the right arm of her suit. She slipped on her glove, covering the blue veins like pale rivers of ice in her wrist. Her eyes made Miles think of razors.
He stepped to her shoulder, and waved away her tech. The words he spoke weren't any of the dozens he had rehearsed for the occasion. He lowered his voice to whisper.
'I know all about suicide. Don't think you can fool me.'
She started, and flushed. Frowned at him in fierce scorn. Snapped her faceplate shut.
Forgive, whispered his anguished thought to her. It is necessary.
Arde lowered Miles's helmet over his head, connected his control leads, checked the connections. A lacework of fire netted, knotted, and tangled in Miles's gut. Damn, but it was getting hard to ignore.
He checked his comm link with the tactics room. 'Commodore Tung? Naismith here. Roll the vids.' The inside of his faceplate blurred with color, duplicate readouts of the tactics room telemetry for the field commander. Only communications, no servo links this time. The captured Pelian armor had none, and the old Oseran armor was all safely on manual override. Just in case somebody else out there was learning from experience.
'Last chance to change your mind,' Tung said over the comm link, continuing the old argument. 'Sure you wouldn't rather attack the Oserans after the transfer, farther from the Pelian bases? Our intelligence on them is so much more detailed …'
'No! We have to capture or destroy the payroll before the delivery. Taking it after is strategically useless.'
'Not entirely. We could sure use the money.'
And how, Miles reflected glumly. It would soon take scientific notation to register his debt to the Dendarii. A mercenary fleet could hardly burn money faster if the ships ran on steam power and the funds were shoveled directly into their furnaces. Never had one so little owed so much to so many, and it grew worse by the hour. His stomach oozed around his abdominal cavity like a tortured amoeba, throwing out pseudopods of pain and the vacuole of an acid belch. You are a psychosomatic illusion, Miles assured it.
The assault group formed up and marched to the waiting shuttles. Miles moved among them, trying to touch each person, call them by name, give them some personal word; they seemed to like that. He ordered their ranks in his mind, and wondered how many gaps there would be when this day's work was done. Forgive … He had run out of clever solutions. This one was to be done the old hard way, head-on.
They moved through the shuttle hatch corridors into the waiting shuttle. This must surely be the worst part, waiting helplessly for Tung to deliver them like cartons of eggs, as fragile, as messy when broken. He took a deep breath, and prepared to cope with the usual effects of zero-gee.
He was totally unprepared for the cramp that doubled him over, snatched his breath away, drained his face to a paper-whiteness. Not like this, it had never come on like this before—. He redoubled into a ball, gasping, lost his grasp on his grip-strap, floated tree. Dear God, it was finally happening—the ultimate humiliation—he was going to throw up in a space suit. In moments, everyone would know of his hilarious weakness. Absurd, for a would-be Imperial officer to get space-sick. Absurd, absurd, he had always been absurd. He had barely the presence of mind to hit his ventilator controls to full power with a jerk of his chin, and kill his broadcast—no need to treat his mercenaries to the unedifying sound of their commander retching.
'Admiral Naismith?' came an inquiry from the tactics room. 'Your medical readouts look odd—telemetry check requested.'
The universe seemed to narrow to his belly. A wrenching rush, gagging and coughing, another, another. The ventilator could not keep up. He'd eaten nothing this day, where was it all coming from?
A mercenary pulled him out of the air, tried to help him straighten his clenched limbs. 'Admiral Naismith? Are you all right?'
He opened Miles's faceplate, to Miles's gasp of 'No! Not in here—'
'Son-of-a-bitch!' The man jumped back, and raised his voice to a piercing cry. 'Medtech!'
You're overreacting, Miles tried to say; I'll clean it up myself… Dark clots, scarlet droplets, shimmering crimson globules, floated past his confused eyes, his secret spilled. It appeared to be pure blood. 'No,' he whimpered, or tried to. 'Not now …'
Hands grasped him, passed him back to the shuttle hatch he had entered moments before. Gravity pressed him to the corridor deck—who the devil had upped it to three-gee?—hands pulled his helmet off, plucked at his carefully-donned carapace. He felt like a lobster supper. His belly wrung itself out again.
Elena's face, nearly as white as his now, circled above him. She knelt, tore off her servo glove and gripped his hand, flesh to flesh at last. 'Miles!'
Truth is what you make it… 'Commander Bothari!' he croaked, as loud as he could. A ring of frightened faces huddled around him. His Dendarii. His people. For them, then. All for them. All. 'Take over.'
'I can't!' Her face was pale with shock, terrified. God, Miles thought, I must look just like Bothari, spilling his guts. It's not that bad, he tried to tell her. Silver-black whorls sparkled in his vision, blotting out her face. No! Not yet—
'Leige-lady. You can. You must. I'll be with you.' He writhed, gripped by some sadistic giant. 'You are true Vor, not I … Must have been changlings, back there in those replicators.' He gave her a death's head grin. 'Forward momentum—'
She rose then, determination crowding out the hot terror in her face, the ice that had run like water transmuted to marble.
'Right, my lord,' she whispered. And more loudly, 'Right! Get back there, let the medtechs do their job—' she drove away his admirers. He was flipped efficiently onto a float pallet.
He watched his booted feet, dark and distant hillocks, waver before him as he was borne aloft. Feet first, it would have to be feet first. He barely felt the prick of the first I.V. in his arm. He heard Elena's voice, raised tremblingly behind him.
'All right you clowns! No more games. We're going to win this one for Admiral Naismith!'
Heroes. They sprang up around him like weeds. A carrier, he was seemingly unable to catch the disease he spread.
'Damn it,' he moaned. 'Damn it, damn it, damn it…' He repeated this litany like a mantra, until the medtech's second sedative injection parted him from his pain, frustration, and consciousness.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
He wandered in and out of reality, like being lost in the Imperial Residence when he was a boy, trying various doors, some leading to treasures, others to broom closets, but none to familiarity. Once he awoke to Tung, sitting beside him, and worried about it; shouldn't the mercenary be in the tactics room?
Tung eyed him with affectionate concern. 'You know, son, if you're going to last in this business, you have to learn to pace yourself. We almost lost you there.'
It sounded like a good dictum; perhaps he'd have it calligraphed for the wall of his bedroom.
Another time, Elena. How had she come to sickbay? He'd left her in the shuttle. Nothing stayed where you put it …
'Damn it,' he mumbled apologetically, 'things like this never happened to Vorthalia the Bold.'
She raised a thoughtful eyebrow. 'How do you know? The histories of those times were all written by minstrels and poets. You try and think of a word that rhymes with 'bleeding ulcer'.'
He was still dutifully trying when the greyness swallowed him again.
Once, he woke alone and called over and over for Sergeant Bothari, but the Sergeant didn't come. It's just like the man, he thought petulantly, underfoot all the time and then gone on long leave just when he needed him. The medtech's sedative ended that bout with consciousness, not in Miles's favor.
It was an allergic reaction to the sedative, the surgeon told him later. His grandfather came, and smothered him with a pillow, and tried to hide him under the bed. Bothari, bloody-chested, and the mercenary pilot officer, his implant wires somehow turned inside out and waving about his head like some strange brachiated coral, watched. His mother came at last and shooed away the deadly ghosts like a farm wife clucking to her chickens. 'Quick,' she advised Miles, 'calculate the value of e to the last decimal place, and the spell will be broken. You can
