The warrior's apprentice (26 page)

The alleged agenda for this circus was the preparation of the final Dendarii battle-plan for breaking the Oseran blockade, hence General Halify’s keen interest. His keenness had been rather blunted this last week by a growing dismay. The doubt in Halify’s eyes was an itch to Miles’ spirit; he tried to avoid meeting them. Bargain rates, General, Miles thought sulkily to him. You get what you pay for.

The first half hour was spent knocking down, again, three unworkable pet plans that had been advanced by their owners at previous meetings. Bad odds, requirements of personnel and material beyond their resources, impossibilities of timing, were pointed out with relish by one half of Miles’s group to the other, with opinions of the advancers’ mentalities thrown in gratis. This rapidly degenerated into a classic slanging match. Tung, who normally suppressed such, was one of the principals this time, so it threatened to escalate indefinitely.

“Look, damn it,” shouted the Kshatryan lieutenant, banging his fist on the table for emphasis, “we can’t take the wormhole direct and we all know it. Let’s concentrate on something we can do. Merchant shipping—we could attack that, a counter-blockade—”

“Attack neutral galactic shipping?” yelped Auson. “Do you want to get us all hung?”

“Hanged,” corrected Thorne, earning an ungrateful glare.

“No, see,” Auson bulled on, “the Pelians have little bases all over this system we could have a go at. Like guerilla warfare, attacking and fading into the sands—”

“What sands?” snapped Tung. “There’s nothing to hide your ass behind out there—the Pelians have our home address. It’s a miracle they haven’t given up all

hope of capturing this refinery and flung a half-c meteor shower through here already. Any plan that doesn’t work quickly won’t work at all—”

“What about a lightning raid on the Pelian capital?” suggested the Cetagandan captain. “A suicide squadron to drop a nuclear in there—”

“You volunteering?” sneered the Kshatryan. “That might almost be worthwhile.”

“The Pelians have a trans-shipping station in orbit around the sixth planet,” said the Tau Cetan. “A raid on that would—”

“—take that electron orbital randomizer and—”

“—you’re an idiot—”

“—ambush stray ships—”

Miles’s intestines writhed like mating snakes. He rubbed his hands wearily over his face, and spoke for the first time; the unexpectedness of it caught their attention momentarily.

“I’ve known people who play chess like this. They can’t think their way to a checkmate, so they spend their time trying to clear the board of the little pieces. This eventually reduces the game to a simplicity they can grasp, and they’re happy. The perfect war is a fool’s mate.”

He subsided, elbows on the table, face in his hands. After a short silence, expectation falling into disappointment, the Kshatryan renewed the attack on the Cetagandan, and they were off again. Their voices blurred over Miles. General Halify began to push back from the table.

No one noticed Miles’s jaw drop, behind his hands, or his eyes widen, then narrow to glints. “Son-of-a-bitch,” he whispered. “It’s not hopeless.”

He sat up. “Has it occurred to anyone yet that we’re tackling this problem from the wrong end?”

His words were lost in the din. Only Elena, sitting in a corner across the chamber, saw his face. Her own face turned like a sunflower toward him. Her lips moved silently: Miles?

Not a shameful escape in the dark, but a monument. That’s what he would make of this war. Yes...

He pulled his grandfather’s dagger from its sheath and spun it in the air. It came down and stuck pointfirst in the center of the table with a ringing vibration. He climbed up on the table and marched to retrieve it.

The silence was sudden and complete, but for a mutter from Auson, in front of whom the dagger had landed, “I didn’t think that plastic would scratch...”

Miles yanked the dagger out, resheathed it, and strode up and down the tabletop. His leg brace had developed an annoying click recently, which he’d meant to have Baz fix; now it was loud in the silence. Locking attention, like a whisper. Good. A click, a club on the head, whatever worked was fine by him. It was time to get their attention.

“It appears to have escaped you gentlemen, ladies, and others, that the Dendarii’s appointed task is not to physically destroy the Oserans, but merely to eliminate them as a fighting force in local space. We need not blunt ourselves attacking their strengths.”

Their upturned faces followed him like iron filings drawn to a magnet. General Halify sank back in his seat. Baz’s face, and Arde’s, grew jubilant with hope.

“I direct your attention to the weak link in the chain that binds us—the connection between the Oserans and their employers the Pelians. There is where we must apply our leverage. My children,” he stood gazing out past the refinery into the depths of space, a seer taken by a vision, “we’re going to hit them in the payroll.”

The underwear came first, soft, smooth-fitting, absorbent. Then the connections for the plumbing. Then the boots, the piezo-electric pads carefully aligned with points of maximum impact on toes, heels, the ball of the foot. Baz had done a beautiful job adjusting the fit of the space armor. The greaves went on like skin to Miles’s uneven legs. Better than skin, an exoskeleton, his brittle bones at last rendered technologically equal to anyone’s.

Miles wished Baz were by him at this moment, to take pride in his handiwork, although Arde was doing his best to help Miles ooze into the apparatus. Even more passionately Miles wished himself in Baz’s place.

Felician intelligence reported all still quiet on the Pelian home front. Baz and his hand-picked party of techs, starring Elena Visconti, must have penetrated the planetside frontier successfully and be moving into place for their blow. The killing blow of Miles’s strategy. The keystone of his arching ambitions. His heart had nearly broken, sending them off alone, but reason ruled. A commando raid, if it could be so called, delicate, technical, invisible, would not benefit from so conspicuous and low-tech a piece of baggage as himself. He was better employed here, with the rest of the grunts.

He glanced up the length of his flagship’s armory. The atmosphere seemed a combination of locker room, docking bay, and surgery—he tried not to think about surgeries. His stomach twinged, a probe of pain. Not now, he told it. Later. Be good, and I promise I’ll take you to the medtech, later.

The rest of his attack group were arming and armoring themselves as he was. Techs checked out systems to a quiet undercurrent of colored lights and small audio signals as they probed here, there; the quiet undercurrent of voices was serious, attentive, concentrated, almost meditative, like an ancient church before the services began. It was well. He caught Elena’s eye, two soldiers down the row from himself, and smiled reassuringly, as if he and not she were the veteran. She did not smile back.

He probed his strategy as the techs did their systems. The Oseran payroll was divided into two parts. The first was an electronic transfer payment of Pelian funds into an Oseran account in the Pelian capital, out of which the Oseran fleet purchased local supplies. Miles’s special plan was for that. The second half was in assorted galactic currencies, primarily Betan dollars. This was the cash profit, to be divided among Oser’s captainowners to carry out of Tau Verde local space to their various destinations when their contracts at last expired. It was delivered monthly to Oser’s flagship on its blockade station. Miles corrected his thought with a small grin—had been delivered monthly.

They had taken the first cash payroll in midspace with devastating ease. Half of Miles’s troops were Oserans, after all; several had even done the duty before. Presenting themselves to the Pelian courier as the Oseran pick-up had required only the slightest of adjustments in codes and procedures. They were done and far out of range before the real Oserans arrived. The transcript of the subsequent dispatches between the Pelian courier and the Oseran pick-up ship was a treasure for Miles. He kept it stored atop Bothari’s coffin in his cabin, beside his grandfather’s dagger. More to come, Sergeant, he thought. I swear it.

The second operation, two weeks later, had been crude by comparison, a slugging match between the new, more heavily-armed Pelian courier and Miles’s three warships. Miles had prudently stepped aside and let Tung direct it, confining his comments to an occasional approving “Ah.” They gave up maneuvering to board upon the approach of four Oseran ships. The Oserans were taking no chances with this delivery.

The Dendarii had blasted the Pelian and its precious cargo into its component atoms, and fled. The Pelians had fought bravely. Miles burned them a death-offering that night in his cabin, very privately.

Arde connected Miles’s left shoulder joint, and began to run through the checklist of rotational movements of all the joints from shoulder to fingertips. His ring finger was running about 20% weak. Arde opened the pressure plate under his left wrist and pinned the tiny power-up control.

His strategy... By the third attempted hijacking, it was clear the enemy was learning from experience. Oser sent a convoy practically to the planet’s atmosphere for the pick-up. Miles’s ships, hovering out of range, had been unable to even get near. Miles was forced to use his ace-in-the-hole.

Tung had raised his eyebrows when Miles asked him to send a simple paper message to his former communications officer. “Please cooperate with all Dendarii requests,” it read, signed, meaninglessly to the Eurasian, with the Vorkosigan seal concealed in the hilt of Miles’s grandfather’s dagger. The communications officer had been a fountain of intelligence ever since. Bad, to so endanger one of Captain Illyan’s operatives, worse to risk their best eye in the Oseran fleet. If the Oserans ever figured out who had microwaved the money, the man’s life was surely forfeit. To date, though, the Oserans held only four packing cases of ashes and a mystery.

Miles felt a slight change in gravity and vibration; they must be moving into attack formation. Time to get his helmet on, and make contact with Tung and Auson in the tactics room. Elena’s tech fitted her helmet. She opened her faceplate, spoke to the tech; they collaborated on some minor adjustment.

If Baz was keeping his schedule, this was surely Miles’s last chance with her. With the engineer out of the way, there was no one to usurp his hero’s role. The next rescue would be his. He pictured himself, blasting menacing Pelians right and left, pulling her out of some tactical hole—the details were vague. She would have to believe he loved her then. His tongue would magically untangle, he’d finally find the right words after so many wrong ones, her snowy skin would warm in the heat of his ardor and bloom again...

Her face, framed by her helmet, was cold, austere in profile, the same blank winter landscape she had exhibited to the world since Bothari’s death. Her lack of reaction worried Miles. True, she had had her Dendarii duties to distract her, keep her moving—not like the self-indulgent luxury of his own withdrawal. At least with Elena Visconti gone, she was spared those awkward meetings in the corridors and conference rooms, both women pretending fiercely to cold professionalism.

Elena stretched in her armor, and gazed pensively into the black hole of her plasma arc muzzle built into the right arm of her suit. She slipped on her glove, covering the blue veins like pale rivers of ice in her wrist. Her eyes made Miles think of razors.

He stepped to her shoulder, and waved away her tech. The words he spoke weren’t any of the dozens he had rehearsed for the occasion. He lowered his voice to whisper.

“I know all about suicide. Don’t think you can fool me.”

She started, and flushed. Frowned at him in fierce scorn. Snapped her faceplate shut.

Forgive, whispered his anguished thought to her. It is necessary.

Arde lowered Miles’s helmet over his head, connected his control leads, checked the connections. A lacework of fire netted, knotted, and tangled in Miles’s gut. Damn, but it was getting hard to ignore.

He checked his comm link with the tactics room. “Commodore Tung? Naismith here. Roll the vids.” The inside of his faceplate blurred with color, duplicate readouts of the tactics room telemetry for the field commander. Only communications, no servo links this time. The captured Pelian armor had none, and the old Oseran armor was all safely on manual override. Just in case somebody else out there was learning from experience.

“Last chance to change your mind,” Tung said over the comm link, continuing the old argument. “Sure you wouldn’t rather attack the Oserans after the transfer, farther from the Pelian bases? Our intelligence on them is so much more detailed...”

“No! We have to capture or destroy the payroll before the delivery. Taking it after is strategically useless.”

“Not entirely. We could sure use the money.”

And how, Miles reflected glumly. It would soon take scientific notation to register his debt to the Dendarii. A mercenary fleet could hardly burn money faster if the ships ran on steam power and the funds were shoveled directly into their furnaces. Never had one so little owed so much to so many, and it grew worse by the hour. His stomach oozed around his abdominal cavity like a tortured amoeba, throwing out pseudopods of pain and the vacuole of an acid belch. You are a psychosomatic illusion, Miles assured it.

The assault group formed up and marched to the waiting shuttles. Miles moved among them, trying to touch each person, call them by name, give them some personal word; they seemed to like that. He ordered their ranks in his mind, and wondered how many gaps there would be when this day’s work was done. Forgive... He had run out of clever solutions. This one was to be done the old hard way, head-on.