Lois Bujold - Mirror Dance

“There,” said Framingham suddenly, “is the floor they were trapped on. We picked up contact with ’em there.”

Quinn marked another dot. “Then the cryo-chamber has to be somewhere near the line of march between here and here.” She pointed to the two bright dots. “It has to be.” She stared, eyes narrowed. “Two buildings. Two and a half, I suppose. But there’s not a damn thing on Tonkin’s voice transmissions that gives me a clue.” The insect-voice described Bharaputran attackers, and cried for help, over and over, but did not mention the cryo-chamber. Mark’s throat contracted in synchrony. Quinn, turn him off, please… .

The program ran to its end. All the Dendarii around the table stared at it, as if willing it to yield up something more. There was no more.

The door slid aside and Captain Thorne entered. Mark had never seen a more exhausted-looking human being. Thorne too was still dressed in dirty fatigues, only the plasma mirror pack discarded from its half armor. Its gray hood was pushed back, brown hair plastered flat to its head. A circle of grime in the middle of Thorne’s pale face marked the hood opening, gray twin to the circle of red on Quinn’s face from her mirror-field overload burn. Thorne’s movements were hurried and jerky, will overriding a fatigue close to collapse. Thorne leaned, hands on the conference table, mouth a grim horizontal line.

“So, could you get anything at all out of Tonkin?” asked Quinn of Thorne. “What the computer has, we just saw. And I don’t think it’s enough.”

“The medics got him waked up, briefly,” reported Thorne. “He did talk. I was hoping the recorders would make sense of what he said, but …”

“What did he say?”

“He said when they reached this building,” Thorne pointed, “they were cut off. Not yet surrounded, but blocked from a line to the shuttle, and the enemy closing the ring fast. Tonkin said, Norwood yelled he had an idea, he’d seen something “back there”. He had Tonkin create a diversion with a grenade attack, and guard a particular corridor—must be that one there. Norwood took the cryo-chamber and ran back along their route. He returned a few minutes later—not more than six minutes, Tonkin said. And he told Tonkin, “It’s all right now. The Admiral will get out of here even if we don’t.” About two minutes later, he was killed by that projectile grenade, and Tonkin was knocked loopy by the concussion.”

Framingham nodded. “My crew got there not three minutes after that. They drove off a pack of Bharaputrans who were searching the bodies—looting, looking for intelligence, or both, Corporal Abromov wasn’t sure—they picked up Tonkin and Norwood’s body and ran like hell. Nobody in the squad reported seeing a cryo-chamber anywhere.”

Quinn chewed absently on a fingernail stump. Mark did not think he was even conscious of the gesture. “That’s all?”

“Tonkin said Norwood was laughing,” Thorne added.

“Laughing.” Quinn grimaced. “Hell.”

Captain Bothari-Jesek was sunk in her station chair. Everyone around the table appeared to digest this last tidbit, staring at the holomap. “He did something clever,” said Bothari-Jesek. “Or something that he thought was clever.”

“He only had about five minutes. How clever could he be in five minutes?” Quinn complained. “Gods damn the clever jerk to sixteen hells for not reporting!”

“He was doubtless about to.” Bothari-Jesek sighed. “I don’t think we need to waste time rationing blame. There’s going to be plenty to go around.”

Thorne winced, as did Framingham, Quinn, and Taura. Then they all glanced at Mark. He cringed back in his seat.

“It’s only been,” Quinn glanced at her chrono, “less than two hours. Whatever Norwood did, the cryo-chamber has to still be down there. It has to.”

“So what do we do?” Lieutenant Kimura asked dryly. “Mount mother drop mission?”

Quinn thinned her lips in non-appreciation of the weary sarcasm. “You volunteering, Kimura?” Kimura flipped up his palms in surrender and subsided.

“In the meantime,” Bothari-Jesek said, “Fell Station is calling us, pretty urgently. We have to start dealing. I presume this will involve our hostage.” A short nod of thanks in Kimura’s direction acknowledged the only wholly successful part of the drop mission, and Kimura nodded back. “Does anyone here know what the Admiral intended to do with Baron Bharaputra?”

A circle of negative headshakes. “Don’t you know, Quinnie?” asked Kimura, surprised.

“No. There wasn’t time to chat. I’m not even sure if the Admiral seriously expected your kidnapping expedition to succeed, Kimura, or whether it was only for the diversionary value. That would be more like his strategizing, not to let the whole mission turn on one unknown outcome. I expect he planned,” her voice faded in a sigh, “to use his initiative.” She sat up straight. “But I sure as hell know what I intend to do. The deal this time is going to be in our favor. Baron Bharaputra could be the ticket out of here for all of us, and the Admiral too, but we have to work it just right.”

“In that case,” said Bothari-Jesek, “I don’t think we should let on to House Bharaputra just how valuable a package we left downside.”

Bothari-Jesek, Thorne, Quinn, all of them, turned to look at Mark, coldly speculative.

“I’ve thought of that too,” said Quinn.

“No,” he whispered. “No!” His scream emerged as a croak. “You can’t be serious. You can’t make me be him, I don’t want to be him any more, God! No!” He was shaking, shivering, his stomach turning and knotting. I’m cold.

Quinn and Bothari-Jesek glanced at each other. Bothari-Jesek nodded, some unspoken message.

Quinn said, “You are all dismissed to your duties. Except you, Captain Thorne. You are relieved of command of the Ariel. Lieutenant Hart will take over.”

Thorne nodded, as if this were entirely expected. “Am I under arrest?”

Quinn’s eyes narrowed in pain. “Hell, we don’t have the time. Or the personnel. And you’re not debriefed yet, and besides, I need your experience. This … situation could change rapidly at any moment. Consider yourself under house arrest, and assigned to me. You can guard yourself. Take a visiting officer’s cabin here on the Peregrine, and call it your cell if it makes you feel any better.”

Thorne’s face went very bleak indeed. “Yes, ma’am,” it said woodenly.

Quinn frowned. “Go clean up. We’ll continue this later.”

Except for Quinn and Bothari-Jesek, they all filed out. Mark tried to follow them. “ Not you,” said Quinn in a voice like a death bell. He sank back into his station chair and huddled there. As the last Dendarii cleared the chamber, Quinn reached over and turned off all recording devices.

Miles’s women. Elena-the-childhood-sweetheart, now Captain Bothari-Jesek, Mark had studied back when the Komarrans had tutored him to play Lord Vorkosigan. Yet she was not quite what he had expected. Quinn the Dendarii had taken the Komarran plotters by surprise. The two women had a coincidental resemblance in coloration, both with short dark hair, fine pale skin, liquid brown eyes. Or was it so coincidental? Had Vorkosigan subconsciously chosen Quinn as Bothari-Jesek’s substitute, when he couldn’t have the real thing? Even their first names were similar, Elli and Elena.

Bothari-Jesek was the taller by a head, with long aristocratic features, and was more cool and reserved, an effect augmented by her clean officer’s undress grays. Quinn, fatigue-clad and combat-booted, was shorter, though still a head taller than himself, rounder and hotter. Both were terrifying. Mark’s own taste in women, if ever he should live to exercise it, ran more to something like that little blonde clone they’d pulled from under the bed, if only she’d been the age looked to be. Somebody short, soft, pink, timid, somebody who wouldn’t kill and eat him after they mated.