'Maybe.'
'My lord,' Bothari's voice was edged with agitation, 'you're not considering harboring this deserter?'
'Well .. .' Miles voice was mild. 'Technically, I don't know he's a deserter. I've merely heard some allegations.'
'He admitted it.'
'Bravado, perhaps. Inverted snobbery.'
'Are you hankering to be another Lord Vorloupulous?' asked Bothari dryly.
Miles laughed, and sighed; Baz's mouth twisted. Hathaway begged to be let in on the joke.
'It's Barrayaran law again,' Miles explained. 'Our courts are not kindly disposed to those who maintain the letter of the law and violate its spirit. The classic precedent was the case of Lord Vorloupulous and his 2000 cooks.'
'Did he run a chain of restaurants?' asked Hathaway, floundering. 'Don't tell me that's illegal on Barrayar too …'
'Oh, no. This was at the end of the Time of Isolation, almost a hundred years ago. Emperor Dorca Vorbarra was centralizing the government, and breaking the power of the Counts as separate governing entities—there was a civil war about it. One of the main things he did was eliminate private armies, what they used to call livery and maintenance on old Earth. Each Count was stripped down to twenty armed followers—barely a bodyguard.
'Well, Lord Vorloupulous had a feud going with a few neighbors, for which he found this allotment quite inadequate. So he hired on 2000 'cooks', so-called, and sent them out to carve up his enemies. He was quite ingenious about arming them, butcher knives instead of short swords and so on. There were plenty of recently unemployed veterans looking for work at the time, who weren't too proud to give it a try …' Miles's eyes glinted amusement.
'The Emperor, naturally, didn't see it his way. Dorca marched his regular army, by then the only one on Barrayar, on Vorloupulous and arrested him for treason, for which the sentence was—still is—public exposure and death by starvation. So the man with 2000 cooks was condemned to waste away in the Great Square of Vorbarr Sultana. And to think they always said Dorca Vorbarra had no sense of humor …'
Bothari smiled grimly, and Baz chuckled; Hathaway's laugh was more hollow. 'Charming,' he muttered.
'But it had a happy ending,' Miles went on. Hathaway brightened. 'The Cetagandans invaded us about that point, and Lord Vorloupulous was released.'
'By the Cetagandans? Lucky,' commented Hathaway.
'No, by Emperor Dorca, to fight the Cetagandans. You understand, he wasn't pardoned—the sentence was merely delayed. When the First Cetagandan War was over, he would have been expected to show up to complete it. But he died fighting, in battle, so he had an honorable death after all.'
'That's a happy ending?' Hathaway shrugged. 'Oh, well.'
Baz, Miles noted, had become silent and withdrawn again. Miles smiled at him, experimentally; he smiled back awkwardly, looking younger for it. Miles made his decision.
'Mr. Jesek, I'm going to make you a proposition, which you can take or leave. That ship I mentioned is the RG 132. The jump pilot officer's name is Arde Mayhew. If you can disappear—I mean really disappear—for the next couple of days, and then get in touch with him at the Silica shuttleport, he'll see that you get a berth on his ship, outbound.'
'Why should you help me at all, Mr.—Lord—'
'Mr. Naismith, for all practical purposes.' Miles shrugged. 'Call it a fancy for seeing people get second chances. It's something they're not very keen on, at home.'
Home, Baz's eyes echoed silently again. 'Well—it was good to hear the accent again, for a little time. I might just take you up on that,' he remembered to be cagey, 'or I might not.'
Miles nodded, retrieved his bottle, motioned to Bothari, and withdrew. They threaded their way back across the recycling center with an occasional muted clank. When Miles looked back, Jesek was a shadow, melting toward another exit.
Miles became conscious of a profound frown from Sergeant Bothari. He smiled wryly, and kicked over a control casing from some junked industrial robot, lying skeletally athwart a mound of other rubble. 'Would you have had me turn him in?' he asked softly. 'But you're Service to the bone, I suppose you would. So would my father, I guess—he's so all-fired stringent about the law, no matter how ghastly the consequences.'
Bothari grew still. 'Not—always, my lord.' He retreated into a suddenly neutral silence.
'Miles,' whispered Elena, detouring from a nocturnal trip to the bathroom from the bedroom she was sharing with Mrs. Naismith, 'aren't you ever going to bed? It's almost morning.'
'Not sleepy.' He entered yet another inquiry on his grandmother's comconsole. It was true; he still felt fresh, and preternaturally alert. It was just as well, for he was plugged into a commercial network of enormous complexity. Ninety percent of success seemed to lie in asking the right questions. Tricky, but after several hours work he seemed to be getting the hang of it. 'Besides, with Mayhew in the spare bedroom, I'm doomed to the couch.'
'I thought my father had the couch.'
'He ceded it to me, with a smile of grim glee. He hates the couch. He slept on it all the time I went to school here. He's blamed every ache, twinge, and lower back pain he's had ever since on it, even after two years. It couldn't possibly be old age creeping up on him, oh, no …'
Elena strangled a giggle. She leaned over his shoulder for a look at the screen. The light from it silvered her profile, and the scent of her hair, falling forward, dizzied him. 'Finding anything?' she asked.
Miles entered three wrong directions in a row, swore, and refocused his attention. 'Yes, I think so. There were a lot more factors to be taken into account than I realized, at first. But I think I've found something—' He retrieved his fumbled data, and waved his finger through the holoscreen. 'That is my first cargo.'
The screen displayed a lengthy manifest. 'Agricultural equipment,' she analyzed. 'Bound for—whatever is Felice?'
'It's a country on Tau Verde IV, wherever that is. It's a four-week run—I've been cost-calculating fuel, and supplies, and the logistics of it in general—Everything from spare parts to toilet paper. That's not what's interesting, though. What's interesting is that with that cargo I can pay for the trip and clear my debt to Calhoun, well inside the time limit on my note.' His voice went small. 'I'm afraid I, uh, underestimated the time I'd need for the RG 132 to run enough cargos to cover my note, a little. A lot. Well, quite a lot. Badly. The ship costs more to run than I'd realized, when I finally went to add up all the real numbers.' He pointed to a figure. 'But that's what they're offering for transport, C.O.D. Felice. And the cargo's ready to go immediately.'
Her eyebrows drew down in awed puzzlement. 'Pay for the whole ship in one run? But that's wonderful! But …'
He grinned. 'But?'
'But why hasn't somebody else snapped up this cargo? It seems to have been sitting in the warehouse a long time.'
'Clever girl,' he crooned encouragingly. 'Go on.'
'I see they only pay on delivery. But maybe that's normal?'
'Yes …' he spread the word out, like butter. 'Anything else?'
She pursed her lips. 'Something's weird.'
'Indeed.' His eyes crinkled. 'Something is, as you say, weird.'
'Do I have to guess? Because if I do, I'm going back to bed …' She stifled a yawn.
'Ah. Well—Tau Verde IV is in a war zone, at the moment. It seems there is a planetary war in progress. One of the sides has the local wormhole exit blocked—not by their own people, it seems to be a somewhat industrially backward place—they've hired a mercenary fleet. And why has this cargo been mouldering in a warehouse so long? Because none of the big shipping companies will carry into a war zone—their insurance lapses. That goes for most of the little independents, as well. But since I'm not insured, it does not go for me.' He smirked.
Elena looked doubtful. 'Is it dangerous, crossing the blockade? If you cooperate on their stop-and search —'
'In this case, I think so. The cargo happens to be addressed to the other side of the fray.'
