Lois Bujold - Barrayar

There, at the bottom of the wardrobe, was a sturdy plastic bag containing several pairs of Kareen’s shoes, no doubt hastily transported by some maidservant when Vordarian had Imperially decreed Kareen move in with him. Cordelia emptied out the shoes, stumbled back around the bed, and collected Vordarian’s head from the place where it had rolled to a stop. It was heavy, but not so heavy as the uterine replicator. She pulled the drawstrings tight.

“Drou. You’re in the best shape. Carry the replicator. Start down. Don’t drop it.” If she dropped Vordarian, Cordelia decided, it would scarcely do him further harm.

Droushnakovi nodded and grabbed up both the replicator and the abandoned swordstick. Cordelia wasn’t sure if she retrieved the latter for its newly acquired historical value, or from some fractured sense of obligation for one of Kou’s possessions. Cordelia coaxed Bothari to his feet. Cool air was rushing up out of the panel opening, drawn by the fire beyond the door. It would make a neat flue, till the burning wall crashed in and blocked the entry. Vordarian’s people were going to have a very puzzling time, poking through the embers and wondering where they’d gone.

The descent was nightmarish, in the compressed space, with Bothari whimpering below her feet. She could carry the bag neither beside nor in front of her, so had to balance it on one shoulder and go one—handed, palm slapping down the rungs and her wrist aching.

Once on the level, she prodded the weeping Bothari ruthlessly forward, and wouldn’t let him stop till they came again to Ezar’s cache in the ancient stable cellar.

“Is he all right?” Droushnakovi asked nervously, as Bothari sat down with his head between his knees.

“He has a headache,” said Cordelia. “It may take a while to pass off.”

Droushnakovi asked even more diffidently, “Are you all right, Milady?”

Cordelia couldn’t help it; she laughed. She choked down the hysteria as Drou began to look really scared. “No.”

Ezar’s cache included a crate of currency, Barrayaran marks of various denominations. It also included a choice of IDs tailored to Drou, not all of which were obsolete. Cordelia put the two together, and sent Drou out to purchase a used groundcar. Cordelia waited by the cache while Bothari slowly uncurled from his tight fetal ball of pain, recovering enough to walk.

Getting back out of Vorbarr Sultana had always been the weak part of her plan, Cordelia felt, perhaps because she’d never really believed they’d get this far. Travel was tightly restricted, as Vordarian sought to keep the city from collapsing under him should its frightened populace attempt to stream away. The monorail required passes and cross-checks. Lightflyers were absolutely forbidden, targets of opportunity for trigger-happy guards. Groundcars had to cross multiple roadblocks. Foot travel was too slow for her burdened and exhausted party. There were no good choices.

After an eternity, pale Drou returned, to lead them back through the tunnels and out to an obscure side street. The city was dusted with sooty snow. From the direction of the Residence, a kilometer off, a darker cloud boiled up to mix with the winter-grey sky; the fierce fire was still not under control, apparently. How long would Vordarian’s decapitated command structure keep functioning? Had word of his death leaked out yet?

As instructed, Drou had found a very plain and unobtrusive old groundcar, though there had been enough funds to buy the most luxurious new vehicle the city still held. Cordelia wanted to save that reserve for the checkpoints.

But the checkpoints were not as bad as Cordelia had feared. Indeed, the first was empty, its guards pulled back, perhaps, to fight the fire or seal the perimeter of the Residence. The second was crowded with vehicles and impatient drivers. The inspectors were perfunctory and nervous, distracted and half—paralyzed by who-knew-what rumors coming from downtown. A fat wad of currency, handed out under Drou’s perfect false ID, disappeared into a guard’s pocket. He waved Drou through, driving her “sick uncle” home. Borthari looked sick enough, for sure, huddled under a blanket that also hid the replicator. At the last checkpoint Drou “repeated” a likely version of a rumor of Vordarian’s death, and the worried guard deserted on the spot, shedding his uniform in favor of a civilian overcoat and vanishing down a side street.

They zigzagged over bad side roads all afternoon to reach Vorinnis’s neutral District, where the aged groundcar died of a fractured power-train. They abandoned it and took to the monorail system then, Cordelia driving her exhausted little party on, racing the clock in her head. At midnight, they reported in at the first military installation over the next loyalist border, a supply depot. It took Drou several minutes of argument with the night duty officer to persuade him to 1) identify them, 2) let them in, and 3) let them use the military comm net to call Tanery Base to demand transport. At that point the D.O. abruptly became a lot more efficient. A high-speed air shuttle with a hot pilot was scrambled to pick them up.

Approaching Tanery Base at dawn from the air, Cordelia felt the most unpleasant flash of deja vu. It was so like her first arrival from the mountains, she had the sense of being caught in a time loop. Perhaps she’d died and gone to hell, and her eternal torment would be to repeat the last three weeks’ events over and over, endlessly. She shivered.

Droushnakovi watched her with concern. The exhausted Bothari dozed, in the air shuttle’s passenger cabin. Illyan’s two ImpSec men, identical twins for all Cordelia could tell to Vordarian’s ones they’d murdered back at the Residence, maintained a nervous silence. Cordelia held the uterine replicator possessively on her lap. The plastic bag sat between her feet. She was irrationally unable to let either item out of her sight, though it was clear Drou would much rather the bag had ridden in the luggage compartment.

The air shuttle touched neatly down on its landing pad, and its engines whined to silence.

“I want Captain Vaagen, and I want him now,” Cordelia repeated for the fifth time as Illyan’s men led them underground into the Security debriefing area.

“Yes, Milady. He’s on his way,” the ImpSec man assured her again. She glowered suspiciously at him.

Cautiously, the ImpSec men relieved them of their personal arsenal. Cordelia didn’t blame them; she wouldn’t have trusted her wild-looking crew with charged weapons either. Thanks to Ezar’s cache the women were not ill dressed, though there had been nothing in Bothari’s size, so he’d retained his smoked and stinking black fatigues. Fortunately the. dried blood spatters didn’t show much. But all their faces were hollow-eyed, grooved and shadowed. Cordelia shivered, and Bothari’s hands and eyelids twitched, and Droushnakovi had a distressing tendency to start crying, silently, at random moments, stopping as suddenly as she started.

At long last—only minutes, Cordelia told herself firmly—Captain Vaagen appeared, a tech at his side. He wore undress greens, and his steps were quick, up to Vaagen—speed again. The only residue of his injuries seemed to be a black patch over his eye; on him, it looked good, giving him a fine piratical air. Cordelia trusted the patch was only a temporary part of ongoing treatment.

“Milady!” He managed a smile, the first to shift those facial muscles in a while, Cordelia sensed. His one eye gleamed triumph. “You got it!”

“I hope so, Captain.” She held up the replicator, which she had refused to let the ImpSec men touch. “I hope we’re in time. There aren’t any red lights yet, but there was a warning beeper. I shut it off, it was driving me crazy.”