Miles Errant (103 page)

"She didn't say," said Rowan blandly. "But I was glad for a chance to sharpen my skills. Thanks to your security guard's excellent aim, he was quite a medical challenge."

The conversation became medical-technical, between Lotus and Rowan, and then more desultory, as the clone-girl served them an elaborate meal. Rowan evaded as smoothly as the Baron questioned, and no one expected him to know anything. But Baron Bharaputra seemed not to be in a hurry. Clearly, he was setting up to play some kind of waiting game. Afterwards the guards escorted them back to their room, which he realized at last was part of a corridor of identical chambers designed, perhaps, to house the servants of important visitors.

"Where are we?" he hissed at Rowan as soon as the door shut behind them. "Could you tell? Is this Bharaputra's headquarters?"

"No," said Rowan. "His main residence is still under renovation. Something about a commando raid blowing out several rooms," she added snappishly.

He walked slowly around their chamber, but he did not take up banging on the walls again, to Rowan's obvious relief. "It occurs to me . . . that there's another way to escape besides breaking from the inside out. That's to get someone else to break from the outside in. Tell me . . . would it be harder to break in and take someone held prisoner by House Bharaputra, House Fell, or House Ryoval?"

"Well . . . Fell would be the hardest, I suppose. He has more troops and heavy weapons. Ryoval would be the easiest. Ryoval's really a House Minor, except he's so old, he gets the honors of a House Major by habit."

"So . . . if one wanted someone bigger and badder than Bharaputra, one might go to Fell."

"One might."

"And . . . if one knew help were on the way . . . it might be tactically brighter to leave said prisoner at Ryoval's, rather than to have him shifted to some more formidible location."

"It might," she conceded.

"We have to get to Fell."

"How? We can't even get out of this room!"

"Out of the room, yes, we must get out of the room. But we might not have to get out of the house. If one of us could just get to a comconsole for a few uninterrupted minutes. Call Fell, call
someone
, let the world know Vasa Luigi has us.
That
would start things moving."

"Call Lilly," said Rowan sturdily. "Not Fell."

I need Fell. Lilly can't break into Ryoval's.
He considered the uneasy possibility that he and the Durona Group might be starting to move at cross-purposes. He wanted a favor from Fell, whom Lilly wished to escape. Still—one would not have to offer very much to interest Fell in a raid on Ryoval. A break-even in materials, and the profit in old hatred. Yeah.

He wandered into the bathroom and stared at himself in the mirror.
Who am I?
A skinny, haggard, pale, odd-looking little man with desperate eyes and a tendency to convulsions. If he could even decide which one his clone-twin was, glimpsed so painfully yesterday, he could dub himself the other by process of elimination. The fellow had looked like Naismith to him. But Vasa Luigi was no fool, and Vasa Luigi was convinced of the reverse. He had to be one or the other. Why couldn't he decide?
If I am Naismith, why did my brother claim my place?
 

At that moment, he discovered why it was called a
cascade
.

The sensation was of being under a waterfall, of some river that emptied a continent, tons of water battering him to his knees. He emitted a tiny mewl, crouching down with his arms wrapping his head, shooting pains behind his eyes and terror locking his throat. He pressed his lips together to prevent any other sound escaping, that would attract Rowan in all her concern. He needed to be alone for this, oh yes.

No wonder I couldn't guess. I was trying to choose between two wrong answers. Oh, Mother. Oh, Da. Oh, Sergeant. Your boy has screwed up this one, bad. Real bad. Lieutenant Lord Miles Naismith Vorkosigan crawled on the tiled floor and screamed in silence, just a faint hiss. No, no, no, oh, shit. . . . 

Elli . . .

Bel, Elena, Taura . . .

Mark . . . Mark?
That stout, glowering, controlled, determined fellow had been
Mark
?

He could not remember anything about his death. He touched his chest, fearfully, tracing the evidence of . . . what event? He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to remember the last that he could. The raid downside at Bharaputra's surgical facility, yes. Mark had engineered a disaster, Mark and Bel between them, and he'd come flying down to try and pull all their nuts out of the fire. Some megalomanic inspiration to top Mark, show him how the experts did it, to take those clone-children from Vasa Luigi, who had offended him . . . take 'em home to Mother.
Crap, what does my mother know about all this by now?
Nothing, he prayed. They were all still here on Jackson's Whole, somehow.
How
long had he been dead . . . ?

Where the hell is ImpSec? 
 

Besides rolling around here on this bathroom floor, of course. 
 

Ow, ow, ow. . . . 
 

And Elli.
Do I know you, ma'am?
he'd asked. He should have bitten his tongue out.

Rowan . . . Elli.
It made sense, in a weird way. His lover was a tall, brown-eyed, dark-haired, tough-minded, smart woman. The first thing presented to his confused awakening senses had been a tall, brown-eyed, dark-haired, tough-minded, smart woman. It was a very natural mistake.

He wondered if Elli was going to buy that explanation. His taste for heavily-armed girlfriends did have potential drawbacks. He inhaled a hopeless laugh.

It clogged in his throat.
Taura, here?
Did Ryoval know it? Did he know what a lovely big clawed hand she'd had in the destruction of his gene banks, four years ago, or did he just blame "Admiral Naismith"? True, all of Ryoval's bounty hunters he'd encountered subsequently had seemed focused obsessively and exclusively upon himself. But Ryoval's troopers had mistaken Mark for the Admiral; had Ryoval? Surely Mark would tell him he was the clone.
Hell, I'd tell him the same if it were me, on the off-chance of confusing the issue.
What was happening to Mark? Why had Mark offered himself as Miles's . . . ransom? Mark couldn't possibly be cryo-amnesic too, could he? No—Lilly had said the Dendarii, and the clones, and "Admiral Naismith" had all escaped. So how did they come to be
back
?

They came looking for you, Admiral Dipshit. 
 

And had run headlong into Ryoval, looking for the same thing. He was a damned rendezvous.

What a
merciful
state cryo-amnesia was. He wished for it back.

"Are you all right?" Rowan called doubtfully. She stepped to the bathroom door, and saw him on the floor. "Oh, no! Another convulsion?" She dropped to her knees beside him, long fingers checking for damages. "Did you hit yourself on anything?"

"Ah . . . ah . . ."
I'll not bother avenging myself upon a cryo-amnesic
, Vasa Luigi had said. He had better remain a cryo-amnesic then, for the moment, till he had a better grip on things. And on himself. "I think I'm all right."

He suffered her to anxiously put him to bed. She stroked his hair. He stared at her in dismay through half-lidded, pretend-post-convulsion-sleepy eyes.
What have I done?
 

What am I going to do? 
 

He had forgotten why he was here. His skin was beginning to grow back.

He wondered where Mark had gone.

People came, and tormented a nameless thing without boundaries, and went away again. He met them variously. His emerging aspects became personas, and eventually, he named them, as well as he could identify them. There was Gorge, and Grunt, and Howl, and another, quiet one that lurked on the fringes, waiting.

He let Gorge go out to handle the force-feedings, because Gorge was the only one who actually enjoyed them. Gorge, after all, would never have been permitted to do all that Ryoval's techs did. Grunt he sent forth when Ryoval came again with the hypospray of aphrodisiac. Grunt had also been responsible for the attack on Maree, the body-sculptured clone, he rather thought, though Grunt, when not all excited, was very shy and ashamed and didn't talk much.

Howl handled the rest. He began to suspect Howl had been obscurely responsible for delivering them all to Ryoval in the first place. Finally, he'd come to a place where he could be punished
enough. Never give aversion therapy to a masochist. The results are unpredictable.
So Howl deserved what Howl got. The elusive fourth one just waited, and said that someday, they would all love him best.

They did not always stay within their lines. Howl had a tendency to eavesdrop on Gorge's sessions, which came regularly while Howl's did not; and more than once Gorge turned up riding along with Grunt on his adventures, which then became exceptionally peculiar. Nobody joined Howl by choice.

Having named them all, he finally found Mark by process of elimination. Gorge and Grunt and Howl and the Other had sent Lord Mark deep inside, to sleep through it all. Poor, fragile Lord Mark, barely twelve weeks old.

Ryoval could not even see Lord Mark down in there. Could not reach him. Could not touch him. Gorge and Grunt and Howl and the Other were all very careful not to wake the baby. Tender and protective, they defended him. They were
equipped
to. An ugly, grotty, hard-bitten bunch, these psychic mercenaries of his. Unlovely. But they got the job done.

He began to hum little marching tunes to them, from time to time.

Absence makes the heart grow fonder.
And, Miles feared, the converse. Rowan had pulled her pillow over her head again. He continued to pace. And talk. He couldn't seem to stop himself. In the time that had passed since his concealed memory cascade, he had evolved a multitude of plans for their escape, all with some fatal flaw. Unable to put any of them into effect, he had re-ordered and refined them out loud. Over and over. Rowan had stopped critiquing them . . . yesterday? In fact, she'd stopped talking to him at all. She'd given up trying to pet him and relax him, and instead tended to stay on the far side of the room, or hide for long periods in the bathroom. He couldn't blame her. His returning nervous energy seemed to be building to something like a frenzy.

This forced confinement was stressing her affection for him to the limit. And, he had to admit, he had not been able to conceal his slight new hesitation toward her. A coolness in his touch, an increased resistance to her medical authority. He loved and admired her, no question, and would be delighted to have her in charge of any sickbay he owned. Under his command. But guilt and the sense of no privacy had combined to cripple his interest in intimacy. He had other passions at the moment. And they were consuming him.

Dinner was due soon. Assuming three meals per long Jacksonian day, they'd been here four days. The Baron had not spoken with them again. What schemes was Vasa Luigi evolving, out there? Had he been auctioned yet? What if the next person through the door was his buyer? What if nobody bid at all, what if they left him in here forever?

Meals were usually brought on a tray by a servant, under the watchful eye of a couple of stunner-armed guards. He'd tried everything he could think of short of breaking his cover to suborn them, in their brief snatches of conversation. They'd just smiled at him. He was dubious of his ability to outrun a stunner-beam, but at the next opportunity, he resolved to try. He hadn't had a chance to try anything clever. He was ready to try something stupid. Surprise sometimes worked. . . .

The lock clicked. He spun, poised to dart forward. "Rowan, get up!" he hissed. "I'm going to try for it."

"Oh, hell," she moaned, emerging. Without faith, brow-beaten, she rose and trudged around the bed to stand by his side. "Stunning hurts, you know. And then you throw up.
You'll
probably have convulsions."

"Yes. I know."

"But at least it'll shut you up for a while," she muttered under her breath.

He rose on the balls of his feet. Then sank back again as the servant entered.
Oh, my. What's this?
There was suddenly a new player in the game, and his mind locked into over-drive. Rowan, watching him for his announced bolt, looked up too, and her eyes widened.

It was the clone-girl Lilly—Lilly Junior, he supposed he must think of her—in her brown-and-pink silk house-servant's uniform, a long wrap skirt and spangled jacket. Straight-backed, she carried their meal tray, and set it down on the table across the room. Incomprehensibly, the guard nodded at her and withdrew, closing the door behind him.

She began to lay out their meal, servant-fashion; Rowan approached her, lips parted.

He saw a dozen possibilities, instantly; also that this chance might never come again. There was no way, in his debilitated state, that he could overpower the girl himself. What about that sedative Rowan had threatened him with? Could Rowan get the drop on her? Rowan was not good at catching oblique hints, and terrible at following cryptic orders. She'd want explanations. She'd want to
argue
. He could only try.

"
Goodness
you two look alike," he chirped brightly, glaring at Rowan. She gave him a look of exasperated bafflement, which she converted to a smile as the girl turned toward them. "How is it that we rate, uh, such a high-born servant, milady?"

Lilly's smooth hand touched her chest. "
I
am not my lady," she said, in a tone that suggested he must be a complete fool. Not without reason. "But you . . ." She looked searchingly at Rowan. "I don't understand you."

"Did the Baronne send you?" Miles asked.

"No. But I told the guards your food was drugged, and the Baronne sent me to stay and watch you eat it," she added, somewhat off-the-cuff.

"Is that, uh, true?" he asked.

"No." She tossed her head, making her long hair swing, and dropped him from her attention to focus hungrily upon Rowan. "Who
are
you?"