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Authors: Lois McMaster Bujold

Tags: #Science Fiction

Cordelia's Honor (58 page)

BOOK: Cordelia's Honor
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"Plasma arc? Is that when he got that horrible burn?" Cordelia asked. She tried to keep her tone very calm.

Gregor nodded mutely. "Some soldiers took Mama, those other ones, not Negri's ones. Captain Negri picked me up and ran. We went through the tunnels, under the Residence, and came out in a garage. We went in the lightflyer. They shot at us. Captain Negri kept telling me to shut up, to be quiet. We flew and flew, and he kept yelling at me to be quiet, but I
was
. And then we landed by the lake." Gregor was trembling again.

"Mm." Kareen spun in vivid detail in Cordelia's head, despite the simplicity of Gregor's account. That serene face, wrenched into screaming rage and terror as they tore the son she'd borne the Barrayaran hard way from her grip, leaving . . . nothing but a shoe, of all their precarious life and illusory possessions. So Vordarian's troops had Kareen. As hostage? Victim? Alive or dead?

"Do you think Mama's all right?"

"Sure." Cordelia shifted uncomfortably. "She's a very valuable lady. They won't hurt her."
Till it becomes expedient for them to do so.
 

"She was crying."

"Yes." She could feel that same knot in her own belly. The mental flash she'd shied from all day yesterday burst in her brain. Boots, kicking open a secured laboratory door. Kicking over desks, tables. No faces, just boots. Gun butts sweeping delicate glassware and computerized monitors from benches into a tangled smash on the floor. A uterine replicator rudely jerked open, its sterile seals slashed, its contents dumped pell-mell wetly on the tiles . . . no need even for the traditional murderous swing by the heels of infant head against the nearest concrete wall, Miles was so little the boots could just
step
on him and smash him to jam. . . . She drew in her breath.

Miles is all right. Anonymous, just like us. We are very small, and very quiet, and safe. Shut up, keep quiet, kid.
She hugged Gregor tightly. "My little boy is in the capital, too, same as your Mama. And you're with me. We'll look out for each other. You bet."

* * *

After supper, and still no sign of Kly, Cordelia said, "Show me that cave, Sergeant."

Kly kept a box of cold lights atop his mantel. Bothari cracked one, and led Cordelia and Gregor up into the woods on a faint stony path. He made a menacing will-o'-the-wisp, with the bright green-tinged light shining from the tube between his fingers.

The area near the cave mouth showed signs of having once been cleared, though recent overgrowth was closing back in. The entrance was by no means hidden, a yawning black hole twice the height of Bothari and wide enough to edge a lightflyer through. Immediately within, the roof rose and walls flared to create a dusty cavern. Whole patrols could camp therein, and had, in the distant past, judging from the antique litter. Bunk niches were carved in the rock, and names and initials and dates and crude comments covered the walls.

A cold fire-pit in the center was matched by a blackened vent-hole above, which had once provided exit for the smoke. A ghostly crowd of hillmen, guerilla soldiers, seemed to hover in Cordelia's mind's eye, eating, joking, spitting gum-leaf, cleaning their weapons and planning their next foray. Ranger spies came and went, ghosts among the ghosts, to place their precious blood-won information before their young general, who spread his maps out on that flat rock over there. . . . She shook the vision from her head, and took the light and explored the niches. At least five traversable exits led off from the cavern, three of which showed signs of having been heavily traveled.

"Did Kly say where these went, or where they came out, Sergeant?"

"Not exactly, Milady. He did say the passages went back for kilometers, into the hills. He was late, and in a hurry to get on."

"Is it a vertical or horizontal system, did he say?"

"Beg pardon, Milady?"

"All on one strata, or with unexpected big drops? Are there lots of blind alleys? Which path were we supposed to take? Are there underground streams?"

"I think he expected to be leading us, if we went in. He started to explain, then said it was too complicated."

She frowned, contemplating the possibilities. She'd done a bit of cave work in her Survey training, enough to grasp what the term
respect for the hazards
meant. Vents, drops, cracks, labyrinthine cross-passages . . . plus, here, the unexpected rise and fall of water, not a matter of much concern on Beta Colony. It had rained last night. Sensors were not much help in finding a lost cave explorer. And whose sensors? If the system was as extensive as Kly suggested, it could absorb hundreds of searchers. . . . Her frown changed to a slow smile.

"Sergeant, let's camp here tonight."

* * *

Gregor liked the cave, especially when Cordelia described the history of the place. He rattled around the cavern whispering military dialogue to himself like "Zap, zap, zap!", climbed in and out of all the niches, and tried to sound out the rude words carved in the walls. Bothari lit a small fire in the pit and spread a bedroll for Gregor and Cordelia, taking the night watch for himself. Cordelia set a second bedroll, wrapped around trail snacks and supplies, in a grabbable bundle near the entrance. She arranged the black fatigue jacket with the name VORKOSIGAN, A., artistically in a niche, as if used to sit upon and keep someone's haunches from the cold stone and then temporarily forgotten when the sitter rose. Last of all Bothari brought up their lame and useless horses, re-saddled and bridled, and tethered them just outside.

Cordelia emerged from the widest passage, where she'd dropped an almost-spent cold light a quarter kilometer along, over a rope-strung ten-meter cliff. The rope was natural fiber, and very old and brittle. She'd elected not to test it.

"I don't quite get it, Milady," said Bothari. "With the horses abandoned out there, if anyone comes looking they'll find us at once, and know exactly where we've gone."

"Find this, yes," said Cordelia. "Know where we've gone, no. Because without Kly, there is no way I'm taking Gregor down into this labyrinth. But the best way to look like we were here is to actually be here for a bit."

Bothari's flat eyes lit in understanding at last, as he gazed around at the five black entrances at their various levels. "Ah!"

"That means we also need to find a real bolt-hole. Somewhere up in the woods, where we can cut across to the trail Kly brought us up yesterday. Wish we'd done this in daylight."

"I see what you mean, Milady. I'll scout."

"Please do, Sergeant."

Taking their trail bundle, he disappeared into the dim woods. Cordelia tucked Gregor into the bedroll, then perched outside among the rocks above the cave mouth and kept watch. She could see the vale, stretched out greyly below the tops of the trees, and make out Kly's cabin roof. No smoke rose now from its chimney. Beneath the stone, no remote thermal sensor would find their new fire, though the smell of it hung in the chill air, detectable to nearby noses. She watched for moving lights in the sky till the stars were a watery blur in her eyes.

Bothari returned after a very long time. "I have a spot. Shall we move now?"

"Not yet. Kly might still show up."
First.
 

"Your turn to sleep, then, Milady."

"Oh, yes." The evening's exertions had only partly warmed the acid fatigue from her muscles. Leaving Bothari on the limestone outcrop in the starlight like a guardian gargoyle, she crawled in with Gregor. Eventually, she slept.

* * *

She woke with the grey light of dawn making the cavern entrance a luminous misty oval. Bothari made hot tea, and they shared cold lumps of pan bread left from last night, and nibbled dried fruit.

"I'll watch some more," Bothari volunteered. "I can't sleep so good without my medication anyway."

"Medication?" said Cordelia.

"Yeah, I left my pills at Vorkosigan Surleau. I can feel it clearing out of my system. Things seem sharper."

Cordelia chased a suddenly very lumpy bite of bread with a swallow of hot tea. But were his psychoactive drugs truly therapeutic, or merely political in their effect? "Let me know if you are experiencing any kind of difficulty, Sergeant," she said cautiously.

"Not so far. Except it's getting harder to sleep. They suppress dreams." He took his tea and wandered back to his post.

Cordelia carefully refrained from cleaning up their campsite. She did escort Gregor to the nearest rivulet for a personal washup. They were certainly acquiring an authentic hill-folk aroma. They returned to the cavern, where Cordelia rested a while on the bedroll. She must insist on relieving Bothari soon. Come on, Kly. . . .

Bothari's tense low voice reverberated in the cavern. "Milady. Sire. Time to go."

"Kly?"

"No."

Cordelia rolled to her feet, kicked the pre-arranged pile of dirt over the last coals of their fire, grabbed Gregor, and hustled him out the cave mouth. He looked suddenly frightened and sickly. Bothari was pulling the bridles off the horses, loosing them and tossing the gear on the pile with the saddles. Cordelia pulled herself up beside the cave and snatched one quick glimpse over the treetops. A flyer had landed in front of Kly's cabin. Two black-uniformed soldiers were circling to the right and left. A third disappeared under the porch roof. Faint and delayed in the distance came the bang of Kly's front door being kicked open. Only soldiers, no hillman-guides or hillman-prisoners in that flyer. No sign of Kly.

They took to the woods at a jog, Bothari boosting up and carrying Gregor piggyback. Rose made to follow them, and Cordelia whirled to wave her arms and whisper frantically, "No! Go away, idiot beast!" to spook her off. Rose hesitated, then turned to stay by her lame companion.

Their run was steady, unpanicked. Bothari had his route all picked out, taking advantage of sheltering rocks and trees and water-carved steps. They scrambled up, down, up, but just when she thought her lungs would burst and their pursuers must spot them, Bothari vanished along a steep rock face.

"Over here, Milady!"

He'd found a thin, horizontal crack in the rocks, half a meter high and three meters deep. She rolled in beside him to find the niche shielded by solid rock everywhere but the front, and that almost blocked by fallen stone. Their bedroll and supplies waited.

"No wonder," Cordelia gasped, "the Cetagandans had trouble up here." A thermal sensor would have to be aimed straight in, to pick them up, from a point twenty meters in the air out over the ravine. The place was riddled with hundreds of similar crannies.

"Even better." Bothari pulled a pair of antique field glasses, looted from Kly's cabin, from their bedroll. "We can see them."

The glasses were nothing but binocular tubes with sliding glass lenses, purely passive light-collectors. They must have dated from the Time of Isolation. The magnification was poor by modern standards, no UV or infrared boost, no rangefinder pulse . . . no power cell to leak detectable energy traces. Flat on her belly, chin in the rubble, Cordelia could glimpse the distant cavern entrance on the slope rising beyond the ravine and a knife-backed ridge. When she said, "Now we must be
very
quiet," pale Gregor practically went fetal.

The black-clad scanner men found the horses at last, though it seemed to take them forever. Then they found the cave mouth. The tiny figures gesticulated excitedly to each other, ran in and out, and called the flyer, which landed outside the entrance with much crackling of shrubbery. Four men entered; eventually, one came back out. In time, another flyer landed. Then a lift van arrived, and disgorged a whole patrol. The mountain mouth ate them all. Another lift van came, and men set up lights, a field generator, comm links.

Cordelia made a nest of the bedroll for Gregor, and fed him little snacks and sips from their water bottle. Bothari stretched out in the back of the niche with the thinnest blanket folded under his head, otherwise seeming impervious to the stone. While Bothari dozed, Cordelia kept careful count of the net flow of hunters. By mid-afternoon, she calculated that some forty men had gone below and not come up again.

Two men were brought out strapped to float pallets, loaded into a medical-evacuation lifter, and flown away. A lightflyer made a bad landing in the crowded area, toppled downslope, and crunched into a tree. Yet more men became involved in extracting, righting, and repairing it. By dusk over sixty men had been sucked down the drain. A whole company drawn away from the capital, not pursuing refugees, not available to root out the secrets of ImpMil . . . it wasn't enough to make a real difference, surely.

It's a start. 
 

Cordelia and Bothari and Gregor slipped from the niche in the gloaming, cleared the ravines, and made their way silently through the woods. It was nearly full dark when they came to the edge of the trees and struck Kly's trail. As they crossed over the ridge edging the vale, Cordelia looked back. The area by the cave mouth was marked by searchlights, stabbing up through the mists. Lightflyers whined in and out of the site.

They dropped over the ridge and slithered down the slope that had so nearly killed her to climb, hanging on to Rose's stirrup two days ago. Fully five kilometers down the trail, in a rocky region of treeless scrub, Bothari came to an abrupt halt. "Sh. Milady, listen."

Voices. Men's voices, not far off, but strangely hollow. Cordelia stared into the darkness, but no lights moved. Nothing moved. They crouched beside the trail, senses straining.

Bothari crept off, head tilted, following his ears. After a few moments Cordelia and Gregor cautiously followed. She found Bothari kneeling by a striated outcrop. He motioned her closer.

"It's a vent," he announced in a whisper. "Listen."

The voices were much clearer now, sharp cadences, angry gutturals punctuated by swearing in two or three languages.

"Goddammit, I know we went left back at that third turn."

"That wasn't the third turn, that was the fourth."

"We re-crossed the stream."

"It wasn't the same friggin' stream,
sabaki!
"

BOOK: Cordelia's Honor
8.98Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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