The warrior's apprentice (34 page)

“Whose maximum convenience?” inquired Count Vorhalas dryly.

“You were thinking of this as a private declaration, I trust,” said Count Vorkosigan.

“Well, yes—I’m afraid most of the mercenaries would be, uh, rather disturbed to hear they’d been drafted into the Barrayaran Imperial Service. But why not put them in Captain Illyan’s department? Their status would have to remain covert then. Let him figure out something useful to do with ‘em. A free mercenary fleet secretly owned by Barrayaran Imperial Security.”

Gregor looked suddenly more reconciled; indeed, intrigued. “That might be practical...”

Count Vorkosigan’s teeth glinted in a white flash of a grin, instantly suppressed. “Simon,” he murmured, “will be overjoyed.”

“Really?” said Gregor dubiously.

“You have my personal guarantee.” Count Vorkosigan sketched a bow, sitting.

Vorhalas snorted, and eyed Miles. “You’re too bloody clever for your own good, you know, boy?”

“Exactly, sir,” said Miles agreeably, in a mild hysteria of relief, feeling lighter by 3000 soldiers and God knew how many tons of equipment. He had done it—the last piece glued back in its place...

“... dare play the fool with me,” muttered Vorhalas. He raised his voice to Count Vorkosigan. “That only answers half my question, Aral.”

Count Vorkosigan studied his fingernails, eyes alight. “True, we can’t leave him running around loose. I, too, shudder to think what accidents he might commit next. He should doubtless be confined to an institution, where he would be forced to labor all day long under many watchful eyes.” He paused thoughtfully. “May I suggest the Imperial Service Academy?”

Miles looked up, mouth open in an idiocy of sudden hope. All his calculations had been concentrated on wriggling out from under Vorloupulous’s law. He’d scarcely dared even to dream of life afterwards, let alone such reward as this...

His father lowered his voice to him. “Assuming it’s not beneath you—Admiral Naismith. I never did get to congratulate you on your promotion.”

Miles reddened. “It was all just fakery. sir. You know that.”

“All?”

“Well—mostly.”

“Ah, you grow subtle, even with me... But you have tasted command. Can you go back to subordination? Demotions are a bitter meat to swallow.” An old irony played around his mouth.

“You were demoted, after Komarr, sir...”

“Broken back to Captain, yes.”

One corner of Miles’s mouth twisted up. “I have a bionic stomach now, that can digest anything. I can handle it.”

Count Vorhalas raised skeptical brows. “What sort of ensign do you think he will make, Admiral Vorkosigan?”

“I think he will make a terrible ensign,” said Count Vorkosigan frankly. “But if he can avoid being strangled by his harried superiors for—er—excessive initiative, I think he might be a fine General Staff officer someday.”

Vorhalas nodded reluctant agreement. Miles’s eyes blazed up like bonfires, in reflection to his father’s.

After two days of testimony and behind the-scenes maneuvering, the Council vote was unanimous for acquittal. For one thing, Gregor took his place by right as Count Vorbarra and cast a resounding “innocent” as the fourth vote called, instead of the usual abstention customary for the Emperor. The rest swung meekly into line.

Some of Count Vorkosigan’s older political opponents looked as if they’d rather spit, but only Count Vorhalas voted an abstention. Then, Vorhalas had never been of Vordrozda’s party, and had no taint of association to wash off.

“Ballsy bastard.” Count Vorkosigan exchanged a familiar salute across the chamber with his closest enemy. “I wish they all had his backbone, if not his opinions.”

Miles sat quietly, absorbing this most mitigated triumph. Elena would have been safe, after all.

But not happy. Hunting hawks do not belong in cages, no matter how much a man covets their grace, no matter how golden the bars. They are far more beautiful soaring free. Heartbreakingly beautiful.

He sighed, and rose to go wrestle with his destiny.

The vinyards garlanding the terraced slopes of the long lake above Vorkosigan Surleau were misted with new green. The surface of the water glittered in a warm breath of air, a spatter of silver coins. It had once been a custom somewhere to put coins on the eyes of the dead, Miles had read, for their journey; it seemed appropriate. He imagined the sun-coins sinking to the bottom of the lake, there to pile up and up until they broke the surface, a new island.

The clods of earth were cold and wet yet, winter lingering beneath the surface of the soil. Heavy. He tossed a shovelful shoulder-high from the hole he dug.

“Your hands are bleeding,” observed his mother. “You could do that in five seconds with a plasma arc.”

“Blood,” said Miles, “washes away sin. The Sergeant said so.”

“I see.” She made no further demur, but sat in companionable silence, her back against a tree, watching the lake. It was her Betan upbringing, Miles supposed; she never seemed to tire of the delight of water open to the sky.

He finished at last. Countess Vorkosigan gave him a hand up out of the pit. He took up the control lead of the float pallet, and lowered the oblong box, waiting patiently all this time, into its rest. Bothari had always waited patiently for him.

Covering it back up was quicker work. The marker his father had ordered was not yet finished; hand-carved, like the others in this family plot. Miles’s grandfather lay not far away, next to the grandmother Miles had never known, dead decades before in Barrayaran civil strife. His eye lingered a moment, uncomfortably, on a double space reserved next to his grandfather, above the slope and perpendicular to the Sergeant’s new grave. But that burden was yet to come.

He placed a shallow beaten copper bowl upon a tripod at the foot of the grave. In it he piled juniper twigs from the mountains, and a lock of his own hair. He then pulled a colored scarf from his jacket, carefully unfolded it, and placed a curl of finer dark hair among the twigs. His mother added a clipping of short grey hair, and a thick, generous tress of her own red roan, and withdrew to a distance.

Miles, after a pause, laid the scarf beside the hair. “I’m afraid I made a most improper Baba,” he whispered in apology. “I never meant to mock you. But Baz loves her, he’ll take good care of her... My word was too easy to give, too hard to keep. But there. There.” He added flakes of aromatic bark. “You shall lie warm here, watching the long lake change its faces, winter to spring, summer to fall. No armies march here, and even the deepest midnights aren’t wholly dark. Surely God won’t overlook you, in such a spot as this. There will be grace and forgiveness enough, old dog, even for you.” He lit the offering. “I pray you will spare me a drink from that cup, when it overflows for you.”

EPILOGUE

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The emergency docking drill was called in the middle of the night cycle, naturally. He’d probably have timed it that way himself, Miles thought, as he scrambled through the corridors of the orbital weapons platform with his fellow cadets. This four-week stint of orbital and free-fall training was due to end tomorrow for his group, and the instructors hadn’t pulled anything nasty for at least four days. Not for him the galloping anticipation of upcoming leave planetside that had formed the bulk of the conversation in the officer’s mess last night. He had sat quietly, meditating on all the marvelous possibilities for a grand finale.

He arrived at his assigned shuttle hatch corridor at the same moment as his co-trainee and the instructor. The instructor’s face was a mask of neutrality. Cadet Kostolitz looked Miles over sourly.

“Still carrying that obsolete pig-sticker, eh?” said Kostolitz, with an irritated nod at the dagger at Miles’s waist.

“I have permission,” said Miles tranquilly.

“D’you sleep with it?”

A small, bland smile. “Yes.”

Miles considered the ongoing problem of Kostolitz. The accidents of Barrayaran history guaranteed he would be dealing with class-consciousness in his officers throughout his Imperial Service career, aggressive like Kostolitz’s or in more subtle forms. He must learn to handle it not merely well, but creatively, if his officers were ever to give him their best.

He had the uncanny sensation of being able to look through Kostolitz the way a doctor saw through a body with his diagnostic viewers. Every twist and tear and emotional abrasion, every young cancer of resentment growing from them, seemed red-lined in his mind’s eye. Patience. The problem displayed itself with everincreasing clarity. The solution would follow, in time, with opportunity. Kostolitz could teach him much. This docking drill might prove interesting after all.

Kostolitz had acquired a thin green armband since they had last been paired, Miles saw. He wondered what wit among the instructors had come up with that idea. The armbands were rather like getting a gold star on your paper in reverse; green represented injury in drills, yellow represented death, in the judgment of whatever instructor was umpiring the simulated catastrophe. Very few cadets managed to escape these training cycles without a collection of them. Miles had encountered Ivan Vorpatril yesterday, sporting two greens and a yellow, not as bad as the unfortunate fellow he’d seen at mess last night with five yellows.

Miles’s own undecorated sleeve was attracting a bit more attention from the instructors than he really wanted, lately. The notoriety had a pleasant flip-side; some of the more alert among his fellow cadets vied quietly to have Miles in their groups, as armbandrepellent. Of course, the very most alert were now avoiding him like a plague, realizing he was beginning to draw fire. Miles grinned to himself, in happy anticipation of something really sneaky and underhanded coming up. Every cell of his body seemed awake and singing.

Kostolitz, with a stifled yawn and a last growl at Miles’s upper-class decorative blade, took the starboard side of the shuttle and began working forward with his checklist. Miles took the port side, ditto. The instructor floated between them, watching sharply over their shoulders. He’d got one good thing out of his adventures with the Dendarii Mercenaries, Miles reflected; his free-fall nausea had vanished, an unexpected side-benefit of the work Tung’s surgeon had done on his stomach. Small favors.

Kostolitz was working swiftly, Miles saw from the corner of his eye. They were being timed. Kostolitz counted emergency breath masks through the plexiglass of their case and hurried on. Miles almost called a suggestion to him, then clamped his jaw. It wouldn’t be appreciated. Patience. Item. Item. Item—first aid kit, correctly in its wall socket. Automatically suspicious, Miles unlocked it and checked to see that all its contents were indeed intact. Tape, tourniquets, plastic bandage, IV tubing, meds, emergency oxygen—no surprises concealed there. He ran a hand along the bottom of the case, and caught his breath—plastic explosive? No, only a wad of chewing gum. Shucks.

Kostolitz was finished and waiting impatiently as Miles arrived up front. “You’re slow, Vorkosigian.” Kostolitz jammed his report panel into the read-slot, and slid into the pilot’s seat.

Miles eyed an interesting bulge in the instructor’s breast pocket. He patted his own pockets, and essayed a helpless smile. “Oh, sir,” he chirped politely to the instructor, “I seem to have misplaced my light-pen. May I borrow yours?”

The instructor disgorged it unwillingly. Miles lidded his eyes. In addition to the light-pen, the instructor’s pocket contained three emergency breath-masks, folded. An interesting number, three. Anyone on a space station might carry a breath mask in his pocket as a matter of course, but three? Yet they had a dozen breath-masks ready to hand, Kostolitz had just checked them—no. Kostolitz had just counted them.

“Your light pens are standard issue,” said the instructor coldly. “You’re supposed to hang onto them. You careless characters are going to bring the Accounting Office down on us all, one of these days.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.” Miles signed his name with a flourish, made to pocket the pen, came up with two. “Oh, here’s mine. Sorry, sir.”

He entered his report, and strapped himself into the co-pilot’s chair. With his seat at the limit of its forward adjustment, he could just reach the foot controls. Imperial equipment was not so flexible as the mercenaries’ had been. No matter. He schooled himself to strict attention. He was still awkward in his handling of shuttle controls. But a bit more practice, and he would never be at the mercy of a shuttle pilot for transportation again.

It was Kostolitz’s turn now, though. Miles was pressed into his padded seat by the acceleration as the shuttle popped free of its clamps and began to boost toward its assigned station. Breath masks. Check lists. Assumptions. The chip on Kostolitz’s shoulder. Assumptions... Miles’s nerves extended themselves, spider-patient, questing. Minutes crept by.

A sharp report, and a hissing, came from the rear of the cabin. Miles’s heart lurched and began to pound violently, in spite of his anticipation. He swung around and took it in at a glance, as when a strobe-flash of lightning betrays the secrets of the dark. Kostolitz swore violently. Miles breathed, “Ha!”

A jagged hole in the paneling on the starboard side of the shuttle was pouring out a thick green gas; a coolant line had snapped, as from a meteor hit. The “meteor” was undoubtedly plastic explosive, since the stuff was streaming into and not out of the cabin. Besides, the instructor was still seated, watching them. Kostolitz leaped for the case of emergency breath masks.

Miles dove instead for the controls. He snapped the atmosphere circuit from recycle to exterior venting, and in one pauseless motion fired the shuttle’s attitude verniers at maximum boost. After a groaning moment, the shuttle began to turn, then spin, around an axis through the center of the cabin. Miles, the instructor, and Kostolitz were thrown forward. The coolant gas, heavier than their atmosphere mix, began to pile up against the back wall of the cabin in noxious billows under the influence of this simplest of artificial gravities.

“You crazy bastard!” screamed Kostolitz, scrabbling at a breath mask. “What are you doing?”

The instructor’s expression was first an echo of Kostolitz’s, then suddenly enlightened. He eased back into the seat he had begun to shoot out of, hanging on tightly and observing, his eyes crinkling with interest.

Miles was too busy to reply. Kostolitz would figure it out shortly, he was sure. Kostolitz donned a breath mask, attempted to inhale. He snatched it off his face and threw it aside, and grabbed up the second of the three he’d brought forward. Miles climbed up the wall toward the first aid kit.

The second breath mask curved past him. Empty reservoirs, no doubt. Kostolitz had counted the breath masks without checking their working condition. Miles levered the first aid kit open and pulled out IV tubing and two Y-connectors. Kostolitz threw aside the third breath mask and began climbing back up the starboard wall toward the case of breath masks. The coolant gas made an acrid, burning stench in Miles’s nostrils, but its harmful concentrations remained in the other end of the cabin, for now.

A cry of rage and fear, interrupted by coughing, came from Kostolitz as he began pawing through breath masks, checking their condition readouts at last. Miles’s lips drew back in a wicked grin. He pulled his grandfather’s dagger from its sheath, cut the IV tubing into four pieces, inserted the Y-connectors, sealed them with blobs of plastic bandage, jammed the hookah-like apparatus into the single outlet of the emergency medical oxygen canister, and skidded back to the instructor.

“Air, sir?” He offered a hissing end of IV tubing to the officer. “I suggest you breathe in through your mouth and out through your nose.”

“Thank you, Cadet Vorkosigan,” said the instructor in a fascinated tone, taking it. Kostolitz, coughing, eyes rolling desperately, fell back toward them, barely managing not to put his feet through the control panel. Miles blandly handed him a tube. He sucked on it, eyes wide and watering, not, Miles thought, only from the effects of the coolant gas.

Clenching his air-tube between his teeth, Miles began to climb the starboard wall. Kostolitz started after him, then discovered that both he and the instructor had been issued short tethers. Miles uncoiled tubing behind him; yes, it would reach, although just barely. Kostolitz and the instructor could only watch, breathing in yogalike cadence.

Miles reversed his hold as he passed the midpoint of the cabin and centrifugal force began to pull him toward the pooling green gas slowly filling the shuttle from the back wall. He counted down wall panels, 4a, 4b, 4c—that should be it. He popped it open, and found the manual shut-off valves.That one? No, that one. He turned it. It slipped in his sweating hand.

The panel door on which he rested his weight gave way with a sudden crack, and he swung out over the evilly heaving green gas. The oxygen tube ripped from his mouth and flapped around wildly. He was saved from yelping only by the fact that he was holding his breath. The instructor, forward, lurched futilely, tied to his air supply. But by the time he’d fumbled his pocket open, Miles had swallowed, achieved a more secure grip on the wall, and recovered his tube in a heart-stopping grab. Try again. He turned the valve, hard, and the hissing from the hole in the wall a meter astern of him faded to an elfin moan, then stopped.

The tide of green gas began to recede and thin at last, as the cabin ventilators labored. Miles, shaking only slightly, climbed back to the front end of the shuttle and strapped himself into his co-pilot’s seat without comment. Comment would have been awkward around his oxygen tube anyway.

Cadet Kostolitz, in his role as pilot, returned to his controls. The atmosphere cleared at last. He stopped the spin and aimed the damaged shuttle slowly back toward dock, paying strict and subdued attention to engine temperature readouts. The instructor looked extremely thoughtful, and only little pale.

The chief instructor himself was waiting in the shuttle hatch corridor of the orbital station when they docked, along with a repairs tech. He smiled cheerily, turning two yellow armbands absently in his hands.

Their own instructor sighed, and shook his head dolefully at the armbands. “No.”

“No?” queried the chief instructor. Miles was not sure if it was with amazement or disappointment.

“No.”

“This I’ve got to see.” The two instructors ducked into the shuttle, leaving Miles and Kostolitz alone a moment.

Kostolitz cleared his throat. “That, ah—blade of yours came in pretty handy after all.”

“Yes, there are times when a plasma arc beam isn’t nearly as suitable for cutting,” Miles agreed. “Like when you’re in a chamber full of inflammable gas.”

“Oh, hell,” Kostolitz seemed suddenly struck. “That stuff will go off, mixed with oxygen. I almost...” He cut himself off, cleared his throat again. “You don’t miss much, do you?” A sudden suspicion filled his face. “Did you know about this set up in advance?”

“Not exactly. But I figured something must be up when I counted the three breath masks in the instructor’s pocket.”

“You—” Kostolitz paused, turned. “Did you really lose track of your light-pen?”

“No.”

“Hell,” Kostolitz muttered again. He scuffed around the corridor a moment, hunched, red, dismally recalcitrant.

Now, thought Miles. “I know a place you can buy good blades, in Vorbarr Sultana,” he said with nicely calculated diffidence. “Better than standard issue stuff. You can get a real bargain there sometimes, if you know what to look for.”

Kostolitz stopped. “Oh, yeah?” He began to straighten, as though being relieved of a weight. “You, ah—I don’t suppose...”

“It’s kind of a hole-in-the-wall. I could take you there sometime, during leave, if you’re interested.”

“Really? You’d—you’d—yes, I’d be interested.” Kostolitz feigned a casual air. “Sure.” He looked suddenly much more cheerful.

Miles smiled.