"Now what?" said Mark thinly. He looked like he felt trapped indeed, sandwiched between the two Barrayarans.
Miles settled back against the slimy wet wall with a false air of ease. "Now we wait. Just like a tactics room. You spend a lot of time waiting in a tactics room. If you have a good imagination, it's—pure hell." He keyed his wrist comm. "Nim?"
"Yo, sir. I was just about to call you." Nim's uneven voice sounded like he was running, or maybe crawling. "A police aircar just landed at Tower Seven. We're withdrawing through the park strip behind the Barrier. The observer reports the locals just entered Tower Six, too."
"Have you got anything off Quinn's wrist comm?"
"It still hasn't moved, sir."
"Has anyone made contact with Captain Galeni yet?"
"No, sir. Wasn't he with you?"
"He left about the time I lost Quinn. Last seen on the outside of the Tidal Barrier at about the midpoint. I'd sent him to look for another way in. Ah . . . report at once if anyone spots him."
"Yo, sir."
Damn, another worry. Had Galeni run into trouble, Cetagandan, Barrayaran, or local? Had he been betrayed by his own state of mind? Miles now wished he'd kept Galeni by him as heartily as he wished he'd kept Quinn. But they hadn't yet found Ivan then; Miles hardly could have done otherwise. He felt like a man trying to assemble a jigsaw puzzle of live pieces, that moved and changed shape at random intervals with tiny malicious giggles. He unclenched his teeth. Mark was regarding him nervously; Ivan was hunkered down not paying much attention to anything, by the way he was biting his lips locked in an internal struggle with his new-won claustrophobia.
There was a movement in the somewhat distorted 180-degree scanner view of the corridor, a man loping silently around the curvature from the south end. Cetagandan point man, Miles guessed, though he wore civilian clothes. He had a stunner, not a plasma arc in his hand—apparently the Cetagandans were now aware that the locals were on the scene in too great force to silence by a convenient murder, and were now thinking of de-escalating, or at least decapitalizing, the Situation. The Cetagandan scouted up the corridor a few more meters, then vanished back the way he'd come.
A minute later, movement from the north: a pair of men tiptoeing along as quietly as a couple of gorillas of that size could move. One of them was the numbskull who'd managed to appear on a covert op still wearing his regulation Service boots. He too had exchanged his original weapon for a more demure stunner, though his companion still carried a lethal nerve disruptor. It looked like it really could be shaping up for a round of stunner tag. Ah, the stunner, weapon of choice for all uncertain situations, the one weapon with which you really could shoot first and ask questions later.
"Holster your nerve disrupter, that's right, good boy!" Miles murmured, as the second man too switched weapons. "Heads up, Ivan; this could be the best show well see all year."
Ivan glanced up, his absorbed uncertain smile transmuting into something genuinely sardonic, more like the old Ivan. "Oh, shit, Miles. Destang will have your nuts for engineering this."
"At present, Destang doesn't even know I'm involved. H'sh. Here we go."
The Cetagandan point man had returned. He made a come-on motion, and was leapfrogged by a second Cetagandan. On the other end of the corridor, beyond their view due to the curve, the remaining three Barrayarans came jogging. That accounted for all the Barrayarans that had been in the tower; any outer-perimeter backup was now cut off from them by the cordon of local police. The Barrayarans had apparently given up on their mysteriously vanished quarry and were in pull-out mode, hoping to exit via Tower Seven as quickly as possible without having to explain themselves to a bunch of unsympathetic Earthmen. The Cetagandans, who had actually witnessed the supposed Admiral Naismith run this way, were still in hunting array, though their rear guard was presumably closing up with the pressure from the locals coming on strong behind.
No sign of the rear guard yet; no sign of Quinn being dragged along as a prisoner. Miles didn't know whether to hope for that or not. It would be very nice to know she was still alive, but fiendishly difficult to extract her from the Cetagandans' clutches before the constables closed in. Least-cost scenario called for letting her be stunned/arrested with the mob of them, and reclaiming her from the police at their leisure—but suppose some Cetagandan goon decided in the heat of the final crunch that dead women couldn't talk? Miles jittered like a boiling kettle at the thought.
Perhaps he should have jacked up Ivan and Mark and attacked. The breakable leading the disabled and the unreliable in an assault on the unknown … no. But would he have done more, done less, for any other officer in his command? Was he so worried about his command logic being ambushed by his emotions that he was now erring in the opposite direction? That would be a betrayal of both Quinn and the Dendarii. . . .
The lead Cetagandan darted into the line of sight of the lead Barrayaran. They both fired instantly, and dropped each other in a heap.
"Stunner reflexes," muttered Miles. "S' wonderful."
"My God," said Ivan, entranced to the point of wholly forgetting his hermetic enclosure, "it's just like the proton annihilating the anti-proton. Poof!"
The remaining Barrayarans, strung out along the corridor, flattened to the wall. The Cetagandan dropped to the floor and crawled to his downed comrade. A Barrayaran popped out into the corridor and blitzed him, the Cetagandan's return shot going wide. Two of the four Barrayarans hurried to the unconscious bodies of their mystery opponents. One prepared to offer covering fire, the other began checking them out, weapons, pockets, clothing. He naturally turned up no IDs. The baffled Barrayaran was just pulling off a shoe to dissect—Miles felt he would continue on to the body itself momentarily—when a distorted amplified voice began booming down the corridor from their rear. Miles could not quite make out the echo-splintered words, but the sense of it was clearly, "Here! Halt! What's all this, then?' " One of the Barrayarans helped another load up themstunned one for a shoulder-carry; it had to have been the biggest man who'd been hit, Boots himself. They were close enough to the fisheye that Miles could make out the carrier's legs shake slightly as he straightened and began staggering south under his burden, two men taking the point before and the remaining one the rear guard behind.
The doomed little army had gone perhaps four steps when another pair of Cetagandans appeared around the south curve. One was firing his stunner back over his shoulder as he ran. His attention was so divided, he did not see his partner go down to the Barrayaran point men's stunner fire until he tripped over the sprawling body and fell headlong. He kept his clutch on his own stunner, turned his fall into a controlled roll, and snapped off return fire. One of the Barrayaran point men went down.
The Barrayaran rear guard leapfrogged forward around the burdened middle man and helped his partner zap the rolling Cetagandan, then ran forward with him, hugging the wall. Unfortunately, they overshot the arc of concealment at the same moment as a blast of massed, unaimed stunner fire from beyond the curvature was clearing the corridor for some forward push from the unknowns—police combat team, Miles deduced both from the tactic and the feet that the Cetagandan had been firing in that direction. Men met energy wave with predictable results.
The remaining Barrayaran stood in the corridor bending under the weight of his unconscious comrade and cursing steadily, his eyes squeezed shut as if to shut out the sheer overwhelming embarrassment of it all. When the police appeared behind him he clumped in a circle to face them and raised his hands in surrender as best he could, flipping his empty palms out and letting his stunner clatter to the floor.