Cetaganda

From Miles's eye-level, the deck sprouted a forest of red boots, as Benin's squad clumped in to disarm and arrest Kety's retainers, and march them out with their hands atop their heads. Kety and Naru were taken along with them, sandwiched silently between some hard-eyed men who didn't look as though they were interested in listening to explanations.

At a growl from Kety, the procession paused in front of the entering Barrayarans. Miles heard Kety's voice, icy-cold: 'Congratulations, Lord Vorpatril. I hope you may be fortunate enough to survive your victory.'

'Huh?' said Ivan.

Oh, let him go. It would be too exhausting to try and sort out Kety about his confused inversion of Miles's little chain-of-command. Maybe Benin would have it straight. At a sharp word from their sergeant the security squad prodded their prisoners back into motion and clattered on down the corridor.

Four shiny black boots made their way through the mob and halted before Miles's nose. Speaking of explanations . . . Miles twisted his head and looked up the odd foreshortened perspective at Colonel Vorreedi and Ivan. The deck was cool beneath his stinging cheek, and he didn't really want to move, even supposing he could.

Ivan bent over him, giving an upside-down view up his nostrils, and said in a strained tone, 'Are you all right?'

'Sh-sh-shock-stick. Nothing b-broken.'

'Right,' said Ivan, and hauled him to his feet by his collar. Miles hung a moment, shivering and twitching like a fish on a hook, till he found his unsteady balance. By necessity, he leaned on Ivan, who supported him with an un-commenting hand under his elbow.

Colonel Vorreedi looked him up and down. 'I'll let the ambassador do the protesting about that.' Vorreedi's distant expression suggested he thought privately that the fellow with the shock-stick had stopped too soon. 'Vorob'yev is going to need all the ammunition he can get. You have created the most extraordinary public incident of his career, I suspect.'

'Oh, Colonel,' sighed Miles. 'I predict there's going to b-be nothing p-public 'bout this incident. Wait 'n see.'

Ghem-Colonel Benin, across the room, was bowing and scraping to the hauts Pel and Nadina, and supplying them with float-chairs, albeit lacking force-screens, extra robes, and ghem-lady attendants. Arresting them in the style to which they were accustomed?

Miles glanced up at Vorreedi. 'Has Ivan, um, explained everything, sir?'

'I trust so,' said Vorreedi, in a voice drenched with menace.

Ivan nodded vigorously, but then hedged, 'Um . . . all I could. Under the circumstances.'

Meaning, lack of privacy from Cetagandan eavesdroppers, Miles presumed. All, Ivan? Is my cover still intact?

'I admit,' Vorreedi went on, 'I am still …. assimilating it.'

'What h-happened after I left the Star Creche?' Miles asked Ivan.

'I woke up and you were gone. I think that was the worst moment of my life, knowing you'd gone haring off on some crazy self-appointed mission with no backup.'

'Oh, but you were my backup, Ivan,' Miles murmured, earning himself a glare. 'And a good one too, as you have just demonstrated, yes?'

'Yeah, your favorite kind—unconscious on the floor where I couldn't inject any kind of sense into the proceedings. You took off to get yourself killed, or worse, and everybody would have blamed me. The last thing Aunt Cordelia said to me before we left was, 'And try to keep him out of trouble, Ivan.''

Miles could hear Countess Vorkosigan's weary, exasperated cadences quite precisely in Ivan's parody.

'Anyway, as soon as I figured out what the hell was going on, I got away from the haut-ladies—'

'How?'

'God, Miles, they're just like my mother, only eight times over. Ugh! Anyway, the haut Rian insisted I go through ghem-Colonel Benin, which I was willing to do—he at least seemed like he had his head screwed on straight—'

Perhaps attracted by the sound of his name, Benin strolled over to listen in on this.

'—and God be praised he paid attention to me. Seemed to make more sense out of my gabble than I did at the time.'

Benin nodded. 'I was of course following the very unusual activities around the Star Creche today—'

Around, not in. Quite.

'My own investigations had already led me to suspect something was going on involving one or more of the haut-governors, so I had orbital squads on alert.'

'Squads, ha,' said Ivan. 'There's three Imperial battle cruisers surrounding this ship right now.'

Benin smiled slightly, and shrugged.

'Ghem-General Chilian is a dupe, I believe,' Miles put in. 'Though you will p-probably wish to question him about the activities of his wife, the haut Vio.'

'He has already been detained,' Benin assured him.

Detained, not arrested, all right. Benin seemed exactly on track so far. But had he realized yet that all the governors had been involved? Or was Kety elected sole sacrifice? A Cetagandan internal matter, Miles reminded himself. It was not his job to straighten out the entire Cetagandan government, tempting as it would be to try. His duty was confined to extracting Barrayar from the morass. He smiled at the glowing white bubble still protecting the real Great Key. The hauts Nadina and Pel were consulting with some of Benin's men; it appeared that rather than attempting to get the force-screen down here they were making arrangements to transport it and its precious contents whole and inviolate back to the Star Creche.

Vorreedi gave Miles a grim look. 'One thing that Lord Vorpatril has not yet explained to my satisfaction, Lieutenant Vorkosigan, is why you concealed the initial incident involving an object of such obvious importance —'

'Kety was trying to frame Barrayar, sir. Until I could achieve independent corroborative evidence that —'

Vorreedi went on inexorably, 'From your own side.'

'Ah.' Miles briefly considered a relapse of shock-stick symptoms, rendering him unable to talk. No, alas. His own motives were obscure even to him, in retrospect. What had he started out wanting, before the twisting events had made sheer survival his paramount concern? Oh, yes, promotion. That was it.

Not this time, boy-o. Antique but evocative phrases like damage control and spin doctoring free-floated through his consciousness.

'In fact, sir, I did not at first recognize the Great Key for what it was. But once the haut Rian contacted me, events slid very rapidly from apparently trivial to extremely delicate. By the time I realized the full depth and complexity of the haut-governor's plot, it was too late.'

'Too late for what?' asked Vorreedi bluntly.

What with the shock-stick residue and all, Miles did not need to feign a sick smile. But it seemed Vorreedi had drifted back to the conviction that Miles was not working as a covert ops agent for Simon Illyan after all. That's what you want everybody to think, remember? Miles glanced aside at ghem- Colonel Benin, listening in fascination.

'You would have taken the investigation away from me, you know you would have, sir. Everyone in the wormhole nexus thinks I'm a cripple who's been given a cushy nepotistic sinecure as a courier. That I might be competent for more is something Lieutenant Lord Vorkosigan would never, in the ordinary course of events, ever be given a chance to publicly prove.'

To the world at large, true. But Illyan knew all about the pivotal role Miles had played in the Hegen Hub,