Disbelief, confusion; only one or two of the techs grasped what was being demanded, and began to undress. The others, with many uncertain glances around, belatedly followed suit.
“When you are again ready to obey your orders,” Metzov continued in a parade-pitched voice that carried to every man, “you may dress and go to work. It’s up to you.” He stepped back, nodded to his sergeant, and took up a pose of parade rest. “That’ll cool ’em off,” he muttered to himself, barely loud enough for Miles to catch. Metzov looked as if he fully expected to be out here no more than five minutes; he might already be thinking of warm quarters and a hot drink.
Olney and Pattas were among the techs, Miles noted, along with most of the rest of the Greek-speaking cadre who had plagued Miles early on. Others Miles had seen around, or talked to during his private investigation into the background of the drowned man, or barely knew. Fifteen naked men starting to shiver violently as the dry snow whispered around their ankles. Fifteen bewildered faces beginning to look terrified. Eyes shifted toward the nerve disruptors trained on them. Give in, Miles urged silently. It’s not worth it. But more than one pair of eyes flickered to him, and squeezed shut in resolution.
Miles silently cursed the anonymous clever boffin who’d invented fetaine as a terror weapon, not for his chemistry, but for his insight into the Barrayaran psyche. Fetaine could surely never have been used, could never be used. Any faction trying to do so must rise up against itself and tear apart in moral convulsions.
Yaski, standing back from his men, looked thoroughly horrified. Bonn, his expression black and brittle as obsidian, began to strip off his gloves and parka.
No, no, no! Miles screamed inside his head. If you join them they’ll never back down. They’ll know they’re right. Bad mistake, bad . . . Bonn dropped the rest of his clothes in a pile, marched forward, joined the line, wheeled, and locked eyes with Metzov. Metzov’s eyes narrowed with new fury. “So,” he hissed, “you convict yourself. Freeze, then.”
How had things gone so bad, so fast? Now would be a good time to remember a duty in the weather office, and get the hell out of here. If only those shivering bastards would back down, Miles could get through this night without a ripple in his record. He had no duty, no function here. . . .
Metzov’s eye fell on Miles. “Vorkosigan, you can either take up a weapon and be useful, or consider yourself dismissed.”
He could leave. Could he leave? When he made no move, the sergeant walked over and thrust a nerve disruptor into Miles’s hand. Miles took it up, still struggling to think with brains gone suddenly porridge. He did retain the wit to make sure the safety was on before pointing the disruptor vaguely in the direction of the freezing men.
This isn’t going to be a mutiny. It’s going to be a massacre.
One of the armed grubs giggled nervously. What had they been told they were doing? What did they believe they were doing? Eighteen-, nineteen-year-olds—could they even recognize a criminal order? Or know what to do about it if they did?
Could Miles?
The situation was ambiguous, that was the problem. It didn’t quite fit. Miles knew about criminal orders; every academy man did. His father came down personally and gave a one-day seminar on the topic to the seniors at midyear. He’d made it a requirement to graduate, by Imperial fiat back when he’d been regent. What exactly constituted a criminal order, when and how to disobey it. With vid evidence from various historical test cases and bad examples, including the politically disastrous Solstice Massacre, which had taken place under the admiral’s own command. Invariably one or more cadets had to leave the room to throw up during that part.
The other instructors hated Vorkosigan’s Day. Their classes were subtly disrupted for weeks afterward. One reason Admiral Vorkosigan didn’t wait till any later in the year; he almost always had to make a return trip a few weeks after, to talk some disturbed cadet out of dropping out at almost the finale of his schooling. Only the academy cadets got this live lecture, as far as Miles knew, though his father talked of canning it on holovid and making it a part of basic training Service-wide. Parts of the seminar had been a revelation even to Miles.
But this . . . If the techs had been civilians, Metzov would clearly be in the wrong. If this had been in wartime, while being harried by some enemy, Metzov might be within his rights, even duty. This was somewhere between. Soldiers disobeying, but passively. Not an enemy in sight. Not even a physical situation threatening, necessarily, lives on the base (except theirs), though when the wind shifted that could change. I’m not ready for this, not yet, not so soon. What was right?
My career . . . Claustrophobic panic rose in Miles’s chest, making him feel like a man with his head caught in a drain. The nerve disruptor wavered just slightly in his hand. Over the parabolic reflector he could see Bonn standing dumbly, too congealed now even to argue anymore. Ears were turning white out there, and fingers and feet. One man crumpled into a shuddering ball, but made no move to surrender. Was there any softening of doubt yet, in Metzov’s rigid neck?
For a lunatic moment Miles envisioned thumbing off the safety and shooting Metzov. And then what, shoot the grubs? He couldn’t possibly get them all before they got him.
I could be the only soldier here under thirty who’s ever killed an enemy before, in battle or out of it. The grubs might fire out of ignorance, or sheer curiosity. They didn’t know enough not to. What we do in the next half hour will replay in our heads for as long as we breathe.
He could try doing nothing. Only follow orders. How much trouble could he get into, only following orders? Every commander he’d ever had agreed, he needed to follow orders better. Think you’ll enjoy your ship duty, then, Ensign Vorkosigan, you and your pack of frozen ghosts? At least you’d never be lonely. . . .
Miles, still holding up the nerve disruptor, faded backward, out of the grubs’ line-of-sight, out of the corner of Metzov’s eye. Tears stung and blurred his vision. From the cold, no doubt.
He sat on the ground. Pulled off his gloves and boots. Let his parka fall, and his shirts. Trousers and thermal underwear atop the pile, and the nerve disruptor nested carefully on them. He stepped forward. His leg braces felt like icicles against his calves.
I hate passive resistance. I really, really hate it.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing, Ensign?” Metzov snarled as Miles limped past him.
“Breaking this up, sir,” Miles replied steadily. Even now some of the shivering techs flinched away from him, as if his deformities might be contagious. Pattas didn’t draw away, though. Nor Bonn.
“Bonn tried that bluff. He’s now regretting it. It won’t work for you either, Vorkosigan.” Metzov’s voice shook, too, though not from the cold.
You should have said “Ensign.” What’s in a name? Miles could see the ripple of dismay run through the grubs, that time. No, this hadn’t worked for Bonn. Miles might be the only man here for whom this sort of individual intervention could work. Depending on how far gone Mad Metzov was by now.
Miles spoke now for both Metzov’s benefit and the grubs’. “It’s possible—barely—that Service Security wouldn’t investigate the deaths of Lieutenant Bonn and his men, if you diddled the record, claimed some accident. I guarantee Imperial Security will investigate mine.”
Metzov grinned strangely. “Suppose no witnesses survive to complain?”
Metzov’s sergeant looked as rigid as his master. Miles thought of Ahn, drunken Ahn, silent Ahn. What had Ahn seen, once long ago, when crazy things were happening on Komarr? What kind of surviving witness had he been? A guilty one, perhaps? “S-s-sorry, sir, but I see at least ten witnesses, behind those nerve disruptors.” Silver parabolas—they looked enormous, like serving dishes, from this new angle. The change in point of view was amazingly clarifying. No ambiguities now.
Miles continued, “Or do you propose to execute your firing squad and then shoot yourself? Imperial Security will fast-penta everyone in sight. You can’t silence me. Living or dead, through my mouth or yours—or theirs—I will testify.” Shivers racked Miles’s body. Astonishing, the effect of just that little bit of east wind, at this temperature. He fought to keep the shakes out of his voice, lest cold be mistaken for fear.
“Small consolation, if you—ah—permit yourself to freeze, I’d say, Ensign.” Metzov’s heavy sarcasm grated on Miles’s nerves. The man still thought he was winning. Insane.
Miles’s bare feet felt strangely warm now. His eyelashes were crunchy with ice. He was catching up fast to the others, in terms of freezing to death, no doubt because of his smaller mass. His body was turning a blotchy purple-blue.
The snow-blanketed base was so silent. He could almost hear the individual snow grains skitter across the sheet ice. He could hear the vibrating bones of each man around him, pick out the hollow frightened breathing of the grubs. Time stretched.
He could threaten Metzov, break up his complacency with dark hints about Komarr, the truth will out. He could call on his father’s rank and position. He could . . . dammit, Metzov must realize he was overextended, no matter how mad he was. His discipline parade bluff hadn’t worked and now he was stuck with it, stonily defending his authority unto death. He can be a funny kind of dangerous, if you really threaten him. . . . It was hard, to see through the sadism to the underlying fear. But it had to be there, underneath. Pushing wasn’t working. Metzov was practically petrified with resistance. What about pulling . . . ?
“But consider, sir,” Miles’s words stuttered out persuasively, “the advantages to yourself of stopping now. You now have clear evidence of a mutinous, er, conspiracy. You can arrest us all, throw us in the stockade. It’s a better revenge, ’cause you get it all and lose nothing. I lose my career, get a dishonorable discharge or maybe prison—do you think I wouldn’t rather die? Service Security punishes the rest of us for you. You get it all.”
Miles’s words had hooked him; Miles could see it, in the red glow fading from the narrowed eyes, in the slight bending of that stiff, stiff neck. Miles had only to let the line out, refrain from jerking on it and renewing Metzov’s fighting frenzy, wait. . . .
Metzov stepped nearer, bulking in the half-light, haloed by his freezing breath. His voice dropped, pitched to Miles’s ear alone. “A typical soft Vorkosigan answer. Your father was soft on Komarran scum. Cost us lives. A court-martial for the Admiral’s little boy—that might bring down that holier-than-thou buggerer, eh?”
Miles swallowed icy spit. Those who do not know their history, his thought careened, are doomed to keep stepping in it. Alas, so were those who did, it seemed. “Thermo the damned fetaine spill,” he whispered hoarsely, “and see.”
“You’re all under arrest,” Metzov bellowed out suddenly, his shoulders hunching. “Get dressed.”
The others looked stunned with relief, then. After a last uncertain glance at the nerve disruptors they dove for their clothes, donning them with frantic, cold-clumsy hands. But Miles had seen it complete in Metzov’s eyes sixty seconds earlier. It reminded him of that definition of his father’s. A weapon is a device for making your enemy change his mind. The mind was the first and final battleground; the stuff in between was just noise.
Lieutenant Yaski had taken the opportunity afforded by Miles’s attention-arresting nude arrival on center stage to quietly disappear into the admin building and make several frantic calls. As a result the trainees’ commander, the base surgeon, and Metzov’s second-in-command arrived, primed to persuade or perhaps sedate and confine Metzov. But by that time Miles, Bonn, and the techs were already dressed and being marched, stumbling, toward the stockade bunker under the Argus-eyes of the nerve disruptors.
“Am I s-supposed to th-thank you for this?” Bonn asked Miles through chattering teeth. Their hands and feet swung like paralyzed lumps; he leaned on Miles, Miles hung on him, hobbling down the road together.
“We got what we wanted, eh? He’s going to plasma the fetaine on-site before the wind shifts in the morning. Nobody dies. Nobody gets their nuts curdled. We win. I think.” Miles emitted a deathly cackle through numb lips.
“I never thought,” wheezed Bonn, “that I’d ever meet anybody crazier than Metzov.”
“I didn’t do anything you didn’t,” protested Miles. “Except I made it work. Sort of. It’ll all look different in the morning, anyway.”
“Yeah. Worse,” Bonn predicted glumly.
Bujold, Lois McMaster. The Vor Game (Vorkosigan Saga) (Miles Vorsokigan Book 6) (pp. 81-88). (Function). Kindle Edition.
He had been fifteen on his year-long school visit to Beta Colony, and he'd found himself for the first time in his life with what looked like unlimited possibilities for sexual intimacy. This illusion had crashed and burned very quickly, as he found the most fascinating girls already taken. The rest seemed about equally divided among good Samaritans, the kinky/curious, hermaphrodites, and boys.
He did not care to be an object of charity, and he found himself too Barrayaran for the last two categories, although Betan enough not to mind them for others. A short affair with a girl from the kinky/curious category was enough. Her fascination with the peculiarities of his body made him, in the end, more self-conscious than the most open revulsion he had experienced on Barrayar, with its fierce prejudice against deformity. Anyway, after finding his sexual parts disappointingly normal, the girl had drifted off.
The affair had ended, for Miles, in a terrifying black depression that had deepened for weeks, culminating at last late one night in the third, and most secret, time the Sergeant had saved his life. He had cut Bothari twice, in their silent struggle for the knife, exerting hysterical strength against the Sergeant's frightened caution of breaking his bones. The tall man had finally achieved a grip that held him, and held him, until he broke down at last, weeping his self-hatred into the Sergeant's bloodied breast until exhaustion finally stilled him. The man who'd carried him as a child, before he first walked at age four, then carried him like a child to bed. Bothari treated his own wounds, and never referred to the incident again.
Age fifteen had not been a very good year. Miles was determined not to repeat it.
Bujold, Lois McMaster. The Warrior's Apprentice (Vorkosigan Saga) (Miles Vorsokigan Book 2) (Function). Kindle Edition.
He swallowed. “You see, one of Lord Vorkosigan’s nonmilitary duties is to eventually, sometime, somewhere, come up with a Lady Vorkosigan. The eleventh Countess-Vorkosigan-to-be. It’s rather expected from a man from a strictly patrilineal culture, y’see. You do know”—his throat seemed to be stuffed with cotton, his accent wavered back and forth—“that these, uh, physical problems of mine”—his hand swept vaguely down the length, or lack of it, of his body—“were teratogenic. Not genetic. My children should be normal. A fact which may have saved my life, in view of Barrayar’s traditional ruthless attitude toward mutations. I don’t think my grandfather was ever totally convinced of it. I’ve always wished he could have lived to see my children, just to prove it—”
“Miles,” Elli interrupted him gently.
“Yes?” he said breathlessly.
“You’re babbling. Why are you babbling? I could listen by the hour, but it’s worrisome when you get stuck on fast-forward.”
“I’m nervous,” he confessed. He smiled blindingly at her.
“Delayed reaction, from this afternoon?” She slipped closer to him, comfortingly. “I can understand that.”
He eased his right arm around her waist. “No. Yes, well, maybe a little. Would you like to be Countess Vorkosigan?”
She grinned. “Made of glass? Not my style, thanks. Really, though, the title sounds more like something that would go with black leather and chromium studs.”
The mental image of Elli so attired was so arresting, it took him a full half minute of silence to trace back to the wrong turn. “Let me rephrase that,” he said at last. “Will you marry me?”
The silence this time was much longer.
“I thought you were working up to asking me to go to bed with you,” she said finally, “and I was laughing. At your nerves.” She wasn’t laughing now.
“No,” said Miles. “That would have been easy.”
"You don’t want much, do you? Just to completely rearrange the rest of my life.”
“It’s good that you understand that part. It’s not just a marriage. There’s a whole job description that goes with it.”
“On Barrayar. Downside.”
“Yes. Well, there might be some travel.”
She was quiet for too long, then said, “I was born in space. Grew up on a deep-space transfer station. Worked most of my adult life aboard ships. The time I’ve spent with my feet on real dirt can be measured in months.”
“It would be a change,” Miles admitted uneasily.
“And what would happen to the future Admiral Quinn, free mercenary?”
“Presumably—hopefully—she would find the work of Lady Vorkosigan equally interesting.”
“Let me guess. The work of Lady Vorkosigan would not include ship command.”
“The security risks of allowing such a career would appall even me. My mother gave up a ship command—Betan Astronomical Survey—to go to Barrayar.”
“Are you telling me you’re looking for a girl just like Mom?”
“She has to be smart—she has to be fast—she has to be a determined survivor,” Miles explained unhappily. “Anything less would be a slaughter of the innocent. Maybe for her, maybe for our children with her. Bodyguards, as you know, can only do so much.”
Her breath blew out in a long, silent whistle, watching him watching her. The slippage between the distress in her eyes and the smile on her lips tore at him. Didn’t want to hurt you— the best I can offer shouldn’t be pain to you—is it too much, too little . . . too awful?
“Oh, love,” she breathed sadly, “you aren’t thinking.”
“I think the world of you.”
“And so you want to maroon me for the rest of my life on a, sorry, backwater dirtball that’s just barely climbed out of feudalism, that treats women like chattel—or cattle—that would deny me the use of every military skill I’ve learned in the past twelve years from shuttle docking to interrogation chemistry . . . I’m sorry. I’m not an anthropologist, I’m not a saint, and I’m not crazy.”
“You don’t have to say no right away,” said Miles in a small voice.
“Oh, yes I do,” she said. “Before looking at you makes me any weaker in the knees. Or in the head.”
And what am I to say to that? If you really loved me, you’d be delighted to immolate your entire personal history on my behalf? Oh, sure. She’s not into immolation. This makes her strong, her strength makes me want her, and so we come full circle. “It’s Barrayar that’s the problem, then.”
“Of course. What female human in her right mind would voluntarily move to that planet? With the exception of your mother, apparently.”
“She is exceptional. But . . . when she and Barrayar collide, it’s Barrayar that changes. I’ve seen it. You could be a force of change like that.”
Elli was shaking her head. “I know my limits.”
“No one knows their limits till they’ve gone beyond them.”
She eyed him. “You would naturally think so. What’s with you and Barrayar, anyway? You let them push you around like . . . I’ve never understood why you’ve never just grabbed the Dendarii and taken off. You could make it go, better than Admiral Oser ever did, better than Tung even. You could end up emperor of your own rock by the time you were done.”
“With you at my side?” He grinned strangely. “Are you seriously suggesting I embark on a plan of galactic conquest with five thousand guys?”
She chuckled. “At least I wouldn’t have to give up fleet command. No, really seriously. If you’re so obsessed with being a professional soldier, what do you need Barrayar for? A mercenary fleet sees ten times the action of a planetary one. A dirtball may see war once a generation, if it’s lucky—”
“Or unlucky,” Miles interpolated.
“A mercenary fleet follows it around.”
“That statistical fact has been noted in the Barrayaran high command. It’s one of the chief reasons I’m here. I’ve had more actual combat experience, albeit on a small scale, in the past four years than most other Imperial officers have seen in the last fourteen. Nepotism works in strange ways.” He ran a finger along the clean line of her jaw. “I see it now. You are in love with Admiral Naismith.”
“Of course.”
“Not Lord Vorkosigan.”
“I am annoyed with Lord Vorkosigan. He sells you short, love.”
He let the double entendre pass. So, the gulf that yawned between them was deeper than he’d truly realized. To her, it was Lord Vorkosigan who wasn’t real. His fingers entwined around the back of her neck, and he breathed her breath as she asked, “Why do you let Barrayar screw you over?”
“It’s the hand I was dealt.”
“By whom? I don’t get it.”
“It’s all right. It just happens to be very important to me to win with the hand I was dealt. So be it.”
“Your funeral.” Her lips were muffled on his mouth.
“Mmm.”
She drew back a moment. “Can I still jump your bones? Carefully, of course. You’ll not go away mad, for turning you down? Turning Barrayar down, that is. Not you, never you . . .”
I’m getting used to it. Almost numb. “Am I to sulk?” he inquired lightly. “Because I can’t have it all, take none, and go off in a huff? I’d hope you’d bounce me down the corridor on my pointed head if I were so dense.”
She laughed. It was all right, if he could still make her laugh. If Naismith was all she wanted, she could surely have him. Half a loaf for half a man. They tilted bedward, hungry-mouthed. It was easy, with Quinn; she made it so.
Bujold, Lois McMaster. Brothers in Arms (Vorkosigan Saga) (Miles Vorsokigan Book 5) (pp. 113-118). (Function). Kindle Edition.
He was babbling, knew he was babbling. Some dam had broken in him. He gave himself over to the flood and boiled on down the sluice.
“Elena, I love you, I’ve always loved you—” She leaped like a startled deer; he gasped and flung his arms around her. “No, listen! I love you, I don’t know what the Sergeant was but I loved him too, and whatever of him is in you I honor with all my heart, I don’t know what is truth and I don’t give a damn anymore, we’ll make our own like he did, he did a bloody good job I think, I can’t live without my Bothari, marry me!” He spent the last of his air shouting the last two words, and had to pause for a long inhalation.
“I can’t marry you! The genetic risks—”
“I am not a mutant! Look, no gills”—he stuck his fingers into the corners of his mouth and spread it wide—“no antlers—” He planted his thumbs on either side of his head and wriggled his fingers.
“I wasn’t thinking of your genetic risks. Mine. His. Your father must have known what he was—he’ll never accept—”
“Look, anybody who can trace a blood relationship with Mad Emperor Yuri through two lines of descent has no room to criticize anybody else’s genes.”
“Your father is loyal to his class, Miles, like your grandfather, like Lady Vorpatril—they could never accept me as Lady Vorkosigan.”
“Then I’ll present them with an alternative. I’ll tell them I’m going to marry Bel Thorne. They’ll come around so fast they’ll trip over themselves.”
She sat back helplessly and buried her face in his pillow, shoulders shaking. He had a moment of terror that he’d broken her down into tears. Not break down, build up, and up, and up . . . But, “Damn you for making me laugh!” she repeated. “Damn you . . .”
He galloped on, encouraged. “And I wouldn’t be so sure about my father’s class loyalties. He married a foreign plebe, after all.” He dropped into seriousness. “And you cannot doubt my mother. She always longed for a daughter, secretly—never paraded it, so as not to hurt the old man, of course—let her be your mother in truth.”
“Oh,” she said, as if he had stabbed her. “Oh . . .”
"You’ll see, when we get back to Barrayar—”
“I pray to God,” she interrupted him, voice intense, “I may never set foot on Barrayar again.”
“Oh,” he said in turn. After a long pause he said, “We could live somewhere else. Beta Colony. It would have to be pretty quietly, once the exchange rate got done with my income—I could get a job, doing—doing—doing something.”
“And on the day the emperor calls you to take your place on the Council of Counts, to speak for your district and all the poor sods in it, where will you go then?”
He swallowed, struck silent. “Ivan Vorpatril is my heir,” he offered at last. “Let him take the countship.”
“Ivan Vorpatril is a jerk.”
"Oh, he’s not such a bad sort.”
“He used to corner me, when my father wasn’t around, and try to feel me up.”
“What! You never said—”
“I didn’t want to start a big flap.” She frowned into the past. “I almost wish I could go back in time, just to boot him in the balls.”
He glanced sideways at her, considerably startled. “Yes,” he said slowly, “you’ve changed.”
“I don’t know what I am anymore. Miles, you must believe me—I love you as I love breath—” His heart rocketed. “But I can’t be your annex.”
And crashed. “I don’t understand.”
“I don’t know how to put it plainer. You’d swallow me up the way an ocean swallows a bucket of water. I’d disappear in you. I love you, but I’m terrified of you, and of your future.”
His bafflement sought simplicity. “Baz. It’s Baz, isn’t it?”
“If Baz had never existed, my answer would be the same. But as it happens—I have given him my word.”
“You”—the breath went out of him in a ha—“Break it,” he ordered.
She merely looked at him, silently. In a moment he reddened, dropping his eyes in shame.
“You own honor by the ocean,” she whispered. “I have only a little bucketful. Unfair to jostle it—my lord.”
He fell back across his bed, defeated.
She rose.
Bujold, Lois McMaster. The Warrior's Apprentice (Vorkosigan Saga) (Miles Vorsokigan Book 2) (pp. 269-271). (Function). Kindle Edition.
Beside Bel stood another soldier, the top of his helmet—my helmet—not quite level with the top of Bel’s shoulder. He had half-forgotten how startling Mark was. Do I really look like that?
“You—” Miles’s voice cracked, and he found he had to stop and swallow. “Later, you and I are going to have a long talk. There’s a lot you don’t seem to understand.”
Mark’s chin came up, defiantly. Surely my face is not that round. It must be an illusion, from the hood. “What about these kids?” said Mark. “These clones.”
“What about them?” A couple of young men in brown silk tunics and shorts appeared to be actually helping the Dendarii defenders, scared and excited rather than surly. Another group, boys and girls mixed, sat in a plain-scared bunch on the floor under the watchful eye of a stunner-armed trooper. Crap, they really are just kids.
“We’ve—you’ve got to take them along. Or I’m not going.” Mark’s teeth were set, but Miles saw him swallow.
“Don’t tempt me,” snarled Miles. “Of course we’re taking them along, how the hell else would we get out of here alive?”
Mark’s face lit, torn between hope and hatred. “And then what?” he demanded suspiciously.
“Oh,” Miles caroled sarcastically, “we’re just going to waltz right over to Bharaputra Station and drop them off, and thank Vasa Luigi kindly for the loan. Idiot! What d’you think? We load up and run like hell. The only place to put them would be out the airlock, and I guarantee you’d go first!”
Mark flinched, but took a deep breath and nodded. “All right, then.”
“It is not. All. Right,” Miles bit out. “It is merely . . . merely . . .” He could not come up with a word to describe what it merely was, aside from the most screwed-up mess he’d ever encountered. “If you were going to try and pull a stupid stunt like this, you might at least have consulted the expert in the family!”
“You? Come to you for help? D’you think I’m crazy?” demanded Mark furiously.
“Yes—” They were interrupted by a staring blond clone boy, who’d walked up to them open-mouthed.
“You really are clones,” he said in wonderment.
“No, we’re twins born six years apart,” snapped Miles. “Yes, we’re just as much clones as you are, that’s right, go back and sit down and obey orders, dammit.”
The boy retreated hastily, whispering, “It’s true!”
“Dammit,” Mark howled under his breath, if that squeezed sotto voce could be so described, “how come they believe you and not me? It’s not fair!”
Quinn’s voice, through his helmet, derailed the family reunion. “If you and Don Quixote Junior are done greeting each other, Medic Norwood has Phillipi prepped and loaded, and the wounded ready to transport.”
“Form up, let’s get the first batch out the door, then,” he responded. He called up Blue Squad’s sergeant. “Framingham, take the first convoy. You ready to roll?”
“Ready. Sergeant Taura has marshaled them for me.”
“Go. And don’t look back.”
Half-a-dozen Dendarii, about three times that many bewildered and exhausted clones, and the two wounded troopers on float pallets assembled in the foyer and filed out the ruined doors.
*** (A lot of action goes here as Miles frantically tries to salvage the operation.)
Miles turned and dashed down the corridor and through some big double doors, beckoned anxiously onward by Thorne, who waited to help cover him.
“I’ll take rear guard,” Thorne volunteered.
Was Thorne entertaining thoughts of dying heroically, thus avoiding the inevitable court-martial? For a moment, Miles entertained thoughts of letting it do so. It would be the Vorish thing to do. The Old Vor could be a bunch of assholes, at times. “You get those clones to the shuttle,” Miles snapped in turn. “Finish the job you took on. If I’m paying this much, I want to get what I’m paying for.”
Thorne’s teeth bared, but it nodded. They both galloped after the squad.
The double doors opened onto an enormous concrete-floored room, which obviously nearly filled the big building. Red- and green-painted catwalks ran around a girdered ceiling high above, festooned with looping cables of mysterious function. A few harsh pale lights shone down, casting multiple shadows. He blinked in the gloom and almost lowered his infrared visor. It appeared to be an assembly area for large projects of some kind, though at the moment there seemed to be nothing in progress. Quinn and Mark hesitated, waiting for them to catch up despite Miles’s urgent gesture for them to hurry on. “What are you stopping for?” he barked in furious fear. He skidded to a halt beside them.
“Look out!” someone yelled. Quinn spun, raising her plasma arc, seeking aim. Mark’s mouth opened, the ‘o’ foolishly echoing the circle of his gray hood around his face.
Miles saw the Bharaputran because they were looking square at each other, in that frozen moment. A team of brown-clad Bharaputran snipers, probably come up through the tunnels. They were scrambling along the girders, barely more prepared than the Dendarii they pursued. The Bharaputran had a hand-sized projectile weapon launcher of some kind pointed straight at him, its muzzle bright with flare.
Miles could not, of course, see the projectile, not even as it entered his chest. Only his chest, bursting outward like a flower, and a sound not heard but only felt, a hammer-blow launching him backward. Dark flowers bloomed too in his eyes, covering everyone.
He was astonished, not by how much he thought, for there was no time for thought, but by how much he felt, in the time it took for his last heartburst of blood to finish flowing through his brain. The chamber careening around him . . . pain beyond measure . . . rage, and outrage . . . and a vast regret, infinitesimal in duration, infinite in depth. Wait, I haven’t—
The ramp mechanism labored, metal and plastic complaining—then jammed on the twisted distortion of the melt.
“Get that hatch sealed back there!” the shuttle pilot’s voice yowled over the headset.
“Ramp’s jammed,” Miles yowled back. “Jettison it!”
The ramp mechanism skreeled and shrieked, reversing itself. The ramp shuddered, jammed again. Hands reached out to thump on it urgently.
“You’ll never get it that way!” Beatrice, across the hatch from Miles, yelled fiercely, and twisted around to kick at it with her bare feet. The wind of their flight screamed over the open hatchway, buffeting and vibrating the shuttle like a giant blowing across the top of a bottle.
To a chorus of shouting, thumping, and swearing, the shuttle lurched abruptly onto its side. Men, women, and loose equipment tangled across the tilting deck. Beatrice kicked bloodily at a final buggered bolt. The ramp tore loose at last. Beatrice, sliding, fell with it.
Miles dove at her, lunging across the hatchway. If he connected, he never knew, for his right hand was a senseless blob. He saw her face only as a white blur as she whipped away into the blackness.
It was like a silence, a great silence, in his head. Although the roar of wind and engines, screaming and swearing and yelling, went on as before, it was lost somewhere between his ears and his brain, and went unregistered. He saw only a white blur, smearing into the darkness, repeated again and again, replaying like a looping vid.
He found himself crouched on his hands and knees, the shuttle’s acceleration sucking him to the deck. They’d got the hatch closed. The merely human babble within seemed muffled and thin, now that the roaring voices of the gods were silenced. He looked up into the pale face of Pitt’s lieutenant, crouched beside him still clutching the unfired Dendarii weapon he’d grabbed up in that other lifetime.
“You’d better kill a whole lot of Cetagandans for Marilac, boy,” Miles rasped to him at last. “You better be worth something to somebody, ’cause I’ve sure paid too much for you.”
Rowan and Elli, on the same ship? Not to mention Taura. What if they all got together and compared notes? What if they fell into a feud? Worse, what if they struck up an alliance and colluded to partition him by treaty? North Miles and South Miles . . . It wasn’t, he swore, that he picked up so many women. Compared to Ivan, he was practically celibate. It was just that he never put any down. The accumulation could become downright embarrassing, over a long enough timespan. He needed a Lady Vorkosigan, to put an end to this nonsense. But even Elli the bold refused to volunteer for that duty.
“Yes,” said Miles, “that works. Home. Captain Quinn, arrange Mark’s and my transport with ImpSec. Sergeant Taura, would you please put yourself at Lilly Durona’s disposal? The sooner we evacuate from here the better, I agree. And, um, Bel . . . would you stay and talk with me, please.”
(The memory blurs here - there's a piece missing in the middle.)
“Think about it, then, on the way back to Escobar. Talk to Quinn. Decide by the time you get there, and let her know.”
Bel nodded, rose, and looked around Lilly Durona’s quiet living room. “I’m not altogether sorry, you know,” it said to Mark. “One way or another, we’ve pulled almost ninety people out of this stinking gravity well. Out of certain death or Jacksonian slavery. Not a bad score, for an aging Betan. You can bet I’ll remember them, too, when I remember this.”
“Thank you,” whispered Mark.
Bel eyed Miles. “Do you remember the first time we ever saw each other?” it asked.
“Yes. I stunned you.”
“You surely did.” It walked over to his chair, and bent, and took his chin in its hand. “Hold still. I’ve been wanting to do this for years.” It kissed him, long and quite thoroughly. Miles thought about appearances, thought about the ambiguity of it, thought about sudden death, thought the hell with it all, and kissed Bel back. Straightening again, Bel smiled.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
That entire Kyril Island encounter. (V, VG)
Disbelief, confusion; only one or two of the techs grasped what was being demanded, and began to undress. The others, with many uncertain glances around, belatedly followed suit.
“When you are again ready to obey your orders,” Metzov continued in a parade-pitched voice that carried to every man, “you may dress and go to work. It’s up to you.” He stepped back, nodded to his sergeant, and took up a pose of parade rest. “That’ll cool ’em off,” he muttered to himself, barely loud enough for Miles to catch. Metzov looked as if he fully expected to be out here no more than five minutes; he might already be thinking of warm quarters and a hot drink.
Olney and Pattas were among the techs, Miles noted, along with most of the rest of the Greek-speaking cadre who had plagued Miles early on. Others Miles had seen around, or talked to during his private investigation into the background of the drowned man, or barely knew. Fifteen naked men starting to shiver violently as the dry snow whispered around their ankles. Fifteen bewildered faces beginning to look terrified. Eyes shifted toward the nerve disruptors trained on them. Give in, Miles urged silently. It’s not worth it. But more than one pair of eyes flickered to him, and squeezed shut in resolution.
Miles silently cursed the anonymous clever boffin who’d invented fetaine as a terror weapon, not for his chemistry, but for his insight into the Barrayaran psyche. Fetaine could surely never have been used, could never be used. Any faction trying to do so must rise up against itself and tear apart in moral convulsions.
Yaski, standing back from his men, looked thoroughly horrified. Bonn, his expression black and brittle as obsidian, began to strip off his gloves and parka.
No, no, no! Miles screamed inside his head. If you join them they’ll never back down. They’ll know they’re right. Bad mistake, bad . . . Bonn dropped the rest of his clothes in a pile, marched forward, joined the line, wheeled, and locked eyes with Metzov. Metzov’s eyes narrowed with new fury. “So,” he hissed, “you convict yourself. Freeze, then.”
How had things gone so bad, so fast? Now would be a good time to remember a duty in the weather office, and get the hell out of here. If only those shivering bastards would back down, Miles could get through this night without a ripple in his record. He had no duty, no function here. . . .
Metzov’s eye fell on Miles. “Vorkosigan, you can either take up a weapon and be useful, or consider yourself dismissed.”
He could leave. Could he leave? When he made no move, the sergeant walked over and thrust a nerve disruptor into Miles’s hand. Miles took it up, still struggling to think with brains gone suddenly porridge. He did retain the wit to make sure the safety was on before pointing the disruptor vaguely in the direction of the freezing men.
This isn’t going to be a mutiny. It’s going to be a massacre.
One of the armed grubs giggled nervously. What had they been told they were doing? What did they believe they were doing? Eighteen-, nineteen-year-olds—could they even recognize a criminal order? Or know what to do about it if they did?
Could Miles?
The situation was ambiguous, that was the problem. It didn’t quite fit. Miles knew about criminal orders; every academy man did. His father came down personally and gave a one-day seminar on the topic to the seniors at midyear. He’d made it a requirement to graduate, by Imperial fiat back when he’d been regent. What exactly constituted a criminal order, when and how to disobey it. With vid evidence from various historical test cases and bad examples, including the politically disastrous Solstice Massacre, which had taken place under the admiral’s own command. Invariably one or more cadets had to leave the room to throw up during that part.
The other instructors hated Vorkosigan’s Day. Their classes were subtly disrupted for weeks afterward. One reason Admiral Vorkosigan didn’t wait till any later in the year; he almost always had to make a return trip a few weeks after, to talk some disturbed cadet out of dropping out at almost the finale of his schooling. Only the academy cadets got this live lecture, as far as Miles knew, though his father talked of canning it on holovid and making it a part of basic training Service-wide. Parts of the seminar had been a revelation even to Miles.
But this . . . If the techs had been civilians, Metzov would clearly be in the wrong. If this had been in wartime, while being harried by some enemy, Metzov might be within his rights, even duty. This was somewhere between. Soldiers disobeying, but passively. Not an enemy in sight. Not even a physical situation threatening, necessarily, lives on the base (except theirs), though when the wind shifted that could change. I’m not ready for this, not yet, not so soon. What was right?
My career . . . Claustrophobic panic rose in Miles’s chest, making him feel like a man with his head caught in a drain. The nerve disruptor wavered just slightly in his hand. Over the parabolic reflector he could see Bonn standing dumbly, too congealed now even to argue anymore. Ears were turning white out there, and fingers and feet. One man crumpled into a shuddering ball, but made no move to surrender. Was there any softening of doubt yet, in Metzov’s rigid neck?
For a lunatic moment Miles envisioned thumbing off the safety and shooting Metzov. And then what, shoot the grubs? He couldn’t possibly get them all before they got him.
I could be the only soldier here under thirty who’s ever killed an enemy before, in battle or out of it. The grubs might fire out of ignorance, or sheer curiosity. They didn’t know enough not to. What we do in the next half hour will replay in our heads for as long as we breathe.
He could try doing nothing. Only follow orders. How much trouble could he get into, only following orders? Every commander he’d ever had agreed, he needed to follow orders better. Think you’ll enjoy your ship duty, then, Ensign Vorkosigan, you and your pack of frozen ghosts? At least you’d never be lonely. . . .
Miles, still holding up the nerve disruptor, faded backward, out of the grubs’ line-of-sight, out of the corner of Metzov’s eye. Tears stung and blurred his vision. From the cold, no doubt.
He sat on the ground. Pulled off his gloves and boots. Let his parka fall, and his shirts. Trousers and thermal underwear atop the pile, and the nerve disruptor nested carefully on them. He stepped forward. His leg braces felt like icicles against his calves.
I hate passive resistance. I really, really hate it.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing, Ensign?” Metzov snarled as Miles limped past him.
“Breaking this up, sir,” Miles replied steadily. Even now some of the shivering techs flinched away from him, as if his deformities might be contagious. Pattas didn’t draw away, though. Nor Bonn.
“Bonn tried that bluff. He’s now regretting it. It won’t work for you either, Vorkosigan.” Metzov’s voice shook, too, though not from the cold.
You should have said “Ensign.” What’s in a name? Miles could see the ripple of dismay run through the grubs, that time. No, this hadn’t worked for Bonn. Miles might be the only man here for whom this sort of individual intervention could work. Depending on how far gone Mad Metzov was by now.
Miles spoke now for both Metzov’s benefit and the grubs’. “It’s possible—barely—that Service Security wouldn’t investigate the deaths of Lieutenant Bonn and his men, if you diddled the record, claimed some accident. I guarantee Imperial Security will investigate mine.”
Metzov grinned strangely. “Suppose no witnesses survive to complain?”
Metzov’s sergeant looked as rigid as his master. Miles thought of Ahn, drunken Ahn, silent Ahn. What had Ahn seen, once long ago, when crazy things were happening on Komarr? What kind of surviving witness had he been? A guilty one, perhaps? “S-s-sorry, sir, but I see at least ten witnesses, behind those nerve disruptors.” Silver parabolas—they looked enormous, like serving dishes, from this new angle. The change in point of view was amazingly clarifying. No ambiguities now.
Miles continued, “Or do you propose to execute your firing squad and then shoot yourself? Imperial Security will fast-penta everyone in sight. You can’t silence me. Living or dead, through my mouth or yours—or theirs—I will testify.” Shivers racked Miles’s body. Astonishing, the effect of just that little bit of east wind, at this temperature. He fought to keep the shakes out of his voice, lest cold be mistaken for fear.
“Small consolation, if you—ah—permit yourself to freeze, I’d say, Ensign.” Metzov’s heavy sarcasm grated on Miles’s nerves. The man still thought he was winning. Insane.
Miles’s bare feet felt strangely warm now. His eyelashes were crunchy with ice. He was catching up fast to the others, in terms of freezing to death, no doubt because of his smaller mass. His body was turning a blotchy purple-blue.
The snow-blanketed base was so silent. He could almost hear the individual snow grains skitter across the sheet ice. He could hear the vibrating bones of each man around him, pick out the hollow frightened breathing of the grubs. Time stretched.
He could threaten Metzov, break up his complacency with dark hints about Komarr, the truth will out. He could call on his father’s rank and position. He could . . . dammit, Metzov must realize he was overextended, no matter how mad he was. His discipline parade bluff hadn’t worked and now he was stuck with it, stonily defending his authority unto death. He can be a funny kind of dangerous, if you really threaten him. . . . It was hard, to see through the sadism to the underlying fear. But it had to be there, underneath. Pushing wasn’t working. Metzov was practically petrified with resistance. What about pulling . . . ?
“But consider, sir,” Miles’s words stuttered out persuasively, “the advantages to yourself of stopping now. You now have clear evidence of a mutinous, er, conspiracy. You can arrest us all, throw us in the stockade. It’s a better revenge, ’cause you get it all and lose nothing. I lose my career, get a dishonorable discharge or maybe prison—do you think I wouldn’t rather die? Service Security punishes the rest of us for you. You get it all.”
Miles’s words had hooked him; Miles could see it, in the red glow fading from the narrowed eyes, in the slight bending of that stiff, stiff neck. Miles had only to let the line out, refrain from jerking on it and renewing Metzov’s fighting frenzy, wait. . . .
Metzov stepped nearer, bulking in the half-light, haloed by his freezing breath. His voice dropped, pitched to Miles’s ear alone. “A typical soft Vorkosigan answer. Your father was soft on Komarran scum. Cost us lives. A court-martial for the Admiral’s little boy—that might bring down that holier-than-thou buggerer, eh?”
Miles swallowed icy spit. Those who do not know their history, his thought careened, are doomed to keep stepping in it. Alas, so were those who did, it seemed. “Thermo the damned fetaine spill,” he whispered hoarsely, “and see.”
“You’re all under arrest,” Metzov bellowed out suddenly, his shoulders hunching. “Get dressed.”
The others looked stunned with relief, then. After a last uncertain glance at the nerve disruptors they dove for their clothes, donning them with frantic, cold-clumsy hands. But Miles had seen it complete in Metzov’s eyes sixty seconds earlier. It reminded him of that definition of his father’s. A weapon is a device for making your enemy change his mind. The mind was the first and final battleground; the stuff in between was just noise.
Lieutenant Yaski had taken the opportunity afforded by Miles’s attention-arresting nude arrival on center stage to quietly disappear into the admin building and make several frantic calls. As a result the trainees’ commander, the base surgeon, and Metzov’s second-in-command arrived, primed to persuade or perhaps sedate and confine Metzov. But by that time Miles, Bonn, and the techs were already dressed and being marched, stumbling, toward the stockade bunker under the Argus-eyes of the nerve disruptors.
“Am I s-supposed to th-thank you for this?” Bonn asked Miles through chattering teeth. Their hands and feet swung like paralyzed lumps; he leaned on Miles, Miles hung on him, hobbling down the road together.
“We got what we wanted, eh? He’s going to plasma the fetaine on-site before the wind shifts in the morning. Nobody dies. Nobody gets their nuts curdled. We win. I think.” Miles emitted a deathly cackle through numb lips.
“I never thought,” wheezed Bonn, “that I’d ever meet anybody crazier than Metzov.”
“I didn’t do anything you didn’t,” protested Miles. “Except I made it work. Sort of. It’ll all look different in the morning, anyway.”
“Yeah. Worse,” Bonn predicted glumly.
Bujold, Lois McMaster. The Vor Game (Vorkosigan Saga) (Miles Vorsokigan Book 6) (pp. 81-88). (Function). Kindle Edition.
Suicide attempt. (?, WA)
He did not care to be an object of charity, and he found himself too Barrayaran for the last two categories, although Betan enough not to mind them for others. A short affair with a girl from the kinky/curious category was enough. Her fascination with the peculiarities of his body made him, in the end, more self-conscious than the most open revulsion he had experienced on Barrayar, with its fierce prejudice against deformity. Anyway, after finding his sexual parts disappointingly normal, the girl had drifted off.
The affair had ended, for Miles, in a terrifying black depression that had deepened for weeks, culminating at last late one night in the third, and most secret, time the Sergeant had saved his life. He had cut Bothari twice, in their silent struggle for the knife, exerting hysterical strength against the Sergeant's frightened caution of breaking his bones. The tall man had finally achieved a grip that held him, and held him, until he broke down at last, weeping his self-hatred into the Sergeant's bloodied breast until exhaustion finally stilled him. The man who'd carried him as a child, before he first walked at age four, then carried him like a child to bed. Bothari treated his own wounds, and never referred to the incident again.
Age fifteen had not been a very good year. Miles was determined not to repeat it.
Bujold, Lois McMaster. The Warrior's Apprentice (Vorkosigan Saga) (Miles Vorsokigan Book 2) (Function). Kindle Edition.
Elli Quinn turns down his proposal. (B, BiA)
“Miles,” Elli interrupted him gently.
“Yes?” he said breathlessly.
“You’re babbling. Why are you babbling? I could listen by the hour, but it’s worrisome when you get stuck on fast-forward.”
“I’m nervous,” he confessed. He smiled blindingly at her.
“Delayed reaction, from this afternoon?” She slipped closer to him, comfortingly. “I can understand that.”
He eased his right arm around her waist. “No. Yes, well, maybe a little. Would you like to be Countess Vorkosigan?”
She grinned. “Made of glass? Not my style, thanks. Really, though, the title sounds more like something that would go with black leather and chromium studs.”
The mental image of Elli so attired was so arresting, it took him a full half minute of silence to trace back to the wrong turn. “Let me rephrase that,” he said at last. “Will you marry me?”
The silence this time was much longer.
“I thought you were working up to asking me to go to bed with you,” she said finally, “and I was laughing. At your nerves.” She wasn’t laughing now.
“No,” said Miles. “That would have been easy.”
"You don’t want much, do you? Just to completely rearrange the rest of my life.”
“It’s good that you understand that part. It’s not just a marriage. There’s a whole job description that goes with it.”
“On Barrayar. Downside.”
“Yes. Well, there might be some travel.”
She was quiet for too long, then said, “I was born in space. Grew up on a deep-space transfer station. Worked most of my adult life aboard ships. The time I’ve spent with my feet on real dirt can be measured in months.”
“It would be a change,” Miles admitted uneasily.
“And what would happen to the future Admiral Quinn, free mercenary?”
“Presumably—hopefully—she would find the work of Lady Vorkosigan equally interesting.”
“Let me guess. The work of Lady Vorkosigan would not include ship command.”
“The security risks of allowing such a career would appall even me. My mother gave up a ship command—Betan Astronomical Survey—to go to Barrayar.”
“Are you telling me you’re looking for a girl just like Mom?”
“She has to be smart—she has to be fast—she has to be a determined survivor,” Miles explained unhappily. “Anything less would be a slaughter of the innocent. Maybe for her, maybe for our children with her. Bodyguards, as you know, can only do so much.”
Her breath blew out in a long, silent whistle, watching him watching her. The slippage between the distress in her eyes and the smile on her lips tore at him. Didn’t want to hurt you— the best I can offer shouldn’t be pain to you—is it too much, too little . . . too awful?
“Oh, love,” she breathed sadly, “you aren’t thinking.”
“I think the world of you.”
“And so you want to maroon me for the rest of my life on a, sorry, backwater dirtball that’s just barely climbed out of feudalism, that treats women like chattel—or cattle—that would deny me the use of every military skill I’ve learned in the past twelve years from shuttle docking to interrogation chemistry . . . I’m sorry. I’m not an anthropologist, I’m not a saint, and I’m not crazy.”
“You don’t have to say no right away,” said Miles in a small voice.
“Oh, yes I do,” she said. “Before looking at you makes me any weaker in the knees. Or in the head.”
And what am I to say to that? If you really loved me, you’d be delighted to immolate your entire personal history on my behalf? Oh, sure. She’s not into immolation. This makes her strong, her strength makes me want her, and so we come full circle. “It’s Barrayar that’s the problem, then.”
“Of course. What female human in her right mind would voluntarily move to that planet? With the exception of your mother, apparently.”
“She is exceptional. But . . . when she and Barrayar collide, it’s Barrayar that changes. I’ve seen it. You could be a force of change like that.”
Elli was shaking her head. “I know my limits.”
“No one knows their limits till they’ve gone beyond them.”
She eyed him. “You would naturally think so. What’s with you and Barrayar, anyway? You let them push you around like . . . I’ve never understood why you’ve never just grabbed the Dendarii and taken off. You could make it go, better than Admiral Oser ever did, better than Tung even. You could end up emperor of your own rock by the time you were done.”
“With you at my side?” He grinned strangely. “Are you seriously suggesting I embark on a plan of galactic conquest with five thousand guys?”
She chuckled. “At least I wouldn’t have to give up fleet command. No, really seriously. If you’re so obsessed with being a professional soldier, what do you need Barrayar for? A mercenary fleet sees ten times the action of a planetary one. A dirtball may see war once a generation, if it’s lucky—”
“Or unlucky,” Miles interpolated.
“A mercenary fleet follows it around.”
“That statistical fact has been noted in the Barrayaran high command. It’s one of the chief reasons I’m here. I’ve had more actual combat experience, albeit on a small scale, in the past four years than most other Imperial officers have seen in the last fourteen. Nepotism works in strange ways.” He ran a finger along the clean line of her jaw. “I see it now. You are in love with Admiral Naismith.”
“Of course.”
“Not Lord Vorkosigan.”
“I am annoyed with Lord Vorkosigan. He sells you short, love.”
He let the double entendre pass. So, the gulf that yawned between them was deeper than he’d truly realized. To her, it was Lord Vorkosigan who wasn’t real. His fingers entwined around the back of her neck, and he breathed her breath as she asked, “Why do you let Barrayar screw you over?”
“It’s the hand I was dealt.”
“By whom? I don’t get it.”
“It’s all right. It just happens to be very important to me to win with the hand I was dealt. So be it.”
“Your funeral.” Her lips were muffled on his mouth.
“Mmm.”
She drew back a moment. “Can I still jump your bones? Carefully, of course. You’ll not go away mad, for turning you down? Turning Barrayar down, that is. Not you, never you . . .”
I’m getting used to it. Almost numb. “Am I to sulk?” he inquired lightly. “Because I can’t have it all, take none, and go off in a huff? I’d hope you’d bounce me down the corridor on my pointed head if I were so dense.”
She laughed. It was all right, if he could still make her laugh. If Naismith was all she wanted, she could surely have him. Half a loaf for half a man. They tilted bedward, hungry-mouthed. It was easy, with Quinn; she made it so.
Bujold, Lois McMaster. Brothers in Arms (Vorkosigan Saga) (Miles Vorsokigan Book 5) (pp. 113-118). (Function). Kindle Edition.
Elena Bothari turns down his proposal. (B, WA)
“Elena, I love you, I’ve always loved you—” She leaped like a startled deer; he gasped and flung his arms around her. “No, listen! I love you, I don’t know what the Sergeant was but I loved him too, and whatever of him is in you I honor with all my heart, I don’t know what is truth and I don’t give a damn anymore, we’ll make our own like he did, he did a bloody good job I think, I can’t live without my Bothari, marry me!” He spent the last of his air shouting the last two words, and had to pause for a long inhalation.
“I can’t marry you! The genetic risks—”
“I am not a mutant! Look, no gills”—he stuck his fingers into the corners of his mouth and spread it wide—“no antlers—” He planted his thumbs on either side of his head and wriggled his fingers.
“I wasn’t thinking of your genetic risks. Mine. His. Your father must have known what he was—he’ll never accept—”
“Look, anybody who can trace a blood relationship with Mad Emperor Yuri through two lines of descent has no room to criticize anybody else’s genes.”
“Your father is loyal to his class, Miles, like your grandfather, like Lady Vorpatril—they could never accept me as Lady Vorkosigan.”
“Then I’ll present them with an alternative. I’ll tell them I’m going to marry Bel Thorne. They’ll come around so fast they’ll trip over themselves.”
She sat back helplessly and buried her face in his pillow, shoulders shaking. He had a moment of terror that he’d broken her down into tears. Not break down, build up, and up, and up . . . But, “Damn you for making me laugh!” she repeated. “Damn you . . .”
He galloped on, encouraged. “And I wouldn’t be so sure about my father’s class loyalties. He married a foreign plebe, after all.” He dropped into seriousness. “And you cannot doubt my mother. She always longed for a daughter, secretly—never paraded it, so as not to hurt the old man, of course—let her be your mother in truth.”
“Oh,” she said, as if he had stabbed her. “Oh . . .”
"You’ll see, when we get back to Barrayar—”
“I pray to God,” she interrupted him, voice intense, “I may never set foot on Barrayar again.”
“Oh,” he said in turn. After a long pause he said, “We could live somewhere else. Beta Colony. It would have to be pretty quietly, once the exchange rate got done with my income—I could get a job, doing—doing—doing something.”
“And on the day the emperor calls you to take your place on the Council of Counts, to speak for your district and all the poor sods in it, where will you go then?”
He swallowed, struck silent. “Ivan Vorpatril is my heir,” he offered at last. “Let him take the countship.”
“Ivan Vorpatril is a jerk.”
"Oh, he’s not such a bad sort.”
“He used to corner me, when my father wasn’t around, and try to feel me up.”
“What! You never said—”
“I didn’t want to start a big flap.” She frowned into the past. “I almost wish I could go back in time, just to boot him in the balls.”
He glanced sideways at her, considerably startled. “Yes,” he said slowly, “you’ve changed.”
“I don’t know what I am anymore. Miles, you must believe me—I love you as I love breath—” His heart rocketed. “But I can’t be your annex.”
And crashed. “I don’t understand.”
“I don’t know how to put it plainer. You’d swallow me up the way an ocean swallows a bucket of water. I’d disappear in you. I love you, but I’m terrified of you, and of your future.”
His bafflement sought simplicity. “Baz. It’s Baz, isn’t it?”
“If Baz had never existed, my answer would be the same. But as it happens—I have given him my word.”
“You”—the breath went out of him in a ha—“Break it,” he ordered.
She merely looked at him, silently. In a moment he reddened, dropping his eyes in shame.
“You own honor by the ocean,” she whispered. “I have only a little bucketful. Unfair to jostle it—my lord.”
He fell back across his bed, defeated.
She rose.
Bujold, Lois McMaster. The Warrior's Apprentice (Vorkosigan Saga) (Miles Vorsokigan Book 2) (pp. 269-271). (Function). Kindle Edition.
Death at the wrong end of a needler. (N, MD)
“You—” Miles’s voice cracked, and he found he had to stop and swallow. “Later, you and I are going to have a long talk. There’s a lot you don’t seem to understand.”
Mark’s chin came up, defiantly. Surely my face is not that round. It must be an illusion, from the hood. “What about these kids?” said Mark. “These clones.”
“What about them?” A couple of young men in brown silk tunics and shorts appeared to be actually helping the Dendarii defenders, scared and excited rather than surly. Another group, boys and girls mixed, sat in a plain-scared bunch on the floor under the watchful eye of a stunner-armed trooper. Crap, they really are just kids.
“We’ve—you’ve got to take them along. Or I’m not going.” Mark’s teeth were set, but Miles saw him swallow.
“Don’t tempt me,” snarled Miles. “Of course we’re taking them along, how the hell else would we get out of here alive?”
Mark’s face lit, torn between hope and hatred. “And then what?” he demanded suspiciously.
“Oh,” Miles caroled sarcastically, “we’re just going to waltz right over to Bharaputra Station and drop them off, and thank Vasa Luigi kindly for the loan. Idiot! What d’you think? We load up and run like hell. The only place to put them would be out the airlock, and I guarantee you’d go first!”
Mark flinched, but took a deep breath and nodded. “All right, then.”
“It is not. All. Right,” Miles bit out. “It is merely . . . merely . . .” He could not come up with a word to describe what it merely was, aside from the most screwed-up mess he’d ever encountered. “If you were going to try and pull a stupid stunt like this, you might at least have consulted the expert in the family!”
“You? Come to you for help? D’you think I’m crazy?” demanded Mark furiously.
“Yes—” They were interrupted by a staring blond clone boy, who’d walked up to them open-mouthed.
“You really are clones,” he said in wonderment.
“No, we’re twins born six years apart,” snapped Miles. “Yes, we’re just as much clones as you are, that’s right, go back and sit down and obey orders, dammit.”
The boy retreated hastily, whispering, “It’s true!”
“Dammit,” Mark howled under his breath, if that squeezed sotto voce could be so described, “how come they believe you and not me? It’s not fair!”
Quinn’s voice, through his helmet, derailed the family reunion. “If you and Don Quixote Junior are done greeting each other, Medic Norwood has Phillipi prepped and loaded, and the wounded ready to transport.”
“Form up, let’s get the first batch out the door, then,” he responded. He called up Blue Squad’s sergeant. “Framingham, take the first convoy. You ready to roll?”
“Ready. Sergeant Taura has marshaled them for me.”
“Go. And don’t look back.”
Half-a-dozen Dendarii, about three times that many bewildered and exhausted clones, and the two wounded troopers on float pallets assembled in the foyer and filed out the ruined doors.
***
(A lot of action goes here as Miles frantically tries to salvage the operation.)
Miles turned and dashed down the corridor and through some big double doors, beckoned anxiously onward by Thorne, who waited to help cover him.
“I’ll take rear guard,” Thorne volunteered.
Was Thorne entertaining thoughts of dying heroically, thus avoiding the inevitable court-martial? For a moment, Miles entertained thoughts of letting it do so. It would be the Vorish thing to do. The Old Vor could be a bunch of assholes, at times. “You get those clones to the shuttle,” Miles snapped in turn. “Finish the job you took on. If I’m paying this much, I want to get what I’m paying for.”
Thorne’s teeth bared, but it nodded. They both galloped after the squad.
The double doors opened onto an enormous concrete-floored room, which obviously nearly filled the big building. Red- and green-painted catwalks ran around a girdered ceiling high above, festooned with looping cables of mysterious function. A few harsh pale lights shone down, casting multiple shadows. He blinked in the gloom and almost lowered his infrared visor. It appeared to be an assembly area for large projects of some kind, though at the moment there seemed to be nothing in progress. Quinn and Mark hesitated, waiting for them to catch up despite Miles’s urgent gesture for them to hurry on. “What are you stopping for?” he barked in furious fear. He skidded to a halt beside them.
“Look out!” someone yelled. Quinn spun, raising her plasma arc, seeking aim. Mark’s mouth opened, the ‘o’ foolishly echoing the circle of his gray hood around his face.
Miles saw the Bharaputran because they were looking square at each other, in that frozen moment. A team of brown-clad Bharaputran snipers, probably come up through the tunnels. They were scrambling along the girders, barely more prepared than the Dendarii they pursued. The Bharaputran had a hand-sized projectile weapon launcher of some kind pointed straight at him, its muzzle bright with flare.
Miles could not, of course, see the projectile, not even as it entered his chest. Only his chest, bursting outward like a flower, and a sound not heard but only felt, a hammer-blow launching him backward. Dark flowers bloomed too in his eyes, covering everyone.
He was astonished, not by how much he thought, for there was no time for thought, but by how much he felt, in the time it took for his last heartburst of blood to finish flowing through his brain. The chamber careening around him . . . pain beyond measure . . . rage, and outrage . . . and a vast regret, infinitesimal in duration, infinite in depth. Wait, I haven’t—
The end of Dagoola IV. (N, BoI)
“Get that hatch sealed back there!” the shuttle pilot’s voice yowled over the headset.
“Ramp’s jammed,” Miles yowled back. “Jettison it!”
The ramp mechanism skreeled and shrieked, reversing itself. The ramp shuddered, jammed again. Hands reached out to thump on it urgently.
“You’ll never get it that way!” Beatrice, across the hatch from Miles, yelled fiercely, and twisted around to kick at it with her bare feet. The wind of their flight screamed over the open hatchway, buffeting and vibrating the shuttle like a giant blowing across the top of a bottle.
To a chorus of shouting, thumping, and swearing, the shuttle lurched abruptly onto its side. Men, women, and loose equipment tangled across the tilting deck. Beatrice kicked bloodily at a final buggered bolt. The ramp tore loose at last. Beatrice, sliding, fell with it.
Miles dove at her, lunging across the hatchway. If he connected, he never knew, for his right hand was a senseless blob. He saw her face only as a white blur as she whipped away into the blackness.
It was like a silence, a great silence, in his head. Although the roar of wind and engines, screaming and swearing and yelling, went on as before, it was lost somewhere between his ears and his brain, and went unregistered. He saw only a white blur, smearing into the darkness, repeated again and again, replaying like a looping vid.
He found himself crouched on his hands and knees, the shuttle’s acceleration sucking him to the deck. They’d got the hatch closed. The merely human babble within seemed muffled and thin, now that the roaring voices of the gods were silenced. He looked up into the pale face of Pitt’s lieutenant, crouched beside him still clutching the unfired Dendarii weapon he’d grabbed up in that other lifetime.
“You’d better kill a whole lot of Cetagandans for Marilac, boy,” Miles rasped to him at last. “You better be worth something to somebody, ’cause I’ve sure paid too much for you.”
Bujold, Lois McMaster. Borders of Infinity (3-novella collection - Vorkosigan Saga) (p. 292-293). (Function). Kindle Edition.
Miles's polycule +1 (V, MD)
“Yes,” said Miles, “that works. Home. Captain Quinn, arrange Mark’s and my transport with ImpSec. Sergeant Taura, would you please put yourself at Lilly Durona’s disposal? The sooner we evacuate from here the better, I agree. And, um, Bel . . . would you stay and talk with me, please.”
(The memory blurs here - there's a piece missing in the middle.)
“Think about it, then, on the way back to Escobar. Talk to Quinn. Decide by the time you get there, and let her know.”
Bel nodded, rose, and looked around Lilly Durona’s quiet living room. “I’m not altogether sorry, you know,” it said to Mark. “One way or another, we’ve pulled almost ninety people out of this stinking gravity well. Out of certain death or Jacksonian slavery. Not a bad score, for an aging Betan. You can bet I’ll remember them, too, when I remember this.”
“Thank you,” whispered Mark.
Bel eyed Miles. “Do you remember the first time we ever saw each other?” it asked.
“Yes. I stunned you.”
“You surely did.” It walked over to his chair, and bent, and took his chin in its hand. “Hold still. I’ve been wanting to do this for years.” It kissed him, long and quite thoroughly. Miles thought about appearances, thought about the ambiguity of it, thought about sudden death, thought the hell with it all, and kissed Bel back. Straightening again, Bel smiled.
Bujold, Lois McMaster. Mirror Dance (Vorkosigan Saga) (Miles Vorsokigan Book 8) (p. 541-542). (Function). Kindle Edition.