Benin was trying for the rattling unexpected straight shot, to unnerve his quarry. "Correct," Miles answered, with a smile.
Expecting denial, Benin already had his mouth open for the second strike, probably the presentation of some telling piece of evidence that would give the Barrayaran the lie. He had to close it again, and start over. "If … if you wished to keep it a secret, why did you as much as flat tell me to look where I would be sure to find you? And," his tone sharpened with baffled annoyance, "if you didn't want to keep it a secret, why didn't you tell me about it in the first place?"
"It provided an interesting test of your competence. I wanted to know if it would be worth my while to persuade you to share your results. Believe me, my first encounter with the Ba Lura is as much a mystery to me as I'm sure it is to you."
Even from beneath the gaudy face paint, the look Benin gave Miles reminded him forcibly of the look he got all too often from superiors. He even capitalized it in his mind, The Look. In a weird backhanded way, it made him feel quite comfortable with Benin. His smile became slightly cheerier.
"And . . . how did you encounter the Ba?" said Benin.
"What do you know so far?" 'Miles countered. Benin would, of course, keep something back, to cross-check Miles s story. That was quite all right, as Miles proposed to tell almost the whole truth, next.
"Ba Lura was at the transfer station the day you arrived. He left the station at least twice. Once, apparently, from a pod docking bay in which the security monitors were deactivated and unchecked for a period of forty minutes. The same bay and the same period in which you arrived, Lord Vorkosigan."
"Our first arrival, you mean."
"… Yes."
Vorreedi's eyes were widening and his lips were thinning. Miles ignored him, for now, though Ivan's gaze cautiously shifted to check him out.
"Deactivated? Torn out of the wall, I'd call it. Very well, ghem-Colonel. But tell me—was our encounter in the pod dock the first or second time the Ba appeared to leave the station?"
"Second," Benin said, watching him closely.
"Can you prove that?"
"Yes."
"Good. It may be very important later that you can prove that." Ha, Benin wasn't the only one who could cross-check the truth of this conversation. Benin, for whatever reason, was being straight with him so far. Turn and turnabout. "Well, this is what happened from our point of view—"
In a flat voice, and with plenty of corroborative physical details, Miles described their confusing clash with the Ba. The only item he changed was to report the Ba reaching for its trouser pocket before he'd yelled his warning. He brought the tale up to the moment of Ivan's heroic struggle and his own retrieval of the loose nerve disrupter, and bounced it over to Ivan to finish. Ivan gave him a dirty look, but, taking his tone from Miles, offered a brief factual description of the Ba's subsequent escape.
Since it lacked face paint, Miles could watch Vorreedi's face darken, out of the corner of his eye. The man was too cool and controlled to actually turn purple or anything, but Miles bet a blood pressure monitor would be beeping in plaintive alarm right now.
"And why did you not report this at our first meeting, Lord Vorkosigan?" Benin asked again, after a long, digestive pause.
"I might," said Vorreedi in a slightly suffused voice, "ask you the same question, Lieutenant." Benin shot Vorreedi a raised-brow look, almost putting his face paint in danger of smudging.
Lieutenant, not my lord; Miles took the point. "The pod pilot reported to his captain, who will have reported to his commander." To wit, Illyan; in fact, the report, slogging through normal channels, should be reaching Illyan's desk right about now. Three days more for an emergency query to arrive on Vorreedi's desk from home, six more days for a reply and return-reply. It would all be over before Illyan could do a damned thing, now. "However, on my authority as senior envoy, I suppressed the incident for diplomatic reasons. We were sent with specific instructions to maintain a low profile and behave with maximum courtesy. My government considered this solemn occasion an important opportunity to send a message that we would be glad to see more normal trade and other relations, and an easing of tensions along our mutual borders. I did not judge that it would do anything helpful for our mutual tensions to open our visit with charges of an unmotivated armed attack by an Imperial slave upon the Barrayaran special representatives."
The implied threat was obvious enough; despite Benin's face paint, Miles could tell that one had hit home. Even Vorreedi looked like he might be giving the pitch serious consideration.
"Can you . . . prove your assertions, Lord Vorkosigan?" asked Benin cautiously.
"We still have the captured nerve disruptor. Ivan?" Miles nodded to his cousin.
Gently, using only his fingertips, Ivan drew the weapon from his pocket and laid it gingerly on the table, and returned his hands demurely to his lap. He avoided Vorreedi's outraged eye. Vorreedi and Benin reached simultaneously for the nerve disruptor, and simultaneously stopped, frowning at each other.
"Excuse me," said Vorreedi. "I had not seen this before."
"Really?" said Benin. How extraordinary, his tone implied. "Go ahead." His hand dropped politely.
Vorreedi picked up the weapon and examined it closely, among other things checking to see that the safety lock was indeed engaged, before handing it equally politely to Benin.
"I'd be glad to return the weapon to you, ghem-Colonel," Miles went on, "in exchange for whatever information you are able to deduce from it. If it can be traced back to the Celestial Garden, that's not much help, but if it was something the Ba acquired en route, well … it might be revealing. This is a check that you can make more easily than I can." Miles paused, then added, "Who did the Ba visit from the station the first time?"
Benin glanced up from his close contemplation of the nerve disruptor. "A ship moored off-station."
"Can you be more specific?"
"No."
"Excuse me, let me re-phrase that. Could you be more specific if you chose to?"
Benin set the disruptor down, and leaned back, his expression of attention to Miles, if possible, intensifying.
He was silent for a long thoughtful moment before finally replying, "No, unfortunately. I could not." Rats. The three haut-governors' ships moored off that transfer station were Ilsum Kety's, Slyke Giaja's and Este Rond's. This could have been the final line of his triangulation, but Benin didn't have it. Yet. "I'd be particularly interested in how traffic control, or what certainly passed for traffic control, came to direct us to the wrong, or at any rate the first, pod dock."
"Why do you think the Ba entered your pod?" Benin asked in turn.
"Given the intense confusion of the encounter, I certainly would consider the possibility of it having been an accident. If it was arranged, I think something must have gone very wrong."
No shit, said Ivan's silent morose look. Miles ignored him.
"Anyway, ghem-Colonel, I hope this helps to anchor your time-table," Miles continued in a tone of finality. Surely Benin would be itching to run and check out his new clue, the nerve disrupter.
Benin didn't budge. "So what did you and the haut Rian really discuss, Lord Vorkosigan?"
"For that, I'm afraid you will have to apply to the haut Rian. She is Cetagandan to the bone, and so all your department." Alas. "But I think her distress at the death of the Ba Lura was quite genuine."
Benin's eyes flicked up. "When did you see enough of her to gauge the depth of her distress?"
"Or so I deduced." And if he didn't end this now he was going to put his foot in it so deep they'd need a hand-tractor to pull it out again. He had to play Vorreedi with the utmost delicacy; this was not quite the case with Benin. "This is fascinating, ghem-Colonel, but I'm afraid I'm out of time for this morning. But if you ever find out where that nerve disruptor came from, and where the Ba went to, I would be more than glad to continue the conversation." He sat back, folded his arms, and smiled cordially.