Miles Errant - Lois McMaster Bujold [135]
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It was like coming home, to step aboard the Triumph again. Knots Miles had not been conscious of undid themselves in the back of his neck as he inhaled the familiar recycled air and soaked the small subliminal chirps and vibrations of the properly functioning, live ship in through his bones. Things were looking in rather better repair all over than at any time since Dagoola, and Miles made a mental note to find out which aggressive engineering sergeants he had to thank for it. It would be good to be just Naismith again, with no problem more complex than what could be laid out in plain military language by HQ, finite and unambiguous.
He issued orders. Cancel further work contracts by individual Dendarii or their groups. All personnel presently scattered downside on work or leave to go on a six hour recall alert. All ships to begin their twenty-four hour preflight checks. Send Lieutenant Bone to me. It gave him a pleasantly megalomanic sense of drawing all things toward a center, himself, though that humor cooled when he contemplated the unsolved problem waiting for him in his Intelligence division.
Quinn in tow, Miles went to pay Intelligence a visit. He found Bel Thorne manning the security comconsole. If manning was the right term; Thorne was one of Beta Colony's hermaphrodite minority, hapless heirs of a century-past genetic project of dubious merit. It had been one of the lunatic fringe's loonier experiments, in Miles's estimation. Most of the men/women stuck to their own comfortable little subculture on tolerant Beta Colony; that Thorne had ventured out into the wider galactic world bespoke either courage, terminal boredom, or most probably if you knew Thorne, a low taste for unsettling people. Captain Thorne kept soft brown hair cut in a deliberately ambiguous style, but wore hard-earned Dendarii uniform and rank with crisp definition.
"Hi, Bel." Miles pulled up a station chair and hooked it into its clamps; Thorne greeted him with a friendly semi-salute. "Play me back everything the surveillance team picked up from Galen's house after Quinn and I rescued the Barrayaran military attaché and left to deliver him back to their embassy." Quinn kept her face quite straight through this bit of revisionist history.
Thorne obediently fast-forwarded through a half hour of silence, then slowed through the disjointed conversation of the two unhappy Komarran guards awakening from stun. Then the chime of the comconsole; a somewhat degraded image resynthesized from the vid beam; the slow toneless voice and face of Galen himself, requesting a report on the guard's murderous assignment; the sharp rise in tone, as he heard of the dramatic rescue instead—"Fools!" A pause. "Don't attempt to contact me again." Cut.
"We traced the source of the call, I trust," said Miles.
"Public comconsole at a tube station," said Thorne. "By the time we got someone there, the potential search radius had widened to about a hundred kilometers. Good tube system, that."
"Right. And he never returned to the house after that?"
"Abandoned everything, apparently. He's had previous experience evading security, I take it."
"He was an expert before I was born," sighed Miles. "What about the two guards?"
"They were still at the house when the surveillance guys from the Barrayaran embassy arrived and took over and we packed our kit and went home. Have the Barrayarans paid us for this little