A knock sounded at the cabin door, and Armsman Roic's diffident voice, “My lord?”
“On my way, Roic.” Miles and Ekaterin exchanged places—finding himself at her chest height, he stole a pleasantly resilient hug in passing—and he exited to the courier ship's narrow corridor.
Roic wore a slightly plainer version of Miles's Vorkosigan House uniform, as befitted his liege-sworn armsman's status. “Do you want me to pack up your things now for transfer to the Barrayaran flagship, m'lord?” he asked.
“No. We're going to stay aboard the courier.”
Roic almost managed to conceal his wince. He was a young man of imposing height and intimidating breadth of shoulder, and had described his bunk above the courier ship's engineer as
Miles added, “I don't care to hand off control of my movements, not to mention my air supply, to either side in this squabble just yet. The flagship's bunks aren't much bigger anyway, I assure you, Armsman.”
Roic smiled ruefully, and shrugged. “I'm afraid you should've brought Jankowski, sir.”
“What, because he's shorter?”
“No, m'lord!” Roic looked faintly indignant. “Because he's a real veteran.”
A Count of Barrayar was limited by law to a bodyguard of a score of sworn men; the Vorkosigans had by tradition recruited most of their armsmen from retiring twenty-year veterans of the Imperial Service. By political need, in the last decades they'd mostly been former ImpSec men. They were a keen but graying bunch. Roic was an interesting new exception.
“When did that become a concern?” Miles's father's cadre of armsmen treated Roic as a junior because he was, but if they were treating him as a second-class citizen . . .
“Eh . . .” Roic waved somewhat inarticulately around the courier ship, by which Miles construed that the problem lay in more recent encounters.
Miles, about to lead off down the short corridor, instead leaned against the wall and folded his arms. “Look, Roic—there's scarcely a man in the Imperial Service your age or younger who's faced as much live fire in the Emperor's employ as you have in the Hassadar Municipal Guard. Don't let the damned green uniforms spook you. It's empty swagger. Half of 'em would fall over in a faint if they were asked to take down someone like that murderous lunatic who shot up Hassadar Square.”
“I was already halfway across the plaza, m'lord. It would've been like swimming halfway across a river, deciding you couldn't make it, and turning around to swim back. It was
“But not the time to take out another dozen or so bystanders. Auto-needler's a filthy weapon.” Miles brooded briefly.
“That it is, m'lord.”
For all his height, Roic tended to shyness when he felt himself to be socially outclassed, which unfortunately seemed to be much of the time in the Vorkosigans' service. Since the shyness showed on his surface mainly as a sort of dull stolidity, it tended to get overlooked.
“You're a Vorkosigan armsman,” said Miles firmly. “The ghost of General Piotr is woven into that brown and silver. They'll be spooked by
Roic's brief smile conveyed more gratitude than conviction. “Wish I could've met your grandfather, m'lord. From all the tales they told of him back in the District, he was quite something. My great-grandfather served with him in the mountains during the Cetagandan Occupation, m'mother says.”
“Ah! Did she have any good stories about him?”
Roic shrugged. “He died of t' radiation after Vorkosigan Vashnoi was destroyed. M'grandmother would never talk about him much, so I don't know.”
“Pity.”
Lieutenant Smolyani poked his head around the corner. “We're locked on to the
“Very good, Lieutenant.”
Miles followed Roic, who had to duck his head through the oval doorway, into the courier's cramped personnel hatch bay. Smolyani took up station by the hatch controls. The control pad twinkled and beeped; the door slid open onto the airlock and the flex tube, beyond it. Miles nodded to Roic, who took a visible breath and swung himself through. Smolyani braced to a salute; Miles returned him an acknowledging nod and a “Thank you, Lieutenant,” and followed Roic.
A meter of stomach-lifting zero-gee in the flex tube ended at a similar hatchway. Miles grasped the handgrips and swung himself through and smoothly to his feet in the open airlock. He stepped from it into a very much more spacious hatch bay. On his left, Roic loomed formally, awaiting him. The flagship's door slid closed behind him.
Before him, three green-uniformed men and a civilian stood stiffly to attention. Not one of them changed expression at Miles's un-Barrayaran physique. Presumably Vorpatril, whom Miles barely recalled from a few passing encounters in Vorbarr Sultana's capital scene, remembered him more vividly, and had prudently briefed his staff on the mutoid appearance of Emperor Gregor's shortest, not to mention youngest and newest, Voice.
Admiral Eugin Vorpatril was of middle height, stocky, white-haired, and grim. He stepped forward and gave Miles a crisp and proper salute. “My Lord Auditor. Welcome aboard the
“Thank you, Admiral.” He did not add
Vorpatril continued, “May I introduce my Fleet Security commander, Captain Brun.”
The lean, tense man, possibly even grimmer than his admiral, nodded curtly. Brun had been in operational charge of the ill-fated patrol whose hair-trigger exploits had blown the situation from minor legal brangle to major diplomatic incident. No, not happy at all.
“Senior Cargomaster Molino of the Komarran fleet consortium.”
Molino too was middle-aged, and quite as dyspeptic-looking as the Barrayarans, though dressed in neat dark Komarran-style tunic and trousers. A senior cargomaster was the ranking executive and financial officer of the limited-term corporate entity that was a commercial convoy, and as such bore most of the responsibilities of a fleet admiral with a fraction of the powers. He also had the unenviable task of being the designated interface between a potentially very disparate bunch of commercial interests, and their Barrayaran military protectors, which was usually enough to account for dyspepsia even without a crisis. He murmured a polite, “My Lord Vorkosigan.”
Vorpatril's tone took on a slightly gritty quality. “My fleet legal officer, Ensign Deslaurier.”
Tall Deslaurier, pale and wan beneath a lingering touch of adolescent acne, managed a nod.
Miles blinked in surprise. When, under his old covert ops identity, he had run a supposedly independent mercenary fleet for ImpSec's galactic operations, Fleet Legal had been a major department; just negotiating the peaceful passage of armed ships through all the varied local space legal jurisdictions had been a full-time job of nightmarish complexity. “Ensign.” Miles returned the nod, and chose his wording carefully. “You, ah . . . would seem to have a considerable responsibility, for your rank and age.”
Deslaurier cleared his throat, and said in a nearly inaudible voice, “Our department chief was sent home earlier in the voyage, my Lord Auditor. Compassionate leave. His mother'd died.”
“Yes, my lord.”
Vorpatril put in, possibly mercifully, “I and my staff are entirely at your disposal, my Lord Auditor, and are ready with our reports as you requested. Would you care to follow me to our briefing room?”
“Yes, thank you, Admiral.”
Some shuffling and ducking through the corridors brought the party to a standard military briefing room: bolted-down holovid-equipped table and station chairs, friction matting underfoot harboring the faint musty odor of a sealed and gloomy chamber that never enjoyed sunlight or fresh air. The place
