Lois Bujold - Barrayar

“Always, my lord.”

“I want that lightflyer.” Piotr nodded to Negri’s damaged vehicle, which, while no longer smoking, did not look very airworthy to Cordelia. Not nearly ready for wild flight, jinking or diving to evade determined enemies … It’s in about as good a shape for this as I am, she feared. “And Negri,” Piotr continued.

“He would appreciate that,” said Aral.

“I am certain of it.” Piotr nodded shortly, and turned to the first-aid squad. “Leave off, boys, it’s no damn good by now.” He directed them instead to load the body into the lightflyer.

Aral turned to Cordelia last, at last, for the first time. “Dear Captain …” The same sere expression had been fixed on his face since Negri had fallen out of the lightflyer.

“Aral, was this a surprise to anyone but me?”

“I didn’t want to worry you with it, when you were so sick.” His lips thinned. “We’d found Vordarian was conspiring, at HQ and elsewhere. Illyan’s investigation was inspired. Top security people must have that sort of intuition, I suppose. But to convict a man of Vordarian’s magnitude and connections of treason, we needed the hardest of evidence. The Council of Counts as a body is highly intolerant of central Imperial interference with their members. We couldn’t take a mere vaporplot before them. “But Negri called me last night with the word he had his evidence in hand, enough to move on at last. He needed an Imperial order from me to arrest a ruling District Count. I was supposed to go up to Vorbarr Sultana tonight and oversee the operation. Clearly, Vordarian was warned. His original move wasn’t planned for another month, preferably right after my successful assassination.” “But—”

“Go, now.” He pushed her toward the lightflyer. “Vordarian’s troops will be here in minutes. You must get away. No matter what else he holds, he can’t make himself secure while Gregor stays free,”

“Aral—” Her voice came out a stupid squeak; she swallowed what felt like freeze—dried chunks of spit. She wanted to gabble a thousand questions, ten thousand protests. “Take care.”

“You, too.” A last light flared in his eyes, but his face was already distant, lost to the driving internal rhythm of tactical calculation. No time.

Aral went to take Gregor from Drou’s arms, whispering something to her; reluctantly, she released the boy to him. They piled into the lightflyer, Bothari at the controls, Cordelia jammed into the back beside Negri’s corpse, Gregor dumped into her lap. The boy made no noise at all, but only shivered. His eyes were wide and shocky, turned up to hers. Her arms encircled him automatically. He did not cling back, but wrapped his arms around his own torso. Negri, lolling, feared nothing now, and she almost envied him.

“Did you see what happened to your mother, Gregor?” Cordelia murmured to him.

“The soldiers took her.” His voice was thin and flat. The overloaded lightflyer hiccoughed into the air, and Bothari aimed it generally upslope, wavering only meters from the ground. It whined and moaned and rattled. Cordelia did, too, internally. She twisted around to stare back through the distorted canopy for a look—a last look?—at Aral, who had turned away and was double-timing toward the driveway where his soldiers were assembling a motley collection of vehicles, personal and governmental. Why aren’t we taking one of those?

“When you clear the second ridge—if you can—turn right, Sergeant,” Piotr directed Bothari. “Follow the creek.”

Branches slashed at the canopy, as Bothari flew less than a meter above the trickling water and sharp rocks.

“Land in that little space there and kill the power,” ordered Piotr. “Everyone, strip off any powered items you may be carrying.” He divested his chrono and a comm link. Cordelia shed her chrono.

Bothari, easing the flyer down beside the creek beneath some Earth—import trees that had only half—shed their leaves, asked, “Does that include weapons, m’lord?”

“Especially weapons, Sergeant. The charge unit on a stunner shows up on a scanner like a torch. A plasma arc power cell lights it up like a bloody bonfire.”

Bothari fished two of each from his person, plus other useful gear; a hand-tractor, his comm link, his chrono, some kind of small medical diagnostic device. “My knife, too, m’lord?”

“Vibra-knife?”

“No, just steel.”

“Keep that.” Piotr hunched over the lightflyer’s controls and began re-programming the automatic pilot. “Everyone out. Sergeant, jam the canopy half-open.”

Bothari managed this task with a pebble crammed forcibly into the canopy’s seating—groove, then whirled at a sound from the undergrowth.

“It’s me,” came Armsman Esterhazy’s breathless voice. Esterhazy, age forty, a mere stripling beside some of Piotr’s other grizzled veterans, kept himself in top shape; he’d been hustling indeed, to get so puffed. “I have them, my lord.”

The “them” in question turned out to be four of Piotr’s horses, tied together by lines attached to the metal bars in their mouths the Barrayarans called “bits.” Cordelia thought it a very small control surface for such a large piece of transport. The big beasts twitched and stamped and shook their jingling heads, red nostrils round and flaring, ominous bulky shapes in the vegetation.

Piotr finished re-programming the autopilot. “Bothari, here,” he said. Together, they manhandled Negri’s corpse back to the pilot’s seat and strapped it in. Bothari powered the lightflyer up and jumped out. It lurched into the air, nearly crashing into a tree, and lumbered back over the ridge. Piotr, standing watching it rise, muttered under his breath, “Salute him for me, Negri.”

“Where are you sending him?” Cordelia asked. Valhalla?

“Bottom of the lake,” said Piotr, with some satisfaction. “That will puzzle them.”

“Won’t whoever follows trace it? Hoist it back out?”

“Eventually. But it should go down in the two-hundred-meter-deep section. It will take them time. And they won’t know at first when it went down, nor how many bodies are missing from it. They’ll have to search that whole section of the lake bottom, to be sure that Gregor isn’t stuck in it. And negative evidence is never quite conclusive, eh? They won’t know, even then. Mount up, troops, we’re on our way.” He headed purposefully toward his animals.

Cordelia trailed doubtfully. Horses. Would one call them slaves, symbionts, or commensals? The one toward which Esterhazy aimed her stood five feet high at the top. He stuck its lines into her hands and turned away. Its saddle was at the level of her chin, and how was she supposed to levitate up there? The horse looked much larger, at this range, than when idling around decoratively at a distance in its pasture. The brown fur-covered skin of its shoulder shuddered suddenly. Oh, God, they’ve given me a defective one, it’s going into convulsions—a small mew escaped her.

Bothari had climbed atop his, somehow. He at least was not overpowered by the size of the animal. Given his height he made the full-sized beast look like a pony. City-bred, Bothari was no horseman, and seemed all knees and elbows despite what cavalry training Piotr had managed to inflict on him in the months of his service. But he was clearly in control of his mount, however awkward and rough his motions.

“You’re point-man, Sergeant,” Piotr told him. “I want us strung out to the limit of mutual visibility. No bunching up. Start up the trails for the flat rock—you know the place—and wait for us.”

Bothari jerked his horse’s head around and kicked at its sides, and clattered off up the woodland path at the seat-thumping pace called a canter.