Lois Bujold - Mirror Dance

Elena Bothari-Jesek was watching him with a sort of appalled fascination. “So like him. Yet not him. Why are you shivering?”

“I’m cold,” muttered Mark.

“ You’re cold!” Quinn echoed in outrage. “You’re cold! You gods-damned little sucker—” She turned her station chair abruptly around, and sat with her back to him.

Bothari-Jesek rose and walked around to his end of the table. Willow-wood woman. She touched his forehead, which was clammy; he flinched almost explosively. She bent and stared into his eyes. “Quin–back off. He’s in psychological shock.”

“He doesn’t deserve my consideration!” Quinn choked.

“He’s still in shock, regardless. If you want results, you have to take it into account.”

“Hell.” Quinn turned back. New clean wet tracks ran down from eyes across her red-and-white, dirt-and-dried-blood-smudged face. “You didn’t see. You didn’t see Miles lying there with his heart blown all over the room.”

“Quinnie, he’s not really dead. Is he? He’s just frozen, and … and placed.” Was there the faintest tinge of uncertainty, denial, in her voice?

“Oh, he’s really dead all right. Very really frozen dead. And he’s going to stay that way forever if we don’t get him back!” The blood all over her fatigues, caked in the grooves of her hands, smeared across her face, was finally turning brown.

Bothari-Jesek took a breath. “Let’s focus on the business to hand. The immediate question is, can Mark fool Baron Fell? Fell met the real Miles once.”

“That’s one of the reasons I didn’t put Bel Thorne under close arrest. Bel was there, and can advise, I hope.”

Yes. And that’s the curious thing …” She hitched a hip over the tabletop, and let one long booted leg swing. “Shock or no shock, Mark hasn’t blown Miles’s deep-cover. The name Vorkosigan hasn’t passed lips, has it?”

“No,” Quinn admitted.

Bothari-Jesek twisted up her mouth, and studied him. “Why not?” She asked suddenly.

He crouched down a little further in his station chair, trying to ape the impact of her stare. “I don’t know,” he muttered. She tried implacably for more, and he mustered in an only slightly louder mumble, “Habit, I guess.” Mostly Ser Galen’s habit of beating the shit of him whenever he’d screwed up, back in the bad old days. “When I do the part, I do the part. Miles would never have slipped that one, so I don’t either.”

“Who are you when you’re not doing the part?” Bothari-Jesek’s gaze was narrowed, calculating.

“I … hardly know.” He swallowed, and tried again for more volume in his voice. “What’s going to happen to my—to the clones?”

As Quinn began to speak, Bothari-Jesek held up her hand, stopping her. Bothari-Jesek said instead, “What do you want to have happen to them?”

“I want them to go free. To be set free somewhere safe, where House Bharaputra can’t kidnap them back.”

“A strange altruism. I can’t help wondering, why? Why this whole mission in the first place? What did you hope to gain?”

His mouth opened, but no sound came out. He couldn’t answer. He was still clammy, weak and shaking. His head ached blackly, as though draining of blood. He shook his head.

“Peh!” snorted Quinn. “What a loser. What a, a damned anti-Miles. Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.”

“Quinn,” said Bothari-Jesek quietly. There was a profound reproof in her voice, just in that single word, which Quinn heard and acknowledged with a shrug of her shoulder. “I don’t think either one of us knows quite what we have hold of, here,” Bothari-Jesek continued. “But I know when I’m out of my depth. However, I know someone who wouldn’t be.”

“Who?”

“Countess Vorkosigan.”

“Hm.” Quinn sighed. “That’s another thing. Who’s going to tell her about—” A downward jerk of her thumb indicated Jackson’s Whole, and the fatal events that had just passed there. “And gods help me, if I’m really in command of this outfit now, I’m gonna have to report all this to Simon Illyan.” She paused. “Do you want to be in command, Elena? As senior shipmaster present, now that Bel’s under quasi-arrest, and all that. I just grabbed ’cause I had to, under fire.”

“You’re doing fine,” said Bothari-Jesek with a small smile. “I’ll support you.” She added, “You’ve been more closely involved with intelligence all along, you’re the logical choice.”

“Yes, I know.” Quinn grimaced. “You’ll tell the family, if it comes to that?”

“For that,” Bothari-Jesek sighed, “I am the logical choice. I’ll tell the Countess, yes.”

“It’s a deal.” But they both looked as if they wondered who had the better, or worse, half of it.

“As for the clones,” Bothari-Jesek eyed Mark again, “how would you like to earn their freedom?”

“Elena,” said Quinn warningly, “don’t make promises. We don’t know what we’re going to have to trade yet, to get out of here. To get—” another gesture downward, “him back.”

“No,” Mark whispered. “You can’t. Can’t send them … back down there, after all this.”

“I traded Phillipi,” said Quinn grimly. “I’d trade you in a heartbeat, except that he … Do you know why we came downside on this bloody drop mission in the first place?” she demanded.

Wordlessly, he shook his head.

“It was for you, you little shit. The Admiral had a deal half-cut with Baron Bharaputra. We were going to buy out Green Squad for quarter of a million Betan dollars. It wouldn’t have cost much more than the drop mission, counting all the equipment we lost along with Thorne’s shuttle. And the lives. But the Baron refused to throw you into the pot. Why he wouldn’t sell you, I don’t know. You’re worthless to everybody else. But Miles wouldn’t leave you!”

Mark stared down at his hands, which plucked at each other. He lanced up to see Bothari-Jesek studying him again as if he were some vital cryptogram.

“As the Admiral would not leave his brother,” said Bothari-Jesek lowly, “so Mark will not leave the clones. Will you? Eh?”

He would have swallowed, but he’d run out of spit.

“You’ll do anything to save them, eh? Anything we ask?”

His mouth opened and closed. It might have been a hollow, sound-less yes.

“You’ll play the part of the Admiral for us? We’ll coach you, of course.”

He half-nodded, but managed to blurt out, “What promise—?”

“We’ll take all the clones with us when we go. We’ll put them down somewhere House Bharaputra can’t reach.”

“Elena!” objected Quinn.

“I want,” he did swallow this time, “I want the Barrayaran woman’s word. Your word,” he said to Bothari-Jesek.

Quinn sucked on her lower lip, but did not speak. After a long muse, Bothari-Jesek nodded. “All right. You have my word on it. But you give us your total cooperation, understood?”

“Your word as what?”

“Just my word.”

“… Yes. All right.”

Quinn rose and stared down at him. “But is he even fit to play the part right now?”

Bothari-Jesek followed her look. “Not in that condition, no, I suppose not. Let him clean up, eat, rest. Then we’ll see what can be lone.”

“Baron Fell may not give us time to coddle him.”

“We’ll tell Baron Fell he’s in the shower. That’ll be true enough.”

A shower. Food. He was so ravenous as to be almost beyond hunger, numb in the belly, listless in the flesh. And cold.

“All I can say,” said Quinn, “is that he’s a damn poor imitation of the real Miles Vorkosigan.”