Lois Bujold - Mirror Dance

Friction-slippered footsteps were nearly silent, but these were heavy enough to vibrate the deck. Sergeant Taura pelted into the shuttle hatch corridor. She saw the blonde clone, and yelled over her shoulder, “Here’s another one! Just two to go.” Another trooper came panting in her wake.

“What happened, Taura?” sighed Quinn.

“That girl, that ringleader. The really smart one,” said Taura, skidding to a halt. Her eyes checked the cross-corridors as she spoke. “She told all the girls some bullshit story about how we were a slave ship. She persuaded ten of them to try for a break-out at once. Stunner guard got three, the other seven scattered. We’ve recaptured four. Mostly just hiding, but I think that long-haired girl actually had a coherent plan to try to get to the personnel pods before we jumped from local space. I’ve put a guard on them to cut her off.”

Quinn swore, bleakly. “Good thinking, Sergeant. Your cut-off must have succeeded, because she came up here. Unfortunately, she ran smack into Baron Bharaputra’s exchange. She got out with him. We were able to grab the other one before she made it across.” Quinn nodded at the blonde, whose weeping had choked down to snivels. “So you’re only looking for one more.”

“How did—” the sergeant’s eyes flicked over the shuttle hatch corridor, puzzled. “How did you let that happen, ma’am?”

Quinn’s face was set in an expressionless mask. “I chose not to start a fire-fight over her.”

The sergeant’s big clawed hands twitched in bewilderment, but no verbal criticism of her superior escaped those outslung lips. “We’d better find the last one, then, before something worse happens.”

“Carry on, Sergeant. You four, help her,” Quinn gestured to her now-unemployed guards. “Report to me in the briefing room when you have them all re-secured, Taura.”

Taura nodded, motioned the troopers down the various cross-corridors, and herself loped toward the nearest lift tube. Her nostrils flared; she seemed to be almost sniffing for her quarry.

Quinn turned on her heel, muttering, “I’ve got to get to the debriefing. Find out what happened to—”

“I’ll … take her back to the clone quarters, Quinn,” Mark volunteered, with a nod at the blonde.

Quinn looked doubtfully at him.

“Please. I want to.”

She glanced at the hatch where the Eurasian girl had gone, and back at his face. He didn’t know what his face looked like, but she inhaled. “You know, I’ve been over the drop records a couple of times, since we left Fell Station. I hadn’t … had a chance to tell you. Did you realize, when you stepped in front of me when we were scrambling to board Kimura’s drop shuttle, just what your plasma mirror field power was down to?”

“No. I mean, I knew I’d taken a lot of hits, in the tunnels.”

“One hit. If it had absorbed one more hit, it would have failed. Two more hits and you’d have fried.”

“Oh.”

She frowned at him, as if still trying to decide whether to credit him with courage or simply with stupidity. “Well. I thought it was interesting. Something you’d want to know.” She hesitated longer. “My power pack was down to zero. So if you’re really comparing scores with Baron Bharaputra, you can raise yours back to fifty.”

He didn’t know what she expected him to say. At last Quinn sighed, “All right. You can escort her. If it’ll make you feel better.” She strode off toward the debriefing, her own face very anxious.

He turned, and took the blonde by the arm, very gently; she flinched, blinking through big tear-sheened blue eyes. Even though he knew very well—none better—how intentionally her features and body were sculptured and designed, the effect was still overwhelming: beauty and innocence, sexuality and fear mixed in an intoxicating draught. She looked a ripe twenty, at fresh physical peak, a perfect match to his own age. And only a few centimeters taller than himself. She might have been designed to be the heroine in his drama, except that his life had dissolved into some sub-heroic puddle, chaotic and beyond control. No rewards, only more punishments.

“What’s your name?” he asked with false brightness.

She looked at him suspiciously. “Maree.”

Clones had no surnames. “That’s pretty. Come on, Maree. I’ll take you back to your, uh, dormitory. You’ll feel better, when you’re back with your friends.”

She perforce began to walk with him.

“Sergeant Taura is all right, you know. She really wants to take care of you. You just scared her, running off like that. She was worried you’d get hurt. You’re not really afraid of the sergeant, are you?”

Her lovely lips pressed closed in confusion. “I’m … not sure.” Her walk was a dainty, swaying thing, though her steps made her breasts wobble most distractingly, half-bagged in the pink tunic. She ought to be offered reduction treatment, though he was not sure such was in the Peregrine’s ship’s surgeon’s range of expertise. And if her somatic experiences at Bharaputra’s were anything like his had been, she was probably sick of surgery right now. He certainly had been, after all the bodily distortions they’d laid on him.

“We’re not a slave ship,” he began again earnestly. “We’re taking you—” The news that their destination was the Barrayaran Empire might not be so reassuring, at that. “Our first stop will probably be Komarr. But you might not have to stay there.” He had no power to make promises about her ultimate destination. None. One prisoner could not rescue another.

She coughed, and rubbed her eyes.

“Are you … all right?”

“I want a drink of water.” Her voice was hoarse from the running and the crying.

“I’ll get you one,” he promised. His own cabin was just a corridor away; he led her there.

The door hissed open at the touch of his palm upon the pad. “Come in. I never had a chance to talk with you. Maybe if I had … that girl wouldn’t have fooled you.” He guided her within, and settled her on the bed. She was trembling slightly. So was he.

“Did she fool you?”

“I … don’t know, Admiral.”

He snorted bitterly. “I’m not the Admiral. I’m a clone, like you. I was raised at Bharaputra’s, one floor down from where you live. Lived.” He went to his washroom, drew a cup of water, and carried it to her. He had half an impulse to offer it to her on his knees. She had to be made to—”I have to make you understand. Understand who you are, what’s happened to you. So you won’t he fooled again. You have a lot to learn, for your own protection.” Indeed—in that body. “You’ll have to go to school.”

She swallowed water. “Don’t want to go to school,” she said, muffled into the cup.

“Didn’t the Bharaputrans ever let you into the virtual learning programs? When I was there, it was the best part. Better even than the games. Though I liked the games, of course. Did you play Zylec?”

She nodded.

“That was fun. But the history, the astrography shows—the virtual instructor was the funniest program. A white-haired old geezer in Twentieth-century clothes, this jacket with patches on the elbows—I always wondered if he was based on a real person, or was a composite.”

“I never saw them.”

“What did you do all day?”

“We talked among ourselves. We did our hair. Swam. The proctors made us do calesthenics every day—”

“Us, too.”

“—till they did this to me.” She touched a breast. “Then they only made me swim.”

He could see the logic of that. “Your last body-sculpture was pretty recent, I take it.”

“About a month ago.” She paused. “You really don’t … think my mother was coming for me?”