"General," Kety nodded to Naru, then to the bubble, "how long to get that open?"
"Let me see." Naru knelt to the unconscious whey-faced tech, and relieved him of a small device, which he pointed at the bubble. "They've changed the codes. Half an hour, once you get my men waked up."
Kety grimaced. His wrist comm chimed. Kety's brows rose, and he spoke into it. "Yes, Captain?"
"Haut-governor," came the formal, uneasy voice of some subordinate. "We are experiencing a peculiar communication over emergency channels. An enormous data dump is being speed-loaded into our systems. Some kind of coded gibberish, but it has exceeded the memory capacity of the receiver and is spilling over into other systems like a virus. It's marked with an Imperial override. The initial signal appears to be originating from our ship. Is this . . . something you intend?"
Kety's brows drew down in puzzlement. Then his gaze rose to the white bubble, glowing in the center of the room. He swore, one sharp, heartfelt sibilant. "No. Ghem-General Naru! We have to get this force-screen down now!"
Kety spared a venomous glare for Pel and Miles that promised infinite retribution later, then he and Naru fell to frantic consultation. Heavy doses of synergine from the guards' med-kit failed to return the techs to immediate consciousness, though they stirred and groaned in a promising fashion. Kety and Naru were left to do it themselves. Judging by the wicked light in Pel's eyes, as she and the haut Nadina clung together, they were going to be way too late. The pain of the shock-stick blows were fading to pins and needles, but Miles remained curled up on the floor, the better not to draw further such attentions to himself.
Kety and Naru were so absorbed in their task and their irate arguments over the swiftest way to proceed, only Miles noticed when a spot on the door began to glow. Despite his pain, he smiled. A beat later, the whole door burst inward in a spray of melted plastic and metal. Another beat, to wait out anyone's hair-trigger reflexes.
Ghem-Colonel Benin, impeccably turned out in his bloodred dress uniform and freshly applied face paint, stepped firmly across the threshold. He was unarmed, but the red-clad squad behind him carried an arsenal sufficient to destroy any impediment in their path up to the size of a pocket dreadnought. Kety and Naru froze in mid-lurch; Kety's liveried retainers suddenly seemed to think better of drawing weapons, opening their hands palm-outward and standing very still. Colonel Vorreedi, equally impeccable in his House blacks, if not quite so cool in expression, stepped in behind. Benin. In the corridor beyond, Miles could just glimpse Ivan looming behind the armed men, and shifting anxiously from foot to foot.
"Good evening, haut Kety, ghem-General Naru." Benin bowed with exquisite courtesy. "By the personal order of Emperor Fletchir Giaja, it is my duty to arrest you both upon the serious charge of treason to the Empire. And," contemplating Naru especially, Benin's smile went razor-sharp, "complicity in the murder of the Imperial Servitor the Ba Lura."
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
From Miles's eye-level, the deck sprouted a forest of red boots, as Benin's squad clumped in to disarm and arrest Kety's retainers, and march them out with their hands atop their heads. Kety and Naru were taken along with them, sandwiched silently between some hard-eyed men who didn't look as though they were interested in listening to explanations.
At a growl from Kety, the procession paused in front of the entering Barrayarans. Miles heard Kety's voice, icy-cold: "Congratulations, Lord Vorpatril. I hope you may be fortunate enough to survive your victory."
"Huh?" said Ivan.
Oh, let him go. It would be too exhausting to try and sort out Kety about his confused inversion of Miles's little chain-of-command. Maybe Benin would have it straight. At a sharp word from their sergeant the security squad prodded their prisoners back into motion and clattered on down the corridor.
Four shiny black boots made their way through the mob and halted before Miles's nose. Speaking of explanations . . . Miles twisted his head and looked up the odd foreshortened perspective at Colonel Vorreedi and Ivan. The deck was cool beneath his stinging cheek, and he didn't really want to move, even supposing he could.
Ivan bent over him, giving an upside-down view up his nostrils, and said in a strained tone, "Are you all right?"
"Sh-sh-shock-stick. Nothing b-broken."
"Right," said Ivan, and hauled him to his feet by his collar. Miles hung a moment, shivering and twitching like a fish on a hook, till he found his unsteady balance. By necessity, he leaned on Ivan, who supported him with an un-commenting hand under his elbow.
Colonel Vorreedi looked him up and down. "I'll let the ambassador do the protesting about that." Vorreedi's distant expression suggested he thought privately that the fellow with the shock-stick had stopped too soon. "Vorob'yev is going to need all the ammunition he can get. You have created the most extraordinary public incident of his career, I suspect."
"Oh, Colonel," sighed Miles. "I predict there's going to b-be nothing p-public 'bout this incident. Wait 'n see."
Ghem-Colonel Benin, across the room, was bowing and scraping to the hauts Pel and Nadina, and supplying them with float-chairs, albeit lacking force-screens, extra robes, and ghem-lady attendants. Arresting them in the style to which they were accustomed?
Miles glanced up at Vorreedi. "Has Ivan, um, explained everything, sir?"
"I trust so," said Vorreedi, in a voice drenched with menace.
Ivan nodded vigorously, but then hedged, "Um . . . all I could. Under the circumstances."
Meaning, lack of privacy from Cetagandan eavesdroppers, Miles presumed. All, Ivan? Is my cover still intact?
"I admit," Vorreedi went on, "I am still .... assimilating it."
"What h-happened after I left the Star Creche?" Miles asked Ivan.
"I woke up and you were gone. I think that was the worst moment of my life, knowing you'd gone haring off on some crazy self-appointed mission with no backup."
"Oh, but you were my backup, Ivan," Miles murmured, earning himself a glare. "And a good one too, as you have just demonstrated, yes?"
"Yeah, your favorite kind—unconscious on the floor where I couldn't inject any kind of sense into the proceedings. You took off to get yourself killed, or worse, and everybody would have blamed me. The last thing Aunt Cordelia said to me before we left was, 'And try to keep him out of trouble, Ivan.'"
Miles could hear Countess Vorkosigan's weary, exasperated cadences quite precisely in Ivan's parody.
"Anyway, as soon as I figured out what the hell was going on, I got away from the haut-ladies—"
"How?"
"God, Miles, they're just like my mother, only eight times over. Ugh! Anyway, the haut Rian insisted I go through ghem-Colonel Benin, which I was willing to do—he at least seemed like he had his head screwed on straight—"
Perhaps attracted by the sound of his name, Benin strolled over to listen in on this.
"—and God be praised he paid attention to me. Seemed to make more sense out of my gabble than I did at the time."
Benin nodded. "I was of course following the very unusual activities around the Star Creche today—"
Around, not in. Quite.
"My own investigations had already led me to suspect something was going on involving one or more of the haut-governors, so I had orbital squads on alert."
"Squads, ha," said Ivan. "There's three Imperial battle cruisers surrounding this ship right now."