Young Miles Read online

  "My name is Miles Naismith. I represent the Dendarii Free Mercenary Fleet."

  "Never heard of it," called a bold heckler from the blur of faces around Miles.

  Miles smiled acidly. "If you had, heads would roll in my security department. We do not advertise. Recruitment is by invitation only. Frankly," his gaze swept the crowd, making eye contact, linking each face one by one to its name and personal possessions, "if what I've seen so far represents your general standards, but for our assignment here you'd have gone right on not hearing of us."

  Auson, Thorne, and the chief engineer, subdued and weary from fourteen hours of being dragged—raked—over every weld, weapon, tool, data bank, and supply room from one end of the ship to the other, had scarcely a twitch left in them. But Auson looked wistful at the thought.

  Miles paced back and forth before his audience, radiating energy like a caged ferret. "We do not normally draft recruits, particularly from such dismal raw material. After yesterday's performance, I personally would have no compunction at disposing of you all by the swiftest means, just to improve the military tone of this ship." He scowled upon them fiercely. They looked nervous, uncertain; was there just the slightest hangdog shuffle there? Onward. "But your lives have been begged for you, upon a point of honor, by a better soldier than most of you can hope to be—" He glanced pointedly at Elena who, prepared, raised her chin and stood in a sort of parade rest, indicating to all the source of this unusual mercy.

  Actually, Miles wondered if she wouldn't have personally shoved Auson, at least, out the nearest air lock. But having cast her in the role of "Commander Elena Bothari, my executive officer and unarmed combat instructor," it had occurred to him that he had the perfect setup for a fast round of good guy-bad guy.

  "—and so I have agreed to the experiment. To put it in terms you are familiar with—former Captain Auson has yielded your contracts to me."

  That stirred them into outraged murmuring. A couple of them rose from their seats, a dangerous precedent. Fortunately, they hesitated, as if uncertain whether to start for Miles's throat first, or Captain Auson's. Before the ripple of motion could become an unstoppable tidal wave, Bothari brought his disrupter to aim with a good loud slap against his other hand. Bothari's lips were drawn back in a canine grimace, and his pale eyes blazed.

  The mercenaries lost the moment. The ripple died. Those who had risen sat back down carefully, their hands resting plainly and demurely upon their knees.

  Damn, thought Miles enviously, I wish I could muster that much menace. . . . The trick of it, alas, was that it was not a trick at all. Bothari's ferocity was palpably sincere.

  Elena aimed her nerve disruptor in a white nervous grip, her eyes wide; but then, an obviously nervous person with a lethal weapon has a brand of menace all their own, and more than one mercenary spared a glance from the Sergeant to the other possible source of crossfire. A male mercenary attempted a prudent placating smile, palms out. Elena snarled under her breath, and the smile winked out hastily. Miles raised his voice and overrode the lingering whispers of confusion.

  "By Dendarii regulation, you will all start at the same rank—the lowest, recruit-trainee. This is not an insult; every Dendarii, including myself, has started there. Your promotions will be by demonstrated ability—demonstrated to me. Due to your previous experience and the needs of the moment, your promotions will probably be much more rapid than usual. What this means, in effect, is that any one of you could find yourself the brevet captain of this ship within weeks."

  The murmur became suddenly thoughtful. What this meant, in effect, thought Miles, was that he had just succeeded in dividing all the lower-ranking echelons from their former seniors. He nearly grinned as ambition visibly lit a scattering of faces. And had he ever lit a fire under those seniors—Thorne and Auson stared at each other in edgy speculation.

  "Your new training will begin immediately. Those not assigned to training groups this shift will temporarily re-commence their old duties. Any questions?" He held his breath; his scheme pivoted on the point of a pin. He would know in a minute. . . .

  "What's your rank?" asked a mercenary.

  Miles decided to stay flexible. "You may address me as Mr. Naismith." There, let them build theories on that.

  "Then how do we know who to obey?" asked the original hard-eyed heckler.

  Miles bared his teeth in a scimitar smile. "Well, if you disobey one of my orders, I'll shoot you on the spot. You figure it out." He drummed his fingers lightly on his holstered nerve disruptor. Some of Bothari's aura seemed to have rubbed off on him, for the heckler wilted.

  A mercenary held up her hand, serious as a child at school.

  "Yes, Trainee Quinn?"

  "When do we get copies of the Dendarii regulations?"

  Miles's heart seemed to stop. He hadn't thought of that one. It was such a reasonable request—the sort of commander Miles was trying to pass himself off as should know his regs by heart, or sleep with them under his pillow, or something. He produced a dry-mouthed smile, and croaked boldly, "Tomorrow. I'll have copies distributed to everyone." Copies of what? I'll figure something out. . . .

  There was a silence. Then another voice from the back popped up. "What kind of insurance package does the, the Dendariis have? Do we get a paid vacation?"

  And another: "Do we get any perqs? What's the pay scale?"

  And yet another: "Will our pensions carry over from our old contracts? Is there a retirement plan?"

  Miles nearly bolted from the room, confounded by this spate of practical questions. He had been prepared for defiance, disbelief, a concerted unarmed rush. . . . He had a sudden maniac vision of Vorthalia the Bold demanding a whole-life policy from his Emperor at sword's point.

  He gulped down total confusion, and forged ahead. "I'll distribute a brochure," he promised—he had a vague idea that sort of information came in brochures—"later. As for fringe benefits—" He barely managed to turn a glassy stare into an icy one. "I am permitting you to live. Further privileges will have to be earned."

  He surveyed their faces. Confusion, yes, that was what he wanted. Dismay, division, and most of all, distraction. Perfect. Let them, swirled upside-down in this gush of flim-flam, forget that their primary duty was to retake their own ship. Forget it for just a week, keep them too busy to think for just a week, a week was all he needed. After that, they'd be Daum's problem. There was something else in their faces, though; he could not quite put his finger on it. No matter—his next task was to get offstage gracefully, and get them all moving. And get a minute alone with Bothari . . .

  "Commander Elena Bothari has a list of your assignments. See her on your way out. Attention!" He put a snap in his voice. They shuffled raggedly to their feet, as if the posture were but dimly remembered. "Dismissed!" Yes, before they came up with any more bizarre questions and his invention failed him.

  He caught a snatch of sotto voce conversation as he marched out.

  "—homicidal runt lunatic . . ."

  "Yes, but with a commander like that, there's a chance I might survive my next battle. . . ."

  He recognized the something-else in their faces suddenly—it was that same unnerving hunger he had seen in Mayhew's and Jesek's. It generated an unaccountable coldness in the pit of his belly.

  He motioned Sergeant Bothari aside. "Do you still have that old copy of the Barrayaran Imperial Service regs that you used to carry around?" Bothari's bible, it was; Miles had sometimes wondered if the Sergeant had ever read another book.

  "Yes, my lord." Bothari gave him a fishy stare, as if to say, Now what?

  Miles sighed relief. "Good. I want it."

  "What for?"

  "Dendarii fleet regulations."

  Bothari looked poleaxed. "You'll never—"

  "I'll run it through the computer, make a copy—go through and chop out all the cultural references, change the names—it shouldn't take too long."

  "My lord—those are the old regulations!" The flat bass voice
was almost agitated. "When those gutless slugs get a look at the old discipline parades—"

  Miles grinned. "Yeah, if they saw the specs for those lead-lined rubber hoses, they'd probably faint dead away. Don't worry. I'll update them as I go along."

  "Your father and the General Staff did that fifteen years ago. It took them two years."

  "Well, that's what happens with committees."

  Bothari shook his head, but told Miles where to find the old data disc among his things.

  Elena joined the conference, looking nervous. But impressive, Miles thought; like a thoroughbred horse. "I've got them divided up into groups, by your list," she reported. "Now what?"

  "Go ahead and take your group to the gym now and start the phys-ed class. General conditioning, then start teaching them what your father's taught you."

  "I've never taught anybody before. . . ."

  He smiled up at her, willing confidence into her face, her eyes, her spine. "Look, you can probably kill the first two days just having them demonstrate what they know on each other, while you stand around and say "Um," and "Hm," and "God help us," and things like that. The important thing isn't to teach them anything, but to keep them busy, wear them out, don't give them time to think or plan or combine their forces. It's only for a week. If I can do it," he said manfully, "you can do it."

  "I've heard that before somewhere," she muttered.

  "And you, Sergeant—take your group and start them on weapons drills. If you run out of Barrayaran drills, the Oseran standard procedures are in the computers, you can filch some of them. Ride them. Baz will be running his people into the ground down in engineering—spring cleaning like they've never had before. And after I've gotten these regs straightened around, we can start quizzing them on those, too. Tire 'em out."

  "My lord," said the Sergeant sternly, "there are twenty of them and four of us. At the end of the week, who do you think is going to be tireder?" He slipped into vehemence. "My first responsibility is your hide, damn it!"

  "I'm thinking of my hide, believe me! And you can best cover my hide by going out there and making them believe I'm a mercenary commander."

  "You're not a commander, you're a bloody holovid director," muttered Bothari.

  * * *

  The editing job on the Imperial Regulations proved larger and more grueling than Miles had anticipated. Even the wholesale slaughter of such chapters as those detailing instructions for purely Barrayaran ceremonies such as the Emperor's Birthday Review left an enormous mass of material. Miles slashed into it, gutting almost as fast as he could read.

  It was the closest look he had ever given to military regulations, and he meditated on them, deep in the night cycle. Organization seemed to be the key. To get huge masses of properly matched men and material to the right place at the right time in the right order with the swiftness required to even grasp survival—to wrestle an infinitely complex and confusing reality into the abstract shape of victory—organization, it seemed, might even outrank courage as a soldierly virtue.

  He recalled a remark of his grandfather's—"More battles have been won or lost by the quartermasters than by any general staff." It had been apropos a classic anecdote about a quartermaster who had issued the young guerilla general's troops the wrong ammunition. "I had him hung by his thumbs for a day," Grandfather had reminisced, "but Prince Xav made me take him down." Miles fingered the dagger at his waist, and removed five screens of regulations about ship-mounted plasma weapons, obsolete for a generation.

  His sclera were red and his cheeks hollow and grey with beard stubble at the end of the night cycle, but he had boiled his plagiarization down into a neat, fierce little handbook for getting everybody's weapons pointed in the same direction. He pressed it into Elena's hands to be copied and distributed before staggering off to wash and change clothes, the better to present a front of eagle-eyed, as opposed to pie-eyed, command before his "new troops."

  "Done," he murmured to her. "Does this make me a space pirate?"

  She groaned.

  * * *

  Miles did his best to be seen everywhere that day cycle. He re-inspected sickbay, and gave it a grudging pass. He observed both Elena's and the Sergeant's "classes," trying to look as if he were noting every mercenary's performance with stern appraisal, and not in truth nearly falling asleep on his feet. He squeezed time for a private conversation with Mayhew, now manning the RG 132 alone, to bring him up to date and bolster his confidence in the new scheme for holding the prisoners. He drew up some superficial written tests of his new "Dendarii Regulations" for Elena and Bothari to administer.

  The mercenary pilot officer's funeral was in the afternoon, ship time. Miles made it a pretext for a rigorous inspection of the mercenaries' personal gear and uniforms: a proper parade. For the sake of example and courtesy, he turned himself and the Botharis out in the best clothes they had from his grandfather's funeral. Their somber brilliance artistically complimented the mercenaries' crisp grey-and-whites.

  Thorne, pale and silent, observed the sharp turnout with a strange gratitude. Miles was rather pale and silent himself, and breathed an inward sigh of relief when the pilot officer's body was at last safely cremated, his ashes scattered in space. Miles allowed Auson to conduct the brief ceremonies unhindered; his most soaring thespian hypocrisy, Miles felt, was not up to taking over this function.

  He withdrew afterward to the cabin he had appropriated, telling Bothari he wanted to study the Oserans' real regulations and procedures. But his concentration was failing him. Odd flashes of formless movement occurred in his peripheral vision. He lay down but could not rest. He resumed pacing with his uneven stride, notions for fine-tuning his prisoner scheme tumbling through his brain but then escaping him. He was grateful when Elena interrupted him with a status report.

  He confided to her, rather randomly, a half dozen of his new ideas, then asked her anxiously, "Do they seem to be buying it? I'm not sure how I'm coming across. Are they going to accept orders from a kid?"

  She grinned. "Major Daum seems to have taken care of that angle. Apparently he bought what you told him."

  "Daum? What did I tell him?"

  "About your rejuvenation treatment."

  "My what?"

  "He seems to think you were on leave from the Dendarii to go to Beta Colony for a rejuvenation treatment. Isn't that what you told him?"

  "Hell no!" Miles paced. "I told him I was there for medical treatment, yes—thought it would account for this—" a vague wave of his hand indicating the peculiarities of his body, "combat injuries or something. But—there isn't any such thing as a Betan rejuvenation treatment! That's just a rumor. It's their public health system, and the way they live, and their genetics—"

  "You may know it, but a lot of non-Betans don't. Daum seems to think you're not only older but, er, a lot older."

  "Well, naturally he believes it, then, if he thought it up himself." Miles paused. "Bel Thorne must know better, though."

  "Bel's not contradicting it." She smirked. "I think it has a crush on you."

  Miles rubbed his hands through his hair, and over his numb face. "Baz must realize this rejuvenation rumor is nonsense, too. Better caution him not to correct anybody, though, it works to my advantage. I wonder what he thinks I am? I thought he'd have figured it out by now."

  "Oh, Baz has his own theory. I—it's my fault, really. Father's always so worried about political kidnappers, I thought I'd better lead Baz astray."

  "Good. What kind of fairy tale did you cook up for him?"

  "I think you're right about people believing things they make up themselves. I swear I didn't plant any of this, I just didn't contradict it. He knows you're a Count's son, since you swore him in as an Armsman—aren't you going to get in trouble for that?"

  Miles shook his head. "I'll worry about that if we live through this. Just so he doesn't figure out which Count's son."

  "Well I think you did a good thing. It seems to mean a lot to him. Anyway, he thinks
you're about his age. Your father, whoever he was, disinherited you, and exiled you from Barrayar to . . ." she faltered, "to get you out of sight," she finished, raising her chin bravely.

  "Ah," said Miles. "A reasonable theory." He came to the end of a circuit in his pacing and stood absorbed, apparently, by the bare wall in front of him.

  "You mustn't blame him for it—"

  "I don't." He smiled a quick reassurance, and paced again.

  "You have a younger brother who has usurped your rightful place as heir—"

  He grinned in spite of himself. "Baz is a romantic."

  "He's an exile himself, isn't he?" she asked quietly. "Father doesn't like him, but he won't say why . . ." She looked at him expectantly.

  "I won't either, then. It's—it's not my business."

  "But he's your liegeman now."

  "All right, so it is my business. I just wish it weren't. But Baz will have to tell you himself."

  She smiled at him. "I knew you'd say that." Oddly, the non-answer seemed to content her.

  "How did your last combat class go? I hope they all crawled out on their hands and knees."

  She smiled tranquilly. "Very nearly. Some of the technical people act like they never expected to do that kind of fighting. Others are awfully good—I've kind of got them working on the klutzy ones."

  "That's just right," he approved eagerly. "Conserve your own energy, expend theirs. You've grasped the principle."

  She glowed in his praise. "You've got me doing so many things I've never done before, new people, things I'd never dreamed of—"

  "Yes . . ." He stumbled. "I'm sorry I got you into this nightmare. I've been demanding so much of you—but I'll get you out. My word on it. Don't be scared."

  Her mouth set in indignation. "I'm not scared! Well—some. But I feel more alive than I've ever been. You make anything seem possible."

  The longed-for admiration in her eyes perturbed him. It was too much like hunger. "Elena—this whole thing is balanced on a hoax. If those guys out there wake up and realize how badly they have us outnumbered, we'll crash like—" He cut himself off. That wasn't what she needed to hear. He rubbed his eyes, fingertips pressing hard against them, and paced.