CHAPTER TWELVE

   The Major put Gregor, comfortably padded by the bedroll and saddlebags, up behind him. Cordelia faced one more climb onto that torture-device for humans and horses called a saddle. She would never have made it without Bothari. The Major took her reins this time, and Rose and his horse walked side by side with a lot less jerking of the bridle. Bothari dropped back, trailing watchfully.
   "So," said the old man after a time, with a sideways look at her, "you're the new Lady Vorkosigan."
   Cordelia, rumpled and filthy, smiled back desperately. "Yes. Ah, Count Piotr didn't mention your name, Major ... ?"
   "Amor Klyeuvi, Milady. But folks up here just call me Kly."
   "And, uh ... what are you?" Besides some mountain kobold Piotr had conjured out of the ground.
   He smiled, an expression more repellent than attractive given the state of his teeth. "I'm the Imperial Mail, Milady. I ride the circuit through these hills, out of Vorkosigan Surleau, every ten days. Been at it for eighteen years. There are grown kids up here with kids of their own who never knew me as anything but Kly the Mail."
   "I thought mail went to these parts by lightflyer."
   "They're phasing them in. But the flyers don't go to every house, just to these central drop—points. No courtesy to it, anymore." He spat disgust and gum-leaf. "But if the General'll hold 'em off another two years here, I'll make my last twenty, and be a triple-twenty-years Service man. I retired with my double-twenty, see."
   "From what branch, Major Klyuevi?"
   "Imperial Rangers." He watched slyly for her reaction; she rewarded him with impressed raised brows. "I was a throat-cutter, not a tech. 'S why I could never go higher than major. Got my start at age fourteen, in these mountains, running rings around the Cetagandans with the General and Ezar. Never did get back to school after that. Just training courses. The Service passed me by, in time."
   "Not entirely, it seems," said Cordelia, staring around the apparently unpeopled wilderness.
   "No ..." His breath became a purse-lipped sigh, as he glanced back over his shoulder at Gregor in meditative unease.
   "Did Piotr tell you what happened yesterday afternoon?"
   "No. I left the lake day-before-yesterday morning. Missed all the excitement. I expect the news will catch up with me before noon."
   "Is ... anything else likely to catch up with us by then?"
   "We'll just have to see." He added more hesitantly, "You'll have to get out of those clothes, Milady. The name VORKOSIGAN, A., in big block letters over your jacket-pocket isn't any too anonymous."
   Cordelia glanced down at Aral's black fatigue shirt, quelled.
   "My lord's livery sticks out like a flag, too," Kly added, looking back at Bothari. "But you'll pass well enough, in the right clothes. I'll see what I can do, in a bit here."
   Cordelia sagged, her belly aching in anticipation of rest. Refuge. But at what price to those who gave her refuge? "Will helping us put you in danger?"
   His tufted grey brow rose. "Belike." His tone did not invite further comment on the topic.
   She had to bring her tired mind back on-line somehow, if she was to be asset and not hazard to everyone around her. "That gum-leaf of yours. Does it work anything like coffee?"
   "Oh, better than coffee, Milady."
   "Can I try some?" Shyness lowered her voice; it might be too intimate a request.
   His cheeks creased in a dry grin. "Only backcountry sticks like me chew gum-leaf, Milady. Pretty Vor ladies from the capital wouldn't be caught dead with it in their pearly teeth."
   "I'm not pretty, I'm not a lady, and I'm not from the capital. And I'd kill for coffee right now. I'll try it."
   He let his reins drop to his steadily plodding horse's neck, rummaged in his blue-grey jacket pocket, and pulled out his pouch. He broke off a chunk, in none-too-clean fingers, and leaned across.
   She regarded it a doubtful moment, dark and leafy in her palm. Never put strange organics in your mouth till they've been cleared by the lab. She lapped it up. The wad was made self-sticking by a bit of maple syrup, but after her saliva washed away the first startling sweetness, the flavor was pleasantly bitter and astringent. It seemed to peel away the night's film coating her teeth, a real improvement. She straightened.
   Kly regarded her with bemusement. "So what are you, off-worlder not-a-lady?"
   "I was an astrocartographer. Then a Survey captain. Then a soldier, then a POW, then a refugee. And then I was a wife, and then I was a mother. I don't know what I'm going to be next," she answered honestly, around the gum-leaf. Pray not widow.
   "Mother? I'd heard you were pregnant, but ... didn't you lose your baby to the soltoxin?" He eyed her waist in confusion.
   "Not yet. He still has a fighting chance. Though it seems a little uneven, to match him against all of Barrayar just yet... . He was born prematurely. By surgical section." (She decided not to try to explain the uterine replicator.) "He's at the Imperial Military Hospital. In Vorbarr Sultana. Which for all I know has just been captured by Vordarian's rebel forces ..." She shivered. Vaagen's lab was classified, nothing to draw anyone's attention. Miles was all right, all right, all right, and one crack in that thin shell of conviction would hatch out hysteria... . Aral, now, Aral could take care of himself if anyone could. So how had he been so caught-out, eh, eh? No question, ImpSec was riddled with treason. They couldn't trust anyone around here, and where was Illyan? Trapped in Vorbarr Sultana? Or was he Vordarian's quisling? No ... Cut off, more likely. Like Kareen. Like Padma and Alys Vorpatril. Life racing death ...
   "No one will bother the hospital," said Kly, watching her face.
   "I—yes. Right."
   "Why did you come to Barrayar, off-worlder?"
   "I wanted to have children." A humorless laugh puffed from her lips. "Do you have any children, Kly the Mail?"
   "Not so far as I know."
   "You were very wise."
   "Oh ..." His face grew distant. "I don't know. Since my old woman died, 's been pretty quiet. Some men I know, their children have been a great trouble to them. Ezar. Piotr. Don't know who will burn the offerings on my grave. M' niece, maybe."
   Cordelia glanced at Gregor, riding along atop the saddlebags and listening. Gregor had lit the taper to Ezar's great funeral offering-pyre, his hand guided by Aral's.
   They rode on up the road, climbing. Four times Kly ducked up side-trails, while Cordelia, Bothari, and Gregor waited out of sight. On the third of these delivery-runs Kly returned with a bundle including an old skirt, a pair of worn trousers, and some grain for the tired horses. Cordelia, still chilled, put the skirt on over her old Survey trousers. Bothari exchanged his conspicuous brown uniform pants "with the silver stripe down the side for the hillman's cast-offs. The pants were too short, riding ankle—high, giving him the look of a sinister scarecrow. Bothari's uniform and Cordelia's black fatigue shirt were bundled out of sight in an empty mailbag. Kly solved the problem of Gregor's missing shoe by simply stripping off the remaining one and letting the boy go barefoot, and concealing his too-nice blue suit beneath a man's oversize shirt with the sleeves rolled up. Man, woman, child, they looked a haggard, ragged little hill family.
   They made the top of Amie Pass and started back down. Occasionally folk waited by the roadside for Kly; he passed on verbal messages, rattling them off in what sounded to Cordelia to be verbatim style. He distributed letters on paper and cheap vocodisks, their self-playbacks tinny and thin. Twice he paused to read letters to apparently illiterate recipients, and once to a blind man guided by a small girl. Cordelia grew twitchier with each mild encounter, drained by nervous exhaustion. Will that fellow betray us? What do we look like to that woman? At least the blind man can't describe us. ...
   Toward dusk, Kly returned from one of his side-loops to gaze up and down the silent shadowed wilderness trail and declare, "This place is just too crowded." It was a measure of Cordelia's overstrain that she found herself mentally agreeing with him.
   He looked her over, worry in his eyes. "Think you can go on for another four hours, Milady?"
   What's the alternative? Sit by this mud puddle and weep till we're captured? She struggled to her feet, pushing up from the log she'd been perched on waiting their guide's return. "That depends on what's at the end of four more hours of this."
   "My place. I usually spend this night at my niece's, near here. My route ends about another ten hours farther on, when I'm making my deliveries, but if we go straight up we can do it in four. I can double back to this point by tomorrow morning and keep my schedule as usual. Real quiet-like. Nothing to remark on."
   What does "straight up" mean? But Kly was clearly right; their whole safety lay in their anonymity, their invisibility. The sooner they were out of sight, the better. "Lead on, Major."
   It took six hours. Bothari's horse went lame, short of their goal. He dismounted and towed it. It limped and tossed its head. Cordelia walked, too, to ease her raw legs and to keep herself warm and awake in the chilling darkness. Gregor fell asleep and fell off, cried for his mother, then fell asleep again when Kly moved him around to his front to keep a better grip. The last climb stole Cordelias breath and made her heart race, even though she hung on to Rose's stirrup for help. Both horses moved like old women with arthritis, stumping along jerkily; only the animals' innate gregariousness kept them following Kly's hardy pinto.
   The climb became a drop, suddenly, over a ridge and into a great vale. The woods grew thin and ragged, interspersed with mountain meadows. Cordelia could feel the spaces stretching out around her, true mountain scale at last, vast gulfs of shadow, huge bulks of stone, silent as eternity. Three snowflakes melted on her staring, upturned face. At the edge of a vague patch of trees, Kly halted. "End of the line, folks."
   Cordelia sleepwalked Gregor into the tiny shack, felt her way to a cot, and rolled him onto it. He whimpered in his sleep as she dragged the blankets over him. She stood swaying, numb-brained, then in a last burst of lucidity kicked off her slippers and climbed in with him. His feet were cold as a cryo-corpse's. As she warmed them against her body his shivering gradually relaxed into deeper sleep. Dimly, she was aware that Kly—Bothari—somebody, had started a fire in the fireplace. Poor Bothari, he'd been awake every bit as long as she had. In a quite military sense, he was her man; she should see that he ate, cared for his feet, slept ... she should, she should... .
   Cordelia snapped awake, to discover that the movement that had roused her was Gregor, sitting up beside her and rubbing his eyes in bleary disorientation. Light streamed in through two dirty windows on either side of the wooden front door. The shack, or cabin—two of the walls were made of whole logs stacked up—was only a single room. In the grey stone fireplace at one end a kettle and a covered pot sat on a grating over a bed of glowing coals. Cordelia reminded herself again that wood represented poverty, not wealth, here. They must have passed ten million trees yesterday.
   She sat up, and gasped from the pain in her muscles. She straightened her legs. The bed was a rope net strung on a frame and supporting first a straw-stuffed mattress, then a feather-stuffed one. She and Gregor were warm, at least, in their nest. The air of the room was dusty-smelling, tinged with a pleasant edge of wood smoke.
   Booted footsteps sounded on the boards of the porch outside, and Cordelia grasped Gregor's arm in sudden panic. She couldn't run—that black iron fireplace poker would make a pretty poor weapon against a stunner or nerve disruptor—but the steps were Bothari's. He slipped through the door along with a puff of outside air. His crudely sewn tan cloth jacket must be a borrowing from Kly, judging from the way his bony wrists stuck out beyond the turned-down sleeve cuffs. He'd pass for a hillman easily, as long as he kept his urban-accented mouth shut.
   He nodded at them. "Milady. Sire." He knelt by the fireplace, glanced under the pot lid, and tested the kettle's temperature by cupping a big hand a few centimeters above it. "There's groats, and syrup," he said. "Hot water. Herb tea. Dried fruit. No butter."
   "What's happening?" Cordelia rubbed her face awake, and swung her legs overboard, planning a stumble toward that herb tea.
   "Not much. The Major rested his horse a while, and left before light, to keep his schedule. It's been real quiet, since."
   "Did you get any sleep yet?"
   "Couple of hours, I think."
   The tea had to wait while Cordelia escorted the Emperor downslope to Kly's outhouse. Gregor wrinkled his nose, and eyed the adult-sized seat nervously. Back on the cabin porch Cordelia supervised hand and face washing over a dented metal basin.
   The view from the porch, once she'd toweled her face dry and vision clear, was stunning. Half of Vorkosigan's District seemed spread out below, the brown foothills, the green-and-yellow-specked peopled plains beyond. "Is that our lake?" Cordelia nodded to a glint of silver in the hills, near the limits of her vision.
   "I think so," said Bothari, squinting.
   So far, to have come this fast on foot. So fearfully near, in a lightflyer ... Well, at least you could see whatever was coming.
   The hot groats and syrup, served on a cracked white plate, tasted wonderful. Cordelia guzzled herb tea, and realized she'd become dangerously dehydrated. She tried to encourage Gregor to drink, but he didn't like the astringent taste of the tea. Bothari looked almost suffused with shame, that he couldn't produce milk out of the air at his Emperor's direct request. Cordelia solved the dilemma by sweetening the tea with syrup, rendering it acceptable.
   By the time they finished breakfast, washed up the few utensils and dishes, and flung the bit of wash water over the porch rail, the porch had warmed enough in the morning sun to make sitting tolerable.
   "Why don't you take over the bed, Sergeant. I'll keep watch. Ah ... did Kly have any suggestions what we should do, if somebody hostile drops down on us here before he gets back? It kind of looks like we've run out of places to run to."
   "Not quite, Milady. There's a set of caves, up in that patch of woods in back. An old guerilla cache. Kly took me back last night to see the entrance."
   Cordelia sighed. "Right. Get some sleep, Sergeant, we'll surely need you later."
   She sat in the sun. in one of the wooden chairs, resting her body if not her mind. Her eyes and ears strained for the whine of a distant lightflyer or heavy aircar. She tied Gregor's feet up with makeshift rag shoes, and he wandered about examining things. She accompanied him on a visit to the shed to see the horses. The Sergeant's beast was still very lame, and Rose was moving as little as possible, but they had fodder in a rick and water from a little stream that ran across the end of their enclosure. Kly's other horse, a lean and fit-looking sorrel, seemed to tolerate the equine invasion, only nipping when Rose edged too close to its side of the hayrick.
   Cordelia and Gregor sat on the porch steps as the sun passed zenith, comfortably warm now. The only sound in the vast vale besides a breeze in the branches was Bothari's snores, resonating through the cabin walls. Deciding this was as relaxed as they were likely to get, Cordelia at last dared quiz Gregor on his view—her only eyewitness report—of the coup in the capital. It wasn't much help; Gregor's five-year-old eyes saw the what well enough, it was the whys that escaped him. On a higher level, she had the same problem, Cordelia admitted ruefully to herself.
   "The soldiers came. The colonel told Mama and me to come with him. One of our liveried men came in. The colonel shot him."
   "Stunner, or nerve disruptor?"
   "Nerve disruptor. Blue fire. He fell down. They took us to the Marble Courtyard. They had aircars. Then Captain Negri ran in, with some men. A soldier grabbed me, and Mama grabbed me back, and that's what happened to my shoe. It came off in her hand. I should have ... fastened it tighter, in the morning. Then Captain Negri shot the soldier who was carrying me, and some soldiers shot Captain Negri—"
   "Plasma arc? Is that when he got that horrible burn?" Cordelia asked. She tried to keep her tone very calm.
   Gregor nodded mutely. "Some soldiers took Mama, those other ones, not Negri's ones. Captain Negri picked me up and ran. We went through the tunnels, under the Residence, and came out in a garage. We went in the lightflyer. They shot at us. Captain Negri kept telling me to shut up, to be quiet. We flew and flew, and he kept yelling at me to be quiet, but I was. And then we landed by the lake." Gregor was trembling again.
   "Mm." Kareen spun in vivid detail in Cordelia's head, despite the simplicity of Gregor's account. That serene face, wrenched into screaming rage and terror as they tore the son she'd borne the Barrayaran hard way from her grip, leaving ... nothing but a shoe, of all their precarious life and illusory possessions. So Vordarian's troops had Kareen. As hostage? Victim? Alive or dead?
   "Do you think Mama's all right?"
   "Sure." Cordelia shifted uncomfortably. "She's a very valuable lady. They won't hurt her." Till it becomes expedient for them to do so.
   "She was crying."
   "Yes." She could feel that same knot in her own belly. The mental flash she'd shied from all day yesterday burst in her brain. Boots, kicking open a secured laboratory door. Kicking over desks, tables. No faces, just boots. Gun butts sweeping delicate glassware and computerized monitors from benches into a tangled smash on the floor. A uterine replicator rudely jerked open, its sterile seals slashed, its contents dumped pell-mell wetly on the tiles ... no need even for the traditional murderous swing by the heels of infant head against the nearest concrete wall, Miles was so little the boots could just step on him and smash him to jam... . She drew in her breath.
   Miles is all right. Anonymous, just like us. We are very small, and very quiet, and safe. Shut up, keep quiet, kid. She hugged Gregor tightly. "My little boy is in the capital, too, same as your Mama. And you're with me. We'll look out for each other. You bet."
   After supper, and still no sign of Kly, Cordelia said, "Show me that cave, Sergeant."
   Kly kept a box of cold lights atop his mantel. Bothari cracked one, and led Cordelia and Gregor up into the woods on a faint stony path. He made a menacing will-o'-the-wisp, with the bright green-tinged light shining from the tube between his fingers.
   The area near the cave mouth showed signs of having once been cleared, though recent overgrowth was closing back in. The entrance was by no means hidden, a yawning black hole twice the height of Bothari and wide enough to edge a lightflyer through. Immediately within, the roof rose and walls flared to create a dusty cavern. Whole patrols could camp therein, and had, in the distant past, judging from the antique litter. Bunk niches were carved in the rock, and names and initials and dates and crude comments covered the walls.
   A cold fire-pit in the center was matched by a blackened vent-hole above, which had once provided exit for the smoke. A ghostly crowd of hillmen, guerilla soldiers, seemed to hover in Cordelia's mind's eye, eating, joking, spitting gum-leaf, cleaning their weapons and planning their next foray. Ranger spies came and went, ghosts among the ghosts, to place their precious blood-won information before their young general, who spread his maps out on that flat rock over there... . She shook the vision from her head, and took the light and explored the niches. At least five traversable exits led off from the cavern, three of which showed signs of having been heavily traveled.
   "Did Kly say where these went, or where they came out, Sergeant?"
   "Not exactly, Milady. He did say the passages went back for kilometers, into the hills. He was late, and in a hurry to get on."
   "Is it a vertical or horizontal system, did he say?"
   "Beg pardon, Milady?"
   "All on one strata, or with unexpected big drops? Are there lots of blind alleys? Which path were we supposed to take? Are there underground streams?"
   "I think he expected to be leading us, if we went in. He started to explain, then said it was too complicated."
   She frowned, contemplating the possibilities. She'd done a bit of cave work in her Survey training, enough to grasp what the term respect for the hazards meant. Vents, drops, cracks, labyrinthine cross—passages ... plus, here, the unexpected rise and fall of water, not a matter of much concern on Beta Colony. It had rained last night. Sensors were not much help in finding a lost cave explorer. And whose sensors? If the system was as extensive as Kly suggested, it could absorb hundreds of searchers ... Her frown changed to a slow smile. "Sergeant, let's camp here tonight."

   Gregor liked the cave, especially when Cordelia described the history of the place. He rattled around the cavern whispering military dialogue to himself like "Zap, zap, zap!", climbed in and out of all the niches, and tried to sound out the rude words carved in the walls. Bothari lit a small fire in the pit and spread a bedroll for Gregor and Cordelia, taking the night watch for himself. Cordelia set a second bedroll, wrapped around trail snacks and supplies, in a grabbable bundle near the entrance. She arranged the black fatigue jacket with the name VORKOSIGAN, A., artistically in a niche, as if used to sit upon and keep someone's haunches from the cold stone and then temporarily forgotten when the sitter rose. Last of all Bothari brought up their lame and useless horses, re-saddled and bridled, and tethered them just outside.
   Cordelia emerged from the widest passage, where she'd dropped an almost-spent cold light a quarter kilometer along, over a rope-strung ten-meter cliff. The rope was natural fiber, and very old and brittle. She'd elected not to test it.
   "I don't quite get it, Milady," said Bothari. "With the horses abandoned out there, if anyone comes looking they'll find us at once, and know exactly where we've gone."
   "Find this, yes," said Cordelia. "Know where we've gone, no. Because without Kly, there is no way I'm taking Gregor down into this labyrinth. But the best way to look like we were here is to actually be here for a bit."
   Bothari's flat eyes lit in understanding at last, as he gazed around at the five black entrances at their various levels. "Ah!"
   "That means we also need to find a real bolt-hole.
   Somewhere up in the woods, where we can cut across to the trail Kly brought us up yesterday. Wish we'd done this in daylight."
   "I see what you mean, Milady. I'll scout."
   "Please do, Sergeant."
   Taking their trail bundle, he disappeared into the dim woods. Cordelia tucked Gregor into the bedroll, then perched outside among the rocks above the cave mouth and kept watch. She could see the vale, stretched out greyly below the tops of the trees, and make out Kly's cabin roof. No smoke rose now from its chimney. Beneath the stone, no remote thermal sensor would find their new fire, though the smell of it hung in the chill air, detectable to nearby noses. She watched for moving lights in the sky till the stars were a watery blur in her eyes.
   Bothari returned after a very long time. "I have a spot. Shall we move now?"
   "Not yet. Kly might still show up." First.
   "Your turn to sleep, then, Milady."
   "Oh, yes." The evening's exertions had only partly warmed the acid fatigue from her muscles. Leaving Bothari on the limestone outcrop in the starlight like a guardian gargoyle, she crawled in with Gregor. Eventually, she slept.
   She woke with the grey light of dawn making the cavern entrance a luminous misty oval. Bothari made hot tea, and they shared cold lumps of pan bread left from last night, and nibbled dried fruit.
   "I'll watch some more," Bothari volunteered. "I can't sleep so good without my medication anyway."
   "Medication?" said Cordelia.
   "Yeah, I left my pills at Vorkosigan Surleau. I can feel it clearing out of my system. Things seem sharper."
   Cordelia chased a suddenly very lumpy bite of bread with a swallow of hot tea. But were his psychoactive drugs truly therapeutic, or merely political in their effect? "Let me know if you are experiencing any kind of difficulty, Sergeant," she said cautiously.
   "Not so far. Except it's getting harder to sleep. They suppress dreams." He took his tea and wandered back to his post.
   Cordelia carefully refrained from cleaning up their campsite. She did escort Gregor to the nearest rivulet for a personal washup. They were certainly acquiring an authentic hill-folk aroma. They returned to the cavern, where Cordelia rested a while on the bedroll. She must insist on relieving Bothari soon. Come on, Kly... .
   Bothari's tense low voice reverberated in the cavern. "Milady. Sire. Time to go."
   "Kly?"
   "No."
   Cordelia rolled to her feet, kicked the pre-arranged pile of dirt over the last coals of their fire, grabbed Gregor, and hustled him out the cave mouth. He looked suddenly frightened and sickly. Bothari was pulling the bridles off the horses, loosing them and tossing the gear on the pile with the saddles. Cordelia pulled herself up beside the cave and snatched one quick glimpse over the treetops. A flyer had landed in front of Kly's cabin. Two black-uniformed soldiers were circling to the right and left. A third disappeared under the porch roof. Faint and delayed in the distance came the bang of Kly's front door being kicked open. Only soldiers, no hillman-guides or hillman-prisoners in that flyer. No sign of Kly.
   They took to the woods at a jog, Bothari boosting up and carrying Gregor piggyback. Rose made to follow them, and Cordelia whirled to wave her arms and whisper frantically, "No! Go away, idiot beast!" to spook her off. Rose hesitated, then turned to stay by her lame companion.
   Their run was steady, unpanicked. Bothari had his route all picked out, taking advantage of sheltering rocks and trees and water-carved steps. They scrambled up, down, up, but just when she thought her lungs would burst and their pursuers must spot them, Bothari vanished along a steep rock face.
   "Over here, Milady!"
   He'd found a thin, horizontal crack in the rocks, half a meter high and three meters deep. She rolled in beside him to find the niche shielded by solid rock everywhere but the front, and that almost blocked by fallen stone. Their bedroll and supplies waited.
   "No wonder," Cordelia gasped, "the Cetagandans had trouble up here." A thermal sensor would have to be aimed straight in, to pick them up, from a point twenty meters in the air out over the ravine. The place was riddled with hundreds of similar crannies.
   "Even better." Bothari pulled a pair of antique field glasses, looted from Kly's cabin, from their bedroll. "We can see them."
   The glasses were nothing but binocular tubes with sliding glass lenses, purely passive light—collectors. They must have dated from the Time of Isolation. The magnification was poor by modern standards, no UV or infrared boost, no rangefinder pulse ... no power cell to leak detectable energy traces. Flat on her belly, chin in the rubble, Cordelia could glimpse the distant cavern entrance on the slope rising beyond the ravine and a knife-backed ridge. When she said, "Now we must be very quiet," pale Gregor practically went fetal.
   The black-clad scanner men found the horses at last, though it seemed to take them forever. Then they found the cave mouth. The tiny figures gesticulated excitedly to each other, ran in and out, and called the flyer, which landed outside the entrance with much crackling of shrubbery. Four men entered; eventually, one came back out. In time, another flyer landed. Then a lift van arrived, and disgorged a whole patrol. The mountain mouth ate them all. Another lift van came, and men set up lights, a field generator, comm links.
   Cordelia made a nest of the bedroll for Gregor, and fed him little snacks and sips from their water bottle. Bothari stretched out in the back of the niche with the thinnest blanket folded under his head, otherwise seeming impervious to the stone. While Bothari dozed, Cordelia kept careful count of the net flow of hunters. By mid-afternoon, she calculated that some forty men had gone below and not come up again.
   Two men were brought out strapped to float pallets, loaded into a medical—evacuation lifter, and flown away. A lightflyer made a bad landing in the crowded area, toppled downslope, and crunched into a tree. Yet more men became involved in extracting, righting, and repairing it. By dusk over sixty men had been sucked down the drain. A whole company drawn away from the capital, not pursuing refugees, not available to root out the secrets of ImpMil ... it wasn't enough to make a real difference, surely.
   It's a start.
   Cordelia and Bothari and Gregor slipped from the niche in the gloaming, cleared the ravines, and made their way silently through the woods. It was nearly full dark when they came to the edge of the trees and struck Kly's trail. As they crossed over the ridge edging the vale, Cordelia looked back. The area by the cave mouth was marked by searchlights, stabbing up through the mists. Lightflyers whined in and out of the site.
   They dropped over the ridge and slithered down the slope that had so nearly killed her to climb, hanging on to Rose's stirrup two days ago. Fully five kilometers down the trail, in a rocky region of treeless scrub, Bothari came to an abrupt halt. "Sh. Milady, listen."
   Voices. Men's voices, not far off, but strangely hollow. Cordelia stared into the darkness, but no lights moved. Nothing moved. They crouched beside the trail, senses straining.
   Bothari crept off, head tilted, following his ears. After a few moments Cordelia and Gregor cautiously followed. She found Bothari kneeling by a striated outcrop. He motioned her closer.
   "It's a vent," he announced in a whisper. "Listen."
   The voices were much clearer now, sharp cadences, angry gutturals punctuated by swearing in two or three languages.
   "Goddammit, I know we went left back at that third turn."
   "That wasn't the third turn, that was the fourth."
   "We re-crossed the stream."
   "It wasn't the same friggin' stream, sabaki!"
   "Merde. Perdu!"
   "Lieutenant, you're an idiot!"
   "Corporal, you're out of line!"
   "This cold light's not going to last the hour. See, it's fading."
   "Well, don't shake it up, you moron, when it glows brighter it goes faster."
   "Give me that—!"
   Bothari's teeth gleamed in the darkness. It was the first smile Cordelia had seen crack his face in months. Silently, he saluted her. They tiptoed softly away, into the chill of the Dendarii night.
   Back on the trail, Bothari sighed deeply. "If only I'd had a grenade to drop down that vent. Their search parties would still be shooting at each other this time next week."

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

   Four hours down the night trail, the distinctive black and white horse loomed out of the dark. Kly was a shadow aboard it, but his thick profile and battered hat were instantly recognizable.
   "Bothari!" The name huffed from Kly's mouth. "We live. Grace of God."
   Bothari's voice was flat. "What happened to you, Major?"
   "I almost ran into one of Vordarian's squads at a cabin I was delivering mail to. They're actually trying to go over these hills house by house. Dosing everyone they meet with fast-penta. They must be bringing the drug in by the barrel."
   "We expected you back last night," said Cordelia. She tried not to let her tone sound too accusing.
   The felt hat bobbed as Kly gave her a weary nod of greeting. "Would've been, except for Vordarian's bloody patrol. I didn't dare let them question me. I spent a day and a night, dodging 'em. Sent my niece's husband to get you. But when he got to my place this morning, Vordarian's men were all over. I figured we'd lost everything. But when they were still all over by nightfall, I took heart. They wouldn't still be looking for you if they'd found you. Figured I'd better get my ass up here and do some scouting myself. This is beyond hope."
   Kly turned his horse around, heading back down the trail. "Here, Sergeant, put the boy up."
   "I can carry the boy. Think you'd better give m'lady a lift. She's about out."
   Too true. It was a measure of Cordelia's exhaustion that she went willingly to Kly's horse. Between them, Bothari and Kly shoved her aboard, perched astraddle on the pinto's warm rump. They started off, Cordelia gripping the mailman's coat.
   "What happened to you?" Kly asked in turn.
   Cordelia let Bothari answer, in his short sentences made even shorter by his burdened stride, as he carried Gregor piggyback. When he got to a mention of the men heard down the vent, Kly barked a laugh, then clapped a hand over his mouth. "They'll be weeks getting out of there. Good work, Sergeant!"
   "It was Lady Vorkosigan's idea."
   "Oh?" Kly twisted around to glance back over his shoulder at Cordelia, clinging wanly.
   "Aral and Piotr both seemed to think diversion worthwhile," Cordelia explained. "I gather Vordarian has limited reserves."
   "You think like a soldier, m'lady." Kly sounded approving.
   Cordelia wrinkled her brow in dismay. What an appalling compliment. The last thing she wanted was to start thinking like a soldier, playing their game by their rules. The hallucinatory military world-view was horribly infectious, though, immersed in it as she was now. How long can I tread water?
   Kly led them on another two hours of night marching, striking out on unfamiliar trails. In deep pre—dawn dark they came to a shack, or house. It seemed to be of similar construction to Kly's place, but more extensive, with rooms built on and other rooms built on to the additions. A light from a tiny flame, some sort of greasy homemade candle, burned in a window.
   An old woman in a nightgown and jacket, her grey hair in a braid down her back, came to the door and motioned them within. Another old man—but younger than Kly—took the horse out of sight toward a shed. Kly made to go with him.
   "Is it safe here?" Cordelia asked dizzily. Where is here?
   Kly shrugged. "They searched here day before yesterday. Before I sent for m' nephew-in-law. Checked it off clean."
   The old woman snorted, surly memory in her eye.
   "What with the caves, and all the unchecked homesteads, and the lake, it'll be a while before they get around to re-checking. They're still searching the lake bottom, I hear, they've flown in all kinds of equipment. It's as safe as any." He went off after his horse.
   Meaning, as unsafe as any. Bothari was already taking his boots off. His feet must be bad. Her feet were a mess, her slippers walked to flinders, and Gregor's rag shoes utterly destroyed. She'd never felt so near the end of all endurance, bone-weary, blood-weary, though she'd done much longer hikes before. It was as if her truncated pregnancy had drained life itself out of her, to pass it on to another. She let herself be guided, fed bread and cheese and milk and put to bed in a little side room, herself on one narrow cot and drooping Gregor on another. She would believe in safety tonight the way Barrayaran children believed in Father Frost at Winterfair, true because she desperately wanted it to be.
   The next day a raggedy boy of about ten appeared out of the woods, riding Kly's sorrel horse bareback with a rope halter. Kly made Cordelia, Gregor, and Bothari hide out of sight while he paid the boy off with a few coins, and Sonia, Kly's aged niece, packed him some sweet cakes to speed him on his way. Gregor peeked wistfully out the corner of one curtained window as the child vanished again.
   "I didn't dare go myself," Kly explained to Cordelia. "Vordarian has three platoons of men up there now." A wheezing chuckle escaped him at some inner vision. "But the boy knows nothing but that the old mailman was sick and needed his re-mount."
   "They didn't fast-penta that child, did they?"
   "Oh, yes."
   "They dared!"
   Kly's black-stained lips compressed in sympathy with her outrage. "If he can't get hold of Gregor, Vordarian's coup is likely doomed. And he knows it. There's not much he wouldn't dare to do, at this point." He paused. "You can be glad fast-penta has replaced torture, eh?"
   Kly's nephew-in-law helped him saddle up the sorrel, and buckle on the mailbags. The mailman adjusted his hat, and climbed up.
   "If I don't keep my schedule, it will be near-impossible for the Gen'ral to contact me," he explained. "Got to go, I'm late already. I'll be back. You and the boy stay inside, out of sight, as much as you can, m'lady." He turned his horse toward the bare-branched woods. The animal blended quickly into the red-brown native scrub.
   Cordelia found Kly's last advice all too easy to follow. She spent most of the next four days in her cot-bed. The dull silence of hours went by in a fog, a relapse into the frightening fatigue she'd experienced after the placental transfer operation and its near-lethal complications. Conversation provided no diversion. The hill-folk were as laconic as Bothari. It was the threat of fast-penta, Cordelia thought. The less you knew, the less you could tell. The old woman Sonia's eyes probed Cordelia curiously, but she never asked anything beyond, "You hungry?" Cordelia didn't even know her last name.
   Baths. After the first one, Cordelia did not ask again. The old couple worked all afternoon to haul and heat enough water for herself and Gregor. Their simple meals were nearly as much labor. No Pull Tab To Heat Contents up here. Technology, a woman's best friend. Unless the technology appeared in the form of a nerve disruptor in the hand of some dead-eyed soldier hunting you down carelessly as an animal.
   Cordelia counted over the days since the coup, since all hell had broken loose. What was happening in the larger world? What response from the space forces, from planetary embassies, from conquered Komarr? Would Komarr seize the chaos to revolt, or had Vordarian taken them by surprise too? Aral, what are you doing out there?
   Sonia, though she asked no questions, would now and then return from outings and drop bits of local news. Vordarian's troops, headquartered in Piotr's residence, were close to abandoning the search of the lake bottom. Hassadar was sealed, but refugees escaped in a trickle; someone's children, smuggled out, had arrived to stay with relatives nearby. At Vorkosigan Surleau most of Piotr's armsmen's families had escaped except Armsman Vogti's wife and very aged mother, who had been taken away in a groundcar, no one knew where.
   "And, oh yes, very strange," Sonia added. "They took Karla Hysopi. That hardly makes sense. She was only the widow of a retired regular Service sergeant, what use do they expect to make of her?"
   Cordelia froze. "Did they take the baby, too?"
   "Baby? Donnia didn't say about a baby. Grandchild, was it?"
   Bothari was sitting by the window sharpening his knife on Sonia's kitchen whetstone. His hand paused in mid-stroke. He looked up to meet Cordelias alarmed eyes. Beyond a tightening of his jaw his face did not change expression, yet the sudden increase of tension in his body made Cordelia's stomach knot. He looked back down at what he was doing, and took a longer, firmer stroke that hissed along the whetstone like water on coals.
   "Maybe ... Kly will know something more, when he comes back," Cordelia quavered.
   "Belike," said Sonia doubtfully.
   At last, on schedule, on the evening of the seventh day, Kly rode into the clearing on his sorrel horse. A few minutes later Armsman Esterhazy rode in behind him. He was dressed in hillman's togs, and his mount was a lean and spindle-shanked hill horse, not one of Piotr's big glossy beasts. They put their horses away and came in to a dinner Sonia had apparently fixed this night of Kly's rounds for eighteen years.
   After dinner they pulled up chairs to the stone fireplace, and Kly and Esterhazy briefed Cordelia and Bothari in low tones. Gregor sat by Cordelias feet.
   "Since Vordarian has greatly widened his search area," Esterhazy began, "Count and Lord Vorkosigan have decided that the mountains are still the best place to hide Gregor. As the search radius grows enemy forces will be spread thinner and thinner."
   "Locally, Vordarian's forces are still hunting up and down the caves," Kly put in. "There's about two hundred men still up there. But as soon as they finish finding each other, I expect they'll pull out. I hear they've given up on finding you in there, Milady. Tomorrow, Sire," Kly glanced down and addressed Gregor directly, "Armsman Esterhazy will take you to a new place, a lot like this one. You'll have a new name for a while, for pretend. And Armsman Esterhazy will pretend he's your da. Think you can do that?"
   Gregor's hand tightened on Cordelia's skirt. "Will Lady Vorkosigan pretend she's my ma?"
   "We're going to take Lady Vorkosigan back to Lord Vorkosigan, at Tanery Base Shuttleport." At Gregor's alarmed look Kly added, "There's a pony, where you're going. And goats. The lady there might teach you how to milk the goats."
   Gregor looked doubtful, but did not fuss further, though the next morning as he was put up behind Esterhazy on the shaggy horse he looked near to tears.
   Cordelia said anxiously, "Take care of him, Armsman."
   Esterhazy gave her a driven look. "He's my Emperor, Milady. He holds my oath."
   "He's also a little boy, Armsman. Emperor is ... a delusion you all have in your heads. Take care of the Emperor for Piotr, yes, but you take care of Gregor for me, eh?"
   Esterhazy met her eyes. His voice softened. "My little boy is four, Milady."
   He did understand, then. Cordelia swallowed relief and grief. "Have you ... heard anything from the capital? About your family?"
   "Not yet," said Esterhazy bleakly.
   "I'll keep my ears open. Do what I can."
   "Thank you." He gave her a nod, not as retainer to his lady, but as one parent to another. No other word seemed necessary.
   Bothari was out of earshot, having returned to the cabin to pack up their few supplies. Cordelia went to Kly's stirrup, as he prepared to swing his black and white horse about and lead Esterhazy and Gregor on their way. "Major. Sonia passed on a rumor that Vordarian's troops took Mistress Hysopi. Bothari had hired her to foster his baby girl. Do you know if they took Elena—the baby—too?"
   Kly lowered his voice. "'Twas the other way around, as I have it. They went for the baby, Karla Hysopi raised hell, so they took her too even though she wasn't on the list."
   "Do you know where?"
   He shook his head. "Somewhere in Vorbarr Sultana. Belike your husband's Intelligence will know exactly, by now."
   "Have you told the Sergeant yet?"
   "His brother armsman told him, last night."
   "Ah."
   Gregor looked back over his shoulder at her as they rode away, until they were obscured from sight by the tree-boles.
   For three days Kly's nephew guided them through the mountains, Bothari on foot leading Cordelia on a bony-hipped little hill horse with a sheepskin pad cinched to its back. On the third afternoon, they came to a cabin which sheltered a skinny youth who led them to a shed that held, wonder of wonders, a rickety lightflyer. He loaded up the backseat with Cordelia and six jugs of maple syrup. Bothari shook hands silently with Kly's nephew, who mounted the little horse and vanished into the woods.
   Under Bothari's narrow eye, the skinny youth coaxed his vehicle into the air. Brushing treetops, they followed ravines and ridges up over the snow-frosted spine of the mountains and down the other side, out of Vorkosigan's District. They came at dusk to a little market town. The youth brought his flyer down in a side street. Cordelia and Bothari helped him carry his gurgling produce to a small grocer's shop, where he bartered the syrup for coffee, flour, soap, and power cells.
   Upon returning to his lightflyer, they found that a battered groundtruck had pulled up and parked behind it. The youth exchanged no more than a nod with its driver, who hopped out and slid the door to the cargo bay aside for Bothari and Cordelia. The bay was a quarter full of fiber sacks of cabbages. They did not make very good pillows, though Bothari did his best to arrange Cordelia a nest of them as the truck rocked along above the dismally uneven roads. Bothari then sat wedged against the side of the cargo bay and compulsively polished the edge of his knife to molecular sharpness with a makeshift strop, a bit of leather he'd begged from Sonia. Four hours of this and Cordelia was ready to start talking to the cabbages.
   The truck thumped to a halt at last. The door slid aside, and first Bothari then Cordelia emerged to find themselves in the middle of nowhere: a gravel-surfaced road over a culvert, in the dark, in the country, in an unfamiliar district of unknown loyalties.
   "They'll pick you up at Kilometer Marker Ninety-six," the truck driver said, pointing to a white smudge in the dimness that appeared to be merely a painted rock.
   "When?" asked Cordelia desperately. For that matter, who were they?
   "Don't know." The man returned to his truck and drove off in a spray of gravel from the hoverfan, as if he were already pursued.
   Cordelia perched on the painted boulder and wondered morbidly which side was going to leap out of the night first, and by what test she might tell them apart. Time passed, and she entertained an even more depressed vision of no one picking them up at all.
   But at last a darkened lightflyer floated down out of the night sky, its engines pitched to eerie near-silence. Its landing feet crunched in the gravel. Bothari crouched beside her, his useless knife gripped in his hand. But the man awkwardly levering himself up out of the passenger seat was Lieutenant Koudelka. "Milady?" he called uncertainly to the two human scarecrows. "Sergeant?" A breath of pure delight puffed from Cordelia as she recognized the pilot's blonde head as Droushnakovi. My home is not a place, it is people, sir... .
   With Bothari's hand on her elbow, at Koudelka's anxious gesture Cordelia fell gratefully into the padded backseat of the flyer. Droushnakovi cast a dark look over her shoulder at Bothari, wrinkled her nose, and asked, "Are you all right, Milady?"
   "Better than I expected, really. Go, go."
   The canopy sealed, and they rose into the air. Vent fans powered up, cycling filtered air. Colored lights from the control interface highlighted Kou's and Drou's faces. A technological cocoon. Cordelia glanced at systems readouts over Droushnakovi's shoulder, and then up through the canopy; yes, dark shapes paced them, guardian military flyers. Bothari saw them, too, his eyes narrowing in approval. Some fraction of tension eased from his body.
   "Good to see you two—" some subtle cue of their body language, some hidden reserve, kept Cordelia from adding together again. "I gather you got that accusation about the comconsole sabotage straightened out in good order?"
   "As soon as we got the chance to stop and fast-penta that guard corporal, Milady," Droushnakovi answered. "He didn't have the nerve to suicide before questioning."
   "He was the saboteur?"
   "Yes," answered Koudelka. "He'd intended to escape to Vordarian's troops when they arrived to capture us. Vordarian apparently suborned him months ago."
   "That accounts for our security problems. Or does it?"
   "He passed information about our route, the day of the sonic grenade attempt." Koudelka rubbed at his sinuses in memory.
   "So it was Vordarian behind that!"
   "Confirmed. But the guard doesn't seem to have known anything about the soltoxin. We turned him inside out. He wasn't a high-level conspirator, just a tool."
   Nasty flow of thought, but, "Has Illyan reported in yet?"
   "Not yet. Admiral Vorkosigan hopes he may be hiding in the capital, if he wasn't killed in the first fighting."
   "Hm. Well, you'll be glad to know Gregor's all right—"
   Koudelka held up an interrupting hand. "Excuse me, Milady. The Admiral ordered—you and the Sergeant are not to debrief anything about Gregor to anyone except Count Piotr or himself."
   "All right. Damn fast-penta. How is Aral?"
   "He's well, Milady. He ordered me to bring you up to date on the strategic situation—"
   Screw the strategic situation, what about my baby? Alas, the two seemed inextricably intertwined.
   "—and answer any questions you had."
   Very well. "What about our baby? Pi—Miles?"
   "We've heard nothing bad, Milady."
   "What does that mean?"
   "It means we've heard nothing," Droushnakovi put in glumly.
   Koudelka shot her an irate look, which she shrugged off with a twitch of one shoulder.
   "No news may be good news," Koudelka went on. "While it's true Vordarian holds the capital—"
   "And therefore ImpMil, yes," said Cordelia.
   "And he's publicizing names of hostages related to anyone in our command structure, there's been no mention of, of your child, in the lists. The Admiral thinks Vordarian simply doesn't realize that what went into the replicator was viable. Doesn't know what he's got."
   "Yet," bit off Cordelia.
   "Yet," Koudelka conceded reluctantly.
   "All right. Go on."
   "The overall situation isn't as bad as we feared at first.
   Vordarian holds Vorbarr Sultana, his own District and its military bases, and he's put troops in Vorkosigan's District, but he only has about five district counts who are his committed allies. About thirty of the other counts were caught in the capital, and we can't tell their real allegiance while Vordarian holds guns to their heads. Most of the twenty-three remaining Districts have reiterated their oaths to my Lord Regent. Though a couple are waffling, who have relatives in the capital or who are in dicey strategic positions as potential battlefields."
   "And the space forces?"
   "I was just coming to them, yes, Milady. Over half of their supplies come up from the shuttleports in Vordarian's District. For the moment, they're still holding out for a clear result rather than moving in to create one. But they've refused to openly endorse Vordarian. It's a balance, and whoever can tip it their way first will start a landslide. Admiral Vorkosigan seems awfully confident." Cordelia was not sure from the lieutenant's tone if he altogether shared that confidence. "But then, he has to. For morale. He says Vordarian lost the war the hour Negri got away with Gregor, and the rest is just maneuvering to limit the losses. But Vordarian holds Princess Kareen."
   "Doubtless one of the losses Aral is anxious to limit. Is she all right? Vordarian's goons haven't abused her?"
   "Not as far as we know. She seems to be under house arrest in her own rooms in the Imperial Residence. Several of the more important hostages have been secluded there."
   "I see." She glanced sideways in the dim cabin at Bothari, who did not change expression. She waited for him to ask after Elena, but he said nothing. Droushnakovi stared bleakly into the night, at the mention of Kareen.
   Had Kou and Drou made up? They seemed cool, civil, all duty and on duty. But whatever surface apologies had passed, Cordelia sensed no healing in them. The secret adoration and will-to-trust was all gone from the blue eyes that now and then flicked from the control interface to the man in the passenger seat. Drou's glances were merely wary.
   Lights glowed ahead on the ground, the spatter of a middle-sized city, and beyond it, the jumbled geometries of a sprawling military shuttleport. Drou went through code-check after code-check, as they approached. They spiraled down to a pad that lit for them, peopled with armed guards. Their guard-flyers passed on overhead to their own landing zones.
   The guards surrounded them as they exited the flyer, and escorted them as fast as Koudelka's pace would permit to a lift tube. They went down, took a slide-walk, and went down again through blast doors. Tanery Base clearly featured a hardened underground command post. Welcome to the bunker. And yet a throat-catching whiff of familiarity shook Cordelia for a terrifying moment of confusion and loss. Beta Colony did a lot better on the interior decorating than these barren corridors, but she might have descended to the utility level of some buried Betan city, safe and cool... I want to go home.
   There were three green-uniformed officers, talking in a corridor. One was Aral. He saw her. "Thank you, dismissed, gentlemen," he said in the middle of someone's sentence, then more consciously, "We'll continue this shortly." But they lingered to goggle.
   He looked no worse than tired. Her heart ached to look at him, and yet ... Following you has brought me here. Not to the Barrayar of my hopes, but to the Barrayar of my fears.
   With a voiceless "Ha!" he embraced her, hard to him. She hugged him back. This is a good thing. Go away, World. But when she looked up the World was still waiting, in the form of seven watchers all with agendas.
   He held her away, and scanned her anxiously up and down. "You look terrible, dear Captain."
   At least he was polite enough not to say, You smell terrible. "Nothing a bath won't cure."
   "That is not what I meant. Sickbay for you, before anything." He turned to find Sergeant Bothari first in line.
   "Sir, I must report in to my lord Count," Bothari said.
   "Father's not here. He's on a diplomatic mission from me to some of his old cronies. Here, you, Kou—take Bothari and set him up with quarters, food chits, passes, and clothes. I'll want your personal report immediately. I've seen to Cordelia, Sergeant."
   "Yes, sir." Koudelka led Bothari away.
   "Bothari was amazing," Cordelia confided to Aral. "No—that's unjust. Bothari was Bothari, and I shouldn't have been amazed at all. We wouldn't have made it without him."
   Aral nodded, smiling a little. "I thought he would do for you."
   "He did indeed."
   Droushnakovi, taking up her old position at Cordelias elbow the moment Bothari vacated it, shook her head in doubt, and followed along as Aral steered Cordelia down the corridor. The rest of the parade followed less certainly.
   "Hear any more about Illyan?" Cordelia asked.
   "Not yet. Did Kou brief you?"
   "A sketch, enough for now. I don't suppose any more word's come in on Padma and Alys Vorpatril, then, either?"
   He shook his head regretfully. "But neither are they on the list of Vordarian's confirmed captures. I think they're hiding in the city. Vordarian's side is leaking information like a sieve, we'd know if any arrest that important had happened. I can only wonder if our own arrangements are so porous. That's the trouble with these damned civil affrays, everybody has a brother—"
   A voice from down the corridor hailed loudly, "Sir! Oh, sir!" Only Cordelia felt Aral flinch, his arm jerking under her hand.
   An HQ staffer led a tall man in black fatigues with colonel's tabs on the collar toward them. "There you are, sir. Colonel Gerould is here from Marigrad."
   "Oh. Good. I have to see this man now. ..." Aral looked around hurriedly, and his eye fell on Droushnakovi. "Drou, please escort Cordelia to the infirmary for me. Get her checked, get her—get her everything."
   The colonel was no HQ desk pilot. He looked, in fact, as if he'd just flown in from some front line, wherever the "front" was in this war for loyalties. His fatigues were dirty and wrinkled and looked slept—in, their smoke-stink eclipsing Cordelia's mountain-reek. His face was lined with fatigue. But he looked only grim, not beaten. "The fighting in Marigrad has gone house-to-house, Admiral," he reported without preamble.
   Vorkosigan grimaced. "Then I want to hopscotch it. Come with me to the tactics room—what is that on your arm, Colonel?"
   A wide piece of white cloth and a narrower strip of brown circled the officer's black upper left sleeve. "ID, sir. We couldn't tell who we were shooting at, up close. Vordarian's people are wearing red and yellow, 's as close as they could come to maroon and gold, I guess. That's supposed to be brown and silver for Vorkosigan, of course."
   "That's what I was afraid of." Vorkosigan looked extremely stern. "Take it off. Burn it. And pass the word down the line. You already have a uniform, Colonel, issued to you by the Emperor. That's who you're fighting for. Let the traitors alter their uniforms."
   The colonel looked shocked at Vorkosigan's vehemence, but, after a beat, enlightened; he stripped the cloth hastily from his arm and stuffed it in his pocket. "Right, sir."
   Aral let go of Cordelia's hand with a palpable effort. "I'll meet you in our quarters, love. Later."
   Later in the week, at this rate. Cordelia shook her head helplessly, took in one last view of his stocky form as if her intensity could somehow digitize and store him for retrieval, and followed Droushnakovi into Tanery Base's underground warren. At least with Drou, Cordelia was able to overrule Vorkosigan's itinerary and insist on a bath first. Almost as good, she found half a dozen new outfits in her correct size, betraying Drou's palace—trained good taste, waiting for her in a closet in Aral's quarters.
   The base doctor had no charts; Cordelia's medical records were of course all behind enemy lines in Vorbarr Sultana at present. He shook his head and keyed up a new form on his report panel. "I'm sorry, Lady Vorkosigan. We'll simply have to begin at the beginning. Please bear with me. Do I understand correctly you've had some sort of female trouble?"
   No, most of my troubles have been with males. Cordelia bit her tongue. "I had a placental transfer, let me see, three plus," she had to count it up on her fingers, "about five weeks ago."
   "Excuse me, a what?"
   "I gave birth by surgical section. It did not go well."
   "I see. Five weeks post-partum." He made a note. "And what is your present complaint?"
   I don't like Barrayar, I want to go home, my father-in-law wants to murder my baby, half my friends are running for their lives, and I can't get ten minutes alone with my husband, whom you people are consuming before my eyes, my feet hurt, my head hurts, my soul hurts ... it was all too complicated. The poor man just wanted something to put in his blank, not an essay. "Fatigue," Cordelia managed at last.
   "Ah." He brightened, and entered this factoid on his report panel. "Post-partum fatigue. This is normal." He looked up and regarded her earnestly. "Have you considered starting an exercise program, Lady Vorkosigan?"

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

   "Who are Vordarian's men?" Cordelia asked Aral in frustration. "I've been running from them for weeks, but it's like I've only glimpsed them in a rearview mirror. Know your enemy and all that. Where does he get this endless supply of goons?"
   "Oh, not endless." Aral smiled slightly, and took another bite of stew. They were—miracle!—alone at last, in his simple underground senior officer's apartment. Their supper had been brought in on a tray by a batman, and spread on a low table between them. Aral had then, to Cordelia's relief, ejected this hovering minion with a "Thank you, Corporal, that will be all."
   Aral swallowed his bite and continued, "Who are they? For the most part, anyone who was caught with an officer up along his chain of command who elected Vordarian's side, and who hasn't worked up the nerve, or in some cases the wit, to either frag the officer or desert his unit and report in elsewhere. And obedience and unit cohesion is deeply inculcated in these men. 'When the going gets rough, stick to your unit' is literally drilled into them. So the unfortunate fact that their officer is leading them into treason makes clinging to their squad-brothers even more natural. Besides," he grinned bleakly, "it's only treason if Vordarian loses."
   "And is Vordarian losing?"
   "As long as I live, and keep Gregor alive, Vordarian cannot win." He nodded in conviction. "Vordarian is imputing crimes to me as fast as he can invent them. Most serious is the rumor he's floating that I've made away with Gregor and seek the Imperium for myself. I judge this a ploy to smoke out Gregor's hiding place. He knows that Gregor's I not with me. Or he'd be tempted to lob a nuclear in here." Cordelia's lips curled in aversion. "So does he want to capture Gregor, or kill him?"
   "Kill only if he can't capture. I will, when the time is right, produce Gregor."
   "Why not right now?"
   He sat back with a tired sigh, and pushed away his tray with a few bites of stew and a ragged bread shred still left in his bowl. "Because I wish to see how many of Vordarian's forces I can woo back to my side before the denoument. Desert to me is not quite the right term ... come over, maybe. I don't wish to inaugurate my second year of office with four thousand military executions. All below a certain rank can be given a blanket pardon on the grounds that they were oath-bound to follow their officers, but I want to save as many of the senior men as I can. Five district counts and Vordarian are doomed now, no hope for them. Damn him for starting this."
   "What are Vordarian's troops doing? Is this a sitzkrieg?"
   "Not quite. He's wasting a lot of his time and mine, trying to gain a couple of useless strong points, like the supply depot at Marigrad. We oblige and draw him in, or out. It keeps Vordarian's commanders occupied, and their minds off the real high ground, which are the space-based forces. If only I had Kanzian!"
   "Have your intelligence people located him yet?" The admired Admiral Kanzian was one of the two men in the Barrayaran High Command whom Vorkosigan regarded as his superiors in strategy. Kanzian was an advanced space operations specialist; the space-based forces had great faith in him. "No horse manure stuck on his boots," was the way Kou had once expressed it, to Cordelia's amusement.
   "No, but Vordarian doesn't have him either. He's vanished. Hope to God he wasn't caught in some stupid street cross-fire and is lying unidentified on a slab somewhere. What a waste that would be."
   "Would going up help? To sway the space forces?"
   "Why d'you think I'm troubling to hold Tanery Base? I've considered the pros and cons of moving my field HQ aboard ship. I think not yet; it could be misinterpreted as the first step in running away."
   Running away. What a seductive thought. Far, far away from all this lunacy, till it was all reduced to the single dimension of a minor filler in some galactic news vid. But ... run away from Aral? She studied him, as he sat back on the padded sofa, staring at but not seeing the remains of his supper. A weary middle-aged man in a green uniform, of no particular handsomeness (except perhaps for the sharp grey eyes); a hungry intellect at constant internal war with fear-driven aggression, each fueled by a lifetime crowded with bizarre experience, Barrayaran experience. You should have fallen in love with a happy man, if you wanted happiness. But no, you had to fall for the breathtaking beauty of pain... .
   The two shall be made one flesh. How literal that ancient pious mouthing had turned out to be. One little scrap of flesh, prisoned in a uterine replicator behind enemy lines, bound them now like Siamese twins. And if little Miles died, would that bond be slashed?
   "What ... what are we doing about Vordarian's hostages?"
   He sighed. "That is the hard nut in the center. Stripped of everything else, as we are gradually doing, Vordarian still holds over twenty district counts and Kareen. And several hundred lesser folk."
   "Such as Elena?"
   "Yes. And the city of Vorbarr Sultana itself, for that matter. He could threaten to atomize the city, at the end, to get passage off—planet. I've toyed with the idea of dealing. Have him assassinated later. Can't just let him go free, it would be unjust to all those who've died already in loyalty to me. What burning could satisfy those betrayed souls? No."
   "So we're planning various rescue-raid options, for the end. The moment when the shift in men and loyalties reaches critical mass, and Vordarian really starts to panic. Meanwhile we wait. In the end ... I'll sacrifice hostages before I'll let Vordarian win." His unseeing stare was black, now.
   "Even Kareen?" All the hostages? Even the tiniest?
   "Even Kareen. She is Vor. She understands."
   "The surest proof I am not Vor," said Cordelia glumly. "I don't understand any of this ... stylized madness. I think you should all be in therapy, every last one of you."
   He smiled slightly. "Do you think Beta Colony could be persuaded to send us a battalion of psychiatrists as humanitarian aid? The one you had that last argument with, perhaps?"
   Cordelia snorted. Well, Barrayaran history did have a sort of weird dramatic beauty, in the abstract, at a distance. A passion play. It was close-up that the stupidity of it all became more palpable, dissolving like a mosaic into meaningless squares.
   Cordelia hesitated, then asked, "Are we playing the hostage game?" She was not sure she wanted to hear the answer.
   Vorkosigan shook his head. "No. That's been my toughest argument, all week, to look men in the eye who have wives and children up in the capital, and say No." He arranged his cutlery neatly on his tray, in its original pattern, and added in a meditative tone, "But they aren't looking widely enough. This is not, so far, a revolution, merely a palace coup. The population is inert, or rather, lying low, except for some informers. Vordarian is making his appeals to the elite conservatives, old Vor, and the military. The Count can't count. The new technoculture is producing plebe progressives as fast as our schools can crank them out. They are the majority of the future. I wish to give them some method besides colored armbands to distinguish the good guys from the bad guys. Moral suasion is a more powerful force than Vordarian suspects. What old Earth general said that the moral is to the physical as three to one? Oh, Napoleon, that was it. Too bad he didn't follow his own advice. I'd put it as five to one, for this particular war."
   "But do your powers balance? What about the physical?" Vorkosigan shrugged. "We each have access to enough weapons to lay Barrayar waste. Raw power is not really the issue. But my legitimacy is an enormous advantage, as long as weapons must be manned. Hence Vordarian's attempts to undercut that legitimacy with his accusations about my doing away with Gregor. I propose to catch him in his lie."
   Cordelia shivered. "You know, I don't think I would care to be on Vordarian's side."
   "Oh, there are still a few ways he could win. My death is entailed in all of them. Without me as a focus, the only Regent annointed by the late Ezar, what's to choose? Vordarian's claim is then as good as anyone's. If he killed me, and got possession of Gregor, or vice versa, he could conceivably consolidate from there. Till the next coup, and train of revolts and vengeance-killings rebounding into the indefinite future ..." His eyes narrowed, as he contemplated this dark vision. "That's my worst nightmare. That this war won't stop if we lose, till another Dorca Vorbarra the Just arises to put an end to another Bloody Century. God knows when. Frankly, I don't see a man of that calibre among my generation." Check your mirror, thought Cordelia somberly.
   "Ah, so that's why you wanted me to see the doctor first," Cordelia teased Aral that night. The doctor, once Cordelia had adjusted a few of his confused assumptions, had examined her meticulously, changed his prescription from exercise to rest, and cleared her to resume marital relations, with caution. Aral merely grinned, and made love to her as if she were spun glass. His own recovery from the soltoxin was nearly complete, she judged from this. He slept like a rock, only warmer, till the comconsole woke them at dawn. There must have been some military conspiracy at work, for it not to have lit up before then. Cordelia pictured some understaffer confiding to Kou, "Yeah, let's let the Old Man get laid, maybe he'll mellow out. ..."
   Still, the miserable fatigue-fog lifted faster this time. Within a day, with Droushnakovi for escort, Cordelia was up and exploring her new surroundings.
   She ran across Bothari in the base gymnasium. Count Piotr had not yet returned, so once he'd debriefed to Aral Bothari had no duties either. "Got to keep in training," he told her shortly.
   "You been sleeping?"
   "Not much," he said, and resumed his running. Compulsively, too long, far past the optimum effect-for-time-spent trade-off. He sweated to fill time and kill thought, and Cordelia silently wished him luck.
   She caught up on the details of the war from Aral and Kou and the controlled newsvids. What counts were allied, who was known hostage and where, what units were deployed on each side and which were ripped apart and scattered to both; where fighting had taken place, what damages, which commanders had renewed oath ... knowledge without power. No more, she judged, than her intellectualized version of Bothari's endless running; and even less useful for distracting her mind from unbroken concentration on all the horrors and disasters, past or impending, that she could presently do nothing about.
   She preferred her military history with more temporal displacement. A century or two in the past, say. She imagined some cool future scholar looking through a time-telescope at her, and gave him a mental rude gesture. Anyway, she now realized, the military histories she'd read had left out the most important part; they never told what happened to people's babies.
   No—they were all babies, out there. Every mother's son in a black uniform. One of Aral's reminiscences floated up in her memory, velvet voice rumbling, "It was about that time that soldiers started looking like children to me. ..." She pushed away from the vidconsole, and went to search the bathroom for medication for pain.
   On the third day she passed Lieutenant Koudelka in a corridor, stumping along at a near run, his face flushed with excitement.
   "What's up, Kou?"
   "Illyan's here. And he's brought Kanzian with him!"
   Cordelia followed him to a briefing room. Droushnakovi had to lengthen even her long stride to keep up. Aral, flanked by two staffers, sat with his hands clasped on the table before him, listening with utmost attention. Commander Illyan sat on the edge of the table, swinging one leg in rhythm to his voice. A bandage on his left arm was stained with yellow seepage. He was pale and dirty, but his eyes shone in triumph, gilded with a touch of fever. He wore civilian gear that looked as if it had been stolen out of someone's laundry, and then rolled downhill in.
   An older man was sitting beside Illyan—a staffer handed the man a drink, which Cordelia recognized as a potassium-salts-laced fruit-flavored pick-me-up for the metabolically depleted. He tasted it dutifully, and made a face, looking as if he would have preferred some more old-fashioned revivifier such as brandy. Overweight and undertall, greying where he was not balding, Admiral Kanzian was not a very martial-looking man. He looked grandfatherly—though only if one's grandfather was a research professor. His face was held together with an intensity of intellect that seemed to give the term "military science" real clout. Cordelia had met him in uniform; his air of quiet authority seemed unaffected by civilian shirt and slacks that might have come from the same laundry basket as Illyan's.
   Illyan was saying, "—and then we spent the next night in the cellar. Vordarian's squad came back the next morning, but—Milady!"
   His grin of greeting was blunted by a flash of guilt, as he glanced to and away from her waist. She'd rather he kept piffling on, excited, about his adventures, but her arrival seemed to deflate him, ghost of his most notable failure at his banquet of victory.
   "Wonderful to see you both, Simon, Admiral." They exchanged nods; Kanzian made to rise, but was unanimously waved back to his seat, which made his lip twist in bemusement. Aral signed her to sit next to him.
   Illyan continued in a more clipped fashion. His past two weeks of hide-and-seek with Vordarian's forces seemed to parallel Cordelia's, though in the far more complex setting of the seized capital. But Cordelia recognized the familiar terrors under his plain words. He brought his tale swiftly up to the present moment. Kanzian nodded an occasional confirmation.
   "Well done, Simon," said Vorkosigan when Illyan concluded. He nodded toward Kanzian. "Extremely well done."
   Illyan smiled. "Thought you'd like it, sir."
   Vorkosigan turned to Kanzian. "As soon as you feel able, I would like to brief you in the tac room, sir."
   "Thank you, my lord. I've been out of communications—except for Vordarian's newscasts—since I escaped Headquarters. Though there was much to be deduced from what we did see. By the way, I commend your strategy of restraint. Good so far. But you're close to its limits."
   "So I've sensed, sir."
   "What's Jolly Nolly doing at Jumppoint Station One?"
   "Not answering his tightbeam. Last week his understaffers were offering an amazing array of excuses, but their ingenuity finally dried up."
   "Ha. I can just picture it. His colitis must be in wonderful form. I'll bet not all of those 'indisposeds' were lies. I think I should begin with a private chat with Admiral Knollys, just the two of us."
   "I would appreciate that, sir."
   "We will discuss the inevitabilities of time. And the defects of a potential commander who bases an entire strategy on an assassination he then does not succeed in carrying out." Kanzian frowned judgmentally. "Not well constructed, to let your whole war turn on one event. Vordarian always did have a tendency to pop off."
   Cordelia, aside, caught Illyan's eye. "Simon. Did you pick up any information at all, while you were trapped in Vorbarr Sultana, about the Imperial Military Hospital? Vaagen and Henri's lab?" My baby?
   Regretfully, he shook his head. "No, Milady." Illyan glanced in turn at Vorkosigan. "My lord, is it true about Captain Negri's death? We'd only had it from rumor, and Vordarian's propaganda broadcasts. Thought it might have been a he."
   "Negri is dead. Unfortunately." Vorkosigan grimaced. Illyan sat upright in alarm. "And the Emperor, too?"
   "Gregor is safe and well."
   Illyan slumped again. "Thank God. Where?"
   "Elsewhere," said Vorkosigan dryly.
   "Oh. Quite, sir. Beg pardon."
   "As soon as you've hit sickbay and the showers, Simon, I have some housecleaning chores for you," Vorkosigan continued. "I want to know just exactly how ImpSec was blindsided by Vordarian's coup. I have no wish to malign the dead—and God knows the man paid for his mistakes—but Negri's old personal system for running ImpSec, with all his little secret compartments shared only with Ezar, has to be taken completely apart. Every component, every man re-examined, before it's all put back together. That will be your first job as the new Chief of Imperial Security. Captain Illyan."
   Illyan's face went from pale-tired to green-white. "Sir—you want me to step into Negri's shoes?"
   "Shake them out, first," Vorkosigan advised dryly. "And with dispatch, if you please. I cannot produce the Emperor until ImpSec is again fit to guard him."
   "Yes, sir." Illyan's voice was thin with his staggerment.
   Kanzian levered out of his seat, shrugging off the help of an anxious staff officer. Aral squeezed Cordelia's hand under the table, and rose to accompany the nucleus of his new General Staff. As they all exited, Kou grinned over his shoulder at Cordelia and whispered, "Things are looking up, eh?"
   She smiled bleakly back at him. Vorkosigan's words echoed in her head. When the shift in men and loyalties reaches the critical point, and Vordarian starts to panic ...
   The trickle of refugees appearing at Tanery Base became a steady stream, as the week wore on. The most spectacular after Kanzian was the breakout of Prime Minister Vortala from Vordarian's house arrest. He arrived with several wounded liveried men and a hair-raising tale of bribery, trickery, chase, and exchange-of-fire. Two lesser Imperial Ministers also turned up, one on foot. Morale rose with each notable addition; the base's atmosphere grew electric with anticipation of action. The question exchanged by staffers in corridors became not, "Who's come in?" but "Who's come in this morning?" Cordelia tried to appear cheered by it all, hugging her dread to her private mind. Vorkosigan grew both pleased and tenser.
   As instructed, Cordelia rested a lot in Vorkosigan's quarters. All too soon she felt re-energized enough to start beating on the walls. She then tried varying the prescription with a few experimental push-ups and knee-bends (but not sit-ups). She was just contemplating the merits and drawbacks of going to join Bothari in the gym, when the comconsole chimed.
   Koudelka's apprehensive face appeared over the vid plate. "Milady, m'lord requests you join him now in Briefing Room Seven. Something's come in he wants you to see."
   Cordelia's stomach twisted. "All right. On my way."
   An array of men were waiting in Briefing Room Seven, clustered around a vidconsole in low-voiced debate. Staffers, Kanzian, Minister Vortala himself. Vorkosigan looked up and gave her a brief, unfelt smile.
   "Cordelia. I'd like your opinion on something that's come in."
   Flattering, but, "What sort of something?"
   "Vordarian's latest special report has a new twist. Kou, replay the vid, please."
   Vordarian's propaganda broadcasts from the capital were mostly subjects for derision, among Vorkosigan's men. Their faces looked rather more serious, this time.
   Vordarian appeared in what was recognizably one of the state rooms of the Imperial Residence, the formal and serene Blue Room. Ezar Vorbarra used to make his rare public pronouncements from that background. Vorkosigan frowned.
   Vordarian, in full dress greens, was seated on an ivory silk sofa, Princess Kareen at his side. Her dark hair was pulled back severely from her oval face with jeweled combs. She wore a striking black gown, somber and formal.
   Vordarian spoke only a few earnest words, invoking the viewers' attention. Then the vid cut away to the great chamber of the Council of Counts at Vorhartung Castle. The vid zoomed in on the Lord Guardian of the Speaker's circle, dressed in his full regalia. The vid did not show what, besides its own pickup, was aimed at the Lord Guardian's head, but something in his repeated looks, just to one side instead of directly at the focus, made Cordelia place a lethally armed man, or maybe a squad, in that unseen position.
   The Lord Guardian raised a plastic flimsy, and began, "I quote—due to the—"
   "Ah, slick!" murmured Vortala, and Koudelka paused the vid to say, "I beg your pardon, Minister?"
   "The I-quote—he's just legally distanced himself from the words about to come off that flimsy and out his mouth. Didn't catch that, the first time. Good, Georgos, good," Vortala addressed the paralyzed figure. "Go on, Lieutenant, I didn't mean to interrupt."
   The holovid image continued, "—vile murder of the child—Emperor Gregor Vorbarra, and betrayal of his sacred oaths by the would-be usurper Vorkosigan, the Council of Counts declares the false Regent faithless, outcast, stripped of powers and outlawed. This day the Council of Counts confirms Commodore Count Vidal Vordarian as Prime Minister and acting Regent for Dowager-Princess Kareen Vorbarra, forming an emergency caretaker government until such time as a new heir may be found and confirmed by the Council of Counts and Council of Ministers in full council assembled."
   He continued with further legalities, as the vid panned the chamber. "Freeze it, Koudelka," Vortala demanded. His lips moved as he counted. "Ha! Not even one-third present. He doesn't have near a quorum. Who does he think he's fooling?"
   "Desperate man, desperate measures," Kanzian murmured as the holo continued at Koudelka's touch.
   "Watch Kareen," Vorkosigan said to Cordelia.
   The holo cut back to Vordarian and the Princess. Vordarian went on in such mealy terms, it took Cordelia a moment to unravel the fact that in the phrase "personal protector," Vordarian was announcing an engagement of marriage. His hand closed earnestly over Kareen's, though his eye contact was reserved for the holovid. Kareen lifted her hand to receive a ring without changing her calm expression in the slightest. The vid closed with solemn music. The End. They were thankfully spared Betan-style post-mortem commentary; apparently, nobody ever asked the Barrayaran-in-the-street much of anything, at least until major rioting raised the volume to a level no one dared ignore.
   "How would you analyze Kareen's reaction?" Aral asked Cordelia.
   Cordelia's brows rose. "What reaction? How, analyze? She never said a word!"
   "Just so. Does she looked drugged to you? Or under compulsion? Or was that real assent? Is she duped by Vordarian's propaganda, or what?" Frustrated, Vorkosigan eyed the space where the woman's image had lately been. "She's always been reserved, but that was the most unreadable performance I've ever seen."
   "Run it again, Kou," said Cordelia. She had him stop at the best views of Kareen. She studied the frozen face, scarcely less animate than when the holo was running.
   "She doesn't look woozy or sedated. And her eyes don't look aside the way the Speakers did."
   "Nobody threatening her with a weapon?" Vortala guessed.
   "Or perhaps she simply doesn't care," Cordelia suggested grimly.
   "Assent, or compulsion?" Vorkosigan repeated.
   "Maybe neither. She's been dealing with this sort of nonsense all her adult life ... what do you expect of her? She survived three years of marriage with Serg, before Ezar sheltered her. She must be a bona fide expert in guessing what not to say and when not to say it."
   "But to publicly submit to Vordarian—if she thinks he's responsible for Gregor's death ..."
   "Yes, what does she believe? If she truly thinks her son is dead—even if she doesn't believe you killed him—then all she has left to look out for is her own survival. Why risk that survival for some dramatic futility, if it won't help Gregor? What does she owe you, owe us, after all? We've all failed her, as far as she knows."
   Vorkosigan winced.
   Cordelia went on, "Vordarian's been controlling her access to information, surely. She may even be convinced he's winning. She's a survivor; she's survived Serg and Ezar, so far. Maybe she means to survive you and Vordarian both. Maybe the only revenge she thinks she'll ever get is to live long enough to spit on all your graves."
   One of the staff officers muttered, "But she's Vor. She should have defied him."
   Cordelia favored him with a glittery grin. "Oh, but you never know what any Barrayaran woman thinks by what she says in front of Barrayaran men. Honesty is not exactly rewarded, you know."
   The staffer gave her an unsettled look. Drou smiled sourly. Vorkosigan blew out his breath. Koudelka blinked.
   "So, Vordarian gets tired of waiting and appoints himself Regent," Vortala murmured.
   "And Prime Minister," Vorkosigan pointed out in return.
   "Indeed, he swells."
   "Why not go straight for the Imperium?" asked the staff officer.
   "Testing the waters," said Kanzian.
   "It's coming, later in the script," opined Vortala.
   "Or maybe sooner, if we force his hand a bit," suggested Kanzian. "The last and fatal step. We must consider how to rattle him just a little more."
   "Not much longer," Vorkosigan said firmly.
   The ghostly mask of Kareen's face hung before Cordelia's mind's eye all that day, and returned at her waking the next morning. What did Kareen think? What did Kareen feel, for that matter? Perhaps she was as numb as the evidence suggested. Perhaps she was biding her time. Perhaps she was all for Vordarian. If I knew what she believed, I'd know what she was doing. If I knew what she was doing, I'd know what she believed.
   Too many unknowns in this equation. If I were Kareen ... Was this a valid analogy? Could Cordelia reason from herself to another? Could anyone? They had likenesses, Kareen and herself, both women, near in age, mothers of endangered sons... . Cordelia took Gregor's shoe from her meager pile of mountain souvenirs, and turned it in her hand. Mama grabbed me back, but my shoe came off in her hand. I should have fastened it tighter... . Maybe she should trust her own judgment. Maybe she knew exactly what Kareen was thinking.
   When the comconsole chimed, close to the time of yesterday's call, Cordelia shot to answer it. A new broadcast from the capital, new evidence, something to break that circle of unreason? But the face that materialized over the vidplate was not Koudelka, but a stranger with Intelligence insignia on his collar.
   "Lady Vorkosigan?" he began deferentially.
   "Yes?"
   "I'm Major Sircoj, duty—officer at the main portal. It's my job to screen everyone new reporting in, men who've left traitor-units and so on, and to collect any new intelligence they've brought with them. We had a man turn up half an hour ago who says he escaped the capital, who refuses to voluntarily debrief. We've confirmed his claim that he's had anti-nterrogation conditioning—if we try to fast-penta him, it'll kill him. He keeps asking—actually, insisting—to speak with you. He could be an assassin."
   Cordelia's heart pounded. She leaned into the holovid as if she might climb through it. "Did he bring anything with him?" she demanded breathlessly. "Like a canister, about half a meter high—lots of blinking lights, and big red letters on top that say This End Up? Looks mysterious as hell, guaranteed to send any security guard into fits—his name, Major!"
   "He brought nothing but the clothes he's standing in. He's not in good shape. His name is Vaagen, Captain Vaagen."
   "I'll be right there."
   "No, Milady! The man is practically raving. Could be dangerous, I can't let you—"
   She left him talking to an empty room. Droushnakovi had to break into a run to catch up with her. Cordelia made it to the main portal Security offices in less than seven minutes, and paused in the corridor to catch her breath. To catch her soul, that wanted to fly out her mouth. Calm. Calm. Raving apparently cut no ice with Sircoj.
   She lifted her chin and entered the office. "Tell Major Sircoj that Lady Vorkosigan is here to see him," she told the clerk, who raised impressed brows and obediently bent to his comconsole.
   Sircoj appeared in a few endless minutes—through that door, Cordelia mentally marked his route. "I must see Captain Vaagen."
   "Milady, he could be dangerous," Sircoj began exactly where she'd cut him off before. "He could be programmed in some unexpected way."
   Cordelia considered unexpectedly grabbing Sircoj by the throat and attempting to squeeze reason into him. Impractical. She took a deep breath. "What will you let me do? Can I at least see him on vid?"
   Sircoj looked thoughtful. "That might be all right. A cross-check on our identification, and we can record. Very well."
   He took her into another room, and keyed up a monitor viewer. Her breath blew out with a small moan.
   Vaagen was alone in a holding room, pacing from wall to wall. He wore green uniform trousers and a brown-stained white shirt. He was terribly changed from the trim and energetic scientist she'd last seen in his lab at Imp Mil. Both his eyes were ringed with red-purple blotches, one lid swollen nearly shut; the slit glowed a frightening blood-scarlet. He moved bent-over. Bathless, sleepless, swollen lips ...
   "You get a medtech for that man!" Cordelia realized she'd yelled when Sircoj jumped.
   "He's been triaged. His condition is not life—threatening. We can start treating him just as soon as he's security-cleared," said Sircoj doggedly.
   "Then you put him on-line with me," Cordelia said through set teeth. "Drou, go back to the office, call Aral. Tell him what's going on."
   Sircoj looked worried at this, but stuck valiantly to his procedures. More endless seconds, while someone went back to the prison-area and took Vaagen to a comconsole.
   His face came up over the plate at last; Cordelia could see her own face reflected in the passionate intensity in his. Connected at last.
   "Vaagen! What happened?"
   "Milady!" His hands clenched, trembling, as he leaned on them toward the vid pickup. "The idiots, the morons, the ignorant, stupid—" he sputtered into helpless obscenities, then caught his breath and began again, quickly, concisely, as if her image might be snatched away again at any moment.
   "We thought we might be all right at first, after the first two days' fighting trailed off. We hid the replicator at ImpMil, but nobody came. We lay low, and took turns sleeping in the lab. Then Henri managed to smuggle his wife out of town, and we both stayed. We tried to continue the treatments in secret. Thought we might wait it out, wait till rescue. Things had to break, one way or another... .
   "We'd almost stopped expecting them, but they came. Last—yesterday." He rubbed a hand through his hair as if seeking some connection between real-time and nightmare-time, where clocks ran crazy. "Vordarian's squad. Came looking for the replicator. We locked the lab, they broke in. Demanded it. We refused, refused to talk, they couldn't fast-penta either of us. So they beat us up. Beat him to death, like street scum, like he was nobody, all that intelligence, all that education, all that promise wasted, dropped by some mumbling moron swinging a gun butt..." Tears were running down his face.
   Cordelia stood white and stricken; bad, bad attack of defective deja vu. She'd played the lab scene in her head already a thousand times, but she'd never seen Dr. Henri dead on the floor, nor Vaagen beaten senseless.
   "Then they ripped into the lab. Everything, all the treatment records. All Henri's work on burns, gone. They didn't have to do that. All gone for nothing!" His voice cracked, hoarse with fury.
   "Did they ... find the replicator? Dump it out?" She could see it; she had seen it over and over, spilling... .
   "They found it, finally. But then they took it. And then let me go." He shook his head from side to side.
   "Took it," she repeated stupidly. Why? What sense, to take the technology and not the techs? "And let you go. To run to us, I suppose. To give us the word."
   "You have it, Milady."
   "Where, do you suppose? Where did they take it?"
   Vorkosigan's voice spoke beside her. "The Imperial Residence, most likely. All the best hostages are being kept there. I'll put Intelligence right on it." He stood, feet planted, grey-faced. "It seems we're not the only side turning up the pressure."

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

   Within two minutes of Vorkosigan's arrival at main portal Security, Captain Vaagen was flat on a float pallet and on his way to the infirmary, with the top trauma doctor on the base being paged for rendezvous. Cordelia reflected bitterly on the nature of chain of command; all truth and reason and urgent need were not enough, apparently, to lend causal power to one outside that chain.
   Further interrogation of the scientist had to wait on his medical treatment. Vorkosigan used the time to put Illyan and his department on the new problem. Cordelia used the time to pace in circles in the infirmary's waiting area. Droushnakovi watched her in silent worry, not so foolish as to offer up reassurances they both knew to be empty.
   At last the trauma man emerged from surgery to announce Vaagen conscious and oriented enough for a brief—he emphasized the brief—questioning. Aral came, trailing Koudelka and Illyan, and they all trooped in to find Vaagen in an infirmary bed, with his eye patched and an IV running fluids and meds.
   Vaagen's hoarse and weary voice added a few horrific details, but nothing to change the word-picture he'd first given Cordelia.
   Illyan listened with steady attention. "Our people at the Residence confirm," he reported when Vaagen ran down, depressed whisper trailing to silence. "The replicator was apparently brought in yesterday, and has been placed in the most heavily guarded wing, near Princess Kareen's quarters. Our loyalists don't know what it is, they think it's some kind of a device, maybe a bomb to take out the Residence and everyone in it in the final battle."
   Vaagen snorted, coughed, and winced.
   "Do they have anyone tending it?" Cordelia asked the question no one else had, so far. "A doctor, a medtech, anyone?"
   Illyan frowned. "I don't know, Milady. I can try to find out, but every extra communication endangers our people up there."
   "Mm."
   "The treatment's interrupted anyway," Vaagen muttered. His hand fiddled with the edge of his sheet. "Bitched to hell."
   "I realize you've lost your notes, but could you ... reconstruct your work?" Cordelia asked diffidently. "If you got the replicator back, that is. Take up where you left off."
   "It wouldn't be where we left off, by the time we got it back. And it wasn't all in my head. Some of it was in Henri's."
   Cordelia took a deep breath. "As I recall, these Escobaran portable replicators run on a two-week service cycle. When did you last recharge the power, and change the filters and add nutrients?"
   "Power cell's good for months," Vaagen corrected. "Filters are more of a problem. But the nutrient solution will be the first limiting factor it'll hit. At its hyped-up metabolic rate, the fetus would starve a couple of days before the system choked on its waste. Breakdown products might overload the filters pretty soon after lean-tissue metabolism began, though."
   She avoided Aral's gaze and looked straight at Vaagen, who looked straight back with his one good eye, more than physical pain in his face. "And when did you and Henri last service the replicator?"
   "The fourteenth."
   "Less than six days left," Cordelia whispered, appalled.
   "About ... about that. What day is this?" Vaagen looked around in an uncharacteristic uncertainty that hurt Cordelia's heart to watch.
   "The time limit applies only if it's not being properly taken care of," Aral put in. "The Residence physician, Kareen and Gregor's man—wouldn't he realize something was needed?"
   "Sir," Illyan said, "the Princess's physician was reported killed in the first day's fighting at the Residence. Two cross-confirmations—I have to consider it certain."
   "They could let Miles die out of sheer ignorance up there," Cordelia realized in dismay. "As well as on purpose." Even one of their own secret loyalists, under the heroic impression he was defusing a bomb, could be a menace to her child.
   Vaagen twisted in his sheets. Aral caught Cordelias eye, and jerked his head toward the door. "Thank you, Captain Vaagen. You have done us extraordinary service. Beyond duty."
   "Screw duty," Vaagen muttered. "Bitched to hell ... damned ignorant goons ..."
   They withdrew, to leave Vaagen to his unrestful recovery. Vorkosigan dispatched Illyan to his multiplied duties.
   Cordelia faced Aral. "Now what?"
   His lips were a flat, hard line, his eyes half-absent with calculation, the same calculations she was running, Cordelia guessed, complicated by a thousand added factors she could only imagine. He said slowly, "Nothing's changed, really. From before."
   "It is changed. Whatever the difference there is between being in hiding, and being a prisoner. But why did Vordarian wait till now for this capture? If he was ignorant of Miles's existence before this, who told him of it? Kareen, maybe, when she decided to cooperate?"
   Droushnakovi looked sick at this suggestion.
   Aral said, "Maybe Vordarian's playing with us. Maybe he was always keeping the replicator in reserve, till he most needed a new lever."
   "Our son. In reserve," Cordelia corrected. She stared into those half-there grey eyes, willing See me, Aral! "We have to talk about this." She towed him down the corridor to the nearest private room, a doctors' conference chamber, and turned up the lights. Obediently, he seated himself at the table, Kou at his elbow, and waited for her. She sat down opposite him. We've always sat on the same side, before... . Drou stood behind her.
   Aral watched her warily. "Yes, Cordelia?"
   "What's going on in your head?" she demanded. "Where are we, in this?"
   "I ... regret. In hindsight. Regret not sending a raid earlier. The Residence is a far more difficult fortress to penetrate right now than the military hospital, dangerous as a raid on ImpMil would have been. And yet... I could not change that choice. When men on my own staff were asked to wait and sweat, I could not risk men and expend resources for my private benefit. Miles's ... position, gave me the power to demand their loyalty in the face of Vordarian's pressure. They knew I asked no risk of them and theirs I was unwilling to share myself."
   "But now the situation's changed," Cordelia pointed out. "Now you aren't sharing the same risks. Their relatives have all the time there is. Miles has only six days, minus the time we spend arguing." She could feel that clock ticking, in her head.
   He said nothing.
   "Aral ... in all our time here, what favor have I ever asked of you, of your official powers?"
   A sad half-smile quirked across his lips, and vanished. His eyes were wholly on her, now. "Nothing," he whispered. They both sat tensely, leaning toward the other, his elbows planted and hands clasped near his chin, her hands out flat before her, controlled.
   "I'm asking now."
   "Now," he said after a long hesitation, "is an extremely delicate time, in the overall strategic situation. We are right now engaged in secret negotiations with two of Vordarian's top commanders to sell him out. The space forces are about to commit. We are on the verge of being able to shut Vordarian down without a major set-battle."
   Cordelia's thought was diverted just long enough to wonder how many of Vorkosigan's commanders were secretly negotiating right now to sell them out. Time would tell. Time.
   Vorkosigan continued, "If—if we bring this negotiation off as I wish, we will be in a position to rescue most of the hostages in one major surprise raid, from a direction Vordarian does not expect."
   "I'm not asking for a big raid."
   "No. But I'm telling you that a small raid, particularly if things went wrong, might seriously interfere with the success of the larger, later one."
   "Might."
   "Might." He tilted his head in concession to the uncertainty.
   "Time?"
   "About ten days."
   "Not good enough."
   "No. I will try to speed things up. But you understand—if I botch this chance, this timing, several thousand men could pay for my mistakes with their lives."
   She understood clearly. "All right. Suppose we leave the armies of Barrayar out of this for the moment. Let me go. With maybe a liveried man or two, and pinpoint—downright hypodermic—secrecy. A totally private effort."
   His hands slapped to the table, and he sputtered, "No! God, Cordelia!"
   "Do you doubt my competence?" she asked dangerously. I sure do. Now was not the moment to admit this, however. "Is that 'Dear Captain' just a pet name for a pet, or did you mean it?"
   "I have seen you do extraordinary things—"
   You've also seen me fall flat on my face, so?
   "—but you are not expendable. God. That really would make me terminally crazy. To wait, not knowing ..."
   "You ask that of me. To wait, unknowing. You ask it every day."
   "You are stronger than I. You are strong beyond reason."
   "Flattering. Not convincing."
   His thought circled hers; she could see it in his knife-keen eyes. "No. No haring off on your own. I forbid it, Cordelia. Flat, absolutely. Put it right out of your mind. I cannot risk you both."
   "You do. In this."
   His jaw clamped; his head lowered. Message received and understood. Koudelka, sitting worriedly beside him, glanced back and forth between the two of them in consternation. Cordelia could sense the pressure of Drou's hand, white-tight on the back of her chair.
   Vorkosigan looked like something being ground between two great stones; she had no desire to see him smeared to powder. In a moment, he would demand her word to confine herself to Base, to dare no risk.
   She opened her hand, curving up on the tabletop. "I would choose differently. But no one appointed me Regent of Barrayar."
   The tension ran out of him with a sigh. "Insufficient imagination. A common failing, among Barrayarans, my love."
   Returning to Aral's quarters, Cordelia found Count Piotr in the corridor, just turning away from their door. He was quite changed from the exhausted wild man who'd left her on a mountain trail. Now he was dressed in the sort of quietly upper-class clothes favored by retired Vor lords and senior Imperial ministers; neat trousers, polished half-boots, an elaborate tunic. Bothari loomed at his shoulder, once again costumed in his formal brown-and-silver livery. Bothari carried a thick coat folded over his arm, by which Cordelia deduced Piotr had just blown in from his diplomatic mission to some fellow District count to the wintery north of Vordarian's holdings. Vorkosigan's people certainly seemed to be able to move at will now, outside the heartlands held by Vordarian.
   "Ah. Cordelia." Piotr gave her a formal, cautious nod; not reopening hostilities here. That was fine with Cordelia. She was not sure she had any will to fight left in her gnawed-out heart.
   "Good day, sir. Was your trip a success?"
   "Indeed it was. Where is Aral?"
   "Gone to Sector Intelligence, I believe, to consult with Illyan about the most recent reports from Vorbarr Sultana."
   "Ah? What's happening?"
   "Captain Vaagen turned up at our door. He'd been beaten half-senseless, but he still somehow made it from the capital—it seems Vordarian finally woke up to the fact that he had another hostage. His squad looted Miles's replicator from ImpMil, and took it back to the Imperial Residence. I expect we'll hear more from him soon about it, but he's doubtless waited to give us the full pleasure of Captain Vaagen's tale, first."
   Piotr threw back his head in a sharp, bitter laugh. "Now there's an empty threat."
   Cordelia unclenched her jaw long enough to say, "What do you mean, sir?" She knew perfectly well what he meant, but she wanted to see him run to his limit. All the way, damn you; spit it all out.
   His lips twitched, half frown, half smile. "I mean Vordarian inadvertently offers House Vorkosigan a service. I'm sure he doesn't realize it."
   You wouldn't say that if Aral were standing here, old man. Did you set this up? God, she couldn't say that to him—"Did you set this up?" Cordelia demanded tightly.
   Piotr's head jerked back. "I don't deal with traitors!"
   "He's of your Old Vor party. Your true allegiance. You always said Aral was too damned progressive."
   "You dare accuse me—!" His outrage edged into plain rage.
   Her rage was shadowing her vision with red. "I know you are an attempted murderer, why not an attempted traitor, too? I can only hope your incompetence holds good."
   His voice was breathy with fury. "Too far!"
   "No, old man. Not nearly far enough."
   Drou looked absolutely terrorized. Bothari's face was a stony blank. Piotr's hand twitched, as if he wanted to strike her. Bothari watched that hand, his eyes glittering oddly, shifting.
   "While dumping that mutant out of its can is the best favor Vidal Vordarian could do me, I am hardly likely to let him know it," Piotr bit out. "It will be far more amusing to watch him try to play a joker as if it were an ace, and then wonder what went wrong. Aral knows—I imagine he's relieved as hell, to have Vordarian do his job for him. Or have you bewitched him into planning something spectacularly stupid?"
   "Aral's doing nothing."
   "Oh, good boy. I was wondering if you'd stolen his spine permanently. He is Barrayaran after all."
   "So it seems," she said woodenly. She was shaking. Piotr was not in much better case.
   "This is a side-issue," he said, as much to himself as her, trying to regain his self-control. "I have major issues to pursue with the Lord Regent. Farewell, Milady." He tilted his head in ironic effort, and turned away.
   "Have a nice day," she snarled to his back, and flung herself through the door into Aral's quarters.
   She paced for twenty minutes, back and forth, before she trusted herself enough to speak even to Drou, who had squeezed into a corner seat as if trying to make herself small.
   "You don't really think Count Piotr is a traitor, do you, Milady?" Droushnakovi asked, when Cordelia's steps finally slowed.
   Cordelia shook her head. "No ... no. I just wanted to hurt him back. This place is getting to me. Has gotten to me." Wearily, she sank into a seat and leaned her head back against the padding. After a silence she added, "Aral's right. I have no right to risk. No, that's not quite correct. I have no right to failure. And I don't trust myself anymore. I don't know what's happened to my edge. Lost it in a strange land." I can't remember. Can't remember how I did it. She and Bothari were twins, right enough, two personalities separately but equally crippled by an overdose of Barrayar.
   "Milady ..." Droushnakovi plucked at her skirts, looking down into her lap. "I was in Imperial Residence Security for three years."
   "Yes ..." Her heart lurched, gulped. As an exercise in self—discipline, Cordelia closed her eyes and did not open them again. "Tell me about that, Drou."
   "Negri trained me himself. Because I was Kareen's body servant, he always said I would be the last barrier between Kareen and Gregor and—and anything that was bad enough to get that far. He showed me everything about the Residence. He used to drill me about it. He showed me things I don't think he showed anybody else. We had five emergency escape routes worked out, in our disaster drills. Two of them were common Security procedure. One of them he showed only to a few top staffers like Illyan. The other two—I don't know that anybody knew about them but Negri and Emperor Ezar. And I'm thinking ..." she moistened her lips, "a secret route out of something ought to be an equally secret route in. Don't you think?"
   "Your reasoning interests me extremely, Drou. As Aral might say. Go on." Cordelia still did not open her eyes.
   "That's about it. If I could somehow get to the Residence, I bet I could get in. If Vordarian's just taken over all the standard Security arrangements and beefed them up."
   "And get back out?"
   "Why not?" Cordelia found she had to remember to breathe. "Who do you work for, Drou?"
   "Captain—" she started to answer, but slowed selfconsciously. "Negri. But he's dead. Commander—Captain Illyan, now, I suppose."
   "Let me rephrase that." Cordelia opened her eyes at last. "Who did you put your life on the line for?"
   "Kareen. And Gregor, of course. They were kind of the same thing."
   "Still are. This mother bets." She caught Drou's blue gaze. "And Kareen gave you to me."
   "To be my mentor. We thought you were a soldier."
   "Never. But that doesn't mean I never fought." Cordelia paused. "What do you want to trade for, Drou? Your life in my hand—I shall not say oath-sworn, that's for those other idiots—for what?"
   "Kareen," Droushnakovi answered steadily. "I've watched them, here, gradually reclassifying her as expendable. Every day for three years, I put my life on the line because I believed that her life was important. You watch someone that closely for that long, you don't have too many illusions about her. Now they seem to think I should just switch off my loyalty, like some guard-machine. There's something wrong with that. I want to—to at least try for Kareen. In exchange for that—whatever you will, Milady."
   "Ah." Cordelia rubbed her lips. "That seems ... equitable. One expendable life for another. Kareen for Miles." She sank down in the chair in deep meditation.
   First you see it. Then you do it. "It's not enough." Cordelia shook her head at last. "We need ... someone who knows the city. Someone with muscle, for backup. A weapons-man, a sleepless eye. I need a friend." The comers of her lips turned up in a very small smile. "Closer than a brother." She rose and walked to the comconsole.
   "You asked to see me, Milady?" said Sergeant Bothari.
   "Yes. Please come in."
   Senior officers' quarters did not intimidate Bothari, but his brow furrowed nonetheless as Cordelia gestured him to a seat. She took Aral's usual spot across the low table from him. Drou sat again in the corner, watching in reserved silence.
   Cordelia regarded Bothari, who regarded her in return. He looked all right physically, though his face was grooved with tension. She sensed, as with a third eye, frustrated energies coursing through his body; arcs of rage, nets of control, a tangled electric knot of dangerous sexuality under it all. Reverberating energies, building up and up without release, in desperate need of ordered action lest they break out wildly on their own. She blinked, and refocused on his less terrifying surface; a tired-looking ugly man in an elegant brown uniform.
   To her surprise, Bothari began. "Milady. Have you heard anything new about Elena?"
   Wondering why I called you here? To her shame, she had almost forgotten Elena. "Nothing new, I'm afraid. She is reported being kept along with Mistress Hysopi in that downtown hotel that Vordarian's Security commandeered when they ran out of cells, with a lot of other second– and third-tier hostages. She hasn't been moved to the Residence or anything." Elena was not, unlike Kareen, in the direct line of Cordelia's secret mission. If he asked, how much dare she promise?
   "I was sorry to hear about your son, Milady."
   "My mutant, as Piotr would say." She watched him; she could read his shoulders and spine and gut better than that blank beaky face.
   "About Count Piotr," he said, and stopped. His hands hooked each other, between his knees, and flexed. "I had thought to speak to the admiral. I hadn't thought to speak to you. I should have thought of you."
   "Always." Now what?
   "Man came up to me yesterday. In the gym. Not in uniform, no rank or nametag. He offered me Elena. Elena's life, if I would assassinate Count Piotr."
   "How tempting," Cordelia choked, before she could stop herself. "What, uh, guarantees did he offer?"
   "That question came to me, pretty shortly. There I would be, in deep shit, maybe executed, and who would care for a, a dead man's bastard then? I figured it for a cheat, just another cheat. I went back to look for him, been on the lookout, but I never spotted him since." He sighed. "It almost seems like a hallucination, now."
   The expression on Drou's face was a study in the deepest unreassurance, but fortunately Bothari was turned away from her and did not notice. Cordelia shot her a small quelling frown.
   "Have you been having hallucinations?" Cordelia asked.
   "I don't think so. Just bad dreams. I try not to sleep."
   "I ... have a dilemma of my own," Cordelia said. "As you heard me tell Piotr."
   "Yes, Milady."
   "Had you heard about the time limit?"
   "Time limit?"
   "If it's not serviced, the replicator will start to fail to support Miles in less than six days. Aral argues that Miles is in no more danger than any of his staffers' families. I disagree."
   "Behind his back, I've heard some say otherwise."
   "Ah?"
   "They say it's a cheat. The admiral's son is some sort of mutant, non-viable, while they risk whole children."
   "I don't think he realizes ... anyone says that."
   "Who would repeat it to his face?"
   "Very few. Maybe not even Illyan." Though Piotr probably wouldn't fail to pass it on, if he picked it up. "Dammit! No one, on either side, would hesitate to dump that replicator." She brooded, and began again. "Sergeant. Who do you work for?"
   "I am oath-sworn Armsman to Count Piotr," Bothari recited the obvious. He was watching her closely now, a weird smile tugging at one corner of his mouth.
   "Let me rephrase that. I know the official penalties for an armsman going AWOL are fearsome. But suppose—"
   "Milady." He held up a hand; she paused in mid-breath. "Do you remember, back on the front lawn at Vorkosigan Surleau when we were loading Negri's body into the lightflyer, when my Lord Regent told me to obey your voice as his own?"
   Cordelias brows went up. "Yes ... ?"
   "He never countermanded that order."
   "Sergeant," she breathed at last, "I'd never have guessed you for a barracks-lawyer."
   His smile grew a millimeter tighter. "Your voice is as the voice of the Emperor himself. Technically."
   "Is it, now," she whispered in delight. Her nails dug into her palms.
   He leaned forward, his hands now held rock-still between his knees. "So, Milady. What were you saying?"
   The motor pool staging bay was an echoing low vault, its shadows slashed by the lights from a glass-walled office. Cordelia stood waiting in the darkened lift tube portal, Drou at her shoulder, and watched through the distant rectangle of glass as Bothari negotiated with the transport officer. General Vorkosigan's Armsman was signing out a vehicle for his oath-lord. The passes and IDs Bothari had been issued apparently worked just fine. The motor pool man fed Bothari's cards to his computer, took Bothari's palm print on his sensor-pad, and dispatched orders with snap and hustle.
   Would this simple plan work? Cordelia wondered desperately. And if it didn't, what alternative had they? Their planned route sketched itself in her mind, red light-lines snaking over a map. Not north toward their goal, but due south first, by groundcar into the next loyal District. Ditch the distinctive government vehicle, take the monorail west to yet another District, then northwest to another; then due east into Count Vorinnis's neutral zone, focus of so much diplomatic attention from both sides. Piotr's comment echoed in her memory, "I swear, Aral, if Vorinnis doesn't quit trying to play both ends against the middle, you ought to hang him higher than Vordarian when this is over." Then into the capital District itself, then, somehow, into the sealed city. A daunting number of kilometers to cover. Three times the distance of the direct route.
   So much time. Her heart swung north like a compass needle.
   The first and last Districts would be the worst. Aral's forces could be almost more inimical to this excursion than Vordarian's. Her head spun with the cumulative impossibility of it all.
   Step by step, she told herself firmly. One step at a time. Just get off Tanery Base; that, they could do. Divide the infinite future into five-minute blocks, and take them one by one.
   There, the first five minutes down already, and a swift and shining general staff car appeared from underground storage. A small victory, in reward for a little patience and daring. What might great patience and daring yet bring?
   Judiciously, Bothari inspected the vehicle, as if in doubt that it was quite fit for his master. The transport officer waited anxiously, and seemed to deflate with relief when the great general's Armsman, after running his hand over the canopy and frowning at some minute speck of dust, gave it a grudging acceptance. Bothari brought the vehicle around to the lift tube portal and parked it, neatly blocking the office's view of the entering passengers.
   Drou bent to pick up their satchel, packed with a very odd variety of clothing including Bothari's and Cordelia's mountain souvenirs, and their thin assortment of weapons. Bothari set the polarization on the rear canopy to mirror-reflection, and raised it.
   "Milady!" Lieutenant Koudelka's anxious voice called from the lift tube entry behind them. "What are you doing?"
   Cordelia's teeth closed on vile words. She converted her savage expression to a light, surprised smile, and turned. "Hello, Kou. What's up?"
   He frowned, looking at her, at Droushnakovi, at the satchel. "I asked first." He was out of breath; he must have been chasing them down for some minutes, after not finding her in Aral's quarters. An ill—timed errand.
   Cordelia kept her smile fixed, as her mind blinked on a vision of a Security team piling out of the lift tube to arrest her, or at least her plans. "We're ... going into town."
   His lips thinned in skepticism. "Oh? Does the Admiral know? Where's Illyan's outer-perimeter team, then?"
   "Gone on ahead," said Cordelia blandly.
   The vague plausibility actually raised a flicker of doubt in his eyes. Alas, only for a moment. "Now, wait just a bloody minute—"
   "Lieutenant," Sergeant Bothari interrupted. "Take a look at this." He gestured toward the rear passenger compartment of the staff car.
   Koudelka leaned to look. "What?" he said impatiently.
   Cordelia winced as Bothari's open hand chopped down across the back of Koudelka's neck, and winced again at the heavy thud of Koudelka's head hitting the far side of the compartment's interior after a powerful boost-assist to neck and belt by Bothari. His swordstick clattered to the pavement.
   "In." Bothari's voice was a strained low growl, accompanied by a quick glance across the bay toward the glass-walled transport office.
   Droushnakovi flung the satchel into the compartment and dove in after Koudelka, shoving his long loose limbs out of the way. Cordelia grabbed up the stick and piled in after. Bothari stood back, saluted, closed the mirrored canopy, and entered the driver's compartment.
   They started smoothly. Cordelia had to control irrational panic as Bothari stopped at the first checkpoint. She could see and hear the guards so clearly, it was difficult to remember they saw only the reflections of their own hard eyes. But apparently General Piotr could indeed pass anywhere at will. How pleasant, to be General Piotr. Though in these trying times, probably not even Piotr could have entered Tanery Base without that rear canopy being opened and scanned. The final gate crew that waved them out was busily engaged in just such an inspection of a large incoming convoy of freight haulers. Their timing was just as Cordelia had planned and prayed.
   Cordelia and Droushnakovi finally got the sprawling Koudelka straightened up between them. His first alarming flaccidity was passing off. He blinked and moaned. Koudelka's head, neck, and upper torso were of the few areas of his body not rewired; Cordelia trusted nothing inorganic was broken.
   Droushnakovi's voice was taut with worry. "What'll we do with him?"
   "We can't dump him out on the road, he'd run back and give the word," said Cordelia. "Yet if we cinched him to a tree out of sight somewhere, there's a chance he might not be found ... we'd better tie him up, he's coming around."
   "I can handle him."
   "He's had enough handling, I'm afraid."
   Droushnakovi managed to immobilize Koudelka's hands with a twisted scarf from the satchel; she was quite good at clever knots.
   "He might prove useful," mused Cordelia.
   "He'll betray us," frowned Droushnakovi.
   "Maybe not. Not once we're in enemy territory. Once the only way out is forward."
   Koudelka's eyes stopped jerking, following some invisible starry blur, and came at last into focus. Both his pupils were still the same size, Cordelia was relieved to note.
   "Milady—Cordelia," he croaked. His hands yanked futilely at the silky bonds. "This is crazy. You'll run right into Vordarian's forces. And then Vordarian will have two handles on the Admiral, instead of just one. And you and Bothari know where the Emperor is!"
   "Was," corrected Cordelia. "A week ago. He's been moved since then, I'm sure. And Aral has demonstrated his capacity to resist Vordarian's leverage, I think. Don't underestimate him."
   "Sergeant Bothari!" Koudelka leaned forward, appealing into the intercom. The front canopy was also silvered, now.
   "Yes, Lieutenant?" Bothari's bass monotone returned.
   "I order you to turn this vehicle around."
   A slight pause. "I'm not in the Imperial Service anymore, sir. Retired."
   "Piotr didn't order this! You're Count Piotr's man."
   A longer pause; a lower tone. "No. I am Lady Vorkosigan's dog."
   "You're off your meds!"
   How such could travel over a purely audio link Cordelia was not sure, but a canine grin hung in the air before them.
   "Come on, Kou," Cordelia coaxed. "Back me. Come for luck. Come for life. Come for the adrenaline rush."
   Droushnakovi leaned over, a sharp smile on her lips, to breathe in Koudelka's other ear, "Look at it this way, Kou. Who else is ever going to give you a chance at field combat?"
   His eyes shifted, right and left, between his two captors. The pitch of the groundcar's power—whine rose, as they arrowed into the growing twilight.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

   Illegal vegetables. Cordelia sat in bemused contemplation between sacks of cauliflower and boxes of cultivated brillberries as the creaking hovertruck coughed along. Southern vegetables, that flowed toward Vorbarr Sultana on a covert route just like hers. She was half-certain that under that pile were a few sacks of the same green cabbages she'd traveled with two or three weeks ago, migrating according to the strange economic pressures of the war.
   The Districts controlled by Vordarian were now under strict interdiction by the Districts loyal to Vorkosigan. Though starvation was still a long way off, food prices in the capital of Vorbarr Sultana had skyrocketed, in the face of hoarding and the coming winter. So poor men were inspired to take chances. And a poor man already taking a chance was not averse to adding a few unlisted passengers to his load, for a bribe.
   It was Koudelka who'd generated the scheme, abandoning his urgent disapproval, drawn in to their strategizing almost despite himself. It was Koudelka who'd found the produce wholesale warehouses in the town in Vorinnis's District, and cruised the loading docks for independents striking out with their loads. Though it was Bothari who'd ruled the size of the bribe, pitifully small to Cordelia's mind, but just right for the parts they now played of desperate countryfolk.
   "My father was a grocer," Koudelka had explained stiffly, when selling his scheme to them. "I know what I'm doing."
   Cordelia had puzzled for a moment what his wary glance at Droushnakovi meant, till she recalled Drou's father was a soldier. Kou had talked of his sister and widowed mother, but it was not till that moment that Cordelia realized Kou had edited his father from his reminiscences out of social embarrassment, not any lack of love between them. Koudelka had vetoed the choice of a meat truck for transport: "It's more likely to be stopped by Vordarian's guards," he'd explained, "so they can shake down the driver for steaks." Cordelia wasn't sure if he was speaking from military or food service experience, or both. In any case, she was grateful not to ride with grisly refrigerated carcasses.
   They dressed for their parts as best they could, pooling the satchel and the clothes they stood in. Bothari and Koudelka played two recently discharged vets, looking to better their sorry lot, and Cordelia and Drou two countrywomen co-scheming with them. The women were decked in a realistically odd combination of worn mountain dress and upper-class castoffs apparently acquired from some secondhand shop. They managed the right touch of mis-fittedness, of women not wearing originals, by trading garments.
   Cordelia's eyes closed in exhaustion, though sleep was far from her. Time ticked in her brain. It had taken them two days to get this far. So close to their goal, so far from success ... Her eyes snapped open again when the truck halted and thumped to the ground.
   Bothari eased through the opening to the driver's compartment. "We get out here," he called lowly. They all filed through, dropping to the city curb. Their breath smoked in the chill. It was pre-dawn dark, with fewer lights about than Cordelia thought there ought to be. Bothari waved the transport on.
   "Didn't think we should ride all the way in to the Central Market," Bothari grunted. "Driver says Vorbohn's municipal guards are thick there this time of day, when the new stocks come in."
   "Are they anticipating food riots?" Cordelia asked.
   "No doubt, plus they like to get theirs first," said Koudelka. "Vordarian's going to have to put the army in soon, before the black market sucks all the food out of the rationing system." Kou, in the moments he forgot to pretend himself an artificial Vor, displayed an amazing and detailed grasp of black-market economics. Or, how had a grocer bought his son the education to gain entry to the fiercely competitive Imperial Military Academy? Cordelia grinned under her breath, and looked up and down the street. It was an old section of town, pre-dating lift tubes, no buildings more than six flights high. Shabby, with plumbing and electricity and light-pipes cut into the architecture, added as afterthoughts.
   Bothari led off, seeming to know where he was going. The maintenance did not improve, in their direction of transit. Streets and alleys narrowed, channeling a moist aroma of decay, with an occasional whiff of urine. Lights grew fewer. Drou's shoulders hunched. Koudelka gripped his stick.
   Bothari paused before a narrow, ill-lit doorway bearing a hand-lettered sign, Rooms. "This'll do." The door, an ancient non-automatic that swung on hinges, was locked. He rattled it, then knocked. After a long time, a little door within the door opened, and suspicious eyes stared out.
   "Whatcha want?"
   "Room."
   "At this hour? Not damned likely."
   Bothari pulled Drou forward. The stripe of light from the opening played over her face.
   "Huh," grunted the door—muffled voice. "Well ..." Some clinking of chains, the grind of metal, and the door swung open.
   They all huddled in to a narrow hallway featuring stairs, a desk, and an archway leading back to a darkened chamber. Their host grew even grumpier when he learned they desired only one room among the four of them. Yet he did not question it; apparently their real desperation lent their pose of poverty a genuine edge. With the two women and especially Koudelka in the party, no one seemed to leap to identify them as secret agents.
   They settled into a cramped, cheap upstairs room, giving Kou and Drou first shot at the beds. As dawn seeped through the window, Cordelia followed Bothari back downstairs to forage.
   "I should have realized we'd need to bring rations, to a city under siege," Cordelia muttered.
   "It's not that bad yet," said Bothari. "Ah—best you don't talk, Milady. Your accent."
   "Right. In that case, strike up a conversation with this fellow, if you can. I want to hear the local view of things."
   They found the innkeeper, or whatever he was, in the little room beyond the archway, which, judging from a counter and a couple of battered tables with chairs, doubled as a bar and a dining room. The man reluctantly sold them some seal-packed food and bottled drinks at inflated prices, while complaining about the rationing and angling for information about them.
   "I been planning this trip for months," said Bothari, leaning on the bar, "and the damned war's bitched it."
   The innkeep made an encouraging noise, one entrepreneur to another. "Oh? What's your strat?"
   Bothari licked his lips, eyes narrowing in thought. "You saw that blonde?"
   "Yo?"
   "Virgin."
   "No way. Too old."
   "Oh, yeah. She can pass for class, that one. We were gonna sell it to some Vor lord at Winterfair. Get us a grubstake. But they've all skipped town. Could try for a rich merchant, I guess. But she won't like it. I promised her a real lord."
   Cordelia hid her mouth behind her hand, and tried not to emit any attention-drawing noises. It was an excellent thing Drou was not there to learn Bothari's idea of a cover story. Good God. Did Barrayaran men actually pay for the privilege of committing that bit of sexual torture upon uninitiated women?
   The 'keep glanced at Cordelia. "You leave her alone with your partner without her duenna, you could lose what you came to sell."
   "Naw," said Bothari. "He would if he could, but he took a nerve-disruptor bolt, once. Below the belt, like. He's out on medical discharge."
   "What're you out on?"
   "Discharged without prejudice."
   This was a code-phrase for, Quit or be housed in the stockade, as Cordelia understood it, the ultimate fate of chronic troublemakers who fell just, but only just, short of felony.
   "You put up with a spastic?" The 'keep jerked his head, indicating their upstairs room and its inhabitants.
   "He's the brains of the outfit."
   "Not too many brains, to come up here and try to do that bit of business now."
   "Yeah. I think I could've had a better price for that same piece of meat here if I'd had her butchered and dressed."
   "You got that right," snorted the 'keep glumly, eyeing the food piled on the counter before Cordelia.
   "She's too good to waste, though. Guess I'll have to find something else, till this mess blows over. Kill some time. Somebody may be hiring muscle..." Bothari let this trail off. Was he running out of inspiration?
   The 'keep studied him with interest. "Yo? I've had something in my eye I could use a, like, agent for. Been afraid for a week somebody else'd go after it first. You could be just what I need."
   "Yo?"
   The 'keep leaned forward across the bar, confidentially. "Count Vordarian's boys are giving out some fat rewards, down at ImpSec, for information-leading-to. Now, I wouldn't normally mess with ImpSec whoever was running it this week, but there's a strange fellow down the street who's taken a room. And he keeps to it, 'cept when he goes out for food, more food than one man might eat ... he's got someone in there with him no one ever sees. And he sure isn't one of us. I can't help thinking he might be ... worth something to somebody, eh?"
   Bothari frowned judiciously. "Could be dangerous. Admiral Vorkosigan blows back into town, they'll be looking real hard for that little list of informers. And you have an address."
   "But you don't, seems. If you'd front it, I could give you a ten percent split. I think he's big, that fellow. He's sure scared."
   Bothari shook his head. "I been out-country, and I came up here—can't you smell it, here in the city? Defeat, man. Vordarian's people look downright morbid to me. I'd think real carefully 'bout that list, if I was you."
   The 'keep's lips tightened in frustration. "One way or another, opportunity's not going to last."
   Cordelia grabbed for Bothari's ear to whisper, "Play along. Find out who it is. Could be an ally." After a moment's thought she added, "Ask for fifty percent."
   Bothari straightened, nodded. "Fifty-fifty," he said to the 'keep. "For the risk."
   The 'keep frowned at Cordelia, but respectfully. He said reluctantly, "Fifty percent of something's better than a hundred percent of nothing, I suppose."
   "Can you get me a look at this fellow?" asked Bothari.
   "Maybe."
   "Here, woman." Bothari piled the packages in Cordelias arms. "Take these back to the room."
   Cordelia cleared her throat, and tried for an imitation mountain accent. "You be careful belike. City man'll take you."
   Bothari favored the 'keep with an alarming grin. "Ah, he wouldn't try and cheat an old vet. More than once."
   The 'keep smiled back nervously.
   Cordelia dozed uneasily, and jerked awake as Bothari returned to their little room. He checked the hallway carefully before closing the door behind him. He looked grim.
   "Well, Sergeant? What did you find out?" What if their fellow-hider turned out to be someone as strategically important as, say, Admiral Kanzian? The thought frightened her. How could she resist being turned aside from her personal mission if some greater good were too crystal-clear ... Kou on a pallet on the floor, and Drou on the other cot, both blinking sleep, sat up on their elbows to listen.
   "It's Lord Vorpatril. Lady Vorpatril, too."
   "Oh, no." She sat upright. "Are you certain?"
   "Oh, yes."
   Kou scrubbed at his scalp, hair bent with sleep. "Did you make contact with them?"
   "Not yet."
   "Why not?"
   "It's Lady Vorkosigan's call. Whether to divert from our primary mission."
   And to think she'd wished for command: "Do they seem all right?"
   "Alive, lying low. But—that git downstairs can't have been the only one to spot them. I've spiked him for now, but somebody else could get greedy any time."
   "Any sign of the baby?"
   He shook his head. "She hasn't had it yet."
   "It's late! She was due over two weeks ago. How hellish." She paused. "Do you think we could escape the city together?"
   "The more people in a party, the more conspicuous," Bothari said slowly. "And I caught a glimpse of Lady Vorpatril. She's real conspicuous. People'd notice her."
   "I don't see how joining us now would improve their position. Their cover's worked for several weeks. If we succeed at the Residence, maybe we can try for them on the way back. Certainly have Illyan send loyalist agents to help them, if we get back ..." Damn. If she were an official raid, she'd have just the contacts the Vorpatrils needed. But then, if she were an offical raid, she doubtless would not have come this way. She sat thinking. "No. No contact yet. But we'd better do something to discourage your friend downstairs."
   "I have," said Bothari. "Told him I knew where I could get a better price, and not risk my head later. We may be able to bribe him to help us."
   "You'd trust him?" said Droushnakovi doubtfully.
   Bothari grimaced. "As far as I can see him. I'll try to keep an eye on him, while we're here. 'Nother thing. I caught a broadcast on his vid in the back room. Vordarian had himself declared Emperor last night."
   Kou swore. "So he's finally gone and done it."
   "But what does it mean?" asked Cordelia. "Does he feel himself strong, or is it a move of desperation?"
   "Last-ditch ploy to try to sway the space forces, I'd guess," said Kou.
   "Will it really attract more men than it offends?"
   Kou shook his head. "We have a real fear of chaos, on Barrayar. We've tried it. It's nasty. The Imperium has been identified as a source of order ever since Dorca Vorbarra broke 'the power of the warring counts and unified the planet. Emperor is a real power-word, here."
   "Not to me," Cordelia sighed. "Let's get some rest. Maybe by this time tomorrow it'll all be over." Hopeful/gruesome thought, depending on how it was construed. She counted the hours over for the thousandth time, one day left to penetrate the Residence, two to get back to Vdrkosigan's territories ... not much to spare. She felt as if she was flying, faster and faster. And running out of turning room.
   Last chance to call the whole thing off. A fine misting rain had brought early dusk to the city. Cordelia stared out the dirty window into the slick street, striped with the reflections of a few sickly amber-haloed streetlights. Only a few bundled shapes hurried along, heads down.
   It was as if war and the winter had inhaled autumn's last breath, and blew back out a deathly silence. Nerves, Cordelia told herself, straightened her back, and led her little party downstairs.
   The desk was deserted. Cordelia was just deciding to skip such formalities as checking out-they had, after all, paid in advance—when the 'keep came stomping in through the front door, shaking cold drops from his jacket and swearing. He spotted Bothari.
   "You! It's all your fault, you gutless git. We missed it, we bloody missed it, and now someone else will collect. That reward could've been mine, should've been mine—"
   The 'keep's invective was cut off with a thump as Bothari pinned him to the wall. The man's toes stretched for the floor as Bothari's suddenly feral face leaned into his. "What happened?"
   "One of Vordarian's squads picked up that fellow. Looks like he led them back to his partner, too." The 'keep's voice wavered between anger and fear. "They've got them both, and I've got nothing!"
   "Got them?" Cordelia repeated sickly.
   "Picking 'em off right now, damn it."
   There might still be a chance, Cordelia realized. Command decision or tactical compulsion, it hardly mattered now. She grabbed a stunner out of the satchel; Bothari stepped back and she buzzed the 'keep where he stood openmouthed. Bothari shoved his inert form behind the desk. "We have to try for them. Drou, break out the rest of the weapons. Sergeant, lead us there. Go!"
   And so she found herself running down the street toward a scene any right-minded Barrayaran would run the other way to avoid, a night-arrest by security forces. Drou kept up with Bothari; Koudelka, burdened with the satchel, lagged behind. Cordelia wished the mist were thicker.
   The Vorpatrils' bolt-hole turned out to be two blocks down and one over, in a shabby narrow building much like the one they'd spent the day in. Bothari held up a hand, and they peered cautiously around the corner, then drew back. Two Security groundcars were parked out front of the little hostel, covering the entrance. But for themselves, the area was strangely deserted. Koudelka came panting up behind.
   "Droushnakovi," said Bothari, "circle around. Get a cross-fire position covering the other side of those groundcars. Watch out, they're sure to have men at the back door."
   Yes, street tactics were clearly Bothari's call. Drou nodded, checked her weapons' charges, and walked as if casually across the corner, not even turning her head. Once out of the enemy's line of sight, she flowed into a silent run.
   "We got to get a better position," Bothari muttered, risking his head once more around the corner. "Can't bloody see."
   "A man and a woman walk down the street," Cordelia visualized desperately. "They stop to talk in a doorway. They goggle curiously at the security men, who are engrossed in their arrest—would we pass?"
   "Not for long," said Bothari, "once they spot our energy weapons on their area scanners. But we'd last longer than two men. It's going to move fast, when it moves. Might pass just long enough. Lieutenant, cover us from here. Have the plasma arc ready, it's all we've got to stop a vehicle."
   Bothari shoved his nerve disruptor out of sight under his jacket. Cordelia tucked her stunner in the waistband of her skirt, and lightly took Bothari's arm. They strolled around the corner.
   This was a really stupid idea, Cordelia decided, matching steps to Bothari's booted stride. They should have set up hours ago, if they'd been going to try an ambush like this. Or they should have hooked Padma and Alys out hours ago. And yet—how long ago had Padma been spotted? Might they have fallen into some long-laid trap, and gone down together? No might-have-beens. Pay attention to the now.
   Bothari's steps slowed, as they approached a deep shadowed doorway. He swung her in, and leaned with his arm on the wall, close to her. They were near enough now to the arrest scene to catch voices. Snatches of crackle from the comm links carried clearly in the damp air.
   Just in time. Despite the shabby shirt and trousers, Cordelia readily recognized the dark-haired man pinned against the groundcar by one guard as Captain Vorpatril. His face was marred with a grated, bleeding contusion and swollen lips, pulled back in a stereotypical fast-penta-induced smile. The smile slipped to anguish, and back again, and his giggles choked on moans.
   Black-clad security men were bundling a woman out the hostel door and into the street. The security team's attention was drawn to her; Cordelia's and Bothari's, too.
   Alys Vorpatril wore only a nightgown and robe, with her feet jammed bare into flat shoes. Her dark hair was loose, flowing down wildly around her white face; she looked a fair madwoman. She was indeed conspicuously pregnant, black robe falling open around her white-gowned belly. The guard manhandling her had her arms locked behind her; her legs splayed for balance against his backward pull.
   The guard commander, a full colonel, checked a report panel. "That's it, then. The lord and the heir." His eye locked to Alys Vorpatril's abdomen; he shook his head as if to clear it, and spoke into his comm link. "Pull back, boys, we're done here."
   "What the hell are we supposed to do about this, Colonel?" asked his lieutenant uneasily. His voice blended fascination with dismay as he walked over to Lady Vorpatril and lifted her gown high. She had gained weight, these last two months; her chin and breasts were rounded, thighs thickened, belly padded out. He poked a curious finger deep into that soft white flesh. She stood silent, trembling, face on fire with rage at his liberty and eyes glistening dark with tears of fear. "Our orders are to kill the lord and the heir. It doesn't say her. Are we supposed to sit around and wait? Squeeze? Cut her open? Or," his voice went persuasive, "maybe just take her back to HQ?"
   The guard holding her from behind grinned and ground his hips into her buttocks, mock—thrusts of unmistakable meaning. "We don't have to take her straight back, do we? I mean, this is Vor meat. What a chance."
   The colonel stared at him, and spat disgust. "Corporal, you're perverted."
   Cordelia realized with a shock that Bothari's riveted attention to the scene before them was no longer tactical. He was deeply aroused. His eyes seemed to glaze as she watched; his lips parted.
   The guard colonel pocketed his comm link, and drew his nerve disruptor. "No." He shook his head. "We make this quick and clean. Step aside, Corporal."
   Strange mercies ...
   The guard expertly popped Alys's knees and shoved her down, stepping back. Her hands flung out to the pavement, too late to save her swollen belly from a hard smack. Padma Vorpatril moaned through his fast-penta haze. The guard colonel raised his nerve disruptor and hesitated, as if uncertain whether to aim it at her head or torso.
   "Kill them," Cordelia hissed in Bothari's ear, jerked out her stunner, and fired.
   Bothari snapped not only awake, but over into some berserker mode; his nerve disruptor bolt hit the guard colonel at the same moment as Cordelias stunner beam did, though she had drawn first. Then he was moving, a dark blur leaping behind a parked vehicle. He snapped off shots, blue crackles that electrified the air; two more guards fell as the rest took cover behind their groundcars.
   Alys Vorpatril, still on the pavement, curled up in a tight ball, trying to cover her abdomen with her arms and legs. Padma Vorpatril, penta-drunk, staggered bewilderedly toward her, arms out, apparently with some similar idea in mind. The guard lieutenant, rolling on the pavement toward cover, aimed his nerve disruptor at the distraught man.
   The guard lieutenant's pause for accuracy was fatal; Droushnakovi's nerve disruptor cross-fire and Cordelias stunner beam intersected upon his body—a millisecond too late. His nerve disruptor bolt took Padma Vorpatril squarely in the back of his head. Blue sparks danced, dark hair sparked orange, and Padma's body arced in a violent convulsion and fell twitching. Alys Vorpatril wailed, a short sharp cry cut off by a gasp. On her hands and knees, she seemed momentarily frozen between trying to crawl toward him, or away.
   Droushnakovi's cross-fire vantage was perfect. The last guard was killed while still trying to raise the canopy of the armored groundcar. A driver, shielded inside the second vehicle, prudently chose to try and speed away. Koudelka's plasma arc bolt, set on high power, blasted into the groundcar as it accelerated past the corner. It skidded wildly, dragging an edge and trailing sparks, and crashed into the side of a brick building.
   Yes, and didn't my whole strategy for this mission turn on our staying invisible? Cordelia thought dizzily, and ran forward. She and Droushnakovi reached Alys Vorpatril at the same moment; together they hoisted the shuddering woman to her feet.
   "We have to get out of here," said Bothari, rising from his firing-crouch and coming toward them.
   "No shit," agreed Koudelka, limping up and staring around at the sudden and spectacular carnage. The street was amazingly quiet. Not for long, Cordelia suspected.
   "This way." Bothari pointed up an alley, narrow and dark. "Run."
   "Shouldn't we try to take that car?" Cordelia gestured to the body-draped vehicle.
   "No. Traceable. And it can't fit where we're going."
   Cordelia was not sure if the wild-faced, weeping Alys was able to run anywhere, but she stuck her stunner back in her waistband and took one of the pregnant woman's arms. Drou took the other, and together they guided her in the sergeant's wake. At least Koudelka was no longer the slowest of the party.
   Alys was crying, yet not hysterical; she glanced only once over her shoulder at her husband's body, then concentrated grimly on trying to run. She did not run well. She was hopelessly unbalanced, her arms wrapping her belly in an attempt to take up the shocks of her heavy footsteps. "Cordelia," she gasped. An acknowledgment of recognition; there was no time or breath for demands of explanation.
   They had not lurched more than three blocks when Cordelia began to hear sirens from the area they were fleeing. But Bothari seemed controlled again, unpanicked. They traversed another narrow alley, and Cordelia realized they had crossed into a region of the city with no streetlights, or indeed any lights at all. Her eyes strained in the misty shadows.
   Alys stopped suddenly, and Cordelia skidded to a halt, almost jerking the woman off her feet. Alys stood for half a minute, bent over, gasping.
   Cordelia realized that beneath its deceptive padding of fat, Alys's abdomen was hard as a rock; the back of her robe was soaking wet. "Are you going into labor?" she asked. She didn't know why she made that a question, the answer was obvious.
   "This has been going on—for a day and a half," Alys blurted. She seemed unable to straighten. "I think my water broke back there, when that bastard knocked me down. Unless it's blood—should have passed out by now, if all that was blood—it hurts so much worse, now... ." Her breath slowed; she pulled her shoulders back with effort.
   "How much longer?" asked Kou in alarm.
   "How should I know? I've never done this before. Your guess is as good as mine," Lady Vorpatril snapped. Hot anger to warm cold fear. It wasn't enough warmth, a candle against a blizzard.
   "Not much longer, I'd say," came Bothari's voice out of the dark. "We'd better go to ground. Come on."
   Lady Vorpatril could no longer run, but managed a rapid waddle, stopping helplessly every two minutes. Then every one minute.
   "Not going to make it all the way," muttered Bothari. "Wait here." He disappeared up a side—alley? The passages all seemed alleys here, cold and stinking, much too narrow for groundcars. They had passed exactly two people in the maze, huddled to one side of a passage in a heap, and stepped carefully around them.
   "Can you do anything to, like, hold back?" asked Kou, watching Lady Vorpatril double over again. "We ought to ... try and get a doctor or something."
   "That's what that idiot Padma went out for," Alys ground out. "I begged him not to go ... oh, God!" After another moment she added, in a surprisingly conversational tone, "The next time you're vomiting your guts out, Kou, let me suggest you just close your mouth and swallow hard ... it's not exactly a voluntary reflex!" She straightened again, shivering violently.
   "She doesn't need a doctor, she needs a flat spot," Bothari spoke from the shadows. "This way."
   He led them a short distance to a wooden door, formerly nailed shut in an ancient solid stuccoed wall. Judging from the fresh splinters, he'd just kicked it open. Once inside, with the door pulled tight-shut again, Droushnakovi at last dared pull a hand-light from the satchel. It illuminated a small, empty, dirty room. Bothari swiftly prowled its perimeters. Two inner doors had been broken open long ago, but beyond them all was soundless and lightless and apparently deserted. "It'll have to do," said Bothari.
   Cordelia wondered what the hell to do next. She knew all about placental transfers and surgical sections now, but for so-called normal births she had only theory to go on. Alys Vorpatril probably had even less grasp of the biology, Drou less still, and Kou was downright useless. "Has anyone here ever actually been in on one of these, before?"
   "Not I," muttered Alys. Their looks met in rather too clear an understanding.
   "You're not alone," said Cordelia stoutly. Confidence should lead to relaxation, should lead to something. "We'll all help."
   Bothari said—oddly reluctantly—"My mother used to do a spot of midwifery. Sometimes she'd drag me along to help. There's not that much to it."
   Cordelia controlled her brows. That was the first time she'd heard the sergeant say word one about either of his parents.
   The sergeant sighed, clearly realizing from their array of looks that he'd just put himself in charge. "Lend me your jacket, Kou."
   Koudelka divested the garment gallantly, and made to wrap it around the shaking Lady Vorpatril. He looked a little more dismayed when the sergeant put his own jacket around Lady Vorpatril's shoulders, then made her lie down on the floor and spread Koudelka's jacket under her hips. She looked less pale, lying down, less like she was about to pass out. But her breath stopped, then she cried out, as her abdominal muscles locked again.
   "Stay with me, Lady Vorkosigan," Bothari murmured to Cordelia. For what? Cordelia wondered, then realized why as he knelt and gently pushed up Alys Vorpatril's nightgown. He wants me for a control mechanism. But the killing seemed to have bled off that horrifying wave of lust that had so distorted his face, back in the street. His gaze now was only normally interested. Fortunately, Alys Vorpatril was too self-absorbed to notice that Bothari's attempt at an expression of medical coolness was not wholly successful.
   "Baby's head's not showing yet," he reported. "But soon."
   Another spasm, and he looked around vaguely and added, "I don't think you'd better scream, Lady Vorpatril. They'll be looking by now."
   She nodded understanding, and waved a desperate hand; Drou, catching on, rolled up a bit of cloth into a rag rope, and gave it to her to bite.
   And so the tableau hung, for spasm after uterine spasm. Alys looked utterly wrung, crying very quietly, unable to stop her body's repeated attempts to turn itself inside out long enough to catch either breath or balance. The baby's head crowned, dark haired, but seemed unable to go further.
   "How long is this supposed to take?" asked Kou, in a voice that tried to sound measured, but came out very worried.
   "I think he likes it where he is," said Bothari. "Doesn't want to come out in the cold." This joke actually got through to Alys; her sobbing breath didn't change, but her eyes flashed in a moment of gratitude. Bothari crouched, frowned judiciously, hunkered around to her side, placed a big hand on her belly, and waited for the next spasm. Then he leaned.
   The infant's head popped out, between Lady Vorpatril's bloody thighs, quick as that.
   "There," said the sergeant, sounding rather satisfied. Koudelka looked thoroughly impressed.
   Cordelia caught the head between her hands, and eased the body out with the next contraction. The baby boy coughed twice, sneezed like a kitten in the awed silence, inhaled, grew pinker, and emitted a nerve—shattering wail. Cordelia nearly dropped him.
   Bothari swore at the noise. "Give me your swordstick, Kou."
   Lady Vorpatril looked up wildly. "No! Give him back to me, I'll make him be quiet!"
   "Wasn't what I had in mind," said Bothari with some dignity. "Though it's an idea," he added as the wails went on. He pulled out the plasma arc and heated the sword briefly, on low power. Sterilizing it, Cordelia realized.
   Placenta followed cord on the next contraction, a messy heap on Kou's jacket. She stared with covert fascination at the spent version of the supportive organ that had been of so much concern in her own case. Time. This rescue's taken so much time. What are Miles's chances down to now? Had she just traded her son's life for little Ivan's? Not-so-little Ivan, actually, no wonder he'd given his mother so much trouble. Alys must be blessed with an unusually wide pelvic arch, or she'd never have made it though this nightmare night alive.
   After the cord drained white, Bothari cut it with the sterilized blade, and Cordelia self-knotted the rubbery thing as best she could. She mopped off the baby and wrapped him in their spare clean shirt, and handed him at last into Alys's outstretched arms.
   Alys looked at the baby and began crying again muffled sobs. "Padma said ... I'd have the best doctors' Padma said ... there'd be no pain. Padma said he'd stay with me ... damn you, Padma!" She clutched Padma's son to her. In an altered tone of mild surprise, she added "Ow!" Infant mouth had found her breast, and apparently had a grip like a barracuda.
   "Good reflexes," observed Bothari.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

   "For God's sake, Bothari, we can't take her in there," hissed Koudelka.
   They stood in an alley deep in the maze of the caravanserai. A thick-walled building bulked an unusual three stories high in the cold, wet darkness. High on its stuccoed face, scabrous with peeling paint, yellow light glinted through carved shutters. An oil lamp burned dimly above a wooden door, the only entrance Cordelia could see.
   "Can't leave her out here. She needs heat," replied the sergeant. He carried Lady Vorpatril in his arms; she clung to him, wan and shivering. "It's a slow night anyway. Late. They're closing down."
   "What is this place?" asked Droushnakovi. Koudelka cleared his throat. "Back in the Time of Isolation, when this was the center of Vorbarr Sultana, it was a lord's Residence. One of the minor Vorbarra princes, I think. That's why it's built like a fortress. Now it's a ... sort of inn."
   Oh, so this is your whorehouse, Kou, Cordelia managed not to blurt out. Instead she addressed Bothari, "Is it safe? Or is it likely to be stocked with informers like that last place?"
   "Safe for a few hours," Bothari judged. "A few hours is all we have anyway." He set Lady Vorpatril down, handing her off to Droushnakovi, and slipped inside after a muffled conversation through the door with some guardian. Cordelia tucked little Ivan more firmly to her, tugging her jacket over him for all the warmth she could share. Fortunately, he had slept quietly through their several-minutes hike from the abandoned building to this place. In a few moments Bothari returned, and motioned them to follow.
   They passed through an entryway, almost like a stone tunnel, with narrow slits in the walls and holes every half-meter above. "For defense, in the old days," whispered Koudelka, and Droushnakovi nodded understanding. No arrows or boiling oil awaited them tonight, though. A man as tall as Bothari, but wider, locked the door again behind them.
   They came out in a large, dim room that had been converted into some sort of bar/dining room. It was occupied only by two dispirited-looking women in robes and a man snoring with his head on the table. As usual, an extravagant fireplace glowed with coals of wood.
   They had a guide, or hostess. A rangy woman beckoned them silently toward the stairs. Fifteen years ago, or even ten years ago, she might have achieved a leggy aquiline look; now she was bony and faded, misclad in a gaudy magenta robe with drooping ruffles that seemed to echo her inherent sadness. Bothari swept up Lady Vorpatril and carried her up the steep stairs. Koudelka stared around uneasily, and seemed to brighten slightly upon not finding someone.
   The woman led them to a room off an upstairs hallway. "Change the sheets," muttered Bothari, and the woman nodded and vanished. Bothari did not set the exhausted Lady Vorpatril down. The woman returned in a few minutes, and whisked off the bed's rumpled coverings and replaced them with fresh linens. Bothari laid Lady Vorpatril in the bed and backed up. Cordelia tucked the sleeping infant in her arm, and Lady Vorpatril managed a grateful nod.
   The—housewoman, Cordelia decided she would think of her—stared with a spark of interest at the baby. "That's a new one. Big boy, eh?" her voice swung to a tentative coo.
   "Two weeks old," stated Bothari in a repelling tone.
   The woman snorted, hands on hips. "I do my bit of midwifery, Bothari. Two hours, more like."
   Bothari shot Cordelia an odd look, almost a flash of fear. The housewoman held up a hand to ward off his frown. "Whatever you say."
   "We should let her sleep," said Bothari, "till we're sure she isn't going to bleed."
   "Yes, but not alone," said Cordelia. "In case she wakes up disoriented in a strange place." In the range of strange, Cordelia suspected, this place qualified as downright alien for the Vor woman.
   "I'll sit with her a while," volunteered Droushnakovi. She glowered suspiciously at the housewoman, who was apparently leaning too near the baby for her taste. Cordelia didn't think Drou was at all fooled by Koudelka's pretense that they had stumbled into some sort of museum. Nor would Lady Vorpatril be, once she'd rested enough to regain her wits.
   Droushnakovi plunked down in a shabby padded armchair, wrinkling her nose at its musty smell. The others withdrew from the room. Koudelka went off to find whatever this old building used for a lavatory, and to try and buy them some food. An underlying tang to the air suggested to Cordelia that nothing in the caravanserai was hooked up to the municipal sewerage. No central heating, either. At Bothari's frown, the housewoman made herself scarce.
   A sofa, a couple of chairs, and a low table occupied a space at the end of the hall, lit by a red-shaded battery-driven lamp. Wearily, Bothari and Cordelia sat there. With the pressure off for a moment, not fighting the strain, Bothari looked ragged. Cordelia had no idea what she looked like, but she was certain it wasn't her best.
   "Do they have whores on Beta Colony?" Bothari asked suddenly.
   Cordelia fought mental whiplash. His voice was so tired the question sounded almost casual, except that Bothari never made casual conversation. How much had tonight's violent events disturbed his precarious balance, stressed his peculiar fault lines? "Well ... we have the L.P.S.T.s," she answered cautiously. "I guess they fill some of the same social functions."
   "Ellpee Estees?"
   "Licensed Practical Sexuality Therapists. You have to pass the government boards, and get a license. You're required to have at least an associate degree in psychotherapy. Except that all three sexes take up the profession. The hermaphrodites make the most money, they're very popular with the tourists. It's not ... not a high social status job, but neither are they dregs. I don't think we have dregs on Beta Colony, we sort of stop at the lower middle class. It's like ..." she paused, struggling for a cultural translation, "sort of like being a hairdresser, on Barrayar. Delivering a personal service to professional standards, with a bit of art and craft."
   She'd actually managed to boggle Bothari, surely a first. His brow wrinkled. "Only Betans would think you needed a bleeding university degree... . Do women hire them?"
   "Sure. Couples, too. The ... the teaching element is rather more emphasized, there."
   He shook his head, and hesitated. He shot her a sidelong look. "My mother was a whore." His tone was curiously distant. He waited.
   "I'd ... about figured that out."
   "Don't know why she didn't abort me. She could have, she did those as well as midwifery. Maybe she was looking to her old age. She used to sell me to her customers."
   Cordelia choked. "Now ... now that would not have been allowed, on Beta Colony."
   "I can't remember much about that time. I ran away when I was twelve, when I got big enough to beat up her damned customers. Ran with the gangs, till I was sixteen, passed for eighteen, and lied my way into the Service. Then I was out of here." His palms slid across each other, indicating how slick and fast his escape.
   "The Service must have seemed like heaven, in comparison."
   "Till I met Vorrutyer." He stared around vaguely. "There were more people around here, back then. It's almost dead here now." His voice went meditative. "There's a great deal of my life I can't remember very well. It's like I'm all ... patchy. Yet there are some things I want to forget and can't."
   She wasn't about to ask, What? But she made an I-am-listening noise, down in her throat.
   "Don't know who my father was. Being a bastard here is damn near as bad as being a mutant."
   " 'Bastard' is used as a negative description of a personality, but it doesn't really have an objective meaning, in the Betan context. Unlicensed children aren't the same thing, and they're so rare, they're dealt with on a case-by-case basis." Why is he telling me all this? What does he want of me? When he started, he seemed almost fearful; now he looks almost contented. What did I say right? She sighed.
   To her secret relief, Koudelka returned about then, bearing actual fresh sandwiches of bread and cheese, and bottled beer. Cordelia was glad for the beer; she'd have been dubious of the water in this place. She chased her first bite with a grateful swallow, and said, "Kou, we have to re—arrange. our strategy."
   He settled awkwardly beside her, listening seriously. "Yes?"
   "We obviously can't take Lady Vorpatril and the baby with us. And we can't leave her here. We left five corpses and a burning groundcar for Vordarian's security. They're going to be searching this area in earnest. But for just a little while longer, they will still be hunting for a very pregnant woman. It gives us a time window. We have to split up."
   He filled a hesitant moment with a bite of sandwich. "Will you go with her, then, Milady?"
   She shook her head. "I must go with the Residence team. If only because I'm the only one who can say, This is impossible now, it's time to quit. Drou is absolutely required, and I need Bothari." And, in some strange way, Bothari needs me. "That leaves you."
   His lips compressed bitterly. "At least I won't slow you down."
   "You're not a default choice," she said sharply. "Your ingenuity got us in to Vorbarr Sultana. I think it can get Lady Vorpatril out. You're her best shot."
   "But it feels like you're running into danger, and I'm running away."
   "A dangerous illusion. Kou, think. If Vordarian's goons catch her again, they'll show her no mercy. Nor you, nor especially the baby. There is no 'safer.' Only mortal necessity, and logic, and the absolute need to keep your head."
   He sighed. "I'll try, Milady."
   " 'Try' is not good enough. Padma Vorpatril 'tried.' You bloody succeed, Kou."
   He nodded slowly. "Yes, Milady."
   Bothari left to scrounge clothing for Kou's new persona of poor-young-husband-and-father. "Customers are always leaving things," he remarked. Cordelia wondered what he could collect here in the way of street clothes for Lady Vorpatril. Kou took food in to Lady Vorpatril and Drou. He returned with a very bleak expression on his face, and settled again beside Cordelia.
   After a time he said, "I guess I understand now why Drou was so worried about being pregnant."
   "Do you?" said Cordelia.
   "Lady Vorpatril's troubles make mine look ... pretty small. God, that looked painful."
   "Mm. But the pain only lasts a day." She rubbed her scar. "Or a few weeks. I don't think that's it."
   "What is, then?"
   "It's ... a transcendental act. Making life. I thought about that, when I was carrying Miles. 'By this act, I bring one death into the world.' One birth, one death, and all the pain and acts of will between. I didn't understand certain Oriental mystic symbols like the Death-mother, Kali, till I realized it wasn't mystic at all, just plain fact. A Barrayaran-style sexual 'accident' can start a chain of causality that doesn't stop till the end of time. Our children change us ... whether they live or not. Even though your child turned out to be chimerical this time, Drou was touched by that change. Weren't you?"
   He shook his head in bafflement. "I wasn't thinking about all that. I just wanted to be normal. Like other men."
   "I think your instincts are all right. They're just not enough. I don't suppose you could get your instincts and your intellect working together for once, instead of at cross-purposes ?"
   He snorted. "I don't know. I don't know ... how to get through to her now. I said I was sorry."
   "It's not all right between you two, is it?"
   "No."
   "You know what's bothered me most, on the journey up here?" said Cordelia.
   "No ..."
   "I couldn't say goodbye to Aral. If ... anything happens to me—or to him, for that matter—it will leave something hanging, unraveled, between us. And no way to ever make it right."
   "Mm." He folded a little more into himself, slumped in the chair.
   She meditated a bit. "What have you tried besides 'I'm sorry'? How about, 'How do you feel? Are you all right? Can I help? I love you,' there's a classic. Words of one syllable. Mostly questions, now I think on it. Shows an interest in starting a conversation, y'know?"
   He smiled sadly. "I don't think she wants to talk to me anymore."
   "Suppose," she leaned her head back, and stared unseeing down the hallway. "Suppose things hadn't taken such a wrong turn, that night. Suppose you hadn't panicked. Suppose that idiot Evon Vorhalas hadn't interrupted with his little horror show." There was a thought. Too painful, that might—not—have—been. "Drop back to square one. There you were, cuddling happily." Aral had used that word, cuddling. It hurt too much to think of Aral just now, too. "You part friends, you wake up the next morning, er, aching with unrequited love ... what happens next, on Barrayar?"
   "A go-between."
   "Ah?"
   "Her parents, or mine, would hire a go-between. And then they'd, well, arrange things."
   "And you do what?"
   He shrugged. "Show up on time for the wedding and pay the bill, I guess. Actually, the parents pay the bill."
   No wonder the man was at a loss. "Did you want a wedding? Not just to get laid?"
   "Yes! But ... Milady, I'm just about half a man, on a good day. Her family'd take one look at me and laugh."
   "Have you ever met her family? Have they met you?"
   "No ..."
   "Kou, are you listening to yourself?"
   He looked rather shamefaced. "Well ..."
   "A go-between. Huh." She stood up.
   "Where are you going?" he asked nervously.
   "Between," she said firmly. She marched down the hall to Lady Vorpatril's door, and stuck her head in. Droushnakovi was sitting watching the sleeping woman. Two beers and the sandwiches sat untouched on a bedside table.
   Cordelia slipped within, and closed the door gently. "You know," she murmured, "good soldiers never pass up a chance to eat or sleep. They never know how much they'll be called on to do, before the next chance."
   "I'm not hungry." Drou too had a folded-in look, as if caught in some trap within herself.
   "Want to talk about it?"
   She grimaced uncertainly, and moved away from the bed to a settee in the far corner of the room. Cordelia sat beside her. "Tonight," she said lowly, "was the first time I was ever in a real fight."
   "You did well. You found your position, you reacted—"
   "No." Droushnakovi made a bitter hand-chopping gesture. "I didn't."
   "Oh? It looked good to me."
   "I ran around behind the building—stunned the two security men waiting at the back door. They never saw me. I got to my position, at the building's corner. I watched those men, tormenting Lady Vorpatril in the street. Insulting and staring and pushing and poking at her ... it made me so angry, I switched to my nerve disruptor. I wanted to kill them. Then the firing started. And ... and I hesitated. And Lord Vorpatril died because of it. My fault—"
   "Whoa, girl! That goon who shot Padma Vorpatril wasn't the only one taking aim at him. Padma was so penta-soaked and confused, he wasn't even trying to take cover. They must have double—dosed him, to force him to lead them back to Alys. He might as easily have died from another shot, or blundered into our own cross-fire."
   "Sergeant Bothari didn't hesitate," Droushnakovi said flatly.
   "No," agreed Cordelia.
   "Sergeant Bothari doesn't waste energy feeling ... sorry, for the enemy, either."
   "No. Do you?"
   "I feel sick."
   "You kill two total strangers, and expect to feel jolly?"
   "Bothari does."
   "Yes. Bothari enjoyed it. But Bothari is not, even by Barrayaran standards, a sane man. Do you aspire to be a monster?"
   "You call him that!"
   "Oh, but he's my monster. My good dog." She always had trouble explaining Bothari, sometimes even to herself. Cordelia wondered if Droushnakovi knew the Earth-historical origin of the term, scapegoat. The sacrificial animal that was released yearly into the wilderness, to carry the sins of its community away ... Bothari was surely her beast of burden; she saw clearly what he did for her. She was less certain what she did for him, except that he seemed to find it desperately important. "I, for one, am glad you are heartsick. Two pathological killers in my service would be an excess. Treasure that nausea, Drou."
   She shook her head. "I think maybe I'm in the wrong trade."
   "Maybe. Maybe not. Think what a monstrous thing an army of Botharis would be. Any community's arm of force—military, police, security—needs people in it who can do the necessary evil, and yet not be made evil by it. To do only the necessary, and no more. To constantly question the assumptions, to stop the slide into atrocity."
   "The way that security colonel quashed that obscene corporal."
   "Yes. Or the way that lieutenant questioned the colonel ... I wish we might have saved him," Cordelia sighed.
   Drou frowned deeply, into her lap.
   "Kou thought you were angry with him," said Cordelia.
   "Kou?" Droushnakovi looked up dimly. "Oh, yes, he was just in here. Did he want something?"
   Cordelia smiled. "Just like Kou, to imagine all your unhappiness must center on him." Her smile faded. "I'm going to send him with Lady Vorpatril, to try and smuggle her and the baby out. We'll go our separate ways as soon as she's able to walk."
   Drou's face grew worried. "He'll be in terrible danger. Vordarian's people will be rabid over losing her and the young lord tonight."
   Yes, there was still a Lord Vorpatril to disturb Vordarian's genealogical calculations, wasn't there? Insane system, that made an infant seem a mortal danger to a grown man. "There's no safety for anybody, till this vile war is ended. Tell me. Do you still love Kou? I know you're over your initial starry-eyed infatuation. You see his faults. Egocentric, and with a bug in his brain about his injuries, and terribly worried about his masculinity. But he's not stupid. There's hope for him. He has an interesting life ahead of him, in the Regents service." Assuming they all lived through the next forty-eight hours. A passionate desire to live was a good thing to instill in her agents, Cordelia thought. "Do you want him?"
   "I'm ... bound to him, now. I don't know how to explain ... I gave him my virginity. Who else would have me? I'd be ashamed—"
   "Forget that! After we bring off this raid, you're going to be covered in so much glory, men will be lining up for the status of courting you. You'll have your pick. In Aral's household, you'll have a chance to meet the best. What do you want? A general? An Imperial minister? A Vor lordling? An off-world ambassador? Your only problem will be choosing, since Barrayaran custom stingily only allows you one husband at a time. A clumsy young lieutenant hasn't got a prayer of competing with all those polished seniors."
   Droushnakovi smiled, a bit skeptically, at Cordelia's painted vision. "Who says Kou won't be a general himself someday?" she said softly. She sighed, her brow creasing. "Yes. I still want him. But ... I guess I'm afraid he'll hurt me again."
   Cordelia thought that one over. "Probably. Aral and I hurt each other all the time."
   "Oh, not you two, Milady! You seem so, so perfect."
   "Think, Drou. Can you imagine what mental state Aral is in right this minute, because of my actions? I can. I do."
   "Oh."
   "But pain ... seems to me an insufficient reason not to embrace life. Being dead is quite painless. Pain, like time, is going to come on regardless. Question is, what glorious moments can you win from life in addition to the pain?"
   "I'm not sure I follow that, Milady. But ... I have a picture, in my head, Of me and Kou, on a beach, all alone. It's so warm. And when he looks at me, he sees me, really sees me, and loves me. ..."
   Cordelia pursed her lips. "Yeah ... that'll do. Come with me."
   The girl rose obediently. Cordelia led her back in to the hall, forcefully arranged Kou at one end of the sofa, sat Drou down on the other, and plopped down between them. "Drou, Kou has a few things to say to you. Since you apparently speak different languages, he's asked me to be his interpreter."
   Kou made an embarrassed negative motion over Cordelia's head.
   "That hand signal means, I'd rather blow up the rest of my life than look like a fool for five minutes. Ignore it," Cordelia said. "Now, let me see. Who begins?"
   There was a short silence. "Did I mention I'm also playing the parts of both your parents? I think I shall begin by being Kou's Ma. Well, son, and have you met any nice girls yet? You're almost twenty-six, you know. I saw that vid," she added in her own voice as Kou choked. "I have her style, eh? And her content. And Kou says, Yes, Ma, there's this gorgeous girl. Young, tall, smart– and Kou's Ma says, Tee hee! And hires me, your friendly neighborhood go-between. And I go to your father, Drou, and say, there's this young man. Imperial lieutenant, personal secretary to the Lord Regent, war hero, slated for the inside track at Imperial HQ—and he says, Say no more! We'll take him. Tee—hee. And—"
   "I think he'll have more to say than that!" interrupted Kou.
   Cordelia turned to Droushnakovi. "What Kou just said was, he thinks your family won't like him 'cause he's a crip."
   "No!" said Drou indignantly. "That's not so—"
   Cordelia held up a restraining hand. "As your go-between, Kou, let me tell you. When one's only lovely daughter points and says firmly, Da, I want that one, a prudent Da responds only, Yes, dear. I admit, the three large brothers may be harder to convince. Make her cry, and you could have a serious problem in the back alley. By which I presume you haven't complained to them yet, Drou?"
   She stifled an involuntary giggle. "No!"
   Kou looked as if this was a new and daunting thought.
   "See," said Cordelia, "you can still evade fraternal retribution, Kou, if you scramble." She turned to Drou. "I know he's been a lout, but I promise you, he's a trainable lout."
   "I said I was sorry," said Kou, sounding stung.
   Drou stiffened.
   "Yes. Repeatedly," she said coldly.
   "And there we come to the heart of the matter," Cordelia said slowly, seriously. "What Kou actually means, Drou, is that he isn't a bit sorry. The moment was wonderful, you were wonderful, and he wants to do it again. And again and again, with nobody but you, forever, socially approved and uninterrupted. Is that right, Kou?"
   Kou looked stunned. "Well—yes!"
   Drou blinked. "But... that's what I wanted you to say!"
   "It was?" He peered over Cordelia's head.
   This go-between system may have some real merits. But also its limits. Cordelia rose from between them, and glanced at her chrono. The humor drained from her spirit. "You have a little time yet. You can say a lot in a little time, if you stick to words of one syllable."

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

   Pre-dawn in the alleys of the caravanserai was not so pitchy-black as night in the mountains. The foggy night sky reflected back a faint amber glow from the surrounding city. The faces of her friends were grey blurs, like the very earliest of ancient photographs; Cordelia tried not to think, Like the faces of the dead.
   Lady Vorpatril, cleaned and fed and rested a few hours, was still none too steady, but she could walk on her own. The housewoman had contributed some surprisingly sober clothes for her, a calf-length grey skirt and sweaters against the cold. Koudelka had exchanged all his military gear for loose trousers, old shoes, and a jacket to replace the one that had suffered from its emergency obstetrical use. He carried baby Lord Ivan, now makeshift-diapered and warmly wrapped, completing the picture of a timid little family trying to make it out of town to the wife's parents in the country before the fighting started. Cordelia had seen hundreds of refugees just like them, in passing, on her way into Vorbarr Sultana.
   Koudelka inspected his little group, ending with a frowning look at the swordstick in his hand. Even when seen as a mere cane, the satin wood, polished steel ferrule, and inlaid grip did not look very middle-class. Koudelka sighed. "Drou, can you hide this somehow? It's conspicuous as hell with this outfit, and more of a hindrance than a help when I'm trying to carry this baby."
   Droushnakovi nodded, and knelt and wrapped the stick in a shirt, and stuffed it into the satchel. Cordelia remembered what had happened the last time Kou had carried that stick down to the caravanserai, and stared nervously into the shadows. "How likely are we to be jumped by someone, at this hour? We don't look rich, certainly."
   "Some would kill you for your clothes," said Bothari glumly, "with winter coming on. But it's safer than usual. Vordarian's troops have been sweeping the quarter for 'volunteers,' to help dig those bomb shelters in the city parks."
   "I never thought I'd approve of slave labor," Cordelia groaned.
   "It's nonsense anyway," Koudelka said. "Tearing up the parks. Even if completed they wouldn't shelter enough people. But it looks impressive, and it sets up Lord Vorkosigan as a threat, in people's minds."
   "Besides," Bothari lifted his jacket to reveal the silvered gleam of his nerve disruptor, "this time I've got the right weapon."
   This was it, then. Cordelia embraced Alys Vorpatril, who hugged her back, murmuring, "God help you, Cordelia. And God rot Vidal Vordarian in hell."
   "Go safely. See you back at Tanery Base, eh?" Cordelia glanced at Koudelka. "Live, and so confound our enemies."
   "We'll tr—we will, Milady," said Koudelka. Gravely, he saluted Droushnakovi. There was no irony in the military courtesy, though perhaps a last tinge of envy. She returned him a slow nod of understanding. Neither chose to confuse the moment with further words. The two groups parted in the clammy darkness. Drou watched over her shoulder till Koudelka and Lady Vorpatril turned out of sight, then picked up the pace.
   They passed from black alleys to lit streets, from deserted darkness to occasional other human forms, hurrying about early winter morning business. Everybody seemed to cross streets to avoid everybody else, and Cordelia felt a little less noticeable. She stiffened inwardly when a municipal guard groundcar drove slowly past them, but it did not stop.
   They paused, across the street, to be certain their target building had been unlocked for the morning. The structure was multi-storied, in the utilitarian style of the building boom that had come on the heels of Ezar Vorbarra's ascent to power and stability thirty-plus years ago. It was commercial, not governmental; they crossed the lobby, entered the lift tubes, and descended unimpeded.
   Drou began seriously looking over her shoulder when they reached the sub-basement. "Now we look out of place." Bothari kept watch as she bent and forced a lock to a utility tunnel. She led them down it, taking two cross-turns. The passage was clearly used frequently, as the lights remained on. Cordelia's ears strained for footsteps not their own.
   An access cover was bolted to the floor. Droushnakovi loosened it quickly. "Hang and drop. It's not much more than two meters. It'll likely be wet."
   Cordelia slid into the dark circle, landing with a splash. She lit her hand-light. The water, slick and black and shimmering, came to her booted ankles in the synthacrete tube. It was icy cold. Bothari followed. Drou knelt on his shoulders, to coax the cover back into place, then splashed down beside her. "There's about half a kilometer of this storm sewer. Come on," she whispered. This close to their goal, Cordelia needed no urging to hurry.
   At the half-kilometer, they climbed into a darkened orifice high on the curving wall that led to a much older and smaller tunnel, made of time-blackened brick. Knees and backs bent, they shuffled along. It must be particularly painful for Bothari, Cordelia reflected. Drou slowed, and began tapping on the tunnel's roof with the steel ferrule of Koudelka's stick. When the ticks became hollow tocks, she stopped. "Here. It's meant to swing downward.
   Watch it." She released the sheath, and slid the blade carefully between a line of slimy bricks. A click, and the false-brick-lined panel flopped down, nearly cracking her head. She returned the sword to its casing. "Up." She pulled herself through.
   They followed to find themselves in another ancient drain, even narrower. It sloped more steeply upward. They crouched along, their clothes brushing the sides and picking up damp stains. Drou rose suddenly, and clambered out over a pile of broken bricks into a dark, pillared chamber.
   "What is this place?" whispered Cordelia. "Too big for a tunnel ..."
   "The old stables," Drou whispered back. "We're under the Residence grounds, now."
   "It doesn't sound so secret to me. Surely they must appear in old drawings and elevations. People—Security—must know this is here." Cordelia stared into the dim, musty recesses, past pale arches picked out by their wavering hand-lights.
   "Yes, but this is the cellar of the old old stables. Not Dorcas, but Dorca's great—uncle's. He kept over three hundred horses. They burned down in a spectacular fire about two hundred years ago, and instead of rebuilding on the site, they knocked them flat and put up the new old stables on the east side, downwind. Those got converted to staff apartments in Dorca's day. Most of the hostages are being kept over there now." Drou marched firmly forward, as if sure of her ground. "We're to the north of the main Residence now, under the gardens Ezar designed. Ezar apparently found this old cellar and arranged this passage with Negri, thirty years ago. A bolt-hole that even their own Security didn't know about. Trusting, eh?"
   "Thank you, Ezar," Cordelia murmured wryly.
   "Once we're out of Ezar's passage, the real risk starts," the girl commented.
   Yes, they could still pull out now, retrace their steps and no one the wiser. Why have these people so blithely handed me the right to risk their lives? God, I hate command. Something skittered in the shadows, and somewhere, water dripped.
   "Here," said Droushnakovi, shining her light on a pile of boxes. "Ezar's cache. Clothes, weapons, money—Captain Negri had me add some women's and boy's clothes to it just last year, at the time of the Escobar invasion. He was keyed up for trouble about it, but the riots never reached here. My clothes should only be a little big for you."
   They discarded their beslimed street clothes. Droushnakovi shook out clean dresses, suitable for senior Residence womenservants too superior for menial's uniforms; the girl had worn them for just such service. Bothari unbundled his black fatigue uniform again from the satchel, and donned it, adding correct Imperial Security insignia. From a distance he made a proper guard, though he was perhaps a little too rumpled to pass inspection up close. As Drou had promised, a complete array of weapons lay fully charged in sealed cases. Cordelia chose a fresh stunner, as did Drou; their eyes met. "No hesitation this time, eh?" Cordelia murmured. Drou nodded grimly. Bothari took one of each, stunner, nerve disruptor, and plasma arc. Cordelia trusted he wouldn't clank when he walked.
   "You can't fire that thing indoors," Droushnakovi objected to the plasma arc.
   "You never know," shrugged Bothari.
   After a moment's thought, Cordelia added the swordstick, tightening a loop of her belt around its grip. A serious weapon it wasn't, but it had proved an unexpectedly useful tool on this trip. For luck. Then from the last depths of the satchel, Cordelia pulled what she privately considered to be the most potent weapon of all.
   "A shoe?" said Droushnakovi blankly.
   "Gregor's shoe. For when we make contact with Kareen. I rather fancy she still has the other." Cordelia nested it deeply in the inner pocket of one of Drou's Vorbarra—crested boleros, worn over Cordelia's dress to complete the picture of an inner Residence worker.
   When their preparations were as complete as possible, Drou led them again into narrowing darkness. "Now we're under the Residence itself," she whispered, turning sideways. "We go up this ladder, between the walls. It was added after, there's not much space."
   This proved an understatement. Cordelia sucked in her breath and climbed after her, sandwiched flat between two walls, trying not to accidently touch or thump. The ladder was made, naturally, of wood. Her head throbbed with exhaustion and adrenaline. She mentally measured the width. Getting the uterine replicator back down this ladder was going to be a bitch. She told herself sternly to think positively, then decided that was positive. Why am I doing this? I could be back at Tanery Base with Aral right now, letting these Barrayarans kill each other all day long, if it is their pleasure. ...
   Above her, Drou stepped aside onto some sort of tiny ledge, a mere board. When Cordelia came up beside her, she gestured "stop" and extinguished her hand-light. Drou touched some silent latch mechanism, and a wall panel swung outward before them. Clearly, everything had been kept well oiled right up to Ezar's death.
   They looked out into the old Emperors bedchamber. They had expected it to be empty. Drou's mouth opened in a voiceless O of dismay and horror.
   Ezar's huge old carved wooden bed, the one he'd for-God's-sake died in, was occupied. A shaded light, dimmed to an orange glow, cast highlight and shadow across two bare-torsoed, sleeping forms. Even in this foreshortened view, Cordelia instantly recognized the dish-face and moustache of Vidal Vordarian. He sprawled across four—fifths of the bed, his heavy arm flung possessively across Princess Kareen. Her dark hair was tumbled on the pillow. She slept in a tight, tiny ball in the upper corner of the bed, facing outward, white arms clutched to her chest, nearly in danger of falling out.
   Well, we're reached Kareen. But there's a hitch. Cordelia shivered with the impulse to shoot Vordarian in his sleep. But the energy discharge must set off alarms. Until she had Miles's replicator in her hand, she was not ready to run for it. She motioned Drou to close the panel again, and breathed "Down," to Bothari, waiting beneath her. They reversed their painstaking four-flight climb. Back in the tunnel, Cordelia turned to face the girl, who was crying quite silently.
   "She's sold out to him," Droushnakovi whispered, her voice shaking with grief and revulsion.
   "If you'll explain to me what power-base you imagine she has to resist the man right now, I'd be interested to hear it," said Cordelia tartly. "What do you expect her to do, fling herself out a window to avoid a fate worse than death? She did fates worse than death with Serg, I don't think they hold any more emotion for her."
   "But if only we'd got here sooner, I might—we might have saved her."
   "We still might."
   "But she's really sold out!"
   "Do people lie in their sleep?" asked Cordelia. At Drou's confused look, she explained. "She didn't look like a lover to me. She lay like a prisoner. I promised we'd try for her, and we will." Time. "But we'll go for Miles first. Let's try the second exit."
   "We'll have to pass through more monitored corridors," Droushnakovi warned.
   "Can't be helped. If we wait, this place will start waking up, and we'll hit more people."
   "They're coming on duty in the kitchens right now," sighed Drou. "I used to stop in for coffee and hot pastries, some days."
   Alas, a commando raid could not knock off for breakfast. This was it. Go or no-go? Was it bravery, or stupidity, that drove her on? It couldn't be bravery, she was sick with fear, the same hot acid nausea she'd felt just before combat during the Escobar war. Familiarity with the sensation didn't help. If I do not act, my child will die. She would simply have to do without courage. "Now," Cordelia decided. "There will be no better chance."
   Up the narrow ladder again. The second panel opened in the old Emperor's private office. To Cordelia's relief it still remained dark and unused, untouched since it had been cleaned out and locked after Ezar's death last spring. His comconsole desk, with all its Security overrides, was disconnected, wiped of secrets, dead as its owner. The windows were still dark, with the tardy winter morning.
   Kou's stick banged against Cordelia's calf as she strode across the room. It did look odd, hitched to her waist too obviously like a sword. On a bureau in the office was a wide antique tray holding a flat ceramic bowl, typical of the knickknacks that cluttered the Residence. Cordelia laid the stick across the tray and lifted it solemnly, servant-fashion.
   Droushnakovi nodded approval. "Carry it halfway between your waist and your chest," she whispered. "And keep your spine straight, they always told me."
   Cordelia nodded. They closed the panel behind them, straightened themselves, and entered the lower corridor of the north wing.
   Two Residence serving women and a security guard. At first glance, they looked perfectly natural in this setting, even in these troubled times. A guard corporal standing duty at the foot of the Petite Stairway at the corridor's west end came to attention at the sight of Bothari's ImpSec and rank tabs; they exchanged salutes. They were passing out of sight up around the stairs' curve before he looked again, harder. Cordelia steeled herself not to break into a panicked run. A subtle piece of misdirection; the two women couldn't be a threat, they were already guarded. That their guard could be the threat, might escape the corporal for minutes yet.
   They turned into the upper corridor. There. Behind that door, according to the loyalists' reports, Vordarian kept the captured replicator. Right under his eye. Perhaps as a human shield; any explosive dropped on Vordarian's quarters must kill tiny Miles, as well. Or did the Barrayaran think of her damaged child as human?
   Another guard stood outside that door. He stared at them suspiciously, his hand touching his sidearm. Cordelia and Droushnakovi walked on by without turning their heads. Bothari's exchanged salute flowed smoothly into a clip to the man's jaw that snapped his head back into the wall. Bothari caught him before he dropped. They swung the door open and dragged the guard inside; Bothari took his place in the corridor. Silently, Drou closed the door. Cordelia stared wildly around the little chamber, looking for automatic monitors. The room might formerly have been a bedroom of the sort once slept in by bodyservants to be near their Vorish masters, or perhaps an unusually large wardrobe; it didn't even have a window overlooking some dull inner court. The portable uterine replicator sat on a cloth-covered table in the exact center of the room. Its lights still glowed their reassuring greens and ambers. No feral red eyes warned of malfunction yet. A breath half-agony, half-relief, tore from Cordelias lips at the sight of it.
   Droushnakovi gazed around the room unhappily. "What's wrong, Drou?" whispered Cordelia. "Too easy," the girl muttered.
   "We're not done yet. Say 'easy' an hour from now." She licked her lips, shaken by secret subliminal agreement with Droushnakovi's evaluation. No help for it. Grab and go. Speed, not secrecy, was their hope now.
   She set the tray down on the table, reached for the replicator's carrying handle, and stopped. Something, something wrong ... she stared more closely at the readouts. The oxygenation monitor wasn't even functioning. Though its indicator light glowed green, the nutrient fluid level read 00.00. Empty.
   Cordelia's mouth opened in a silent wail. Her stomach churned. She leaned closer, eyes devouring all the illogical hash of false readouts. Her hagridden nightmare, made suddenly and horribly real—had they dumped it on the floor, into a drain, down a toilet? Had Miles died quickly, mercifully smashed, or had they let the tiny infant, bereft of life-support, twitch to death in agony while they watched? Perhaps they hadn't even bothered to watch ... The serial number. Look at the serial number. A hopeless hope, but ... she forced her blurring eyes to focus, her racing mind to try and remember. She had fingered that number, pensively, back in Vaagen and Henri's lab, meditating upon this piece of technology and the distant world that had created it—and this number didn't match. Not the same replicator, not Miles's! One of the sixteen others, used to bait this trap.
   Her heart sank. How many other traps were laid? She pictured herself running frantically from replicator to replicator, like a distraught child in some cruel game of keep-away, searching ... I shall go mad.
   No. Wherever the real replicator was, it was near to Vordarian's person. Of that, she was sure. She knelt beside the table, putting her head down a moment to fight the blood—drained black balloons that clouded her vision and threatened to empty her mind of consciousness. She lifted the cloth. There. A pressure—sensor. Was this Vordarian's own clever idea? Slick and vicious. Drou bent to follow her gesture.
   "A trap," whispered Cordelia. "Lift the replicator, and the alarms go off."
   "If we disarm it—"
   "No. Don't bother. It's false bait. Not the right replicator. It's an empty, with the controls buggered to make it look like it's running." Cordelia tried to think clearly through the pounding in her skull. "We'll have to retrace our steps. Back down, and up. I hadn't expected to encounter Vordarian here. But I guarantee he'll know where Miles is. A little old-fashioned interrogation. We'll be working against time. When the alarm goes up—"
   Footsteps thudded in the corridor, and shouts. The chirping buzz of stunner fire. Swearing, Bothari flung himself backward through the door. "That's done it. They've spotted us."
   When the alarm goes up, it's all over, Cordelia's thought completed itself, in a vertigo of loss. No window, one door, and they'd just lost control of their only exit. Vordarian's trap had worked after all. May Vidal Vordarian rot in hell ...
   Droushnakovi clutched her stunner. "We won't surrender you, Milady. We'll fight to the end."
   "Rubbish," snapped Cordelia. "There's nothing our deaths would buy here but the deaths of a few more of Vordarian's goons. Meaningless."
   "You mean we should just quit?"
   "Suicidal glory is the luxury of the irresponsible. We're not giving up. We're waiting for a better opportunity to win. Which we can't take if we're stunned or nerve-fried." Of course, if that had been the real replicator on the table ... she was insane enough by now to sacrifice these people's lives for her son's, Cordelia reflected ruefully, but not yet mad enough to trade them for nothing. She hadn't grown that Barrayaran yet.
   "You give yourself to Vordarian as a hostage," Bothari warned.
   "Vordarian has held me hostage since the day he took Miles," Cordelia said sadly. "This changes nothing."
   A few minutes of shouted negotiations through the door accomplished their surrender, despite the hair-trigger nerves of the security guards. They tossed out their weapons. The guards ran a scan for power packs to be sure, then four of them piled into the little room to frisk their new prisoners. Two more waited outside as backup. Cordelia made no sudden moves to startle them. A guard frowned puzzlement when the interesting lump in Cordelia's vest turned out to be only a child's shoe. He laid it on the table next to the tray.
   The commander, a man in the maroon and gold
   Vordarian livery, spoke into his wrist comm. "Yes. We're secured here. Tell m'lord. No, he said to wake him. You want to explain why you didn't? Thank you."
   The guards did not prod them into the corridor, but waited. The still-unconscious man Bothari had clipped was dragged out. The guards placed Cordelia, arms outstretched to the wall and legs straddled, in a row with Bothari and Droushnakovi. She was dizzy with despair. But Kareen would come to her sometime, even as a prisoner. Must come to her. All she needed was thirty seconds with Kareen, maybe less. When I see Kareen, you are a dead man, Vordarian. You may walk and talk and give orders, unconscious of your demise for weeks, but I'll seal your fate as surely as you've sealed my son's.
   The reason for the wait materialized at last; Vordarian himself, in green uniform trousers and slippers, bare-chested, shouldered his way through the doorway. He was followed by Princess Kareen, clutching a dark red velvet robe around her. Cordelia's heart hammered at a doubled rate. Now?
   "So. The trap worked," Vordarian began complacently, but added a genuinely shocked "Huh!" as Cordelia pushed away from the wall and turned to face him. A hand signal stopped a guard from shoving her back into position. The shock on Vordarian's face gave way to a wolfish grin. "My God, did it work! Excellent!" Kareen, hovering behind him, stared at Cordelia in bewildered astonishment.
   My trap worked, Cordelia thought, stunned with her opportunity. Watch me. ...
   "That's the thing, my lord," said the liveried man, not at all happily. "It didn't work. We didn't pick this party up at the outer perimeter of the Residence and clear their way, they just bloody turned up—without triggering anything. That shouldn't have happened. If I hadn't come along looking for Roget, we might not have spotted 'em."
   Vordarian shrugged, too delighted by the magnitude of his prey to issue some trifling censure. "Fast-penta that frill," he pointed at Droushnakovi, "and I imagine you'll find out how. She used to work in Residence Security."
   Droushnakovi glowered over her shoulder at Princess Kareen in hurt accusation; Kareen unconsciously pulled her robe up more closely about her neck, her dark eyes full of equally hurt question.
   "Well," said Vordarian, still smiling at Cordelia, "is my Lord Vorkosigan so thin of troops he sends his wife to do their work? We cannot lose." He smiled at his guards, who smiled back.
   Damn, I wish I'd shot this lout in his sleep. "What have you done with my son, Vordarian?"
   Vordarian said through his teeth, "An outworlder frill will never gain power on Barrayar by scheming to give a mutant the Imperium. That, I guarantee."
   "Is that the official line, now? I don't want power. I just object to idiots having power over me."
   Behind Vordarian, Kareen's lips quirked sadly. Yes, listen to me, Kareen!
   "Where's my son, Vordarian?" Cordelia repeated doggedly.
   "He's Emperor Vidal now," Kareen remarked, her glance going back and forth between them, "if he can keep it."
   "I will," Vordarian promised. "Aral Vorkosigan has no better a blood-claim than my own. And I will protect where Vorkosigan's party has failed. Protect and preserve the real Barrayar." His head shifted; apparently this assertion was directed over his shoulder to Kareen.
   "We have not failed," Cordelia whispered, meeting Kareen's eyes. Now. She lifted the shoe from the table, and stretched out her arm with it; Kareen's eyes widened. She darted forward and grabbed it. Cordelia's hand spasmed like a dying runner's giving up the baton in some mortal relay race. Fierce certainty bloomed like fire in her soul. I have you now, Vordarian. The sudden movement sent a ripple through the armed guards. Kareen examined the shoe with passionate intensity, turning it in her hands. Vordarian's brows rose in bafflement, then he dismissed Kareen from his attention and turned to his liveried guard commander.
   "We'll keep all three of these prisoners here in the Residence. I'll personally attend the fast-penta interrogations. This is a spectacular opportunity—" . Kareen's face, when she lifted it again to Cordelia, was terrible with hope.
   Yes, thought Cordelia. You were betrayed. Lied to. Your son lives; you must move and think and feel again, no more the walking numbness of a dead spirit beyond pain. This is no gift I've brought you. It is a curse.
   "Kareen," said Cordelia softly, "where is my son?"
   "The replicator is on a shelf in the oak wardrobe, in the old Emperor's bedchamber," Kareen replied steadily, locking her eyes to Cordelia's. "Where is mine?"
   Cordelia's heart melted in gratitude for her curse, live pain. "Safe and well, when I last saw him, as long as this pretender," she jerked her head at Vordarian, "doesn't find out where. Gregor misses you. He sends his love." Her words might have been spikes, pounded into Kareen's body.
   That got Vordarian's attention. "Gregor is at the bottom of a lake, killed in the flyer crash with that traitor Negri," he said roughly. "The most insidious lie is the one you want to hear. Guard yourself, my lady Kareen. I could not save him, but I will avenge him. I promise you that."
   Uh—oh. Wait, Kareen. Cordelia bit her lip. Not here. Too dangerous. Wait your best opportunity. Wait till the bastard's asleep, at least—but if even a Betan hesitated to shoot her enemy sleeping, how much less a Vor? She is true Vor... .
   An unfriendly smile crinkled Kareen's lips. Her eyes were alight. "This has never been immersed," she said softly.
   Cordelia heard the murderous undertones ringing like a bell; Vordarian, apparently, only heard the breathiness of some girlish grief. He glanced at the shoe, not grasping its message, and shook his head as if to clear it of static. "You'll bear another son someday," he promised her kindly. "Our son."
   Wait, wait, wait, Cordelia screamed inside. "Never," whispered Kareen. She stepped back beside the guard in the doorway, snatched his nerve disruptor from his open holster, aimed it point-blank at Vordarian, and fired.
   The startled guard knocked her hand up; the shot went wide, crackling into the ceiling. Vordarian dove behind the table, the only furniture in the room, rolling. His liveried man, in pure spinal reflex, snapped up his nerve disruptor and fired. Kareen's face muscles locked in death-agony as the blue fire washed around her head; her mouth pulled open in a last soundless cry. Wait, Cordelia's thought wailed.
   Vordarian, utterly horrified, bellowed "No!", scrambled to his feet, and tore a nerve disruptor from the hand of another guard. The liveried man, realizing the enormity of his error, tossed his weapon away as if to divorce himself from his action. Vordarian shot him.
   The room tilted around her. Cordelia's hand locked around the hilt of the swordstick and triggered its sheath flying into the head of one guard, then brought the blade smartly down across Vordarian's weapon—wrist. He screamed, and blood and the nerve disruptor flew wide. Droushnakovi was already diving for the first discarded nerve disruptor. Bothari just took his target out with one lethal hand-blow to the neck. Cordelia slammed the door shut against the guards in the corridor, surging forward. A stunner charge buzzed into the walls, then three blue bolts in rapid succession from Droushnakovi took out the last of Vordarian's men.
   "Grab him," Cordelia yelled to Bothari. Vordarian, shaking, his left hand clamped around his half-severed right wrist, was in poor condition to resist, though he kicked and shouted. His blood ran the color of Kareen's robe. Bothari locked Vordarian's head in a firm grip, nerve disruptor pressed to his skull.
   "Out of here," snarled Cordelia, and kicked the door back open. "To the Emperor's chamber." To Miles. Vordarian's other guards, preparing to fire, held back at the sight of their master.
   "Back off!" Bothari roared, and they fell away from the door. Cordelia grabbed Droushnakovi by the arm, and they stepped over Kareen's body. Her ivory limbs lay muddled in the red fabric, abstractly beautiful forms even in death. The women kept Bothari and Vordarian between themselves and Vordarian's troops, and retreated down the corridor. "Pull that plasma arc out of my holster and start firing," Bothari savagely directed Cordelia. Yes; Bothari had managed to retrieve it in the melee, probably why his body count hadn't been higher.
   "You can't set fire to the Residence," Drou gasped in horror.
   A fortune in antiquities and Barrayaran historical artifacts were housed in this wing alone, no doubt. Cordelia grinned wildly, grabbed the weapon, and fired back down the corridor. Wooden furniture, wooden parquetry, and age-dry tapestries roared into flame as the beam's searing fingers touched them.
   Burn, you. Burn for Kareen. Pile a death-offering to match her courage and agony, blazing higher and higher– As they reached the door of the old Emperor's bedchamber, she fired the hallway in the opposite direction for good measure. THAT for what you've done to me, and to my boy—the flames should hold back pursuit for a few minutes. She felt as though her body were floating, light as air. Is this how Bothari feels, when he kills? Droushnakovi went for the wall panel to the secret ladder. She was functioning steadily now, as if her hands belonged to a different body than her tear-ravaged face. Cordelia dropped the sword on the bed and raced straight for the huge old carved oak wardrobe that stood against the near wall, and flung its doors wide. Green and amber lights glowed in the dim recesses of the center shelf. God, don't let it be another decoy... . Cordelia wrapped her arms around the canister and lifted it out into the light. The right weight, this time, heavy with fluids; the right readouts, the right numbers. The right one.
   Thank you, Kareen. I didn't mean to kill you. Surely she was mad. She didn't feel anything, no grief or remorse, though her heart was racing and her breath came in gasps. A shocky combat-high, that immortal rush that made men charge machine guns. So this was what the war-addicts came for.
   Vordarian was still struggling against Bothari's grip, swearing horribly. "You won't escape!" He stopped bucking, and tried to catch Cordelia's eyes. He took a deep breath. "Think, Lady Vorkosigan. You'll never make it. You must have me for a shield, but you can't carry me stunned. Conscious, I'll fight you every meter of the way. My men will be all over you, out there." His head jerked toward the window. "Stun us all and take you prisoner." His voice went persuasive. "Surrender now, and you'll save your lives. That one's life, too, if it means so much to you." He nodded to the replicator Cordelia held in her arms. Her steps were heavier than Alys Vorpatril's, now.
   "I never gave orders for that fool Vorhalas to kill Vorkosigan's heir," Vordarian continued desperately into her silence. Blood leaked rapidly between his fingers. "It was only his father, with his fatal progressive policies, who threatened Barrayar. Your son might have inherited the Countship from Piotr with my goodwill. Piotr should never have been divided from his party of true allegiance. It's a crime, what Lord Aral has put Piotr through—"
   So. It was you. Even at the very beginning. Blood loss and shock were making a jerky parody of Vordarian's usual smooth delivery of political argument. It was as if he sensed he could talk his way out of retribution, if only he hit on the right key words. Somehow, Cordelia doubted he would. Vordarian was not gaudily evil like Vorrutyer had been, not personally degraded like Serg; yet evil had flowed from him nonetheless, not from his vices, but from his virtues: the courage of his conservative convictions, his passion for Kareen. Cordelia's head ached, vilely.
   "We'd never proved you were behind Evon Vorhalas," Cordelia said quietly. "Thank you for the information."
   That shut him up, for a moment. His eyes shifted uneasily to the door, soon to burst inward, ignited by the inferno behind it.
   "Dead, I'm no use to you as a hostage," he said, drawing himself up in dignity.
   "'You're no use to me at all, Emperor Vidal," said Cordelia frankly. "There are at least five thousand casualties in this war so far. Now that Kareen is dead, how long will you keep fighting?"
   "Forever," he snarled whitely. "I will avenge her—avenge them all—"
   Wrong answer, Cordelia thought, with a curious lightheaded sadness. "Bothari." He was at her side instantly. "Pick up that sword." He did so. She set the replicator on the floor and laid her hand briefly atop his, wrapped around the hilt. "Bothari, execute this man for me, please." Her tone sounded weirdly serene in her own ears, as if she'd just asked Bothari to pass the butter. Murder didn't really require hysterics.
   "Yes, Milady," Bothari intoned, and lifted the blade. His eyes gleamed with joy.
   "What?" yelped Vordarian in astonishment. "You're a Betan! You can't do—"
   The flashing stroke cut off his words, his head, and his life. It was really extremely neat, despite the last spurts of blood from the stump of his neck. Vorkosigan should have loaned Bothari's services the day they'd executed Carl Vorhalas. All that upper body strength, combined with that extraordinary steel ... the bemused gyration of her thought snapped back to near-reality as Bothari fell to his knees with the body, dropping the swordstick and clutching his head. He screamed. It was as if Vordarian's death cry had been forced out of Bothari's throat.
   She dropped beside him, suddenly afraid again, though she'd been numb to fear, white-out overloaded, ever since Kareen had grabbed for the nerve disruptor and triggered all this chaos. Keyed by similar stimuli, Bothari was having the forbidden flashback, Cordelia guessed, to the mutinous throat-cutting that the Barrayaran high command had decreed he must forget. She cursed herself for not forseeing this possibility. Would it kill him?
   "This door is hot as hell," Droushnakovi, white and shaken, reported from beside it. "Milady, we have to get out of here now."
   Bothari was gasping raggedly, hands still pressed to his head, yet even as she watched his breathing grew marginally less disrupted. She left him, to crawl blindly over the floor. She needed something, something moisture-proof... .
   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."

CHAPTER NINETEEN

   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."
   He looked the device over, checking key readouts. "Good. Good. Nutrient reservoir is very low, but not quite depleted yet. Filters still functioning, uric acid level high but not over tolerance—I think it's all right, Milady. Alive, that is. What this interruption has done to my calcification treatments will take more time to determine. We'll be in the infirmary. I should be able to begin servicing it within the hour."
   "Do you have everything you need there? Supplies?"
   His white teeth flashed. "Lord Vorkosigan had me begin setting up a lab the day after you left. Just in case, he said."
   And, I love you. "Thank you. Go, go." She surrendered the replicator into Vaagen's hands, and he hurried out with it.
   She sat back down like a marionette with the strings cut. Now she could allow herself to feel the full weight of her exhaustion. But she could not stop quite yet. She had one very important debriefing yet to accomplish. And not to these hovering ImpSec twits, who pestered her—she closed her eyes and pointedly ignored them, letting Drou stammer out answers to their foolish questions.
   Desire warred with dread. She wanted Aral. She had defied Aral, most openly. Had it touched his honor, scorched his—admittedly, unusually flexible—Barrayaran male ego beyond tolerance? Would she be frozen out of his trust forever? No, that suspicion was surely unjust. But his public credibility among his peers, part of the delicate psychology of power—had she damaged it? Would some damnable unforseen political consequence rebound out of all this, back on their heads? Did she care? Yes, she decided sadly. It was hell to be so tired, and still care.
   "Kou!"
   Drou's cry snapped Cordelias eyes open. Koudelka was limping into the main portal Security debriefing office. Good Lord, the man was back in uniform, shaved and sharp. Only the grey rings under his eyes were non-regulation.
   Kou and Drou's reunion, Cordelia was delighted to note, was not in the least military. The staff soldier was instantly plastered all over with tall and grubby blonde, exchanging muffled unregulation greetings like darling, love, thank God, safe, sweet... . The ImpSec men turned away uncomfortably from the blast of naked emotion radiating from their faces. Cordelia basked in it. A far more sensible way to greet a friend than all that moronic saluting.
   They parted only to see each other better, still holding hands. "You made it," chortled Droushnakovi. "How long have you—is Lady Vorpatril—?"
   "We only made it in about two hours ahead of you," Kou said breathlessly, reoxygenating after a heroic kiss. "Lady Vorpatril and the young lord are bedded down in the infirmary. The doctor says she's suffering mainly from stress and exhaustion. She was incredible. We had a couple of bad moments, getting past Vordarian's Security, but she never cracked. And you—you did it! I passed Vaagen in the corridor, with the replicator—you rescued m'lord's son!"
   Droushnakovi's shoulders sagged. "But we lost Princess Kareen."
   "Oh." He touched her lips. "Don't tell me—Lord Vorkosigan instructed me to bring you all to him the instant you arrived. Debrief to him before anyone. I'll take you to him now." He waved away the ImpSec men like flies, something Cordelia had been longing to do.
   Bothari had to help her rise. She gathered up the yellow plastic bag. She noted ironically that it bore the name and logo of one of the capital's most exclusive women's clothiers. Kareen encompasses you at last, you bastard.
   "What's that?" asked Kou.
   "Yes, Lieutenant," the urgent ImpSec man put in, "please—she's refused to let us examine it in any way. By regulations, we shouldn't let her carry it into the base."
   Cordelia pulled open the top of the bag and held it out for Kou's inspection. He peered within.
   "Shit." The ImpSec men surged forward as Koudelka jumped back. He waved them down. "I ... I see," he swallowed. "Yes, Admiral Vorkosigan will certainly want to see that."
   "Lieutenant, what should I put on my inventory?" the ImpSec man—whined, Cordelia decided, was what he was doing. "I have to register it, if it's going in."
   "Let him cover his ass, Kou," Cordelia sighed.
   Kou peeked again, his lips twisting into a very crooked grin. "It's all right. Put it down as a Winterfair gift for Admiral Vorkosigan. From his wife."
   "Oh, Kou," Drou held out his sword. "I saved this. But we lost the casing, I'm sorry."
   Kou took it, looked at the bag, made the connection, and carried it more carefully. "That's ... that's all right. Thank you."
   "I'll take it back to Siegling's and get a duplicate casing made," Cordelia promised.
   The ImpSec men gave way before Admiral Vorkosigan's top aide. Kou led Cordelia, Bothari, and Drou into the base. Cordelia pulled the drawstring tight, and let the bag swing from her hand.
   "We're going down to the Staff level. The admiral's been in a sealed meeting for the last hour. Two of Vordarian's top officers came in secretly last night. Negotiating to sell him out. The best hostage-rescue plan hinges on their cooperation."
   "Did they know about this yet?" Cordelia held up the bag.
   "I don't think so, Milady. You've just changed everything." His grin grew feral, and his uneven stride lengthened.
   "I expect that raid is still going to be required," Cordelia sighed. "Even in collapse, Vordarian's side is still dangerous. Maybe more dangerous, in their desperation." She thought of that downtown Vorbarr Sultana hotel, where Bothari's baby girl Elena was, as far as she knew, still housed. Lesser hostages. Could she persuade Aral to apportion a few more resources for lesser hostages? Alas, she had probably not put all the soldiers out of work even yet. I tried. God, I tried.
   They went down, and down, to the nerve center of Tanery Base. They came to a highly secured conference chamber; a lethally armed squad stood ramrod-guard outside it. Koudelka wafted them past. The doors slid aside, and closed again behind them.
   Cordelia took in the tableau, that paused to look back up at her from around the polished table. Aral was in the center, of course. Illyan and Count Piotr flanked him on either side. Prime Minister Vortala was there, and Kanzian, and some other senior staffers all in formal dress greens. The two double-traitors sat across, with their aides. Clouds of witnesses. She wanted to be alone with Aral, be rid of the whole bloody mob of them. Soon.
   Aral's eyes locked to hers in silent agony. His lips curled in an utterly ironic smile. That was all; and yet her stomach warmed with confidence again, sure of him. No frost. It was going to be all right. They were in step again, and a torrent of words and hard embraces could not have communicated it any better. Embraces would come, though, the grey eyes promised. Her own lips curved up for the first time since—when?
   Count Piotr's hand slapped down hard upon the table. "Good God, woman, where have you been?" he cried furiously.
   A morbid lunacy overtook her. She smiled fiercely at him, and held up the bag. "Shopping."
   For a second, the old man nearly believed her; conflicting expressions whiplashed over his face, astonishment, disbelief, then anger as it penetrated he was being mocked.
   "Want to see what I bought?" Cordelia continued, still floating. She yanked the bag's top open, and rolled Vordarian's head out across the table. Fortunately, it had ceased leaking some hours back. It stopped faceup before him, lips grinning, drying eyes staring.
   Piotr's mouth fell open. Kanzian jumped, the staffers swore, and one of Vordarian's traitors actually fell out of his chair, recoiling. Vortala pursed his lips and raised his brows. Koudelka, grimly proud of his key role in stage-managing this historic moment in one-upsmanship, laid the swordstick on the table as further evidence. Illyan puffed, and grinned triumphantly through his shock.
   Aral was perfect. His eyes widened only briefly, then he rested his chin on his hands and gazed over his father's shoulder with an expression of cool interest. "But of course," he breathed. "Every Vor lady goes to the capital to shop."
   "I paid too much for it," Cordelia confessed.
   "That, too, is traditional." A sardonic smile quirked his lips.
   "Kareen is dead. Shot in the melee. I couldn't save her."
   He Opened his hand, as if to let the nascent black humor fall through his fingers. "I see." He raised his eyes again to hers, as if asking Are you all right?, and apparently finding the answer, No.
   "Gentlemen. If you will be pleased to excuse yourselves for a few minutes. I wish to be alone with my wife."
   In the shuffle of the men rising to their feet, Cordelia caught a mutter, "Brave man ..."
   She nailed Vordarian's men by eye, as they backed from the table. "Officers. I recommend that when this conference resumes, you surrender unconditionally upon Lord Vorkosigan's mercy. He may still have some." I certainly don't, was the unspoken cap to that. "I'm tired of your stupid war. End it."
   Piotr edged past her. She smiled bitterly at him. He grimaced uneasily back. "It appears I underestimated you," he murmured.
   "Don't you ever ... cross me again. And stay away from my son."
   A look from Vorkosigan held back her outpouring of rage, quivering on the lip of her cup. She and Piotr exchanged wary nods, like the vestigial bows of two duelists.
   "Kou," said Vorkosigan, staring bemusedly at the grisly object lying by his elbow. "Will you please arrange for this thing to be removed to the base morgue. I don't fancy it as a table decoration. It will have to be stored till it can be buried with the rest of him. Wherever that may be."
   "Sure you don't want to leave it there to inspire Vordarian's staffers to come to terms?" said Kou.
   "No," said Vorkosigan firmly. "It's had a sufficiently salutary effect already."
   Gingerly, Kou took the bag from Cordelia, opened it, and used it to capture Vordarian's head without actually touching it.
   Aral's eye took in her weary team, Droushnakovi's grief, Bothari's compulsive twitching. "Drou. Sergeant. You are dismissed to wash and eat. Report back to me in my quarters after we finish here."
   Droushnakovi nodded, and the sergeant saluted, and they followed Koudelka out.
   Cordelia fell into Aral's arms as the door sighed shut, into his lap, catching him as he rose for her. They both landed with enough force to threaten the balance of the chair. They embraced each other so tightly, they had to back off to manage a kiss.
   "Don't you ever," he husked, "pull a stunt like that again."
   "Don't you ever let it become necessary, again."
   "Deal."
   He held her face away from his, between his hands, his eyes devouring her. "I was so afraid for you, I forgot to be afraid for your enemies. I should have remembered. Dear Captain."
   "I couldn't have done a thing, alone. Drou was my eyes, Bothari my right arm, Koudelka our feet. You must forgive Kou for going AWOL. We sort of kidnapped him."
   "So I heard."
   "Did he tell you about your cousin Padma?"
   "Yes," a grieved sigh. He stared back through time. "Padma and I were the only survivors of Mad Yuri's massacre of Prince Xav's descendants, that day. I was eleven. Padma was one, a baby ... I always thought of him as the baby, ever after. Tried to watch out for him ... Now I'm the only one left. Yuri's work is almost done."
   "Bothari's Elena. She must be rescued. She's a lot more important than that barn full of counts at the Residence."
   "We're working on that right now," he promised. "Top priority, now that you've removed Emperor Vidal from consideration." He paused, smiling slowly. "I fear you've shocked my Barrayarans, love."
   "Why? Did they think they had a monopoly on savagery? Those were Vordarian's last words. 'You're a Betan. You can't do.' "
   "Do what?"
   "This, I suppose he would have said. If he'd had the chance."
   "A lurid trophy, to carry on the monorail. Suppose someone had asked you to open your bag?"
   "I would have."
   "Are you ... quite all right, love?" His mouth was serious, under his smile.
   "Meaning, have I lost my grip? Yes, a little. More than a little." Her hands still shook, as they had for a day, a continuing tremula that did not pass off. "It seemed ... necessary, to bring Vordarian's head along. I hadn't actually thought about mounting it on the wall of Vorkosigan House along with your father's hunting trophies, though it's an idea. I don't think I consciously realized why I was hanging on to it till I walked into this room. If I'd staggered in here empty-handed and told all those men I'd killed Vordarian, and undeclared their little war, who'd have believed me? Besides you."
   "Illyan, perhaps. He's seen you in action before. The others ... you're quite right."
   "I think I also had some idea stuck in my mind from ancient history. Didn't they used to publicly display the bodies of slain rulers, to scotch pretenders? It seemed appropriate. Though Vordarian was almost a side-issue, from my point of view."
   "Your ImpSec escort reported to me you'd recovered the replicator. Was it still working?"
   "Vaagen has it now, checking it. Miles is alive. Damage unknown. Oh. It seems Vordarian had some hand in setting up Evon Vorhalas. Not directly, through some agent."
   "Illyan suspected it." His arms tightened around her.
   "About Bothari," she said. "He's not in good shape. Way overstressed. He needs real treatment, medical, not political. That memory wipe was a horror show."
   "At the time, it saved his life. My compromise with Ezar. I had no power then. I can do better now."
   "You'd better. He's fixated on me like a dog. His words. And I've used him like one. I owe him ... everything. But he scares me. Why me?"
   Vorkosigan looked very thoughtful. "Bothari ... does not have a good sense of self. No strong center. When I first met him, at his most ill, his personality was close to separating into multiples. If he were better educated, not so damaged, he would have made an ideal spy, a deep-penetration mole. He's a chameleon. A mirror. He becomes whatever is required of him. Not a conscious process, I don't think. Piotr expects a loyal retainer, and Bothari plays the part, deadpan as you please. Vorruryer wanted a monster, and Bothari became his torturer. And victim. I demanded a good soldier, and he became one for me. You ..." his voice softened, "you are the only person I know who looks at Bothari and sees a hero. So he becomes one for you. He clings to you because you create him a greater man than he ever dreamed of being."
   "Aral, that's crazed."
   "Ah?" He nuzzled her hair. "But he's not the only man you have that peculiar effect upon. Dear Captain."
   "I'm afraid I'm not in much better shape than Bothari. I botched it, and Kareen died. Who will tell Gregor? If it weren't for Miles, I'd quit. You keep Piotr off me, or I swear, next time I'll try and take him apart." She was shaking again.
   "Sh." He rocked her, a little. "I think you can at least leave the mopping up to me, eh? Will you trust me again? We'll make something of these sacrifices. Not vain."
   "I feel dirty. I feel sick."
   "Yes. Most sane people do, coming in off a combat mission. It's a very familiar state of mind." He paused. "But if a Betan can become so Barrayaran, maybe it's not so impossible for Barrayarans to become a little more Betan. Change is possible."
   "Change is inevitable," she asserted. "But you can't manage it Ezar's way. This isn't Ezar's era anymore. You have to find your own way. Remake this world into one Miles can survive in. And Elena. And Ivan. And Gregor."
   "As you will, Milady."
   On the third day after Vordarian's death, the capital fell to loyal Imperial troops; if not without a shot being fired, at least not nearly so bloodily as Cordelia had feared. Only two pockets of resistance, at ImpSec and at the Residence itself, had to be cleared out by ground troops. The downtown hotel with its hostages was surrendered intact by its garrison, after hours of intense covert negotiations. Piotr gave Bothari a one-day leave to personally retrieve his child and her fosterer and escort them home. Cordelia slept through the night for the first time since her return. Evon Vorhalas had been commanding ground troops for Vordarian in the capital, in charge of the last defense of the space communications center in the military headquarters complex. He died in the final flurry of fighting, shot by his own men when he spurned an offer of amnesty in return for their surrender. In a way, Cordelia was relieved. The traditional punishment for treason upon the part of a Vor lord was public exposure and death by starvation. The late Emperor Ezar had not hesitated to maintain the gruesome tradition. Cordelia could only pray that Gregor's reign would see the custom end.
   Without Vordarian to hold it together, his rebel coalition shattered rapidly into disparate factions. An extreme conservative Vor lord in the city of Federstok raised his standard and declared himself Emperor, succeeding Vordarian; his pretendership lasted somewhat less than thirty hours. In an eastern coastal District belonging to one of Vordarian's allies, the Count suicided upon capture. An anti-Vor group declared an independent republic in the chaos. The new Count, an infantry colonel from a collateral family line who had never anticipated such honors falling upon him, took instant and effective exception to this violent swing to the over-progressive. Vorkosigan left it to him and his District militia, reserving Imperial troops for "non-District-internal matters."
   "You can't go halfway and stop," Piotr muttered forebodingly, at this delicacy.
   "One step at a time," Vorkosigan returned grimly, "I can walk around the world. Watch me."
   On the fifth day, Gregor was returned to the capital. Vorkosigan and Cordelia together undertook to tell him of the death of Kareen. He cried in bewilderment. When he quieted, he was taken for a ride in a groundcar with a transparent force-screen, reviewing some troops; in fact, the troops were reviewing him, that he might be seen to be alive, finally dispelling Vordarian's rumors of his death. Cordelia rode with him. His silent shockiness hurt her to the heart, but it was better from her point of view than parading him first and then telling him. If she'd had to endure his repeated queries of when he would see his mother again, all during the ride, she would have broken down herself.
   The funeral for Kareen was public, though much less elaborate than it would have been in less chaotic circumstances. Gregor was required to light an offering pyre for the second time in a year. Vorkosigan asked Cordelia to guide Gregor's hand with the torch. This part of the funeral ceremony seemed almost redundant, after what she'd done to the Residence. Cordelia added a thick lock of her own hair to the pile. Gregor clung close to her.
   "Are they going to kill me, too?" he whispered to her. He didn't sound frightened, just morbidly curious. Father, grandfather, mother, all gone in a year; no wonder he felt targeted, confused though his understanding of death was at his age.
   "No," she said firmly. Her arm tightened around his shoulders. "I won't let them." God help her, this baseless assurance actually seemed to console him.
   I'll look after your boy, Kareen, Cordelia thought as the flames rose up. The oath was more costly than any gift being burned, for it bound her life unbreakably to Barrayar. But the heat on her face eased the pain in her head, a little.
   Cordelia's own soul felt like an exhausted snail, shelled in a glassy numbness. She crept like an automaton through the rest of the ceremony, though there were flashes when her surroundings made no sense at all. The assorted Barrayaran Vor reacted to her with a frozen, deep formality. They doubtless figure me for crazy-dangerous, a madwoman let out of the attic by overindulgent relations. It finally dawned on her that their exaggerated courtesies signified respect.
   It made her furious. All Kareen's courage of endurance had bought her nothing, Lady Vorpatril's brave and bloody birth-giving was taken for granted, but whack off some idiot's head and you were really somebody, by God—!
   It took Aral an hour, when they returned to his quarters, to calm her down, and then she had a crying jag. He stuck it out.
   "Are you going to use this?" she asked him, when sheer weariness returned her to a semblance of coherence. "This, this ... amazing new status of mine?" How she loathed the word, acid in her mouth.
   "I'll use anything," he vowed quietly, "if it will help me put Gregor on the throne in fifteen years a sane and competent man, heading a stable government. Use you, me, whatever it takes. To pay this much, then fail, would not be tolerable."
   She sighed, and put her hand in his. "In case of accident, donate my remaining body parts, too. It's the Betan way. Waste not."
   His lip curled up helplessly. Face-to-face, they rested their foreheads together for a moment, bracing each other. "Want not."
   Her silent promise to Kareen was made policy when she and Aral, as a couple, were officially appointed Gregor's guardians by the Council of Counts. This was legally distinct somehow from Aral's guardianship of the Imperium as Regent. Prime Minister Vortala took time to lecture her and make it clear her new duties involved no political powers. She did have economic functions, including trusteeship of certain Vorbarra holdings that were separate from Imperial properties, appending strictly to Gregor's title as Count Vorbarra. And by Aral's delegation, she was given oversight of the Emperor's household. And education.
   "But, Aral," said Cordelia, stunned. "Vortala emphasized I was to have no power."
   "Vortala ... is not all-wise. Let's just say, he has a little trouble recognizing as such some forms of power which are not synonymous with force. Your window of opportunity is narrow, though; at age twelve Gregor will enter a pre-Academy preparatory school."
   "But do they realize ... ?"
   "I do. And you do. It's enough."

CHAPTER TWENTY

   One of Cordelia's first orders was to assign Droushnakovi back to Gregor's person, for his emotional continuity. This did not mean giving up the girl's company, a comfort to which Cordelia had grown deeply accustomed, because upon Illyan's renewed insistence Aral finally took up living quarters in the Imperial Residence. It eased Cordelias heart, when Drou and Kou were wed a month after Winterfair.
   Cordelia offered herself as a go-between for the two families. For some reason, Kou and Drou both turned the offer down, hastily, though with profuse thanks. Given the bewildering pitfalls of Barrayaran social custom, Cordelia was just as happy to leave it to the experienced elderly lady the couple did contract.
   Cordelia saw Alys Vorpatril often, exchanging domestic visits. Baby Lord Ivan was, if not exactly a comfort to Alys, certainly a distraction in her slow recovery from her physical ordeal. He grew rapidly despite a tendency to fussiness, an iatrogenic trait, Cordelia realized after a while, triggered by Alys's fussing over him. Ivan should have three or four sibs to divide her attention among, Cordelia decided, watching Alys burp him on her shoulder while planning aloud his educational attack, come age eighteen, upon the formidable Imperial Military Academy entrance examinations.
   Alys Vorpatril was drawn off her embittered mourning for Padma and her planning of Ivan's life down to the last detail, when she was given a look at a picture of the wedding dress Drou was drooling over.
   "No, no, no!" she cried, recoiling. "All that lace—you would look as furry as a big white bear. Silk, dear, long falls of silk is what you need—" and she was off. Motherless, sisterless Drou could scarcely have found a more knowledgeable bridal consultant. Lady Vorpatril ended by making the dress one of her several presents, to be sure of its aesthetic perfection, along with a "little holiday cottage" which turned out to be a substantial house on the eastern seashore. Come summer, Drou's beach dream would come true. Cordelia grinned, and purchased the girl a nightgown and robe with enough tiers of lace layered on them to satiate the most frill-starved soul.
   Aral lent the hall: the Imperial Residence's Red Room and adjacent ballroom, the one with the beautiful marquetry floor, which to Cordelia's immense relief had escaped the fire. In theory, this magnificent gesture was required to ease Illyan's Security headaches, as Cordelia and Aral were to stand among the principal witnesses. Personally, Cordelia thought converting ImpSec into wedding caterers a promising turn of events.
   Aral looked over the guest list and smiled. "Do you realize," he said to Cordelia, "every class is represented? A year ago this event, here, would not have been possible. The grocer's son and the non-com's daughter. They bought it with blood, but maybe next year it can be bought with peaceful achievement. Medicine, education, engineering, entrepreneurship—shall we have a party for librarians?"
   "Won't those terrible Vorish crones all Piotr's friends are married to complain about social over-progressiveness?"
   "With Alys Vorpatril behind this? They wouldn't dare." The affair grew from there. By a week in advance Kou and Drou were considering eloping out of sheer panic, having lost all control of everything whatsoever to their eager helpers. But the Imperial Residence's staff brought it all together with practiced ease. The senior housewoman flew about, chortling, "And here I was afraid we weren't going to have anything to do, once the admiral moved in, but those dreadful boring General Staff dinners."
   The day and hour came at last. A large circle made of colored groats was laid out on the floor of the Red Room, encompassed by a star with a variable number of points, one for each parent or principal witness to stand at: in this case, four. In Barrayaran custom a couple married themselves, speaking their vows within the circle, requiring neither priest nor magistrate. Practically, a coach, called appropriately enough the Coach, stood outside the circle and read the script for the fainthearted or faint-headed to repeat. This dispensed with the need for higher neural functions such as learning and memory on the part of the stressed couple. Lost motor coordination was supplied by a friend each, who steered them to the circle. It was all very practical, Cordelia decided, as well as splendid.
   With a grin and a flourish Aral placed her at her assigned star point, as if setting out a bouquet, and took his own place. Lady Vorpatril had insisted on a new gown for Cordelia, a sweeping length of blue and white with red floral accents, color-coordinated with Aral's ultra-formal parade red-and-blues. Drou's proud and nervous father also wore his red-and-blues and held down his point. Strange to think of the military, which Cordelia normally associated with totalitarian impulses, as the spearhead of egalitarianism on Barrayar. The Cetagandans' gift, Aral called it; their invasion had first forced the promotion of talent regardless of origin, and the waves of that change were still traveling through Barrayaran society.
   Sergeant Droushnakovi was a shorter, slighter man than Cordelia had expected. Either Drou's mother's genes, better nutrition, or both had boosted all his children up taller than himself. All three brothers, from the captain to the corporal, had been broken loose from their military assignments to attend, and stood now in the big outer circle of other witnesses along with Kou's excited younger sister. Kou's mother stood on the star's last point, crying and smiling, in a blue dress so color-perfect Cordelia decided Alys Vorpatril must have somehow gotten to her, too.
   Koudelka marched in first, propped by his stick with its new cover and Sergeant Bothari. Sergeant Bothari wore the most glittery version of Piotr's brown and silver livery, and whispered helpful, horribly suggestive advice like "If you feel really nauseous, Lieutenant, put your head down." The very thought turned Kou's face greener, an extraordinary color-contrast with his red-and-blues that Lady Vorpatril would no doubt have disapproved.
   Heads turned. Oh, my. Alys Vorpatril had been absolutely right about Drou's gown. She swept in, as stunningly graceful as a sailing ship, a tall clean perfection of form and function, ivory silk, gold hair, blue eyes, white, blue, and red flowers, so that when she stepped up beside Kou one suddenly realized how tall he must be. Alys Vorpatril, in silver-grey, released Drou at the circle's edge with a gesture like some hunting goddess releasing a white falcon, to soar and settle on Kou's outstretched arm.
   Kou and Drou made it through their oaths without stammering or passing out, and managed to conceal their mutual embarrassment at the public declaration of their despised first names, Clement and Ludmilla.
   ("My brothers used to call me Lud," Drou had confided to Cordelia during the practice yesterday. "Rhymes with mud. Also thud, blood, crud, dud, and cud."
   "You'll always be Drou to me," Kou had promised.)
   As senior witness Aral then broke the circle of groats with a sweep of one booted foot and let them out, and the music, dancing, eating and drinking began.
   The buffet was incredible, the music live, and the drinking ... traditional. After the first formal glass of the good wine Piotr'd sent on, Cordelia drifted up to Kou and murmured a few words about Betan research on the detrimental effects of ethanol on sexual function, after which he switched to water.
   "Cruel woman," Aral whispered in her ear, laughing.
   "Not to Drou, I'm not," she murmured back.
   She was formally introduced to the brothers, now brothers-in-law, who regarded her with that awed respect that made her teeth grind. Though her jaw eased a bit when a rhyming brother was waved to silence by Dad to make room for some comment by the bride on the topic of hand-weapons. "Quiet, Jos," Sergeant Droushnakovi told his son. "You've never handled a nerve disruptor in combat." Drou blinked, then smiled, a gleam in her eye.
   Cordelia seized a moment with Bothari, whom she saw all too seldom now that Aral had split his household from Piotr's.
   "How is Elena doing, now she's back home? Has Mistress Hysopi recovered from it all yet?"
   "They're well, Milady," Bothari ducked his head, and almost-smiled. "I visited about five days ago, when Count Piotr went down to check on his horses. Elena, um, creeps. Put her down and look away a minute, you look back and she's moved... ." He frowned. "I hope Carla Hysopi stays alert."
   "She saw Elena safely through Vordarian's war, I suspect she'll handle crawling with equal ease. Courageous woman. She should be in line for some of those medals they're handing out."
   Bothari's brow wrinkled. "Don't know they'd mean much to her."
   "Mm. She does understand she can call on me for anything she needs, I trust. Any time."
   "Yes, Milady. But we're doing all right for the moment." A flash of pride, there, in that statement of sufficiency. "It's very quiet down at Vorkosigan Surleau, in the winter. Clean. A right and proper place for a baby." Not like the place I grew up in, Cordelia could almost hear him add. "I mean her to have everything right and proper. Even her da."
   "How are you doing, yourself?"
   "The new med is better. Anyway, my head doesn't feel like it's stuffed with fog anymore. And I sleep at night. Besides that I can't tell what it's doing."
   Its job, apparently; he seemed relaxed and calm, almost free of that sinister edginess. Though he was still the first person in the room to look over to the buffet and ask, "Is he supposed to be up?"
   Gregor, in pajamas, was creeping along the edge of the culinary array, trying to look invisible and nail down a few goodies before he was spotted and taken away again. Cordelia got to him first, before he was either stepped on by an unwary guest, or recaptured by Security forces in the persons of the breathless maidservant and terrified bodyguard who were supposed to be filling in for Drou. They were followed up by a paper-white Simon Illyan. Fortunately for Illyan's heart, Gregor had apparently only been formally missing for about sixty seconds. Gregor shrank into her skirts as the hyperventilating adults loomed over him.
   Drou, who had noticed Illyan touch his comm, turn pale, and start to move, checked in by sheer force of habit. "What's the matter?"
   "How'd he get away?" snarled Illyan to Gregor's keepers, who stammered out something inaudible about thought he was asleep and never took my eyes off.
   "He's not away," Cordelia put in tartly. "This is his home. He ought to be at least able to walk about inside, or why do you keep all those bloody useless guards on the walls out there?"
   "Droushie, can't I come to your party?" Gregor asked plaintively, casting around desperately for an authority to outrank Illyan.
   Drou looked at Illyan, who looked disapproving. Cordelia broke the deadlock without hesitation. "Yes, you can."
   So, under Cordelia's supervision, the Emperor danced with the bride, ate three cream cakes, and was carried away to bed satisfied. Fifteen minutes was all he'd wanted, poor kid.
   The party rolled on, elated. "Dance, Milady?" Aral inquired hopefully at her elbow.
   Dare she try it? They were playing the restrained rhythms of the mirror-dance—surely she couldn't go too wrong. She nodded, and Aral drained his glass and led her onto the polished marquetry. Step, slide, gesture: concentrating, she made an interesting and unexpected discovery. Either partner could lead, and if the dancers were alert and sharp, the watchers couldn't tell the difference. She tried some dips and slides of her own, and Aral followed smoothly. Back and forth the lead passed like a ball between them, the game growing ever more absorbing, until they ran out of music and breath.
   The last snows of winter were melting from the streets of Vorbarr Sultana when Captain Vaagen called from ImpMil for Cordelia.
   "It's time, Milady. I've done all I can do in vitro. The placenta is ten months old and clearly senescing. The machine can't be boosted any more to compensate."
   "When, then?"
   "Tomorrow would be good."
   She barely slept that night. They all trooped down to the Imperial Military Hospital the next morning, Aral, Cordelia, Count Piotr flanked by Bothari. Cordelia was not at all sure she wanted Piotr present, but until the old man did them all the convenience of dropping dead, she was stuck with him. Maybe one more appeal to reason, one more presentation of the facts, one more try, would do the trick. Their unresolved antagonism grieved Aral; at least he let the onus for fueling it fall on Piotr, not herself. Do your worst, old man. You have no future except through me. My son will light your offering pyre. She was glad to see Bothari again, though.
   Vaagen's new laboratory was an entire floor in the most up-to-date building in the complex. Cordelia'd had him moved from his old lab on account of ghosts, having come in for one of her frequent visits soon after their return to Vorbarr Sultana to find him in a state of near-paralysis, unable to work. Every time he entered the room, he'd said, Dr. Henri's violent and senseless death replayed in his memory. He could not step on the floor near the place where Henri's body had fallen, but had to walk wide around; little noises made him jump and twitch. "I am a man of reason," he'd said hoarsely. "This superstitious nonsense means nothing to me." So Cordelia had helped him burn a private offering to Henri in a brazier on the lab floor, and disguised the move as a promotion.
   The new lab was bright and spacious and free of revenant spirits. Cordelia found a mob of men waiting when Vaagen ushered her in: researchers assigned to Vaagen to explore replicator technology, interested civilian obstetricians including Dr. Ritter, Miles's own pediatrician-to-be, and his consulting surgeon. The changing of the guard. Mere parents needed determination to elbow their way in.
   Vaagen bustled about, happily important. He still wore his eyepatch, but promised Cordelia he would take the time for the last round of surgery to restore his vision very soon now. A tech trundled out the uterine replicator and Vaagen paused, as if trying to figure out how to put the proper drama and ceremony into what Cordelia knew for a very simple event. He settled on turning it into a technical lecture for his colleagues, detailing the composition of the hormone solutions as he injected them into the appropriate feed-lines, interpreting readouts, describing the placental separation going on within the replicator, the similarities and differences between replicator and body births. There were several differences Vaagen didn't mention. Alys Vorpatril should see this, Cordelia thought.
   Vaagen looked up to see her watching him, paused selfconsciously, and smiled. "Lady Vorkosigan." He gestured to the replicator's latch-seals. "Would you care to do the honors?"
   She reached, hesitated, and looked around for Aral. There he was, solemn and attentive at the edge of the crowd. "Aral?"
   He strode forward. "Are you sure?"
   "If you can open a picnic cooler, you can do this." They each took a latch and raised them in unison, breaking the sterile seal, and lifted the top off. Dr. Ritter moved in with a vibra-scalpel, cutting through the thick felt mat of nutrient tubing with a touch so delicate the silvery amniotic sac beneath was unscored, then cut Miles free of his last bit of biological packaging, clearing his mouth and nose of fluids before his first surprised inhalation. Aral's arm, around her, tightened so hard it hurt. A muffled laugh, no more than a breath, broke from his lips; he swallowed and blinked to bring his features, suffused with elation and pain, back under strict control.
   Happy birthday, thought Cordelia. Good color ...
   Unfortunately, that was about all that was really good. The contrast with baby Ivan was overwhelming. Despite the extra weeks of gestation, ten months to Ivan's nine-and-a-half, Miles was barely half Ivan's size at birth, and far more wizened and wrinkled. His spine was noticeably deformed, and his legs were drawn up and locked in a tight bend. He was definitely a male heir, though, no question about that. His first cry was thin, weak, nothing at all like Ivan's angry, hungry bellow. Behind her, she heard Piotr hiss with disappointment.
   "Has he been getting enough nutrition?" she asked Vaagen. It was hard to keep the accusation out of her tone.
   Vaagen shrugged helplessly. "All he would absorb."
   The pediatrician and his colleague laid Miles out under a warming light, and began their examination, Cordelia and Aral on either side.
   "This bend will straighten out on its own, Milady," the pediatrician pointed. "But the lower spine should have surgical correction as early as possible. You were right, Vaagen, the treatment to optimize skull development also fused the hip sockets. That's why the legs are locked in that strange position, m'lord. He'll require surgery to crack those bones loose and turn them around before he can start to crawl or walk. I don't recommend that in the first year, on top of the spinal work, let him gain strength and weight first—"
   The surgeon, testing the infant's arms, swore suddenly and snatched up his diagnostic viewer. Miles mewed. Aral's hand clenched, by his trouser seam. Cordelia's stomach sank. "Hell!" said the surgeon. "His humerus just snapped. You're right, Vaagen, the bones are abnormally brittle."
   "At least he has bones," sighed Vaagen. "He almost didn't, at one point."
   "Be careful," said the surgeon, "especially of the head and spine. If the rest are as bad as the long bones, we're going to have to come up with some kind of reinforcement. ..."
   Piotr stamped toward the door. Aral glanced up, his lips thinning to a frown, and excused himself to follow. Cordelia was torn, but once observation assured her that the bone-setting was under way and the doctors' new caution would protect Miles from further damage today, she left their ingenious heads bent over him and followed Aral.
   In the corridor, Piotr was stalking up and down. Aral stood at parade rest, unmoved and unmoving. Bothari was a silent witness in the background.
   Piotr turned and saw her. "You! You've strung me along. This is what you call 'great repairs'? Gah!"
   "They are great repairs. Miles is unquestionably much better than he was. Nobody promised perfection."
   "You lied. Vaagen lied."
   "We did not," denied Cordelia. "I tried to give you accurate summaries of Vaagen's experiments all the way along. What he's delivered is about what his reports led us to expect. Check your ears."
   "I see what you're trying, and it won't work. I've just told him," he pointed at Aral, "this is where I stop. I don't want to see that mutant again. Ever. While it lives, if it lives, and it looks pretty damned sickly to me, don't bring it around my door. As God is my judge, woman, you won't make a fool of me."
   "That would be redundant," snapped Cordelia.
   Piotr's lips curled in a silent snarl. Cheated of a cooperative target, he turned on Aral. "And you, you spineless, skirt-smothered—if your elder brother had lived—" Piotr's mouth clamped shut abruptly, too late.
   Aral's face drained to a grey hue Cordelia had seen but twice before; both times he'd been a breath and a chance away from committing murder. Piotr had joked about Aral's famous rages. Only now did Cordelia realize Piotr, though he may have witnessed his son in irritation, had never seen the real thing. Piotr seemed to realize it, too, dimly. His brows lowered; he stared, off-balanced.
   Aral's hands locked to each other, behind his back. Cordelia could see them shake, white-knuckled. His chin lifted, and he spoke in a whisper.
   "If my brother had lived, he would have been perfect. You thought so; I thought so; Emperor Yuri thought so, too. So ever after you've had to make do with the leftovers from that bloody banquet, the son Mad Yuri's death squad overlooked. We Vorkosigans, we can make do." His voice fell still further. "But my firstborn will live. I will not fail him."
   The icy statement was a near-lethal cut across the belly, as fine a slash as Bothari could have delivered with Koudelka's swordstick, and very accurately placed. Truly, Piotr should not have lowered the tone of this discussion. The breath huffed from him in disbelief and pain.
   Aral's expression grew inward. "I will not fail him again," he corrected himself lowly. "A second chance you were never given, sir." Behind his back his hands unclenched. A small jerk of his head dismissed Piotr and all Piotr might say.
   Blocked twice, visibly suffering from his profound misstep, Piotr looked around for a target of opportunity upon which to vent his frustration. His eye fell on Bothari, watching blank-faced.
   "And you. Your hand was in this from beginning to end. Did my son place you as a spy in my household? Where do your loyalties lie? Do you obey me, or him?"
   An odd gleam flared in Bothari's eye. He tilted his head toward Cordelia. "Her."
   Piotr was so taken aback, it took him several seconds to regain his speech. "Fine," he sputtered at last. "She can have you. I don't want to see your ugly face again. Don't come back to Vorkosigan House. Esterhazy will deliver your things before nightfall."
   He wheeled and marched away. His grand exit, already weak, was spoiled when he looked back over his shoulder before he rounded the corner.
   Aral vented a very weary sigh.
   "Do you think he means it this time?" Cordelia asked. "All that never-ever stuff?"
   "Government concerns will require us to communicate. He knows that. Let him go home and listen to the silence for a bit. Then we'll see." He smiled bleakly. "While we live, we cannot disengage."
   She thought of the child whose blood now bound them, her to Aral, Aral to Piotr, and Piotr to herself. "So it seems." She looked an apology to Bothari. "I'm sorry, Sergeant. I didn't know Piotr could fire an oath-armsman."
   "Well, technically, he can't," Aral explained. "Bothari was just reassigned to another branch of the household. You."
   "Oh." Just what I always wanted, my very own monster. What am I supposed to do, keep him in my closet? She rubbed the bridge of her nose, then regarded her hand. The hand that had encompassed Bothari's on the swordstick. So. And so. "Lord Miles will need a bodyguard, won't he?"
   Aral tilted his head in interest. "Indeed."
   Bothari looked suddenly so intently hopeful, it made Cordelia catch her breath. "A bodyguard," he said, "and backup. No raff could give him a hard time if ... let me help, Milady."
   Let me help. Rhymes with I love you, right? "It would be ..." impossible, crazy, dangerous, irresponsible, "my pleasure, Sergeant."
   His face lit like a torch. "Can I start now?"
   "Why not?"
   "I'll wait for you in there, then." He nodded toward Vaagen's lab. He slipped back through the door. Cordelia could just picture him, leaning watchfully against the wall—she trusted that malevolent presence wouldn't make the doctors so nervous they would drop their fragile charge.
   Aral blew out his breath, and took her in his arms. "Do you Betans have any nursery tales about the witch's name-day gifts?"
   "The good and bad fairies seem to all be out in force for this one, don't they?" She leaned against the scratchy fabric of his uniformed shoulder. "I don't know if Piotr meant Bothari for a blessing or a curse. But I bet he really will keep the raff off. Whatever the raff turns out to be. It's a strange list of birthday presents we've given our boychick."
   They returned to the lab, to listen attentively to the rest of the doctors' lecture on Miles's special needs and vulnerabilities, arrange the first round of treatment schedules, and wrap him warmly for the trip home. He was so small, a scrap of flesh, lighter than a cat, Cordelia found when she at last took him up in her arms, skin to skin for the first time since he'd been cut from her body. She had a moment's panic. Put him back in the vat for about eighteen years, I can't handle this... . Children might or might not be a blessing, but to create them and then fail them was surely damnation. Even Piotr knew that. Aral held the door open for them.
   Welcome to Barrayar, son. Here you go: have a world of wealth and poverty, wrenching change and rooted history. Have a birth; have two. Have a name. Miles means "soldier," but don't let the power of suggestion overwhelm you. Have a twisted form in a society that loathes and fears the mutations that have been its deepest agony. Have a title, wealth, power, and all the hatred and envy they will draw. Have your body ripped apart and re-arranged. Inherit an array of friends and enemies you never made. Have a grandfather from hell. Endure pain, find joy, and make your own meaning, because the universe certainly isn't going to supply it. Always be a moving target. Live. Live. Live.

EPILOGUE

VORKOSIGAN SURLEAU—FIVE YEARS LATER.

   "Dammit, Vaagen," Cordelia panted under her breath. "You never told me the little bugger was going to be hyperactive."
   She galloped down the end stairs, through the kitchen, and out onto the terrace at the end of the rambling stone residence. Her gaze swept the lawn, probed the trees, and scanned the long lake sparkling in the summer sun. No movement.
   Aral, dressed in old uniform trousers and a faded print shirt, came around the house, saw her, and opened his hands in a no-luck gesture. "He's not out here."
   "He's not inside. Down, or up, d'you think? Where's little Elena? I bet they're together. I forbade him to go down to the lake without an adult, but I don't know... ."
   "Surely not the lake," said Aral. "They swam all morning. I was exhausted just watching them. In the fifteen minutes I timed it, he climbed the dock and jumped back in nineteen times. Multiply that by three hours."
   "Up, then," decided Cordelia. They turned and trudged together up the hill on the gravel path lined with native, Earth-import, and exotic shrubbery and flowers. "And to think," Cordelia wheezed, "I prayed for the day he would walk."
   "It's five years pent-up motion all let loose at once," Aral analyzed. "In a way, it's reassuring that all that frustration didn't turn in on itself and become despair. For a time, I was afraid it might."
   "Yes. Have you noticed, since the last operation, that the endless chatter's dried up? At first I was glad, but do you suppose he's going to go mute? I didn't even know that refrigeration unit was supposed to come apart. A mute engineer."
   "I think the, er, verbal and mechanical aptitudes will come into balance eventually. If he survives."
   "There's all of us adults, and one of him. We ought to be able to keep up. Why do I feel like he has us outnumbered and surrounded?" She crested the hill. Piotr's stable complex lay in the shallow valley below, half a dozen red-painted wood and stone buildings, fenced paddocks, pastures planted to bright green Earth grasses. She saw horses, but no children. Bothari was ahead of them, though, just exiting one building and entering another. His bellow carried up to them, thinned by distance. "Lord Miles?"
   "Oh, dear, I hope he's not bothering Piotr's horses," said Cordelia. "Do you really think this reconciliation attempt will work, this time? Just because Miles is finally walking?"
   "He was civil, last night at dinner," said Aral, judiciously hopeful.
   "I was civil, last night at dinner," Cordelia shrugged. "He as much as accused me of starving your son into dwarfism. Can I help it if the kid would rather play with his food than eat it? I just don't know about stepping up the growth hormone, Vaagen's so uncertain about its effect on bone friability."
   A crooked smile stole over Aral's face. "I did think the dialogue with the peas marching to surround the bread-roll and demand surrender was rather ingenious. You could almost picture them as little soldiers in Imperial greens."
   "Yes, and you were no help, laughing instead of terrorizing him into eating like a proper Da."
   "I did not laugh."
   "Your eyes were laughing. He knew it, too. Twisting you round his thumb."
   The warm organic scent of horses and their inevitable by-products permeated the air as they approached the buildings. Bothari re-appeared, saw them, and waved an apologetic hand. "I just saw Elena. I told her to get down out of that loft. She said Lord Miles wasn't up there, but he's around here somewhere. Sorry, Milady, when he talked about looking at the animals, I didn't realize he meant immediately. I'm sure I'll find him in just a moment."
   "I was hoping Piotr would offer a tour," Cordelia sighed.
   "I thought you didn't like horses," said Aral.
   "I loathe them. But I thought it might get the old man talking to him, like a human being, instead of over him like a potted plant. And Miles was so excited about the stupid beasts. I don't like to linger here, though. This place is so ... Piotr." Archaic, dangerous, and you have to watch your step.
   Speak of the devil. Piotr himself emerged from the old stone tack storage shed, coiling a web rope. "Hah. There you are," he said neutrally. He joined them sociably enough, though. "I don't suppose you would like to see the new filly."
   His tone was so flat, she couldn't tell if he wanted her to say yes, or no. But she seized the opportunity. "I'm sure Miles would."
   "Mm."
   She turned to Bothari. "Why don't you go get—" But Bothari was staring past her, his lips rippling in dismay. She wheeled.
   One of Piotr's most enormous horses, quite naked of bridle, saddle, halter, or any other handle to grab, was trotting out of the barn. Clinging to its mane like a burr was a dark-haired, dwarfish little boy. Miles's sharp features shone with a mixture of exaltation and terror. Cordelia nearly fainted.
   "My imported stallion!" yelped Piotr in horror.
   In pure reflex, Bothari snatched his stunner from its holster. He then stood paralyzed with the uncertainty of what to shoot and where. If the horse went down and rolled on its little rider—
   "Look, Sergeant!" Miles's thin voice called eagerly. "I'm taller than you!"
   Bothari started to run toward him. The horse, spooked, wheeled away and broke into a canter.
   "—and I can run faster, too!" The words were whipped away in the bounding motion of the gait. The horse shied out of sight around the stable.
   The four adults pelted after. Cordelia heard no other cry, but when they turned the corner Miles was lying on the ground, and the horse had stopped further on and lowered its head to nibble at the grass. It snorted in hostility when it saw them, raised its head, danced from foot to foot, then snatched a few more bites.
   Cordelia fell to her knees beside Miles, who was already sitting up and waving her away. He was pale, and his right hand clutched his left arm in an all-too-familiar signal of pain.
   "You see, Sergeant?" Miles panted. "I can ride, I can."
   Piotr, on his way toward his horse, paused and looked down.
   "I didn't mean to say you weren't able" said the sergeant in a driven tone. "I meant you didn't have permission."
   "Oh."
   "Did you break it?" Bothari nodded to the arm.
   "Yeah," the boy sighed. There were tears of pain in his eyes, but his teeth set against any quaver entering his voice.
   The sergeant grumbled, and rolled up Miles's sleeve, and palpated the forearm. Miles hissed. "Yep." Bothari pulled, twisted, adjusted, took a plastic sleeve from his pocket, slipped it over the arm and wrist, and blew it up. "That'll keep it till the doctor sees it."
   "Hadn't you better ... containerize that horrendous horse?" Cordelia said to Piotr.
   " 'S not h'rrendous," Miles insisted, scrambling to his feet. "It's the prettiest."
   "You think so, eh?" said Piotr roughly. "How do you figure that? You like brown?"
   "It moves the springiest," Miles explained earnestly, bouncing in imitation.
   Piotr's attention was arrested. "And so it does," he said, sounding bemused. "It's my hottest dressage prospect ... You like horses?"
   "They're great. They're wonderful." Miles pirouetted.
   "I could never much interest your father in them." Piotr gave Aral a dirty look.
   Thank God, thought Cordelia.
   "On a horse, I could go as fast as anybody, I bet," said Miles.
   "I doubt it," said Piotr coldly, "if that was a sample. If you're going to do it, you have to do it right."
   "Teach me," said Miles instantly.
   Piotr's brows shot up. He glanced at Cordelia, and smiled sourly. "If your mother gives permission." He rocked on his heels, in certain smug safety, knowing Cordelias rooted antipathy to the beasts.
   Cordelia bit her tongue on Over my dead body, and thought fast. Aral's intent eyes were signaling something, but she couldn't read it. Was this a new way for Piotr to try and kill Miles? Take him out and get him smashed, trampled, broken ... tired out? Now there was a thought. ...
   Risk, or security? In the few months since Miles had at last acquired a full range of motion, she'd run on panicked overdrive, trying to save him from physical harm; he'd spent the same time near-frantically trying to escape her supervision. Much more of this struggle, and either she'd be insane, or he would.
   If she could not keep him safe, perhaps the next best thing was to teach him competence at living dangerously. He was almost undrownable already. His big grey eyes were radiating a desperate, silent plea at her, Let me, let me, let me ... with enough transmission energy to burn through steel. I would fight the world for you, but I'm damned if I can figure out how to save you from yourself. Go for it, kid.
   "Yes," she said. "If the sergeant accompanies you."
   Bothari shot her a look of horrified reproach. Aral rubbed his chin, his eyes alight. Piotr looked utterly taken aback to have his bluff called.
   "Good," said Miles. "Can I have my own horse? Can I have that one?"
   "No, not that one," said Piotr indignantly. Then drawn in, added, "Perhaps a pony."
   "Horse," said Miles, watching his face.
   Cordelia recognized the Instant Re-Negotiation Mode, a spinal reflex, as far as she could tell, triggered by the faintest concession. The kid should be put to work beating out treaties with the Cetagandans. She wondered how many horses he'd finally end up with. "A pony," she put in, giving Piotr the support that he did not yet recognize how badly he was going to need. "A gentle pony. A gentle short pony."
   Piotr pursed his lips, and gave her a challenging look. "Perhaps you can work up to a horse," he said to Miles. "Earn it, by learning well."
   "Can I start now?"
   "You have to get your arm set first," said Cordelia firmly.
   "I don't have to wait till it heals, do I?"
   "It will teach you not to run around breaking things!"
   Piotr regarded Cordelia through half-lidded eyes. "Actually, proper dressage training starts on a lunge line. You aren't permitted to use your arms till you've developed your seat."
   "Yeah?" said Miles, hanging worshipfully on his words. "What else—?"
   By the time Cordelia withdrew to hunt up the personal physician who accompanied the Lord Regent's traveling circus, ah, entourage, Piotr had recaptured his horse—rather efficiently, though Cordelia wondered if the sugar in his pockets was cheating—and was already explaining to Miles how to make a simple line into an effective halter, which side of the beast to stand on, and what direction to face while leading. The boy, barely waist-high to the old man, was taking it in like a sponge, upturned face passionately intent.
   "Want to lay a side-bet, who's leading who on that lunge line by the end of the week?" Aral murmured in her ear.
   "No contest. I must say, the months Miles spent immobilized in that dreadful spinal brace did teach him how to do charm. The most efficient long-term way to control those about you, and thus exert your will. I'm glad he didn't decide to perfect whining as a strategy. He's the most willful little monster I've ever encountered, but he makes you not notice."
   "I don't think the Count has a chance," Aral agreed.
   She smiled at the vision, then glanced at him more seriously. "When my father was home on leave one time from the Betan Astronomical Survey, we made model gliders together. Two things were required to get them to fly. First we had to give them a running start. Then we had to let them go." She sighed. "Learning just when to let go was the hardest part."
   Piotr, his horse, Bothari, and Miles turned out of sight into the barn. By his gestures, Miles was asking questions at a rapid-fire rate.
   Aral gripped her hand as they turned to go up the hill. "I believe he'll soar high, dear Captain."