Galen’s angry shouting. Lars and Mok, pinning him at Galen’s command, pulling off his clothes, as if the beating he’d just taken at their hands was not punishment enough. They’d sent the girl away before they’d started; she’d run like a rabbit. He spat salt-and-iron blood. The shock-stick pointing, touching, there, there, pop and crackle. Galen going even more red-faced, accusing him of treason, worse, raving on about Aral Vorkosigan’s alleged sexual proclivities, turning up the power far too high. “Flip him.” Knotting terror deep in his gut, the visceral memory of pain, humiliation, burning and cramps, a weird short-circuited arousal and horribly shameful release despite it all, the stink of searing flesh… .
He pushed back the visions, and almost passed out before he managed to inhale and exhale one more time. Somehow he was sitting not on the bed but on the floor beside it, arms and legs spasmodically drawn up. The astonished blonde girl crouched half-naked on the rumpled mattress, staring down at him. “What’s the matter with you? Why did you stop? Are you dying?”
No, just wishing I were. It wasn’t fair. He knew exactly where this conditioned reflex came from. It wasn’t a memory buried in his subconscious, more’s the pity, nor from some distant, blurred childhood. It was barely four years ago. Wasn’t that sort of clear insight supposed to free one from such demons of the past? Was he going to go into self-induced spasms every time he tried to have sex with a real girl? Or was it just the extreme tension of the occasion? If ever the situation was less tense, less conscience-thwarted, if ever he really had time to make love instead of a hasty, sweaty scramble, then maybe he might overcome memory and madness— or maybe I won’t … he fought for another shuddering inhalation. Another. His lungs began to work again. Was he really in danger of choking to death? Presumably once he actually passed out his autonomic nervous system would take over again.
His cabin door slid open. Taura and Bothari-Jesek stood silhouetted in the aperture, peering into the dimness. What they saw made Bothari-Jesek swear, and Sergeant Taura shoulder forward.
Now, he wanted to pass out now. But his single-minded demon did not cooperate. He continued to breathe, curled up with his trousers around his knees.
“What are you doing?” Sergeant Taura growled. A dangerous, truly wolflike timbre; her fangs gleamed at the corners of her mouth in the soft light. He’d seen her tear men’s throats out with one hand.
The little clone sat up on her knees on the bed, looking terribly worried, her hands as usual trying to cover and support her most notable features, as usual only drawing more attention to them. “I only asked for a drink of water,” she whimpered. “I’m sorry.”
Sergeant Taura hastily dropped her eight-foot height to one knee and turned out her palms, to indicate to the girl that she wasn’t angry with her. Mark wasn’t sure if Maree caught that subtlety.
“Then what happened?” Bothari-Jesek asked sternly.
“He made me kiss him.”
Bothari-Jesek’s eye raked his huddled disarray, and glinted furiously. She was stiff and tense as a drawn bow. She wheeled to face him. Her voice went very low. “Did you just try to rape her?”
“No! I don’t know. I only—”
Sergeant Taura rose, grasped him by the shirt and some skin, pulled him to his feet and beyond, and pinned him against the nearest wall. The floor was a meter beyond his stretching toes. “Answer straight, damn you,” the sergeant snarled.
He closed his eyes, and took a deep breath. Not for any threat from Miles’s women, no. Not for them. But for the second half of Galen’s humiliation of him, in its own way a more excruciating rape than the first. When Lars and Mok, alarmed, had finally persuaded Galen to stop, Mark had been in shock so deep as to be skirting cardiac arrest. Galen had been forced to take his valuable clone to his pet physician in the middle of the night, the one he’d somehow strong-armed into supplying him with the drugs and hormones to keep Mark’s body growth on track, matching Miles’s. Galen had explained the burns by telling the physician that Mark had been secretly masturbating with the shock-stick, accidentally powered it up, and been unable to turn it off for the muscle spasms it caused, till his screams brought help. The doctor had actually barked a shocked laugh. Thin-voiced, Mark had concurred, too afraid to gainsay Galen even when he was alone with the physician. Yet the doctor saw his bruises, must have known there was more to the story. But said nothing. Did nothing. It was his own weak concurrence that he regretted most, in hindsight, the black laugh that burned the deepest. He could not, would not, let Maree exit bearing any such burden of proof.
In short, blunt phrases, he described exactly what he had just tried to do. It all came out sounding terribly ugly, though it had been her beauty that had overwhelmed him. He kept his eyes shut. He did not mention his panic attack, or try to explain Galen. He writhed inside, but spoke flat truth. Slowly, as he spoke, the wall bumped up his spine till his feet were on the deck again. The pressure on his shirt released, and he dared to open his eyes.
He almost closed them again, scorched by the open contempt in Bothari-Jesek’s face. He’d done it now. She who had been almost sympathetic, almost kind, almost his only friend here, stood rigidly enraged, and he knew he had alienated the one person who might have spoken for him. It hurt, a killing hurt, to have so little and then lose it.
“When Taura reported she was one clone short,” Bothari-Jesek bit out, “Quinn said you’d insisted on taking her. Now we know why.”
“No. I didn’t intend … anything. She really only wanted a drink of water.” He pointed to the cup, lying on its side on the deck.
Taura turned her back on him, and knelt on one knee by the bed, and addressed the blonde in a deliberately gentle voice. “Are you hurt?”
“I’m all right,” she quavered. She pulled her tunic back up over her shoulders with a shrug. “But that man was real sick.” She stared at him in puzzled concern.
“Obviously,” muttered Bothari-Jesek. Her chin went up, and her eyes nailed Mark, still clinging to the wall. “You’re confined to quarters, mister. I’m putting the guard back on your door. Don’t even try to come out.”
I won’t, I won’t.
They marched Maree away. The door seals hissed closed like a falling guillotine blade. He rolled onto his narrow bed, shaking.
Two weeks to Komarr. He very seriously wished he were dead.
Chapter Eleven
Mark spent the first three days of his solitary confinement lying in a depressed huddle. He had meant his heroic mission to save lives, not destroy them. He added up the body count, one by one. The shuttle pilot. Phillipi. Norwood. Kimura’s trooper. And the eight seriously wounded. All those people hadn’t had names, back when he had first been planning this. And all the anonymous Bharaputrans, too. The average Jacksonian security guard was just a joe scrambling for a living. He wondered bleakly if any of the dead Bharaputrans were people he had once met or joked with when he’d lived in the clone creche. As ever, the little people were ground up like meat, while those with enough power to really be held responsible escaped, walking out free like Baron Bharaputra.
Did the lives of forty-nine clones outweigh four dead Dendarii? The Dendarii did not seem to think so. Those people were not volunteers. you tricked them to their deaths.
He was shaken by an unwelcome insight. Lives did not add as integers. They added as infinities.
I didn’t mean it to come out this way.
And the clones. The blonde girl. He of all men knew she was not the mature woman her general physique and particular augmentations so stunningly advertised her as being. The sixty-year-old brain which had been planning to move in doubtless would have known how to handle such a body. But Mark had seen her so clearly, in his mind, that ten-year-old on the inside. He hadn’t wanted to hurt or frighten her, yet he’d managed to do both. He’d wanted to please her, make her face light. The way they all lit up for Miles?, the internal voice mocked.