Miles returned his attention to the problem of spying on Nav and Com. If the ba had knocked out the monitor the way the passing quaddies just had, or even merely thrown a jacket over the vid pickup, Miles would be out of luck . . . ah. Finally. An image of Nav and Com formed over his vid plate. But now he had no sound. Miles gritted his teeth and bent forward.
The vid pickup was apparently centered over the door, giving a good view over the half dozen empty station chairs and their dark consoles. The ba was there, still dressed in the Betan garb of its discarded alias, jacket and sarong and sandals. Although a pressure suit—one—abstracted from the Idris 's supplies lay nearby, flung over the back of a station chair. Corbeau, still vulnerably naked, was seated in the pilot's chair, but had not yet lowered his headset. The ba held up a hand, said something; Corbeau frowned fiercely, and flinched, as the ba pressed a hypospray briefly against the pilot's upper arm and stepped back with a flash of satisfaction on its strained face.
Drugs? Surely even the ba was not mad enough to drug a jump pilot upon whose neural function it would shortly be betting its life. Some disease inoculation? The same problem applied, although something latent might do—Cooperate, and later I will let you have the antidote . Or pure bluff, a shot of water, perhaps. The hypospray seemed altogether too crude and obvious as a Cetagandan drug administration method; it hinted at bluff to Miles's mind, though perhaps not to Corbeau's. One had no choice but to turn control over to the pilot when he lowered his headset and plugged the ship into his mind. It made pilots hard to effectively threaten.
It did rather put paid to Vorpatril's paranoid fear that Corbeau had turned traitor, volunteering for this as a way to get a free ride out of his quaddie detention cell and his dilemmas. Or did it? Regardless of prior or secret agreements, the ba would not simply trust when it could, it would think, guarantee.
Over his wrist com, muffled as from a distance, Miles heard a sudden, startling bellow from Admiral Vorpatril: “What? That's impossible. Have they gone mad? Not now . . .”
After a few more moments passed without further enlightenment, he murmured, “Um, Ekaterin? Are you still there?”
Her breath drew in. “Yes.”
“What's going on?”
“Admiral Vorpatril was called away by his communications officer. Some sort of priority message from Sector Five headquarters just arrived. It seems to be something very urgent.”
On the vid image in front of him, Miles watched as Corbeau began to run through preflight checks, moving from station to station under the hard, watchful eyes of the ba. Corbeau made sure to move with disproportional care; apparently, from the movement of his rather stiff lips, explaining each move before he touched a console. And slowly, Miles noted. Rather more slowly than necessary, if not quite slowly enough to be obvious about it.
Vorpatril's voice, or rather, Vorpatril's heavy breathing, returned at last. The admiral appeared to have run out of invective. Miles found that considerably more disturbing than his previous naval bellowing.
“My lord.” Vorpatril hesitated. His voice dropped to a sort of stunned growl. “I have just received Priority One orders from Sector Five HQ to marshal my escort ships, abandon the Komarran fleet, and head for fleet rendezvous off Marilac at maximum possible speed.”
Not with my wife, you don't , was Miles's first gyrating thought.
Then he blinked, freezing in his seat.
The other function of the military escorts Barrayar donated to the Komarran trade fleets was to quietly and unobtrusively maintain an armed force dispersed through the Nexus. A force that could, in the event of a truly dire emergency, be collected rapidly so as to present a convincing military threat at key strategic points. In a crunch it might otherwise be too slow, or even diplomatically or militarily impossible, to get any force from the homeworlds through the wormhole jumps of intervening local space polities to the mustering places where it could do Barrayar some good. But the trade fleets were out there already.
The planet of Marilac was a Barrayaran ally at the back door of the Cetagandan Empire, from Barrayar's point of view, in the complex web of wormhole jump routes that strung the Nexus together. A second front, as Rho Ceta's immediate neighborly threat to Komarr was considered the first front. Granted, the Cetagandans had the shorter lines of communication and logistics between the two points of contact. But the strategic pincer still beat hell out of the sound of one hand clapping, particularly with the potential addition of Marilacan forces. The Barrayarans would only be marshaling at Marilac in order to offer a threat to Cetaganda.
Except that, when Miles and Ekaterin had left Barrayar on this belated honeymoon trip, relations between the two empires had been about as—well, cordial was perhaps not quite the right term—about as unstrained as they had been in years. What the hell could have changed that, so profoundly, and so quickly?
Something has stirred up the Cetagandans around Rho Ceta, Gregor had said.
A few jumps out from Rho Ceta, Guppy and his smuggler friends had off-loaded a strange live cargo from a Cetagandan government ship, one with lots of fancy markings. A screaming-bird pattern, perhaps? Along with one, and only one person—one survivor? After which the ship had tilted away, on a dangerous in-bound course for the system's suns. What if that trajectory hadn't been a swing around? What if it had been a straight dive, with no return?
“Sonuvabitch,” breathed Miles.
“My lord?” said Vorpatril. “If—”
“Quiet ,” snapped Miles.
The admiral's silence was shocked, but it held.
Once a year, the most precious cargoes of the haut race left the Star Cr?che on the capital world of Eta Ceta. Eight ships, bound each for one of the planets of the Empire so curiously ruled by the haut. Each carrying that year's cohort of haut embryos, genetically modified and certified results of all the contracts of conception so carefully negotiated, the prior year, between the members of the great constellations, the clans, the carefully cultivated gene-lines of the haut race. Each load of a thousand or so nascent lives conducted by one of the eight most important haut ladies of the Empire, the planetary consorts who were the steering committee of the Star Cr?che. All most private, most secret, most never-to-be-discussed with outsiders.
How was it that a ba agent could not go back for more copies, if it lost such a cargo of future haut lives in transit?
When it wasn't an agent at all. When it was a renegade .
“The crime isn't murder,” Miles whispered, his eyes widening. “The crime is kidnapping .”
The murders had come subsequently, in an increasingly panicked cascade, as the ba, with good reason, attempted to bury its trail. Well, Guppy and his friends had surely been planned to die, as eyewitnesses to the fact that one person had not gone down with the rest on the doomed ship. A ship hijacked, if briefly, before its destruction—all the best hijackings were inside jobs, oh, yes. The Cetagandan government must be going insane over this.
“My lord, are you all right—?”
Ekaterin's voice, in a fierce whisper: “No, don't interrupt him. He's thinking. He just makes those funny leaking noises when he's thinking.”
From the Celestial Garden's point of view, a Star Cr?che child-ship had disappeared on what should have been a safe route to Rho Ceta. Every rescue force and intelligence agent the Cetagandan empire owned would have been flung into the case. If it were not for Guppy, the tragedy might have passed as some mysterious malfunction that had sent the ship tumbling, out of control and unable to signal, to its fiery doom. No survivors, no wreckage, no loose ends. But there was Guppy. Leaving a messy trail of wildly suggestive evidence behind him with every flopping footfall.