One object he knew personally; a cloissone-hilted dagger, which Miles had inherited from old General Piotr. He dared to take it down and test its heft and edge. So when in the past two years had Miles stopped carting it around, and sensibly began leaving it safely at home? He replaced it carefully on the shelf in its sheath.
One wall-hanging was ironic, personal, and obvious: an old metal leg-brace, crossed, military-museum fashion, with a Vor sword. Half-joke, half-defiance. Both obsolete. A cheap photonic reproduction of a page from an ancient book was matted and mounted in a wildly expensive silver frame. The text was all out of context, but appeared to be some sort of pre-Jump religious gibberish, all about pilgrims, and a hill, and a city in the clouds. Mark wasn’t sure what that was all about; nobody had ever accused Miles of being the religious type. Yet it was clearly important to him.
Some of these things aren’t prizes, Mark realized. They are lessons.
A holovid portfolio box rested on the bedside table. Mark sat down, and activated it. He expected Elli Quinn’s face, but the first videoportrait to come up was of a tall, glowering, extraordinarily ugly man in Vorkosigan Armsmen’s livery. Sergeant Bothari, Elena’s father. He keyed through the contents. Quinn was next, then Bothari-Jesek. His parents, of course. Miles’s horse, Ivan, Gregor: after that, a parade of faces and forms. He keyed through faster and faster, not recognizing even a third of the people. After the fiftieth face, he stopped clicking.
He rubbed his face wearily. He’s not a man, he’s a mob. Right. He sat bent and aching, face in his hands, elbows on his knees. No. I am not Miles.
Miles’s comconsole was the secured type, in no way junior to the one in the Count’s library. Mark walked over and examined it only by eye; his hands he shoved back deep into his trouser pockets. His fingertips encountered Kareen Koudelka’s crumpled flowerlets.
He drew them out, and spread them on his palm. In a spasm of frustration, he smashed the blooms with his other hand, and threw them to the floor. Less than a minute later he was on his hands and knees frantically scraping the scattered bits up off the carpet again. I think I must be insane. He sat on his knees on the floor and began to cry.
Unlike poor Ivan, no one interrupted his misery, for which he was profoundly grateful. He sent a mental apology after his Vorpatril cousin, Sorry, sorry … though odds were even whether Ivan would remember anything about his intrusion come the morning. He gulped for control of his breath, his head aching fiercely.
Ten minutes delay downside at Bharaputra’s had been all the difference. If they’d been ten minutes faster, the Dendarii would have made it back to their drop shuttle before the Bharaputrans had a chance to blow it up, and all would have unfolded into another future. Thousands of ten-minute intervals had passed in his life, unmarked and without effect. But that ten minutes had been all it took to transform him from would-be hero to permanent scum. And he could never recover the moment.
Was that, then, the commander’s gift: to recognize those critical minutes, out of the mass of like moments, even in the chaos of their midst? To risk all to grab the golden ones? Miles had possessed that gift of timing to an extraordinary degree. Men and women followed him, laid all their trust at his feet, just for that.
Except once, Miles’s timing had failed… .
No. He’d been screaming his lungs out for them to keep moving. Miles’s timing had been shrewd. His feet had been fatally slowed by others’ delays.
Mark climbed up off the floor, washed his face in the bathroom, and returned and sat in the comconsole’s station chair. The first layer of secured functions was entered by a palm-lock. The machine did not quite like his palm-print; bone growth and subcutaneous fat deposits were beginning to distort the pattern out of the range of recognition. But not wholly, not yet; on the fourth try it took a reading that pleased it, and opened files to him. The next layer of functions required codes and accesses he did not know, but the top layer had all he needed for now: a private, if not secured, comm channel to ImpSec.
ImpSec’s machine bounced him to a human receptionist almost immediately. “My name is Lord Mark Vorkosigan,” he told the corporal on night-duty, whose face appeared above the vid plate. “I want to speak with Simon Illyan. I suppose he’s still at the Imperial Residence.”
“Is this an emergency, my lord?” the corporal asked.
“It is to me,” growled Mark.
Whatever the corporal thought of that, he patched Mark on through. Mark insisted his way past two more layers of subordinates before the ImpSec chief’s tired face materialized.
Mark swallowed. “Captain Illyan.”
“Yes, Lord Mark, what is it?” Illyan said wearily. It had been a long night for ImpSec, too.
“I had an interesting conversation with a certain Captain Vorventa, earlier this evening.”
“I am aware. You offered him some not-too-oblique threats.”
And Mark had assumed that ImpSec guard/servant had been sent to protect him … ah, well.
“So I have a question for you, sir. Is Captain Vorventa on the list of people who are supposed to know about Miles?”
Illyan’s eyes narrowed. “No.”
“Well, he does.”
“That’s … very interesting.”
“Is that helpful for you to know?”
Illyan sighed. “It gives me a new problem to worry about. Where is the internal leak? Now I’ll have to find out.”
“But—better to know than not.”
“Oh, yes.”
“Can I ask a favor in return?”
“Maybe.” Illyan looked extremely non-committal. “What kind of favor?”
“I want in.”
“What?”
“I want in. On ImpSec’s search for Miles. I want to start by reviewing your reports, I suppose. After that, I don’t know. But I can’t stand being kept alone in the dark any more.”
Illyan regarded him suspiciously. “No,” he said at last. “I’m not turning you loose to romp through my top-secret files, thank you. Good night, Lord Mark.”
“Wait, sir! You complained you were understaffed. You can’t turn down a volunteer.”
“What do you imagine you can do that ImpSec hasn’t?” Illyan snapped.
“The point is, sir—ImpSec hasn’t. You haven’t found Miles. I can hardly do less.”
He hadn’t put that quite as diplomatically as he should have, Mark realized, as Illyan’s face darkened with anger. “Good night, Lord Mark,” Illyan repeated through his teeth, and cut the link with a swipe of his hand.
Mark sat frozen in Miles’s station chair. The house was so quiet the loudest sound he could hear was his own blood in his ears. He should have pointed out to Illyan how clever he’d been, how quick on the uptake; Vorventa had revealed what he knew, but in no way had Mark cross-revealed that he knew Vorventa knew. Illyan’s investigation must now take the leak, whatever it was, by surprise. Isn’t that worth something? I’m not as stupid as you think I am.
You’re not as smart as I thought you were, either, Illyan. You are not … perfect. That was disturbing. He had expected ImpSec to be perfect, somehow; it had anchored his world to think so. And Miles, perfect. And the Count and Countess. All perfect, all unkillable. All made out of rubber. The only real pain, his own.