The warrior's apprentice (19 page)

Thorne swelled. Auson wilted, all the old shame and rage crowding in his eyes. Miles turned to him.

“You have also served, Trainee Auson,” Miles said, thinking, overlooking that understandable small mutiny in the tactics room... “Even while on the sick list. And for those who also serve, there is also a reward.” He gestured grandly out the plexiport where a free-fall crew with cutting torches was just beginning to untangle the Triumph from its entrapment. “There is your new command. Sorry about the dents.” He dropped his voice. “And perhaps next time you will not be so full of assumptions?”

Auson turned about, waves of bewilderment, astonishment, and delight breaking in his face. Bothari pursed his lips in appreciation of Miles’s feudal ploy. Auson in command of his own ship must eventually wake to the fact that it was his own ship; Auson subordinate to Thorne must always be a potential focus for disaffection. But Auson in command of a ship held from Miles’s hands became, ipso facto, Miles’s man. Never mind that Tung’s ship in either of their hands was technically grand theft of the most grandiose...

Tung took just slightly longer than Auson to understand the drift of the conversation. He began to swear; Miles did not recognize the language, but it was unmistakably invective. Miles had never seen a man actually foam at the lips before.

“See that this prisoner gets a tranquillizer,” Miles ordered kindly as Tung was dragged away. An aggressive commander, Miles thought covetously. Thirty years experience—I wonder if I can do anything with him... ?

Miles looked around and added, “See the medtech and get those things taken off your arms, Captain Auson.”

“Yes, sir!” Auson substituted a sharp nod for a curtailed attempt at a salute, and marched off, head held

high. Thorne followed, to oversee further intelligence gathering from prisoners and the freed Felicians.

An engineering tech in want of supervision descended upon them instantly, to carry off Jesek. She grinned proudly at Miles. “Would you say we’ve earned our combat bonus today, sir?”

Combat bonus? Miles wondered blankly. He gazed around the station. Thinly spread but energetic activities of consolidation met his eye wherever he turned. “I should think so, Trainee Mynova.”

“Sir,” she paused shyly. “Some of us were wondering— just what is our pay schedule going to be? Bi-weekly or monthly?”

Pay schedule. Of course. His charade must continue— how long? He glanced out at the RG 132. Bent. Bent, and full of undelivered cargo, unpaid for. He’d have to keep going somehow, until they at least made contact with Felician forces. “Monthly,” he said firmly.

“Oh,” she said, sounding faintly disappointed. “I’ll pass the word along, sir.”

“What if we’re still here in a month, my lord?” asked Bothari as she left with Jesek. “It could get ugly— mercenaries expect to be paid.”

Miles rubbed his hands through his hair, and quavered with desperate assertiveness, “I’ll figure something out!”

“Can we get anything to eat around here?” asked Mayhew plaintively. He looked drained.

Thorne popped back up at Miles’s elbow. “About the counterattack, sir—”

Miles spun on his heel. “Where?” he demanded, looking around wildly.

Thorne looked slightly taken aback. “Oh, not yet, sir.”

Miles slumped, relieved. “Please don’t do that to me, Captain Thorne. Counterattack?”

“I’m thinking, sir, there’s bound to be one. On account of the escaped courier, if nothing else. Shouldn’t we start planning for it?”

“Oh, absolutely. Planning. Yes. You, ah—have an idea to present, do you?” Miles prodded hopefully.

“Several, sir.” Thorne began to detail them, with verve; Miles realized he was absorbing about one sentence in three.

“Very good, Captain,” Miles interrupted. “We’ll, uh, have a senior officer’s meeting after—after inspection, and you can present them to everybody.”

Thorne nodded contentedly, and dashed off, saying something about setting up a telecom listening post.

Miles’s head spun. The jumbled geometries of the refinery, its ups and downs chosen, apparently, at random, did nothing to decrease his sense of disorientation. And it was all his, every rusty bolt, dubious weld, and stopped-up toilet in it...

Elena was observing him anxiously. “What’s the matter, Miles? You don’t Took happy. We won!”

A true Vor, Miles told himself severely, does not bury his face in his leigewoman’s breasts and cry—even if he is at a convenient height for it.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

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Miles’s first tour of his new domain was rapid and exhausting. The Triumph was about the only encouraging part of it. Bothari lingered to go over the arrangements for keeping the horde of new prisoners secure with the overworked patrol assigned to that detail. Never had Miles seen a man wish more passionately to be twins; he half-expected Bothari to go into mitosis on the spot. The Sergeant grudgingly left Elena to be Miles’s substitute bodyguard. Once out of sight, Miles instead put Elena to work as a real executive officer, taking notes. He did not trust even his own quick memory with the mass of new detail.

A combined sickbay had been set up in the refinery’s infirmary, as the largest facility. The air was dry and cold and stale, like all recycled air, sweet with scented antiseptics overlaying a faint tang compounded of sweat, excrement, burnt meat, and fear. All medical personnel were drafted from the new prisoners, to treat their own wounded, requiring yet a couple more of Miles’s thinlyspread troops as guards. They in turn were sucked in by the needs of the moment as assistant corpsmen. Miles watched Tung’s efficient surgeon and staff at work, and let this pass, limiting himself to a quiet reminder to the guards of their primary duty. So long as Tung’s medicos stayed busy it was probably safe.

Miles was unnerved by the catatonic Colonel Benar, and the two other Felician military officers who lay listlessly, barely responding to their rescue. Such little wounds, he thought, observing the slight chafing at wrists and ankles, and tiny discolorations under their skins marking hypospray injection points. By such little wounds we kill men... The murdered pilot officer’s ghost, perched on his shoulder like a pet crow, stirred and ruffled itself in silent witness.

Auson’s medtech borrowed Tung’s surgeon for the delicate placement of plastiskin that was to serve Elli Quinn for a face until she could be sent—how? when?—to some medical facility with proper regenerative biotech.

“You don’t have to watch this,” Miles murmured to Elena, as he stood discreetly by to observe the procedure.

Elena shook her head. “I want to.”

“Why?”

“Why do you?”

“I’ve never seen it. Anyway, it was my bill she paid. It’s my duty, as her commander.”

“Well, then, it’s mine, too. I worked with her all week.”

The medtech unwrapped the temporary dressings. Skin, nose, ears, lips gone. Subcutaneous fat boiled away. Eyes glazed white and burst, scalp burned off—she tried to speak, a clotted mumble. Miles reminded himself that her pain nerves had been blocked. He turned his back abruptly, hand sneaking to his lips, and swallowed hard.

“I guess we don’t have to stay. We’re not really contributing anything.” He glanced up at Elena’s profile, which was pale but steady. “How long are you going to watch?” he whispered. And silently, to himself, for God’s sake, it might have been you, Elena...

“Until they’re done,” she murmured back. “Until I don’t feel her pain anymore when I look. Until I’m hardened—like a real soldier—like my father. If I can block it from a friend, certainly I ought to be able to block it from the enemy—”

Miles shook his head in instinctive negation. “Look, can we continue this in the corridor?”

She frowned, but then took in his face, pursed her lips, and followed him without further argument. In the corridor he leaned against the wall, swallowing saliva and breathing deeply.

“Should I fetch a basin?”

“No. I’ll be all right in a minute.” I hope... The minute passed without his disgracing himself. “Women shouldn’t be in combat,” he managed finally.

“Why not?” said Elena. “Why is that,” she jerked her head toward the infirmary, “any more horrible for a woman than a man?”

“I don’t know,” Miles groped. “Your father once said that if a woman puts on a uniform she’s asking for it, and you should never hesitate to fire—odd streak of egalitarianism, coming from him. But all my instincts are to throw my cloak across her puddle or something, not blow her head off. It throws me off.”

“The honor goes with the risk,” argued Elena. “Deny the risk and you deny the honor. I always thought you were the one Barrayaran male I knew who’d allow that a woman might have an honor that wasn’t parked between her legs.”

Miles floundered. “A soldier’s honor is to do his patriotic duty, sure—”

“Or hers!”

“Or hers, all right—but all this isn’t serving the Emperor! We’re here for Tav Calhoun’s ten percent profit margin. Or anyway, we were . . .”

He gathered himself, to continue his tour, then paused. “What you said in there—about hardening yourself—”

She raised her chin. “Yes?”

“My mother was a real soldier, too. And I don’t think she ever failed to feel another’s pain. Not even her enemy’s.”

They were both silent for long after that.

The officers’ meeting to plan for the counterattack was not so difficult as Miles had feared. They took over a conference chamber that had belonged to the refinery’s senior management; the breathtaking panorama out the plexiports swept the entire installation. Miles growled, and sat with his back to it.

He quickly slid into the role of referee, controlling the flow of ideas while concealing his own dearth of hard factual information. He folded his arms, and said “Um,” and “Hm,” but only very occasionally “God help us,” because it caused Elena to choke. Thorne and Auson, Daum and Jesek, and the three freed Felician junior officers who had not been brain-drained did the rest, although Miles found he had to steer them gently away from ideas too much like those just demonstrated not to work for the Pelians.

“It would help a great deal, Major Daum, if you could reach your command,” Miles wound up the session, thinking, How can you have misplaced an entire country, for God’s sake? “As a last resort, perhaps a volunteer in one of those station shuttles could sneak on down to the planet and tell them we’re here, eh?”

“We’ll keep trying, sir,” Daum promised.

Some enthusiastic soul had found quarters for Miles in the most luxurious section of the refinery, previously reserved, like the elegant conference chamber, for senior management. Unfortunately, the housekeeping services had been rather interrupted in the past few weeks. Miles picked his way among personal artifacts from the last Pelian to camp in the executive suite, overlaying yet another strata from the Felician he had evicted in his turn. Strewn clothing, empty ration wrappings, data discs, half-empty bottles, all well stirred by the flipflops in the artificial gravity during the attack. The data discs, when examined, proved all light entertainment. No secret documents, no brilliant intelligence coups. .

Miles could have sworn the variegated fuzzy patches growing on the bathroom walls moved, when he was not looking directly at them. Perhaps it was an effect of fatigue. He was careful not to touch them when he showered. He set the lights to maximum UV when he was done, and sealed the door, reminding himself sternly that he had not demanded the Sergeant’s nocturnal company on the grounds that there were Things in his closet since he was four. Aching for sleep, he crawled into clean underwear brought with him.

Bed was a null-gee bubble, warmed womb-like by
 
infra-red. Null-gee sex, Miles had heard, was one of the high points of space travel. He’d never had a chance to try it, personally. Ten minutes of attempting to relax in the bubble convinced him he never would, either, although when heated the smells and stains that permeated the chamber suggested that a minimum of three people had tried it there before him recently. He crawled out nastily and sat on the floor until his stomach stopped trying to turn itself inside out. So much for the spoils of victory.

There was a splendid view out the plexiports of the RG 132’s corrugated, gaping hull. Occasionally stress would release in some tortured flake of metal, and it would snap off spontaneously to stir the smattering of other wrinkled bits, clinging to the ship like dandruff. Miles stared at it for a time, then decided to go see if Sergeant Bothari still had that flask of scotch.

The corridor outside his executive suite ended in an observation deck, a crystal and chrome shell arched by the sweep of hard-edged stars in their powdered millions. Furthermore, it faced away from the refinery. Attracted, Miles wandered toward it.

Elena’s voice, raised in a wordless cry, shot him out of somnolence into an adrenalin rush. It came from the observation deck; Miles broke into his uneven run.

He swarmed up the catwalk and spun one-handed around a gleaming upright. The dimmed observation deck was upholstered in royal-blue velvet that glowed in the starlight. Liquid-filled settees and benches in odd curving shapes seemed to invite the indolent recliner. Baz Jesek was spread-eagled backward over one, with Sergeant Bothari atop him.

The Sergeant’s knees ground into the engineer’s stomach and groin, and the great hands knotted about Baz’s neck, twisting. Baz’s face was maroon, his frantic words strangled inchoate. Elena, her tunic undone, galloped around the pair, hands clenching and unclenching in despair of daring to physically oppose Bothari. “No, Father! No!” she cried.

Had Bothari caught the engineer trying to attack her? Hot jealous rage shook Miles, dashed immediately by cold reason. Elena, of all women, was capable of defending herself; the Sergeant’s paranoias had seen to that. His jealousy went ice green. He could let Bothari kill Baz...

Elena saw him. “Miles—my lord! Stop him!”

Miles approached them. “Get off him, Sergeant,” he ordered. Bothari, his face yellow with rage, glanced sideways, then back to his victim. His hands did not slacken.

Miles knelt and laid his hand lightly on the corded muscles of Bothari’s arm. He had the sick feeling it was the most dangerous thing he had done in his life. He dropped his voice to a whisper. “Must I give my orders twice, Armsman?”

Bothari ignored him.

Miles closed his hands tightly around the Sergeant’s wrist.

“You don’t have the strength to break my grip,” Bothari snarled out of the corner of his mouth.

“I have the strength to break my own fingers trying,” Miles murmured back, and threw all his weight into his pull. His fingernails went white. In a moment, his brittle joints would start to snap...

The Sergeant’s eyes squeezed shut, his breath hissing in and out past his stained teeth. Then, with an oath, he sprang off Baz and shook free of Miles. He turned his back, chest heaving, blind eyes lost in infinity.

Baz writhed off the bench and fell to the carpet with a thump. He gulped air in a hoarse liquid choke, and spat up blood. Elena ran to him and cradled his head in her lap, heedless of the mess.

Miles staggered up and stood, catching his breath. “All right,” he said at last, “What’s going on here?”

Baz tried to speak, but it came out a gurgling bark. Elena was crying, no help there. “Damn it, Sergeant—”

“Caught her nuzzling that coward,” Bothari growled, still with his back to them.

“He is not a coward!” Elena yelled. “He’s as good a soldier as you. He saved my life today—” she turned to Miles. “Surely you saw it, my lord, on your monitors. There was an Oseran with a servo-aim locked on me—I thought it was all over—Baz shot him with his plasma arc. Tell him!”

She was talking about the Oseran he had slain with his own medkit, Miles realized. Baz had cooked a corpse, unknowing. I saved you, Miles cried inwardly. It was me, it was me... “That’s right Sergeant,” he heard himself saying. “You owe her life to your brother Armsman.”

“That one is no brother to me.”

“By my word, I say he is!”

“It’s not proper—it’s not right—I have to make it right. It has to be perfect—” Bothari swung around, narrow jaw working. In his life, Miles had never seen Bothari more agitated. I’ve put too much strain on him lately, he thought remorsefully. Too much, too fast, too out-of-control...

Baz croaked out words. “No... dishonor!” Elena hushed him, and lurched to her feet to face Bothari, fiercely.

“You and your military honor! Well, I’ve faced fire, and I’ve killed a man, and it was nothing but butchery. Any robot could have done it. There was nothing to it. It’s all a sham, a hoax, a lie, a big put-on. Your uniform doesn’t awe me any more, do you hear?”

Bothari’s face was dark and rigid. Miles made shushing motions at Elena. He’d no objection to growing independence of spirit, but God in heaven, her timing was terrible. Couldn’t she see it? No, she was too tangled up in her own pain and shame, and the new ghost clinging to her shoulder. She had not mentioned that she’d killed a man, earlier; but, Miles knew, there were reasons one might choose not to.

He needed Baz, he needed Bothari, he needed Elena, and he needed them all working together to get them home alive. Not, then, what he ached to cry out of his own anguish and anger, but what they needed to hear.

The first thing Elena and Bothari needed was to be parted until tempers cooled, lest they tear out each other’s hearts. As for Baz—”Elena,” said Miles, “Help Baz to the infirmary. See that the medtech checks him for internal injuries.”

“Yes, my lord,” she replied, emphasizing the official nature of the order with his title, for Bothari’s benefit, presumably. She levered Baz to his feet, and pulled his arm across her shoulders, with an awkward venomous glower at her father. Bothari’s hands twitched, but he said nothing and made no move.