The warrior's apprentice (25 page)

Miles sprang for his stunner as Elena leaped for the Escobaran. Elena struck the needier sliding across the room and had the woman’s arms hooked behind her, twisting in their shoulder sockets with the strength of her terror and rage, by the time he’d brought the stunner to aim. But the woman was resistless, spent. Miles saw why as he spun back to the Sergeant.

Bothari fell like a wall toppling, as if in pieces at the joints. His shirt displayed four or five tiny drops of blood only, scarcely a nosebleed’s worth. But they were obliterated in a sudden red flood from his mouth as he convulsed, choking. He writhed once on the friction matting, vomiting a second scarlet tide across the first, across Miles’s hands, lap, shirt front, as he scrambled on hands and knees to kneel by his bodyguard’s head.

“Sergeant?”

Bothari lay still, watchful eyes stopped and open, head twisted, the blood flung from his mouth soaking into the friction matting. He looked like some dead animal, smashed by a vehicle. Miles patted Bothari’s chest frantically, but could not even find the pinhole entrance wounds. Five hits—Bothari’s chest cavity, abdomen, organs, must be sliced and stirred to hamburger, within...

“Why didn’t he fire?” wailed Elena. She shook the Escobaran woman. “Wasn’t it charged?”

Miles glanced at the plasma arc’s readouts in the Sergeant’s stiffening hand. Freshly charged, Bothari had just done it himself.

Elena took one despairing look at her father’s body, and snaked a hand around the Escobaran woman’s throat, catching her tunic. Her arm tightened across the woman’s windpipe.

Miles rocked back on his heels, his shirt, trousers, hands soaked in blood. “No, Elena! Don’t kill her!”

“Why not? Why not?” Tears were swarming down her ravaged face.

“I think she’s your mother.” Oh, God, he shouldn’t have said that...

“You believe those horrible things—” she raged at him. “Unbelieveable lies—” But her hold slackened.

“Miles—I don’t even know what some of those words mean . . .”

The Escobaran woman coughed, and twisted her head around, to stare in astonishment and dismay over her shoulder. “This is that one’s spawn?” she asked Miles.

“His daughter.”

Her eyes counted off the features of Elena’s face. Miles did too; it seemed to him the secret sources of Elena’s hair, eyes, elegant bone structure, stood before him.

“You look like him.” Her great brown eyes held a thin crust of distaste over a bog of horror. “I’d heard the Barrayarans had used the fetuses for military research.” She eyed Miles in confused speculation. “Are you another? But no, you couldn’t be...”

Elena released her, and stood back. Once, at the summer place at Vorkosigan Surleau, Miles had witnessed a horse trapped in a shed burn to death, no one able to get near it for the heat. He had thought no sound could be more heart-piercing than its death screams. Elena’s silence was. She was not crying now.

Miles drew himself up in dignity. “No, ma’am. Admiral Vorkosigan saw them all safely delivered to an orphanage, I believe. All but . . .”

Elena’s lips formed the word, “lies,” but there was no more conviction in her. Her eyes sucked at the Escobaran woman with a hunger that terrified Miles.

The door of the cabin slid open again. Arde Mayhew sauntered in, saying, “My lord, do you want these assignments—God almighty!” He nearly tripped, stopping short. “I’ll get the medtech, hang on!” He dashed back out.

Elena Visconti approached Bothari’s body with the caution one would use toward a freshly-killed poisonous reptile. Her eyes locked with Miles’s from opposite sides of the barrier. “Admiral Naismith, I apologize for inconveniencing you. But this was no murder. It was the just execution of a war criminal. It was just,” she insisted, her voice edged with passion. “It was.” Her voice fell away.

It was no murder, it was a suicide, Miles thought. He could have shot you where you stood at any time, he was that fast. “No...”

Her lips thinned in despair. “You call me a liar too? Or are you going to tell me I enjoyed it?”

“No...” He looked up at her across a vast gulf, one meter wide. “I don’t mock you. But—until I was four, almost five years old, I couldn’t walk, only crawl. I spent a lot of time looking at people’s knees. But if there was ever a parade, or something to see, I had the best view of anybody because I watched it from on top the Sergeant’s shoulder.”

For answer, she spat on Bothari’s body. A spasm of rage darkened Miles’s vision. He was saved from a possibly disastrous action by the return of Mayhew and the medtech.

The medtech ran to him, “Admiral! Where are you hit?”

He stared at her stupidly a moment, then glanced down at himself, realizing the red reason for her concern. “Not me. It’s the Sergeant.” He brushed ineffectually at the cooling stickiness.

She knelt by Bothari. “What happened? Was it an accident?”

Miles glanced up at Elena where she stood, just stood, arms wrapped around herself as if she were cold. Only her eyes traveled, back and forth from the Sergeant’s crumpled form to the harsh straightness of the Escobaran. Back and forth, finding no rest.

His mouth was stiff; he made it move by force of will. “An accident. He was cleaning the weapons. The needier was set on auto rapid-fire.” Two true statements out of three.

The Escobaran woman’s mouth curled in silent triumph and relief. She thinks I have endorsed her justice, Miles realized. Forgive me...

The medtech shook her head, running a hand scanner over Bothari’s chest. “Whew. What a mess.”

A sudden hope rocketed through Miles. “The cryo chambers—what’s their status?”

“All filled, sir, after the counterattack.”

“When you triage for them, how—how do you choose?”

“The least messed-up ones have the best hope of revival. They get first choice. Enemies last, unless Intelligence throws a fit.”

“How would you rate this injury?”

“Worse than any I’ve got on ice now, except two.”

“Who are the two?”

“A couple of Captain Tung’s people. Do you want me to dump one?”

Miles paused, searching Elena’s face. She was staring at Bothari’s body as if he were some stranger, wearing her father’s face, who had suddenly unmasked. Her dark eyes were like deep caverns; like graves, one for Bothari, one for himself.

“He hated the cold,” he muttered at last. “Just—get a morgue pack.”

“Yes, sir.” She exited, unhurried.

Mayhew wandered up, to stare bemused and bewildered on the face of death. “I’m sorry, my lord. I was just beginning to like him, in a kind of weird way.”

“Yes. Thank you. Go away.” Miles looked up at the Escobaran woman. “Go away,” he whispered.

Elena was turning around and around between the dead and the living, like a creature newly caged discovering that cold iron sears the flesh. “Mother?” she said at last, in a tiny voice not at all like her own.

“You keep away from me,” the Escobaran woman snarled at her, low-voiced and pale. “Far away.” She gave her a look of loathing, contemptuous as a slap, and stalked out.

“Um,” said Arde. “Maybe you should come somewhere and sit down, Elena. I’ll get you a, a drink of water or something.” He plucked at her anxiously. “Come away now, there’s a good girl.”

She suffered herself to be led, with one last look over her shoulder. Her face reminded Miles of a bombed-out city.

Miles waited for the medtech, in deathwatch for his first leigeman, afraid, and growing more so, unaccustomed. He had always had the Sergeant to be afraid for him. He touched Bothari’s face; the shaved chin was rough under his fingertips.

“What do I do now, Sergeant?”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

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It was three days before he cried, worried that he could not cry. Then, in bed alone at night, it came as a frightening uncontrollable storm lasting hours. Miles judged it a just catharsis, but it kept repeating on succeeding nights, and then he worried that it would not stop. His stomach hurt all the time now, but especially after meals, which he therefore scarcely touched. His sharp features sharpened further, molding to his bones.

The days were a grey fog. Faces, familiar and unfamiliar, badgered him for directions, to which his reply was an invariable, laconic, “Suit yourself.” Elena would not talk to him at all. He was stirred to fear she was finding comfort in Baz’s arms. He watched her covertly, anxious. But she seemed not to be finding comfort anywhere.

After a particularly formless and inconclusive Dendarii staff meeting Arde Mayhew took him aside. Miles had sat silent at the head of the table, seemingly studying his hands, while his officers’ voices had croaked on meaningless as frogs.

“God knows,” whispered Arde, “I don’t know much about being a military officer.” He took an angry breath. “But I do know you can’t drag 200 and more people out on a limb with you like this and then go catatonic.”

“You’re right,” Miles snarled back, “you don’t know much.”

He stamped off, stiff-backed, but shaken inside with the justice of Mayhew’s complaint. He slammed into his cabin just in time to throw up in secret for the fourth time that week, the second since Bothari’s death, resolve sternly to take up the work at hand immediately and no more nonsense, and fall across his bed to lay immobile for the next six hours.

He was getting dressed. Men who’d done isolated duty all agreed, you had to keep the standards up or things went to hell. Miles had been awake three hours now, and had his trousers on. In the next hour he was either going to try for his socks, or shave, whichever seemed easier. He contemplated the pig-headed masochism of the Barrayaran habit of the daily shave versus, say, the civilized Betan custom of permanently stunning the hair follicles. Perhaps he’d go for the socks.

The cabin buzzer blatted. He ignored it. Then the intercom, Elena’s voice: “Miles, let me in.”

He lurched to a sitting position, nearly blacking himself out, and called hastily, “Come!”, which released the voice-lock.

She picked her way in across strewn clothing, weapons, equipment, disconnected chargers, rations wrappers, and stared around, wrinkling her nose in dismay. “You know,” she said at last, “if you’re not going to pick this mess up yourself you ought to at least choose a new batman.”

Miles stared around too. “It never occurred to me,” he said humbly. “I used to imagine I was a very neat person. Everything just put itself away, or so I thought. You wouldn’t mind?”

“Mind what?”

“If I got a new batman.”

“Why should I care?”

Miles thought it over. “Maybe Arde. I’ve got to find something for him to do, sooner or later, now he can’t jump anymore.”

“Arde?” she repeated dubiously.

“He’s not nearly as slovenly as he used to be.”

“Mm.” She picked up a hand-viewer that was lying upside-down on the floor, and looked for a place to set it. But there was only one level surface in the cabin that held no clutter or dust. “Miles, how long are you going to keep that coffin in here?”

“It might as well be stored here as anywhere. The morgue’s cold. He didn’t like the cold.”

“People are beginning to think you’re strange.”

“Let ‘em think what they like. I gave him my word once that I’d take him back to be buried on Barrayar, if—if anything happened to him out here.”

She shrugged angrily. “Why bother keeping your word to a corpse? It’ll never know the difference.”

“I’m alive,” Miles said quietly, “and I’d know.”

She stalked around the cabin, lips tight. Face tight, whole body tight—”I’ve been running your unarmed combat classes for ten days now. You haven’t come to a single session.”

He wondered if he ought to tell her about throwing up the blood. No, she’d drag him off to the medtech for sure. He didn’t want to see the medtech. His age, the secret weakness of his bones—too much would become apparent on a close medical examination.

She went on. “Baz is doing double shifts, reconditioning equipment, Tung and Thorne and Auson are running their tails off organizing the new recruits—but it’s all starting to come apart. Everybody’s spending all their time arguing with everybody else. Miles, if you spend another week holed up in here, the Dendarii Mercenaries are going to start looking just like this cabin.”

“I know. I’ve been to the staff meetings. Just because I don’t say anything doesn’t mean I’m not listening.”

“Then listen to them when they say they need your leadership.”

“I swear to God, Elena, I don’t know what for.” He ran his hands through his hair, and jerked up his chin. “Baz fixes things, Arde runs them, Tung and Thorne and Auson and their people do the fighting, you keep them all sharp and in condition—I’m the one person who doesn’t do anything real at all.” He paused. “They say? What do you say?”

“What does it matter what I say?”

“You came...”

“They asked me to come. You haven’t been letting anyone else in, remember? They’ve been pestering me for days. They act like a bunch of ancient Christians asking the Virgin Mary to intercede with God.”

A ghost of his old grin flitted across his mouth. “No, only with Jesus. God is back on Barrayar.”

She choked, then buried her face in her hands. “Damn you for making me laugh!” she said, muffled.

He rose to capture her hands and make her sit beside him. “Why shouldn’t you laugh? You deserve laughter, and all good things.”

She did not answer, but stared across the room at the oblong silver box resting in the corner, at the bright scars on the far wall. “You never doubted her accusations,” she said at last. “Not even for the first instant.”

“I saw a lot more of him than you ever did. He practically lived in my back pocket for seventeen years.”

“Yes...” her eyes fell to her hands, now twisting in her lap. “I suppose I never did see more than glimpses. He would come to the village at Vorkosigan Surleau and give Mistress Hysop her money once a month—he’d hardly ever stay more than an hour. Looking three meters tall in that brown and silver livery of yours. I’d be so excited, I couldn’t sleep for a day before or after. Summers were heaven, because when your mother asked me up the lake to the summer place to play with you, I’d see him all day long.” Her hands tightened to fists, and her voice broke. “And it was all lies. Faking glory, while all the time underneath was this—cess-pit.”

He made his voice more gentle than he had ever known he could. “I don’t think he was lying, Elena. I think he was trying to forge a new truth.”

Her teeth were clenched and feral. “The truth is, I am a madman’s rape-bred bastard, my mother is a murderess who hates the very shape of my shadow—I can’t believe I’ve inherited no more from them than my nose and my eyes—”

There it was, the dark fear, most secret. He started in recognition, and dove after it like a knight pursuing a dragon underground. “No! You’re not them. You are you, your own person—totally separate—innocent—”

“Coming from you, I think that’s the most hypocritical thing I’ve ever heard.”

“Huh?”

“What are you but the culmination of your generations? The flower of the Vor—”

“Me?” He stared in astonishment. “The culmination of degeneration, maybe. A stunted weed...” He paused; her face seemed a mirror of his own astonishment. “They do add up, it’s true. My grandfather carried nine generations on his back. My father carried ten. I carry eleven— and I swear that last one weighs more than all the rest put together. It’s a wonder I’m not squashed even shorter. I feel like I’m down to about half a meter right now. Soon I’ll disappear altogether.”

He was babbling, knew he was babbling. Some dam had broken in him. He gave himself over to the flood and boiled on down the sluice.

“Elena, I love you, I’ve always loved you—” She leaped like a startled deer, he gasped and flung his arms around her. “No, listen! I love you, I don’t know what the Sergeant was but I loved him too, and whatever of him is in you I honor with all my heart, I don’t know what is truth and I don’t give a damn anymore, we’ll make our own like he did, he did a bloody good job I think, I can’t live without my Bothari, marry me!” He spent the last of his air shouting the last two words, and had to pause for a long inhalation.

“I can’t marry you! The genetic risks—”

“I am not a mutant! Look, no gills—” he stuck his fingers into the corners of his mouth and spread it wide, “no antlers— “ he planted his thumbs on either side of his head and wriggled his fingers.

“I wasn’t thinking of your genetic risks. Mine. His. Your father must have known what he was—he’ll never accept—”

“Look, anybody who can trace a blood relationship with Mad Emperor Yuri through two lines of descent has no room to criticize anybody else’s genes.”

“Your father is loyal to his class, Miles, like your grandfather, like Lady Vorpatril—they could never accept me as Lady Vorkosigan.”

“Then I’ll present them with an alternative. I’ll tell them I’m going to marry Bel Thorne. They’ll come around so fast they’ll trip over themselves.”

She sat back helplessly and buried her face in his pillow, shoulders shaking. He had a moment of terror that he’d broken her down into tears. Not break down, build up, and up, and up... But, “Damn you for making me laugh!” she repeated. “Damn you . . .”

He galloped on, encouraged. “And I wouldn’t be so sure about my father’s class loyalties. He married a foreign plebe, after all.” He dropped into seriousness. “And you cannot doubt my mother. She always longed for a daughter, secretly—never paraded it, so as not to hurt the old man, of course—let her be your mother in truth.”

“Oh,” she said, as if he had stabbed her. “Oh...”

“You’ll see, when we get back to Barrayar—”

“I pray to God,” she interrupted him, voice intense, “I may never set foot on Barrayar again.”

“Oh,” he said in turn. After a long pause he said, “We could live somewhere else. Beta Colony. It would have to be pretty quietly, once the exchange rate got done with my income—I could get a job, doing—doing—doing something.”

“And on the day the Emperor calls you to take your place on the Council of Counts, to speak for your district and all the poor sods in it, where will you go then?”

He swallowed, struck silent. “Ivan Vorpatril is my heir,” he offered at last. “Let him take the Countship.”

“Ivan Vorpatril is a jerk.”

“Oh, he’s not such a bad sort.”

“He used to corner me, when my father wasn’t around, and try to feel me up.”

“What! You never said—”

“I didn’t want to start a big flap.” She frowned into the past. “I almost wish I could go back in time, just to boot him in the balls.”

He glanced sideways at her, considerably startled. “Yes,” he said slowly, “you’ve changed.”

“I don’t know what I am anymore. Miles, you must believe me—I love you as I love breath—”

His heart rocketed.

“But I can’t be your annex.”

And crashed. “I don’t understand.”

“I don’t know how to put it plainer. You’d swallow me up the way an ocean swallows a bucket of water. I’d disappear in you. I love you, but I’m terrified of you, and of your future.”

His bafflement sought simplicity. “Baz. It’s Baz, isn’t it?”

“If Baz had never existed, my answer would be the same. But as it happens—I have given him my word.”

“You—” the breath went out of him in a “ha,”—”Break it,” he ordered.

She merely looked at him, silently. In a moment he reddened, and dropped his eyes in shame.

“You own honor by the ocean,” she whispered. “I have only a little bucketful. Unfair to jostle it—my lord.”

He fell back across his bed, defeated.

She rose. “Are you coming to the staff meeting?”

“Why bother? It’s hopeless.”

She stared down at him, lips thinned, and glanced across to the box in the corner. “Isn’t it time you learned to walk on your own feet—cripple?”

She ducked out the door just in time to avoid the pillow he threw at her, her lips curving just slightly at this spasmodic display of energy.

“You know me too bloody well,” he whispered. “Ought to keep you just for security reasons.”

He staggered to his feet and went to shave.

He made it to the staff conference, barely, and sagged into his usual seat at the head of the table. It was a full meeting, held therefore in the roomy refinery conference chamber. General Halify and an aide sat in. Tung and Thorne and Auson, Arde and Baz, and the five men and women picked to officer the new recruits ringed the table. The Cetagandan ghem-captain sat opposite the

Kshatryan lieutenant, their growing animosity threatening to equal the three-way rivalry among Tung, Auson, and Thorne. The two united only long enough to snarl at the Felicians, the professional assassin from Jackson’s Whole, or the retired Tau Cetan major of commandos, who in turn sniped at the ex-Oserans, making the circle complete.