Mirror Dance

Norwood—”

A comm beeper interrupted him. Quinn leaned on her hands on the comconsole to listen.

“Quinn, this is Bel. That contact I found agrees to meet us at the Ariel’s docking bay. If you want to be in on the interrogation, you need to pod over now.”

“Yes, right, I’ll be there, Quinn out.” She turned, haggard, and started for the door. “Elena, see that he,” a jerk of her thumb, “is confined to quarters.”

“Yeah, well, after you talk with whatever Bel dragged in, get yourself some rest, huh, Quinnie? You’re unstrung. You almost lost it back there.”

Quinn’s ambiguous parting wave acknowledged the truth of this, without making any promises. As Quinn exited, Bothari-Jesek turned to her station console, to order up a personnel pod to be ready for Quinn by the time she arrived at the hatch.

Mark rose and wandered around the tactics room, his hands thrust carefully into his pockets. A dozen real- time and holo-schematic display consoles sat dark and still; communication and encoding systems lay silent. He pictured the tactics nerve center fully staffed, alive and bright and chaotic, heading into battle. He imagined enemy fire peeling the ship open like a meal tray, all that life smashed and burned and spilled into the hard radiation and vacuum of space. Fire from House Fell’s station at Jumppoint Five, say, as the Peregrine fought for escape. He shuddered, nauseated.

He paused before the sealed door to the briefing chamber. Bothari-Jesek was now engaged in some other communication, some decision having to do with the security of their Fell Station moorings. Curious, he laid his palm upon the lock-pad. Somewhat to his surprise, the door slid demurely open. Somebody had some re-programming to do, if all top-secured Dendarii facilities were keyed to admit a dead man’s palm print. A lot of re-programming— Miles doubtless had it fixed so he could just waft right through anywhere in the fleet. That would be his style.

Bothari-Jesek glanced up, but said nothing. Taking that as tacit permission, Mark walked into the briefing room, and circled the table. Lights came up for him as he paced. Thorne’s words, spoken here, echoed in his head. Norwood said, The Admiral will get out of here even if we don’t. How carefully had the Dendarii examined their recordings of the drop mission? Surely someone had been over them all several times by now. What could he possibly see that they hadn’t? They knew their people, their equipment. But I know the medical complex. I know Jackson’s Whole.

He wondered how far his palm would take him. He slipped into Quinn’s station chair; sure enough, files bloomed for him, opened at his touch as no woman ever had. He found the downloaded records of the drop mission. Norwood’s data was lost, but Tonkin had been with him part of the time. What had Tonkin seen? Not colored lines on the map, but real-time, real-eye, real-ear? Was there such a record? The command helmet had kept such, he knew, if trooper-helmets did too then—ah, ha. Tonkin’s visuals and audio came up on the console before his fascinated eyes.

Trying to follow them gave him an almost instant headache. This was no ballasted and gimballed vid pick- up, no steady pan, but rather the jerky, snatching glances of real head movements. He slowed the replay to watch himself in the lift-tube foyer, a short, agitated fellow in grey camouflage, glittering eyes in a set face. Do I really look like that? The deformities of his body were not so apparent as he’d imagined, under the loose uniform.

He sat behind Tonkin’s eyes and walked with him through the hurried maze of Bharaputra’s buildings, tunnels, and corridors, all the way to the last firefight at the end. Thorne had quoted Norwood correctly; it was right there on the vid. Though he’d been wrong on the time; Norwood was gone eleven minutes by the helmet’s unsubjective clock. Norwood’s flushed face reappeared, panting, the urgent laugh sounded—and, moments later, the grenade-strike, the explosion—almost ducking, Mark hastily shut off the vid, and glanced down at himself as if half-expecting to be branded with another mortal splattering of blood and brains.

If there’s any clue, it has to be earlier. He started the program again from the parting in the foyer. The third time through, he slowed it down and took it step by step, examining each. The patient, finicky, self-forgetful absorption was almost pleasurable. Tiny details—you could lose yourself in tiny details, an anesthetic for brain-pain.

“Got you,” he whispered. It had flashed past so fast as to be subliminal, if you were running the vid in real-time. The briefest glimpse of a sign on the wall, an arrow on a cross-corridor labeled Shipping and Receiving.

He looked up to find Bothari-Jesek watching him. How long had she been sitting there? She slumped relaxed, long legs crossed at booted ankles, long fingers tented together. “What have you got?” she asked quietly.

He called up the holomap of the ghostly buildings with Norwood and Tonkin’s line of march glowing inside. “Not here,” he pointed, “but there.” He marked a complex well off-sides from the route the Dendarii had traveled with the cryo-chamber. “That’s where Norwood went. Through that tunnel. I’m sure of it! I’ve seen that facility—been all over that building. Hell, I used to play hide and seek in it with my friends, till the babysitters made us stop. I can see it in my head as surely as if I had Norwood’s helmet vid playing right here on the table. He took that cryo-chamber down to Shipping and Receiving, and he shipped it!”

Bothari-Jesek sat up. “Is that possible? He had so little time!”

“Not just possible. Easy! The packing equipment is fully automated. All he had to do was put the cryo- chamber in the casing machine and hit the keypad. The robots would even have delivered it to the loading dock. It’s a busy place—receives supplies for the whole complex, ships everything from data disks to frozen body parts for transplants to genetically engineered fetuses to emergency equipment for search and rescue teams. Such as reconditioned cryo-chambers. All sorts of stuff! It operates around the clock, and it would have had to be evacuated in a hurry when our raid hit. While the packing equipment was running, Norwood could have been generating the shipping label on the computer. Slapped ’em together, gave it to the transport robot—and then, if he was as smart as I think, erased the file record. Then he ran like hell back to Tonkin.”

“So the cryo-chamber is sitting packed on a loading dock downside! Wait’ll I tell Quinn! I suppose we’d better tell the Bharaputrans where to look—”

“I …” he held up a restraining hand. “I think …”

She looked at him, and sank back into the station chair, eyes narrowing. “Think what?”

“It’s been almost a full day since we lifted. It’s been a half-day and more since we told the Bharaputrans to look for the cryo-chamber. If that cryo-chamber was still sitting on a loading dock, I think the Bharaputrans would have found it by now. The automated shipping system is efficient. I think the cryo- chamber already went out, maybe within the first hour. I think the Bharaputrans and Fell are telling the truth. They must be going insane right now. Not only is there no cryo-chamber down there, they haven’t got a clue in hell where it went!”

Bothari-Jesek sat stiff. “Do we?” she asked. “My God. If you’re right—it could be on its way anywhere. Freighted out from any of two dozen orbital transfer stations—it could have been jumped by now! Simon Illyan is going to have a stroke when we report this.”

“No. Not anywhere,” Mark corrected intently. “It could only have been addressed to somewhere that Medic Norwood knew. Someplace he could remember, even when he was surrounded and cut off and under fire.”

She licked her lips, considering this. “Right,” she said at last. “Almost anywhere. But at least we can start guessing by studying Norwood’s personnel files.” She sat back, and looked up at him with grave eyes. “You know, you do all right, alone in a quiet room. You’re not stupid. I didn’t see how you could be. You’re just not the field- officer type.”

“I’m not any kind of officer-type. I hate the military.”

“Miles loves field work. He’s addicted to adrenalin rushes.”

“I hate them. I hate being afraid. I can’t think when I’m scared. I freeze when people shout at me.”

“Yet you can think… . How much of the time are you scared?”

“Most of it,” he admitted grimly.

“Then why do you …” she hesitated, as if choosing her words very cautiously, “why do you keep trying to be Miles?”

“I’m not, you’re making me play him!”