Cordelia's Honor - Lois McMaster Bujold [41]
"Ten or eleven, I guess," Stuben said.
"All right. Give me your stunner. Go. Go. Go."
"Captain, we came here to rescue you!" cried Stuben, bewildered.
Words failed her utterly. She put a hand on his shoulder instead. "I know. Thank you." She ran.
Approaching engineering from one deck above, she came to an intersection of two corridors. Down the larger was a group of men assembling and checking weapons. Down the smaller were two men covering an entry port to the next deck, a last checkpoint before territory covered by Radnov's fire. One of them was Yeoman Nilesa. She pounced on him.
"Captain Vorkosigan sent me down," she lied. "He wants me to try one last effort at negotiation, as a neutral in the affair."
"That's a waste of time," observed Nilesa.
"So he hopes," she improvised. "It'll keep them tied up while he's getting ready. Can you get me in without alarming anybody?"
"I can try, I guess." Nilesa went forward and undogged a circular hatch in the floor at the end of the corridor.
"How many guards on this entrance?" she whispered.
"Two or three, I think."
The hatch swung up, revealing a man-width access tube with a ladder up one side and a pole down the middle.
"Hey, Wentz!" he shouted down it.
"Who's that?" a voice floated up.
"Me, Nilesa. Captain Vorkosigan wants to send that Betan frill down to talk to Radnov."
"What for?"
"How the hell should I know? You're the ones who're supposed to have comm pickups in everybody's bunks. Maybe she's not such a good lay after all." Nilesa shrugged an apology toward her, and she accepted it with a nod.
There was a whispered debate below.
"Is she armed?"
Cordelia, readying both stunners, shook her head.
"Would you give a weapon to a Betan frill?" Nilesa called back rhetorically, watching her preparations in puzzlement.
"All right. Put her in, dog the hatch, and let her drop. If you don't close the hatch before she drops, we'll shoot her. Got that?"
"Yo."
"What'll I be looking at when I get to the bottom?" she quizzed Nilesa.
"Nasty spot. You'll be standing in a sort of niche in the storeroom off the main control room. You can only get one man at a time through it, and you're pinned in there like a target, with the wall on three sides. It's designed that way on purpose."
"No way to rush them through it? I mean, you're not planning to?"
"No way in hell."
"Good. Thanks."
Cordelia climbed down into the tube, and Nilesa closed the hatch over her with a sound like the lid of a coffin.
"All right," came the voice from below, "drop."
"It's a long way down," she called back, having no trouble sounding tremulous. "I'm afraid."
"Screw it. I'll catch you."
"All right." She wrapped her legs and one arm around the pole. Her hand shook as she jammed the second stunner into her holster. Her stomach pumped sour bile into the back of her throat. She swallowed, took a deep breath to keep it there, held her stunner pointed ready, and dropped.
She landed face-to-face with the man below, his nerve disruptor held casually at the level of her waist. His eyes widened as he saw her stunner. Here the Barrayaran custom of all-male crews on warships paid her, for he hesitated just a fraction of a second to shoot a woman. In that fraction she fired first. He slumped heavily over her, head lolling on her shoulder. Bracing, she held him as a shield before her.
Her second shot laid out the next guard as he was bringing his disruptor to aim. The third guard got off a hasty burst that was absorbed by the back of the man she held, although the nimbus of it seared the outer edge of her left thigh. The pain of it flared screamingly, but no sound escaped her clenched teeth. With a wild berserker accuracy that seemed no part of herself, she felled him too, then looked frantically around for a place of concealment.
Some conduits ran overhead; people entering a room usually look down and around before thinking to look up. She stuck