Brothers in Arms

'Yes. They're in a squeeze.' Galeni crushed his cup slowly in his fist. 'Reduced to wild gambles.'

'This one seems pretty damned exotic, to bet—sixteen, eighteen years on? How the devil did they assemble the medical resources? Was your father a doctor?'

Galeni snorted. 'Hardly. The medical half was the easy part, apparently, once they'd got hold of the stolen tissue sample from Barrayar. Though how they did that—'

'I spent the first six years of my life getting prodded, probed, biopsied, scanned, sampled, sliced and diced by doctors. There must have been kilograms of me floating around in various medical labs to choose from, a regular tissue smorgasbord. That was the easy part. But the actual cloning—'

'Was hired out. To some shady medical laboratory on the planet of Jackson's Whole, as I understand it, that would do anything for a price.'

Miles's mouth, opening, gaped for a moment. 'Oh. Them.'

'Do you know about Jackson's Whole?'

'I've—encountered their work in another context. Damned if I can't name the lab most likely to have done it, too. They're experts at cloning. Among other things, they do the illegal brain-transfer operations-illegal anywhere but Jackson's Whole, that is—where the young clone is grown in a vat, and the old brain is transferred into it—the old rich brain, needless to say—and, um, they've done some bioengineering work that I can't talk about, and . . . yes. And all this time they had a copy of me in the back room—those sons of bitches, they're going to find out they're not as bloody untouchable as they think they are this time . . . I' Miles controlled incipient hyperventilation. Personal revenge upon Jackson's Whole must wait for some more propitious time. 'So. The Komarran underground invested nothing except money in the project for the first ten or fifteen years. No wonder it was never traced.'

'Yes,' said Galeni. 'So a few years ago, the decision was made to pull this card out of their sleeve. They picked up the completed clone, now a young teenager, from Jackson's Whole and began training him to be you.'

'Why?'

'They're apparently going for the Imperium.'

'What?!' Miles cried. 'No! Not with me—'

'That. . . individual. . . stood right there, 'Galeni pointed to a spot near the door, 'two days ago and told me I was looking at the next Emperor of Barrayar.'

'They would have to kill both Emperor Gregor and my father to mount anything of a sort—' Miles began frantically.

'I would imagine,' said Galeni dryly, 'they're looking forward to just that.' He lay back on his bench, eyes glinting, hands locked behind his neck for a pillow, and purred, 'Over my dead body, of course.'

'Over both our dead bodies. They don't dare let us live…'

'I believe I mentioned that yesterday.'

'Still, if anything goes wrong,' Miles's gaze flickered toward the light fixture, 'it might be handy for them to have hostages.' He enunciated this idea clearly, emphasizing the plural. Though he feared that from the Barrayaran point of view, only one of them had value as a hostage. Galeni was no fool; he knew who the goat was too.

Damn, damn, damn. Miles had walked into this trap, knowing it was a trap, in hopes of gaining just the sort of information he now possessed. But he hadn't meant to stay trapped. He rubbed the back of his neck in utter frustration—what joy it would have been to call down a Dendarii strike force on this—this nest of rebels—right now—

The door clicked. It was too early for lunch. Miles whipped around, hoping for a wild instant to find Commander Quinn leading a patrol to his rescue—no. It was just the two goons again, and a third in the doorway with a stunner.

One gestured at Miles. 'You. Come along.'

'Where to?' Miles asked suspiciously. Could this be the end already—to be taken back down to the garage sub-level and shot or have his neck broken? He felt disinclined to walk voluntarily to his own execution.

Something like that must have been passing through Galeni's mind too, for as the pair grabbed Miles unceremoniously by the arms, Galeni lunged for them. The one with the stunner dropped him before he was halfway across the floor. Galeni convulsed, teeth bared, in desperate resistance, then lay still.

Numbly, Miles allowed himself to be bundled out the door. If his death were coming, he wanted to at least stay conscious, to spit in its eye one last time as it closed on him.

Chapter Nine

To Miles's temporary relief, they took him up, not down the lift tube. Not that they couldn't perfectly well kill him someplace other than the garage sub-level. Galeni, now, they might murder in the garage to avoid having to lug the body, but Miles's own dead weight, so to speak, would not present nearly the logistic load.

The room into which the two men now shoved him was some sort of study or private office, bright despite the polarized window. Library data files filled a transparent shelf on the wall; an ordinary comconsole desk occupied one corner. The comconsole vid was presently displaying a fish-eye view of Miles's cell. Galeni still lay stunned on the floor.

The older man who had seemed in charge of Miles's kidnapping the night before sat on a beige-padded chrome bench before the darkened window, examining a hypospray just taken from its case, which lay open beside him. So. Interrogation, not execution, was the plan. Or at any rate, interrogation before execution. Unless they simply contemplated poisoning him.

Miles tore his gaze from the glittering hypo as the man shifted, his head tilting to study Miles through narrowed blue eyes. A flick of his gaze checked the comconsole. It was a momentary accident of posture, a hand gripping the edge of the bench, that snapped Miles's realization into place, for the man did not greatly resemble Captain Galeni except perhaps in the paleness of his skin. He appeared to be about sixty. Clipped greying hair, lined face, body thickening with age, clearly not that of an outdoorsman or athlete. He wore conservative Earther clothes a generation removed from the historical fashions of the parading teenagers that Miles had enjoyed in the shopping arcade. He might have been a businessman or a teacher, anything but a hairy terrorist.

Except for the murderous tension. In that, in the coil of the hands, flare of the nostril, iron of the mouth, stiffness of the neck, Ser Galen and Duv Galeni were as one.

Galen rose, and stalked slowly around Miles with the air of a man studying a sculpture by an inferior artist. Miles stood very still, feeling smaller than usual in his sock feet, stubbled and grubby. He had come to the center at last, the secret source from which all his coiling troubles had been emanating these past weeks. And the center was this man, who orbited him staring back with hungry hate. Or perhaps he and Galen were both centers, like the twin foci of an ellipse, brought together and superimposed at last to create some diabolical perfect circle.

Miles felt very small and very brittle. Galen could very well begin by breaking Miles's arms with the same absent, nervous air that Elli Quinn bit her nails, just to release tension. Does he see me at all? Or am I an object, a symbol representing the enemy—will he murder me for the sake of sheer allegory?

'So,' Ser Galen spoke. 'This is the real thing at last. Not very impressive, to have seduced my son's loyalty. What can he see in you? Still, you represent Barrayar very well. The monster son of a monster father, Aral Vorkosigan's secret moral genotype made flesh for all to see. Perhaps there is some justice in the universe after all.'

'Very poetic,' choked Miles, 'but biologically inaccurate, as you must know, having cloned me.'

Galen smiled sourly. 'I won't insist on it.' He completed his circuit and faced Miles. 'I suppose you couldn't help being born. But why have you never revolted from the monster? He made you what you are—' an expansive gesture of Galen's open hand summed up Miles's stunted and twisted frame. 'What dictator's charisma does the man possess, that he's able to hypnotize not only his own son but everyone else's too?' The prone figure in the vid console seemed to pluck at Galen's eye. 'Why do you follow him? Why does David? What corrupt kick can my son get out of crawling into a Barrayaran goon-uniform and marching behind Vorkosigan?' Galen's voice feigned light banter very badly; the undertones twisted with anguish.

Miles, glowering, clipped out, 'For one thing, my father has never abandoned me in the presence of an enemy.'