him.

  Then Roic found himself facing the task, all by himself, of stirring up ImpSec supreme headquarters in the middle of the night. He almost wanted to wait for Pym’s return. But he was a Vorkosigan armsman: senior man present, even if merely because sole man present. It was his duty, it was his right, and time was of the essence, if only to relieve Taura’s troubled mind at the earliest possible instant. She hovered, bleak and worried, as he gulped for nerve and fired up the secured comconsole in the nearby library.

  A serious-looking ImpSec captain reported to the front hall in less than thirty minutes. He recorded everything, including Roic’s verbal report, Taura’s description of what the pearls had looked like to her, both their accounts of Madame Vorsoisson’s witnessed symptoms, and a copy of Pym’s original security check records. Roic tried to be straightforward, as he’d often wished witnesses would have been to him back in Hassadar, although in this version the fraught confrontation in the antechamber became merely Sergeant Taura voiced a suspicion to me. Well, it was true.

  For Taura’s sake, Roic made sure to mention the possibility that the pearls had not been sent by Quinn at all and pointed out the other gift certainly known to be from her. The captain frowned and bundled up the live fur as well, and looked as though he wanted to bundle up Taura along with it. He carried off the pearls, the still-purring blanket, and all related packaging in a series of sealed and labeled plastic bags. All this chill efficiency took a bare half hour more.

  “Do you want to go to bed?” Roic asked Taura when the doors closed behind the ImpSec captain. She looks so tired. “I have to stay up anyway. I can give you a call to your room when there’s any news. If there’s any news.”

  She shook her head. “I couldn’t sleep. Maybe they’ll have something soon.”

  “There’s no telling, but I hope so.”

  They settled down to wait together on a sturdy-looking sofa in the antechamber opposite the one displaying the gifts. The noises of the night—odd squeaks of the house settling against the winter cold, the faint whir or hum of distant automated machinery—were very noticeable in the stillness. Taura stretched what Roic suspected were knotted shoulders, and he was briefly inspired to offer a back rub, but he wasn’t sure how she’d take it. The impulse dissolved in cowardice.

  “Quiet around here at night,” she said after a moment.

  She was speaking to him again. Please, don’t stop. “Yeah. I sort of like it, though.”

  “Oh, you, too? The night watch is a philosophical kind of time. Its own world. Nothing moving out there but maybe people being born or people dying, necessity, and us.”

  “Eh, and the bad night people we’re put on watch against.”

  She glanced through the archway into the great hall and beyond. “Apparently so. What an evil trick…” She trailed off in a grimace.

  “This Quinn, you’ve known her a long time?”

  “She was in the Dendarii mercenaries at the time I joined the fleet—‘original equipment,’ as she says. A good leader, a friend by many shared disasters. And victories, sometimes. Ten years adds up to some weight, even if you’re not watching. Especially if you’re not watching, I suppose.”

  He followed the thought spoken by her glance, as well as her words. “Eh, yeah. God spare me from ever facing such a puzzle. It would be as bad as having your count revolt against the emperor, I suppose. Or like finding m’lord in on some insane plot to murder Empress Laisa. Shouldn’t wonder that you’ve been running around in circles in your head all night.”

  “Tighter and tighter, yes. I couldn’t enjoy the emperor’s party from the moment I thought of it, and I know Miles so wanted me to. And I couldn’t tell him why—I’m afraid he thought I was feeling out of place. Well, I was, but it wasn’t a problem, exactly. I’m usually out of place.” She blinked tawny eyes gone dark and wide in the half-light. “What would you do? If you discovered or suspected such a horror?”

  His lips twisted. “That’s a tough one. A higher honor must underlie ours, the count says. We can’t ever obey unthinkingly.”

  “Huh. That’s what Miles says, too. Is that where he got it, from his father?”

  “I shouldn’t be surprised. M’lord’s brother Mark says integrity is a disease, and you can only catch it from someone who has it.”

  A little laugh sounded in her throat. “That sounds like Mark, all right.”

  He considered her question with the seriousness it merited. “I’d have to turn him in, I guess. I hope I’d have the courage, anyways. Nobody would win, in the end. Least of all me.”

  “Oh, yeah. I can see that.”

  Her hand lay on the sofa fabric between them, clawed fingers tapping. He wanted to take it and squeeze it for comfort—hers, or his? But he didn’t dare. Dammit, try, can’t you?

  His argument with himself was interrupted when his wrist com sounded. The gate guard reported the return of the Vorkosigan House party from the Imperial Residence. Roic coded down the house shields and stood aside as the crowd disembarked from a small fleet of groundcars. Pym was in close attendance upon the countess, smiling at something she was saying over her shoulder to him. The guests, variously cheerful, drowsy, or drunk, streamed past chatting and laughing.

  “Anything to report?” Pym inquired perfunctorily. He glanced in curiosity past Roic at Taura, looming over his shoulder.

  “Yes, sir. See me in private as soon as you can, please.”

  The benign sleepy look evaporated from Pym’s features. “Oh?” He glanced back at the mob now divesting wraps and streaming up the stairs. “Right.”

  Low-voiced as Roic had been, the countess had caught the exchange. A wave of her finger dismissed Pym from her side. “Although, if this is of moment, Pym, I’ll take a report before bed,” she murmured.

  “Yes, my lady.”

  Roic jerked his head toward the antechamber of the library, and Pym followed him and Taura through the archway. The moment the guests had cleared the next room, Roic decanted a short précis of the night’s adventure, self-plagiarized from the one he’d given to the ImpSec forensics captain. Omitting, again, the part about Taura’s attempted theft. He hoped like hell that it wasn’t going to turn out to be horribly pertinent later. He would submit the full account to m’lord’s judgment, he decided. When the devil was m’lord going to return?

  Pym grew rigid as he took in the report. “I checked that necklace myself, Roic. Scanned it clear of devices—the chemical sniffer didn’t pick up anything either.”

  “Did you touch it?” asked Taura.

  Pym’s eyes narrowed in memory. “I mainly handled it by the clasp. Well…well, ImpSec will run it through the wringer. M’lord always claims they can use the exercise. It can’t hurt. You acted correctly, Armsman Roic. You can continue about your duties now. I’ll follow it up with ImpSec.”

  With this tepid praise, he moved off, frowning.

  “Is that all we get?” Taura whispered as Pym’s ascending footsteps faded on the winding staircase.

  Roic glanced at his chrono. “Till ImpSec reports back, I guess. It depends on how hard that dirty stuff you saw”—he didn’t insult her by phrasing it as you claimed you saw—“is to identify.”

  She scrubbed tired-looking eyes with the back of her hand. “Can I, uh, can I stay with you till they call?”

  “Sure.”

  In a moment of true inspiration, he led her down to the kitchen and introduced her to the staff refrigerator. He’d been correct; her extraordinary metabolism was in need of fuel again. Ruthlessly, he cleared out everything on the shelves and laid it in front of her. The early morning crew could fend for themselves. There was no shame here in offering up servants’ food to a guest; everyone ate well from Ma Kosti’s kitchen. He dialed up c
offee for himself and tea for her, and they perched together on two stools at the counter.

  Pym found them there as they were finishing eating. The senior armsman’s face was so drained of blood as to be nearly green.

  “Well done, Roic, Sergeant Taura,” he began in a stiff voice. “Very well done. I just now spoke with ImpSec headquarters. The pearls were doctored—with a designer neurotoxin. ImpSec thinks it’s of Jacksonian origin, but they’re still cross-checking. The dose was sealed under a chemically neutral transparent lacquer that dissolves with body heat. Casual handling wouldn’t release it, but if someone put the necklace on and wore it for a time…half an hour or so…”

  “Enough to kill someone?” Taura’s tone was tense.

  “Enough to kill a bloody elephant, the lab boys say.” Pym moistened dry lips. “And I checked it myself. I bloody passed it.” His teeth clenched. “She was going to wear them to—M’lord would have—” He choked himself off and ran a hand over his face, hard.

  “Does ImpSec know who really sent them?” asked Taura.

  “Not yet. But they’re all over it, you can believe.”

  A vision of the deadly pale spheres lying on m’lady-tobe’s warm throat flashed through Roic’s memory. “Madame Vorsoisson touched the pearls last night—night before last, that is now,” said Roic urgently. “She had them on for at least five minutes. Is she going to be all right?”

  “ImpSec is dispatching a physician to Lord Auditor Vorthys’s to check her—one of their toxins experts. If she’d taken in enough to kill her, she’d have died right then, so that’s not going to happen, but I don’t know what other…I have to go now and call m’lord there and warn him to expect a visitor. And—and tell him why. Well done, Roic. Did I say well done? Well done.” Pym drew a shaken, unhappy breath and strode back out.

  Taura, her chin in her hand as she drooped over her plate, scowled after him. “Jacksonian neurotoxin, eh? That doesn’t prove much. The Jacksonians will sell anything to anyone. Miles made enough enemies there in some of our old sorties—if they knew it was intended for him, they’d probably offer a deep discount.”

  “Yeah, I imagine tracing the source is going to take a little longer. Even for ImpSec.” He hesitated. “Although, wouldn’t they know him on Jackson’s Whole only under his old covert ops identity? Your little admiral?”

  “That cover’s been well-blown for a couple of years, he tells me. Partly as a result of the mess his last mission there produced, partly from some other things. Over my head.” She yawned, hugely. It was…impressive. She’d been up since dawn, Roic was reminded, and hadn’t slept through the afternoon as he had. Stranded in what must seem to her an alien place and wrestling terrible fears. All by herself. For the first time, he wondered if she was lonely. One of a kind, the last of her kind if he understood correctly, without home or kin except for that chancy wandering mercenary fleet. And then he wondered why he hadn’t noticed her essential aloneness sooner. Armsmen were supposed to be observant. Yeah?

  “If I promise to come by and tell you if I get any news, d’you suppose you could try to sleep?”

  She rubbed the back of her neck. “Would you? Then I think I could. Try, that is.”

  He escorted her to her door, past m’lord’s dark and empty suite. When he clasped her hand briefly, she clasped back. He swallowed, for courage.

  “Dirty pearls, eh?” he said, still holding her hand. “Y’know…I can’t speak for any other Barrayarans…but I think your genetic modifications are beautiful.”

  Her lips curved up, he hoped not altogether bleakly. “You are getting better.”

  When she let go and turned in, a claw trailing lightly over the skin of his palm made his body shudder in involuntary, sensual surprise. He stared at the closing door and swallowed a perfectly foolish urge to call her back. Or follow her inside…He was still on duty, he reminded himself. The next monitors check was overdue. He forced himself to turn away.

  The sky outside was shifting from the amber night of the city to a chill blue dawn when the gate guard called Roic to code down the house shields for m’lord’s return. As the armsman who’d been called out to chauffeur drove the big car off to put away, Roic opened one door to admit the hunched, frowning figure. M’lord looked up to recognize Roic, and a rather ghastly smile lightened his furrowed features.

  Roic had seen m’lord looking strung-out before, but never so alarmingly as this, not even after one of his bad seizures or when he’d had that spectacular hangover after the disastrous butter bug banquet. His eyes stared out from gray circles like feral animals from their dens. His skin was pale, and lines of tension mapped the anxiety across his face. His movements were simultaneously tired and stiff, and jerky and nervous, a spinning exhaustion that could find no place of rest.

  “Roic. Thank you. Bless you,” m’lord began in a voice that sounded as though it were coming from the bottom of a well.

  “Is m’lady-to-be all right?” Roic asked in some apprehension.

  M’lord nodded. “Yes, now. She fell asleep in my arms, finally, after the ImpSec doctor left. God, Roic! I can’t believe I missed the signs. Poisoning! And I fastened that death around her neck with my own hands! It’s a damned metaphor for this whole thing, that’s what it is. She thought it was just her. I thought it was just her. How little faith in herself, or me in her, to misidentify dying of poison for dying of self-doubt!”

  “She’s not dying, is she?” Roic asked again, to be sure. In this spate of dramatic angst, it was a little hard to tell. “T’ bit of exposure she got isn’t going to have any permanent effects, is it?”

  M’lord began to pace in circles around the entry hall, while Roic followed vainly trying to take his coat. “The doctor said not, not once the headaches pass off, which they seem to have done now. She was so relieved to find out what it really was she burst into tears. Go figure that one out, eh?”

  “Yeah, except that—” Roic began, then bit his tongue. Except that the crying jag he’d inadvertently witnessed had occurred well before the poisoning.

  “What?”

  “Nothing, m’lord.”

  Lord Vorkosigan paused at the archway to the antechamber. “ImpSec. We must call ImpSec to take away all those gifts and recheck them for—”

  “They already came and collected them, m’lord,” Roic soothed him, or tried to. “An hour ago. They say they’ll try t’ get as many as possible cleared and back before the wedding guests start arriving come midafternoon.”

  “Oh. Good.” M’lord stood still a moment, staring into nothing, and Roic finally managed to get his coat away from him.

  “M’lord…you don’t think your Admiral Quinn sent that necklace, do you?”

  “Oh, good heavens, no. Of course not.” M’lord dismissed this fear with a startlingly casual wave of his hand. “Not her style at all. If she were ever that mad at me, she’d kick me downstairs personally. Great woman, Quinn.”

  “Sergeant Taura was worried. I think she thought this Quinn might a’ been, um, jealous.”

  M’lord blinked. “Why? I mean, yes, it’s almost exactly a year since Elli and I parted company, but Ekaterin had nothing to do with that. Didn’t even meet her till a couple of months later. The timing’s pure coincidence, you can assure her. Yeah, so Elli turned down the wedding invitation—she has responsibilities. She got the fleet, after all.” A small sigh escaped him. His lips screwed up in further thought. “I’d sure like to know who knew enough to steal Quinn’s name to smuggle that hellish package in here, though. That’s the real puzzle. Quinn’s connected to Admiral Naismith, not to Lord Vorkosigan. Which was the sticking point in the first place, but never mind now. I want ImpSec to put every available resource on to tearing that one apart.”

  “I believe they already are, m’lord.”

  “Oh. Good.” He looked up, and his face grew, if possible, more serious. “You saved my House last night, you know. Eleven generations of Vorkosigans have narrowed down to the choke point of me, this
generation, this marriage. I’d have been the last, but for that chance—no, not chance—that moment of shrewd observation.”

  Roic waved an embarrassed hand. “Wasn’t me who spotted it, m’lord. It was Sergeant Taura. She’d have reported it herself earlier, if she hadn’t been half taken in by t’ bad guy’s nasty camouflage with your, um, friend Admiral Quinn’s name.”

  M’lord took up his taut orbit of the hall again. “Bless Taura, then. A woman beyond price. Which I already knew, but anyway. I could kiss her feet, by God. I could kiss her all over!”

  Roic was beginning to think that line about the barbed-wire choke chain wasn’t such a joke after all. All this frenetic tension was, if not precisely infectious, starting to get on what was left of his nerves. He remarked dryly, in Pym-like periods, “I was given to understand you already had, m’lord.”

  M’lord jerked to a halt again. “Who told you that?”

  Under the circumstances, Roic decided not to mention Madame Vorsoisson. “Taura.”

  “Eh, maybe it’s the women’s secret code. I don’t have the key, though. You’re on your own there, boy.” He snorted a trifle hysterically. “But if you ever do win an invitation from her, beware—it’s like being mugged in a dark alley by a goddess. You’re not the same man after. Not to mention critical feminine body parts on a scale you can actually find, and as for the fangs, there’s no thrill quite like—”

  “Miles,” a bemused voice interrupted from overhead. Roic glanced up to see the countess, wrapped in a robe, leaning over the balcony railing and observing her son. How long had she been standing there? She was Betan; maybe m’lord’s last remarks wouldn’t discombobulate her as much as they did Roic. In fact, he reflected, he was certain they couldn’t.

  “Good morning, Mother,” m’lord managed. “Some bastard tried to poison Ekaterin, did you hear? When I catch up with him, I swear I’m going to make the Dismemberment of Mad Emperor Yuri look like a house party—”

  “Yes, ImpSec has kept your father and me fully apprised during the night, and I just spoke with Helen. Everything seems under control for the moment, except for persuading Pym not to throw himself off the Star Bridge in expiation. He’s pretty distraught over this slipup. For pity’s sake, come up and take a sleeptimer and lie down for a while.”