Lois Bujold: Captain Vorpatril's alliance

Both she and— hee, I saw that! —Rish blinked. The forest-green Barrayaran officer’s uniform was quite flattering, wasn’t it? Somehow, his shoulders seemed broader, his legs longer, his face…harder to read.

“Gotta run, or I’ll be late for work, under pain of sarcasm,” Vorpatril informed her, reaching past her to grab a ration bar and hold the package between his teeth as he finished fastening his tunic. He shoved the bar temporarily into a trouser pocket and seized her hands. “Help yourselves to whatever you can find. I’ll bring back more tonight, I promise. Don’t go out. Don’t make any outgoing calls, or answer any incoming ones. Lock the doors, don’t let anyone in. If a slithering rat named Byerly Vorrutyer shows up, tell him to come back later, I want to talk to him.” He stared at her in urgent entreaty. “You aren’t a prisoner. But be here when I come back—please?”

Tej gulped.

His grip tightened; laughter flashed in his eyes. He pressed his lips formally to the backs of her hands, one after the other, in some Barrayaran ethnic gesture of unguessable significance, grinned, and ran. The outer door sighed closed on sudden silence, as if all the air had blown out of the room with him.

After a frozen moment, she gathered her nerve, went to the balcony door, and eased it aside. Judging from the angle of the light, she would get an excellent view of Komarr’s huge and famous soletta array, key to the on-going terraforming, as it followed the sun across the sky, later. She’d never been able to see it from her own flat.

She’d been cowering in the shadows for a long, sick time, it seemed in retrospect. Every plan she’d ever been given had come apart in chaos, her old life left in a blood-soaked shambles far behind her. Unrecoverable. Lost.

No going back .

Maybe it was time to take a deep breath and make some new plans. All her own.

She ventured to the railing and peeked down, a dizzying twenty flights. Far below her, a hurrying figure in a green uniform exited the building, wheeled, and strode off.

Tej and Rish spent their first few minutes alone scouting the exits. The luxurious flat had only the one door, but the corridor had lift tubes at either end, and emergency stairs as well. There was also the balcony, Tej supposed, but to be survivable escape by that route would require either antigrav or rappelling gear, which they did not currently possess. They next explored the interior space for any hidden surveillance equipment or other surprises; there either was none, or it was very subtle. The lock on the outer door was much better than average, and Rish set it with satisfaction, but of course no ordinary door would stop a truly determined and well-equipped invader.

Rish did find a compact launderizer concealed in the kitchenette, and applied herself to laundering all the dirty clothes they’d hastily packed, perhaps in the hope that their next escape, whatever it turned out to be, could be more orderly. Tej discovered the captain’s sybaritic bathroom, and decided to treat her chill weariness with a long soak.

The scent of him still lingered in the moist air, strangely pleasant and complex, as if his immune system was calling out to hers: let’s get together and make wonderful new antibodies . She smiled at the silly image, lay back in the spacious tub of hot water, and frankly enjoyed his dash of inadvertently displaced flirtation in the old evolutionary dance, all the better because he couldn’t know how he was observed. It was, she realized after a bit, the first spontaneously sensual moment she’d had since the disastrous fall of her House, all those harried months back. The realization, and the memories it trailed, were enough to destroy the moment again, but it had been nice while it lasted.

She stirred the water with her toes. Since they’d gone to ground on Komarr, fear and grief had slowly been replaced with the less stomach-churning memory of them, till last night had kicked it all up again. It was not in the least logical that she should feel—relatively—safe in this new refuge. Who was this Ivan Vorpatril, and how had he discovered her, and why ? She floated, her hair waving around her head like a sea-net, and breathed his fading scent again, as if it could supply some hint.

The water didn’t cool—the tub had a heater—but at length her hands and feet grew rather wrinkly, and she surged up out of the cradling bath and dried off. Dressed again, she found that Rish had discovered that the flat’s comconsole was not code-locked, and was searching for any Solstice Dome Security reports on their intruders.

“Find anything?’

Rish shrugged her slim shoulders. “Not much. Just a time stamp, and our address. ‘In response to a witness report of a possible break-in, officers arrived and apprehended two men in possession of burglary equipment. Suspects are being held pending investigation.’ It doesn’t sound like anyone’s stepped up to outbid the arrest order yet.”

“I don’t think they do it that way here,” said Tej, doubtfully.

Rish scanned down the file. “‘Officers called to domestic altercation…vandalism reported at bubble-car platform…attempted credit chit fraud by a group of minors…’ Oh, here’s one. ‘Beating interrupted of man spotted by bar patrons stealing public emergency breath masks. Suspect arrested, patrons thanked.’ I suppose I can see why no one would have to pay for that arrest order…The Solstice patrollers were busy enough last night, but really, the crime here seems very dull.”

“I think it’s restful. Anyway, bath’s yours, if you want it. It’s really nice, compared to that dreadful sonic shower we’ve been living with lately. I can recommend it.”

“I believe I will,” Rish allowed. She stood and stretched, looking around. “Posh place. You have to wonder how he can afford it on a Barrayaran military officer’s salary. I never had the impression those fellows were overpaid. And their command doesn’t let them hustle on the side.” She sniffed at this waste of human resources.

“I don’t think it’s his real home, that’s back on Barrayar. He’s just here for some work thing.” Recently arrived, judging from the contents of his kitchenette, or maybe he didn’t cook? Tej nodded at the comconsole. “I wonder how much we could find out just by looking him up?”

Rish’s golden eyebrows rose. “Surely this benighted Imperium doesn’t allow its military secrets out on the commercial planetary net of its conquest.”

Throughout the Jackson’s Whole system, information was tightly controlled, for the money, power, and security it could bestow, and for that narrow edge that could mean the difference between a deal succeeding or failing. At the other extreme, Tej’s favorite tutors from her youth, a trio of Betans her parents had imported at great trouble and expense, had described a planetary information network on their homeworld that seemed open to the point of madness—suicide, perhaps. Yet somehow Beta Colony remained, famously, one of the most scientifically advanced and innovative planets in the Nexus, which was why the tutors had been imported. Of all the instructors she’d been plagued with, the Betans were the only ones whose departure she’d mourned when, homesick, they had declined to renew their contracts for another year. Most other planetary or system polities fell somewhere between the two extremes of attempted information control.

“I think we may be thinking too hard,” said Tej. “We don’t need to start with his secrets, just with what everybody else knows.” Everybody but us .

Rish pursed her lips, nodded, and stepped aside. “Have at it. Shout out if you find anything useful.”