Brothers in Arms

'If those bastards catch you they'll kill you. How much more dire does it have to be?'

'But Miles,' said Ivan, looking up and down the corridor doubtfully, 'didn't you just trap us in the center of a pincers movement?'

'No,' Miles grinned, exhilarated, 'I did not. Not while we own a cloak of invisibility. Come on!' He trotted back to the T intersection and turned right, back toward the Barrayaran-held Tower Six.

'No!' Mark balked. 'The Barrayarans might kill you by accident, but they'll kill me on purpose!'

'The ones back there,' Miles jerked his head over his shoulder, 'would kill us both just to make sure. The Dagoola operation left the Cetagandans more peeved with Admiral Naismith than I think you have grasped. Come on.'

Reluctantly, Mark followed, Ivan bringing up the rear.

Miles's heart pounded. He wished he felt half as confident as his grin to Ivan had suggested. But Mark must not be permitted to sense his doubt. A couple of hundred meters of blank synthacrete jerked past as he ran on tiptoe, trying to make as little noise as possible. If the Barrayarans had already worked their way this far down the tunnel—

They came to the last pumping station, and still no sign of the lethal trouble ahead. Or behind. This pumping station was quiescent again. It would be another twelve hours to the next high tide. If no unexpected surges came downstream, it should stay shut down till then. Still, Miles was disinclined to leave it to chance, and from the way Ivan was shifting from foot to foot, watching him with growing alarm, he'd better be able to offer a guarantee.

He began looking over the control panels, raising one for a look within. Fortunately, it was much simpler than, say, the control nexus for a Jumpship propulsion chamber. A cut here, then there, should disable this pump without lighting up boards in the watchtower. He hoped. Not that anyone in the tower was likely to be paying much attention to their boards just this moment. Miles glanced up at Mark. 'I need my knife, please.'

Unwillingly, Mark handed the antique dagger over, and, at a look from Miles, its sheath as well. Miles used the point to pop the hair-fine wires. His guess as to which ones were which seemed correct; he tried to look like he'd known it all along. He did not hand the knife back when he was done.

He went to the pumping chamber hatch and opened it. No beeping this time. His gravitic grappler made an instant handle on the smooth inner surface. Last problem was that damn manual locking bar. If some innocent—or not-so-innocent—came along and gave it a twirl—ah, no. The same model of tensor field lever, ally to the gravitic grappler, that Quinn had used to open the hatch to the ledge worked here. Miles blew a breath of relief through pursed lips. He returned to the control panel facing the corridor and slapped on his fisheye scan at the end of a row of dials. It blended in nicely.

He gestured toward the open hatch to the pumping chamber, as inviting as a coffin. 'All right. Everybody in.'

Ivan went white. 'Oh, God, I was afraid that was what you had in mind.' Mark did not look much more thrilled than Ivan.

Miles lowered his voice, softly persuasive. 'Look, Ivan, I can't force you. You can head on up the corridor and take the chance that your uniform will keep you from getting your brains fried by somebody's nervous reflex. If you survive contact with Destang's hit squad, you'll get arrested by the locals, which probably won't be fatal. But I'd rather you stuck with me.' He lowered his voice still further. 'And didn't leave me alone with him .'

'Oh.' Ivan blinked.

As Miles expected, this appeal for help had more impact than logic, demands, or cajolery. He added, 'Look, it's just like being in a tactics room.'

'It's just like being in a trap!'

'Have you ever been in a tactics room when the power's knocked out? They are traps. All that sense of command and control is an illusion. I'd rather be in the field.' He smirked, and jerked his head toward his double. 'Besides, don't you think Mark ought to get the chance to share your recent experience?'

'When you put it that way,' growled Ivan, 'it has a certain appeal.'

Miles lowered himself into the pumping chamber first. He thought he could just hear distant footsteps scuffing in the corridor. Mark looked like he wanted to bolt, but with Ivan breathing down his neck he had little choice. Finally Ivan, with a gulp, dropped beside them. Miles keyed on his hand light; Ivan, the only one tall enough, shoved the heavy hatch shut. It was profoundly silent for a moment, but for their breathing, as they squatted knee to knee. Ivan's swollen, empurpled hands clenched and unclenched, sticky with sweat and blood. 'At least y'now they can't hear us.'

'Cozy,' grunted Miles. 'Pray our pursuers are as stupid as I was. I ran past this place twice.' He opened the scanner case and set the receiver to project the north-and-south view of the still-empty corridor. There was a very faint draft in the chamber, Miles noted. Anything more would foretell a rush of water through the lines, and it would be time to bail out, Cetagandans or no Cetagandans.

'Now what?' said Mark thinly. He looked like he felt trapped indeed, sandwiched between the two Barrayarans.

Miles settled back against the slimy wet wall with a false air of ease. 'Now we wait. Just like a tactics room. You spend a lot of time waiting in a tactics room. If you have a good imagination, it's—pure hell.' He keyed his wrist comm. 'Nim?'

'Yo, sir. I was just about to call you.' Nim's uneven voice sounded like he was running, or maybe crawling. 'A police aircar just landed at Tower Seven. We're withdrawing through the park strip behind the Barrier. The observer reports the locals just entered Tower Six, too.'

'Have you got anything off Quinn's wrist comm?'

'It still hasn't moved, sir.'

'Has anyone made contact with Captain Galeni yet?'

'No, sir. Wasn't he with you?'

'He left about the time I lost Quinn. Last seen on the outside of the Tidal Barrier at about the midpoint. I'd sent him to look for another way in. Ah . . . report at once if anyone spots him.'

'Yo, sir.'

Damn, another worry. Had Galeni run into trouble, Cetagandan, Barrayaran, or local? Had he been betrayed by his own state of mind? Miles now wished he'd kept Galeni by him as heartily as he wished he'd kept Quinn. But they hadn't yet found Ivan then; Miles hardly could have done otherwise. He felt like a man trying to assemble a jigsaw puzzle of live pieces, that moved and changed shape at random intervals with tiny malicious giggles. He unclenched his teeth. Mark was regarding him nervously; Ivan was hunkered down not paying much attention to anything, by the way he was biting his lips locked in an internal struggle with his new-won claustrophobia.

There was a movement in the somewhat distorted 180-degree scanner view of the corridor, a man loping silently around the curvature from the south end. Cetagandan point man, Miles guessed, though he wore civilian clothes. He had a stunner, not a plasma arc in his hand—apparently the Cetagandans were now aware that the locals were on the scene in too great force to silence by a convenient murder, and were now thinking of de- escalating, or at least decapitalizing, the Situation. The Cetagandan scouted up the corridor a few more meters, then vanished back the way he'd come.

A minute later, movement from the north: a pair of men tiptoeing along as quietly as a couple of gorillas of that size could move. One of them was the numbskull who'd managed to appear on a covert op still wearing his regulation Service boots. He too had exchanged his original weapon for a more demure stunner, though his companion still carried a lethal nerve disruptor. It looked like it really could be shaping up for a round of stunner tag. Ah, the stunner, weapon of choice for all uncertain situations, the one weapon with which you really could shoot first and ask questions later.

'Holster your nerve disrupter, that's right, good boy!' Miles murmured, as the second man too switched weapons. 'Heads up, Ivan; this could be the best show well see all year.'

Ivan glanced up, his absorbed uncertain smile transmuting into something genuinely sardonic, more like the old Ivan. 'Oh, shit, Miles. Destang will have your nuts for engineering this.'

'At present, Destang doesn't even know I'm involved. H'sh. Here we go.'

The Cetagandan point man had returned. He made a come-on motion, and was leapfrogged by a second Cetagandan. On the other end of the corridor, beyond their view due to the curve, the remaining three Barrayarans