Chapter Two
Ivan sat in the dark and contemplated his progress. It was not heartening.
Not that his reputation for success with women was undeserved, but it was due to brains, not luck, and steady allegiance to a few simple rules. The first rule was to go to places where lots of women already in the mood for company had congregated—parties, dances, bars. Although not weddings, because those tended to put the wrong sorts of thoughts into their heads. Next, try likely prospects till you hit one who smiled back. Next, be amusing, perhaps in a slightly risqué but tasteful way, until she laughed. Extra points if the laughter was genuine. Continue ad lib from there. A 10:1 ratio of trials to hits was not a problem as long as the original pool contained ten or more prospects to start with. It was simple statistics, as he’d tried to explain to his cousin Miles on more than one occasion.
He’d entered that shop knowing the odds were not in his favor; a pool with only one fish required a fellow to get it right the first time. Well, he might have got lucky; it wasn’t unprecedented. He wriggled his wrists against his scarf bonds, which were unexpectedly unyielding for such soft, feminine cloth. Some sort of metaphor, there. This is not my fault.
It was By’s fault, he decided. Ivan was a victim of poor intel from his own side, like many a forlorn hope before him. Ivan had encountered overprotective duennas before, but never one who’d shot him from ambush the first time he walked through the door. The unfriendly blue woman…was a puzzle. He disliked puzzles. He’d never been good at them, not even as a child. His impatient playmates had generally plucked them out of his hands and finished them for him.
Rish was incredibly beautiful—sculpted bones, flowing muscles, stained-glass skin shimmering as she moved—but not in the least attractive, at least in the sense of someone he’d want to cuddle up to. Sort of a cross between a pixie and a python. She was shorter and slimmer than Nanja, and very bendy, but, he had noticed when the two women were dragging him up here, much the stronger. He also suspected genetically augmented reflexes, and the devil knew what else. Best appreciated from several meters’ distance, like a work of art, which he suspected she was.
Whose work? That degree of genetic manipulation on humans was wildly illegal on all three planets of the Barrayaran Imperium. Unless one had it done to oneself, offworld, in which case it might still be better to go live somewhere else, after. Nanja was certainly neither Komarran nor Barrayaran, or she’d have had a more visible reaction to that famous name and address where he’d shipped the ghastly vase. Not only Not From Around Here, but also Not Been Here Long.
Her companion’s elegant gengineering was almost Cetagandan in its subtlety—but the Cetagandans didn’t make human novelties as such. Their aesthetic boundaries in that material were very strict, not to mention restricted, reserved for more serious and long-range goals. Now, animals—when Cetagandans were working with animal or plant genomes, or worse, both at once, all bets were off. He shuddered in memory. He would be glad to cross Cetagandans off his list, renegade or otherwise. He would be ecstatic.
Ivan peered around the dim living room. He was not, he assured himself, tied up in a small, dark place. It was a spacious, dark place, and not pitch-dark in any case, given the ambient urban glow from the window. And on the third floor, well aboveground. He sighed, and remembered to keep wriggling his weary feet. The nasty plastic ropes securing his ankles to the chair legs did seem to be slowly stretching. Perhaps he should have tried harder to escape, earlier. But the two women had been taking him right where he’d wanted to go, inside, for just the purpose he’d come, to talk. True, he’d been envisioning friendly chat, not hostile interrogation, but what was that quote Miles was so fond of? Never interrupt your enemy while he is making a mistake. Not that they were enemies, necessarily. He hoped. By could have stood to be clearer on that point, in retrospect.
The next most likely suspect on the body modification front was, of course, the planet and system of Jackson’s Whole, an almost equally unsavory hypothesis supported, alas, by any number of small hints the two women had let fall.
Jackson’s Whole did not have a unified planetary government—in fact, it claimed to have no government at all. Instead, it was ruled by a patchwork of Great Houses—116 of ’em the last Ivan had heard, but the number shifted in their internecine competitions—and countless Houses Minor. They tended not to hold large, unified territories on the planet’s surface, but rather, interpenetrated more like competing companies. Granted, the system, or lack of it, did make it less likely for the Jacksonians to pull together for, say, a major military invasion of their neighbors. But a person who had no House allegiance or employment there was a very unprotected person indeed.
Ivan had no trouble imagining all sorts of colorful reasons for the two young women to be on the run from the Whole. Any sensible persons not aligned with the power structure—structures—would be better off emigrating, if they could manage it. The real mystery was why anyone from there would be chasing them. Assassination wasn’t that casual a business expense, not with interstellar distances in play. If the two had made it all the way to Komarr but were still this afraid, someone with resources must really care, and not in a good way.
The room was not growing smaller. Nor darker. Nor damper. Nor changing in any way. But dear God this chair was getting hard. He hitched his shoulders and wriggled his butt, recalling all those dire warnings about deep-vein thrombosis and long rides in shuttle seats. As if he didn’t have enough paranoia running through his aching head right now. Though his legs had stopped with the post-stun pins-and-needles, and were down to just pins.
So how had the two women fallen in together, and what was their relationship, really? Was the blue woman friend, business partner, servant, lover, or bodyguard to the other? Some combination, or something even more arcane? When, inevitably, he’d had to pee, Rish had taken the con in the argument over whether it was safe to let him up. Ivan’s plaintive, How long do I have to spend not attacking you to prove I’m not attacking you? had moved the warmer Nanja, but not the gold-eyed other. In the end, Nanja had left the room, and Rish had held a plastic jug.
Decanting his bladder was too much of a relief by then for Ivan to be embarrassed, much. Rish’s strange beauty did not diminish close up, it just grew ever more detailed, almost fractal, but he’d stayed shriveled in her hand nonetheless, too alarmed to be aroused by her cool touch. She’d been as impersonal and efficient as a trained medtech. Which was undoubtedly just as well. Ivan couldn’t vouch for how things would have gone had the task fallen to her partner.
So had undertaking the chore indicated anything except the price of winning the argument, or that Rish was protectively older, or what? Maybe the two women were escaped slaves. They could ask for asylum—slavery was entirely illegal in the Imperium, even more disapproved than gaudy gengineering upon humans, despite the inevitable legal brangling about where mere unfavorable indentures left off and the real thing began. If Rish was a created slave, she might be valuable enough to pursue. Hell, maybe Nanja had stolen her, now there was a thought. That’d tick someone off…
For a planet with a mere nineteen-and-something-hour sidereal day, this was turning into a damned long night. Ivan eyed his out-of-reach wristcom and tried to estimate the time left till dawn, and his non-arrival at work. His credit chit, used at the shipping shop, would surely give ImpSec a Last Known Location. Nanja’s co-clerk would come under questioning about as soon as the investigating officer could scramble there, and probably wouldn’t even need fast-penta to identify Ivan. ImpSec—not Service Security, for reasons Ivan had not yet confided to his quarry—would probably be knocking on the door before the two women had finished arguing over whether to feed their famished prisoner any breakfast. Pleasant, well-upholstered Nanja, Ivan imagined, would take his side…
His breath stopped at a faint scratching noise from the living room window. The flat was three floors up; there was no wind within a dome to move, say, tree branches against the polarizing glass, even assuming there were any trees on that side of the building. He hadn’t had a chance to look. He opened his mouth again, exhaling as quietly as possible. Well—he scraped for optimism—maybe ImpSec hadn’t waited for morning…? And if you believe that, I have a cousin who will sell you the Star Bridge in Vorbarr Sultana…
A hiss, a faint glow, as a narrow plasma beam cut a large hole in the window. Ivan thought he could see two dark shapes briefly limned in the dark beyond. Three floors up? They had to be riding some kind of float pallet, out there above the alley. The panel of normally unbreakable glass was eased back soundlessly out of the way.
Ivan had quite expected ImpSec to come collect him, yet another reason not to exert himself unduly in pointless escape attempts. But not at this hour, and not by that route. It seemed Nanja’s paranoia was more urgently justified than he’d thought.
Ivan became uncomfortably aware that he was still tied to the bloody chair. Even if he could, by some heroic effort, rip his feet out of their restraints (shedding his shoes in the process), his wrists would remain bound to the chair arms. The most he’d be able to manage would be a sort of barefoot, crouching waddle toward his probably-armed foes. Maybe he could swing around and hit them in the shins with the chair legs…? Ivan had no desire to be stunned twice in one day, even optimistically assuming they bore stunners and not some more lethal weapons.
Ivan sank back and waited till both dark shapes had oozed through the gap and stood up, before calling out in a carrying voice: “If you’re after those two women, I gotta tell you, you’re hours too late. They packed their bags and flew ages ago.”
A low-voiced huff from the dark that might have been, What the hell…? A faint double gleam from night goggles as two startled heads turned toward him.
“You may as well turn on the lights,” Ivan continued, loudly. “You could stand to untie me, too.” He bounced in place and thumped his chair legs, as if for emphasis.
The shapes trod forward. One reached to shove up his goggles and hit the light pad on the wall; the other yelped, “Ow!”, clapped his hands over his eyes, and hastily dragged down his own light-amplifying eyewear. Cheap civilian models, Ivan observed, wincing against the sudden glare, not that anything more exotic would be required for this sort of sortie.
The first intruder strode toward him. Waving a stunner, Ivan noted wearily. “Who the hell are you?” the man demanded.
Two males. Komarran accents. And heights and general builds, though Komarran phenotypes were not nearly so uniformly blended as Barrayaran. It was all their centuries of trade, and passing traders, when Barrayar had been cut off from the Nexus at large. Dark clothing that might pass as street wear.
“A few minutes ago, I’d have said I was a completely innocent bystander, but now I’m starting to think I might be someone who was mistaken for you,” said Ivan amiably. “I don’t suppose you could untie me?”
“And why are you strapped to that chair?” added the other, staring.
“Tortured, too,” Ivan supplied inventively. Nanja, Rish, wake up! “Horribly. For hours.”
The second man peered in suspicion. “I don’t see any marks.”
“It was psychological torture.”
“What kind?”
“Well,” Ivan said, beginning with the first thought that rose to his mind, “they took off all their clothes, and then—”
The first man said, “Don’t talk to him, you fool! The job’s gone wrong. Toss the place and let’s split.”
“Hey, it gets better—don’t you want to know about the ice cubes…?”
“Should we grab him, instead?”
The stunner wavered in doubt, steadied, pointing all-too-directly into Ivan’s face. “Decide on the way out. Stun him first.”
And ask questions later? In some nastier locale, much harder for ImpSec to find…? Dammit, Miles could have talked two such goons into untying him. Yeah, and probably suborned them to his cause before the ropes hit the floor, to boot. The trigger finger tightened…
The staccato buzz of a stunner beam came not from the Komarran, but from the shadows of the darkened hallway. Two pulses, two direct head-hits, the most effective if you could make the aim. The range was short. The invaders dropped like sacks of cement.
Ivan controlled his involuntary flinch. “About time you two woke up,” he said cheerily, swiveling his head.
Rish padded into the light, followed at a more cautious tiptoe by Nanja. Neither woman wore filmy nightwear, Ivan saw to his disappointment. And apparently neither slept bare, more’s the pity. Instead, both wore body-hugging knits suitable for the gym. Or for snapping awake in the middle of the night and dealing with unpleasant surprises.
“You know, if anything I said maybe led you to think I didn’t quite believe you, I mean, about being a touch twitchy about uninvited visitors, I take it back,” Ivan began. He nodded to the two lumps on the floor. “Anybody you know?”
Rish knelt and turned them over. Nanja followed to stare down into their faces.
“No,” said Rish.
“Local rental meat,” said Nanja, in a more disgusted tone. Her face grew suddenly tenser. “They’ve tracked us. Not only to Komarr, but all the way to here. Rish, now what do we do?”
“Follow the plan.” The blue woman rose and stared down at the unconscious pair. “Kill them first, I suppose.”
“Wait, wait!” said Ivan, a twinge of panic running through him. She meant that, even if she didn’t sound very enthusiastic about it. “I mean, I agree with your diagnosis, local hirelings. Suggests they probably don’t know much. And I don’t think they were assassins—cappers. They were kidnappers, I bet.” He added after a moment, “And don’t I get any reward for saving you from them, just now? I mean, a kiss would be nice, but untying me would be more practical.”
Nanja, after long look at him, nodded. Under her blue companion’s disapproving glare, she knelt and undid Ivan’s bonds. He vented a whoosh of relief, rubbing his wrists and ankles before carefully standing up. The room only spun a little.
He really shouldn’t push it, but faint heart never won, and all that. He bent his head and presented his cheek to her, just to see what would happen.
A hesitation. A widening of her eyes, which, close up, were a clear sherry color, lighter than her skin, very striking framed with her long black lashes. To his unconcealed delight, she stretched her neck and bestowed a neat peck on his cheekbone.
“See?” he said, in an encouraging tone. “That wasn’t so hard.” The spot tingled pleasantly.
He poked an invader with his toe in passing, as Rish knelt to go through their pockets, then stuck his head out the big rectangular hole in the window through which a faint draft now coursed. A float pallet of much the sort used by techs to effect repairs on tall building faces hovered just below the frame. It bore a large plastic bin, typical of receptacles used to haul away soiled linens in hotels or hospitals. Empty. You could just about fit two stunned women into it, Ivan judged, if you folded them up snugly. Ah, the classics. But a cheap, common object; no one would look at it twice, so long as it wasn’t trundled through some very inappropriate location.
He drew back inside and turned to the two women. “Yep, kidnapping. Not murder. Unless they meant to kill you and then cart away the bodies, tidily. Any guesses which?”
Nanja stood hugging herself, looking cold. “It could be either, I suppose. Depending.”
“Any idea who would be sending you budget ninjas in the dark before dawn? No, silly question, belay that. Would you care to share with me who would, and so on?”
She shook her head. The clouds of curls bounced in a forlorn fashion.
“No IDs, no money, no nothing,” reported Rish, rising. “Just stunners, gloves, and pocket lint.”
The invaders, Ivan noticed for the first time, did indeed wear thin transparent gloves. Cheap, commercial, millions used to protect hands from dirty jobs all over the planet. Nothing unique, nothing traceable, which pretty much went for all of their equipment. Low rent, or cleverer than they seemed?
“You know, those goons could well have some sort of backup waiting outside,” Ivan opined.
“We have an escape route. Over the roofs,” said Nanja.
“Have you ever practiced it?”
“Yes,” said Rish, scowling at him, which was no clue, as she pretty much scowled at him all the time. “Start packing, Tej.”
Tej? Well, Ivan had known that Nanja was an alias. The blue woman hadn’t made that slip of the tongue in front of him before. Starting to trust him, or just rattled?
“Do you know where you’re going? That is, do you have a place to go?” Ivan asked.
To which Rish replied, “No business of yours,” and Nanja-Tej said, “Why do you ask?”
Ivan promptly addressed himself to the latter. “I was thinking you might like to hole up at my place for a few days. Take stock, make your plans when not in a panic. I can almost guarantee I have no prior connection with you for your enemies to trace. It’s likely as good a safe-house as you could get on short notice. And it’s free.”
Nanja hesitated. Nodded. Rish sighed.
“What do we do with these, then?” said Rish, nodding at the lumps. “Safest to kill them…”
Ivan was still having trouble figuring out which woman was in charge. But the lumps did indeed pose a puzzle. The most obvious thing was to call ImpSec Komarr and have them send a professional cleaning crew to take the whole mess in hand. Reminded, Ivan retrieved his wallet, stunner, and wristcom. No one objected. The thing was…
Very belatedly, it occurred to Ivan to wonder what kind of fix Byerly was in, to send an HQ desk pilot to cover these women instead of, say, a trained ImpSec bodyguard or even squad, with all the high-tech trimmings. By’s idea of a joke was not out of the running as a hypothesis, but…just how delicate was By’s investigation? Was he simply out of range of his usual handlers, contacts, and blind drops, or was there some more sinister reason in play? By’s hints had suggested that his current bag of creepy playmates had high connections in the Service—how high? And which branches? Could By be on the track of some corruption within ImpSec Komarr itself?
Dammit, the purpose of a briefing was to tell you everything you needed to know to do your job right. It shouldn’t be a frigging IQ test. Or worse, word puzzle. Ivan hissed in growing frustration. Next time he saw By, he was going to strangle the smarmy Vorrutyer whelp.
The smarmy Vorrutyer whelp who, Ivan had reason to know, did sometimes, if very rarely, report directly to, and receive orders directly from, Emperor Gregor…
“Don’t kill them,” said Ivan abruptly. “Pack up as quick as you can, we’ll take your escape route, and then go to my digs. But on the way out I’ll call Solstice Dome Security, report that I witnessed a break-in from down in the street. Leave the door open for them, everything in place. Plenty enough funny business here that I guarantee they’ll take these goons in charge, maybe put them on ice for a good long time. When the local patrollers arrive, any backup out there will scatter, if they haven’t already. Does that work for you?”
Slowly, Rish nodded. Nanja-Tej was already on her way to their bedroom.
Ivan did yield to the temptation—temptation should have the right-of-way at all times, in his view—to peek after her into the room. The flat only had the one sleeping chamber, windowless, curiously enough. Twin beds, both rumpled, hm. What did that mean…?
The two women were ready in less time than Ivan would have believed possible, having fit everything they wanted into a mere three bags. They had to have drilled this. Ivan coiled up the ropes and scarves and stuffed them into various of his jacket pockets, and returned his chair to its demure place under the kitchen table. As a practical matter, he abandoned any of his fingerprints, loose hairs, or shed skin cells to their fates. Maybe they would pose an interesting test of Solstice Security’s crime scene procedures.
* * *
Tej, dry-mouthed with worry, jittered along the edge of her building’s roof as the Barrayaran spoke into his wristcom. He did an extremely convincing drunken drawl.
“…Yeah, you should see, I’m down in the street watching this right now. No horseshit, these two guys with, like, a window-washer’s float pallet, goin’ right through this third-story window. I don’t see how they’re washing windows in the dark, d’you know? Oh, my God. I just heard a woman scream…!” With a faint smile, Vorpatril shut down his link to the Solstice emergency number.
Solstice Dome never really slept. Enough general illumination from the city lights gave adequate vision for the next task, even if the colors were washed out to a mix of sepia and gray, checkered with darker shadows.
“You first, Tej,” said Rish. “Careful, now. I’ll toss you the bags.”
Tej backed up a few steps for her running start and made the exhilarating broad jump to the next building. Three floors up. She cleared the ledge with ease and turned to catch the bags, one, two, three. Rish followed, loose garments fluttering as she somersaulted in air, landing on balance half a meter beyond Tej, motionless and upright like a gymnast dismounting.
Vorpatril stared gloomily at the gap, backed up quite a way, and made a mighty running jump. Tej caught his shoulders as he stumbled past her on landing.
“Ah,” he wheezed. “Not as bad as it looked. A little gravitational advantage, thank you, Planet Komarr. Almost makes up for your miserly day-length. You wouldn’t want to try that on Barrayar.”
Really? Tej wanted to ask more, but didn’t dare. And there was no time. Rish led off. As they made the second leap, the flashing lights of a dome patrol airsled were visible in the distance, closing rapidly.
Vorpatril balked at the next alley, half a dozen meters across. “We’re not jumping that, are we?”
“No,” said Tej. “There’s an outside stair. From the bottom, it’s only a block to the nearest bubble-car station.”
By the time they’d distributed the bags and walked the block, carefully not hurrying, everyone had caught their breaths again. The few sleepy-looking early, or late, fellow passengers crossing the platform scarcely spared them a glance. Rish twitched her shawl around to hide her head better while Vorpatril selected a four-person car, paying a premium for its exclusive use and express routing. He politely took the rear-facing seat, punched in their destination, and lowered the transparent canopy to its locking position. The car entered its assigned tube and began to hiss along smoothly.
The night was fading into dawn, Tej saw as the car rose on a long arc between two major dome sections. A shimmering red line edged the horizon beyond the limits of the sprawling arcology. As she watched, the tops of the tallest towers seemed to catch fire, eastern windows burning sudden orange in the reflected glow, while their feet remained in shadow. From a few lower sections, higher domes rose in a strange random spatter-pattern, catching gilded arcs.
Her fingers spread on the inside of the canopy as she stared. She’d never seen practically the whole of Solstice laid out like this, before. Since they’d arrived downside, she had only left their refuge to scurry out for work or food, and Rish hadn’t ventured out at all. Perhaps they should have. Their immobility had given only an illusion of safety, in the end. “What are those domes?”
Vorpatril swallowed a jaw-cracking yawn and followed her glance. “Huh. Interplanetary war as urban renewal, I suppose. Those are sections destroyed during the fighting in the Barrayaran annexation, or later in the Komarr Revolt. Making way for fresh new building, after.” He eyed her with tolerant amusement. “A real Komarran would have known that, of course. Even if they weren’t from Solstice.”
She clamped her teeth and sat back, flushing. “Is it so obvious?”
“Not at first,” he assured her. “Until one meets Rish, of course.”
Rish’s gloved hand pulled her shawl down lower over her face.
Several minutes and kilometers brought them to the business and governmental heart of the dome, an area where Tej had never ventured. The platform on which they disembarked was growing busier, and Rish kept her face down. They crossed the street and marched a mere half block till they came to a tall, new building. Vorpatril’s door remote coded them within. The lobby was larger than Tej’s whole flat, lined with marble and real, live potted greenery. The lift tube seemed to rise forever.
They debouched into a hushed, deeply carpeted corridor, walked to the end, and entered, through another coded door, another foyer or hallway and then a living room, with a broad view of the cityscape opening beyond a wide balcony. The décor was serene and technologically austere, except for a few personal possessions dropped at random here and there.
“Ah, no, look at the time!” Vorpatril yelped as they entered. “First dibs on the bathroom, sorry.” He broke into a jog, leaving a trail of clothing in his wake: jacket, shirt, shoes kicked aside. He was unbuckling his trousers as he called over his shoulder, “Make yourselves comfy, I’ll be out in a tick. God, I’d better be…” The bedroom door slid closed behind him.
She and Rish were left staring at each other. This sudden stop seemed even more disorienting than their prior panicked rush.
Tej circled the living area, inspecting a swank kitchenette that seemed all black marble and stainless steel. Despite its culinary promise, the refrigerator contained only four bottles of beer, three bottles of wine (one opened) and a half-dozen packets which the undecorative wrappings betrayed as military ration bars. An open box of something labeled instant groats graced the cupboards in lonely isolation. She was still reading the instructions on the back when the bedroom door slid open and Vorpatril thumped out again: fully dressed, moist from his shower, freshly depilated, hair neatly combed. He paused to hop around and shove his feet into his discarded shoes.
Both she and—hee, I saw that!—Rish blinked. The forest-green Barrayaran officer’s uniform was quite flattering, wasn’t it? Somehow, his shoulders seemed broader, his legs longer, his face…harder to read.
“Gotta run, or I’ll be late for work, under pain of sarcasm,” Vorpatril informed her, reaching past her to grab a ration bar and hold the package between his teeth as he finished fastening his tunic. He shoved the bar temporarily into a trouser pocket and seized her hands. “Help yourselves to whatever you can find. I’ll bring back more tonight, I promise. Don’t go out. Don’t make any outgoing calls, or answer any incoming ones. Lock the doors, don’t let anyone in. If a slithering rat named Byerly Vorrutyer shows up, tell him to come back later, I want to talk to him.” He stared at her in urgent entreaty. “You aren’t a prisoner. But be here when I come back—please?”
Tej gulped.
His grip tightened; laughter flashed in his eyes. He pressed his lips formally to the backs of her hands, one after the other, in some Barrayaran ethnic gesture of unguessable significance, grinned, and ran. The outer door sighed closed on sudden silence, as if all the air had blown out of the room with him.
After a frozen moment, she gathered her nerve, went to the balcony door, and eased it aside. Judging from the angle of the light, she would get an excellent view of Komarr’s huge and famous soletta array, key to the on-going terraforming, as it followed the sun across the sky, later. She’d never been able to see it from her own flat.
She’d been cowering in the shadows for a long, sick time, it seemed in retrospect. Every plan she’d ever been given had come apart in chaos, her old life left in a blood-soaked shambles far behind her. Unrecoverable. Lost.
No going back.
Maybe it was time to take a deep breath and make some new plans. All her own.
She ventured to the railing and peeked down, a dizzying twenty flights. Far below her, a hurrying figure in a green uniform exited the building, wheeled, and strode off.