The medtech ran to him, "Admiral! Where are you hit?"
He stared at her stupidly a moment, then glanced down at himself, realizing the red reason for her concern. "Not me. It's the Sergeant." He brushed ineffectually at the cooling stickiness.
She knelt by Bothari. "What happened? Was it an accident?"
Miles glanced up at Elena where she stood, just stood, arms wrapped around herself as if she were cold. Only her eyes traveled, back and forth from the Sergeant's crumpled form to the harsh straightness of the Escobaran. Back and forth, finding no rest.
His mouth was stiff; he made it move by force of will. "An accident. He was cleaning the weapons. The needler was set on auto rapid-fire." Two true statements out of three.
The Escobaran woman's mouth curled in silent triumph and relief. She thinks I have endorsed her justice, Miles realized. Forgive me …
The medtech shook her head, running a hand scanner over Bothari's chest. "Whew. What a mess."
A sudden hope rocketed through Miles. "The cryo chambers—what's their status?"
"All filled, sir, after the counterattack."
"When you triage for them, how—how do you choose?"
"The least messed-up ones have the best hope of revival. They get first choice. Enemies last, unless Intelligence throws a fit."
"How would you rate this injury?"
"Worse than any I've got on ice now, except two."
"Who are the two?"
"A couple of Captain Tung's people. Do you want me to dump one?"
Miles paused, searching Elena's face. She was staring at Bothari's body as if he were some stranger, wearing her father's face, who had suddenly unmasked. Her dark eyes were like deep caverns; like graves, one for Bothari, one for himself.
"He hated the cold," he muttered at last. "Just—get a morgue pack."
"Yes, sir." She exited, unhurried.
Mayhew wandered up, to stare bemused and bewildered on the face of death. "I'm sorry, my lord. I was just beginning to like him, in a kind of weird way."
"Yes. Thank you. Go away." Miles looked up at the Escobaran woman. "Go away," he whispered.
Elena was turning around and around between the dead and the living, like a creature newly caged discovering that cold iron sears the flesh. "Mother?" she said at last, in a tiny voice not at all like her own.
"You keep away from me," the Escobaran woman snarled at her, low-voiced and pale. "Far away." She gave her a look of loathing, contemptuous as a slap, and stalked out.
"Um," said Arde. "Maybe you should come somewhere and sit down, Elena. I'll get you a, a drink of water or something." He plucked at her anxiously. "Come away now, there's a good girl."
She suffered herself to be led, with one last look over her shoulder. Her face reminded Miles of a bombed-out city.
Miles waited for the medtech, in deathwatch for his first leigeman, afraid, and growing more so, unaccustomed. He had always had the Sergeant to be afraid for him. He touched Bothari's face; the shaved chin was rough under his fingertips.
"What do I do now, Sergeant?"
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
It was three days before he cried, worried that he could not cry. Then, in bed alone at night, it came as a frightening uncontrollable storm lasting hours. Miles judged it a just catharsis, but it kept repeating on succeeding nights, and then he worried that it would not stop. His stomach hurt all the time now, but especially after meals, which he therefore scarcely touched. His sharp features sharpened further, molding to his bones.
The days were a grey fog. Faces, familiar and unfamiliar, badgered him for directions, to which his reply was an invariable, laconic, "Suit yourself." Elena would not talk to him at all. He was stirred to fear she was finding comfort in Baz's arms. He watched her covertly, anxious. But she seemed not to be finding comfort anywhere.
After a particularly formless and inconclusive Dendarii staff meeting Arde Mayhew took him aside. Miles had sat silent at the head of the table, seemingly studying his hands, while his officers' voices had croaked on meaningless as frogs.
"God knows," whispered Arde, "I don't know much about being a military officer." He took an angry breath. "But I do know you can't drag 200 and more people out on a limb with you like this and then go catatonic."
"You're right," Miles snarled back, "you don't know much."
He stamped off, stiff-backed, but shaken inside with the justice of Mayhew's complaint. He slammed into his cabin just in time to throw up in secret for the fourth time that week, the second since Bothari's death, resolve sternly to take up the work at hand immediately and no more nonsense, and fall across his bed to lay immobile for the next six hours.
He was getting dressed. Men who'd done isolated duty all agreed, you had to keep the standards up or things went to hell. Miles had been awake three hours now, and had his trousers on. In the next hour he was either going to try for his socks, or shave, whichever seemed easier. He contemplated the pig-headed masochism of the Barrayaran habit of the daily shave versus, say, the civilized Betan custom of permanently stunning the hair follicles. Perhaps he'd go for the socks.
The cabin buzzer blatted. He ignored it. Then the intercom, Elena's voice: "Miles, let me in."
He lurched to a sitting position, nearly blacking himself out, and called hastily, "Come!", which released the voice-lock.
She picked her way in across strewn clothing, weapons, equipment, disconnected chargers, rations wrappers, and stared around, wrinkling her nose in dismay. "You know," she said at last, "if you're not going to pick this mess up yourself you ought to at least choose a new batman."
Miles stared around too. "It never occurred to me," he said humbly. "I used to imagine I was a very neat person. Everything just put itself away, or so I thought. You wouldn't mind?"
"Mind what?"
"If I got a new batman."
"Why should I care?"
Miles thought it over. "Maybe Arde. I've got to find something for him to do, sooner or later, now he can't jump anymore."
"Arde?" she repeated dubiously.
"He's not nearly as slovenly as he used to be."
"Mm." She picked up a hand-viewer that was lying upside-down on the floor, and looked for a place to set it. But there was only one level surface in the cabin that held no clutter or dust. "Miles, how long are you going to keep that coffin in here?"
"It might as well be stored here as anywhere. The morgue's cold. He didn't like the cold."
"People are beginning to think you're strange."
"Let 'em think what they like. I gave him my word once that I'd take him back to be buried on Barrayar, if—if anything happened to him out here."
She shrugged angrily. "Why bother keeping your word to a corpse? It'll never know the difference."
"I'm alive," Miles said quietly, "and I'd know."
She stalked around the cabin, lips tight. Face tight, whole body tight—"I've been running your unarmed combat classes for ten days now. You haven't come to a single session."
He wondered if he ought to tell her about throwing up the blood. No, she'd drag him off to the medtech for sure. He didn't want to see the medtech. His age, the secret weakness of his bones—too much would become apparent on a close medical examination.
She went on. "Baz is doing double shifts, reconditioning equipment, Tung and Thorne and Auson are running their tails off organizing the new recruits—but it's all starting to come apart. Everybody's spending all their time arguing with everybody else. Miles, if you spend another week holed up in here, the Dendarii Mercenaries are going to start looking just like this cabin."