Brothers in Arms b-8 Read online

  "But what happened to me was so random an accident—even the repairs were experimental—my own doctors didn't know what they'd have till it was over."

  "Getting the duplicate right must have been tricky. But obviously not impossible. Perhaps the . . . individual we saw represents the last in a series of trials."

  "In that case, what have they done with the discards?" Miles asked wildly. A parade of clones passed through his imagination like a chart of evolution run in reverse, upright Ivanish Cro-Magnon devolving through missing links into chimpanzee-Miles.

  "I imagine they were disposed of." Galeni's voice was high and mild, not so much denying as defying honor.

  Miles's belly shivered. "Ruthless."

  "Oh, yes," Galeni agreed in that same soft tone.

  Miles groped for logic. "In that case, he—the clone—" my twin brother, there, he had thought the thought flat out, "must be significantly younger than myself."

  "Several years," agreed Galeni. "At a guess, six."

  "Why six?"

  "Arithmetic. You were about six when the Komarran revolt ended. That would have been the time this group would have been forced to turn its attention toward some other, less direct plan of attack on Barrayar. The idea would not have interested them earlier. Much later, and the clone would still be too young to replace you even with accelerated growth. Too young to carry off the act. It appears he must act as well as look like you, for a time."

  "But why a clone at all? Why a clone of me?"

  "I believe he's intended for some sabotage timed with an uprising on Komarr."

  "Barrayar will never let Komarr go. Never. You're our front gate."

  "I know," said Galeni tiredly. "But some people would rather drown our domes in blood than learn from history. Or learn anything at all." He glanced involuntarily at the light.

  Miles swallowed, rallied his will, spoke into the silence. "How long have you known your father hadn't been blown up with that bomb?"

  Galeni's eyes flashed back to him; his body froze, then relaxed, if so grating a motion could be called relaxation. But he said merely, "Five days." After a time he added, "How did you know?"

  "We cracked open your personnel files. He was your only close relative with no morgue record."

  "We believed he was dead." Galeni's voice was distant, level. "My brother certainly was. Barrayaran Security came and got my mother and me, to identify what was left. There wasn't much left. It was no effort to believe there was literally nothing left of my father, who'd been reported much closer to the center of the explosion."

  The man was in knots, fraying before Miles's eyes. Miles found he did not relish the idea of watching Galeni come apart. Very wasteful of an officer, from the Imperium's viewpoint. Like an assassination. Or an abortion.

  "My father spoke constantly of Komarr's freedom," Galeni went on softly. To Miles, to the light fixture, to himself? "Of the sacrifices we must all make for the freedom of Komarr. He was very big on sacrifices. Human or otherwise. But he never seemed to care much about the freedom of anyone on Komarr. It wasn't until the day the revolt died that I became a free man. The day he died. Free to look with my own eyes, make my own judgments, choose my own life. Or so I thought. Life," the lilt of Galeni's voice was infinitely sarcastic, "is full of surprises." He favored the light fixture with a vulpine smile.

  Miles squeezed his eyes shut, trying to think straight. Not easy, with Galeni sitting two meters away emanating murderous tension on red-line overload. Miles had the unpleasant feeling that his nominal superior had lost sight of the larger strategic picture just now, locked in some private struggle with old ghosts. Or old non-ghosts. It was up to Miles.

  Up to Miles to do—what? He rose, and prowled the room on shaky legs. Galeni watched him through slitted eyes without comment. No exit but the one. He scratched at the walls with his fingernails. They were impervious. The seams at floor and ceiling—he hopped up on the bench and reached dizzily—yielded not at all. He passed into the half-bath, relieved himself, washed his hands and face and sour mouth at the sink—cold water only—drank from his cupped hands. No glass, not even a plastic cup. The water sloshed nauseatingly in his stomach, his hands twitched from the aftereffects of the stun. He wondered what the result of stuffing the drain with his shirt and running the water might be. That seemed to be the maximum possible vandalism. He returned to his bench, wiping his hands on his trousers, and sat down before he fell down.

  "Do they feed you?" he asked. "Two or three times a day," said Galeni. "Some of whatever they're cooking upstairs. Several people seem to be living in this house."

  "That would seem to be the one time you could make a break, then."

  "It was," agreed Galeni.

  Was, right. Their captors' guard would be redoubled now, after Galeni's attempt. Not an attempt that Miles dared duplicate; a beating like the one Galeni had taken would incapacitate him completely. Galeni contemplated the locked door. "It does provide a certain amount of entertainment. You never know, when the door opens, if it's going to be dinner or death."

  Miles got the impression Galeni was rather hoping for death. Bloody kamikaze. Miles knew the fey mood inside out. You could fall in love with that grave-narrow option—it was the enemy of creative strategic thought. It was the enemy, period.

  But his resolve failed to find a practical form, though he spun it round and round inside his head. Surely Ivan must recognize the imposter immediately. Or would he just put down any mistakes the clone made to Miles having an off day? There was certainly precedent for that. And if the Komarrans had spent four days pumping Galeni dry on embassy procedures, it was quite possible the clone would be able to carry out Miles's routine duties error-free. After all, if the creature were truly a clone, he should be just as smart as Miles.

  Or just as stupid . . . Miles hung on to that comforting thought. If Miles made mistakes, in his desperate dance through life, the clone could make just as many. Trouble was, would anyone be able to tell their mistakes apart?

  But what about the Dendarii? His Dendarii, fallen into the hands of a—a what? What were the Komarrans' plans? How much did they know about the Dendarii? And how the hell could the clone duplicate both Lord Vorkosigan and Admiral Naismith, when Miles himself had to make them up as he went along?

  And Elli—if Elli hadn't been able to tell the difference in the abandoned house, could she tell the difference in bed? Would that filthy tittle imposter dare seduce Quinn? But what human being of any of the three sexes could possibly resist an invitation to cavort between the sheets with the brilliant and beautiful. . . ? Miles's imagination curdled with detailed pictures of the clone, out there, Doing Things to his Quinn, most of which Miles hadn't even had time to try yet himself. He found his hands writhing in a white-knuckled grip on the edge of the bench, in danger of snapping his finger-bones.

  He let up. Surely the clone must try to avoid intimate situations with people who knew Miles well, where he would be in most danger of getting tripped up. Unless he was a cocky little shit with a compulsive experimental bent, like the one Miles shaved daily in his mirror. Miles and Elli had just begun to get intimate—would she, wouldn't she know the difference? If she—Miles swallowed, and tried to bring his mind back to the larger political scenario.

  The clone hadn't been created just to drive him crazy; that was merely a fringe benefit. The clone had been forged as a weapon, directed against Barrayar. Through Prime Minister Count Aral Vorkosigan against Barrayar, as if the two were one. Miles had no illusions; it wasn't for his own self's sake that this plot had been gotten up. He could think of a dozen ways a false Miles might be used against his father, ranging from relatively benign to horrifically cruel. He glanced across the cell at Galeni, sprawled coolly, waiting for his own father to kill him. Or using that very coolness to force his father to kill him, proving . . . what? Miles quietly dropped the benign scenarios off his list of possibilities.

  In the end exhaustion overtook him, and he slept on the hard b
ench.

  He slept badly, swimming up repeatedly out of some unpleasant dream only to re-encounter the even more unpleasant reality—cold bench, cramped muscles, Galeni flung across the bench opposite twisting in equal discomfort, his eyes gleaming through the fringe of his lashes not revealing whether he woke or dozed—then wavering back down to dreamland in self-defense. Miles's sense of the passage of time became totally distorted, though when he finally sat up his creaking muscles and the water-clock of his bladder suggested he'd slept long. By the time he made a trip to the washroom, splashed cold water on his now-stubbled face, and drank, his mind was churning back into high gear, rendering further sleep impossible. He wished he had his cat-blanket.

  The door clicked. Galeni snapped from his apparent doze into a sitting position, feet under his center of gravity, face utterly closed. But this time it was dinner. Or breakfast, judging from the ingredients: lukewarm scrambled eggs, sweet raisin bread, blessed coffee in a flimsy cup, one spoon each. It was delivered by one of the poker-faced young men Miles had seen the night before. Another hovered in the doorway, stunner at ready. Eyeing Galeni, the man set the food down on the end of one bench and backed quickly out.

  Miles regarded the food warily. But Galeni collected his and ate without hesitation. Did he know it wasn't drugged or poisoned, or did he just not give a damn anymore? Miles shrugged and ate too.

  Miles swallowed his last precious drops of coffee and asked, "Have you picked up any hint of what the purpose of this whole masquerade is? They must have gone to incredible lengths to produce this . . . duplicate me. It can't be a minor plot."

  Galeni, looking a bit less pale by virtue of the decent food, rolled his cup carefully between his hands. "I know what they've told me. I don't know if what they've told me is the truth."

  "Right, go on."

  "You've got to understand, my father's group is a radical splinter of the main Komarran underground. The groups haven't spoken to each other in years, which is one of the reasons we—Barrayaran Security," a faint ironic smile played around his lips, "—missed them. The main body has been losing momentum over the last decade. The expatriates' children, with no memory of Komarr, have been growing up as citizens of other planets. And the older ones have been—well, growing old. Dying off. And with things becoming not so bad at home, they're not making new converts. It's a shrinking power base, critically shrinking."

  "I can see that would make the radicals itchy to make some move. While they still had a chance," Miles remarked.

  "Yes. They're in a squeeze." Galeni crushed his cup slowly in his fist. "Reduced to wild gambles."

  "This one seems pretty damned exotic, to bet—sixteen, eighteen years on? How the devil did they assemble the medical resources? Was your father a doctor?"

  Galeni snorted. "Hardly. The medical half was the easy part, apparently, once they'd got hold of the stolen tissue sample from Barrayar. Though how they did that—"

  "I spent the first six years of my life getting prodded, probed, biopsied, scanned, sampled, sliced and diced by doctors. There must have been kilograms of me floating around in various medical labs to choose from, a regular tissue smorgasbord. That was the easy part. But the actual cloning—"

  "Was hired out. To some shady medical laboratory on the planet of Jackson's Whole, as I understand it, that would do anything for a price."

  Miles's mouth, opening, gaped for a moment. "Oh. Them."

  "Do you know about Jackson's Whole?"

  "I've—encountered their work in another context. Damned if I can't name the lab most likely to have done it, too. They're experts at cloning. Among other things, they do the illegal brain-transfer operations-illegal anywhere but Jackson's Whole, that is—where the young clone is grown in a vat, and the old brain is transferred into it—the old rich brain, needless to say—and, um, they've done some bioengineering work that I can't talk about, and . . . yes. And all this time they had a copy of me in the back room—those sons of bitches, they're going to find out they're not as bloody untouchable as they think they are this time . . . I" Miles controlled incipient hyperventilation. Personal revenge upon Jackson's Whole must wait for some more propitious time. "So. The Komarran underground invested nothing except money in the project for the first ten or fifteen years. No wonder it was never traced."

  "Yes," said Galeni. "So a few years ago, the decision was made to pull this card out of their sleeve. They picked up the completed clone, now a young teenager, from Jackson's Whole and began training him to be you."

  "Why?"

  "They're apparently going for the Imperium."

  "What?!" Miles cried. "No! Not with me—"

  "That. . . individual. . . stood right there, "Galeni pointed to a spot near the door, "two days ago and told me I was looking at the next Emperor of Barrayar."

  "They would have to kill both Emperor Gregor and my father to mount anything of a sort—" Miles began frantically.

  "I would imagine," said Galeni dryly, "they're looking forward to just that." He lay back on his bench, eyes glinting, hands locked behind his neck for a pillow, and purred, "Over my dead body, of course."

  "Over both our dead bodies. They don't dare let us live…"

  "I believe I mentioned that yesterday."

  "Still, if anything goes wrong," Miles's gaze flickered toward the light fixture, "it might be handy for them to have hostages." He enunciated this idea clearly, emphasizing the plural. Though he feared that from the Barrayaran point of view, only one of them had value as a hostage. Galeni was no fool; he knew who the goat was too.

  Damn, damn, damn. Miles had walked into this trap, knowing it was a trap, in hopes of gaining just the sort of information he now possessed. But he hadn't meant to stay trapped. He rubbed the back of his neck in utter frustration—what joy it would have been to call down a Dendarii strike force on this—this nest of rebels—right now—

  The door clicked. It was too early for lunch. Miles whipped around, hoping for a wild instant to find Commander Quinn leading a patrol to his rescue—no. It was just the two goons again, and a third in the doorway with a stunner.

  One gestured at Miles. "You. Come along."

  "Where to?" Miles asked suspiciously. Could this be the end already—to be taken back down to the garage sub-level and shot or have his neck broken? He felt disinclined to walk voluntarily to his own execution.

  Something like that must have been passing through Galeni's mind too, for as the pair grabbed Miles unceremoniously by the arms, Galeni lunged for them. The one with the stunner dropped him before he was halfway across the floor. Galeni convulsed, teeth bared, in desperate resistance, then lay still.

  Numbly, Miles allowed himself to be bundled out the door. If his death were coming, he wanted to at least stay conscious, to spit in its eye one last time as it closed on him.

  Chapter Nine

  To Miles's temporary relief, they took him up, not down the lift tube. Not that they couldn't perfectly well kill him someplace other than the garage sub-level. Galeni, now, they might murder in the garage to avoid having to lug the body, but Miles's own dead weight, so to speak, would not present nearly the logistic load.

  The room into which the two men now shoved him was some sort of study or private office, bright despite the polarized window. Library data files filled a transparent shelf on the wall; an ordinary comconsole desk occupied one corner. The comconsole vid was presently displaying a fish-eye view of Miles's cell. Galeni still lay stunned on the floor.

  The older man who had seemed in charge of Miles's kidnapping the night before sat on a beige-padded chrome bench before the darkened window, examining a hypospray just taken from its case, which lay open beside him. So. Interrogation, not execution, was the plan. Or at any rate, interrogation before execution. Unless they simply contemplated poisoning him.

  Miles tore his gaze from the glittering hypo as the man shifted, his head tilting to study Miles through narrowed blue eyes. A flick of his gaze checked the comconsole. It was
a momentary accident of posture, a hand gripping the edge of the bench, that snapped Miles's realization into place, for the man did not greatly resemble Captain Galeni except perhaps in the paleness of his skin. He appeared to be about sixty. Clipped greying hair, lined face, body thickening with age, clearly not that of an outdoorsman or athlete. He wore conservative Earther clothes a generation removed from the historical fashions of the parading teenagers that Miles had enjoyed in the shopping arcade. He might have been a businessman or a teacher, anything but a hairy terrorist.

  Except for the murderous tension. In that, in the coil of the hands, flare of the nostril, iron of the mouth, stiffness of the neck, Ser Galen and Duv Galeni were as one.

  Galen rose, and stalked slowly around Miles with the air of a man studying a sculpture by an inferior artist. Miles stood very still, feeling smaller than usual in his sock feet, stubbled and grubby. He had come to the center at last, the secret source from which all his coiling troubles had been emanating these past weeks. And the center was this man, who orbited him staring back with hungry hate. Or perhaps he and Galen were both centers, like the twin foci of an ellipse, brought together and superimposed at last to create some diabolical perfect circle.

  Miles felt very small and very brittle. Galen could very well begin by breaking Miles's arms with the same absent, nervous air that Elli Quinn bit her nails, just to release tension. Does he see me at all? Or am I an object, a symbol representing the enemy—will he murder me for the sake of sheer allegory?

  "So," Ser Galen spoke. "This is the real thing at last. Not very impressive, to have seduced my son's loyalty. What can he see in you? Still, you represent Barrayar very well. The monster son of a monster father, Aral Vorkosigan's secret moral genotype made flesh for all to see. Perhaps there is some justice in the universe after all."

  "Very poetic," choked Miles, "but biologically inaccurate, as you must know, having cloned me."