Borders of Infinity b-7 Read online

  Borders of Infinity

  ( Barrayar - 7 )

  Lois Mcmaster Bujold

  Lois McMaster Bujold

  BORDERS OF INFINITY

  1

  "You have a visitor, Lieutenant Vorkosigan." A little glassy panic twitched in the normally matter-of-fact corpsman's face. He stepped aside to let the man he escorted enter Miles's hospital room. Miles caught a glimpse of the corpsman retreating hastily even before the door hissed shut behind the visitor.

  Snub nose, bright eyes, and an open, mild expression gave the man a false air of youth, though his brown hair was greying at the temples. He was slight of body, wore civilian clothes, and radiated no aura of menace, despite the corpsman's reaction. In fact, he had scarcely an aura at all. Work as a covert agent in his early days had given Simon Illyan, Chief of Barrayar's Imperial Security, a life-long habit of being inconspicuous.

  "Hi, boss," said Miles.

  "You look like hell," Illyan noted agreeably. "Don't bother saluting."

  Miles snorted a laugh, which hurt. Everything seemed to hurt except his arms, bandaged and immobilized from shoulderblades to fingertips; they were still numb from the surgical stunners. He wriggled his hospital-gowned body further into his bedclothes, futilely seeking comfort.

  "How was your bone-replacement surgery?" asked Illyan.

  "About what I expected, from having my legs done before. The ugliest part was opening my right arm and hand up to pick out all the bone fragments. Tedious. The left went a lot faster, the pieces were bigger. Now I get to sit around for a while to see if the marrow transplants are going to take in their synthetic matrix. I'll be a bit anemic for a while."

  "I hope you are not going to make a habit of returning from your mission assignments on a stretcher."

  "Now, now, this is only the second time that's happened. Besides, eventually I'll run out of unreplaced bones. By the time I'm thirty I could be entirely plastic." Glumly, Miles considered this possibility. If more than half of him became spare parts, could he be declared legally dead? Would he ever walk into a prosthetics manufacturing plant and cry, "Mother!"? Were the medical sedatives making him just a little spacey . . . ?

  "About your missions," said Illyan firmly.

  Ah. So this visit wasn't just an expression of personal concern, if Illyan had ever owned any personal concern. It was sometimes hard to tell. "You have my reports," said Miles warily.

  "Your reports, as usual, are masterpieces of understatement and misdirection," said Illyan. He sounded perfectly serene about it.

  "Well . . . anybody might read 'em. You can't tell."

  "Hardly 'anyone,' " said Illyan. "But just so."

  "So what's the problem?"

  "Money. Specifically, accountability for same."

  Maybe it was the drugs he was stuffed with, but Miles could make no sense of this. "Don't you like my work?" he said rather plaintively.

  "Apart from your injuries, the results of your latest mission are highly satisfactory," began Illyan.

  "They'd by-God better be," Miles muttered grimly.

  "—and your late, er, adventures on Earth, just prior to it, are still fully classified. We will discuss them later."

  "I've got to report to a couple of higher authorities first," Miles put in urgently.

  Illyan waved this aside. "So I understand. No. These charges date to the Dagoola affair, and before."

  "Charges?" Miles muttered in bewilderment.

  Illyan studied him thoughtfully. "I consider what the emperor spends to keep up your connection to the Dendarii Free Mercenaries to be worth it purely from an internal security standpoint. Were you to be permanently posted at, say, Imperial HQ here at the capital, you'd be a damned plot-magnet all the time. Not just for favor– and office-seekers, but for anyone who wants to touch your father through you. As now."

  Miles squinted, as though focusing his eyes could focus his thoughts. "Ah?"

  "In brief, certain parties in Imperial Accounting are going over your reports from your mercenary fleet's covert ops with a microscope. They would like to know in more detail where certain large packets of cash have gone. Some of your equipment-replacement chits have been outrageous. More than once. Even from my point of view. They would very much like to prove an on-going pattern of peculation. A court-martial charging you with lining your own pockets at the emperor's expense would be gloriously embarrassing just now, for your father and his whole Centrist coalition."

  Miles exhaled, stunned. "Has it gone so far—?"

  "Not yet. I fully intend to quash it before it gets off the ground. But to do so I need more details. So as not to get blindsided, as I have sometimes been in your more tangled affairs—still remember, if you do not, spending a month in my own prison because of you . . ." Illyan glowered into the past.

  "That was part of a plot against Dad," Miles protested.

  "So is this, if I'm picking up the early signals correctly. But Count Vorvolk in Accounting is their front-man, and he is depressingly loyal, in addition to having the emperor's personal, er, support. Untouchable. But manipulatable, I fear. He's been primed. He thinks he's being a watch-dog. The more he's given a run-around the more tenacious he'll become. He must be handled with utmost care, whether he's mistaken or not."

  "Not . . . ?" breathed Miles. The full import of the timing of Illyan's visit now dawned on him. Not anxiety for an injured subordinate after all. But to put his questions to Miles just post-surgery, when Miles was weak, hurting, drugged, maybe confused. . . . "Why don't you just fast-penta me and get it over with?" Miles snarled.

  "Because I have the report about your idiosyncratic reaction to truth drugs," said Illyan equably. "Unfortunate, that."

  "You could twist my arm." There was a bitter taste in Miles's mouth.

  Illyan's expression was dry and grim. "I thought about it. Then I decided to let the surgeons do it for me."

  "You can be a real sonofabitch some days, Simon, do you know?"

  "Yes." Illyan sat unmoved and unmoving. Waiting. Watching. "Your father cannot afford a scandal in his government this month. Not during this appropriations fight. This plot must be quashed regardless of its truth. What is said in this room will remain—must remain—between you and me alone. But I must know."

  "Are you offering me an amnesty?" Miles's voice was low, dangerous. He could feel his heart begin to pound.

  "If necessary." Illyan's voice was perfectly flat.

  Miles couldn't clench or even feel his fists, but his toes curled. He found himself gulping for air in the pulsing waves of his rage; the room seemed to waver. "You . . . vile . . . bastard! You dare call me a thief. . . ." He rocked in the bed, kicking off tangling strangling covers. His medical monitor began to bleep alarms. His arms were useless weights hanging from his shoulders, flopping nervelessly. "As if I would steal from Barrayar. As if I would steal from my own dead …" He swung his feet out, pulled himself upright with a mighty wrench of abdominal muscles. Dizzied, half-blacking-out, he toppled forward precipitously with no hands to catch himself.

  Illyan leapt to grab him before he smashed face-first on the matting. "What the hell do you think you're doing, boy?" Miles wasn't sure himself.

  "What are you doing to my patient?" the white-faced military doctor cried, plunging through the door. "This man just had major surgery!"

  The doctor was frightened and furious; the corpsman, in his wake, merely frightened. He tried to impede his superior, plucking at his arm and hissing, "Sir, that's Security Chief Illyan!"

  "I know who he is. I don't care if he's Emperor Dorca's ghost. I will not have him carrying on his … business, here." The doctor glared courageously at Illyan. "Your interrogation, or whatever, can take place
in your own damned headquarters. I will not have that kind of thing going on in my hospital. This patient is not released to anybody yet!"

  Illyan looked at first baffled, then outraged. "I was not …"

  Miles considered, briefly, clutching artistically at certain nerve junctions in his body and screaming, except that he wasn't equipped to clutch at anything just at present. "Appearances can be so damning," he purred in Illyan's ear, sinking in Illyan's arms. He grinned evilly through clenched teeth. His body shook, shocky, the sheen of cold sweat on his forehead quite unfeigned.

  Illyan frowned at him, but put him back to bed very carefully.

  "It's all right," Miles wheezed to the doctor. "It's all right. I was merely . . . merely . . ." Upset didn't quite seem to cover it; he'd felt for a moment as if the top of his head had been about to blow off. "Never mind." He felt horribly unbalanced. To think that Illyan, whom he'd known all his life, whom he'd assumed trusted him implicitly or why else send him on a series of such distant, independent missions . . . He'd been proud to be so trusted, while still a young officer, with so little direct supervision in his covert ops . . . Could his whole career to date have been, not desperately needed Service to the Imperium, but just a ploy to get a dangerously clumsy Vor puppy out from underfoot? Toy soldiers . . . no, that made no sense. A peculator. Ugly word. What a profound slur upon his honor, and his wit; as if he did not know where Imperial funds came from, or at what cost.

  The black anger sagged into a black depression. His heart hurt. He felt smeared. Could Illyan—Illyan!—really think, even for one hypothetical moment. . . . Yes, Illyan could. Illyan would not be here, not doing this, if he were not genuinely worried the charge could be proved true. To his dismay, Miles found himself silently crying. Damn the drugs.

  Illyan was staring at him in considerable disquiet. "One way or another, Miles, I must defend your expenditures—which are my department's expenditures—tomorrow."

  "I'd rather be court-martialed."

  Illyan's lips thinned. "I'll come back later. When you've had a chance to sleep. Perhaps you'll be more coherent."

  The doctor fussed over him, zapped him with yet another damned drug, and left. Leadenly, Miles turned his face to the wall; not to sleep, but to remember.

  The Mountains of Mourning

  Miles heard the woman weeping as he was climbing the hill from the long lake. He hadn't dried himself after his swim, as the morning already promised shimmering heat. Lake water trickled cool from his hair onto his naked chest and back, more annoyingly down his legs from his ragged shorts. His leg braces chafed on his damp skin as he pistoned up the faint trail through the scrub, military double-time. His feet squished in his old wet shoes. He slowed curiously as he became conscious of the voices.

  The woman's voice grated with grief and exhaustion. "Please, lord, please. All I want is m'justice . . ."

  The front gate guard's voice was irritated and embarrassed. "I'm no lord. C'mon, get up, woman. Go back to the village and report it at the district magistrate's office."

  "I tell you, I just came from there!" The woman did not move from her knees as Miles emerged from the bushes and paused to take in the tableau across the paved road. "The magistrate's not to return for weeks, weeks. I walked four days to get here. I only have a little money. …" A desperate hope rose in her voice, and her spine bent and straightened as she scrabbled in her skirt pocket and held out her cupped hands to the guard. "A mark and twenty pence, it's all I have, but—"

  The exasperated guard's eye fell on Miles, and he straightened abruptly, as if afraid Miles might suspect him of being tempted by so pitiful a bribe. "Be off, woman!" he snapped.

  Miles quirked an eyebrow, and limped across the road to the main gate. "What's all this about, Corporal?" he inquired easily.

  The guard corporal was on loan from Imperial Security, and wore the high-necked dress greens of the Barrayaran Service. He was sweating and uncomfortable in the bright morning light of this southern district, but Miles fancied he'd be boiled before he'd undo his collar on this post. His accent was not local, he was a city man from the capital, where a more-or-less efficient bureaucracy absorbed such problems as the one on her knees before him.

  The woman, now, was local and more than local—she had backcountry written all over her. She was younger than her strained voice had at first suggested. Tall, fever-red from her weeping, with stringy blonde hair hanging down across a ferret-thin face and protuberant grey eyes. If she were cleaned up, fed, rested, happy and confident, she might achieve a near-prettiness, but she was far from that now, despite her remarkable figure. Lean but full-breasted—no, Miles revised himself as he crossed the road and came up to the gate. Her bodice was all blotched with dried milk leaks, though there was no baby in sight. Only temporarily full-breasted. Her worn dress was factory-woven cloth, but hand-sewn, crude and simple. Her feet were bare, thickly-callused, cracked and sore.

  "No problem," the guard assured Miles. "Go away," he hissed to the woman.

  She lurched off her knees and sat stonily.

  "I'll call my sergeant," the guard eyed her warily, "and have her removed."

  "Wait a moment," said Miles.

  She stared up at Miles from her cross-legged position, clearly not knowing whether to identify him as hope or not. His clothing, what there was of it, offered her no clue as to what he might be. The rest of him was all too plainly displayed. He jerked up his chin and smiled thinly. Too-large head, too-short neck, back thickened with its crooked spine, crooked legs with their brittle bones too-often broken, drawing the eye in their gleaming chromium braces. Were the hill woman standing, the top of his head would barely be even with the top of her shoulder. He waited in boredom for her hand to make the back-country hex sign against evil mutations, but it only jerked and clenched into a fist.

  "I must see my lord Count," she said to an uncertain point halfway between Miles and the guard. "It's my right. My daddy, he died in the Service. It's my right."

  "Prime Minister Count Vorkosigan," said the guard stiffly, "is on his country estate to rest. If he were working, he'd be back in Vorbarr Sultana." The guard looked like he wished he were back in Vorbarr Sultana.

  The woman seized the pause. "You're only a city man. He's my count. My right."

  "What do you want to see Count Vorkosigan for?" asked Miles patiently.

  "Murder," growled the girl/woman. The security guard spasmed slightly. "I want to report a murder."

  "Shouldn't you report to your village speaker first?" inquired Miles, with a hand-down gesture to calm the twitching guard.

  "I did. He'll do nothing." Rage and frustration cracked her voice. "He says it's over and done. He won't write down my accusation, says it's nonsense. It would only make trouble for everybody, he says. I don't care! I want my justice!"

  Miles frowned thoughtfully, looking the woman over. The details checked, corroborated her claimed identity, added up to a solid if subliminal sense of authentic truth which perhaps escaped the professionally paranoid security man. "It's true, Corporal," Miles said. "She has a right to appeal, first to the district magistrate, then to the count's court. And the district magistrate won't be back for two weeks."

  This sector of Count Vorkosigan's native district had only one overworked district magistrate, who rode a circuit that included the lakeside village of Vorkosigan Surleau but one day a month. Since the region of the Prime Minister's country estate was crawling with Imperial Security when the great lord was in residence, and closely monitored even when he was not, prudent troublemakers took their troubles elsewhere.

  "Scan her, and let her in," said Miles. "On my authority."

  The guard was one of Imperial Security's best, trained to look for assassins in his own shadow. He now looked scandalized, and lowered his voice to Miles. "Sir, if I let every country lunatic wander the estate at will—"

  "I'll take her up. I'm going that way."

  The guard shrugged helplessly, but stopped short of saluting;
Miles was decidedly not in uniform. The gate guard pulled a scanner from his belt and made a great show of going over the woman. Miles wondered if he'd have been inspired to harass her with a strip-search without Miles's inhibiting presence. When the guard finished demonstrating how alert, conscientious, and loyal he was, he palmed open the gate's lock, entered the transaction, including the woman's retina scan, into the computer monitor, and stood aside in a pose of rather pointed parade rest. Miles grinned at the silent editorial, and steered the bedraggled woman by the elbow through the gates and up the winding drive.

  She twitched away from his touch at the earliest opportunity, yet still refrained from superstitious gestures, eyeing him with a strange and hungry curiosity. Time was, such openly repelled fascination with the peculiarities of his body had driven Miles to grind his teeth; now he could take it with a serene amusement only slightly tinged with acid. They would learn, all of them. They would learn.

  "Do you serve Count Vorkosigan, little man?" she asked cautiously.

  Miles thought about that one a moment. "Yes," he answered finally. The answer was, after all, true on every level of meaning but the one she'd asked it. He quelled the temptation to tell her he was the court jester. From the look of her, this one's troubles were much worse than his own.

  She had apparently not quite believed in her own rightful destiny, despite her mulish determination at the gate, for as they climbed unimpeded toward her goal a nascent panic made her face even more drawn and pale, almost ill. "How—how do I talk to him?" she choked. "Should I curtsey . . . ?" She glanced down at herself as if conscious for the first time of her own dirt and sweat and squalor.

  Miles suppressed a facetious set-up starting with, Kneel and knock your forehead three times on the floor before speaking, that's what the General Staff does, and said instead, "Just stand up straight and speak the truth. Try to be clear. He'll take it from there. He does not, after all," Miles's lips twitched, "lack experience."