Captain Vorpatril's Alliance Read online

  “I would like this packed and shipped to Miles Vorkosigan, Vorkosigan House, Vorbarr Sultana.”

  She almost asked, What dome? but the unfamiliar accent clicked in before she could make that mistake. The man was not Komarran at all, but a Barrayaran. They didn’t get many Barrayarans in this quiet, low-rent neighborhood. Even a generation after the conquest, the conquerors tended to cluster in their own enclaves, or in the central areas devoted to the planetary government and off-world businesses, or out near the civilian or military shuttleports.

  “Is there a street address? Scanner code?”

  “No, just use the scanner code for the planet and city. Once it gets that far, it’ll find him.”

  Surely it would cost this man far more to ship this . . . object to a planet five wormhole jumps away than it was worth. She wondered if she was obliged to point this out. “Regular or premium service? There’s a stiff price difference, but I have to tell you, express won’t really get there much faster.” It all went on the same jumpship, after all.

  “Is it more likely to arrive intact with premium?”

  “No, sir, it will be packed just the same. There are regulations for anything that goes by jumpship.”

  “Right-oh, regular it is.”

  “Extra insurance?” she said doubtfully. “There’s a base coverage that comes with the service.” She named the amount, and he allowed as it would do. It was in truth considerably less than the shipping charges.

  “You pack it yourself? Can I watch?”

  She glanced at the digital hour display over the door. The task would run her past closing time, but customers were fussy about breakables. She sighed and turned to the foamer. He stood on tiptoe and watched over the counter as she carefully positioned the vase—a glimpse of its underside revealed a sale tag with four markdowns—closed the door, and turned on the machine. A brief hiss, a moment of watching the indicator lights wink hypnotically, and the door popped back open, releasing a pungent whiff that stunned her sense of smell and masked every other scent in the shop. She bent and removed the neat block of flexifoam. It was an aesthetic improvement.

  Ivan Vorpatril, read the name on his credit chit. Also with a Vorbarr Sultana home address. Not just a Barrayaran, then, but one of those Vor-people, the conquerors’ arrogant privileged class. Even her father had been wary of—she cut the thought short.

  “Do you wish to include a note?”

  “Naw, I think it’ll be self-explanatory. His wife’s a gardener, see. She’s always looking for something to stuff her poisonous plants into.” He watched her slide the foam block into its outer container and affix the label, adding after a moment, “I’m new in town. Yourself?”

  “I’ve been here a while,” she said neutrally.

  “Really? I could do with a native guide.”

  Dotte closed out the scanners and turned off the lights as a broad hint to the laggard customer. And, bless her, lingered by the door to see Tej safely free of the shop and him. Tej gestured him out ahead of her, and the door locked behind them all.

  The oldest human habitation on the surface of Komarr, Solstice Dome had a peculiar layout, to Tej’s eye. The aging initial installations resembled the space stations she’d grown up in, with their labyrinths of corridors. The very latest sections were laid out with separate, street-linked buildings, but under vast, soaring, transparent domes that mimicked the open sky the residents hoped to have someday, when the atmospheric terraforming was complete. Middling areas, like this one, fell between, with much less technologically ambitious domes that still gave glimpses of an outside where no one ventured without a breath mask. The passage that Swift Shipping fronted was more street than corridor, anyway, too broad for the persistent customer to easily obstruct her.

  “Off work now, huh?” he inquired ingenuously, with a boyish smile. He was a bit old for boyish smiles.

  “Yes, I’m going home.” Tej wished she could go home, really home. Yet how much of what she’d known as home still existed, even if she could be magically transported there in a blink? No, don’t think those thoughts. The tension headache, and heartache, were too exhausting to bear.

  “I wish I could go home,” said the man, Vorpatril, in unconscious echo of her thought. “But I’m stuck here for a while. Say, can I buy you a drink?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “Dinner?”

  “No.”

  He waggled his eyebrows, cheerfully. “Ice cream? All women like ice cream, in my experience.”

  “No!”

  “Walk you home? Or in the park. Or somewhere. I think they have rowboats to rent in that lake park I passed. That’d make a nice place to talk.”

  “Certainly not!” Ought she to invent a waiting spouse or lover? She linked arms with Dotte, pinching her in silent warning. “Let’s go to the bubble car stop now, Dotte.”

  Dotte gave her a surprised look, knowing perfectly well that Tej—Nanja, as she knew her—always walked home to her nearby flat. But she obediently turned away and led off. Vorpatril followed, not giving up. He slipped around in front, grinned some more, and tried, “What about a puppy?”

  Dotte snorted a laugh, which didn’t help.

  “A kitten?”

  They were far enough from Swift Shipping now that customer politeness rules no longer applied, Tej decided. She snarled at him, “Go away. Or I’ll find a street patroller.”

  He opened his hands in apparent surrender, watching with a doleful expression as they marched past. “A pony . . . ?” he called after them, as if in one last spasm of hope.

  Dotte looked back over her shoulder as they approached the bubble-car station. Tej looked straight ahead.

  “I think you’re crazy, Nanja,” said Dotte, trudging with her up the pedestrian ramp. “I’d have taken him up on that drink in a heartbeat. Or any of the rest of the menu, though I suppose I’d have to draw the line at the pony. It wouldn’t fit in my flat.”

  “I thought you were married.”

  “Yes, but I’m not blind.”

  “Dotte, customers try to pick me up at least twice a week.”

  “But they aren’t usually that incredibly cute. Or taller than you.”

  “What’s that have to do with anything?” said Tej, irritated. “My mother was a head taller than my father, and they did fine.” She clamped her jaw shut. Not so fine now.

  She parted company with Dotte at the platform, but did board a bubble car. She rode to a random destination about ten minutes away, then disembarked and took another car back to a different stop on the other side of her neighborhood, just in case the man was still lingering out there, stalkerlike, at the first one. She strode off briskly.

  Almost home, she started to relax, until she looked up and spotted Vorpatril lounging on the steps to her building entrance.

  She slowed her steps to a dawdle, pretending not to have noticed him yet, raised her wristcom to her lips, and spoke a keyword. Rish’s voice answered at once.

  “Tej? You’re late. I was getting worried.”

  “I’m fine, I’m right outside, but I’m being followed.”

  The voice went sharp. “Can you go roundabout and shake him off?”

  “Already tried that. He got ahead of me somehow.”

  “Oh. Not good.”

  “Especially as I never gave him my address.”

  A brief silence. “Very not good. Can you stall him a minute, then get him to follow you into the foyer?”

  “Probably.”

  “I’ll take care of him there. Don’t panic, sweetling.”

  “I’m not.” She left the channel open on send-only, so that Rish could follow the play. She took her time closing the last few dozen meters, and came to a wary halt at the bottom of her steps.

  “Hi, Nanja!” Vorpatril waved amiably, without getting up, looming, or lunging for her.

  “How did you find this place?” she asked, not amiably.

  “Would you believe dumb luck?”

  “No.”


  “Ah. Pity.” He scratched his chin in apparent thought. “We could go somewhere and talk about it. You can pick where, if you like.”

  She simulated a long hesitation, while calculating the time needed for Rish to get downstairs. Just about . . . now. “All right. Let’s go inside.”

  His brows shot up, but then his smile widened. “Sounds great. Sure!”

  He rose and politely waited while she fished her remote out of her pocket and coded open the front entrance. As the seal-door hissed aside, he followed her into the small lift-tube foyer. A female figure sat on the bench opposite the tubes, hands hidden in her vest as if chilly, voluminous patterned shawl hiding her bent head.

  A slender gloved hand flashed out, aiming a very businesslike stunner.

  “Look out!” Vorpatril cried, and, to Tej’s bewilderment, lurched to try to shove her behind him. Uselessly, as it only cleared the target for Rish. The stun beam kneecapped him neatly, and he fell, Tej supposed, the way a tree was said to, not that she’d ever witnessed a tree do such a thing. Most of the trees she’d seen before she’d fetched up on Komarr had lived in tubs, and did not engage in such vigorous behavior. In any case, he crashed to the tiles with a vague thrashing of upper branches and a loud plonk as his head hit. “Owww . . .” he moaned piteously.

  The quiet buzz of the stunner had not carried far; no one popped out of their first floor flat door to investigate either that or the thump, alarming as the latter had seemed to Tej.

  “Search him,” Rish instructed tersely. “I’ll cover you.” She stood just out of reach of his long but no doubt tingling arms, aiming the stunner at his head. He eyed it woozily.

  Tej knelt and began going through his pockets. His athletic appearance was not a façade; his body felt quite fit, beneath her probing fingers.

  “Oh,” he mumbled after a moment. “You two are t’gether. Thass all right, then . . .”

  The first thing Tej’s patting hand found was a small flimsy, tucked into his breast pocket. Featuring a still scan of her. A chill washed through her.

  She seized his well-shaved jaw, stared into his eyes, demanded tightly: “Are you a hired killer?”

  Still weirdly dilated from the stun nimbus, his eyes were not tracking quite in unison. He appeared to have to think this question over. “Well . . . in a sense . . .”

  Abandoning interrogation in favor of physical evidence, Tej extracted the wallet he’d flashed earlier, a door remote much like her own, and a slender stunner hidden in an inner pocket. No more lethal weaponry surfaced.

  “Let me see that,” said Rish, and Tej obediently handed up the stunner. “Who is this meat really?”

  “Hey, I c’n answer that,” their victim mumbled, but fell prudently silent again as she jerked her aim back at him.

  The top item in the wallet was the credit chit. Beneath it was a disquietingly official-looking security card with a heavy coding strip identifying the man further as one Captain Ivan X. Vorpatril, Barrayaran Imperial Service, Operations, Vorbarr Sultana. Another mentioned such titles as Aide-de-Camp to Admiral Desplains, Chief of Operations, with a complicated building address featuring lots of alphanumeric strings. There was also a strange little stack of tiny rectangles of heavy paper, reading only Lord Ivan Xav Vorpatril, nothing else. The fine, black, raised lettering bumped under her curious fingertips. She passed them all up for Rish’s inspection.

  On sudden impulse, she drew off one of his polished shoes, which made him twitch in a scrambled reflex, and looked inside. Military issue shoes, aha, that explained their unusual style. 12 Ds, though she couldn’t think of a reason for that to be important, except that they fit the rest of his proportions.

  “Barrayaran military stunner, personally coded grip,” Rish reported. She frowned at the handful of IDs. “These all look quite authentic.”

  “Assure you, they are,” their prisoner put in earnestly from the floor. “Damn. By never mentioned any lethal blue-faced ladies, t’ ratfink. Izzat . . . makeup?”

  Tej murmured in uncertainty, “I suppose the best cappers would look authentic. Nice to know they’re taking me seriously enough not to send cut-rate rental meat.”

  “Capper,” wheezed Vorpatril—was that his real name? “Thass Jacksonian slang, innit? For a contract killer. You expectin’ one? That ’splains a lot . . .”

  “Rish,” Tej said, a sinking feeling beginning in her stomach, “do you think he could really be a Barrayaran officer? Oh, no, what do we do with him if he is?”

  Rish glanced uneasily at the outside door. “We can’t stay here. Someone else could come in or out at any moment. Better get him upstairs.”

  Their prisoner did not cry out or try to struggle as they womanhandled his limp, heavy body into the lift tube, up three flights, and down the corridor to the corner flat. As they dragged him inside, he remarked to the air, “Hey, made it inside her door on t’ first date! Are things lookin’ up for Ma Vorpatril’s boy, or what?”

  “This is not a date, you idiot,” Tej snapped at him.

  To her annoyance, his smile inexplicably broadened.

  Unnerved by the warm glance, she dumped him down hard in the middle of the living room floor.

  “But it could be,” he went on. “. . . To a fellow of certain special tastes, that is. Bit of a waste that I’m not one of ’em, but hey, I can be flexible. Was never quite sure about m’cousin Miles, though. Amazons all the way for him. Compensating, I always thought . . .”

  “Do you ever give up?” Tej demanded.

  “Not until you laugh,” he answered gravely. “First rule of picking up girls, y’know; she laughs, you live.” He added after a moment, “Sorry I triggered your, um, triggers back there. I’m not attacking you.”

  “Dead right you’re not,” said Rish, scowling. She tossed shawl, vest, and gloves onto the couch, and dug out her stunner again.

  Vorpatril’s mouth gaped as he stared up at her.

  A black tank top and loose trousers did not hide lapis lazuli-blue skin shot with metallic gold veins, platinum blond pelt of hair, pointed blue ears framing the fine skull and jaw—to Tej, who had known her companion and odd-sister for her whole life, she was just Rish, but there were good reasons she’d kept to the flat, out of sight, ever since they’d come to Komarr.

  “Thass no makeup! Izzat . . . body mod, or genetic construct?” their prisoner asked, still wide-eyed.

  Tej stiffened. Barrayarans were reputed to be unpleasantly prejudiced against genetic variance, whether accidental or designed. Perhaps dangerously so.

  “’Cause if you did it to yourself, thass one thing, but if somebody did it to you, thass . . . thass just wrong.”

  “I am grateful for my existence and pleased with my appearance,” Rish told him, her sharp tone underscored by a jab of her stunner. “Your ignorant opinion is entirely irrelevant.”

  “Very boorish, too,” Tej put in, offended on Rish’s behalf. Was she not one of the Baronne’s own Jewels?

  He managed a little apologetic flip of his hands—stun wearing off already? “No, no, ’s gorgeous, ma’am, really. Took me by surprise, is all.”

  He seemed sincere. He hadn’t been expecting Rish. Wouldn’t a capper or even hired meat have been better briefed? That, and his bizarre attempt to protect her in the foyer, and all the rest, were adding to her queasy fear that she’d just made a serious mistake, one with consequences as lethal, if more roundabout, as if he’d been a real capper.

  Tej knelt to strip off his wristcom, which was clunky and unfashionable.

  “Right, but please don’t fool with that,” he sighed. He sounded more resigned than resistant. “Tends to melt down if other people try to access it. And they make issuing a replacement the most unbelievable pain in the ass. On purpose, I think.”

  Rish examined it. “Also military.” She set it gingerly aside on the nearby lamp table with the rest of his possessions.

  How many details had to point in the same direction before one decided they pointed true? D
epends on how costly it is to be mistaken, maybe? “Do we have any fast-penta left?” Tej asked Rish.

  The blue woman shook her head, her gold ear-bangles flashing. “Not since that stop on Pol Station.”

  “I could go out and try to get some . . .” Here, the truth drug was illegal in private hands, being reserved to the authorities. Tej was fairly sure that worked about as well as it did anywhere.

  “Not by yourself, at this hour,” said Rish, in her and no backtalk voice. Her gaze down at the man grew more thoughtful. “There’s always good old-fashioned torture . . .”

  “Hey!” Vorpatril objected, still working his jaw against the stun numbness. “There’s always good old-fashioned asking politely, didja ever think of that?”

  “It would be bound,” said Tej to Rish, primly overriding his interjection, “to make too much noise. Especially at this time of night. You know how we can hear Ser and Sera Palmi carrying on, next door.”

  “Houseless grubbers,” muttered Rish. Which was rude, but then, she’d also had her sleep impeded by the amorous neighbors. Anyway, Tej wasn’t sure but that she and Rish qualified as Houseless, too, now. And grubbers as well.

  And that was another weird thing. The man wasn’t yelling for help, either. She tried to decide if a capper, even one who’d had the tables so turned upon him, would have the nerve to bluff his way out past an influx of local police. Vorpatril did not seem to be lacking in nerve. Or else, against all the evidence, he didn’t think he had reason to fear them. Mystifying.

  “We’d better tie him up before the stun wears off,” said Tej, watching his tremors ease. “Or else stun him again.”

  He did not even try to resist this process. Tej, a little concerned for that pale skin, vetoed the harsh plastic rope from the kitchen stores that Rish unearthed, and pulled out her soft scarves, at least for his wrists. She still let Rish tug them plenty tight.

  “This is all very well for tonight,” said Vorpatril, observing closely, “especially if you break out t’ feathers—do you have any feathers? because I don’t like that ice cube thing—but I have to tell you, there’s going to be a problem come morning. See, back home, if I didn’t show up for work on time after a night on the town, nobody would panic right off. But this is Komarr. After forty years, assimilation into the Imperium’s going pretty well, they say, but there’s no denying it got off to a bad start. Still folks out there with grudges. Any Barrayaran soldier disappears in the domes, Service Security takes it up seriously, and quick, too. Which, um . . . I’m thinking might not be too welcome to you, if they track me to your door.”