She nodded mutely.
"By the time I could do anything for them—long before I could do anything for them—they were gone. All killed. So I rescued you instead."
She stared doubtfully at him. He could not tell what she was thinking.
The cabin wavered, and a flash of nausea that had nothing to do with suppressed eroticism twisted his stomach.
"What was that?" Maree gasped, her eyes widening. Unconsciously, she grasped his hand. His hand burned at her touch.
"It's all right. It's more than all right. That was your first wormhole jump." From his vantage of, well, several wormhole jumps, he made his tone heartily reassuring. "We're away. The Jacksonians can't get us now."
Much
better than the double-cross he'd been half-anticipating, in some reserved part of his mind, from Baron Fell's forces the moment he had Vasa Luigi hostage in his own fat hands. Not the roar and rock of enemy fire. Just a nice little tame jump. "You're safe. We're all safe now." He thought of the mad Eurasian girl.
Almost all.
He so wanted Maree to believe. The Dendarii, the Barrayarans—he'd scarcely expected them to understand. But this girl—if only he could shine in her eyes. He wanted no reward but a kiss. He swallowed.
You sure it's only a kiss you want?
There was an uncomfortable hot knot growing in his belly, beneath that ghastly constricted waistband. An embarrassing stiffening in his loins. Maybe she wouldn't notice. Understand. Judge.
"Will you . . . kiss me?" he asked humbly, very dry-mouthed. He took the cup from her, and tossed back the last trickle of water. It was not enough to unlock the tension in his throat.
"Why?" she asked, brow wrinkling.
"For . . . pretend."
That was an appeal she understood. She blinked, but, willingly enough, leaned forward and touched her lips to his. Her tunic shifted. . . .
"Oh," he breathed. His hand went round her neck, and stopped its retreat. "Please, again . . ." He drew her face to his. She neither resisted nor responded, but her mouth was amazing nonetheless.
I want, I want . . .
It couldn't hurt to touch her, just to touch her. Her hands went around his neck, automatically. He could feel each cool finger, tipped by a tiny bite of nail. Her lips parted. He melted. His head was pounding. Hot, he shrugged off his jacket.
Stop. Stop now, dammit.
But she
should
have been his heroine. Miles had a damned harem full of them, he was certain. Might she let him . . . do more than kiss her? Not penetration, definitely not. Nothing to hurt her, nothing invasive. A rub between those vast breasts could not hurt her, though it would doubtless bewilder her. He might bury himself in that soft flesh and find release as effectively, more effectively, than between her thighs. She might think he was crazy, but it wouldn't hurt her. His mouth sought hers again, hungrily. He touched her skin.
More.
He slipped her tunic down off her shoulders, freeing her body to his starving hand. Her skin was velvet soft. His other hand, shaking, dove to release the strangling-tight waistband of his trousers. That was a relief. He was dreadfully, excruciatingly aroused. But he would not touch her below the waist, no. . . .
He rolled her backwards on the bed, pinning her, kissing frantically down her body. She emitted a startled gasp. His breath deepened, then, suddenly, stopped. A spasm reached deep into his lungs, as if all his bronchia had constricted at once with a snap like a trap closing.
No! Not again!
It was happening again, just like the time he'd tried last year—
He rolled off her, icy sweat breaking out all over his body. He fought his locked throat. He managed one asthmatic, shuddering, indrawn breath. The flashbacks of memory were almost hallucinatory in their clarity.
Galen's angry shouting. Lars and Mok, pinning him at Galen's command, pulling off his clothes, as if the beating he'd just taken at their hands was not punishment enough. They'd sent the girl away before they'd started; she'd run like a rabbit. He spat salt-and-iron blood. The shock-stick pointing, touching, there,
there
, pop and crackle. Galen going even more red-faced, accusing him of treason, worse, raving on about Aral Vorkosigan's alleged sexual proclivities, turning up the power far too high. "Flip him." Knotting terror deep in his gut, the visceral memory of pain, humiliation, burning and cramps, a weird short-circuited arousal and horribly shameful release despite it all, the stink of searing flesh. . . .
He pushed back the visions, and almost passed out before he managed to inhale and exhale one more time. Somehow he was sitting not on the bed but on the floor beside it, arms and legs spasmodically drawn up. The astonished blonde girl crouched half-naked on the rumpled mattress, staring down at him. "What's the matter with you? Why did you stop? Are you dying?"
No, just wishing I were.
It wasn't
fair
. He knew exactly where this conditioned reflex came from. It wasn't a memory buried in his subconscious, more's the pity, nor from some distant, blurred childhood. It was barely four years ago. Wasn't that sort of clear insight supposed to free one from such demons of the past? Was he going to go into self-induced spasms every time he tried to have sex with a real girl? Or was it just the extreme tension of the occasion? If ever the situation was less tense, less conscience-thwarted, if ever he really had time to make love instead of a hasty, sweaty scramble, then maybe he might overcome memory and madness—
or maybe I won't
. . . he fought for another shuddering inhalation. Another. His lungs began to work again. Was he really in danger of choking to death? Presumably once he actually passed out his autonomic nervous system would take over again.
His cabin door slid open. Taura and Bothari-Jesek stood silhouetted in the aperture, peering into the dimness. What they saw made Bothari-Jesek swear, and Sergeant Taura shoulder forward.
Now
, he wanted to pass out
now
. But his single-minded demon did not cooperate. He continued to breathe, curled up with his trousers around his knees.
"What are you doing?" Sergeant Taura growled. A dangerous, truly wolflike timbre; her fangs gleamed at the corners of her mouth in the soft light. He'd seen her tear men's throats out with one hand.
The little clone sat up on her knees on the bed, looking terribly worried, her hands as usual trying to cover and support her most notable features, as usual only drawing more attention to them. "I only asked for a drink of water," she whimpered. "I'm sorry."
Sergeant Taura hastily dropped her eight-foot height to one knee and turned out her palms, to indicate to the girl that she wasn't angry with
her
. Mark wasn't sure if Maree caught that subtlety.
"Then what happened?" Bothari-Jesek asked sternly.
"He made me kiss him."
Bothari-Jesek's eye raked his huddled disarray and glinted furiously. She was stiff and tense as a drawn bow. She wheeled to face him. Her voice went very low. "Did you just try to rape her?"
"No! I don't know. I only—"
Sergeant Taura rose, grasped him by the shirt and some skin, pulled him to his feet and beyond, and pinned him against the nearest wall. The floor was a meter beyond his stretching toes. "Answer straight, damn you," the sergeant snarled.
He closed his eyes, and took a deep breath. Not for any threat from Miles's women, no. Not for them. But for the second half of Galen's humiliation of him, in its own way a more excruciating rape than the first. When Lars and Mok, alarmed, had finally persuaded Galen to stop, Mark had been in shock so deep as to be skirting cardiac arrest. Galen had been forced to take his valuable clone to his pet physician in the middle of the night, the one he'd somehow strong-armed into supplying him with the drugs and hormones to keep Mark's body growth on track, matching Miles's. Galen had explained the burns by telling the physician that Mark had been secretly masturbating with the shock-stick, accidentally powered it up, and been unable to turn it off for the muscle spasms it caused, till his screams brought help. The doctor had actually barked a shocked laugh. Thin-voiced, Mark had concurred, too afraid to gainsay Galen even when he was alone with the physician. Yet the doctor saw his bruises, must have known there was more to the story. But said nothing. Did nothing. It was his own weak concurrence that he regretted most, in hindsight, the black laugh that burned the deepest. He could not, would not, let Maree exit bearing any such burden of proof.
In short, blunt phrases, he described exactly what he had just tried to do. It all came out sounding terribly ugly, though it had been her beauty that had overwhelmed him. He kept his eyes shut. He did not mention his panic attack, or try to explain Galen. He writhed inside, but spoke flat truth. Slowly, as he spoke, the wall bumped up his spine till his feet were on the deck again. The pressure on his shirt released, and he dared to open his eyes.
He almost closed them again, scorched by the open contempt in Bothari-Jesek's face. He'd done it now. She who had been almost sympathetic, almost kind, almost his only friend here, stood rigidly enraged, and he knew he had alienated the one person who might have spoken for him. It hurt, a killing hurt, to have so little and then lose it.
"When Taura reported she was one clone short," Bothari-Jesek bit out, "Quinn said you'd insisted on taking her. Now we know why."
"
No
. I didn't intend . . . anything. She really only wanted a drink of water." He pointed to the cup, lying on its side on the deck.
Taura turned her back on him, and knelt on one knee by the bed, and addressed the blonde in a deliberately gentle voice. "Are you hurt?"
"I'm all right," she quavered. She pulled her tunic back up over her shoulders with a shrug. "But that man was real sick." She stared at him in puzzled concern.
"Obviously," muttered Bothari-Jesek. Her chin went up, and her eyes nailed Mark, still clinging to the wall. "You're confined to quarters, mister. I'm putting the guard back on your door. Don't even try to come out."
I won't, I won't.
They marched Maree away. The door seals hissed closed like a falling guillotine blade. He rolled onto his narrow bed, shaking.
Two weeks to Komarr. He very seriously wished he were dead.
Mark spent the first three days of his solitary confinement lying in a depressed huddle. He had meant his heroic mission to save lives, not destroy them. He added up the body count, one by one. The shuttle pilot. Phillipi. Norwood. Kimura's trooper. And the eight seriously wounded. All those people hadn't had names, back when he had first been planning this. And all the anonymous Bharaputrans, too. The average Jacksonian security guard was just a joe scrambling for a living. He wondered bleakly if any of the dead Bharaputrans were people he had once met or joked with when he'd lived in the clone crèche. As ever, the little people were ground up like meat, while those with enough power to really be held responsible escaped, walking out free like Baron Bharaputra.
Did the lives of forty-nine clones outweigh four dead Dendarii? The Dendarii did not seem to think so.
Those people were not volunteers. You tricked them to their deaths.
He was shaken by an unwelcome insight. Lives did not add as integers. They added as infinities.
I didn't mean it to come out this way.
And the clones. The blonde girl. He of all men knew she was not the mature woman her general physique and particular augmentations so stunningly advertised her as being. The sixty-year-old brain that had been planning to move in doubtless would have known how to handle such a body. But Mark had seen her so clearly, in his mind, that ten-year-old on the inside. He hadn't wanted to hurt or frighten her, yet he'd managed to do both. He'd wanted to please her, make her face light.
The way they all lit up for Miles?
, the internal voice mocked.
None of the clones could possibly respond as he so ached to have them do. He must let that fantasy go. Ten years from now, twenty years from now, they might thank him for their lives. Or not.
I did all I could. I'm sorry.
Somewhere around the second day he became obsessed with the thought of himself as brain-transplant bait for Miles. Oddly enough, or perhaps logically enough, he did not fear it from Miles. But Miles was hardly in a position to veto the plan. What if it occurred to someone that it would be easier to transplant Miles's brain into Mark's warm and living body than to attempt the tedious repair of that gaping mortal chest wound, and all the cryo-trauma on top of it? It was so frightening a possibility that he half-wanted to volunteer, just to get it over with.
The only thing that kept him from total gibbering breakdown was the reflection that with the cryo-chamber lost, the threat was moot. Until it was found again. In the dark of his cabin, his head buried in his pillow, it came to him that the face he'd most desired to see transformed with respect for him by his daring clone-rescue was Miles's.
You've rather eliminated that possibility, haven't you?
The only surcease from his mental treadmill came with food, and sleep. Forcing down an entire field-ration tray left him blood-stunned enough to actually doze, in inadequate snatches. Desiring unconsciousness above all things, he cajoled the glowering Dendarii who shoved the trays through his door three times a day to bring him extras. Since the Dendarii apparently did not regard their disposable-container field rations as treats, they were willing enough to do so.
Another Dendarii brought, and shoved through the door, a selection of Miles's clean clothing from the stores on the
Ariel
. This time all the insignia were carefully removed. On the third day he gave up even attempting to fasten Naismith's uniform trousers, and switched to loose ship knits. At this point the inspiration struck him.
They can't make me play Miles if I don't look like Miles.
After that, things grew a little foggy, in his head. One of the Dendarii became so irritated by his repeated requests for extra rations that he lugged in a whole case, dumped it in a corner, and told Mark roughly not to pester him again. Mark was left alone with his self-rescue and cunning calculation. He had heard of prisoners tunneling out of their cells with a spoon; might not he?