or give up the attack. …' The transmission was interrupted by static. '—don't know how they're doing it. They can't possibly have packed enough engine in those shuttles to generate this… .' More static. The transmission abruptly broke off.
Vorkosigan selected another. Illyan leaned over his shoulder anxiously. Cordelia sat on the bed, silent, head bowed, listening. The cup of victory; bitter on the tongue, heavy in the stomach, sad as defeat …
'—the flagship is under heavy fire,' reported another commander. Cordelia recognized the voice with a start, and craned her neck for a view of his face. It was Gottyan; evidently he had his captaincy at last. 'I'm going to drop shields altogether and attempt to knock one out with a maximum burst.'
'Don't do it, Korabik!' Vorkosigan shouted hopelessly. The decision, whatever it was, had been made an hour ago, its consequences ineradicably fixed in time.
Gottyan turned his head to one side. 'Ready, Commander Vorkalloner? We are attempting—' he began, and was drowned by static, then silence.
Vorkosigan struck his fist on the desk, hard. 'Damn! How the hell long is it going to take them to figure …' He stared into the snow, then reran the transmission, transfixing it with a frightening expression, grief and rage and nausea mixed. He then selected another band, this time a computer graphic of the space around Escobar, and the ships as little colored lights winking and diving through it. It looked tiny, and bright, and simple, like a child's game. He shook his head at it, lips tight and bloodless.
Venne's face interrupted again. He was pale, with peculiar lines of tension running down to the corners of his mouth.
'Sir, I think you'd better come to the Tactics Room.'
'I can't, Venne, without breaking arrest. Where's Commodore Helski, or Commodore Couer?'
'Helski went forward with the Prince and Admiral Vorhalas, sir. Commodore Couer is here now. You're the ranking flag officer aboard now.'
'The Prince was quite explicit.'
'The Prince—I believe the Prince is dead, sir.' Vorkosigan closed his eyes, and a sigh went out of him, joylessly. He opened them again, and leaned forward. 'Is that confirmed? Do you have any new orders from Admiral Vorhalas?'
'It's—Admiral Vorhalas was with the Prince, sir. Their ship was hit.' Venne turned away to view something over his shoulder, then turned back. 'It's,' he had to clear his throat, 'it's confirmed. The Prince's flagship has been—obliterated. There's nothing left but debris. You're in command now, sir.'
Vorkosigan's face was cold and unhappy. 'Then transmit Contingency Blue orders at once. All ships cease firing immediately. Put all power into shields. This ship to make course for Escobar now at maximum boost. We've got to cut down on our transmission time lag.'
'Contingency Blue, sir? That's full retreat!'
'I know, Commander. I wrote it.'
'But full retreat …'
'Commander Venne, the Escobarans have a new weapon system. It's called a plasma mirror field. It's a new Betan development. It turns the attacker's burst back on itself. Our ships are shooting themselves down with their own firepower.'
'My God! What can we do?'
'Not a damn thing, unless, we want to start boarding their ships and strangling the bastards by hand, one at a time. Attractive, but impractical. Transmit those orders' And order the Commander of Engineers and the Chief Pilot Officer to the Tactics Room. And get the guard commander down here to relieve his men. I don't care to be stunned on the way out the door.'
'Yes, sir!' Venne broke off.
'Got to get those troopships turned around first,' muttered Vorkosigan, rising from his swivel chair. He turned to find both Cordelia and Illyan staring at him.
'How did you know—' began Illyan.
'—about the plasma mirrors?' finished Cordelia.
Vorkosigan was quite expressionless. 'You told me, Cordelia, in your sleep, while Illyan was out. Under the influence of one of the surgeons potions, of course. You'll suffer no ill effects from it.'
She stood upright, aghast. 'That—you miserable—torture would have been more honorable!'
'Oh, smooth, sir!' congratulated Illyan. 'I knew you were all right!'
Vorkosigan shot him a look of dislike. 'It doesn't matter. The information was confirmed too late to do us any good.'
There was a knock on the door.
'Come on, Illyan. It's time to take my soldiers home.'
CHAPTER TEN
Illyan came back promptly for Bothari, barely an hour later. This was followed for Cordelia by twelve hours alone. She considered escaping the room, as her soldierly duty, and engaging in a little one-woman sabotage. But if Vorkosigan was indeed directing a full retreat, it would hardly do to interfere.
She lay on his bed in a black weariness. He had betrayed her; he was no better than the rest of them. 'My perfect warrior, my dear hypocrite'—and it appeared Vorrutyer had known him better than she, after all—no. That was unjust. He had done his duty, in extracting that information; she had done the same, in concealing it for as long as possible. And as one soldier to another, even if an ersatz one—five hours active service, was it?—she had to agree with Illyan, it had been smooth. She could detect no aftereffects at all in herself from whatever he had used for the secret invasion of her mind.
Whatever he had used … What, indeed, could he have used? Where had he cadged it, and when? Illyan hadn't brought it to him. He had been as surprised as she when Vorkosigan dropped that bit of intelligence. One must either believe he kept a secret stash of interrogation drugs hidden in his quarters, or …
'Dear God,' she whispered, not a curse, but a prayer. 'What have I stumbled into now?' She paced the room, the connections clicking unstoppably into place.
Heart-certainty. Vorkosigan had never questioned her; he had known about the plasma mirrors in advance.
It appeared, further, that he was the only man in the Barrayaran command who knew. Vorhalas had not. The Prince certainly had not. Nor Illyan.
'Put all the bad eggs in one basket,' she muttered. 'And—drop the basket? Oh, it couldn't have been his own plan! Surely not …'
She had a sudden horrific vision of it, all complete; the most wasteful political assassination plot in Barrayaran history, and the most subtle, the corpses hidden in a mountain of corpses, forever inextricable.
But he must have had the information from somewhere. Somewhere between the time she had left him with no worse troubles than an engine room full of mutineers, and now, struggling to pull a disarmed armada back to safety before the destruction they had unleashed crashed back on them. Somewhere in a quiet, green silk room, where a great choreographer designed a dance of death, and the honor of a man of honor was broken on the wheel of his service.
Vorrutyer of the demonic vanity shrank, and shrank, before the swelling vision, to a mouse, to a flea, to a pinprick.
'My God, I thought Aral seemed twitchy. He must be half-mad. And the Emperor—the Prince was his son. Can this be real? Or have I gone as crazy as Bothari?'
She forced herself to sit, then lie down, but the plots and counterplots still turned in her brain, an gallery of betrayal within betrayal lining up abruptly at one point in space and time to accomplish its end. The blood beat in her brain, thick and sick.
'Maybe it's not true,' she consoled herself at last. 'I'll ask him, and that's what he'll say. He just questioned me in my sleep. We got the drop on them, and I'm the heroine who saved Escobar. He's just a simple soldier, doing his job.' She turned on her side, and stared into the dimness. 'Pigs have wings, and I can fly home on
