“Now listen to these instructions. You will walk twenty meters toward the bow, turn left, and wait for the next door to open for you.”
Corbeau obeyed, still almost expressionless, except for his eyes. His gaze darted about, as if he searched for something, or was trying to memorize his route. He passed out of sight of the lock vids.
Miles considered the peculiar pattern of old worm scars across Corbeau's body. He must have rolled, or been rolled, across a bad nest. A story seemed written in those fading hieroglyphs. A young colonial boy, perhaps the new boy in camp or town—tricked or dared or maybe just stripped and pushed? To rise again from the ground, crying and frightened, to the jangle of some cruel mockery . . .
Vorpatril swore, repetitively, under his breath. “Why Corbeau? Why Corbeau ?”
Miles, who was frantically wondering the same thing, hazarded, “Perhaps he volunteered.”
“Unless the bloody quaddies bloody sacrificed him. Instead of risking one of their own. Or . . . maybe he's figured out another way to desert.”
“I . . .” Miles held his words for a long moment of thought, then let them out on a breath, “think that would be doing it the hard way.” It was a sticky suspicion, though. Just whose ally might Corbeau prove?
Miles caught Corbeau's image again as the ba walked him through the ship toward Nav and Com, briefly opening and closing airseal doors. He passed through the last barrier and out of vid range, straight-backed, silent, bare feet padding quietly on the deck. He looked . . . cold.
Miles's attention was jerked aside by the flicker of another airlock sensor alarm. Hastily, he called up the image of another lock—just in time to see a quaddie in a green biotainer suit whap the vid monitor mightily with a spanner while beyond, two more green figures sped past. The image shattered and went dark. He could still hear, though—the beep of the lock alarm, the hiss of a lock door opening—but no hiss when it closed. Because it did not close, or because it closed on vacuum? Air, and sound, returned as the lock cycled. The lock, therefore, had opened on vacuum; the quaddies had made their getaway into space around the station.
That answered his question about their biotainer suits—unlike the Idris 's cheaper issue, they were vacuum-rated. In Quaddiespace, that made all kinds of sense. Half a dozen station locks offered refuge within little more than a few hundred meters; the fleeing quaddies would have their pick, in addition to whatever pods or shuttles hovered nearby able to swoop down on them and take them inboard.
“Venn and Greenlaw and Leutwyn just escaped out an airlock,” he reported to Vorpatril. “Good timing.” Shrewd timing, to go just when the ba was both distracted by the arrival of its pilot and, with the real possibility of a getaway now in hand, less inclined to carry out the station-ramming threat. It was exactly the right move, to leak hostages from the enemy's grip at every opportunity. Granted, this use of Corbeau's arrival was ruthlessly calculated in the extreme. Miles could not be sorry. “Good. Excellent! Now this ship is entirely cleared of civilians.”
“Except for you, m'lord,” Roic pointed out, started to say something else, intercepted the dark look Miles cast over his shoulder, and ran down in a mumble.
“Ha,” muttered Vorpatril. “Maybe this will change Watts's mind.” His voice lowered, as if directed away from his audio pickup, or behind his hand. “What, Lieutenant?” Then murmured, “Excuse me,” Miles was not certain to whom.
So, only Barrayarans left aboard now. Plus Bel—on the ImpSec payroll, therefore an honorary Barrayaran for all mortal accounting purposes. Miles smiled briefly despite it all as he considered Bel's probable outraged response to such a suggestion. The best time to insert a strike force would be before the ship started to move, rather than to attempt to play catch-up in mid-space. At some point, Vorpatril was probably going to stop waiting for quaddie permission to launch his men. At some point, Miles would agree.
Miles returned his attention to the problem of spying on Nav and Com. If the ba had knocked out the monitor the way the passing quaddies just had, or even merely thrown a jacket over the vid pickup, Miles would be out of luck . . . ah. Finally. An image of Nav and Com formed over his vid plate. But now he had no sound. Miles gritted his teeth and bent forward.
The vid pickup was apparently centered over the door, giving a good view over the half dozen empty station chairs and their dark consoles. The ba was there, still dressed in the Betan garb of its discarded alias, jacket and sarong and sandals. Although a pressure suit—one—abstracted from the Idris 's supplies lay nearby, flung over the back of a station chair. Corbeau, still vulnerably naked, was seated in the pilot's chair, but had not yet lowered his headset. The ba held up a hand, said something; Corbeau frowned fiercely, and flinched, as the ba pressed a hypospray briefly against the pilot's upper arm and stepped back with a flash of satisfaction on its strained face.
Drugs? Surely even the ba was not mad enough to drug a jump pilot upon whose neural function it would shortly be betting its life. Some disease inoculation? The same problem applied, although something latent might do—Cooperate, and later I will let you have the antidote . Or pure bluff, a shot of water, perhaps. The hypospray seemed altogether too crude and obvious as a Cetagandan drug administration method; it hinted at bluff to Miles's mind, though perhaps not to Corbeau's. One had no choice but to turn control over to the pilot when he lowered his headset and plugged the ship into his mind. It made pilots hard to effectively threaten.
It did rather put paid to Vorpatril's paranoid fear that Corbeau had turned traitor, volunteering for this as a way to get a free ride out of his quaddie detention cell and his dilemmas. Or did it? Regardless of prior or secret agreements, the ba would not simply trust when it could, it would think, guarantee.
Over his wrist com, muffled as from a distance, Miles heard a sudden, startling bellow from Admiral Vorpatriclass="underline" “What? That's impossible. Have they gone mad? Not now . . .”
After a few more moments passed without further enlightenment, he murmured, “Um, Ekaterin? Are you still there?”
Her breath drew in. “Yes.”
“What's going on?”
“Admiral Vorpatril was called away by his communications officer. Some sort of priority message from Sector Five headquarters just arrived. It seems to be something very urgent.”
On the vid image in front of him, Miles watched as Corbeau began to run through preflight checks, moving from station to station under the hard, watchful eyes of the ba. Corbeau made sure to move with disproportional care; apparently, from the movement of his rather stiff lips, explaining each move before he touched a console. And slowly, Miles noted. Rather more slowly than necessary, if not quite slowly enough to be obvious about it.
Vorpatril's voice, or rather, Vorpatril's heavy breathing, returned at last. The admiral appeared to have run out of invective. Miles found that considerably more disturbing than his previous naval bellowing.
“My lord.” Vorpatril hesitated. His voice dropped to a sort of stunned growl. “I have just received Priority One orders from Sector Five HQ to marshal my escort ships, abandon the Komarran fleet, and head for fleet rendezvous off Marilac at maximum possible speed.”
Not with my wife, you don't , was Miles's first gyrating thought.
Then he blinked, freezing in his seat.
The other function of the military escorts Barrayar donated to the Komarran trade fleets was to quietly and unobtrusively maintain an armed force dispersed through the Nexus. A force that could, in the event of a truly dire emergency, be collected rapidly so as to present a convincing military threat at key strategic points. In a crunch it might otherwise be too slow, or even diplomatically or militarily impossible, to get any force from the homeworlds through the wormhole jumps of intervening local space polities to the mustering places where it could do Barrayar some good. But the trade fleets were out there already.