Mirror Dance b-9

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  Did the lives of forty-nine clones outweigh four dead Dendarii? The Dendarii did not seem to think so. Those people were not volunteers. you tricked them to their deaths.

  He was shaken by an unwelcome insight. Lives did not add as integers. They added as infinities.

  I didn’t mean it to come out this way.

  And the clones. The blonde girl. He of all men knew she was not the mature woman her general physique and particular augmentations so stunningly advertised her as being. The sixty-year-old brain which had been planning to move in doubtless would have known how to handle such a body. But Mark had seen her so clearly, in his mind, that ten-year-old on the inside. He hadn’t wanted to hurt or frighten her, yet he’d managed to do both. He’d wanted to please her, make her face light. The way they all lit up for Miles?, the internal voice mocked.

  None of the clones could possibly respond as he so ached to have them do. He must let that fantasy go. Ten years from now, twenty years from now, they might thank him for their lives. Or not. / did all 1 could. I’m sorry.

  Somewhere around the second day he became obsessed with the thought of himself as brain-transplant bait for Miles. Oddly enough, or perhaps logically enough, he did not fear it from Miles. But Miles was hardly in a position to veto the plan. What if it occurred to someone that it would be easier to transplant Miles’s brain into Mark’s warm and living body than to attempt the tedious repair of that gaping mortal chest wound, and all the cryo-trauma on top of it? It was so frightening a possibility that he half-wanted to volunteer, just to get it over with.

  The only thing that kept him from total gibbering breakdown was the reflection that with the cryo-chamber lost, the threat was moot. Until it was found again. In the dark of his cabin, his head buried in his pillow, it came to him that the face he’d most desired to see transformed with respect for him by his daring clone-rescue was Miles’s.

  You’ve rather eliminated that possibility, haven’t you?

  The only surcease from his mental treadmill came with food, and sleep. Forcing down an entire field-ration tray left him blood-stunned enough to actually doze, in inadequate snatches. Desiring unconsciousness above all things, he cajoled the glowering Dendarii who shoved the trays through his door three times a day to bring him extras. Since the Dendarii apparently did not regard their disposable-container field rations as treats, they were willing enough to do so.

  Another Dendarii brought, and shoved through the door, a selection of Miles’s clean clothing from the stores on the Ariel. This time all the insignia were carefully removed. On the third day he gave up even attempting to fasten Naismith’s uniform trousers, and switched to loose ship knits. At this point the inspiration struck him.

  They can’t make me play Miles if I don’t look like Miles.

  After that, things grew a little foggy, in his head. One of the Dendarii became so irritated by his repeated requests for extra rations that he lugged in a whole case, dumped it in a corner, and told Mark roughly not to pester him again. Mark was left alone with his self-rescue and cunning calculation. He had heard of prisoners tunneling out of their cells with a spoon; might not he?

  Still, loony as it was, and on some level he knew that it was, it gave his life a focus. From too much time, endless hours on the multi-jump boost through to Komarr, suddenly there seemed to be not enough. He read the nutrition labels. If he maintained maximum inactivity, a single tray provided all the daily fuel he required. Everything he consumed after that must be converted directly into Not-Miles. Every four trays ought to produce a kilo of extra body mass, if he had the numbers right. Too bad they were all the same menu… .

  There were scarcely enough days to make the project work. Still, on his body, any extra kilos had no place to hide. Toward the end, panicked at the thought of time running out, he ate continuously, till the sheer gasping pain forced him to stop, thus combining pleasure, rebellion, and punishment into one weirdly satisfying experience.

  Quinn entered without knocking, flipping up the lights with brutal efficiency from pitch-dark to full illumination.

  “Agh.” Mark recoiled, and held his hands over his eyes. Ripped from his uncomfortable doze, he rolled over in bed. He blinked at the chrono on the wall. Quinn had come for him a half day-cycle earlier than he’d expected. The Dendarii ships must have been putting on maximum accelerations, if this meant they were about to arrive in Komarr orbit. Oh, help.

  “Get up,” said Quinn. She wrinkled her nose. “Get washed. Put on this uniform.” She laid something forest-green with gold gleams across the foot of the bed. From her general air he’d have expected her to fling things; from the reverent care she bestowed, Mark deduced the uniform must be one of Miles’s.

  “I’ll get up,” said Mark. “And I’ll get washed. But I won’t put on the uniform, or any uniform.”

  “You’ll do as you’re told, mister.”

  “That’s a Barrayaran officer’s uniform. It represents real power, and they guard it accordingly. They hang people who wear fake uniforms.” He tossed off the covers and sat up. He was a little dizzy.

  “My gods,” said Quinn in a choked voice. “What have you done to yourself?”

  “I suppose,” he allowed, “you can still try to stuff me into the uniform. But you might want to consider the effect.” He staggered to the washroom.

  While washing and depiliating, he inventoried the results of his escape attempt. There just hadn’t been enough time. True, he’d regained the kilos he’d had to lose to play Admiral Naismith at Escobar, plus maybe a slight bonus, and in a mere fourteen days instead of the year it had taken them to creep on in the first place. A hint of a double chin. His torso was notably thickened, though, his abdomen—he moved carefully—achingly distended. Not enough, not enough to be safe yet.

  Quinn being Quinn, she had to convince herself, and she tried the Barrayaran uniform on him anyway. He made sure to slump. The effect was … very unmilitary. She gave up, snarling, and let him dress himself. He chose clean ship-knit pants, soft friction-slippers, and a loose Barrayaran civilian-style tunic of Miles’s with big sleeves and an embroidered sash. It took him a moment of careful consideration to decide whether it would annoy Quinn more to see the sash positioned across his rounding belly, equatorially, or under the bulge like a sling. Judging from the lemon-sucking look on her face, under it was, and he left it that way.

  She sensed his fey mood. “Enjoying yourself?” she inquired sarcastically.

  “It’s the last fun I’ll get today. Isn’t it?”

  Her hand opened in dry acquiescence.

  “Where are you taking me? For that matter, where are we?”

  “Komarr orbit. We are about to pod over, secretly, to one of the Barrayaran military space stations. There we are going to have a very private meeting with Chief of Imperial Security Captain Simon Illyan. He came by fast courier all the way from ImpSec headquarters on Barrayar on the basis of a rather ambiguous coded message I sent him, and he’s going to be extremely hot to know why I’ve interrupted his routine. He’s going to demand to know what the hell was so important. And,” her voice wavered in a sigh, “I’m going to have to tell him.”

  She led him out of his cabin-cell through the Peregrine. She had evidently dismissed his door guard when she’d first come in, but in fact all the corridors seemed deserted. No, not deserted. Cleared.

  They came to a personnel pod hatch, and ducked through to find Captain Bothari-Jesek herself at the controls. Bothari-Jesek and no one else. A very private party indeed.

  Bothari-Jesek’s usual coolness seemed particularly frigid today. When she glanced over her shoulder at him, her eyes widened, and her dark winged brows drew down in startled disapproval of his pasty, bloated appearance.

  “Hell, Mark. You look like a drowned corpse that’s floated to the surface after a week.”

  I feel like one. “Thank you,” he intoned blandly.

  She snorted, whether with amusement, disgust, or derision he was not sure, and tu
rned her attention back to the pod control interface. Hatches sealed, clamps retracted, and they sped silently away from the side of the Peregrine. Between the zero-gee and the accelerations, he found his attention centered on his stretched stomach again, and he swallowed against the nausea.

  “Why is the ImpSec head man only ranked as captain?” Mark inquired, to take his mind off his queasiness. “It can’t be for secrecy, everybody knows who he is.”

  “Another Barrayaran tradition,” Bothari-Jesek said. Her tone put a slightly bitter spin on the term tradition. At least she was speaking to him. “Illyan’s predecessor in the post, the late great Captain Negri, never took a promotion beyond captain. That kind of ambition was apparently irrelevant to Emperor Ezar’s Familiar. Everybody knew Negri spoke with the Emperor’s Voice, and his orders cut across all ranks. Illyan … was always a little shy of promoting himself over the rank of his former boss, I guess. He’s paid a vice-admiral’s salary, though. Whatever poor sucker heads ImpSec next after Illyan retires is probably going to be stuck with the rank of captain forever.”

  They approached a mid-sized high orbital space station. Mark finally glimpsed Komarr, turning far below, shrunken by the distance to a half-moon. Bothari-Jesek kept strictly to the flight path assigned to her by an extremely laconic station traffic control. After a nervous pause while they exchanged codes and countersigns, they locked onto a docking hatch.

  They were met by two silent, expressionless armed guards, very neat and trim in Barrayaran green, who ushered them through the station and into a small windowless chamber set up as an office, with a comconsole desk, three chairs, and no other decoration.

  “Thank you. Leave us,” said the man behind the desk. The guards exited as silently as they had done everything else.

  Alone, the man seemed to relax slightly. He nodded to Bothari-Jesek. “Hullo, Elena. It’s good to see you.” His light voice had an unexpected warm timbre, like an uncle greeting a favorite niece.

  The rest of him seemed exactly as Mark had studied in Galen’s vids. Simon Illyan was a slight, aging man, gray rising in a tide from his temples into his brown hair. A rounded face with a snub nose was too etched with faint lines to look quite youthful. He wore, on this military installation, correct officer’s undress greens and insignia like the ones Quinn had tried to foist on Mark, with the Horus-eye badge of Imperial Security winking from his collar.

  Mark realized Illyan was staring back at him with the most peculiar suffused look on his face. “My God, Miles, you—” he began in a strangled voice, then his eye lit with comprehension. He sat back in his chair. “Ah.”’ His mouth twisted up on one side. “Lord Mark. Greetings from your lady mother. And I am most pleased to meet you at last.” He sounded perfectly sincere.

  Not for long, thought Mark hopelessly. And, Lord Mark? He can’t be serious.

  “Also pleased to know where you are again. I take it, Captain Quinn, that my department’s message about Lord Mark’s disappearance from Earth finally caught up with you?”

  “Not yet. It’s probably still chasing us from … our last stop.”

  Illyan’s brows rose. “So did Lord Mark come in from the cold on his own, or did my erstwhile subordinate send him to me?”

  “Neither, sir.” Quinn seemed to have trouble speaking. Bothari-Jesek wasn’t even trying to.

  Illyan leaned forward, growing more serious, though still tinged with a slight irony. “So what half-cocked, insubordinate, I-thought-you-wanted-me-to-use-my-initiative-sir scam has he sent you to try to con me into paying for this time?”

  “No scam, sir,” muttered Quinn. “But the bill is going to be huge.” The coolly amused air faded altogether as he studied her grey face. “Yes?” he said after a moment.

  Quinn leaned on the desk with both hands, not for emphasis, Mark fancied, but for support. “Illyan, we have a problem. Miles is dead.”

  Illyan took this in with a waxen stillness. Abruptly, he turned his chair around. Mark could see only the back of his head. His hair was thin. When he turned back, the lines had sprung out on his set face like a figure-ground reversal; like scars. “That’s not a problem, Quinn,” he whispered. “That’s a disaster.” He laid his hands down flat, very carefully, across the smooth black surface of the desk. So that’s where Miles picked up that gesture, Mark, who had studied it, thought irrelevantly.

  “He’s frozen in a cryo-chamber.” Quinn licked her dry lips.

  Illyan’s eyes closed; his mouth moved, whether on prayers or curses Mark could not tell. But he only said, mildly, “You might have said that first. The rest would have followed as a logical supposition.” His eyes opened, intent. “So what happened? How bad were his wounds—not a head wound, pray God? How well-prepped was he?”

  “I helped do the prep myself. Under combat conditions. I … I think it was good. You can’t know until … well. He took a very bad chest wound. As far as I could tell he was untouched from the neck up.”

  Illyan breathed, carefully. “You’re right, Captain Quinn. Not a disaster. Only a problem. I’ll alert the Imperial Military Hospital at Vorbarr Sultana to expect their star patient. We can transfer the cryo-chamber from your ship to my fast courier immediately.” Was the man babbling, just a little, with relief?

  “Uh …” said Quinn. “No.”

  Illyan rested his forehead gingerly in his hand, as if a headache was starting just behind his eyes. “Finish, Quinn,” he said in a tone of muffled dread.

  “We lost the cryo-chamber.”

  “How could you lose a cryo-chamber?!”

  “It was a portable.” She intercepted his burning stare, and hurried up her report. “It was left downside in the scramble to get off. Each of the combat drop shuttles thought the other one had it. It was a mis-communication—I checked, I swear. It turned out the medic in charge of the cryo-chamber had been cut off from his shuttle by enemy forces. He found himself with access to a commercial shipping facility. We think he shipped the cryo-chamber from there.”

  “You think? I will ask— what combat drop mission, in a moment. Where did he ship it?”

  “That’s just it, we don’t know. He was killed before he could report. The cryo-chamber could be on its way literally anywhere by now.”

  Illyan sat back and rubbed his lips, which were set in a thin, ghastly smile. “I see. And all this happened when? And where?”

  “Two weeks and three days ago, on Jackson’s Whole.”

  “He sent you all to Illyrica, via Vega Station. How the hell did you end up on Jackson’s Whole?”

  Quinn stood at parade rest, and took it from the top, a stiff, clipped synopsis of the events of the last four weeks from Escobar onward. “I have a complete report with all our vid records and Miles’s personal log here, sir.” She laid a data cube on his comconsole.

  Illyan eyed it like a snake; his hand did not move toward it. “And the forty-nine clones?”

  “Still aboard the Peregrine, sir. We’d like to off-load them.”

  My clones. What would Illyan do with them? Mark dared not ask.

  “Miles’s personal log tends to be a fairly useless document, in my experience,” observed Illyan distantly. “He is quite canny about what to leave out.” He grew introspective, and fell silent for a time. Then he rose, and walked from side to side across the little office. The cool facade cracked without warning; face contorted, he turned and slammed his fist into the wall with bone-crunching force, shouting, “Damn the boy for making a fucking farce out of his own funeral!”

  He stood with his back to them; when he turned again and sat down his face was stiff and blank. When he looked up, he addressed Bothari-Jesek.

  “Elena. It’s clear I’m going to have to stay here at Komarr, for the moment, to coordinate the search from ImpSec’s galactic affairs HQ. I can’t afford to put an extra five days of travel time between myself and the action. I will, of course … compose the formal missing-inaction report on Lieutenant Lord Vorkosigan and forward it immediately to Count and Cou
ntess Vorkosigan. I hate to think of it delivered by some subordinate, but it will have to be. But will you, as a personal favor to me, escort Lord Mark to Vorbarr Sultana, and deliver him to their custody?”

  No, no, no, Mark screamed inside.

  “I … would rather not go to Barrayar, sir.”

  “The Prime Minister will have questions that only one who was on the spot can answer. You are the most ideal courier I can imagine for a matter of such … complex delicacy. I grant you the task will be painful.”

  Bothari-Jesek was looking trapped. “Sir, I’m a senior shipmaster.

  I’m not free to leave the Peregrine. And—frankly—I do not care to escort Lord Mark.”

  “I’ll give you anything you ask, in return.”

  She hesitated. “Anything?”

  He nodded.

  She glanced at Mark. “I gave my word that all the House Bharaputra clones would be taken somewhere safe, somewhere humane, where the Jacksonians can’t reach. Will you redeem my word for me?”

  Illyan chewed his lip. “ImpSec can launder their identities readily enough, of course. No difficulty there. Appropriate placement might be trickier. But yes. We’ll take them on.”

  Take them on. What did Illyan mean? For all their other flaws, the Barrayarans at least did not practice slavery.

  “They’re children,” Mark blurted. “You have to remember they’re only children.” It’s hard to remember, he wanted to add, but couldn’t, under Bothari-Jesek’s cold eyes.