Mirror Dance

At least you got the clones out.

No. Miles got the clones out.

Dammit, dammit, dammit …

This half-baked disaster was not the glorious redemption of which he’d dreamed. Yet what had he expected the aftermath to be? In all is desperate plotting, he’d planned almost nothing past his projected return to Escobar with the Ariel. To Escobar, grinning, with the clones under his wing. He’d imagined himself dealing with an enraged Miles then, but then it would have been too late for Miles to stop him, too late to take his victory from him. He’d half-expected to be arrested, but to go willingly, whistling. What had he wanted?

To be free of survivor guilt? To break that old curse? Nobody you knew back then is still alive… . That was the motive he’d thought of as driving him, when he thought at all. Maybe it wasn’t so simple, he’d wanted to free himself from something. … In the last two years, reed of Ser Galen and the Komarrans by the actions of Miles Vorkosigan, freed again altogether by Miles on a London street at dawn, he had not found the happiness he’d dreamed of during his slavery to he terrorists. Miles had broken only the physical chains that bound him; others, invisible, had cut so deep that flesh had grown around hem.

What did you think? That if you were as heroic as Miles, they’d lave to treat you like Miles? That they would have to love you?

And who were they? The Dendarii? Miles himself? Or behind Stiles, those sinister, fascinating shadows, Count and Countess Vorkosigan?

His image of Miles’s parents was blurred, uncertain. The unbalanced Galen had presented them, his hated enemies, as black villains, he Butcher of Komarr and his virago wife. Yet with his other hand he’d required Mark to study them, using unedited source materials, heir writings, their public speeches, private vids. Miles’s parents were Nearly complex people, hardly saints, but just as clearly not the foaming sadistic sodomite and murderous bitch of Galen’s raving paranoias.

In the vids Count Aral Vorkosigan appeared merely a grey-haired, thick-set man with oddly intent eyes in his rather heavy face, with a rich, raspy, level voice. Countess Cordelia Vorkosigan spoke less often, a tall woman with red-roan hair and notable grey eyes, too powerful to be called pretty, yet so centered and balanced as to seem beautiful even though, strictly speaking, she was not.

And now Bothari-Jesek threatened to deliver him to them …

He sat up, and turned on the light. A quick tour of the cabin revealed nothing to commit suicide with. No weapons or blades—the Dendarii had disarmed him when he’d come aboard. Nothing to hang a belt or rope from. Boiling himself to death in the shower was not an option, a sealed fail-safe sensor turned it off automatically when it exceeded physiological tolerances. He went back to bed.

The image of a little, urgent, shouting man with his chest exploding outward in a carmine spray replayed in slow motion in his head. He was surprised when he began to cry. Shock, it had to be the shock that Bothari-Jesek had diagnosed. I hated the little bugger when he was alive, why am I crying? It was absurd. Maybe he was going insane.

Two nights without sleep had left him ringingly numb, yet he could not sleep now. He only dozed, drifting in and out of near-dreams and recent, searing memories. He half-hallucinated about being in a rubber raft on a river of blood, bailing frantically in the red torrent, so that when Quinn came to get him after only an hour’s rest, it was actually a relief.

Chapter Nine

“Whatever you do,” said Captain Thorne, “don’t mention the Betan rejuvenation treatment.

Mark frowned. “What Betan rejuvenation treatment? Is there one?”

“No.”

“Then why the hell would I mention it?”

“Never mind, just don’t.”

Mark gritted his teeth, swung around in his station chair square to he vid plate, and pressed the keypad to lower his seat till his booted feet were flat to the floor. He was fully kitted in Naismith’s officer’s greys. Quinn had dressed him as though he were a doll, or an idiot child. Quinn, Bothari-Jesek, and Thorne had then preceded to fill his lead with a mass of sometimes-conflicting instructions on how to play Miles in the upcoming interview. As if I didn’t know. The three captains now each sat in station chairs out of range of the vid pick-up in he Peregrine’s tac room, ready to prompt him through an ear-bug, and he’d thought Galen was a puppet master. His ear itched, and he wriggled the bug in irritation, earning a frown from Bothari-Jesek. Quinn had never stopped scowling.

Quinn had never stopped. She still wore her blood-soaked fatigues, her sudden inheritance of command of this debacle had allowed her no rest. Thorne had cleaned up and changed to ship greys, but obviously had not slept yet. Both their faces stood out pale in the shadows, too sharply lined. Quinn had made Mark take a stimulant when, getting him dressed, she’d found him too muzzy-mouthed for her taste, and he did not quite like its effects. His head and eyes were almost too clear, but his body felt beaten. All the edges and surfaces of the tac room seemed to stand out with unnatural clarity. Sounds and voices in his ears seemed to have a painful serrated quality, sharp and blurred at once. Quinn was on the stuff too, he realized, watching her wince at a high electronic squeal from the comm equipment.

(“All right, you’re on,”) said Quinn through the ear-bug as the vid plate in front of him began to sparkle. They all shut up at last.

The image of Baron Fell materialized, and frowned at him too. Georish Stauber, Baron Fell of House Fell, was unusual for the leader of a Jacksonian Great House in that he still wore his original body. An old man’s body. The Baron was stout, pink of face, with a shiny liver-spotted scalp fringed by white hair trimmed short. The silk tunic he wore in his House’s particular shade of green made him look like a hypothyroid elf. But there was nothing elfin about his cold and penetrating eyes. Miles was not intimidated by a Jacksonian Baron’s power, Mark reminded himself. Miles was not intimidated by any power backed by less than three entire planets. His father the Butcher of Komarr could eat Jacksonian Great Houses for breakfast.

He, of course, was not Miles.

Screw that. I’m Miles for the next fifteen minutes, anyway.

“So, Admiral,” rumbled the Baron. “We meet again after all.”

“Quite.” Mark managed not to let his voice crack.

“I see you are as presumptuous as ever. And as ill-informed.”

“Quite.”

(“Start talking, dammit,”) Quinn’s voice hissed in his ear.

Mark swallowed. “Baron Fell, it was not a part of my original battle plan to involve Fell Station in this raid. I am as anxious to decamp with my forces as you are to have us leave. To that end, I request your help as a go- between. You … know that we’ve kidnapped Baron Bharaputra, I trust?”

“So I’m told.” One of Fell’s eyelids tic’d. “You’ve rather overreached your available back-up, have you not?”

“Have I?” Mark shrugged. “House Fell is in a state of vendetta with House Bharaputra, are you not?”

“Not exactly. House Fell was on the verge of ending the vendetta with House Bharaputra. We’ve found it mutually unprofitable, of late. I’m now suspected of collusion in your raid.” The Baron’s