“I will be back,” Quinn swore.
“That’ll be between you and Simon Illyan. I promise you, he’ll be just as interested as we are in retrieving that cryo-chamber.”
“Illyan’s just a Barrayaran,” Quinn sputtered for a word, “bureaucrat. He can’t care the way we do.”
“Don’t bet on that,” whispered Bothari-Jesek.
In the end, Bothari-Jesek, Quinn’s downward duty to the rest of the Dendarii, and the logic of the situation had prevailed. And so Mark found himself dressing in officer’s greys for what he earnestly prayed would be his last public appearance ever as Admiral Miles Naismith, observing the transfer of their hostage onto a House Fell shuttle. Whatever happened to Vasa Luigi after that would be up to Baron Fell. Mark could only hope it would be something unpleasant.
Bothari-Jesek came to escort Mark personally from his cabin-prison to the shuttle hatch corridor where the Fell ship was scheduled to clamp on. She looked cool as ever, if weary, and unlike Quinn she limited her critique of the fit of his uniform to a pass of her hand to straighten his collar insignia. The pocketed jacket was roomy, and came down far enough to cover and so disguise the tight bite of the trouser waistband, and the way his flesh was beginning to burgeon over the belt. He yanked the jacket down firmly, and followed the Peregrine’s captain through her ship.
“Why do I have to do this?” he asked her plaintively.
“It’s our last chance to prove—for certain—to Vasa Luigi that you are Miles Naismith, and that … thing in the cryo-chamber is just a clone. Just in case the cryo-chamber didn’t go off-planet, and just in case, by whatever chance, wherever it went, Bharaputra finds it again before we do.”
They arrived at the shuttle hatch corridor at the same time as a couple of heavily-armed Dendarii techs, who took up station at the docking clamp controls. Baron Bharaputra appeared shortly thereafter, escorted by a wary Captain Quinn and two edgy Dendarii guards. The guards, Mark decided, were mainly ornamental. The real power, and the real threat, the heavy pieces on this chessboard, were Jump-point Station Five and the House Fell ships that supported it. He pictured them, arrayed in space around the Dendarii ships. Check. Was Baron Bharaputra king? Mark felt like a pawn masquerading as a knight. Vasa Luigi ignored the guards, kept half an eye on Quinn the Red Queen, but mostly watched the shuttle hatch.
Quinn saluted Mark. “Admiral.”
He returned the salute. “Captain.” He stood at parade rest, as if overseeing his operation. Was he supposed to bandy words with the Baron? He waited for Vasa Luigi to open the conversation. The Baron merely waited, with a disturbingly controlled patience, as if he did not even perceive time the same way Mark did.
Regardless of how outgunned they were, the Dendarii were only minutes from escape. As soon as the transfer was complete, the Peregrine and the Ariel could jump, and the clones would be beyond House Bharaputra’s lethal reach. That much he had accomplished, ass-backwards and screwed up beyond repair, but done. Small victories.
At last came the clanking of the shuttle hatch clamps grasping and positioning their prey, and the hiss of the flex-tube sealing. The Dendarii oversaw the dilation of the hatch portal, and stood to attention. On the other side of the portal a man dressed in House Fell green with captain’s insignia, and flanked by two ornamental guards of his own, nodded sharply and identified himself and his vessel of origin.
He spotted Mark as the highest ranking officer present, and saluted. “Baron Fell’s compliments, Admiral Naismith sir, and he is returning to you something you accidentally left behind.”
Quinn went pale with hope; Mark could swear her heart stopped beating. The Fell captain stepped back from the hatch. But through it swung not the ardently-desired cryo-chamber on a float pallet, but a file of three men and two women, civilian-clothed, looking variously sheepish, angry, and grim. One man was limping, and supported by another.
Quinn’s spies. The group of Dendarii volunteers she had attempted to slip onto Fell Station to continue the search. Quinn’s face flushed red with chagrin. But she raised her chin and said clearly, “Tell Baron Fell we thank him for his care.”
The Fell captain acknowledged the message with a salute and a sour smirk.
“Meet you all in debriefing, soonest,” she breathed, and dismissed the unhappy mob with a nod. They clattered off. Bothari-Jesek went with them.
The Fell captain announced, “We are ready to board our passenger.” Punctilliously, he did not set foot aboard the Peregrine, but waited. Equally punctilliously, the Dendarii guards and Quinn stood away from Baron Bharaputra, who raised his square chin and began to stride forward.
“My lord! Wait for me!”
The high cry from behind them made Mark’s head snap around. The Baron’s eyes too widened in surprise.
The Eurasian girl, her hair swinging, slipped out of a cross-corridor and ran forward. She held hands with the platinum blonde clone. She darted like an eel around the Dendarii guards, who had better sense than to draw weapons in this dicey moment, but not quite enough speed of reflex to catch her. The small-footed blonde was not so athletic, half out-of-balance with her other arm crossed under her breasts, and she was pulled along gasping for breath, blue eyes wide with fear.
Mark saw her, in his mind’s eye, laid out on some operating table, light-crowned scalp peeled carefully back—the whine of a surgical saw cutting through bone, the slow teasing apart of living neurons in the brain stem, then at last the lifting-out of brain, like a gift, mind, memory, person, an offering to some dark god in the masked monster’s gloved hands—
He tackled her around the knees. Her fine-boned hand jerked out of the dark-haired girl’s grip, and she fell forward on the deck. She cried out, then just cried, and kicked at him, rocking and bucking and twisting onto her back. Terrified he would lose his clutch, he worked upward till he lay across her with his full weight. She squirmed beneath him, ineffectually; she didn’t even know enough to try to knee him in the groin. “Stop. Stop, for God’s sake, I don’t want to hurt you,” he mumbled in her ear around a mouthful of sweet-smelling hair.
The other girl meanwhile had succeeded in diving through the shuttle hatch. The House Fell guard captain was confused by her arrival, but not by the Dendarii; he’d drawn a nerve disrupter instantly, repelling the first reflexive lurch of Quinn’s men. “Stop right there. Baron Bharaputra, what is this?”
“My lord!” the Eurasian girl cried. “Take me with you, please! I will be united with my lady. I will!”
“Stay on that side,” the Baron advised her calmly. “They cannot touch you there.”
“You try me—” began Quinn, starting forward, but the Baron raised a hand, fingers delicately crooked, neither fist nor obscenity yet somehow faintly insulting.
“Captain Quinn. Surely you do not wish to create an incident and delay your departure, do you? Clearly, this girl chooses of her own free will.”
Quinn hesitated.
“No!” screamed Mark. He scrambled to his feet, hauled the blonde girl up, and jammed her into the grip of the biggest Dendarii guard. ’’Hold her.” He wheeled to pass Baron Bharaputra.
“Admiral?” The Baron raised a faintly ironic brow.
“You’re wearing a corpse,” Mark snarled. “Don’t talk to me.” He staggered forward, hands out, to face the dark-haired girl across that little, dreadful, politically significant gap. “Girl …” he did not know her name. He did not know what to say. “Don’t go. You don’t have to go. They’ll kill you.”
Growing more certain of her security, though still positioned behind the Fell captain and well out of reach of any Dendarii lunge, she smiled triumphantly at Mark and tossed back her hair. Her eyes were alight. “I’ve saved my honor. All by myself. My honor is my lady. You have no honor. Pig! My life is an offering … greater than you can imagine being. I am a flower on her altar.”