leaps that turned into bird-like swoops as the gravity gave up the ghost. The shuttle which was to be their lifeboat was a stripped-down model, cramped and comfortless. Into it they floated and sealed the hatch. The pilot slid into the control chair and lowered his headset, and the shuttle kicked away from the side of their dying ship.
The engineer floated to her and handed her a little black box. 'I thought you ought to do the honors, Captain.'
'Ha. I bet you wouldn't kill your own dinner, either,' she replied, trying to lighten the mood. They had served their ship together for barely five hours, but it still hurt. 'Are we out of range, Parnell?'
'Yes, Captain.'
'Gentlemen,' she said, and paused, gathering them in by eye, 'I thank you all. Look away from the left port, please.'
She pulled the lever on the box. There was a soundless flash of brilliant blue light, and a general rush for the tiny port immediately after to see the last red glow as the ship folded into itself, carrying its military secrets to a wandering grave.
They shook hands solemnly all around, some right side up, some upside down, some floating at other angles, then secured themselves. Cordelia pulled herself into the navigation station beside Parnell, strapped in, and ran a quick check of its systems.
'Now comes the tricky part,' murmured Parnell. 'I'd still be happier with a straight max boost and try to outrun 'em.'
'We could get away from those fat battlewagons, maybe,' Cordelia conceded. 'But their fast couriers would eat us alive. At least we look like a rock,' she added, thinking of the artistic, probe-reflective camouflage that encased the lifeboat like a shell.
Several minutes of silence followed, as she concentrated on her work. 'All right,' she spoke at last, 'let's sneak out of this neighborhood. It's going to be overcrowded very soon.'
She did not fight the acceleration, but let it press her back into her seat. Tired. She hadn't thought it possible to be more tired than she was afraid. This war nonsense was a great psychological education. That chronometer had to be wrong. Surely it had been a year, and not an hour… . A small light blinked on her control panel. Fear washed the weariness back out of her body with a rush.
'Kill everything,' she ordered, tapping controls herself, and was instantly plunged into weightless darkness. 'Parnell, give us a little realistic tumble.' Her inner ear and a greasy queasiness in her belly told her she was obeyed.
Now her sense of time began to be truly disordered. Darkness and silence reigned, but for an occasional whisper of movement, fabric on plastic, as someone stirred in his seat. In her imagination she felt the Barrayaran probes touching her ship, touching her, icy fingers up her back. I am a rock. I am a void. I am a silence. … In the rear the silence was broken by the noise of someone vomiting, and some muffled swearing. Blast this tumble. Hope he had time to grab a bag… .
There came a jerk and a pressure of weight at an odd angle. Parnell spat an oath like a sob. 'Tractor tow! That's it.'
She sighed without relief, and reached out to key the shuttle back to life, wincing at the blinding brightness of the little lights. 'Well, let's see what's caught us.'
Her hands flicked over the panels. She took a glance at her exterior monitors, and hastily pressed the red button that crashed the lifeboat's computer memory and recognition codes.
'What the hell have we got out there?' asked the engineer anxiously, noting the gesture as he made his way to her shoulder.
'Two cruisers and a fast courier,' she informed him. 'We appear to be slightly outnumbered.'
He snorted unhappily.
A disembodied voice blared from the comm, at too great a volume; she turned it down quickly.
'… not acknowledge surrender, we will destroy you.'
'This is Lifeboat Shuttle A5A,' she responded, modulating her voice carefully. 'Captain Cordelia Naismith, Betan Expeditionary Force, commanding. We are an unarmed lifeboat.'
The comm emitted a surprised 'Peh!' and the voice added, 'Another damned woman! You people are slow learners.'
There was an unintelligible murmur in the background, and the voice returned to its original official tone. 'You will be taken in tow. At the first sign of resistance, you will be obliterated. Understood?'
'Acknowledged,' Cordelia responded. 'We surrender.'
Parnell shook his head angrily. She killed the comm and raised an eyebrow.
'I think we should try and make a break,' he said.
'No. These guys are professional paranoids. The sanest one I ever met didn't like being in a room with a closed door—claimed you never knew what was on the other side. If they say they'll shoot, you'd better believe 'em.'
Parnell and the engineer exchanged a look. 'Go ahead, Nell,' said the engineer. 'Tell her.'
Parnell cleared his throat, and moistened dry lips. 'We wanted to let you know, Captain—that if you think, uh, blowing up the lifeboat might be the best thing for all concerned, we're with you. Nobody else is looking forward to being taken prisoner either.'
Cordelia blinked at this offer. 'That's—very courageous of you, Pilot Officer, but totally unnecessary. Don't flatter yourself. We were handpicked for our ignorance, not our knowledge. You all only have guesses about what was aboard that convoy, and even I don't know any technical details. If we cooperate on the surface, we've at least some chance of getting through this alive.'
'It—wasn't spilling intelligence we were thinking about, ma'am. It's their other habits.'
A sticky silence fell. Cordelia sighed, spiraling in a vortex of grieving doubt. 'It's all right,' she said at last. 'Their reputation is way overblown. Quite decent fellows, some of them.' Especially one, her mind mocked. And even assuming he's still alive, do you really think you could find him in all this mess? Or finding him, save him from the gifts you yourself have brought from hell's hardware store without betraying your duty? Or is this a secret suicide pact? Do you even know yourself? Know thyself.
Parnell, watching her face, shook his head grimly. 'You sure?'
'I've never killed anybody in my life. I'm not going to start with people on my own side, for pity's sake.'
Parnell acknowledged the justice of this with a little quizzical shrug, not quite concealing an underlying relief.
'Anyway, I've got things to live for. This war can't last forever.'
'Somebody back home?' he asked, and as her eyes turned to the probe readouts, added wisely, 'Or out there?'
'Uh, yeah. Out there somewhere.'
He shook his head in sympathy. 'That's a tough one.' He studied her still profile, and added encouragingly, 'But you're right. The big boys will blast those bastards out of the sky sooner or later.'
She gave vent to a small, mechanical, 'Ha,' and massaged her face with her fingertips, trying to rub out the tension. She had a sudden waking vision of a great warship cracked open, spilling its living guts like some monstrous seedpod. Frozen, sterile seeds, adrift on no wind, bloated from decompression and turning forever. Could one recognize a face, after that? she wondered. She turned her chair half away from Parnell, signifying an end to the conversation.
A Barrayaran fast courier took them in tow within an hour.
It was the familiar smell that hit her first, the metal-and-machine-oil, ozone-redolent, locker-room smell of a Barrayaran warship. The two tall soldiers in black who escorted her, each keeping a hand firmly on her elbow, maneuvered her through one last narrow oval doorway to what she guessed must be the main prison area of the great flagship. She and her four men were stripped ruthlessly, searched in minute and paranoid detail, medically examined, holographed, retinaprinted, identified, and issued shapeless orange pajamas. Her men were led away separately. In spite of her words to Parnell, she was sickened by dread of them being peeled, layer by layer, for information they did not hold. Gently now, reason argued; surely the Barrayarans would save them for prisoner exchange.
The guards snapped to attention. Turning, she saw a high-ranking Barrayaran officer enter the processing
