Lois Bujold - Captain Vorpatril's alliance

Ivan Xav, an unjoyful expression on his face, pulled his slippers one by one from his jacket pockets and let them drop to the floor, which seemed much firmer underfoot than it had the other day; evidently Jet was right about the curing rate for the Mycoborer tubes. After a long hesitation, Ivan Xav pulled off his wristcom and emptied his pockets of forbidden gizmos, including his car and door remotes and that neat military stunner that Tej had first met on Komarr. Tej and Star each picked up a spare cold light from a box at the end of the bench. Ivan Xav followed their example, then, after a narrow glance at Tej, proceeded to stuff his pockets with more.

Tej bit her tongue on any comment. It wouldn’t hurt anything. He could return the unused ones later.

Star handed out hospital masks and plastic gloves all around.

“What the hell?” said Ivan Xav.

“It’s all right,” said Tej. “You just don’t want live Mycoborer stuff to rub on your skin. Or get in your lungs, I guess.”

“And you people turned this crap loose on my planet ? That is not my definition of all right . If it’s that nasty, I’d want a full biotainer suit.”

“Well, this is what Grandmama said to use, and she should know. And we’ve been running in and out of here for days with just this, and nothing’s happened to us.”

Ivan Xav stared at Tej with new alarm, as if he expected to see flesh-eating fungus start spreading all over her skin on the spot. His gaze flicked to Star with equal curiosity, if somewhat less concern.

“You don’t have to come along,” added Star. “Nobody invited you.”

Ivan Xav donned the gloves and yanked the mask up over his face. His deep brown eyes, Tej discovered, could glower quite fiercely all on their own, without any help from his mouth.

Tej held up her cold light and started down the tunnel. She whispered over her shoulder, “From this point on, as little talking as possible.”

“Right,” Ivan Xav whispered back.

The tunnel, too, seemed slightly larger in diameter than before. Ivan Xav didn’t even have to duck his head, although he did anyway. He was very careful not to touch or brush the walls in passing. He plainly did not like the sitting and sliding around the two bendy parts at all. He held up his cold light to the occasional random appendix-holes, his brow furrowing in disapproval. Tej tried not to feel defensive. She hadn’t invented the Mycoborer.

A wide place in the passage was impeded by a big pile of dirt, a few pale bones, and a tattered backpack with electronic parts spilling out of it.

“I thought Grandmama was going to make Jet and Amiri clean this up,” Tej whispered to Star, stepping carefully around it.

“They did,” whispered Star back. “But something shifted when we were out today, and this all came spilling out of the wall again. Dada says Jet has to come back and clean it up again before we start hauling goods out.”

“What the hell is this…?” whispered Ivan Xav sharply, holding his cold light down to illuminate the pile. The bones sprang out in harsh relief.

“It’s poor Sergeant Abelard,” Tej whispered back. “I didn’t actually find that dog-tag necklace on the floor of a garage. He was wearing it.”

Ivan Xav knelt, staring wide-eyed, not touching.

“He was in a collapsed tunnel that our tunnel crossed. Or at least his foot was; Jet made the hole. I didn’t think that was such a good idea, but, you know, brothers. Well, I suppose you don’t know brothers. Guys, then.”

Ivan Xav’s hand turned up a flap of backpack, then drew back.

“I do not have claustrophobia,” he…well, it was still a whisper, but it had a lot of snarl in it. It seemed he actually did possess emotional range beyond peeved . “I do, however, have a quite active unexploded bombs phobia. This could be—anything. Unstable, for example. Are you people insane ?”

“It can’t be too unstable,” said Star, unsympathetically. “It didn’t go off when it fell in here, and it didn’t go off when Pidge tripped over it and kicked it a bit ago. I wouldn’t play with it, mind, but it’s not going to do anything spontaneous, I don’t think.”

Unlike Ivan Xav, who looked quite close to something spontaneous, possibly combustion. But he just stood up and waved them on.

Their next check was at a point where the Mycoborer tunnel split into five channels. Three of them wrapped around a large-diameter pipe, from which the sound of rushing water filtered faintly. Ivan stared at it, listening, then shook his head. He muttered something that sounded like, Oh, sure, of course there’s water , but didn’t expand.

“Uh, which way?” Tej asked Star. She hadn’t made it quite this far the other day; but neither had the Mycoborer.

Star counted, then pointed. “That one.”

They trudged after her, slippered feet shuffling. After a number of meters and a few kinks, but no more loop-the-loops, a faint viridescent glow showed up ahead. They rounded one more bend and climbed a slope to find a new vestibule, brightly lit by wavering cold lights, dead-ended against a flat wall and full of silent, milling Arquas.

Dada and the Baronne looked around and spotted Ivan Xav. “Tej!” whispered the Baronne, with a shocked gesture at her Barrayaran.

“It’s all right,” Tej whispered, coming over to them. “He’s with me.”

Dada scowled. “But is he with us ?”

“He will be,” she promised. Ivan Xav smiled tightly behind his mask, but did not gainsay her. Yet.

Amiri was just fitting some sort of hand-pumped suction device to an oval in the wall showing signs of work by cutting fluid and maybe something more physical. He motioned Jet forward; shoulders straining, they shifted the slab out of the wall and let it down slowly and silently.

Amiri tossed in a couple of cold lights—Tej could hear them hit something and roll to a stop—adjusted his mask, and stuck his head through. Nine other Arquas, a ghem Estif, and one Vorpatril held their breaths. Or was that, eight other Arquas, one ghem Estif, and two Vorpatrils…?

“What can you see?” demanded Dada. His hand reached out to clasp the Baronne’s. She gripped back just as hard.

Amiri’s voice floated back: “Marvelous things!”

Ivan had never thought of his nightmares as being insufficiently imaginative, before tonight. Dark, wet, constricted, underground , check. How had he left out biohazards ? After all that, the frigging unexploded bomb just seemed a…a redundant redundancy. And the stray corpse a mere decoration. How did I get into this mess? Miles isn’t even here.

Though the labyrinthine results of the Mycoborer were impressive as well as alarming, he had to admit. The discovery of the supposedly-empty Cetagandan bunker had been interesting, though Ivan wouldn’t have been human if he hadn’t found its transmutation to a ghem-generals’ lost treasure vault riveting, as irresistible to him as to any Arqua. But the belated news of its original provenance as a Cetagandan haut bio-lab , which Tej hadn’t let drop till they were almost here —had to make it the most entirely resistible temptation he had ever encountered.

And that idiot Amiri was going inside . Ivan hadn’t had cause to dislike his new brother-in-law before now, but this was just wrong . Amiri turned to politely help his haut grandmama over the threshold of the oval they’d cut into the wall, incidentally compromising any biohazard containment integrity the old lab had still held, but hey, who cared about that? Not the intent Arquas, it seemed. The tall woman bent her head and twitched her long coat through the aperture, as dignified as an aged queen returning to her country after some long exile. Other Arquas filed through eagerly after her. Tej glanced back over her shoulder as she followed, bright-eyed with triumph.