Bujold, Lois McMaster - MV11 - Borders03 - Borders of Infinity (v2.0) Jacked.

THE BORDERS OF INFINITY
by
Lois McMaster Bujold

How could I have died and gone to hell without noticing the transition?
The opalescent force dome capped a surreal and alien landscape, frozen for a moment by Miles's disorientation and dismay. The dome defined a perfect circle, half a kilometer in diameter. Miles stood just inside its edge, where the glowing concave surface dove into the hard-packed dirt and disappeared. His imagination followed the arc buried beneath his feet to the far side, where it erupted again to complete the sphere. It was like being trapped inside an eggshell. An unbreakable eggshell.
Within was a scene from an ancient limbo. Dispirited men and women sat, or stood, or mostly lay down, singly or in scattered irregular groups, across the breadth of the arena. Miles's eye searched anxiously for some remnant of order or military grouping, but the inhabitants seemed splashed randomly as a liquid across the ground.
Perhaps he had been killed just now, just entering this prison camp. Perhaps his captors had betrayed him to his death, like those ancient Earth soldiers who had lured their victims sheeplike into poisoned showers, diverting and soothing their suspicions with stone soap, until their final enlightenment burst upon them in a choking cloud. Perhaps the annihilation of his body had been so swift, his neurons had not had time to carry the information to his brain. Why else did so many antique myths agree that hell was a circular place?
Dagoola IV Top Security Prison Camp #3. This was it? This naked... dinner plate? Miles had vaguely visioned barracks, marching guards, daily head counts, secret tunnels, escape committees.
It was the dome that made it all so simple, Miles realized. What need for barracks to shelter prisoners from the elements? The dome did it. What need for guards? The dome was generated from without. Nothing inside could breach it. No need for guards, or head counts. Tunnels were a futility, escape committees an absurdity. The dome did it all.
The only structures were what appeared to be big grey plastic mushrooms evenly placed about every hundred meters around the perimeter of the dome. What little activity there was seemed clustered around them. Latrines, Miles recognized.
Miles and his three fellow prisoners had entered through a temporary portal, which had closed behind them before the brief bulge of force dome containing their entry vanished in front of them. The nearest inhabitant of the dome, a man, lay a few meters away upon a sleeping mat identical to the one Miles now clutched. He turned his head slightly to stare at the little party of newcomers, smiled sourly, and rolled over on his side with his back to them. Nobody else nearby even bothered to look up.
"Holy shit," muttered one of Miles's companions. He and his two buddies drew together unconsciously. The three had been from the same unit once, they'd said. Miles had met them bare minutes ago, in their final stages of processing, where they had all been issued their total supply of worldly goods for life in Dagoola #3.
A single pair of loose grey trousers. A matching short-sleeved grey tunic. A rectangular sleeping mat, rolled up. A plastic cup. That was all. That, and the new numbers encoded upon their skins. It bothered Miles intensely that their captors had chosen to locate the numbers in the middle of their backs, where they couldn't see them. He resisted a futile urge to twist and crane his neck anyway, though his hand snaked up under his shirt to scratch a purely psychosomatic itch. You couldn't feel the encode either.
Some motion appeared in the tableau. A group of four or five men approaching. The welcoming committee at last? Miles was desperate for information. Where among all these countless grey men and women-no, not countless, Miles told himself firmly. They were all accounted for here.
The battered remnants of the 3rd and 4th Armored All-Terrain Rangers. The ingenious and tenacious civilian defenders of Garson Transfer Station. Winoweh's 2nd Battalion had been captured almost intact. And the 14th Commandos, survivors of the high-tech fortress at Fallow Core. Particularly the survivors of Fallow Core. Ten thousand, two hundred fourteen exactly. The plant Marilac's finest. Ten thousand, two hundred fifteen, counting himself. Ought he to count himself?
The welcoming committee drew up in a ragged bunch a few meters away. They looked tough and tall and muscular and not noticeably friendly. Dull, sullen eyes, full of a deadly boredom that even their present calculation did not lighten.
The two groups, the five and the three, sized each other up. The three turned, and started walking stiffly and prudently away. Miles realized belatedly that he, not a part of either group, was thus left alone.
Alone and immensely conspicuous. Self-consciousness, body-consciousness, normally held at bay by the simple fact that he didn't have time to waste on it, returned to him with a rush. Too short, too odd-looking-his legs were even in length now, after the last operation, but surely not long enough to outrun these five. And where did one run to, in this place? He crossed off flight as an option.
Fight? Get serious.
This isn't going to work, he realized sadly, even as he started walking toward them. But it was more dignified than being chased down with the same result.
He tried to make his smile austere rather than foolish. No telling whether he succeeded. "Hi, there. Can you tell me where to find Colonel Guy Tremont's 14th Commando Division?"
One of the five snorted sardonically. Two moved behind Miles.
Well, a snort was almost speech. Expression, anyway. A start, a toehold. Miles focused on that one. "What's your name and rank and company, soldier?"
"No ranks in here, mutant. No companies. No soldiers. No nothing."
Miles glanced around. Surrounded, of course. Naturally. "You got some friends, anyway."
The talker almost smiled. "You don't."
Miles wondered if perhaps he had been premature in crossing off flight as an option. "I wouldn't count on that if I were-unh!" The kick to his kidneys, from behind, cut him off-he damn near bit his tongue-he fell, dropping bedroll and cup and landing in a tangle. A barefoot kick, no combat boots this time, thank God-by the rules of Newtonian physics, his attackers' foot ought to hurt just as much as his back. Fine. Jolly. Maybe they'd bruise their knuckles, punching him out...."
One of the gang gathered up Miles's late wealth, cup and bedroll. "Want his clothes? They're too little for me."
"Naw."
"Yeah," said the talker. "Take 'em anyway. Maybe bribe one of the women."
The tunic was jerked off over Miles's head, the pants over his feet. Miles was too busy protecting his head from random kicks to fight much for his clothes, trying obliquely to take as many hits as possible on his belly or ribcage, not arms or legs or jaw. A cracked rib was surely the most injury he could afford right now, here, at the beginning. A broken jaw would be the worst.
His assailants desisted only a little before they discovered by experimentation the secret weakness of his bones.
"That's how it is in here, mutant," said the talker, slightly winded.
"I was born naked," Miles panted from the dirt. "Didn't stop me."
"Cocky little shit," said the talker.
"Slow learner," remarked another.
The second beating was worse than the first. Two cracked ribs at least-his jaw barely escaped being smashed, at the cost of something painfully wrong in his left wrist, flung up as a shield. This time Miles resisted the impulse to offer any verbal parting shots. He lay in the dirt and wished he could pass out.
He lay a long time, cradled in pain. He was not sure how long. The illumination from the force dome was even and shadowless, unchanging. Timeless, like eternity. Hell was eternal, was it not? This place had too damn many congruencies with hell, that was certain.
And here came another demon.... Miles blinked the approaching figure into focus. A man, as bruised and naked as Miles himself, gaunt-ribbed, starveling, knelt in the dirt a few meters away. His face was bony, aged by stress-he might have been forty, or fifty-or twenty-five.
His eyes were unnaturally prominent, due to the shrinking of his flesh. Their whites seemed to gleam feverishly against the dirt darkening his skin. Dirt, not beard stubble-every prisoner in here, male and female, had their hair cut short and the air follicles stunned to prevent re-growth. Perpetually clean-shaven and crew-cut. Miles had undergone the same process bare hours ago. But whoever had processed this fellow must have been in a hurry. The hair stunner had missed a line of his cheek and a few dozen hairs grew there like a stripe on a badly-mown lawn. Even curled as they were, Miles could see they were several centimeters long, draggling down past the man's jaw. If only he knew how fast hair grew, he could calculate how long this fellow had been here. Too long, whatever the numbers, Miles thought with an inward sigh.
The man had the broken-off bottom half of a plastic cup, which he pushed cautiously toward Miles. His breath whistled raggedly past his yellowish teeth, from exertion or excitement or disease-probably not disease, they were all well immunized here. Escape, even through death, was not that easy. Miles rolled over and propped himself stiffly on his elbow, regarding his visitor through the thinning haze of his aches and pains.
The man scrabbled back slightly, smiled nervously. He nodded toward the cup. "Water. Better drink. The cup's cracked, and it all leaks out if you wait too long."
"Thanks," croaked Miles. A week ago, or in a previous lifetime, depending on how you counted time, Miles had dawdled over a selection of wines, dissatisfied with this or that nuance of flavor. His lips cracked as he grinned in memory. He drank. It was perfectly ordinary water, lukewarm, faintly redolent of chlorine and sulfur. A refined body, but the bouquet is a bit presumptuous....
The man squatted in studied politeness until Miles finished drinking, then leaned forward on his knuckles in restrained urgency. "Are you the One?"
Miles blinked. "Am I the what?"
"The One. The other one, I should say. The scripture says there has to be two."
"Uh," Miles hesitated cautiously, "what exactly does the scripture say?"
The man's right hand wrapped over his knobby left wrist, around which was tied a rag screwed into a sort of rope. He closed his eyes; his lips moved a moment, and then he recited aloud, "... but the pilgrims went up that hill with ease, because they had these two men to lead them by the arms; also they had left their garments behind them, for though they went in with them, they came out without them." His eyes popped back open to stare hopefully at Miles.
So, now we begin to see why this guy seems to be all by himself.... "Are you, perchance, the other One?" Miles shot at a venture.
The man nodded, shyly.
"I see. Um..." How was it that he always attracted the nut cases? He licked the last drops of water from his lips. The fellow might have some screws loose, but he was certainly an improvement over the last lot, always presuming he didn't have another personality or two of the homicidal loonie variety tucked away in his head. No, in that case he'd be introducing himself as the Chosen Two, and not be looking for outside assistance. "Um... what's your name?"
"Suegar."
"Suegar. Right, all right. My name is Miles, by the way."
"Huh." Suegar grimaced in a sort of pleased irony. "Your name means 'soldier,' did you know?"
"Uh, yeah, so I've been told."
"But you're not a soldier... ?"
No subtle expensive trick of clothing line or uniform style here to hide from himself, if no one else, the peculiarities of his body. Miles flushed. "They were taking anything, toward the end. They made me a recruiting clerk. I never did get to fire my gun. Listen, Suegar- how did you come to know you were the One, or at any rate one of the Ones? Is it something you've always known?"
"It came on me gradually," confessed Suegar, shifting to sit cross-legged. "I'm the only one in here with the words, y'see." He caressed his rag rope again. "I've hunted all up and down the camp, but they only mock me. It was a kind of process of elimination, y'see, when they all gave up but me."
"Ah." Miles too sat up, only gasping a little in pain. Those ribs were going to be murder for the next few days. He nodded toward the rope bracelet. "Is that where you keep your scripture? Can I see it?" And how the hell had Suegar ever gotten a plastic flimsy, or loose piece of paper or whatever, in here?
Suegar clutched his arms protectively to his chest and shook his head. "They've been trying to take them from me for months, y'see. I can't be too careful. Until you prove you're the One. The devil can quote scripture, y'know."
Yes, that was rather what I had in mind.... Who knew what opportunities Suegar's "scripture" might contain? Well, maybe later. For now, keep dancing. "Are there any other signs?" asked Miles. "You see, I don't know that I'm your One, but on the other hand I don't know I'm not, either. I just got here, after all."
Suegar shook his head again. "It's only five or six sentences, y'see. You have to interpolate a lot."
I'll bet. Miles did not voice the comment aloud. "However did you come by it? Or get it in here?"
"It was at Port Lisma, y'see, just before we were captured," said Suegar. "House-to-house fighting. One of my boot heels had come a bit loose, and it clicked when I walked. Funny, with all that barrage coming down around our ears, how a little thing like that can get under your skin. There was this bookcase with a glass front, real antique books made of paper-I smashed it open with my gun butt and tore out part of a page from one, and folded it up to stick in my boot heel, to make a sort of shim, y'see, and stop the clicking. Didn't look at the book. Didn't even know it was scripture till later. At least, I think it's scripture. It sounds like scripture, anyway. It must be scripture."
Suegar twisted his beard hairs nervously around his finger. "When we were waiting to be processed, I'd pulled it out of my boot, just idle-like, y'know. I had it in my hand-the processing guard saw it, but he just didn't take it away from me. Probably thought it was just a harmless piece of paper. Didn't know it was scripture. I still had it in my hand when we were dumped in here. D'you know, it's the only piece of writing in this whole camp?" he added rather proudly. "It must be scripture."
"Well... you take good care of it, then," advised Miles kindly. "If you've preserved it this long, it was obviously meant to be your job."
"Yeah..." Suegar blinked. Tears? "I'm the only one in here with a job, aren't I? So I must be one of the Ones."
"Sounds good to me," said Miles agreeably. "Say, ah," he glanced around the vast featureless dome, "how do you find your way around in here, anyway?" The place was decidedly undersupplied with landmarks. It reminded Miles of nothing so much as a penguin rookery. Yet penguins seemed able to find their rocky nests. He was going to have to start thinking like a penguin-or get a penguin to direct him. He studied his guide bird, who had gone absent and was doodling in the dirt. Circles, naturally.
"Where's the mess hall?" Miles asked more loudly. "Where did you get that water?"
"Water taps are on the outside of the latrines," said Suegar, "but they only work part of the time. No mess hall. We just get rat bars. Sometimes."
"Sometimes?" said Miles angrily. He could count Suegar's ribs. "Dammit, the Cetagandans are claiming loudly to be treating their POW's by Interstellar Judiciary Commission rules. So many square meters of space per person, 3,000 calories a day, at least fifty grams of protein, two liters of drinking water-you should be getting at least two IJC standard ration bars a day. Are they starving you?"
"After a while," Suegar sighed, "you don't really care if you get yours or not." The animation that his interest in Miles as a new and hopeful object in his world had lent Suegar seemed to be falling away. His breathing had slowed, his posture slumped. He seemed about to lie down in the dirt. Miles wondered if Suegar's sleeping mat had suffered the same fate as his own. Quite some time ago, probably.
"Look, Suegar-I think I may have a relative in this camp somewhere. A cousin of my mother's. D'you think you could help me find him?"
"It might be good for you, to have a relative," Suegar agreed. "It's not good to be by yourself, here."
"Yeah, I found that out. But how can you find anyone? It doesn't look too organized."
"Oh, there's-there's groups and groups. Everyone pretty much stays in the same place after a while."
"He was in the 14th Commandos. Where are they?"
"None of the old groups are left, much."
"He was Colonel Tremont. Colonel Guy Tremont."
"Oh, an officer." Suegar's forehead wrinkled in worry. "That makes it harder. You weren't an officer, were you? Better not let on, if you were-"
"I was a clerk," repeated Miles.
"-because there's groups here who don't like officers. A clerk. You're probably OK, then."
"Were you an officer, Suegar?" asked Miles curiously.
Suegar frowned at him, twisted his beard hairs. "Marilac Army's gone. If there's no army, it can't have officers, can it?"
Miles wondered briefly if he might get farther faster by just walking away from Suegar and trying to strike up a conversation with the next random prisoner he came across. Groups and groups. And, presumably, groups, like the five burly surly brothers. He decided to stick with Suegar for a while longer. For one thing, he wouldn't feel quite so naked if he wasn't naked by himself.
"Can you take me to anybody who used to be in the 14th?" Miles urged Suegar anew. "Anybody, who might know Tremont by sight."
"You don't know him?"
"We'd never met in person. I've seen vids of him. But I'm afraid his appearance may be ... changed, by now."
Suegar touched his own face pensively. "Yeah, probably."
Miles clambered painfully to his feet. The temperature in the dome was just a little cool, without clothes. A voiceless draft raised the hairs on his arms. If he could just get one garment back, would he prefer his pants, to cover his genitals, or his shirt, to disguise his crooked back? Screw it. No time. He held out a hand to help Suegar up. "Come on."
Suegar glanced up at him. "You can always tell a newcomer. You're still in a hurry. In here, you slow down. Your brain slows down...."
"Your scripture got anything to say on that?" inquired Miles impatiently.
"'... they therefore went up here with much agility and speed, through the foundation of the city...' " Twin verticals appeared between Suegar's eyebrows, as he frowned speculatively at Miles.
Thank you, thought Miles. I'll take it. He pulled Suegar up. "Come on, then."
Neither agility nor speed, but at least progress. Suegar led him on a shambling walk across a quarter of the camp, through some groups, in wide arcs around others. Miles saw the surly brothers again at a distance, sitting on their collection of mats. Miles upped his estimation of the size of the tribe from five to about fifteen. Some men sat in twos or threes or sixes, a few sat alone, as far as possible from any others, which still wasn't very far.
The largest group by far consisted entirely of women. Miles studied them with electric interest as soon as his eyes picked up the size of their unmarked boundary. There were several hundred of them at least. None were matless, although some shared. Their perimeter was actually patrolled, by groups of half a dozen or so strolling slowly about. They apparently defended two latrines for their exclusive use.
"Tell me about the girls, Suegar," Miles urged his companion, with a nod toward their group.
"Forget the girls." Suegar's grin actually had a sardonic edge. "They do not put out."
"What, not at all? None of them? I mean, here we all are, with nothing to do but entertain each other. I'd think at least some of them would be interested." Miles's reason raced ahead of Suegar's answer, mired in unpleasantness. How unpleasant did it get in here?
For answer, Suegar pointed upward to the dome. "You know we're all monitored in here. They can see everything, pick up every word if they want. That is, if there's still anybody out there. They may have all gone away, and just forgotten to turn the dome off. I have dreams about that, sometimes. I dream that I'm here, in this dome, forever. Then I wake up, and I'm here, in this dome.... Sometimes I'm not sure if I'm awake or asleep. Except that the food is still coming, and once in a while-not so often, anymore-somebody new, like you. The food could be automated, though, I suppose. You could be a dream...."
"They're still out there," said Miles grimly.
Suegar sighed. "You know, in a way, I'm almost glad."
Monitored, yes. Miles knew all about the monitoring. He put down an urge to wave and call Hi, Mom! Monitoring must be a stultifying job for the goons out there. He wished they might be bored to death. "But what's that got to do with the girls, Suegar?"
"Well, at first everybody was pretty inhibited by that-" he pointed skywards again. "Then after a while we discovered that they didn't interfere with anything we did. At all. There were some rapes.... Since then things have been-deteriorating."
"Hm. Then I suppose the idea of starting a riot, and breaching the dome when they bring troops inside to restore order, is a no-go?"
"That was tried once, a long time ago. Don't know how long." Suegar twisted his hairs. "They don't have to come inside to stop a riot. They can reduce the dome's diameter-they reduced it to about a hundred meters, that time. Nothing to stop them reducing it down to one meter, with all of us still inside, if they choose. It stopped the riot, anyway. Or they can reduce the gas permeability of the dome to zilch and just let us breathe ourselves into a coma. That's happened twice."
"I see," said Miles. It made his neck crawl.
A bare hundred or so meters away, the side of the dome began to bulge inward like an aneurysm. Miles touched Suegar's arm. "What's happening there? More new prisoners being delivered?"
Suegar glanced around. "Uh oh. We're not in a real good position, here." He hovered a moment, as if uncertain whether to go forward or back.
A wave of movement rippled through the camp from the bulge outward, of people getting to their feet. Faces turned magnetically toward the side of the dome. Little knots of men came together; a few sprinters began running. Some people didn't get up at all. Miles glanced back towards the women's group. About half of them were forming rapidly into a sort of phalanx.
"We're so close-what the hell, maybe we've got a chance," said Suegar. "Come on!" He started toward the bulge at his most rapid pace, a jog. Miles perforce jogged too, trying to jar his ribs as little as possible. But he was quickly winded, and his rapid breathing added an excruciating torque to his torso.
"What are we doing?" Miles started to pant to Suegar, before the dome's extruding bulge dissolved with a fading twinkle, and he saw what they were doing, saw it all.
Before the force dome's shimmering barrier now sat a dark brown pile, roughly a meter high, two meters deep, three meters wide. IJC standard ration bars, Miles recognized. Rat bars, apocryphally named after their supposed principal ingredient. Fifteen hundred calories each. Twenty-five grams of protein, fifty percent of the human MDR for vitamins A, B, C, and the rest of the alphabet-tasted like a shingle sprinkled with sugar and would sustain life and health forever or for as long as you could stand to keep eating them.
Shall we have a contest, children, to guess how many rat bars are in that pile? Miles thought. No contest. I don't even have to measure the height and divide by three centimeters. It has to be 10,215 exactly. How ingenious.
The Cetagandan Psy Ops corps must contain some remarkable minds. If they ever fell into his hands, Miles wondered, should he recruit them-or exterminate them? This brief fantasy was overwhelmed by the need to keep to his feet in the present reality, as 10,000 or so people, minus the wholly despairing and those too weak to move, all tried to descend on the same six square meters of the camp at once.
The first sprinters reached the pile, grabbed up armloads of rat bars, and started to sprint off. Some made it to the protection of friends, divided their spoils, and started to move away from the center of the growing human maelstrom. Others failed to dodge clots of operators like the burly surly brothers, and were violently relieved of their prizes. The second wave of sprinters, who didn't get away in time, were pinned up against the side of the dome by the incoming bodies.
Miles and Suegar, unfortunately, were in this second category. Miles's view was reduced to a sweating, heaving, stinking, swearing mass of elbows and chests and backs.
"Eat, eat!" Suegar urged around stuffed cheeks as he and Miles were separated by the pack. But the bar Miles had grabbed was twisted out of his hands before he had gathered his wits enough to follow Suegar's advice. Anyway, his hunger was nothing to his terror of being crushed, or worse, falling underfoot. His own feet pummeled over something soft, but he was unable to push back with enough strength to give the person-man, woman, who knew?-a chance to get up again.
In time the press lessened, and Miles found the edge of the crowd and broke free again. He staggered a little way off and fell to the dirt to sit, shaken and shaking, pale and cold. His breath rasped unevenly in his throat. It took him a long time to get hold of himself again.
Sheer chance, that this had hit his rawest nerve, his darkest fears, threatened his most dangerous weakness. I could die here, he realized, without ever seeing the enemy's face. But there seemed to be no new bones broken, except possibly in his left foot. He was not too sure about his left foot. The elephant who had trod on it was surely getting more than his fair share of rat bars.
All right, Miles thought at last. That's enough time spent on RR. On your feet, soldier. It was time to go find Colonel Tremont.
Guy Tremont. The real hero of the siege of Fallow Core. The defiant one, the one who'd held, and held, and held, after General Xian fled, after Baneri was killed.
Xian had sworn to return, but then Xian had run into that meat grinder at Vassily Station. HQ had promised re-supply, but then HQ and its vital shuttleport had been taken by the Cetagandans.
But by this time Tremont and his troops had lost communication. So they held, waiting, and hoping. Eventually resources were reduced to hope and rocks. Rocks were versatile, they could either be boiled for soup or thrown at the enemy. At last Fallow Core was taken. Not surrendered. Taken.
Guy Tremont. Miles wanted very much to meet Guy Tremont.
On his feet and looking around, Miles spotted a distant shambling scarecrow being pelted off from a group with clods of dirt. Suegar paused out of range of their missiles, still pointing to the rag on his wrist and talking. The three or four men he was haranguing turned their backs to him by way of a broad hint.
Miles sighed and started trudging toward him. "Hey, Suegar!" he called and waved when he got closer.
"Oh, there you are." Suegar turned and brightened, and joined him. "I lost you." Suegar rubbed dirt out of his eyebrows. "Nobody wants to listen, y'know?"
"Yeah, well, most of them have heard you at least once by now, right?"
"Pro'bly twenty times. I keep thinking I might have missed one, y'see. Maybe the very One, the other One."
"Well, I'd be glad to listen to you, but I've really got to find Colonel Tremont first. You said you knew somebody... ?"
"Oh, right. This way." Suegar led off again.
"Thanks. Say, is every chow call like that last one?"
"Pretty much."
"What's to keep some-group-from just taking over that arc of the dome?"
"It's never issued at the same place twice. They move it all around the perimeter. There was a lot of strategy debated at one time, as to whether it was better to be at the center, so's you're never more than half a diameter away, or near the edge, so's to be up front at least part of the time. Some guys had even worked out the mathematics of it, probabilities and all that."
"Which do you favor?"
"Oh, I don't have a spot, I move around and take my chances." His right hand touched his rag. "It's not the most important thing, anyway. Still, it was good to eat-today. Whatever day this is."
"Today is November 2, '97, Earth Common Era."
"Oh? Is that all?" Suegar pulled his beard strands out straight and rolled his eyes, attempting to look across his face at them. "Thought I'd been here longer than that. Why, it hasn't even been three years. Huh." He added apologetically, "In here it's always today."
"Mm," said Miles. "So the rat bars are always delivered in a pile like that, eh?"
"Yeah."
"Damned ingenious."
"Yeah," Suegar sighed. Rage, barely breathed, was camouflaged in that sigh, in the twitch of Suegar's hands. So, my madman is not so simple....
"Here we are," Suegar added. They paused before a group defined by half a dozen sleeping mats in a rough circle. One man looked up and glowered.
"Go away, Suegar. I ain't in the mood for a sermon."
"That the colonel?" whispered Miles.
"Naw, his name's Oliver. I knew him-a long time ago. He was at Fallow Core, though," Suegar whispered back. "He can take you to him."
Suegar bundled Miles forward. "This is Miles. He's new. Wants to talk to you." Suegar himself backed away. Helpfully, Miles realized. Suegar was aware of his unpopularity, it seemed.
Miles studied the next link in his chain. Oliver had managed to retain his grey pajamas, sleeping mat, and cup intact, which reminded Miles again of his own nakedness. On the other hand, Oliver did not seem to be in possession of any ill-gotten duplicates. Oliver might be as burly as the surly brothers, but was not otherwise related. That was good. Not that Miles in his present state need have any more worries about thievery.
Oliver stared at Miles without favor, then seemed to relent. "What d'you want?" he growled.
Miles opened his hands. "I'm looking for Colonel Guy Tremont."
"Ain't no colonels in here, boy."
"He was a cousin of my mother's. Nobody in the family-nobody in the outside world-has heard anything from or about him since Fallow Core fell. I-I'm not from any of the other units or pieces of units that are in here. Colonel Tremont is the only person I know anything about at all." Miles clasped his hands together and tried to look waif-like. Real doubt shook him, drew down his brows. "Is he still alive, even?"
Oliver frowned. "Relative, eh?" He scratched the side of his nose with a thick finger. "I suppose you got a right. But it won't do you any good, boy, if that's what you're thinking."
"I..." Miles shook his head. "At this point, I just want to know."
"Come on, then." Oliver levered himself to his feet with a grunt and lumbered off without looking over his shoulder.
Miles limped in his wake. "Are you taking me to him?"
Oliver made no answer until they'd finished their journey, only a few dozen meters, among and between sleeping mats. One man swore, one spat; most ignored them.
One mat lay at the edge of a group, almost far enough away to look alone. A figure lay curled up on his side with his back to them. Oliver stood silent, big fists on hips, and regarded it.
"Is that the colonel?" Miles whispered urgently.
"No, boy." Oliver sucked on his lower lip. "Only his remains."
Miles, alarmed, knelt down. Oliver was speaking poetically. Miles realized with relief. The man breathed. "Colonel Tremont? Sir?"
Miles's heart sank again, as he saw that breathing was about all that Tremont did. He lay inert, his eyes open but fixed on nothing. They did not even flick toward Miles and dismiss him with contempt. He was thin, thinner than Suegar even. Miles traced the angle of his jaw, the shape of his ear, from the holovids he'd studied. The remains of a face, like the ruined fortress of Fallow Core. It took nearly an archeologist's insight to recognize the connections between past and present.
He was dressed, his cup sat upright by his head, but the dirt around his mat was churned to acrid, stinking mud. From urine, Miles realized. Tremont's elbows were marked with lesions, the beginning of decubiti, bedsores. A damp patch on the grey fabric of his trousers over his body hips hinted at more advanced and horrible sores beneath.
Yet somebody must be tending him, Miles thought, or he wouldn't be looking even this good.
Oliver knelt beside Miles, bare toes squishing in the mud, and pulled a hunk of rat bar from beneath the elastic waistband of his trousers. He crumbled a bit between his thick fingers and pushed it between Tremont's lips. "Eat," he whispered. The lips almost moved; the crumbs dribbled to the mat. Oliver tried again, seemed to become conscious of Miles's eyes upon him, and stuffed the rest of the rat bar back into his pants with an unintelligible grumble.
"Was-was he injured when Fallow Core was overrun?" asked Miles. "Head injury?"
Oliver shook his head. "Fallow Core wasn't stormed, boy."
"But it fell on October 6th, it was reported, and-"
"It fell on October 5th. Fallow Core was betrayed." Oliver turned and walked away before his stiffened face could betray any emotion.
Miles knelt in the mud and let his breath trickle out slowly.
So. And so.
Was this the end of his quest, then?
He wanted to pace and think, but walking still hurt too much. He hobbled a little way off, trying not to accidentally infringe upon the territory of any sizeable group, and sat, then lay in the dirt with his hands behind his head, staring up at the pearly glow of the dome sealed like a lid over them all.
He considered his options, one, two, three. He considered them carefully. It didn't take long.
I thought you didn't believe in good guys and bad guys? He had cauterized his emotions, he'd thought, coming in here, for his own protection, but he could feel his carefully cultivated impartiality slipping. He was beginning to hate that dome in a really intimate, personal way. Aesthetically elegant, form united with function as perfectly as an eggshell, a marvel of physics-perverted into an instrument of torture.
Subtle torture... Miles reviewed the Interstellar Judiciary Commission's rules for the treatment of POW's, to which Cetaganda was a signatory. So many square meters of space per person, yes, they were certainly supplied with that. No prisoner to be solitarily confined for a period exceeding twenty-four hours-right, no solitude in here except by withdrawal into madness. No dark periods longer than twelve hours, that was easy, no dark periods at all, the perpetual glare of noon instead. No beatings-indeed, the guards could say with truth that they never laid a hand on their prisoners. They just watched, while the prisoners beat each other up instead. Rapes, even more strictly forbidden, doubtless handled the same way.
Miles had seen what they could do with their issue of two IJC standard ration bars per person per day. The rat bar riot was a particularly neat touch, he thought. No one could fail to participate (he rubbed his growling stomach). The enemy might have seeded the initial breakdown by sending in a short pile. But maybe not-the first person who snatched two instead of one left another foodless. Maybe next time that one took three, to make up for it, and so it quickly snowballed. Breaking down any hope of order, pitting group against group, person against person in a scrambling dogfight, a twice-a-day reminder of their powerlessness and degradation. None could afford for long to hold themselves aloof unless they wished to embrace slow starvation.
No forced labor-hah, check. That would require the imposition of order. Access to medical personnel-right, the various units' own medics must be mixed in out there somewhere. He re-ran the wording of that paragraph through his memory again-by God, it did say "personnel," didn't it? No medicine, just medical personnel. Empty-handed, naked doctors and medtechs. His lips drew back in a mirthless grin. Accurate lists of prisoners taken had been duly dispatched, as required. But no other communication...
Communication. This lack of word from the outside world might drive even him crazy shortly. It was as bad as prayer, talking to a God who never talked back. No wonder they all seemed touched with a sort of solipsistic schizophrenia here. Their doubts infected him. Was anybody still out there? Could his voice be heard and understood?
Ah, blind faith. The leap of faith. His right hand clenched, as if crushing an eggshell. "This," he enunciated clearly, "calls for a major change of plans."
He drove himself to his feet to go find Suegar again.
Miles found him not far off, hunkered in the dirt doodling. Suegar looked up with a brief smile. "Did Oliver take you to-to your cousin?"
"Yes, but I came too late. He's dying." 
"Yeah ... I was afraid that might be the case. Sorry." 
"Me too." Miles was momentarily distracted from his purpose by a practical curiosity. "Suegar, what do they do with dead bodies here?" 
"There's a rubbish pile of sorts, over against one side of the dome. The dome sort of extrudes and laps it up every once in a while, same way as food and new prisoners are introduced. Usually by the time a body swells and starts to stink, somebody'll drag it over there. I take 'em sometimes."
"No chance of anybody sneaking out in the rubbish pile, I suppose?"
"They microwave-incinerate it all before the portal's opened."
"Ah." Miles took a deep breath, and launched himself. "Suegar, it's come to me. I am the other One."
Suegar nodded serenely, unsurprised. "I'd had it figured."
Miles paused, nonplussed. Was that all the response... ? He had expected something more energetic, either pro or con. "It came to me in a vision," he declared dramatically, following his script anyway.
"Oh, yeah?" Suegar's attention sharpened gratifyingly. "I've never gotten a vision," he added with envy. "Had to figure it all out, y'know, from context. What's it like? A trance?"
Shit, and here I thought this guy talked with elves and angels.... Miles backed down slightly. "No, it's like a thought, only more compelling. It storms your will-burns like lust, only not so easy to satisfy. Not like a trance, because it drives you outward, not inward." He hesitated, unsettled, having spoken more truth than he'd intended.
Suegar looked vastly encouraged. "Oh, good. I was afraid for a second you might be one of those guys who start talking to people nobody else can see."
Miles glanced upward involuntarily, returned his gaze straightly to Suegar.
"-so that's a vision. Why, I've felt like that." His eyes seemed to focus and intensify.
"Didn't you recognize it in yourself?" asked Miles blandly.
"Not by name... it's not a comfortable thing, to be chosen so. I tried to evade it for a long time, but God finds ways of dealing with draft dodgers."
"You're too modest, Suegar. You've believed in your scripture, but not in yourself. Don't you know that when you're given a task, you're given the power to accomplish it as well?"
Suegar sighed in joyous satisfaction. "I knew it was a job for two. It's just like the scripture said."
"Uh, right. So now we are two. But we must be more. I guess we'd better start with your friends."
"That won't take much time," said Suegar wryly. "You got a step two in mind, I hope?"
"Then we'll start with your enemies. Or your nodding acquaintances. We'll start with the first bleeding body that crosses our path. It doesn't matter where we start, because I mean to have them all, in the end. All, to the last and least." A particularly apt quote shot across his memory, and he declaimed vigorously, " 'Those who have ears, let them hear.' All." Miles sent a prayer up from his heart with that one.
"All right," Miles pulled Suegar to his feet, "let's go preach to the unconverted."
Suegar laughed suddenly. "I had a top kick once who used to say, 'Let's go kick some ass,' in just that tone of voice."
"That, too," Miles grimaced. "You understand, universal membership in this congregation won't come all voluntary. But you leave the recruiting to me, hear?"
Suegar stroked his beard hairs, regarded Miles from beneath raised brows. "A clerk, eh?"
"Right."
"Yes, sir."
They started with Oliver.
Miles gestured. "May we step into your office?"
Oliver rubbed his nose with the back of his hand and sniffed. "Let me give you a piece of advice, boy. You ain't gonna make it in here as a stand-up comic. Every joke that can possibly be made has been run into the ground. Even the sick ones."
"Very well." Miles sat cross-legged, near Oliver's mat, but not too near. Suegar hunkered down behind Miles's shoulder, not so welded to the ground, as if ready to skip backwards if necessary. "I'll lay it out straight, then. I don't like the way things are run around here."
Oliver's mouth twisted sardonically; he did not comment aloud. He didn't need to.
"I'm going to change them," Miles added.
"Shit," said Oliver, and rolled back over.
"Starting here and now."
After a moment's silence Oliver added, "Go away or I'll pound you."
Suegar started to get up; Miles irritably motioned him back down.
"He was a commando," Suegar whispered worriedly. "He can break you in half."
"Nine-tenths of the people in this camp can break me in half, including the girls," Miles whispered back. "It's not a significant consideration."
Miles leaned forward, grasped Oliver's chin, and twisted his face back toward him. Suegar sucked his breath through his teeth with a whistle at this dangerous tactic.
"Now, there's this about cynicism, Sergeant. It's the universe's most supine moral position. Real comfortable. If nothing can be done, then you're not some kind of shit for not doing it, and you can lie there and stink to yourself in perfect peace."
Oliver batted Miles's hand down, but did not turn away again. Rage flared in his eyes. "Suegar tell you I was a sergeant?" he hissed.
"No, it's written on your forehead in letters of fire. Listen up, Oliver-"
Oliver rolled over and up as far as supporting his upper body with his knuckles on his sleeping mat. Suegar flinched, but did not flee.
"You listen up, mutant," Oliver snarled. "We've done it all already. We've done drill, and games, and clean living, exercise, and cold showers, except there ain't no cold showers. We've done group sings and floor shows. We've done it by the numbers, by the book, by candlelight. We've done it by force, and made real war on each other. After that we did sin and sex and sadism till we were ready to puke. We've done it all at least ten times. You think you're the first reformer to come through here?"
"No, Oliver," Miles leaned into his face, his eyes boring into Oliver's burning eyes unscorched. His voice fell to a whisper. "I think I'm the last."
Oliver was silent a moment, then barked a laugh. "By God, Suegar has found his soul-mate at last. Two loonies together, just like his scripture says."
Miles paused thoughtfully, sat up as straight as his spine would allow. "Read me your scripture, again, Suegar. The full text." He closed his eyes for total concentration, also to discourage interruptions from Oliver.
Suegar rustled around and cleared his throat nervously. "For those that shall be the heirs of salvation,' " he began. " Thus they went along toward the gate. Now you must note that the city stood upon a mighty hill, but the pilgrims went up that hill with ease, because they had these two men to lead them by the arms; also they had left their mortal garments behind them in the river, for though they went in with them, they came out without them. They therefore went up here with much agility and speed, through the foundation upon which the city was framed higher than the clouds. They therefore went up through the regions of the air...' " He added apologetically, "It breaks off there. That's where I tore the page. Not sure what that signifies."
"Probably means that after that you're supposed to improvise for yourself," Miles suggested, opening his eyes again. So, that was the raw material he was building on. He had to admit the last line in particular gave him a turn, a chill like a bellyfull of cold worms. So be it. Forward.
"There you are, Oliver. That's what I'm offering. The only hope worth breathing for. Salvation itself."
"Very uplifting," sneered Oliver.
" 'Uplifted' is just what I intend you all to be. You've got to understand, Oliver, I'm a fundamentalist. I take my scriptures very literally."
Oliver opened his mouth, then closed it with a snap. Miles had his utter attention.
Communication at last, Miles breathed inwardly. We have connected.
"It would take a miracle," said Oliver at last, "to uplift this whole place."
"Mine is not a theology of the elect. I intend to preach to the masses. Even," he was definitely getting into the swing of this, "the sinners. Heaven is for everyone."
"But miracles, by their very nature, must break in from outside. We don't carry them in our pockets-"
"You don't, that's for sure," muttered Oliver with a glance at Miles's undress.
"-we can only pray, and prepare ourselves for a better world. But miracles come only to the prepared. Are you prepared, Oliver?" Miles leaned forward, his voice vibrating with energy.
"Sh- . ." Oliver's voice trailed off. He glanced for confirmation, oddly enough, at Suegar. "Is this guy for real?"
"He thinks he's faking it," said Suegar blandly, "but he's not. He's the One, all right and tight."
The cold worms writhed again. Dealing with Suegar, Miles decided, was like fencing in a hall of mirrors. Your target, though real, was never quite where it looked like it should be.
Oliver inhaled. Hope and fear, belief and doubt, intermingled in his face. "How shall we be saved, Rev'rend?"
"Ah-call me Brother Miles, I think. Yes. Tell me-how many converts can you deliver on your own naked, unsupported authority?"
Oliver looked extremely thoughtful. "Just let them see that light, and they'll follow it anywhere."
"Well... well... salvation is for all, to be sure, but there may be certain temporary practical advantages to maintaining a priesthood. I mean, blessed also are they who do not see, and yet believe."
"It's true," agreed Oliver, "that if your religion failed to deliver a miracle, that a human sacrifice would certainly follow."
"Ah... quite," Miles gulped. "You are a man of acute insight."
"That's not an insight," said Oliver. "That's a personal guarantee."
"Yes, well ... to return to my question. How many followers can you raise? I'm talking bodies here, not souls."
Oliver frowned, cautious still. "Maybe twenty."
"Can any of them bring in others? Branch out, hook in more?"
"Maybe."
"Make them your corporals, then. I think we had better disregard any previous ranks here. Call it, ah, the Army of the Reborn. No. The Reformation Army. That scans better. We shall be re-formed. The body has disintegrated like the caterpillar in its chrysalis, into nasty green gook, but we shall re-form into the butterfly and fly away."
Oliver sniffed again. "Just what reforms you planning?"
"Just one, I think. The food."
Oliver gave him a disbelieving stare. "You sure this isn't just a scam to get yourself a free meal?"
"True, I am getting hungry..." Miles backed off from the joke as Oliver remained icily unimpressed. "But so are a lot of other people. By tomorrow, we can have them all eating out of our hands."
"When would you want these twenty guys?"
"By the next chow call." Good, he'd startled the man.
"That soon?"
"You understand, Oliver, the belief that you have all the time in the world is an illusion this place fosters on purpose. Resist it."
"You're sure in a hurry."
"So, you got a dental appointment? I think not. Besides, I'm only half your mass. I gotta move twice as fast just to keep up the momentum. Twenty, plus. By next chow call."
"What the hell do you think you're gonna be able to do with twenty guys?"
"We're going to take the food pile."
Oliver's lips tightened in disgust. "Not with twenty guys, you're not. No go. Besides, it's been done. I told you we'd made real war in here. It'd be a quick massacre."
"-and then, after we've taken it-we re-distribute it. Fair and square, one rat bar per customer, all controlled and quartermasterly. To sinners and all. By the next chow call everybody who's ever been shorted will be coming over to us. And then we'll be in a position to deal with the hard cases."
"You're nuts. You can't do it. Not with twenty guys."
"Did I say we were only going to have twenty guys? Suegar, did I say that?"
Suegar, listening in rapt fascination, shook his head.
"Well, I ain't sticking my neck out to get pounded unless you can produce some visible means of support," said Oliver. "This could get us killed."
"Can do," Miles promised recklessly. One had to start lifting somewhere; his imaginary bootstraps would do well enough. "I will deliver 500 troops to the sacred cause by chow call."
"You do that, and I'll walk the perimeter of this camp naked on my hands," retorted Oliver.
Miles grinned. "I may hold you to that, Sergeant. Twenty plus. By chow call." Miles stood. "Come on, Suegar."
Oliver waved them off irritably. They retreated in good order. When Miles looked back over his shoulder, Oliver had arisen, and was walking toward a group of occupied mats tangential to his own, waving down an apparent acquaintance.
"So where do we get 500 troops before next chow call?" Suegar asked. "I better warn you, Oliver was the best thing I had. The next is bound to be tougher."
"What," said Miles, "is your faith wavering so soon?"
"I believe," said Suegar, "I just don't see. Maybe that makes me blessed, I dunno."
"I'm surprised. I thought it was pretty obvious. There." Miles pointed across the camp toward the unmarked border of the women's group.
"Oh." Suegar stopped short. "Oh, oh. I don't think so, Miles."
"Yes. Let's go."
"You won't get in there without a change-of-sex operation."
"What, as God-driven as you are, haven't you tried to preach your scripture to them?"
"I tried. Got pounded. Tried elsewhere after that."
Miles paused, and pursed his lips, studying Suegar. "It wasn't defeat, or you wouldn't have hung on long enough to meet me. Was it-ah, shame, that drained your usual resolve? You got something to work off in that quarter?"
Suegar shook his head. "Not personally. Except maybe, sins of omission. I just didn't have the heart to harass 'em any more."
"This whole place is suffering from sins of omission." A relief, that Suegar wasn't some sort of self-confessed rapist. Miles's eyes swept the scene, teasing out the pattern from the limited cues of position, grouping, activity. "Yes... predator pressure produces herd behavior. Social-fragmentation here being what it is, the pressure must be pretty high, to hold a group of that size together. But I hadn't noticed any incidents since I got here...."
"It comes and goes," said Suegar. "Phases of the moon or something."
Phases of the moon, right. Miles sent up a prayer of thanks in his heart to whatever gods might be-to Whom it may concern-that the Cetagandans appeared to have implanted some standard time-release anti-ovulant in all their female prisoners, along with their other immunizations. Bless the forgotten individual who'd put that clause in the IJC rules, forcing he Cetagandans into more subtle forms of legal torture. And yet, would the presence of pregnancies, infants, and children among the prisoners have been another destabilizing stress-or a stabilizing force deeper and stronger than all the previous loyalties the Cetagandans seemed to have so successfully broken down? From a purely logistical viewpoint, Miles was elated that the question was theoretical.
"Well..." Miles took a deep breath, and pulled an imaginary hat down over his eyes at an aggressive angle. "I'm new here, and so temporarily unembarrassed. Let he who is without sin cast the first lure. Besides, I have an advantage for this sort of negotiation. I'm clearly not a threat." He marched forward.
"I'll wait for you here," called Suegar helpfully, and hunkered down where he was.
Miles timed his forward march to intersect a patrol of six women strolling down their perimeter. He arranged himself in front of them and swept off his imaginary hat to hold strategically over his crotch. "Good afternoon, ladies. Allow me to apologize for m'beh-"
His opening line was interrupted by a mouthful of dirt abruptly acquired as his legs were swept backward and his shoulders forward by the four women who had parted around him, dumping him neatly on his face. He had not even managed to spit it out when he found himself plucked up and whirled dizzily through the air, still facedown, by hands grasping his arms and legs. A muttered count of three, and he was soaring in a short forlorn arc, to land in a heap not far from Suegar. The patrollers walked on without another word.
"See what I mean?" said Suegar.
Miles turned his head to look at him. "You had that trajectory calculated to the centimeter, didn't you?" he said smearily.
"Just about," agreed Suegar. "I figured they could heave you quite a bit farther than usual, on account of your size."
Miles scrambled back up to a sitting position, still trying to get his wind. Damn the ribs, which had grown almost bearable, but which now wrung his chest with electric agony at every breath. In a few minutes he got up and brushed himself off. As an afterthought, he picked up his invisible hat, too. Dizzied, he had to brace his hands on his knees a moment.
"All right," he muttered, "back we go."
"Miles-"
"It's gotta be done, Suegar. No other choice. Anyway, I can't quit, once I've started. I've been told I'm pathologically persistent. I can't quit."
Suegar opened his mouth to object, then swallowed his protest. "Right," he said. He settled down cross-legged, his right hand unconsciously caressing his rag rope library. "I'll wait till you call me in." He seemed to fall into a reverie, or meditation-or maybe a doze.
Miles's second foray ended precisely like the first, except that his trajectory was perhaps a little wider and a little higher. The third attempt went the same way, but his flight was much shorter.
"Good," he muttered to himself. "Must be tiring 'em out."
This time he skipped in parallel to the patrol, out of reach but well within hearing. "Look," he panted, "you don't have to do this piecemeal. Let me make it easy for you. I have this teratogenic bone disorder-I'm not a mutant, you understand, my genes are normal, it's just their expression got distorted, from my mother being exposed to a certain poison while she was pregnant-it was a one-shot thing, won't affect any children I might have-I always felt it was easier to get dates when that was clearly understood, not a mutant-anyway, my bones are brittle, in fact any one of you could probably break every one in my body. You may wonder why I'm telling you all this- in fact, I usually prefer not to advertise it-you have to stop and listen to me. I'm not a threat-do I look like a threat?-a challenge, maybe, not a threat-are you going to make me run all around this camp after you? Slow down, for God's sake-" He would be out of wind, and therefore verbal ammunition, very shortly at this rate. He hopped around in front of them and planted himself, arms outstretched.
"-so if you are planning to break every bone in my body, please do it now and get it over with, because I'm going to keep coming back here until you do."
At a brief hand signal from their leader the patrol stopped, facing him.
"Take him at his word," suggested a tall redhead. Her short brush of electric copper hair fascinated Miles to distraction; he pictured missing masses of it having fallen to the floor at the clippers of the ruthless Cetagandan prison processors. "I'll break the left arm if you'll break the right, Conr," she continued.
"If that's what it takes to get you to stop and listen to me for five minutes, so be it," Miles responded, not retreating. The redhead stepped forward and braced herself, locking his left elbow in an arm bar, putting on the pressure.
"Five minutes, right?" Miles added desperately as the pressure mounted. Her stare scorched his profile. He licked his lips, closed his eyes, held his breath, and waited. The pressure reached critical-he rose on his toes...
She released him abruptly, so that he staggered. "Men," she commented disgustedly. "Always gotta make everything a peeing contest."
"Biology is Destiny," gasped Miles, popping his eyes back open.
"-or are you some kind of pervert-do you get off on being beaten up by women?"
God, I hope not. He remained unbetrayed by unauthorized salutes from his nether parts, just barely. If he was going to be around that redhead much he was definitely going to have to get his pants back somehow. "If I said yes, would you refrain, just to punish me?" he offered.
"Shit, no."
"It was just a thought-"
"Cut the crap, Beatrice," said the patrol leader. At a jerk of her head the redhead stepped back into formation. "All right, runt, you've got your five minutes. Maybe."
"Thank you, ma'am." Miles took a breath, and reordered himself as best he could with no uniform to adjust. "First, let me apologize for intruding upon your privacy in this undress. Practically the first persons I met upon entering this camp were a self-help group-they helped themselves to my clothes, among other things-"
"I saw that," confirmed Beatrice-the-redhead unexpectedly. "Pitt's bunch."
Miles pulled off his hat and swept her a bow with it. "Yes, thank you."
"You moon people behind you when you do that," she commented dispassionately.
"That's their look-out," responded Miles. "For myself, I want to talk to your leader, or leaders. I have a serious plan for improving the tone of this place with which I wish to invite your group to collaborate. Bluntly, you are the largest remaining pocket of civilization, not to mention military order, in here. I'd like to see you expand your borders."
"It takes everything we've got to keep our borders from being overrun, son," replied the leader. "No can do. So take yourself off."
"Jack yourself off, too," suggested Beatrice. "You ain't gettin' any in here."
Miles sighed, and turned his hat around in his hands by its wide brim. He spun it for a moment on one finger, and locked eyes with the redhead. "Note my hat. It was the one garment I managed to keep from the ravages of the burly surly brothers-Pitt's bunch, you say."
She snorted at the turn of phrase. "Those jerks... why just a hat? Why not pants? Why not a full-dress uniform while you're at it?" she added sarcastically.
"A hat is a more useful object for communicating. You can make broad gestures," he did so, "denote sincerity," he held it over his heart, "or indicate embarrassment," over his genitals, with a hangdog crouch, "or rage-" he flung it to earth as if he might drive it into the ground, then picked it up and brushed it off carefully, "or determination-" he jammed it on his head and yanked the brim down over his eyes, "or make courtesies." He swept it off again in salute to her. "Do you see the hat?"
She was beginning to be amused. "Yes..."
"Do you see the feathers on the hat?"
"Yes..."
"Describe them."
"Oh-plumey things."
"How many?"
"Two. Bunched together."
"Do you see the color of the feathers?"
She drew back, suddenly self-conscious again, with a sidewise glance at her companions. "No."
"When you can see the color of the feathers," said Miles softly, "you'll also understand how you can expand your borders to infinity."
She was silent, her face closed and locked. But the patrol leader muttered, "Maybe this little runt better talk to Tris. Just this once."
The woman in charge had clearly been a front line trooper once, not a tech like the majority of the females. She had certainly not acquired the muscles that flowed like braided leather cords beneath her skin from crouching by the hour in front of a holovid display in some rear-echelon underground post. She had toted the real weapons that spat real death, and sometimes broke down; had rammed against the limits of what could really be done by flesh and bone and metal, and been marked by that deforming press. Illusion had been burned out of her like an infection, leaving a cauterized scar. Rage burned permanently in her eyes like a fire in a coal seam, underground and unquenchable. She might be thirty-five, or forty.
God, I'm in love, thought Miles. Brother Miles wants YOU for the Reformation Army... then got hold of his thoughts. Here, now, was the make-or-break point for his scheme, and all the persiflage, verbal misdirection, charm, chutzpah, and bullshit he could muster weren't going to be enough, not even tied up with a big blue bow.
The wounded want power, nothing else; they think it will keep them from being hurt again. This one will not be interested in Suegar's strange message-at least, not yet.... Miles took a deep breath.
"Ma'am, I'm here to offer you command of this camp."
She stared at him as if he were something she'd found growing on the walls in a dark corner of the latrine. Her eyes raked over his nudity; Miles could feel the claw marks glowing from his chin to his toes.
"Which you store in your duffel bag, no doubt," she growled. "Command of this camp doesn't exist, mutant. So it's not yours to give. Deliver him to our perimeter in pieces, Beatrice."
He ducked the redhead. He would pursue correction of the mutant business later. "Command of this camp is mine to create," he asserted. "Note, please, that what I offer is power, not revenge. Revenge is too expensive a luxury. Commanders can't afford it."
Tris uncoiled from her sleeping mat to her full height, then had to bend her knees to bring her face level to his, hissing. "Too bad, little turd. You almost interest me. Because I want revenge. On every man in this camp."
"Then the Cetagandans have succeeded; you've forgotten who your real enemy is."
"Say, rather, that I've discovered who my real enemy is. Do you want to know the things they've done to us-our own guys-"
"The Cetagandans want you to believe this," a wave of his hand embraced the camp, "is something you're doing to each other. So fighting each other, you become their puppets. They watch you all the time, you know, voyeurs of your humiliation."
Her glance flicked upward, infinitesimally; good. It was almost a disease among these people, that they would look in any direction at all in preference to up at the dome.
"Power is better than revenge," suggested Miles, not flinching before her snake-cold, set face, her hot coal eyes. "Power is a live thing, by which you reach out to grasp the future. Revenge is a dead thing, reaching out from the past to grasp you."
"-and you're a bullshit artist," she interrupted, "reaching out to grasp whatever's going down. I've got you pegged now. This is power." She flexed her arm under his nose, muscles coiling and loosing. "This is the only power that exists in here. You haven't got it, and you're looking for some to cover your ass. But you've come to the wrong store."
"No," Miles denied, and tapped his forehead. "This is power. And I own the store. This controls that," he slapped his bunched fist. "Men may move mountains, but ideas move men. Minds can be reached through bodies-what else is the point of all this," he waved at the camp, "but to reach your minds through your bodies. But that power flows both ways, and the outflow is the stronger tide.
"When you have allowed the Cetagandans to reduce your power to that alone," he squeezed her bicep for emphasis-it was like squeezing a rock covered in velvet, and she tensed, enraged at the liberty, "then you have allowed them to reduce you to your weakest part. And they win."
"They win anyway," she snapped, shrugging him off. He breathed relief that she hadn't chosen to break his arm. "Nothing that we do within this circle will result in any net change. We're still prisoners, whatever we do. They can cut off the food, or the damn air, or squeeze us to mush. And time's on their side. If we spill our guts restoring order-if that's what you're trying to work up to-all they have to do is wait for it to break down again. We're beaten. We're taken. There's nobody left out there. We're here forever. And you'd better start getting used to the idea."
"I've heard that song before," said Miles. "Use your head. If they meant to keep you forever, they could have incinerated you at the start, and saved the considerable expense of operating this camp. No. It's your minds they want. You are all here because you were Marilac's best and brightest, the hardest fighters, the strongest, baddest, most dangerous. The ones any potential resisters to the occupation would look to for leadership. It's the Cetagandans' plan to break you, and then return you to your world like little innoculated infections, counseling surrender to your people.
"When this is killed," he touched her forehead, oh so lightly, "then the Cetagandans have nothing more to fear from this," one finger on her bicep, "and you will all go free. To a world whose horizon will encircle you just like this dome, and just as inescapably. The war's not over. You are here because the Cetagandans are still waiting for the surrender of Fallow Core."
He thought for a moment she might murder him, strangle him on the spot. She must certainly prefer ripping him apart to letting him see her weep.
She regained her protective bitter tension with a toss of her head, a gulp of air. "If that's true, then following you puts us farther from freedom, not closer."
Damn, a logician to boot. She didn't have to pound him, she could parse him to death if he didn't scramble. He scrambled. "There is a subtle difference between being a prisoner and being a slave. I don't mistake either for being free. Neither do you."
She fell silent, staring at him through slitted eyes, pulling unconsciously on her lower lip. "You're an odd one," she said at last. "Why do you say 'you' and not 'we'?"
Miles shrugged casually. Blast-he rapidly reviewed his pitch-she was right, he had. A little too close to the edge, there. He might yet make an opportunity of the mistake, though. "Do I look like the flower of Marilac's military might? I'm an outsider, trapped in a world I never made. A traveller-a pilgrim-just passing through. Ask Suegar."
She snorted. "That loonie."
She'd missed the catch. Rats, as Elli would say. He missed Elli. Try again later. "Don't discount Suegar. He has a message for you. I found it fascinating."
"I've heard it. I find it irritating. ... So, what do you want out of this? And don't tell me 'nothing,' 'cause I won't believe you. Frankly, I think you're after command of the camp yourself, and I'm not volunteering to be your stepping stone in some empire-building scheme."
She was thinking at speed now, and constructively, actually following out trains of thought besides that of having him removed to her border in bits. He was getting warmer...
"I only wish to be your spiritual advisor. I do not want-indeed, can't use-command. Just an advisor."
It must have been something about the term "advisor" that clicked, some old association of hers. Her eyes flicked fully open suddenly. He was close enough to see her pupils dilate. She leaned forward, and her index finger traced the faint indentations on his face beside his nose caused by certain control leads in a space armor helmet. She straightened again, and her first two fingers in a V caressed the deeper marks permanently flanking her own nose. "What did you say you were, before?"
"A clerk. Recruiting office," Miles replied sturdily.
"I ... see."
And if what she saw was the absurdity of someone claiming to be a rear-echelon clerk having worn combat armor often and long enough to have picked up its stigmata, he was in. Maybe.
She coiled herself back on her sleeping mat, and gestured toward its other end. "Sit down, chaplain. And keep talking."
Suegar was genuinely asleep when Miles found him again, sitting up cross-legged and snoring. Miles tapped him on the shoulder.
"Wake up, Suegar, we're home."
He snorted to consciousness. "God, I miss coffee. Huh?" He blinked at Miles. "You're still in one piece?"
"It was a near thing. Look, this garments-in-the-river bit-now that we've found each other, do we have to go on being naked? Or is the prophecy sufficiently fulfilled?"
"Huh?"
"Can we get dressed now?" Miles repeated patiently.
"Why-I don't know. I suppose, if we were meant to have clothes, they'd be given to us-"
Miles prodded and pointed. "There. They're given to us."
Beatrice stood a few meters away in a hip-shot pose of bored exasperation, a bundle of grey cloth under her arm. "You two loonies want this stuff or not? I'm going back."
"You got them to give you clothes?" Suegar whispered in amazement.
"Us, Suegar, us." Miles motioned to Beatrice. "I think it's all right."
She fired the bundle at him, sniffed, and stalked away.
"Thanks," Miles called. He shook out the fabric. Two sets of grey pajamas, one small, one large. Miles had only to turn up the bottoms of the pants legs one fold to keep them from catching under his heels. They were stained and stiff with old sweat and dirt, and had probably been peeled off a corpse, Miles reflected. Suegar crawled into his and stood fingering the grey fabric in wonder.
"They gave us clothes. Gave us," he muttered. "How'd you do that?"
"They gave us everything, Suegar. Come on, I've got to talk to Oliver again." Miles dragged Suegar off determinedly. "I wonder how much time we've actually got before the next chow call? Two in each twenty-four-hour cycle, to be sure, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's irregular, to increase your temporal disorientation-after all, it's the only clock in here ..."
Movement caught Miles's eye, a man running. It wasn't the occasional flurry of someone outrunning a hostile group; this one just ran, head down, flat out, bare feet thumping the dirt in frantic rhythm. He followed the perimeter generally, except for a detour around the border of the women's group. As he ran, he wept.
"What's this?" Miles asked Suegar, with a nod at the approaching figure.
Suegar shrugged. "It takes you like that sometimes. When you can't stand sitting in here any more. I saw a guy run till he died, once. Around and around and around..."
"Well," Miles decided, "this one's running to us."
"He's gonna be running away from us in a second..."
"Then help me catch him."
Miles hit him low and Suegar high. Suegar sat on his chest. Miles sat on his right arm, halving his effective resistance. He must have been a very young soldier when he was captured-maybe he had lied about his age at induction-for even now he had a boy's face, ravaged by tears and his personal eternity inside this hollow pearl. He inhaled in sobbing gasps and exhaled in garbled obscenities. After a time he quieted.
Miles leaned into his face and grinned wolfishly. "You a party animal, boy?"
"Yeah..." his white-rimmed eyes rolled, right and left, but no rescue approached.
"How 'bout your friends? They party animals too?"
"The best," the boy asserted, perhaps secretly shaken by the suspicion that he'd fallen into the hands of someone even crazier than himself. "You better clear off me, mutant, or they'll take you apart."
"I want to invite you and your friends to a major party," Miles chanted. "We gonna have a party tonight that's an his-tor-i-cal event. You know where to find Sergeant Oliver, late of the 14th Commandos?"
"Yeah..." the boy admitted cautiously.
"Well, you go get your friends and report to him. You better reserve your seat aboard his ve-hic-le now, 'cause if you're not on it, you gonna be under it. The Reformation Army is moving out. You copy?"
"Copy," he gasped, as Suegar pressed his fist into the boy's solar plexus for emphasis.
"Tell him Brother Miles sent you," Miles called as the boy staggered off, glancing nervously over his shoulder. "You can't hide in here. If you don't show, I'll send the Cosmic Commandos to find you."
Suegar shook out his cramped limbs, his new used clothes. "Think he'll come?"
Miles grinned. "Fight or flight. That one'll be all right." He stretched himself, recaptured his original orientation. "Oliver."
In the end they had not twenty, but 200. Oliver had picked up forty-six. The running boy brought in eighteen. The signs of order and activity in the area brought in the curious-a drifter at the edge of the group had only to ask, "What's going on?" to be inducted and promoted to corporal on the spot. Interest among the spectators was aroused to a fever when Oliver's troops marched up to the women's border-and were admitted within. They picked up another seventy-five volunteers instantly.
"Do you know what's going on?" Miles asked one such, as he fed them through a short gauntlet of inspection and sent them off to one of the fourteen command groups he had devised.
"No," the man admitted. He waved an arm eagerly toward the center of the women's group. "But I wanta go where they're go-ing..."
Miles cut the admissions off at 200 total in deference to Tris's growing nervousness at this infiltration of her borders, and promptly turned the courtesy into a card in his own hand in their still-continuing strategy debate. Tris wanted to divide her group in the usual way, half for the attack, half to maintain home base and keep the borders from collapsing. Miles was insisting on an all-out effort.
"If we win, you won't need guards anymore."
"What if we lose?"
Miles lowered his voice. "We don't dare lose. This is the only time we'll have surprise on our side. Yes, we can fall back-re-group-try again-I for one am prepared-no, compelled-to keep trying till it kills me. But after this, what we're trying to do will be fully apparent to any counter-group, and they'll have time to plan counter-strategies of their own. I have a particular aversion to stalemates. I prefer winning wars to prolonging them."
She sighed, momentarily drained, tired, old. "I've been at war a long time, y'know? After a while even losing a war can start to look preferable to prolonging it."
He could feel his own resolve slip, sucked into the vortex of that same black doubt. He pointed upwards, dropping his voice to a rasping whisper. "But not, surely, to those bastards."
She glanced upwards. Her shoulders straightened. "No. Not to those..." She took a deep breath. "All right, chaplain. You'll get your all-out effort. Just once..."
Oliver returned from a circuit of the command groups and squatted beside them. "They've got their orders. How many's Tris contributing to each group?"
"Commandant Tris," Miles quickly corrected for her as her brows beetled. "It's gonna be an all-out shot. You'll get every walking body in here."
Oliver made a quick calculation in the dirt with his finger for a stylus. "That'll put about fifty in each group-ought to be enough... matter of fact, what say we set up twenty groups? It'll speed distribution when we get the lines set up. Could make the difference between bringing this off, and not."
"No," Miles cut in quickly as Tris began to nod agreement. "It has to be fourteen. Fourteen battle groups make fourteen lines for fourteen piles. Fourteen is-is a theologically significant number," he added as they stared doubtfully at him.
"Why?" asked Tris.
"For the fourteen apostles," Miles intoned, tenting his hands piously.
Tris shrugged. Suegar scratched his head, started to speak-Miles speared him with a baleful glance, and he stilled.
Oliver eyed him narrowly. "Huh." But he did not argue further.
Then came the waiting. Miles stopped worrying about his uppermost fear-that their captors would introduce the next food pile early, before his plans were in place-and started worrying about his second greatest fear, that the food pile would come so late he'd lose control of his troops and they would start to wander off, bored and discouraged. Getting them all assembled had made Miles feel like a man pulling on a goat with a rope made of water. Never had the insubstantial nature of the Idea seemed more self-apparent.
Oliver tapped him on the shoulder and pointed. "Here we go..."
A side of the dome about a third of the way around the edge from them began to bulge inward.
The timing was perfect. His troops were at the peak of readiness. Too perfect... the Centagandans had been watching all this, surely they wouldn't miss an opportunity to make life more difficult for their prisoners. If the food pile wasn't early, it had to be late. Or ...
Miles bounded to his feet, screaming. "Wait! Wait! Wait for my order!"
His sprint groups wavered, drawn toward the anticipated goal. But Oliver had chosen his group commanders well-they held, and held their groups, and looked to Oliver. They had been soldiers once. Oliver looked to Tris, flanked by her lieutenant Beatrice, and Tris looked to Miles, angrily.
"What is it now? We're gonna lose our advantage . , ." she began, as the general stampede throughout the camp started toward the bulge.
"If I'm wrong," Miles moaned, "I'm going to kill myself-wait, dammit! On my order. I can't see-Suegar, give me a boost-" He clambered up on the thin man's shoulders and stared toward the bulge. The force wall had only half twinkled out when the first distant cries of disappointment met his straining ears. Miles's head swivelled frantically. How many wheels within wheels-if the Ceta-gandans knew, and he knew they knew, and they knew he knew they knew, and ... He cut off his internal gibber as a second bulge began, on the opposite side of the camp from the first.
Miles's arm flung out, pointing toward it like a man rolling dice. "There! There! Go, go go!"
Tris caught on then, whistling and shooting him a look of startled respect, before whirling and dashing off to double-time the main body of their troops after the sprint groups. Miles slithered off Suegar and started limping after.
He glanced back over his shoulder, as the rolling grey mass of humanity crashed up against the opposite side of the dome and reversed itself. He felt suddenly like a man trying to outrun a tidal wave. He indulged himself with one brief anticipatory whimper, and limped faster.
One more chance to be mortally wrong-no. His sprint groups had reached the pile, and the pile was really there. Already they were starting to break it down. The support troops surrounded them with a wall of bodies as they began to spread out along the perimeter of the dome. The Cetagandans had outfoxed themselves. This time.
Miles was reduced from the commander's eagle overview to the grunt's worm's-eye as the tidal wave overtook him. Someone shoved him from behind, and his face hit the dirt. He thought he recognized the back of the surly Pitt, vaulting over him, but he wasn't certain- surly Pitt would have stepped on, not over him. Suegar yanked him up by the left arm, and Miles bit back a scream of pain. There was enough howling already.
Miles recognized the running boy, squaring off with another tough. Miles shoved past him with a shouted reminder-"You're supposed to be yelling Get in line', NOT Get fucked!... The signal always gets degraded in combat," he muttered to himself. "Always..."
Beatrice materialized beside him. Miles clung to her instantly. Beatrice had personal space, her own private perimeter, maintained even as Miles watched, by a casual elbow to somebody's jaw with a quite sickening crack. If he tried that, Miles reflected enviously, not only would he smash his own elbow, but his opponent's nipple would probably be quite undamaged. Speaking of nipples, he found himself face to-well, not face-confronting the redhead. He resisted the urge to cuddle into the soft grey fabric covering home base with a contented sigh on the grounds that it would certainly get both his arms broken. He uncrossed his eyes and looked up into her face.
"C'mon," she said, and dragged him off through the mob. Was the noise level dropping? The human wall of his own troops parted just enough to let them squeeze through.
They were near the exit point of the chow line. It was working, by God it was working. The fourteen command groups, still bunched rather too closely along the dome wall-but that could be improved next run-were admitting the hungry supplicants one at a time. The expediters kept the lines moving at top speed, and channeled the already-supplied along the perimeter behind the human shield wall in a steady stream, to flow back out into the larger camp at the edge of the mob. Oliver had put his toughest-looking bravos to work in pairs, patrolling the outflow and making sure no one's rat bar was taken by force.
It was a long time since anyone here had had a chance to be a hero. Not a few of the newly-appointed policemen were approaching their work with great enthusiasm-maybe some personal grudges being worked off there-Miles recognized one of the burly surlys prone beneath a pair of patrollers, apparently getting his face beaten in. Miles, remembering what he was about, tried not to find music in the meaty thunks of fist on flesh.
Miles and Beatrice and Suegar bucked the stream of rat bar-clutching prisoners back toward the distribution piles. With a slightly regretful sigh, Miles sought out Oliver and dispatched him to the exit to restore order among his order-keepers.
Tris had the distribution piles and their immediate lines under tight control. Miles congratulated himself on having the women hand out the food. He had definitely tuned into a deep emotional resonance there. Not a few of the prisoners even muttered a sheepish "thank you" as their rat bars were shoved into their hands, and so did the ones in line behind them, when their turns came.
Nyah! Miles thought upward to the bland and silent dome. You don't have the monopoly on psychological warfare any more, you bastards. We're gonna reverse your peristalsis, and I hope you barf your bowels out-
An altercation at one of the food piles interrupted his meditations. Miles's lip curled with annoyance as he saw Pitt in the middle of it. He limped hastily toward it.
Pitt, it appeared, had repaid his rat bar not with a "thank you" but with a leer, a jeer, and a filthy remark. At least three of the women within hearing were trying to rip him apart, without success; he was big and beefy and had no inhibitions about fighting back. One of the females, not much taller than Miles himself, was knocked back in a heap and didn't get up again. In the meantime, the line was jammed, and the smooth civilized flow of would-be diners totally disrupted. Miles cursed under his breath.
"You, you, you, and-you," Miles tapped shoulders, "grab that guy. Get him out of here-back to the dome wall-"
Miles's draftees were not terribly pleased with their assignment, but by this time Tris and Beatrice had run up and led the attack with rather more science. Pitt was seized and pulled away, behind the lines. Miles made sure the rat bar distribution pile was running again before turning his attention to the savage, foul-mouthed Pitt. Oliver and Suegar had joined him by this time.
"I'm gonna rip the bastard's balls off," Tris was saying. "I command-"
"A military command," Miles interrupted. "If this one is accused of disorderly conduct, you should court martial him."
"He is a rapist and a murderer," she replied icily. "Execution's too good for him. He's got to die slowly."
Miles pulled Suegar aside. "It's tempting, but I feel real uneasy about handing him over to her just now. And yet... real uneasy. Why is that?"
Suegar eyed him respectfully. "I think you're right. You see, there's -there's too many guilty."
Pitt, now in a foaming fury, spotted Miles. "You! You little cunt-licking wimp-you think they can protect you?" He jerked his head toward Tris and Beatrice. "They ain't got the muscle. We've run 'em over before and we'll run 'em over again. We wouldn'ta lost the damn war if we'd had real soldiers-like the Barrayarans. They didn't fill their army with cunts and cunt-lickers. And they ran the Cetagandans right off their planet-"
"Somehow," Miles growled, drawn in, "I doubt you're an expert in the Barrayarans' defense of their homeworld in the First Cetagandan War. Or you might have learned something-"
"Did Tris make you an honorary girl, mutant?" jeered Pitt in return. "It wouldn't take much-"
Why am I standing here bandying words with this low-life crazy? Miles asked himself as Pitt raved on. No time. Let's finish it.
Miles stepped back and folded his arms. "Has it occurred to any of you yet that this man is clearly a Cetagandan agent?"
Even Pitt was shocked to silence.
"The evidence is plain," Miles went on forcefully, raising his voice so all bystanders could hear. "He is a ringleader in your disruption. By example and guile he has corrupted the honest soldiers around him, set them one against another. You were Marilac's best. The Cetagandans could not count on your fall. So they planted a seed of evil among you. Just to make sure. And it worked-wonderfully well. You never suspected-"
Oliver grabbed Miles's ear and muttered, "Brother Miles-I know this guy. He's no Cetagandan agent. He's just one of a whole lot of-"
"Oliver," Miles hissed back through clenched teeth, "shut up." And continued in his clearest parade-ground bellow, "Of course he's a Cetagandan spy. A mole. And all this time you thought this was something you were doing to yourselves."
And where the devil does not exist, Miles thought to himself, it may become expedient to invent him. His stomach churned, but he kept his face set in righteous rage. He glanced at the faces around him. Not a few were as white as his must be, though for a different reason. A low mutter rose among them, partly bewildered, partly ominous.
"Pull off his shirt," Miles ordered, "and lay him down on his face. Suegar, give me your cup."
Suegar's plastic cup had a jagged point along its broken edge. Miles sat on Pitt's buttocks, and using the point as a stylus scratched the words
CETA SPY
across Pitt's back in large print. He dug deep and ruthlessly, and the blood welled. Pitt screamed and swore and bucked.
Miles scrambled to his feet, shaking and breathless from more than just the physical exertion.
"Now," he ordered, "give him his rat bar and escort him to the exit."
Tris's teeth opened in objection, clicked back down. Her eyes burned into Pitt's back as he was hustled off. Her gaze turned rather more doubtfully to Miles, as she stood on one side of him and Oliver on the other.
"Do you really think he was a Cetagandan?" she asked Miles lowly. "No way," scoffed Oliver. "What the hell's the charade all about, Brother Miles?"
"I don't doubt Tris's accusation of his other crimes," said Miles tightly. "You must know. But he couldn't be punished for them without dividing the camp, and so undermining Tris's authority. This way, Tris and the women have their revenge without half the men being set against them. The commandant's hands are clean, yet justice is done on a criminal, and a hard case who would doubtless be stockade bait outside is removed from under our feet. Furthermore, any like-minded souls are handed a warning they can't ignore. It works on every level."
Oliver's face had grown expressionless. After a silent moment he remarked, "You fight dirty, Brother Miles."
"I can't afford to lose." Miles shot him a black look from beneath his own lowered brows. "Can you?"
Oliver's lips tightened. "No."
Tris made no comment at all.
Miles personally oversaw the delivery of rat bars to all those prisoners too sick or weak or beaten to have attempted the chow line.
Colonel Tremont lay too still upon his mat, curled up, staring blankly. Oliver knelt and closed the drying, fixed eyes. The colonel might have died anytime in the last few hours. 
"I'm sorry," said Miles sincerely. "Sorry I came so late." 
"Well ..." said Oliver, "well..."
He stood, chewing on his lip, shook his head, and said no more. Miles and Suegar, Tris and Beatrice helped Oliver carry the body, mat, clothes, cup and all, to the rubbish pile. Oliver shoved the rat bar he had reserved under the dead man's arm. No one attempted to strip the corpse after they had turned away, although another one stiffening there had already been so robbed, lying naked and tumbled.
They stumbled across Pitt's body shortly thereafter. The cause of death was most probably strangulation, but the face was so battered that its empurpling was not a certain clue.
Tris, squatting beside it, looked up at Miles in slow re-estimation. "I think you may be right about power after all, little man."
"And revenge?"
"I thought I could never get my fill of it," she sighed, contemplating the thing beside her. "Yeah... that too."
"Thank you." Miles prodded the body with his toe. "Make no mistake, that is a loss for our side."
Miles made Suegar let somebody else drag it to the rubbish pile.
Miles held a council of war immediately after chow call. Tremont's pallbearers, whom Miles had begun to think of as his general staff, and the fourteen group leaders gathered around him at a spot near the borders of the women's group. Miles paced back and forth before them, gesturing energetically.
"I commend the group leaders for an excellent job, and Sergeant Oliver for choosing them. By bringing this off, we have bought not only the allegiance of the greater part of the camp, but time as well. Each chow call after this should run a little easier, a little smoother, each become a real-life practice drill for the next.
"And make no mistake, this is a military exercise. We're at war again. We've already suckered the Cetagandans into breaking their carefully calculated routine and making a counter-move. We acted. They reacted. Strange as it may all seem to you, we had the offensive advantage.
"Now we start planning our next strategies. I want your thinking on what the next Cetagandan challenge will be." Actually, I want you thinking, period, "So much for the sermon-Commandant Tris, take over." Miles forced himself to sit down cross-legged, yielding the floor to his chosen one whether she wanted it or not. He reminded himself that Tris had been a field officer, not a staff officer; she needed the practice more than he did.
"Of course, they can send in short piles again, like they did before," she began after clearing her throat. "It's been suggested that's how this mess got started in the first place." Her glance crossed Miles's, who nodded encouragingly. "This means we're going to have to start keeping head counts, and work out a strict rotation schedule in advance of people to divide their rations with the short-changed. Each group leader must choose a quartermaster and a couple of accountants to double-check his count."
"An equally disruptive move the Cetagandans may try," Miles couldn't help putting in, "is to send in an overstock, giving us the interesting problem of how to equitably divide the extras. I'd provide for that, too, if I were you." He smiled blandly up at Tris.
She raised an eyebrow at him, and continued. "They may also try dividing the chow pile, complicating our problem of capturing it so as to strictly control its re-distribution. Are there any other really dirty tricks any of you can anticipate?" She couldn't help glancing at Miles.
One of the group leaders raised his hand hesitantly. "Ma'am- they're listening to all this. Aren't we doing their thinking for them?"
Miles rose to answer that one, loud and clear. "Of course they're listening. We've doubtless got their quivering attention." He made a rude gesture domewards. "Let them. Every move they make is a message from outside, a shadow marking their shape, information about them. We'll take it."
"Suppose," said another group leader even more hesitantly, "they cut off our air again? Permanently?"
"Then," said Miles smoothly, "they lose their hard-won position one-up on the IJC, which they've gone to enormous trouble to gain. It's a propaganda coup they've been making much of lately, particularly since our side, in the stress of the way things are going back home, hasn't been able to maintain its own troops in style, let alone any captured Cetagandans. The Cetagandans, whose published view is that they're sharing their Imperial government with us out of cultural generosity, are claiming this as a demonstration of their superior civilization and good manners-"
Some jeers and catcalls marked the prisoners' view of this assertion, and Miles smiled and went on. "The death rate reported for this camp is so extraordinary, it's caught the IJC's attention. The Cetagandans have managed to account for it so far, through three separate IJC inspections, but 100% would be a bit extreme even for them to justify." A shiver of agreement, compressed rage, ran through his rapt listeners.
Miles sat again. Oliver leaned over to him to whisper, "How the hell did you come by all that information?"
Miles smirked. "Did it sound convincing? Good."
Oliver sat back, looking unnerved. "You don't have any inhibitions at all, do you?"
"Not in combat."
Tris and her group leaders spent the next two hours laying out chow call scenario flow charts, and their tactical responses at each branching. They broke up to let the group leaders pass it on to their chosen subordinates, and Oliver to his crew of supplementary Enforcers.
Tris paused before Miles, who had succumbed to gravity sometime during the second hour and now lay in the dirt staring somewhat blankly at the dome, blinking in an effort to keep his blurring eyes open. He had not slept in the day and a half before entering this place. He was not sure how much time had passed since then.
"I thought of one more scenario," Tris remarked. "What do we do if they do nothing at all? Do nothing, change nothing."
Miles smiled sleepily. "It seems most probable. That attempted double-cross on the last chow call was a slip on their part, I think."
"But in the absence of an enemy, how long can we go on pretending we're an army?" she persisted. "You scraped us up off the bottom for this. When it runs down at last, what then?"
Miles curled up on his side, drowning in weird and shapeless thoughts, and enticed by the hint of an erotic dream about a tall aggressive redhead. His yawn cracked his face. "Then we pray for a miracle. Remind me to discuss miracles with you... later...."
He half-woke once when somebody shoved a sleeping mat under him. He gave Beatrice a sleepy bedroom smile.
"Crazy mutant," she snarled at him, and rolled him roughly onto the pad. "Don't you go thinking this was my idea."
"Why Suegar," Miles muttered, "I think she likes me." He cuddled back into the entwining limbs of the dream-Beatrice in fleeting peace.
***
To Miles's secret dismay, his analysis proved right. The Cetagandans returned to their original rat bar routine, unresponsive again to their prisoners' internal permutations. Miles was not sure he liked that. True, it gave him ample opportunity to fine-tune his distribution scheme. But some harassment from the dome would have directed the prisoners' attention outward, given them a foe again, above all broken the paralyzing boredom of their lives. In the long run, Tris must prove right.
"I hate an enemy who doesn't make mistakes," Miles muttered irritably, and flung his efforts into events he could control.
He found a phlegmatic prisoner with a steady heartbeat to lie in the dirt and count his own pulse, and began timing distribution, and then working on reducing timing.
"It's a spiritual exercise," he announced when he had his fourteen quartermasters start issuing the rat bars 200 at a time, with thirty-minute breaks between groups.
"It's a change of pace," he explained in an aside to Tris. "If we can't induce the Cetagandans to provide some variety, we'll just have to do it ourselves." He also finally got an accurate head count of the surviving prisoners. Miles was everywhere, exhorting, producing, pushing, restraining.
"If you really want it to go faster, make more bleeding piles," Oliver protested.
"Don't blaspheme," said Miles, and went to work inducing his groups to cart their rat bars away to distribution piles spaced evenly around the perimeter.
At the end of the nineteenth chow call since he had entered the camp, Miles judged his distribution system complete and theologically correct. Calling every two chow calls a "day," he had been there nine days.
"I'm all done," he realized with a groan, "and it's too early."
"Weeping because you have no more worlds to conquer?" inquired Tris with a sarcastic grin.
By the thirty-second chow call, the system was still running smoothly, but Miles was getting frayed.
"Welcome to the long haul," said Beatrice dryly. "You better start pacing yourself, Brother Miles. If what Tris says is true, we're going to be in here even longer because of you. I must remember to thank you for that properly sometime." She treated him to a threatening smirk, and Miles prudently remembered an errand on the opposite side of the camp.
She was right, Miles thought, depressed. Most prisoners here counted their captivity not in days and weeks, but months and years. He himself was likely to be gibbering nuts in a space of time that most of them would regard as a mere breath. He wondered glumly what form his madness would take, Manic, inspired by the glittering delusion that he was-say-the Conquerer of Komarr? Or depressive, like Tremont, curling up in himself until he was no one at all, a sort of human black hole?
Miracles. There had been leaders throughout history who had been wrong in their timing for armageddon, leading their shorn flocks up the mountain to await an apotheosis that never came. Their later lives were usually marked by obscurity and drinking problems. Nothing to drink in here. Miles wanted about six doubles, right now.
Now. Now. Now.
Miles took to walking the dome perimeter after each chow call, partly to make or at least pretend to inspection, partly to burn off a little of his uncomfortably accumulating nervous energy. It was getting harder and harder to sleep. There had been a period of quiet in the camp after the chow calls were successfully regulated, as if their ordering had been a crystal dropped in a supersaturated solution. But in the last few days the number of fistfights broken up by the Enforcers had risen. The Enforcers themselves were getting quicker to violence, acquiring a potentially unsavory swagger. Phases of the moon. Who could outrace the moon?
"Slow down, Miles," complained Suegar, ambling along beside him.
"Sorry." Miles restrained his stride and broke his self-absorption to look around. The glowing dome rose on his left hand, seeming to pulse to an unsettling hum just out of the range of his hearing. Quiet spread out on his right, groups of people mostly sitting. Not that much visible change since his first day in here. Maybe a little less tension, maybe a little more concerted care being taken of the injured or ill. Phases of the moon. He shook off his unease and smiled cheerfully at Suegar.
"You getting any more positive responses to your sermons these days?" Miles asked.
"Well-nobody tries to beat me up anymore," said Suegar. "But then, I haven't been preaching so often, being busy with the chow calls and all. And then, there are the Enforcers now. It's hard to say."
"You going to keep trying?"
"Oh, yes." Suegar paused. "I've seen worse places than this, y'know. I was at a mining camp once, when I was scarcely more than a kid. A fire gem strike. For a change, instead of one big company or the government muscling in, it had gotten divided up into hundreds and hundreds of little claims, usually about two meters square. Guys dug out there by hand, with trowels and whisk brooms-big fire gems are delicate, y'know, they'll shatter at a careless blow-they dug under the broiling sun, day after day. A lot of these guys had less clothes than us now. A lot of 'em didn't eat as good, or as regular. Working their butts off. More accidents, more disease than here. There were fights, too, in plenty.
"But they lived for the future. Performed the most incredible feats of physical endurance for hope, all voluntary. They were obsessed. They were-well, you remind me a lot of them. They wouldn't quit for nothing. They turned a mountain into a chasm in a year, with hand trowels. It was nuts. I loved it.
"This place," Suegar glanced around, "just makes me scared shitless." His right hand touched his rag rope bracelet. "It'll suck up your future, swallow you down-it's like death is just a formality, after that. Zombie town, suicide city. The day I stop trying, this place'll eat me."
"Mm," agreed Miles. They were nearing what Miles thought of as the farthest point of their circuit, across the camp from the women's group at whose now-permeable borders Miles and Suegar kept their sleeping mats.
A couple of men walking the perimeter from the opposite direction coalesced with another grey-pajama'd pair. As if casually and spontaneously, three more arose from their mats on Miles's right. He could not be sure without turning his head, but Miles thought he caught more peripheral motion closing in behind him.
The approaching four stopped a few meters in front of them. Miles and Suegar hesitated. Grey-clad men, all variously larger than Miles -who wasn't?-frowning, full of a fierce tension that arced to Miles and scree'd down his nerves. Miles recognized only one of them, an ex-surly brother he'd seen in Pitt's company. Miles didn't bother taking his eyes off Pitt's lieutenant to look around for Enforcers. For one thing, he was pretty sure one of the men in the company facing them was an Enforcer.
And the worst of it was, getting cornered-if you could call it that in here-was his own fault, for letting his movements fall into a predictable daily routine. A stupid, basic, beginner's mistake, that inexcusable.
Pitt's lieutenant stepped forward, chewing on his lip, staring at Miles with hollowed eyes. He's psyching himself up, Miles realized. If all he wanted was to beat me to a pulp, he could do it in his sleep. The man slid a carefully-braided rag rope through his fingers. A strangling cord... no, it wasn't going to be another beating. This time, it was going to be premeditated murder.
"You," said Pitt's lieutenant hoarsely. "I couldn't figure you out at first. You're not one of us. You could never have been one of us. Mutant... You gave me the clue yourself. Pitt wasn't a Cetagandan spy. You are!" And lunged forward.
Miles dodged, overwhelmed by onslaught and insight. Damn, he'd known there must be a good reason scragging Pitt that way had felt so much like a mistake despite its efficiency. The false accusation was two-edged, as dangerous to its wielder as its victim-Pitt's lieutenant might even believe his accusation true-Miles had started a witchhunt. Poetic justice, that he be its first victim, but where would it end? No wonder their captors hadn't interfered lately. Their silent Cetagandan watchers must be falling off their station chairs laughing right now-mistake piled on mistake, culminating here by dying stupidly like vermin at the hands of vermin in this verminous hole....
Hands grabbed him; he contorted spasmodically, kicking out, but only half-broke their hold. Beside him Suegar whirled, kicked, struck, shouted with demonic energy. He had reach, but lacked mass. Miles lacked both reach and mass. Still Suegar managed to break an assailant's hold on Miles for a moment.
Suegar's left arm, lashing out for a backhand blow, was caught and locked. Miles winced in sympathetic anticipation of the familiar muffled crack of breaking bones, but instead the man stripped off the rag rope bracelet from Suegar's wrist.
"Hey, Suegar!" the man taunted, dancing backward. "Look what I got!"
Suegar's head swivelled, his attention wrenched from his determined defense of Miles. The man peeled the wrinkled, tattered piece of paper from its cloth covering and waved it in the air. Suegar cried out in dismay and started to plunge toward him, but found himself blocked by two other bodies. The man tore the paper in half twice, then paused, as if momentarily puzzled how to dispose of it-then, with a sudden grin, stuffed the pieces in his mouth and started chewing. Suegar screamed.
"Dammit," cried Miles furiously, "it was me you wanted! You didn't have to do that-" He jammed his fist with all his strength into the smirking face of the nearest attacker, whose attention had been temporarily distracted by Suegar's show.
He could feel his bones shatter all the way back through his wrist. He was so damn tired of the bones, tired of being hurt again and again....
Suegar was screaming and sobbing and trying to gain on the paper chewer, who stood and chewed on through his grin. Suegar had lost all science in his attack, flailing like a windmill. Miles saw him go down, then had no attention left for anything but the anaconda coil of the strangling cord, settling over his own neck. He managed to get one hand between the cord and his throat, but it was the broken one. Cables of pain shuddered up his arm, seeming to burrow under his skin all the way to his shoulder. The pressure in his head mounted to bursting, closing down his vision. Dark purple and yellow moire-patterned clouds boiled up in his eyes like thunder heads. A flashing brush of red hair sizzled past his tunneling vision....
He was on the ground then, with blood, wonderful blood, thudding back into his oxygen-starved brain. It hurt-good, hot and pulsing. He lay for a moment not caring about anything else. It would be so good not to have to get up again....
The damn dome, cold and white and featureless, mocked his returning vision. Miles jerked onto his knees, staring around wildly. Beatrice, some Enforcers, and some of Oliver's commando buddies were chasing Miles's would-be assassins across the camp. Miles had probably only passed out for a few seconds. Suegar lay on the ground a couple of meters off.
Miles crawled over to Suegar. The thin man lay curled up around his stomach, his face pale green and clammy, involuntary shivers coursing through his body. Not good. Shocky. Keep patient warm and administer synergine. No synergine. Miles peeled clumsily out of his tunic and laid it over Suegar. "Suegar? You all right? Beatrice chased the barbarians off..."
Suegar looked up and smiled briefly, but the smile was reabsorbed almost immediately by distancing pain.
Beatrice came back eventually, mussed and breathing heavily. "You loonies," she greeted them dispassionately. "You don't need a bodyguard, you need a bloody keeper." She flopped onto her knees beside Miles to stare at Suegar. Her lips thinned to a white slit. She glanced at Miles, her eyes darkening, the creases between her brows deepening.
I've changed my mind, Miles thought. Don't start caring for me, Beatrice, don't start caring for anybody. You'll only get hurt. Over and over and over...
"You better come back to my group," said Beatrice.
"I don't think Suegar can walk."
Beatrice rounded up some muscle, and the thin man was rolled onto a sleeping mat and carried, too much like Colonel Tremont's corpse for Miles's taste, back to their now-usual sleeping place.
"Find a doctor for him," Miles demanded.
Beatrice came back, strong-arming an angry, older woman.
"He's probably got a busted belly," snarled the doctor. "If I had a diagnostic viewer, I could tell you just what was busted. You got a diagnostic viewer? He needs synergine and plasma. You got any? I could cut him, and glue him back together, and speed his healing with electra-stim, if I had an operating theatre. Put him back on his feet in three days, no sweat. You got an operating theatre? I thought not.
"Stop looking at me like that. I used to think I was a healer. It took this place to teach me I was nothing but an interface between the technology, and the patient. Now the technology is gone, and I'm just nothing."
"But what can we do?" asked Miles.
"Cover him up. In a few days he'll either get better or die, depending on what got busted. That's all." She paused, standing with folded arms and regarding Suegar with rancor, as if his injury was a personal affront. And so it was, for her: another load of grief and failure, grinding her hard-won healer's pride into the dirt. "I think he's going to die," she added.
"I think so too," said Miles.
"Then what did you want me for?" She stomped off.
Later she came back with a sleeping mat and a couple of extra rags, and helped put them around and over Suegar for added insulation, then stomped off again.
Tris reported to Miles. "We got those guys who tried to kill you rounded up. What do you want done with 'em?"
"Let them go," said Miles wearily. "They're not the enemy."
"The hell they're not!"
"They're not my enemies, anyway. It was just a case of mistaken identity. I'm just a hapless traveller, passing through."
"Wake up, little man. I don't happen to share Oliver's belief in your 'miracle.' You're not passing through here. This is the last stop."
Miles sighed. "I'm beginning to think you're right." He glanced at Suegar, breathing shallowly and too fast, beside whom he crouched in watch. "You're almost certainly right, by this time. Nevertheless- let them go."
"Why?" she wailed, outraged.
"Because I said to. Because I asked you to. Would you have me beg for them?"
"Aargh! No. All right!" She wheeled away, running he hands through her clipped hair and muttering under her breath.
A timeless time passed. Suegar lay on his side not speaking, though his eyes flicked open now and then to stare unseeing. Miles moistened his lips with water periodically. A chow call came and went without incident or Miles's participation; Beatrice passed by and dropped two rat bars beside them, stared at them with a carefully-hardened gaze of general disapproval, and stalked off.
Miles cradled his injured hand and sat cross-legged, mentally reviewing the catalogue of errors that had brought him to this pass. He contemplated his seeming genius for getting his friends killed. He had a sick premonition that Suegar's death was going to be almost as bad as Sergeant Bothari's, six years ago, and he had known Suegar only weeks, not years. Repeated pain, as he had reason to know, made one more afraid of injury, not less, a growing, gut-wrenching dread. Not again, never again...
He lay back and stared at the dome, the white, unblinking eye of a dead god. And had more friends than he knew already been killed by this megalomanic escapade? It would be just like the Cetagandans, to leave him in here all unknowing, and let the growing doubt and fear gradually drive him crazy.
Swiftly drive him crazy-the god's eye blinked.
Miles blinked in sympathetic nervous recoil, opened his eyes wide, stared at the dome as if his eyes could bore right through it. Had it blinked? Had the flicker been hallucinatory? Was he losing it?
It flickered again. Miles shot to his feet, inhaling, inhaling, inhaling.
The dome blinked out. For a brief instant, planetary night swept in, fog and drizzle and the kiss of a cold wet wind. This planet's unfiltered air smelled like rotten eggs. The unaccustomed dark was blinding.
"CHOW CALL!" Miles screamed at the top of his lungs.
Then limbo transmuted to chaos in the brilliant flash of a smart bomb going off beyond a cluster of buildings. Red light glared off the underside of an enormous billowing cloud of debris, blasting upward. A racketing string of similar hits encircled the camp, peeled back the night, deafened the unprotected. Miles, still screaming, could not hear his own voice. A returning fire from the ground clawed the clouds with lines of colored light.
Tris, her eyes stunned, rocketed past him. Miles grabbed her by the arm with his good hand and dug in his heels to brake her, yanking her down so he could scream in her ear.
"This is it! Get the fourteen group leaders organized, make 'em get their first blocks of 200 lined up and waiting all around the perimeter. Find Oliver, we've got to get the Enforcers moving to get the rest waiting their turn under control. If this goes exactly as we drilled it, we'll all get off." I hope. "But if they mob the shuttles like they used to mob the rat bar pile, none of us will. You copy?"
"I never believed-I didn't think-shuttles?"
"You don't have to think. We've drilled this fifty times. Just follow the chow drill. The drill!"
"You sneaky little sonofabitch!" The acknowledging wave of her arm, as she dashed off, was very like a salute.
A string of flares erupted in the sky above the camp, as if a white strobe of lightning went on and on, casting a ghastly illumination on the scene below. The camp seethed like a termite mound kicked over. Men and women were running every which way in shouting confusion. Not exactly the orderly vision Miles had had in mind- why, for example, had his people chosen a night drop and not a daytime one?-he would grill his staff later on that point, after he got done kissing their feet-
"Beatrice!" Miles waved her down. "Start passing the word! We're doing the chow call drill. But instead of a rat bar, each person gets a shuttle seat. Make 'em understand that-don't let anybody go haring off into the night or they'll miss their flight. Then come back here and stay by Suegar. I don't want him getting lost or trampled on. Guard, you copy?"
"I'm not a damn dog. What shuttles?"
The sound Miles's ears had been straining for penetrated the din at last, a high-pitched, multi-faceted whine that grew louder and louder. They loomed down out of the boiling scarlet-tinged clouds like monstrous beetles, carapaced and winged, feet extending even as they watched. Fully armored combat drop shuttles, two, three, six... seven, eight... Miles's lips moved as he counted. Thirteen, fourteen, by God. They had managed to get #B-7 out of the shop in time.
Miles pointed. "My shuttles."
Beatrice stood with her mouth open, staring upward. "My God. They're beautiful." He could almost see her mind start to ratchet forward. "But they're not ours. Not Cetagandan either. Who the hell... ?"
Miles bowed. "This is a paid political rescue."
"Mercenaries?"
"We're not something wriggling with too many legs that you found in your sleeping bag. The proper tone of voice is Mercenaries!-with a glad cry."
"But-but-but-"
"Go, dammit. Argue later."
She flung up her hands and ran.
Miles himself started tackling every person within reach, passing on the order of the day. He captured one of Oliver's tall commando buddies and demanded a boost on his shoulders. A quick look around showed fourteen coagulating knots of people in the mob scattered around the perimeter in nearly the right positions. The shuttles hovered, engines howling, then thumped to the ground one by one all around the camp.
"It'll have to do," Miles muttered to himself. He slapped the commando's shoulder. "Down."
He forced himself to walk to the nearest shuttle, a run on the shuttles being just the scenario he had poured out blood and bone and pride these last-three, four?-weeks to avoid.
A quartet of fully-armed and half-armored troops were the first down the shuttle ramp, taking up guard positions. Good. They even had their weapons pointed in the right direction, toward the prisoners they were here to rescue. A larger patrol, fully armored, followed to gallop off double time, leapfrogging their own covering-fire range into the dark toward the Cetagandan installations surrounding the dome circle. Hard to judge which direction held the most danger- from the continuing fireworks, his fighter shuttles were providing plenty of external distraction for the Cetagandans.
At last came the man Miles most wanted to see, the shuttle's comm officer.
"Lieutenant, uh," he connected face and name, "Murka! Over here!"
Murka spotted him. He fumbled excitedly with his equipment and called into his audio pick-up, "Commodore Tung! He's here, I got him!"
Miles peeled the comm set ruthlessly from the lieutenant's head, who obligingly ducked down to permit the theft, and jammed it on his own head left-handed in time to hear Tung's voice reply tinnily, "Well, for God's sake don't lose him again, Murka. Sit on him if you have to."
"I want my staff," called Miles into the pick-up. "Have you retrieved Elli and Elena yet? How much time have we got for this?"
"Yes, sir, no, and about two hours-if we're lucky," Tung's voice snapped back. "Good to have you back aboard, Admiral Naismith."
"You're telling me... Get Elena and Elli. Priority One."
"Working. Tung out."
Miles turned to find that the rat bar group leader in this section had actually succeeded in marshalling his first group of 200, and was engaged in making the second 200 sit back down in a block to wait their turns. Excellent. The prisoners were being channeled up the ramp one at a time through a strange gauntlet. A mercenary slit the back of each grey tunic with a swift slice from a vibra-knife. A second mercenary slapped each prisoner across the back with a medical stunner. A third made a pass with a surgical hand-tractor, roughly ripping out the Cetagandan serial numbers encoded beneath the skin. He didn't bother to waste time on bandaging after. "Go to the front and sit five across, go to the front and sit five across, go to the front..." he chanted, droning in time to his hypnotically moving device.
Miles's sometime-adjutant Captain Thorne appeared, hurrying out of the glare and black shadows, flanked by one of the fleet's ship's surgeons and-praise be-a soldier carrying some of Miles's clothes, and boots. Miles dove for the boots, but was captured instead by the surgeon.
She ran a med stunner between his bare uneven shoulderblades, and zipped a hand-tractor across in its path.
"Ow!" Miles yelped. "Couldn't you wait one bleeding second for the stun to cut in?" The pain faded rapidly to numbness as Miles's left hand patted for the damage. "What's this all about?"
"Sorry, sir," said the surgeon insincerely. "Stop that, your fingers are dirty." She applied a plastic bandage. Rank hath its privileges. "Captain Bothari-Jesek and Commander Quinn learned something from their fellow Cetagandan prison monitors that we hadn't known before you went in. These encodes are permeated with drug beads, whose lipid membranes are kept aligned by a low-power magnetic field the Cetagandans were generating in the dome. An hour out of the dome, and the membranes start to break down, releasing a poison. About four hours later the subject dies-very unpleasantly. A little insurance against escapes, I guess."
Miles shuddered, and said faintly, "I see." He cleared his throat, and added more loudly, "Captain Thorne, mark a commendation- with highest honors-to Commander Elli Quinn and Captain Elena Bothari-Jesek. The, ah, our employer's intelligence service didn't even have that one. In fact, our employer's intelligence data lacked on a truly vast number of points. I shall have to speak to them- sharply-when I present the bill for this expanded operation. Before you put that away, doctor, numb my hand, please." Miles stuck out his right hand for the surgeon's inspection.
"Did it again, did you?" muttered the surgeon. "I'd think you'd learn ..." A pass with the medical stunner, and Miles's swollen hand disappeared from his senses entirely, nothing left from the wrist down. Only his eyes assured him it was still attached to his arm.
"Yes, but will they pay for the expanded operation?" asked Captain Thorne anxiously. "This started out as a one-shot lightning strike to hook out one guy, just the sort of thing little outfits like us specialize in-now it's straining the whole Dendarii fleet. These damn prisoners outnumber us two to one. This wasn't in the original contract. What if our perennial mystery employer decides to stiff us?"
"They won't," said Miles. "My word. But-there's no doubt I'll have to deliver the bill in person."
"God help them, then," muttered the surgeon, and took herself off to continue pulling encodes from the waiting prisoners.
Commodore Ky Tung, a squat, middle-aged Eurasian in half-armor and a command channel headset, turned up at Miles's elbow as the first shuttles loaded with prisoners clapped their locks shut and screamed up into the black fog. They took off in first-come first-served positions, no waiting. Knowing Tung's passion for tight formations, Miles judged time must be their most dangerous limiting factor.
"What are we loading these guys onto, upstairs?" Miles asked Tung.
"We gutted a couple of used freighters. We can cram about 5,000 in the holds of each. The ride out is going to be fast and nasty. They'll all have to lie down and breathe as little as possible."
"What are the Cetagandans scrambling to catch us?"
"Right now, barely more than some police shuttles. Most of their local space military contingent just happens to be on the other side of their sun just now, which is why we just happened to pick this moment to drop by ... we had to wait for their practice maneuvers again, in case you were starting to wonder what was keeping us. In other words, the same scenario as our original plan to pull Colonel Tremont."
"Except expanded by a factor of 10,000. And we've got to get in- what, four lifts? instead of one," said Miles.
"Yeah, but get this," grinned Tung. "They sited these prison camps on this miserable outpost planet so's they wouldn't have to expend troops and equipment guarding them-counted on distance from Marilac, and the downgearing of the war there, to discourage rescue attempts. But in the period since you went in, half of their original guard complement has been pulled to other hot spots. Half!"
"They were relying on the dome." Miles eyed him. "And for the bad news?" he murmured.
Tung's smile soured. "This round, our total time window is only two hours."
"Ouch. Half their local space fleet is still too many. And they'll be back in two hours?"
"One hour, forty minutes, now." A sidewise flick of Tung's eyes betrayed the location of his ops clock, holovid-projected by his command headset into the air at a corner of his vision.
Miles did a calculation in his head, and lowered his voice. "Are we going to be able to lift the last load?"
"Depends on how fast we can lift the first three," said Tung. His ordinarily stoic face was more unreadable than ever, betraying neither hope nor fear.
Which depends in turn on how effectively I managed to drill them all... What was done was done; what was coming was not yet. Miles wrenched his attention to the immediate now.
"Have you found Elli and Elena yet?"
"I have three patrols out searching."
He hadn't found them yet. Miles's guts tightened. "I wouldn't have even attempted to expand this operation in midstream if I hadn't known they were monitoring me, and could translate all those oblique hints back into orders."
"Did they get 'em all right?" asked Tung. "We argued over some of their interpretations of your double-talk on the vids."
Miles glanced around. "They got 'em right... you got vids of all this?" A startled wave of Miles's hand took in the circle of the camp.
"Of you, anyway. Right off the Cetagandan monitors. They burst-transmitted them all daily. Very-er-entertaining, sir," Tung added blandly.
Some people would find entertainment in watching someone swallow slugs, Miles reflected. "Very dangerous... when was your last communication with them?"
"Yesterday." Tung's hand clamped on Miles's arm, restraining an involuntary leap. "You can't do better than my three patrols, sir, and I haven't any to spare to go looking for you."
"Yah, yah." Miles slapped his right fist into his left palm in frustration before remembering that was a bad idea. His two co-agents, his vital link between the dome and the Dendarii, missing. The Cetagandans shot spies with depressing consistency. After, usually, a series of interrogations that rendered death a welcome release.... He tried to reassure himself with logic. If they'd blown their covers as Cetagandan monitor techs, and been interrogated, Tung would have run into a meat grinder here. He hadn't, ergo, they hadn't. Of course, they might have been killed by friendly fire, just now.... Friends. He had too many friends to stay sane in this crazy business.
"You," Miles retrieved his clothes from the still-waiting soldier, "go over there," he pointed, "and find a redhaired lady named Beatrice and an injured man named Suegar. Bring them to me. Carry him carefully, he has internal injuries."
The soldier saluted and marched off. Ah, the pleasure again of being able to give a command without having to follow it up with a supporting theological argument. Miles sighed. Exhaustion waited to swallow him, lurking at the edge of his adrenalin-spurred bubble of hyperconsciousness. All the factors-shuttles, timing, the approaching enemy, distance to the get-away jump point, formed and reformed in all their possible permutations in his mind. Small variations in timing in particular multiplied into major troubles. But he'd known it would be like this back when he'd started. A miracle they'd got this far. No-he glanced at Tung, at Thorne-not a miracle, but the extraordinary initiative and devotion of his people. Well done, oh, well done....
Thorne helped him as he fumbled to dress himself one-handed. "Where the hell is my command headset?" Miles asked.
"We were told you were injured, sir, and in a state of exhaustion. You were scheduled for immediate evacuation."
"Damn presumptuous of somebody..." Miles bit back ire. No place in this schedule for running errands topside. Besides, if he had his headset, he'd be tempted to start giving orders, and he wasn't yet sufficiently briefed on the internal complexities of the operation from the Dendarii fleet's point of view. Miles swallowed his observer status without further comment. It did free him for rear guard.
Miles's batman reappeared, with Beatrice and four drafted prisoners, carrying Suegar on his mat to lay at Miles's feet.
"Get my surgeon," Miles said. His soldier obediently trotted off and found her. She knelt beside the semi-conscious Suegar and pulled the encode from his back. A knot of tension unwound in Miles's neck at the reassuring hiss of a hypospray of synergine.
"How bad?" Miles demanded.
"Not good," the surgeon admitted, checking her diagnostic viewer. "Burst spleen, oozing hemorrhage in the stomach-this one had better go direct to surgery on the command ship. Medtech-" she motioned to a Dendarii waiting with the guards for the return of the shuttle, and gave triage instructions. The medtech swathed Suegar in a thin foil heat wrap.
"I'll make sure he gets there," promised Miles. He shivered, envying the heat wrap a little as the drizzly acid fog beaded in his hair and coiled into his bones.
Tung's expression and attention were abruptly absorbed by a message from his comm set. Miles, who had yielded Lieutenant Murka's headset back to him so that he might continue his duties, shifted from foot to foot in agony for news. Elena, Elli, if I've killed you...
Tung spoke into his pick-up. "Good. Well done. Report to the A7 drop site." A jerk of his chin switched channels. "Sim, Nout, fall back with your patrols to your shuttle drop site perimeters. They've been found."
Miles found himself bent over with his hand supported on gelid knees, waiting for his head to clear, his heart lurching in huge slow gulps. "Elli and Elena? Are they all right?"
"They didn't call for a medtech... you sure you don't need one yourself? You're green."
"I'm all right." Miles's heart steadied, and he straightened up, to meet Beatrice's questing eyes. "Beatrice, would you please go get Tris and Oliver for me? I need to talk to them before the next shuttle relay goes up."
She shook her head helplessly and wheeled away. She did not salute. On the other hand, she didn't argue, either. Miles was insensibly cheered.
The booming racket around the dome circle had died down to the occasional whine of small-arms fire, human cry, or blurred amplified voice. Fires burned in the distance, red-orange glows in the muffling fog. Not a surgically clean operation... the Cetagandans were going to be extremely pissed when they'd counted their casualties, Miles judged. Time to be gone, and long gone. He tried to keep the poisoned encodes in mind, as anodyne to the vision of Cetagandan clerks and techs crushed in the rubble of their burning buildings, but the two nightmares seemed to amplify instead of cancelling each other out.
Here came Tris and Oliver, both looking a little wild-eyed. Beatrice took up station at Tris's right shoulder.
"Congratulations," Miles began, before they could speak. He had a lot of ground to cover and not much time left. "You have achieved an army." A wave of his arm swept the orderly array of prisoners-ex-prisoners-spread across the camp in their shuttle groups. They waited quietly, most seated on the ground. Or was it the Cetagandans who had ingrained such patience in them? Whatever.
"Temporarily," said Tris. "This is the lull, I believe. If things hot up, if you lose one or more shuttles, if somebody panics and it spreads-"
"You can tell anybody who's inclined to panic they can ride up with me if it'll make them feel better. Ah-better also mention that I'm going up in the last load," said Miles.
Tung, dividing his attention between this confab and his headset, grimaced in exasperation at this news.
"That'll settle 'em," grinned Oliver.
"Give them something to think about, anyway," conceded Tris.
"Now I'm going to give you something to think about. The new Marilac resistance. You're it," said Miles. "My employer originally engaged me to rescue Colonel Tremont, that he might raise a new army and carry on the fight. When I found him ... as he was, dying, I had to decide whether to follow the letter of my contract, and deliver a catatonic or a corpse, or the spirit-and deliver an army. I chose this, and I chose you two. You must carry on Colonel Tremont's work."
"I was only a field lieutenant," began Tris in horror, in chorus with Oliver's, "I'm a grunt, not a staff officer. Colonel Tremont was a genius-"
"You are his heirs now. I say so. Look around you. Do I make mistakes in choosing my subordinates?"
After a moment's silence Tris muttered, "Apparently not."
"Build yourselves a staff. Find your tactics geniuses, your technical wizards, and put 'em to work for you. But the drive, and the decisions, and the direction, must be yours, forged in this pit. It is you two who will remember this place, and so remember what it is you are doing, and why, always."
Oliver spoke quietly. "And when do we muster out of this army, Brother Miles? My time was up during the siege of Fallow Core. If I'd been anywhere else, I could have gone home."
"Until the Cetagandan army of occupation rolled down your street."
"Even then. The odds aren't good."
"The odds were worse for Barrayar, in its day, and they ran the Cetagandans right off. It took twenty years, and more blood than either of you have seen in your lives combined, but they did it," asserted Miles.
Oliver seemed more struck by this historical precedent than Tris, who said skeptically, "Barrayar had those crazy Vor warriors. Nuts who rushed into battle, who liked to die. Marilac just doesn't have that sort of cultural tradition. We're civilized-or we were, once...."
"Let me tell you about the Barrayaran Vor," cut in Miles. "The loonies who sought a glorious death in battle found it very early on. This rapidly cleared the chain of command of the accumulated fools. The survivors were those who learned to fight dirty, and live, and fight another day, and win, and win, and win, and for whom nothing, not comfort or security, not family or friends or their immortal souls, was more important than winning. Dead men are losers by definition. Survival and victory. They weren't supermen, or immune to pain. They sweated in confusion and darkness. And with not one-half the physical resources Marilac possessed even now, they won. When you're Vor," Miles ran down a little, "there is no mustering out."
After a silence Tris said, "Even a volunteer patriotic army must eat. And we won't beat the Cetagandans by firing spitballs at them."
"There will be financial and military aid forthcoming through a covert channel other than myself. If there is a Resistance command to deliver it to."
Tris measured Oliver by eye. The fire in her burned closer to the surface than Miles had ever seen it, coursing down those corded muscles. The whine of the first returning shuttles pierced the fog. She spoke quite softly. "And here I thought I was the atheist, Sergeant, and you were the believer. Are you coming with me-or mustering out?"
Oliver's shoulders bowed. With the weight of history, Miles realized, not defeat, for the heat in his eyes matched Tris's. "Coming," he grunted.
Miles caught Tung's eyes. "How we doing?"
Tung shook his head, held up fingers. "About six minutes slow, unloading upstairs."
"Right." Miles turned back to Tris and Oliver. "I want you both to go up on this wave, in separate shuttles, one to each troopship. When you get there, start expediting the off-loading of your people. Lieutenant Murka will give you your shuttle assignment-" he motioned Murka over, and packed them off.
Beatrice lingered. "I'm inclined to panic," she informed Miles in a distant tone. Her bare toe smudged whorls in the dampening dirt.
"I don't need a bodyguard anymore," Miles said. He grinned. "A keeper, maybe ..."
A smile lighted her eyes that did not yet reach her mouth. Later, Miles promised himself. Later, he would make that mouth laugh.
The second wave of shuttles began to lift, even as the remnants of the returning first wave were still landing. Miles prayed everyone's sensors were operating properly, passing each other in this fog. Their timing could only get more ragged from now on. The fog itself was coagulating into a cold rain, silver needles pelting down.
The focus of the operation was narrowing rapidly now, more of machines and numbers and timing, less of loyalties and souls and fearsome obligations. An emotionally pathological mind, devoid of love and fear, might even call it fun, Miles thought. He began jotting scores left-handed in the dirt, numbers up, down, in transit, remaining, but the dirt was turning to gluey black mud and did not retain the impressions.
"Shit," Tung hissed suddenly through clenched teeth. The air before his face blurred in a flurry of vid-projected incoming information, his eyes flicking through it with practiced rapidity. His right hand bunched and twitched, as if tempted to wrench off his headset and stamp it into the mud in frustration and disgust. "That tears it. We just lost two shuttles out of the second wave."
Which two? Miles's mind screamed. Oliver, Tris ... He forced his first question to be, "How?" I swear, if they crashed into each other, I'm going to go find a wall and beat my head on it till I go numb....
"Cetagandan fighter broke through our cordon. He was going for the troop freighters, but we nailed him in time. Almost in time."
"You got identifications on which two shuttles? And were they loaded or returning?"
Tung's lips moved in subvocalization. "A-4, fully loaded. B-7, returning empty. Loss total, no survivors. Fighter shuttle 5 from the Triumph is disabled by enemy fire; pilot recovery now in progress."
He hadn't lost his commanders. His hand-picked and carefully nurtured successors to Colonel Tremont were safe. He opened his eyes, squeezed shut in pain, to find Beatrice, to whom the shuttle IDs meant nothing, waiting anxiously for interpretation.
"Two hundred dead?" she whispered.
"Two hundred six," Miles corrected. The faces, names, voices of the six familiar Dendarii fluttered through his memory. The 200 ciphers must have had faces too. He blocked them out, as too crushing an overload.
"These things happen," Beatrice muttered numbly.
"You all right?"
"Of course I'm all right. These things happen. Inevitable. I am not a weepy wimp who folds under fire." She blinked rapidly, lifting her chin. "Give me... something to do. Anything."
Quickly, Miles added for her. Right. He pointed across the camp. "Got to Pel and Liant. Divide their remaining shuttle groups into blocks of thirty-three, and add them to each of the remaining third-wave shuttle groups. We'll have to send the third wave up overloaded. Then report back to me. Go quick, the rest will be back in minutes."
"Yessir," she saluted. For her sake, not his; for order, structure, rationality, a lifeline. He returned the salute gravely.
"They were already overloaded," objected Tung as soon as she was out of earshot. "They're going to fly like bricks with 233 squeezed on board. And they'll take longer to load on here and unload topside."
"Yes. God." Miles gave up scratching figures in the useless mud. "Run the numbers through the computer for me, Ky. I don't trust myself to add two and two just now. How far behind will we be by the time the main body of the Cetagandans comes in range? Come close as you can, no fudge factors, please."
Tung mumbled into his headset, reeled off numbers, margins, timing. Miles tracked every detail with predatory intensity. Tung concluded bluntly. "At the end of the last wave, five shuttles are still going to be waiting to unload when the Cetagandan fire fries us."
A thousand men and women...
"May I respectfully suggest, sir, that the time has come to start cutting our losses?" added Tung.
"You may, Commodore."
"Option One, maximally efficient; only drop seven shuttles in the last wave. Leave the last five shuttle loads of prisoners on the ground. They'll be re-taken, but at least they'll be alive." Tung's voice grew persuasive on this last line.
"Only one problem, Ky. I don't want to stay here."
"You can still be on the last shuttle up, just like you said. By the way, sir, have I expressed myself yet, sir, on what a genuinely dumb-shit piece of grandstanding that is?"
"Eloquently, with your eyebrows, a while ago. And while I'm inclined to agree with you, have you noticed yet how closely the remaining prisoners keep watching me? Have you ever watched a cat sneaking up on a horned hopper?"
Tung stirred uneasily, eyes taking in the phenomenon Miles described.
"I don't fancy gunning down the last thousand in order to get my shuttle into the air."
"Skewed as we are, they might not realize there were no more shuttles coming till after you were in the air."
"So we just leave them standing there, waiting for us?" The sheep look up, but are not fed...
"Right."
"You like that option, Ky?"
"Makes me want to puke, but-consider the 9,000 others. And the Dendarii fleet. The idea of dropping them all down the rat hole in a pre-doomed effort to pack up all these-miserable sinners of yours, makes me want to puke a lot more. Nine-tenths of a loaf is much better than none."
"Point taken. Let us go on to option two, please. The flight out of orbit is calculated on the speed of the slowest ship, which is ... ?"
"The freighters."
"And the Triumph remains the swiftest?"
"Betcher ass." Tung had captained the Triumph once.
"And the best armored."
"Ya. So?" Tung saw perfectly well where he was being driven. His obtuseness was but a form of oblique balking.
"So. The first seven shuttles up on the last wave lock onto the troop freighters and boost on schedule. We call back five of the Triumph's fighter pilots and dump and destroy their craft. One's damaged already, right? The last five of these drop shuttles clamp to the Triumph in their place, protected from the now-arriving fire of the Cetagandan ships by the Triumph's full shielding. Pack the prisoners into the Triumph's corridors, lock shuttle hatches, boost like hell."
"The added mass of a thousand people-"
"Would be less than that of a couple of the drop shuttles. Dump and blow them too, if you have to, to fit the mass/acceleration window."
"-would overload life support-"
"The emergency oxygen will take us to the wormhole jump point. After Jump the prisoners can be distributed among the other ships at our leisure."
Tung's voice grew anguished. "Those combat drop shuttles are brand new. And my fighters-five of them-do you realize how hard it will be to recoup the funds to replace 'em? It comes to-"
"I asked you to calculate the time, Ky, not the price tag," said Miles through his teeth. He added more quietly, "I'll tack them on to our bill for services rendered."
"You ever hear the term cost overrun, boy? You will...." Tung switched his attention back to his headset, itself but an extension of the tactics room aboard the Triumph. Calculations were made, new orders entered and executed.
"It flies," sighed Tung. "Buys a damned expensive fifteen minutes. If nothing else goes wrong..." he trailed off in a frustrated mumble, as impatient as Miles himself with his inability to be three places at once.
"There comes my shuttle back," Tung noted aloud. He glanced at Miles, plainly unwilling to leave his admiral to his own devices, as plainly itching to be out of the acid rain and dark and mud and closer to the nerve center of operations.
"Get gone," said Miles. "You can't ride up with me anyway, it's against procedure."
"Procedure, hah," said Tung blackly.
With the lift-off of the third wave, there were barely 2,000 prisoners left on the ground. Things were thinning out, winding down; the armored combat patrols were falling back now from their penetration of the surrounding Cetagandan installations, back toward their assigned shuttle landing sites. A dangerous turning of the tide, should some surviving Cetagandan officer recover enough organization to harry their retreat.
"See you aboard the Triumph," Tung emphasized. He paused to brace Lieutenant Murka, out of Miles's earshot. Miles grinned in sympathy for the overworked lieutenant, in no doubt about the orders Tung was now laying on him. If Murka didn't come back with Miles in tow, he'd probably be wisest not to come back at all.
Nothing left now but a little last waiting. Hurry up and wait. Waiting, Miles realized, was very bad for him. It allowed his self-generated adrenalin to wear off, allowed him to feel how tired and hurt he really was. The illuminating flares were dying to a red glow.
There was really very little time between the fading of the labored thunder of the last third wave shuttle to depart, and the screaming whine of the first fourth-wave shuttle plunging back. Alas that this had more to do with being skewed than being swift. The Marilacans still waited in their rat bar blocks, discipline still holding. Of course, nobody'd told them about the little problem in timing they faced. But the nervous Dendarii patrols, chivvying them up the ramps, kept things moving at a pace to Miles's taste. Rear guard was never a popular position to draw, even among the lunatic fringe who defaced their weapons with notches and giggled among themselves while speculating upon newer and more grotesque methods of blowing away their enemies.
Miles saw the semi-conscious Suegar carried up the ramp first. Suegar would actually reach the Triumph's sickbay faster in his company, Miles calculated, on this direct flight, than had he been sent on an earlier shuttle to one of the troop freighters and had to await a safe moment to transfer.
The arena they were leaving had grown silent and dark, sodden and sad, ghostly. I will break the doors of hell, and bring up the dead... there was something not quite right about the half-remembered quote. No matter.
This shuttle's armored patrol, the last, drew back out of the fog and darkness, electronically whistled in like a pack of sheepdogs by their master Murka, who stood at the foot of the ramp as liaison between the ground patrol and the shuttle pilot, who was expressing her anxiety to be gone with little whining revs on the engines.
Then from the darkness-plasma fire, sizzling through the rain-sodden, saturated air. Some Cetagandan hero-officer, troop, tech, who knew?-had crawled up out of the rubble and found a weapon- and an enemy to fire it at. Splintered afterimages, red and green, danced in Miles's eyes. A Dendarii patroller rolled out of the dark, a glowing line across the back of his armor smoking and sparking until quenched in the black mud. His armor legs seized up, and he lay wriggling like a frantic fish in an effort to peel out of it. A second plasma burst, ill-aimed, spent itself turning a few kilometers of fog and rain to superheated steam on a straight line to some unknown infinity.
Just what they needed, to be pinned down by sniper fire now.... A pair of Dendarii rear guards started back into the fog. An excited prisoner-ye gods, it was Pitt's lieutenant again-grabbed up the armor-paralyzed soldier's weapon and made to join them.
"No! Come back later and fight on your own time, you jerk!" Miles sloshed toward Murka. "Fall back, load up, get in the air! Don't stop to fight! No time!"
Some of the last of the prisoners had fallen flat to the ground, burrowing like mudpuppies, a sound sensible reflex in any other context. Miles dashed among them, slapping rumps. "Get aboard, up the ramp, go, go, go!" Beatrice popped up out of the mud and mimicked him, shakily driving her fellows before her.
Miles skidded to a stop beside his fallen Dendarii and snapped the armor clamps open left-handed. The soldier kicked off his fatal carapace, rolled to his feet, and limped for the safety of the shuttle. Miles ran close behind him.
Murka and one patrolman waited at the foot of the ramp.
"Get ready to pull in the ramp and lift on my mark," Murka began to the shuttle pilot. "R-" his words were lost in an explosive pop as the plasma beam sliced across his neck. Miles could feel the searing heat from it pass centimeters above his head as he stood next to his lieutenant. Murka's body crumpled.
Miles dodged, paused to yank off Murka's comm headset. The head came too. Miles had to brace it with his numb hand to pull the headset free. The weight of the head, its density and roundness, hammered into his senses. The precise memory of it would surely be with him until his dying day. He let it fall by Murka's body.
He staggered up the ramp, a last armored Dendarii pulling on his arm. He could feel the ramp sag peculiarly under their feet, glanceddown to see a half-melted seam across it where the plasma arc that had killed Murka had passed on.
He fell through the hatchway, clutching the headset and yelling into it. "Lift, lift! Mark, now! Go!"
"Who is this?" came the shuttle pilot's voice back.
"Naismith."
"Yes, sir."
The shuttle heaved off the ground, engines roaring, even before the ramp had withdrawn. The ramp mechanism labored, metal and plastic complaining-then jammed on the twisted distortion of the melt.
"Get that hatch sealed back there!" the shuttle pilot's voice yowled over the headset.
"Ramp's jammed," Miles yowled back. "Jettison it!"
The ramp mechanism skreeled and shrieked, reversing itself. The ramp shuddered, jammed again. Hands reached out to thump on it urgently. "You'll never get it that way!" Beatrice, across the hatch from Miles, yelled fiercely, and twisted around to kick at it with her bare feet. The wind of their flight screamed over the open hatchway, buffeting and vibrating the shuttle like a giant blowing across the top of a bottle.
To a chorus of shouting, thumping, and swearing, the shuttle lurched abruptly onto its side. Men, women, and loose equipment tangled across the tilting deck. Beatrice kicked bloodily at a final buggered bolt. The ramp tore loose at last. Beatrice, sliding, fell with it.
Miles dove at her, lunging across the hatchway. If he connected, he never knew, for his right hand was a senseless blob. He saw her face only as a white blur as she whipped away into the blackness.
It was like a silence, a great silence, in his head. Although the roar of wind and engines, screaming and swearing and yelling, went on as before, it was lost somewhere between his ears and his brain, and went unregistered. He saw only a white blur, smearing into the darkness, repeated again and again, replaying like a looping vid.
He found himself crouched on his hands and knees, the shuttle's acceleration sucking him to the deck. They'd gotten the hatch closed. The merely human babble within seemed muffled and thin, now that the roaring voices of the gods were silenced. He looked up into the pale face of Pitt's lieutenant, crouched beside him still clutching the unfired Dendarii weapon he'd grabbed up in that other lifetime.
"You'd better kill a whole lot of Cetagandans for Marilac, boy," Miles rasped to him at last. "You better be worth something to somebody, 'cause I've sure paid too much for you."
The Marilacan's face twitched uncertainly, too cowed even to try to look apologetic. Miles wondered what his own face must look like. From the reflection in that mirror, strange, very strange.
Miles began to crawl forward, looking for something, somebody.... Formless flashes made yellow streaks in the corners of his vision. An armored Dendarii, her helmet off, pulled him to his feet.
"Sir? Hadn't you better come forward to the pilot's compartment, sir?"
"Yes, all right..."
She got an arm around him, under his arm, so he didn't fall down again. They picked their way forward in the crowded shuttle, through Marilacans and Dendarii mixed. Faces were drawn to him, marked him fearfully, but none dared an expression of any kind. Miles's eye was caught by a silver cocoon, as they neared the forward end.
"Wait..."
He fell to his knees beside Suegar. A hit of hope... "Suegar. Hey, Suegar!"
Suegar opened his eyes to slits. No telling how much of this he was taking in, through the pain and the shock and the drugs.
"You're on your way now. We made it, made the timing. With all ease. With agility and speed. Up through the regions of the air, higher than the clouds. You had the scripture right, you did."
Suegar's lips moved. Miles bent his head closer.
"... wasn't really a scripture," Suegar whispered. "I knew it ... you knew it ... don't shit me..."
Miles paused, cold-stoned. Then he leaned forward again. "No, brother," he whispered. "For though we went in clothed, we have surely come out naked."
Suegar's lips puffed on a dry laugh.
Miles didn't weep until after they'd made the wormhole jump.
CHAPTER FOUR
Illyan sat silent.
Miles lay back, pale and exhausted, a stupid trembling concealed in his belly making his voice shake. "Sorry. Thought I'd got over it. So much craziness has happened since then, no time to think, digest...."
"Combat fatigue," Illyan suggested.
"The combat only lasted a couple of hours."
"Ah? I'd reckon it at six weeks, by that account."
"Whatever. But if your Count Vorvolk wants to argue that I should have traded lives for equipment, well ... I had maybe five minutes to make a decision, under enemy fire. If I'd had a month to study it, I'd have come to the same conclusion. And I'll stand behind it now, in a court martial or any goddamn arena he wants to fight me in."
"Calm down," Illyan advised. "I will deal with Vorvolk, and his shadow-advisors. I think... no, I guarantee their little plot will not intrude further on your recovery, Lieutenant Vorkosigan." His eyes glinted. Illyan had served thirty years in Imperial Security, Miles reminded himself. Aral Vorkosigan's Dog still had teeth.
"I'm sorry my... carelessness shook your confidence in me, sir," said Miles. It was an odd wound that doubt had dealt him; Miles could feel it still, an invisible ache in his chest, slow to heal. So, trust was more of a feedback loop than he had ever realized. Was Illyan right, should he pay more attention to appearances? "I'll try to be more intelligent in future."
Illyan gave him an indecipherable look, his mouth set, neck oddly flushed. "So shall I, Lieutenant."
The swish of the door, the sweep of skirts. Countess Vorkosigan was a tall woman, hair gone red-roan, with a stride that had never quite accommodated itself to Barrayaran female fashions. She wore the long rich skirts of a Vor-class matron as cheerfully as a child playing dress-up, and about as convincingly.
"M'lady," Illyan nodded, rising.
"Hello, Simon. Goodbye, Simon," she grinned back. "That doctor you spooked begs me to use my superior firepower to throw you out. I know you officers and gentlemen have business, but it's time to wrap it up. Or so the medical monitors indicate." She glanced at Miles. A frown flickered across her easy-going features, a hint of steel.
Illyan caught it too, and bowed. "We're quite finished, m'lady. No problem."
"So I trust." Chin lifted, she watched him out.
Miles, studying that steady profile, realized with a sudden lurch just why the death of a certain tall aggressive redhead might still be wringing his gut, long after his reconciliation to other casualties for which he was surely no less responsible. Ha. How late we come to our insights. And how uselessly. Still, a tightness eased in his throat as Countess Vorkosigan turned back to him.
"You look like a defrosted corpse, love." Her lips brushed his forehead warmly.
"Thank you, Mother," Miles chirped.
"That nice Commander Quinn who brought you in says you haven't been eating properly. As usual."
"Ah." Miles brightened. "Where is Quinn? Can I see her?"
"Not here. She is excluded from classified areas, to wit this Imperial Military Hospital, on the grounds of her being foreign military personnel. Barrayarans!" That was Captain Cordelia Naismith's (Betan Astronomical Survey, retired) favorite swear word, delivered with a multitude of inflections as the occasion demanded; this time with exasperation. "I took her to Vorkosigan House to wait."
"Thank you. I ... owe a lot to Quinn."
"So I gather." She smiled at him. "You can be at the long lake three hours after you delude that doctor into releasing you from this dismal place. I've invited Commander Quinn along-there, I thought that might motivate you to pay more serious attention to recovery."
"Yes, ma 'am." Miles eased down into his covers. Sensation was beginning to return to his arms. Unfortunately, the sensation in question was pain. He smiled whitely. It was better than no sensation at all, oh yes.
"We will take turns, feeding and spoiling you," she envisioned. "And... you can tell me all about Earth."
"Ah... yes. I have a great deal to tell you about Earth."
"Rest, then." Another kiss, and she was gone.