Mirror dance (22 page)

Bothari-Jesek sat stiff. "Do we?" she asked. "My God. If you're right—it could be on its way
anywhere
. Freighted out from any of two dozen orbital transfer stations—it could have been
jumped
by now! Simon Illyan is going to have a stroke when we report this."

"No. Not anywhere," Mark corrected intently. "It could only have been addressed to somewhere that Medic Norwood knew. Someplace he could remember, even when he was surrounded and cut off and under fire."

She licked her lips, considering this. "Right," she said at last. "Almost anywhere. But at least we can start guessing by studying Norwood's personnel files." She sat back, and looked up at him with grave eyes. "You know, you do all right, alone in a quiet room. You're not stupid. I didn't see how you could be. You're just not the field-officer type."

"I'm not any kind of officer-type. I hate the military."

"Miles loves field work. He's addicted to adrenalin rushes."

"I hate them. I hate being afraid. I can't think when I'm scared. I freeze when people shout at me."

"Yet you
can
think. . . . How much of the time are you scared?"

"Most of it," he admitted grimly.

"Then why do you . . ." she hesitated, as if choosing her words very cautiously, "why do you keep trying to be Miles?"

"I'm not, you're making me play him!"

"I didn't mean now. I mean generally."

"I don't know what the hell you mean."

Twenty hours later, the two Dendarii ships undocked from Fell Station and manuevered to boost toward Jumppoint Five. They were not alone. An escort of half a dozen House Fell security vessels paced and policed them. The Fell vessels were dedicated local space warships, lacking Necklin rods and wormhole jump capacity; the power thus saved was shunted into a formidible array of weapons and shielding. Muscle-ships.

The convoy was trailed at a discreet distance by a Bharaputran cruiser, more yacht than warship, prepared to accept the final transfer of Baron Bharaputra, as arranged, in space near Fell's Jumppoint Five station. Unfortunately, Miles's cryo-chamber was not aboard it.

Quinn had come close to a breakdown, before accepting the inevitable. Bothari-Jesek had literally backed her against the wall, at their last private conference in the briefing room.

"I won't leave Miles!" Quinn howled. "I'll space that Bharaputran bastard first!"

"Look," Bothari-Jesek hissed, Quinn's jacket bunched in her fist. If she'd been an animal, Mark thought, her ears would have been flat to her head. He huddled in a station chair and tried to make himself small. Smaller. "I don't like this any better than you do, but the situation has gone way beyond our capacity. Miles is clearly out of Bharaputran hands, heading God knows where. We need reinforcements: not warships, but trained intelligence agents. A pile of 'em. We need Illyan, and ImpSec, we need them bad, and we need them as fast as possible. It's time to cut and run. The faster we get out of here, the faster we can return."

"I
will
be back," Quinn swore.

"That'll be between you and Simon Illyan. I promise you, he'll be just as interested as we are in retrieving that cryo-chamber."

"Illyan's just a Barrayaran," Quinn sputtered for a word, "
bureaucrat
. He can't care the way we do."

"Don't bet on that," whispered Bothari-Jesek.

In the end, Bothari-Jesek, Quinn's downward duty to the rest of the Dendarii, and the logic of the situation had prevailed. And so Mark found himself dressing in officer's greys for what he earnestly prayed would be his last public appearance ever as Admiral Miles Naismith, observing the transfer of their hostage onto a House Fell shuttle. Whatever happened to Vasa Luigi after that would be up to Baron Fell. Mark could only hope it would be something unpleasant.

Bothari-Jesek came to escort Mark personally from his cabin-prison to the shuttle hatch corridor where the Fell ship was scheduled to clamp on. She looked cool as ever, if weary, and unlike Quinn she limited her critique of the fit of his uniform to a pass of her hand to straighten his collar insignia. The pocketed jacket was roomy, and came down far enough to cover and so disguise the tight bite of the trouser waistband, and the way his flesh was beginning to burgeon over the belt. He yanked the jacket down firmly, and followed the
Peregrine
's captain through her ship.

"Why do I have to do this?" he asked her plaintively.

"It's our last chance to prove—for certain—to Vasa Luigi that you are Miles Naismith, and that . . . thing in the cryo-chamber is just a clone. Just in case the cryo-chamber didn't go off-planet, and just in case, by whatever chance, wherever it went, Bharaputra finds it again before we do."

They arrived at the shuttle hatch corridor at the same time as a couple of heavily-armed Dendarii techs, who took up station at the docking clamp controls. Baron Bharaputra appeared shortly thereafter, escorted by a wary Captain Quinn and two edgy Dendarii guards. The guards, Mark decided, were mainly ornamental. The real power, and the real threat, the heavy pieces on this chessboard, were Jumppoint Station Five and the House Fell ships that supported it. He pictured them, arrayed in space around the Dendarii ships. Check. Was Baron Bharaputra king? Mark felt like a pawn masquerading as a knight. Vasa Luigi ignored the guards, kept half an eye on Quinn the Red Queen, but mostly watched the shuttle hatch.

Quinn saluted Mark. "Admiral."

He returned the salute. "Captain." He stood at parade rest, as if overseeing his operation. Was he supposed to bandy words with the Baron? He waited for Vasa Luigi to open the conversation. The Baron merely waited, with a disturbingly controlled patience, as if he did not even perceive time the same way Mark did.

Regardless of how outgunned they were, the Dendarii were only minutes from escape. As soon as the transfer was complete, the
Peregrine
and the
Ariel
could jump, and the clones would be beyond House Bharaputra's lethal reach. That much he had accomplished, ass-backwards and screwed up beyond repair, but done. Small victories.

At last came the clanking of the shuttle hatch clamps grasping and positioning their prey, and the hiss of the flex-tube sealing. The Dendarii oversaw the dilation of the hatch portal, and stood to attention. On the other side of the portal a man dressed in House Fell green with captain's insignia, and flanked by two ornamental guards of his own, nodded sharply and identified himself and his vessel of origin.

He spotted Mark as the highest ranking officer present, and saluted. "Baron Fell's compliments, Admiral Naismith sir, and he is returning to you something you accidently left behind."

Quinn went pale with hope; Mark could swear her heart stopped beating. The Fell captain stepped back from the hatch. But through it swung not the ardently-desired cryo-chamber on a float pallet, but a file of three men and two women, civilian-clothed, looking variously sheepish, angry, and grim. One man was limping, and supported by another.

Quinn's spies. The group of Dendarii volunteers she had attempted to slip onto Fell Station to continue the search. Quinn's face flushed red with chagrin. But she raised her chin and said clearly, "Tell Baron Fell we thank him for his care."

The Fell captain acknowledged the message with a salute and a sour smirk.

"Meet you all in debriefing, soonest," she breathed, and dismissed the unhappy mob with a nod. They clattered off. Bothari-Jesek went with them.

The Fell captain announced, "We are ready to board our passenger." Punctilliously, he did not set foot aboard the
Peregrine
, but waited. Equally punctilliously, the Dendarii guards and Quinn stood away from Baron Bharaputra, who raised his square chin and began to stride forward.

"My lord! Wait for me!"

The high cry from behind them made Mark's head snap around. The Baron's eyes too widened in surprise.

The Eurasian girl, her hair swinging, slipped out of a cross-corridor and ran forward. She held hands with the platinum blonde clone. She darted like an eel around the Dendarii guards, who had better sense than to draw weapons in this dicey moment, but not quite enough speed of reflex to catch her. The small-footed blonde was not so athletic, half out-of-balance with her other arm crossed under her breasts, and she was pulled along gasping for breath, blue eyes wide with fear.

Mark saw her, in his mind's eye, laid out on some operating table, light-crowned scalp peeled carefully back—the whine of a surgical saw cutting through bone, the slow teasing apart of living neurons in the brain stem, then at last the lifting-out of brain, like a gift, mind, memory, person, an offering to some dark god in the masked monster's gloved hands—

He tackled her around the knees. Her fine-boned hand jerked out of the dark-haired girl's grip, and she fell forward on the deck. She cried out, then just cried, and kicked at him, rocking and bucking and twisting onto her back. Terrified he would lose his clutch, he worked upward till he lay across her with his full weight. She squirmed beneath him, ineffectually; she didn't even know enough to try to knee him in the groin. "Stop. Stop, for God's sake, I don't want to hurt you," he mumbled in her ear around a mouthful of sweet-smelling hair.

The other girl meanwhile had succeeded in diving through the shuttle hatch. The House Fell guard captain was confused by her arrival, but not by the Dendarii; he'd drawn a nerve disruptor instantly, repelling the first reflexive lurch of Quinn's men. "Stop right there. Baron Bharaputra, what is this?"

"My lord!" the Eurasian girl cried. "Take me with you, please! I will be united with my lady. I will!"

"Stay on that side," the Baron advised her calmly. "They cannot touch you there."

"You try me—" began Quinn, starting forward, but the Baron raised a hand, fingers delicately crooked, neither fist nor obscenity yet somehow faintly insulting.

"Captain Quinn. Surely you do not wish to create an incident and delay your departure, do you? Clearly, this girl chooses of her own free will."

Quinn hesitated.

"No!" screamed Mark. He scrambled to his feet, hauled the blonde girl up, and jammed her into the grip of the biggest Dendarii guard. "
Hold
her." He wheeled to pass Baron Bharaputra.

"Admiral?" The Baron raised a faintly ironic brow.

"You're wearing a corpse," Mark snarled. "Don't talk to me." He staggered forward, hands out, to face the dark-haired girl across that little, dreadful, politically significant gap. "Girl . . ." he did not know her name. He did not know what to say. "Don't go. You don't have to go. They'll kill you."

Growing more certain of her security, though still positioned behind the Fell captain and well out of reach of any Dendarii lunge, she smiled triumphantly at Mark and tossed back her hair. Her eyes were alight. "I've saved my honor. All by myself. My honor is my lady.
You
have no honor. Pig! My life is an offering . . . greater than you can imagine being. I am a flower on her altar."

"You are frigging crazy, Flowerpot," Quinn opined bluntly.

Her chin rose, and her lips thinned. "Baron, come," she ordered coolly. She held out a theatric hand.

Baron Bharaputra shrugged as if to say,
What would you?
, and walked toward the hatch. No Dendarii raised a weapon; Quinn had not ordered them to. Mark had no weapon. He turned to her, anguished.
"Quinn . . ."
 

She was breathing hard. "If we don't jump now, we could lose it all.
Stand still.
"

Vasa Luigi paused in the hatchway, hand on the seal, one foot still on the
Peregrine
's deck, and turned back to face Mark. "In case you are wondering, Admiral—she is my wife's clone," he purred. He raised his right hand, licked his index finger, and touched it to Mark's forehead. It left a cool spot. Counting coup. "One for me. Forty-nine for you. If you ever dare to return here, I promise you I'll even up that score in ways that will make your death something you'll beg for." He slipped the rest of the way through the shuttle hatch. "Hello, Captain, thank you for your patience . . ." The hatch seals closed on the rest of his greeting to his rival's, or ally's, guards.

The silence was broken only by the releasing clank of the clamps and the blonde clone's hopeless, abandoned weeping. The spot on Mark's forehead itched like ice. He rubbed at it with the back of his hand as if half-expecting it to shatter.

Friction-slippered footsteps were nearly silent, but these were heavy enough to vibrate the deck. Sergeant Taura pelted into the shuttle hatch corridor. She saw the blonde clone, and yelled over her shoulder, "Here's another one! Just two to go." Another trooper came panting in her wake.

"What happened, Taura?" sighed Quinn.

"That girl, that ringleader. The really smart one," said Taura, skidding to a halt. Her eyes checked the cross-corridors as she spoke. "She told all the girls some bullshit story about how we were a slave ship. She persuaded ten of them to try for a break-out at once. Stunner guard got three, the other seven scattered. We've recaptured four. Mostly just hiding, but I think that long-haired girl actually had a coherent plan to try to get to the personnel pods before we jumped from local space. I've put a guard on them to cut her off."

Quinn swore, bleakly. "Good thinking, Sergeant. Your cut-off must have succeeded, because she came up here. Unfortunately, she ran smack into Baron Bharaputra's exchange. She got out with him. We were able to grab the other one before she made it across." Quinn nodded at the blonde, whose weeping had choked down to snivels. "So you're only looking for one more."

"How did—" the sergeant's eyes flicked over the shuttle hatch corridor, puzzled. "How did you let that happen, ma'am?"

Quinn's face was set in an expressionless mask. "I chose not to start a fire-fight over her."

The sergeant's big clawed hands twitched in bewilderment, but no verbal criticism of her superior escaped those outslung lips. "We'd better find the last one, then, before something worse happens."

"Carry on, Sergeant. You four, help her," Quinn gestured to her now-unemployed guards. "Report to me in the briefing room when you have them all re-secured, Taura."