“So do you think you can persuade him?” asked Miles.
“Yes,” said Baz, with certainty. He glanced up. “So could you.”
“Except I’ll be headed the other way. Though if things go well, it’s not impossible that I might catch up with you later. I’m putting you in charge of this mission, Baz. Quinn will give you the complete orders, all the codes and contact-people—everything Illyan gave me.”
Baz nodded. “Very good, sir.”
“I’m taking the Peregrine to go after the Ariel,” Miles added.
Baz and Elena exchanged only one quick, sideways glance. “Very good, sir,” echoed Elena, with scarcely a pause. “I shifted the Peregrine from twenty-four-hour to one-hour alert status yesterday. When shall I schedule our departure with Escobaran flight control?”
“In one hour.” And, though no one had asked for explanations, he added, “The Peregrine is the next-fastest thing we have that packs significant firepower, besides the Jayhawk and the Ariel itself. I think that speed is going to be of the essence. If we can overtake the Ariel—well, it’s a lot easier to prevent a mess than to try to clean up after one. I’m sorry now I didn’t leave yesterday, but I had to give it a chance to be simple. I’m assigning Quinn to myself as floating staff because she’s had valuable previous experience with intelligence-gathering on Jackson’s Whole.”
Quinn rubbed her arm. “House Bharaputra is damn dangerous, if that’s where Mark’s headed. They have heavy money, heavy shit, and a sharp memory for revenge.”
“Why d’you think I avoid the place? That’s another danger, that certain Jacksonians will mistake Mark for Admiral Naismith. Baron Ryoval, for example.”
Baron Ryoval was a persistent danger. The Dendarii had disposed of the latest bounty-hunter Ryoval had sent seeking Admiral Naismith’s scalp only three months ago; he had been the fourth to appear so far. It was shaping up to an annual event. Maybe Ryoval dispatched an agent on each anniversary of their first encounter, as a memorial tribute. Ryoval did not command great powers, nor possess a long reach, but he had undergone life-extension treatments; he was patient, and could keep this up for a long, long time.
“Have you considered another possible solution to the problem?” said Quinn slowly. “Send ahead to Jackson’s Whole and warn them. Have, say, House Fell arrest Mark and impound the Ariel till you arrive to retrieve them. Fell hates Ryoval enough to protect Mark from him for the annoyance-factor alone.”
Miles sighed. “I have considered it.” He traced a formless pattern on the polished tabletop with his fingertip.
“You asked for a cross-check, Miles,” Elena pointed out. “What’s wrong with that idea?”
“It might work. But if Mark has really convinced Bel he’s me, they might resist arrest. Maybe fatally. Mark is paranoid about Jackson’s Whole. Mark is paranoid, period. I don’t know what he’d do in a panic.”
“You are awfully tender of Mark’s sensibilities,” said Elena.
“I’m trying to get him to trust me. I can hardly start the process by betraying him.”
“Have you considered how much this little side-jaunt is going to cost, once the bill for it arrives on Simon Illyan’s desk?” Quinn asked.
“ImpSec will pay. Without question.”
Quinn said, “You sure? What’s Mark to ImpSec anyway, now that he’s only a left-over from the exploded plot? There is no danger any more to Barrayar of him being secretly substituted for you. I thought they only watched him for us as a courtesy. A rather expensive courtesy.”
Miles replied carefully, “It is ImpSec’s explicit task to guard the Barrayaran Imperium. That includes not only protecting Gregor’s person, and running a certain amount of galactic espionage—” a wave of his hand included the Dendarii fleet, and Illyan’s far-flung, if thinly stretched, network of agents, military attaches, and informants, “but also keeping watch over Gregor’s immediate heirs. Keeping watch not only to protect them, but to protect the Imperium from any little plot got up by them, or by others seeking to use them. I am acutely conscious that the question of just who is Gregor’s heir is rather tangled at present. I wish to hell he’d marry and get us all off the hook soon.” Miles hesitated for a long moment. “By one interpretation, Lord Mark Pierre Vorkosigan has a place as heir-claimant to the Barrayaran Imperium second only to my own. That makes him not only ImpSec’s business, it makes him our primary business. My personal pursuit of the Ariel is fully justified.”
“Justifiable,” Quinn corrected dryly.
“Whatever.”
“If Barrayar—as you have often claimed—would not accept you as Emperor because of suspicion of mutation, I should think it’d go into spasms at the thought of your clone installed in the Imperial Residence,” said Baz. “Twin brother,” he amended hastily as Miles opened his mouth.
“It doesn’t require the probability of success at gaining the Imperium to make the possibility of an attempt to do so into an ImpSec problem.” Miles snorted. “It’s funny. All the time the Komarrans thought of their faux-Miles as an imposter-claimant. I don’t think either they or Mark realized they’d made a real claimant. Well, I’d have to be dead first anyway, so from my point of view the question is moot.” He rapped the table and rose. “Let’s get moving, people.”
On the way out the door, Elena lowered her voice to ask him, “Miles—did your mother see those horrific investigation-reports of Illyan’s about Mark, too?”
He smiled bleakly. “Who d’you think ordered them done?”
Chapter Five
He began donning the half-armor. First, next to his skin, a piece of the hottest new technology on the market: a nerve-disrupter shield-net. The field-generating net was worked into the fabric of a close-fitting grey body-suit and a hood that protected skull, neck, and forehead, leaving only his eyes, nose, and mouth peeping from the hole. And so the threat of one of the most fearsome anti-personnel weapons, the brain-killing nerve disrupter, was rendered null. As an added bonus, the suit stopped stunner-fire, too. Trust Naismith to have the best and newest, and custom-made to fit … was the elastic fabric supposed to be this bloody tight?
Over the net-suit went a flexible torso-armor that would stop any projectile up to small hand-missiles and down to deadly needier spines. Fortunately for his ability to breathe, its catches were adjustable. He let them out to their fullest extension, rendering the valuable protection merely comfortably and correctly snug. Over it went blessedly loose camouflage-grey fatigues, made of a combat-rated fabric that would neither melt nor burn. Then came belts and bandoliers with stunner, nerve disrupter, plasma arc, grenades, power cells, a rappel-harness and spool, emergency oxygen. On his back he shrugged the harness holding a neat, flat power pack that generated, at the first touch of enemy fire, a one-man-sized plasma arc mirror field, with so miniscule a time lag one barely had time to cook, much. It was good for absorbing thirty or forty direct hits before the power cell, and its porter, died. It seemed almost a misnomer to call it all half-armor: triple armor was more like it.
Over the nerve-disruptor net covering his feet he pulled thick socks, then Naismith’s combat boots. At least the boots fit without any embarrassing adjustments. A mere week of inactivity, and his body fought him, thickening … Naismith was a damned anorectic, that was it. A hyperactive anorectic. He straightened. Properly distributed, the formidible array of equipment was surprisingly light.
On the countertop next to his cabin comconsole, the command helmet sat waiting. The empty shadow beneath its forehead flange made him think, for whatever morbid reason, of an empty skull. He raised the helmet in his hands, and turned it in the light, and stared hungrily at its elegant curves. His hands could control one weapon, two at most. This, through the people it commanded, controlled dozens; potentially, hundreds or even thousands. This was Naismith’s real power.