Captain Vorpatril's Alliance (47 page)

Tej pocketed the necklace and crawled over to look more closely. The gray mass, several kilos’ worth, was slumping, and old wires led into it. “Plastic explosive of some kind?” Tej hazarded.

Jet’s brow wrinkled. “Some really old kind. Maybe it’s deteriorated by now.”

“Maybe it’s not.”

“Um.”

A frightened whisper, Amiri’s voice, came from their hole. “Tej? Jet?”

Jet rolled over, stuck his head down, and whispered back, “Amiri, you have to come see this!”

“I
told
you to leave that damned foot
alone
.”

“Yes, but it’s attached to a whole guy! You’re the doctor—you might be able to tell how old he is!”

Some muffled swearing was followed, a few minutes later, by Amiri wriggling through their makeshift passage. Anger at his more adventurous siblings warred with curiosity, in his expression; with a visible mental IOU, curiosity won, temporarily. Amiri’s gloved fingers danced over the visible portions of the corpse, probing, pulling, checking.

“Can’t be sure without knowing more about Barrayaran soil ecology,” he whispered. “But it’s not very dry down here. Not less than twenty years. Not more than forty. A local forensics expert could likely date it more precisely.” His eye at last fell on the backpack, stretched out beyond the skeletal fingers. “Oh,
crap
. Don’t even touch that!”

Jet tried for an innocent grin, defeated by his medical mask.

“Told you,” whispered Tej.

“It might be too old to go off, though,” Jet suggested. “Maybe we should, like…try to take a little sample to analyze.”

This approach plainly appealed to the researcher in Amiri, but he did stick his head down their hole to whisper, “Grandmama! You’re more of a chemist than I am. Do plastic explosives deteriorate over time?”

“Some do,” her voice came back.

“Ah.” Amiri unceremoniously plucked the knife from Jet’s hand, knelt, and gently tried to carve out a few grams of gray blob. It had apparently hardened with the decades.

“…some become unstable,” Grandmama’s voice continued.

Amiri abruptly desisted.

“I vote we leave it alone,” said Tej. “Or at least come back later when everything else is done. If there’s time.”

“Yes,” said Amiri, reluctantly folding the knife up. He didn’t give it back to Jet.

Jet didn’t protest.

From the same pocket, Amiri withdrew a child’s toy compass, a very simple analog tool indeed. He held up his cold light and squinted at the quivering needle. “I wonder where he was heading?”

“Depends on if he was coming or going?” said Tej.

Amiri sighed, and pocketed the compass again. “I need to get down here and hand-draw a meter-by-meter map, so we don’t waste time sending the Mycoborer in the wrong direction. Some more.”

They wiggled after him back through their unauthorized hole to find Grandmama waiting, scowling at the pile of dirt.

“Jet, you will have to clean this up,” she said, pointing. “Thoroughly, or everyone will be tracking it all over. And put something over this hole you made. The idea!”

“But Grandmama, it was a dead body!”

“Barrayaran graveyards are full of them, if you want more,” she said unsympathetically. “And very unsanitary they are, too. Cremation is much better.”

That was the Cetagandan custom, certainly.

Leaving the two boys to clean up, Grandmama gestured Tej back along the tunnel. Amiri didn’t deserve the chore, but it was plain someone had to watch Jet.

As they went along, Tej studied the ceiling more warily. Was it bending down, at any point?

They arrived back in the vestibule and doffed their masks and gloves. “What was wrong at the tunnel face?” Tej asked.

“The Mycoborer split around an inclusion. Went off in four perfectly useless directions. We started another.”

“What kind of inclusion?”

“Mm, storm sewer, I would hypothesize. It was a cylindrical pipe, anyway, and we could hear water running on the other side.”

“This deep?”

“We are actually close to level with the river, at this stratum. Though it wasn’t Barrayaran work—far too well made. I think it probably dated back to the Ninth Satrapy.”

“Grandmama—could our tunnel collapse? Like on the poor Barrayaran…”
bomber?
Tej tested that word-string in her mind, trying to decide if it made sense. Yeah, probably. Even if the fellow had been a suicide bomber, that had to have been a horrid death. She fingered the identity necklace in her pocket, and wondered if Ivan Xav owned a similar one. She’d not seen it among his things.

“Certainly, in due course.” Grandmama frowned back down their tunnel. “You have to understand, a perfectly circular pipe is in effect two arches supporting each other—an extremely strong shape. I saw such arches back on Earth, built only of simple stones, that have survived three millennia, and that despite it being such a tectonically active planet.”

“But our tunnel isn’t perfectly circular. It’s more sort of…intestinal.”

“Yes, pity. Fortunately, it doesn’t have to last the ages, only a week or two.”

But what if it collapses
on
somebody?
Tej wanted to ask, but Grandmama was already climbing the rickety flex-ladder. She sighed and followed the carefully-moving kitty-slippers.

*
 
*
 
*

That night, by some miracle, Ivan found himself and Tej both awake and in the same place at the same time; and better yet, it was his bedroom. Tej was restless, though, wandering about the place. She opened the top drawer of Ivan’s dresser, into which he swept all his miscellaneous junk, and peered curiously, turning an item over now and then.

“What are you looking for?”

“I was just wondering…do you have any kind of military identification necklace? I’ve never seen you wear one.”

“Necklace? Oh, dog tags.”

“What do dogs have to do with it?”

“Nothing, that’s just what they’re called. I dunno why. They’ve always been called that. Plural, though they only issue you the one. I suppose that’s what they are, but
necklace
probably sounded too girly for the grunts.”

“Oh.”

“I think mine are hung with my black fatigues in my closet.”

“Do Barrayaran soldiers only wear them with the fatigues?”

“They’re not for every day, at least not at HQ. Just if you’re out in the field. Going into some dicey situation, say. There was an argument going around Ops for subcutaneous identity inserts, with electronic trackers, but the troops didn’t like it, and then somebody pointed out that if we could find our guys with a ping, so might an enemy, and the idea died in committee.” Not to mention the possibility that the bad guys could
be
their guys, in some civil fracas. It had happened before.

“So…” She hesitated, looking over her shoulder at him, where he waited in what he hoped was a good tactical position on what had become his side of the bed. “So if you were going into danger, that’s how I’d know?”

“I would
hope
you would know because I’d
tell
you.”

“No…” Her gaze on him grew thoughtful. “I’m not sure you would.”

He cleared his throat. “Anyway, why do you ask?”

“I, uh…saw one today, and I wondered. About you.”

“Where?”

“I—found it on the floor of a parking garage. Here, wait…” She padded out, and padded back in again a minute later, a thin chain that clinked and winked dangling from her hand.

Ivan rolled up and received it, turning it over and reading the inscription. “This is a really old style. Mine look different. Somebody must have saved it for a souvenir. Maybe it dropped out of his pocket.” Ivan’s imagination flashed another, sadder picture. “Or hers.”

“That would make sense.”

“I bet they’ll want it back. Which garage?”

“Um, I don’t remember. There were so many.”

“Maybe I can look this fellow up tomorrow, in the Ops archives.”

“Oh! Can you?” Tej looked briefly cheered, then alarmed. “But maybe…I’d like to keep it as a souvenir myself.” Her hand reached uncertainly after the relic.

“If you want
that
, I can give you my old set. From when I was a lieutenant.” Ivan’s even older set, from when he’d been an ensign, had gone with some girlfriend or another and not come back, Ivan suddenly remembered. Proving that, as a girl-leash, they didn’t work, despite the name, though it seemed as if they ought to.

Tej at last sat on the edge of the bed, still looking abstracted. His stretch for her halted in midair when her next question was, “Ivan Xav…do you know anything much about old Barrayaran military plastic explosives?”

He sank back, flummoxed. “I hope you didn’t find any of
that
on the floor of a garage!”

“No, no.”

“How old?”

“Really old. Twenty years, maybe more?”

“I had a munitions course back at the Academy, but that was all about current stuff.”

“How long ago?”

“Er…seventeen years?”

“But that’s almost twenty years.”

Ivan blinked. “So it is. Um.” He re-marshaled his forces. “Anyway, if you ever run across anything that looks the least suspicious, what you do is call a bomb squad. Or call me, and I’ll call a bomb squad.”

“Is that what you’d do?”

“Of course! Well, except for that old guerilla cache Miles and Elena and I found up in the Dendarii Mountains when we were kids. But we were being very stupid kids, as everyone from Uncle Aral on down explained, very memorably, after the—never mind that now. Anyway, the point is, people can still find old, dangerous stuff lying around on this planet, and civilians shouldn’t fool with it.” Untangling himself from this digression, Ivan finally got back to the important question, which was, “Why do you
ask
?”

“No reason,” Tej said airily.

Right.
Avocados
probably did shifty better than Tej. It was most un-Jacksonian of her.

“It was just something I was reading about,” she added, finding who-knew-what in his expression. Consternation, belike.

“How’s about,” said Ivan after a minute, “I take some personal leave?” And to hell with whether any busy-ImpSec-body thought he was admitting to being a security risk. “If your family’s only going to be here for a while, I should seize the chance to get to know them better. It only makes sense.”

“Oh!” She looked briefly pleased, then dismayed. “I wouldn’t want to interfere with your work. I know your career is very important.”

“We’re not at war. This week, anyway. Ops can suffer along without me for a few days without collapsing, I expect. They always have before.”

Her eyes were bright, like those of an animal in the headlights. “Good, that’s settled. Let’s make love!”

It was a patent diversion. Dammit, she’d be faking orgasms, next.

*
 
*
 
*

…But not, it appeared, yet.

This means she likes me, right?
some awkward young Ivan who still lived at the bottom of his brain urged, just before the physiologically induced lights-out.

Surly old Ivan could only think,
Ivan, you idiot
.

And not one Ivan on the whole pathetic committee had yet been able to muster aloud the only question that mattered.
Tej, will you stay?

Chapter Twenty

On the next morning’s drive Tej found herself threading through a new part of the city, an unexpected suburban sprawl north of the ridges that cradled the river valley and the Old Town. Barrayarans seemed to date all their activities in terms of famous military events—before the Occupation, during Mad Yuri’s War, after the Pretender’s War—but in this rare case, by a peaceful one: the area had mostly been built up
since Gregor took the reins
, or in other words, in the past two decades.

Tej turned in at a modest industrial park, and found a slot for the rented groundcar in front of what was soon to be a rather bewildered minor pipe-laying firm. Star took her notecase and headed purposefully for the door, but for a change Dada did not go with her, nor instruct Tej to stay with the vehicle. Instead, he gestured Tej after him, and walked off toward the street. Tej turned up the collar of her coat against the thick, chilly fog—a change from the recent rains—and followed.

“Where are we going?”

“To see a man I know.”

“Does he expect us?”

“Not yet.”

No appointment, no comconsole contact, and the rental car, which had a mapping system that also served to precisely locate the vehicle for anyone who might be wanting to follow its movements, had a legitimate place to be. Well, faux-legitimate. Tej found herself growing unwillingly alert.

Dada added, “I’m not keen on bringing in an outsider, but we’re now expecting and in fact counting on our visa not being extended. Time grows tight. A reliable contact said she’d used him as a carrier, not long back, and found the results satisfactory. He’ll be open to our business. And, if he has his wits about him, future business.”

They walked two blocks and crossed over to another utilitarian building, and through a door with a sign over it reading
Imola & Kovaks, Storage and Transshipping
. A harried-looking human receptionist presiding over a cluttered counter, which gave Tej a small, unwanted flashback to her days at Swift Shipping, looked up and said, “May I help you, sir, ma’am?”

“Would you please tell Ser Imola that an old friend is here to see him.”

“He’s very busy this morning, but I’ll ask.” Standard clerk-speak prep, Tej recognized from experience, for greasing an unwanted visitor back out the door. “What name should I say?”

“Selby.”

A brief intercom exchange, and the clerk was escorting them upstairs to another office, also cluttered. A man on the high side of middle age, dressed in relatively unmilitary Barrayaran casual business garb, looked up over his comconsole desk, frowning; his frown changed to an expression of astonishment. A touch of his hand extinguished the current display. “Thank you Jon,” he said. “Please close the door.” The clerk, disappointed in his curiosity, did so. Only then did the man surge up and around his desk to grasp both of Dada’s hands and say, “Shiv Arqua, you old pirate! I heard you were dead!”