Her velvet mouth crimped quizzically. She gave him a—sisterly, perhaps—shrug. "I won't hassle you about it any more. But at least think about it. I don't think I've ever seen a human being who needed to get laid worse than you do now."
Oh, God, what a straight line—what did those words really mean? His chest tightened. Comradely comment, or invitation? If mere comment, and he mistook it for invitation, would she think he was leaning on her for sexual favors? If the reverse, would she be insulted again and not breathe on him for years to come? He grinned in panic. "Paid," he blurted. "What I need right now is paid, not laid. After that—after that, um . . . maybe we could go see some of the sights. It seems practically criminal to come all this way and not see any of Old Earth, even if it was by accident. I'm supposed to have a bodyguard at all times downside anyway; we could double up."
She was sighing, straightening up. "Yes, duty first, of course."
Yes, duty first. And his next duty was to report in to Admiral Naismith's employers. After that, all his troubles would be vastly simplified.
Miles wished he could have changed to civilian clothes before embarking on this expedition. His crisp gray-and-white Dendarii admiral's uniform was as conspicuous as hell in this shopping arcade. Or at least made Elli change—they could have pretended to be a soldier on leave and his girlfriend. But his civilian gear had been stashed in a crate several planets back—would he ever retrieve it? The clothes had been tailor-made and expensive, not so much as a mark of status as pure necessity.
Usually he could forget the peculiarities of his body—oversized head exaggerated by a short neck set on a twisted spine, all squashed down to a height of four-foot-nine, the legacy of a congenital accident—but nothing highlighted his defects in his own mind more sharply than trying to borrow clothes from someone of normal size and shape.
You sure it's the uniform that feels conspicuous, boy?
he thought to himself.
Or are you playing foolie-foolie games with your head again? Stop it.
He returned his attention to his surroundings. The spaceport city of London, a jigsaw of nearly two millennia of clashing architectural styles, was a fascination. The sunlight falling through the arcade's patterned glass arch was an astonishing rich color, breathtaking. It alone might have led him to guess his eye had been returned to its ancestral planet. Perhaps later he'd have a chance to visit more historical sites, such as a submarine tour of Lake Los Angeles, or New York behind the great dikes
Elli made another nervous circuit of the bench beneath the light-clock, scanning the crowd. This seemed a most unlikely spot for Cetagandan hit squads to pop up, but still he was glad of her alertness, that allowed him to be tired.
You can come look for assassins under my bed anytime, love. . . .
"In a way, I'm glad we ended up here," he remarked to her. "This might prove an excellent opportunity for Admiral Naismith to disappear up his own existence for a while. Take the heat off the Dendarii. The Cetagandans are a lot like the Barrayarans, really; they take a very personal view of command."
"You're pretty damned casual about it."
"Early conditioning. Total strangers trying to kill me make me feel right at home." A thought struck him with a certain macabre cheer. "You know, this is the first time anybody has tried to kill me for myself, and not because of who I'm related to? Have I ever told you about what my grandfather really did when I was . . ."
She cut off his babble with a lift of her chin. "I think this is it."
He followed her gaze. He
was
tired; she'd spotted their contact before he had. The man coming toward them with the inquiring look on his face wore stylish Earther clothes, but his hair was clipped in a Barrayaran military burr. A non-com, perhaps. Officers favored a slightly less severe Roman patrician style.
I need a haircut,
thought Miles, his
collar suddenly ticklish.
"My lord?" said the man.
"Sergeant Barth?" said Miles.
The man nodded, glanced at Elli. "Who is this?"
"My bodyguard."
"Ah."
So slight a compression of the lips and widening of the eyes, to convey so much amusement and contempt. Miles could feel the muscles coil in his neck. "She is outstanding at her job."
"I'm sure, sir. Come this way, please." He turned and led off.
The bland face was laughing at him, he could feel it, tell by looking at the back of the head. Elli, aware only of the sudden increase of tension in the air, gave him a look of dismay.
It's all right,
he thought at her, tucking her hand in his arm.
They strolled after their guide, through a shop, down a lift tube and then some stairs, then picked up the pace. The underground utility level was a maze of tunnels, conduits, and power optics. They traversed, Miles guessed, a couple of blocks. Their guide opened a door with a palm-lock. Another short tunnel led to another door. This one had a live human guard by it, extremely neat in Barrayaran Imperial dress greens, who scrambled up from his comconsole seat where he monitored scanners to barely resist saluting their civilian-clothed guide.
"We dump our weapons here," Miles told Elli. "All of them. I mean really all."
Elli raised her brows at the sudden shift of Miles's accent, from the flat Betan twang of Admiral Naismith to the warm gutturals of his native Barrayar. She seldom heard his Barrayaran voice, at that—which one would seem put-on to her? There was no doubt which one would seem a put-on to the embassy personnel, though, and Miles cleared his throat, to be sure of fully disciplining his voice to the new order.
Miles's contributions to the pile on the guard's console were a pocket stunner and a long steel knife in a lizard-skin sheath. The guard scanned the knife, popped the silver cap off the end of its jewelled hilt to reveal a patterned seal, and handed it back carefully to Miles. Their guide raised his brows at the miniaturized technical arsenal Elli unloaded.
So there,
Miles thought to him.
Stuff that up your regulation nose.
He followed on feeling rather more serene.
Up a lift tube, and suddenly the ambience changed to a hushed, plush, understated dignity. "The Barrayaran Imperial Embassy," Miles whispered to Elli.
The ambassador's wife must have taste, Miles thought. But the building had a strange hermetically-sealed flavor to it, redolent to Miles's experienced nose as paranoid security in action.
Ah, yes, a planet's embassy is that planet's soil. Feels just like home.
Their guide led them down another lift tube into what was clearly an office corridor—Miles spotted the sensor scanners in a carved arch as they passed—then through two sets of automatic doors into a small, quiet office.
"Lieutenant Lord Miles Vorkosigan, sir," their guide announced, standing at attention. "And—bodyguard."
Miles's hands twitched. Only a Barrayaran could convey such a delicate shade of insult in a half-second pause between two words. Home again.
"Thank you, Sergeant, dismissed," said the captain behind the comconsole desk. Imperial dress greens again—the embassy must maintain a formal tone.
Miles gazed curiously at the man who was to be, will or nill, his new commanding officer. The captain gazed back with equal intensity.
An arresting-looking man, though far from pretty. Dark hair. Hooded, nutmeg-brown eyes. A hard, guarded mouth, fleshy blade of a nose sweeping down a Roman profile that matched his officer's haircut. His hands were blunt and clean, steepled now together in a still tension. In his early thirties, Miles guessed.
But why is this guy looking at me like I'm a puppy that just piddled on his carpet? Miles wondered. I just got here. I haven't had time to offend him yet. Oh, God, I hope he's not one of those rural Barrayaran hicks who see me as a mutant, a refugee from a botched abortion. . . .
"So," said the captain, leaning back in his chair with a sigh, "you're the Great Man's son, eh?"
Miles's smile became absolutely fixed. A red haze clouded his vision. He could hear his blood beating in his ears like a death march. Elli, watching him, stood quite still, barely breathing. Miles's lips moved; he swallowed. He tried again. "Yes, sir," he heard himself saying, as from a great distance. "And who are you?"
He managed, just barely, not to let it come out as
And whose son are you?
The fury bunching his stomach must not be allowed to show; he was going to have to work with this man. It might not even have been an intentional insult. Couldn't have been—how could this stranger know how much blood Miles had sweated fighting off charges of privilege, slurs on his competence?
The mutant's only here because his father got him in. . . .
He could hear his father's voice, countering,
For God's sake get your head out of your ass, boy!
He let the rage stream out on a long, calming breath, and cocked his head brightly.
"Oh," said the captain, "yes, you only talked to my aide, didn't you. I'm Captain Duv Galeni. Senior military attaché for the embassy, and by default chief of Imperial Security, as well as Service Security, here. And, I confess, rather startled to have you appear in my chain of command. It is not entirely clear to me what I'm supposed to do with you."
Not a rural accent; the captain's voice was cool, educated, blandly urban. Miles could not place it in Barrayaran geography. "I'm not surprised, sir," said Miles. "I did not myself expect to be reporting in at Earth, nor so late. I was originally supposed to report back to Imperial Security Command at Sector Two HQ on Tau Ceti, over a month ago. But the Dendarii Free Mercenary Fleet was driven out of Mahata Solaris local space by a surprise Cetagandan attack. Since we were not being paid to make war directly on the Cetagandans, we ran, and ended up unable to get back by any shorter route. This is literally my first opportunity to report in anywhere since we delivered the refugees to their new base."
"I was not—" the captain paused, his mouth twitching, and began again, "I had not been aware that the extraordinary escape at Dagoola was a covert operation of Barrayaran Intelligence. Wasn't it perilously close to being an act of outright war on the Cetagandan Empire?"
"Precisely why the Dendarii mercenaries were used for it, sir. It was actually supposed to be a somewhat smaller operation, but things got a little out of hand. In the field, as it were." Beside him, Elli kept her eyes straight ahead, and didn't even choke. "I, uh . . . have a complete report."
The captain appeared to be having an internal struggle. "Just what is the relationship between the Dendarii Free Mercenary Fleet and Imperial Security, Lieutenant?" he finally said. There was something almost plaintive in his tone.
"Er . . . what do you know already, sir?"
Captain Galeni turned his hands palm-up. "I hadn't even heard of them, except peripherally, until you made contact by vid yesterday. My files—my Security files!—say exactly three things about the organization. They are not to be attacked, any requests for emergency assistance should be met with all due speed, and for further information I must apply to Sector Two Security Headquarters."
"Oh, yeah," said Miles, "that's right. This is only a Class III embassy, isn't it. Um, well, the relationship is fairly simple. The Dendarii are kept on retainer for highly covert operations which are either out of Imperial Security's range, or for which any direct, traceable connection with Barrayar would be politically embarrassing. Dagoola was both. Orders are passed from the General Staff, with the advice and consent of the Emperor, through Chief of Imperial Security Illyan to me. It's a very short chain of command. I'm the go-between, supposedly the sole connection. I leave Imperial HQ as Lieutenant Vorkosigan, and pop up—wherever—as Admiral Naismith, waving a new contract. We go do whatever we've been assigned to do, and then, from the Dendarii point of view, I vanish as mysteriously as I came. God knows what they think I do in my spare time."
"Do you really want to know?" Elli asked, her eyes alight.
"Later," he muttered out of the corner of his mouth.
The captain drummed his fingers on his desk console and glanced down at a display. "None of this is in your official dossier. Twenty-four years old—aren't you a little young for your rank, ah—Admiral?" His tone was dry; his eyes passed mockingly over the Dendarii uniform.
Miles tried to ignore the tone. "It's a long story. Commodore Tung, a very senior Dendarii officer, is the real brains of the outfit. I just play the part."
Elli's eyes widened in outrage; a severe glance from Miles tried to compel her to silence. "You do a lot more than that," she objected.
"If you're the sole connection," frowned Galeni, "who the devil is this woman?" His wording rendered her, if not a non-person, certainly a non-soldier.
"Yes, sir. Well, in case of emergencies, there are three Dendarii who know my real identity. Commander Quinn, who was in on the beginning of the whole scam, is one of them. I'm under orders from Illyan to maintain a bodyguard at all times, so Commander Quinn fills in whenever I have to change identities. I trust her implicitly."
You will respect my people, damn your mocking eyes, whatever you think of me. . . .
"How long has this been going on, Lieutenant?"
"Ah," Miles glanced at Elli, "seven years, isn't it?"
Elli's bright eyes glinted. "It seems like only yesterday," she cooed blandly. It seemed she was finding it hard to ignore the tone too; Miles trusted she would keep her edged sense of humor under control.
The captain regarded his fingernails, then sharply stared at Miles. "Well, I'm going to apply to Sector Two Security, Lieutenant. And if I find out that this is another Vor lordling's idea of a practical joke, I shall do my level best to see that you are brought up on charges for it. No matter who your father is."
"It's all true, sir. My word as Vorkosigan."
"Just so," said Captain Galeni through his teeth.
Miles, infuriated, drew breath—then placed Galeni's regional accent at last. He jerked up his chin. "Are you—Komarran, sir?"