Diplomatic Immunity

“thugs came pounding at Garnet Five's door. They just pushed her aside—”

“Did they identify themselves properly, and relay your orders clearly?”

Corbeau paused, his glance at Miles sharpening. “I admit, my lord,” he said slowly, “Sergeant Touchev announcing, 'All right, mutie-lover, this show's over,' did not exactly convey 'Admiral Vorpatril has ordered all Barrayaran personnel back to their ships' to my mind. Not right away, anyway. I'd just woken up, you see.”

“Did they identify themselves?”

“Not—not verbally.”

“Show any ID?”

“Well . . . they were in uniform, with their patrol armbands.”

“Did you recognize them as fleet security, or did you think this was a private visit—a couple of comrades taking out their racial offense on their own time?”

“It . . . um . . . well—the two aren't exactly mutually exclusive, my lord. In my experience.”

The kid has that one straight, unfortunately. Miles took a breath. “Ah.”

“I was slow, still half asleep. When they shoved me around, Garnet Five thought they were attacking me. I wish she hadn't tried to . . . I didn't slug Touchev till he dumped her out of her float chair. At that point . . . everything sort of went down the disposer.” Corbeau glowered at his feet, encased in prison-issue friction slippers.

Miles sat back. Throw this boy a line. He's drowning. He said mildly, “You know, your career is not necessarily cooked yet. You aren't, technically, AWOL as long as you are involuntarily confined by the Graf Station authorities, any more than Brun's strike patrol here is. For a little while yet, you're in a legal limbo. Your jump pilot's training and surgery would make you a costly loss, from command's viewpoint. If you make the right moves, you could still get out of this pretty cleanly.”

Corbeau's face screwed up. “I don't . . .” He trailed off.

Miles made an encouraging noise.

Corbeau burst out, “I don't want my damned career any more. I don't want to be part of”—he waved around inarticulately—”this . This . . . idiocy.”

Suppressing a certain sympathy, Miles asked, “What's your present status—how far along are you in your enlistment?”

“I signed up for one of the new five-year hitches, with the option to reenlist or go to reserve status for the next five. I've been in three years, two still to go.”

At age twenty-three, Miles reminded himself, two years still seemed a long time. Corbeau could be barely more than an apprentice junior pilot at this stage of his career, although his assignment to the Prince Xav implied a superior rating.

Corbeau shook his head. “I see things differently these days, somehow. Attitudes I used to take for granted, jokes, remarks, just the way things are done—they bother me now. They grate. People like Sergeant Touchev, Captain Brun—God. Were we always this awful?”

“No,” said Miles. “We used to be much worse. I can personally testify to that one.”

Corbeau stared searchingly at him.

“But if all the progressive-minded men had opted out then, as you are proposing to do now, none of the changes I've seen in my lifetime could have happened. We've changed. We can change some more. Not instantly, no. But if all the decent folks quit and only the idiots are left to run the show, it won't be good for the future of Barrayar. About which I do care.” It startled him to realize how passionately true that statement had become, of late. He thought of the two replicators in that guarded room in Vorkosigan House. I always thought my parents could fix anything. Now it's my turn. Dear God, how did this happen?

“I never imagined a place like this.” Corbeau's jerky wave around, Miles construed, now meant Quaddiespace. “I never imagined a woman like Garnet Five. I want to stay here.”

Miles had a bad sense of a desperate young man making permanent decisions for the sake of temporary stimuli. Graf Station was attractive at first glance, certainly, but Corbeau had grown up in open country with real gravity, real air—would he adapt, or would the techno-claustrophobia creep up on him? And the young woman for whom he proposed to throw his life over, was she worthy, or would Corbeau prove a passing amusement to her? Or, over time, a bad mistake? Hell, they'd known each other bare weeks—no one could know, least of all Corbeau and Garnet Five.

“I want out,” said Corbeau. “I can't stand it any more.”

Miles tried again. “If you withdraw your request for political asylum in the Union before the quaddies reject it, it might still be folded into your present legal ambiguity and made to disappear, without further prejudice to your career. If you don't withdraw it first, the desertion charge will certainly stick, and do you vast damage.”

Corbeau looked up and said anxiously, “Doesn't this firefight that Brun's patrol had with the quaddie security here make it in the heat? The Prince Xav 's surgeon said it probably did.”

In the heat , desertion in the face of the enemy, was punishable by death in the Barrayaran military code. Desertion in peacetime was punishable by long stretches of time in some extremely unpleasant stockades. Either seemed excessively wasteful, all things considered. “I think it would require some pretty convoluted legal twisting to call this episode a battle. For one thing, defining it so runs directly counter to the Emperor's stated desire to maintain peaceful relations with this important trade depot. Still . . . given a sufficiently hostile court and ham-handed defense counsel . . . I shouldn't call court-martial a wise risk, if it can possibly be avoided.” Miles rubbed his lips. “Were you drunk, by chance, when Sergeant Touchev came to pick you up?”

“No!”

“Hm. Pity. Drunk is a wonderfully safe defense. Not politically or socially radical, y'see. I don't suppose . . . ?”

Corbeau's mouth tightened in indignation. Suggesting Corbeau lie about his chemical state would not go over well, Miles sensed. Which gave him a higher opinion of the young officer, true. But it didn't make Miles's life any easier.

“I still want out,” Corbeau repeated stubbornly.

“The quaddies don't much like Barrayarans this week, I'm afraid. Relying on them granting your asylum to pluck you out of your dilemma seems to me to be a grave mistake. There must be half a dozen better ways to solve your problems, if you'd open your mind to wider tactical possibilities. In fact, almost any other way would be better than this.”

Corbeau shook his head, mute.

“Well, think about it, Ensign. I suspect the situation will remain murky until I find out what happened to Lieutenant Solian. At that point, I hope to unravel this tangle quickly, and the chance to change your mind about really bad ideas could run out abruptly.”

He climbed wearily to his feet. Corbeau, after a moment of uncertainty, rose and saluted. Miles returned an acknowledging nod and motioned to Roic, who spoke into the cell's intercom and obtained their release.

He exited, frowning thoughtfully, to encounter the hovering Chief Venn. “I want Solian , dammit,” Miles said grouchily to him. “This remarkable evaporation of his doesn't reflect any better on the competence of your security than it does on ours, y'know.”

Venn glowered at him. But he didn't contradict this remark.

Miles sighed and raised his wrist com to his lips to call Ekaterin.

* * *

She insisted on having him rendezvous with her back at the Kestrel . Miles was just as glad for the excuse to escape the depressing atmosphere of Security Post Three. He couldn't call it moral ambiguity, alas. Worse, he couldn't call it legal ambiguity. It was quite clear which side was in the right; it just wasn't his side, dammit.

He found her in their little cabin, just hanging his brown-and-silver House uniform out on a hook. She turned and embraced him, and he tilted his head back for a long, luxurious kiss.

“So, how did your venture into Quaddiespace with Bel go?” he inquired, when he had breath to spare again.

“Very well, I thought. If Bel ever wants a change from being a portmaster, I believe it could go into Union