"Uh . .. Why don't you give me your needler, and sit down, and we'll talk about it—" He held out an open hand, experimentally inviting. Hot shivers that began in the pit of his stomach were radiating outward; his hand shook foolishly. This wasn't the way he'd rehearsed this meeting. She hissed, her needler swinging toward him. He recoiled, and her aim jerked back to Bothari.
"That one," she nodded at the Sergeant, "is an ex-Barrayaran soldier. No surprise, I suppose, that he should have drifted into some obscure mercenary fleet. But he was Admiral Vorrutyer's chief torturer, when the Barrayarans tried to invade Escobar. But maybe you knew that—" her eyes seemed to peel Miles, like flensing knives, for a moment. A moment was quite a long time, at the relativistic speed at which he was now falling.
"I—I—" he stammered. He glanced at Elena; her eyes were huge, her body tense to spring.
"The Admiral never raped his victims himself—he preferred to watch. Vorrutyer was Prince Serg's catamite, perhaps the Prince was jealous. He applied more inventive tortures himself, though. The Prince was waiting, since his particular obsession was pregnant women, which I suppose Vorrutyer's group was obliged to supply—"
Miles's mind screamed through a hundred unwanted connections, no, no, no … So, there was such a thing as latent knowledge. How long had he known not to ask questions he didn't want to hear the answers to? Elena's face reflected total outrage and disbelief. God help him to keep it that way. His stunner lay on Bothari's table, across their mutual line of fire; did he stand a chance of leaping for it?
"I was eighteen years old when I fell into their hands. Just graduated, no war lover, but wishing to serve and protect my home—that was no war, out there, that was some personal hell, growing vile in the Barrayaran high command's unchecked power—" She was close to hysteria, as if old cold dormant terrors were erupting in a swarm more overwhelming than even she had anticipated. He had to shut her up somehow—
"And that one," her finger was tight on the trigger of the needler, "was their tool, their best show-maker, their pet. The Barrayarans refused to turn over their war criminals, and my own government bargained away the justice that should have been mine for the sake of the peace settlements. And so he went free, to be my nightmare for the past two decades. But mercenary fleets dispense their own justice. Admiral Naismith, I demand this man's arrest!"
"I don't—it's not—" began Miles. He turned to Bothari, his eyes imploring denial—make it not be true—"Sergeant?"
The explosion of words had spattered over Bothari like acid. His face was furrowed with pain, brow creased with an effort of—memory? His eyes went from his daughter to Miles to the Escobaran, and a sigh went out of him. A man descending forever into hell, vouchsafed one glimpse of paradise, might have such a look on his face. "Lady …" he whispered. "You are still beautiful."
Don't goad her, Sergeant! Miles screamed silently.
The Escobaran woman's face contorted with rage and fear. She braced herself. A stream, as of tiny silver raindrops, sang from the shaking weapon. The needles burst against the wall all around Bothari in a whining shower of spinning, razor-sharp shards. The weapon jammed. The woman swore, and scrabbled at it. Bothari, leaning against the wall, murmured, "Rest now," Miles was not sure to whom.
Miles sprang for his stunner as Elena leaped for the Escobaran. Elena struck the needler sliding across the room and had the woman's arms hooked behind her, twisting in their shoulder sockets with the strength of her terror and rage, by the time he'd brought the stunner to aim. But the woman was resistless, spent. Miles saw why as he spun back to the Sergeant.
Bothari fell like a wall toppling, as if in pieces at the joints. His shirt displayed four or five tiny drops of blood only, scarcely a nosebleed's worth. But they were obliterated in a sudden red flood from his mouth as he convulsed, choking. He writhed once on the friction matting, vomiting a second scarlet tide across the first, across Miles's hands, lap, shirt front, as he scrambled on hands and knees to kneel by his bodyguard's head.
"Sergeant?"
Bothari lay still, watchful eyes stopped and open, head twisted, the blood flung from his mouth soaking into the friction matting. He looked like some dead animal, smashed by a vehicle. Miles patted Bothari's chest frantically, but could not even find the pinhole entrance wounds. Five hits—Bothari's chest cavity, abdomen, organs, must be sliced and stirred to hamburger, within …
"Why didn't he fire?" wailed Elena. She shook the Escobaran woman. "Wasn't it charged?"
Miles glanced at the plasma arc's readouts in the Sergeant's stiffening hand. Freshly charged, Bothari had just done it himself.
Elena took one despairing look at her father's body, and snaked a hand around the Escobaran woman's throat, catching her tunic. Her arm tightened across the woman's windpipe.
Miles rocked back on his heels, his shirt, trousers, hands soaked in blood. "No, Elena! Don't kill her!"
"Why not? Why not?" Tears were swarming down her ravaged face.
"I think she's your mother." Oh, God, he shouldn't have said that …
"You believe those horrible things—" she raged at him. "Unbelieveable lies—" But her hold slackened.
"Miles—I don't even know what some of those words mean . . ."
The Escobaran woman coughed, and twisted her head around, to stare in astonishment and dismay over her shoulder. "This is that one's spawn?" she asked Miles.
"His daughter."
Her eyes counted off the features of Elena's face. Miles did too; it seemed to him the secret sources of Elena's hair, eyes, elegant bone structure, stood before him.
"You look like him." Her great brown eyes held a thin crust of distaste over a bog of horror. "I'd heard the Barrayarans had used the fetuses for military research." She eyed Miles in confused speculation. "Are you another? But no, you couldn't be …"
Elena released her, and stood back. Once, at the summer place at Vorkosigan Surleau, Miles had witnessed a horse trapped in a shed burn to death, no one able to get near it for the heat. He had thought no sound could be more heart-piercing than its death screams. Elena's silence was. She was not crying now.
Miles drew himself up in dignity. "No, ma'am. Admiral Vorkosigan saw them all safely delivered to an orphanage, I believe. All but . . ."
Elena's lips formed the word, "lies," but there was no more conviction in her. Her eyes sucked at the Escobaran woman with a hunger that terrified Miles.
The door of the cabin slid open again. Arde Mayhew sauntered in, saying, "My lord, do you want these assignments—God almighty!" He nearly tripped, stopping short. "I'll get the medtech, hang on!" He dashed back out.
Elena Visconti approached Bothari's body with the caution one would use toward a freshly-killed poisonous reptile. Her eyes locked with Miles's from opposite sides of the barrier. "Admiral Naismith, I apologize for inconveniencing you. But this was no murder. It was the just execution of a war criminal. It was just," she insisted, her voice edged with passion. "It was." Her voice fell away.
It was no murder, it was a suicide, Miles thought. He could have shot you where you stood at any time, he was that fast. "No …"
Her lips thinned in despair. "You call me a liar too? Or are you going to tell me I enjoyed it?"
"No …" He looked up at her across a vast gulf, one meter wide. "I don't mock you. But—until I was four, almost five years old, I couldn't walk, only crawl. I spent a lot of time looking at people's knees. But if there was ever a parade, or something to see, I had the best view of anybody because I watched it from on top the Sergeant's shoulder."
For answer, she spat on Bothari's body. A spasm of rage darkened Miles's vision. He was saved from a possibly disastrous action by the return of Mayhew and the medtech.