Miles Errant - Lois McMaster Bujold [197]
"Have you considered another possible solution to the problem?" said Quinn slowly. "Send ahead to Jackson's Whole and warn them. Have, say, House Fell arrest Mark and impound the Ariel till you arrive to retrieve them. Fell hates Ryoval enough to protect Mark from him for the annoyance-factor alone."
Miles sighed. "I have considered it." He traced a formless pattern on the polished tabletop with his fingertip.
"You asked for a cross-check, Miles," Elena pointed out. "What's wrong with that idea?"
"It might work. But if Mark has really convinced Bel he's me, they might resist arrest. Maybe fatally. Mark is paranoid about Jackson's Whole. Mark is paranoid, period. I don't know what he'd do in a panic."
"You are awfully tender of Mark's sensibilities," said Elena.
"I'm trying to get him to trust me. I can hardly start the process by betraying him."
"Have you considered how much this little side-jaunt is going to cost, once the bill for it arrives on Simon Illyan's desk?" Quinn asked.
"ImpSec will pay. Without question."
Quinn said, "You sure? What's Mark to ImpSec anyway, now that he's only a left-over from the exploded plot? There is no danger any more to Barrayar of him being secretly substituted for you. I thought they only watched him for us as a courtesy. A rather expensive courtesy."
Miles replied carefully, "It is ImpSec's explicit task to guard the Barrayaran Imperium. That includes not only protecting Gregor's person, and running a certain amount of galactic espionage—" a wave of his hand included the Dendarii fleet, and Illyan's far-flung, if thinly stretched, network of agents, military attachés, and informants, "but also keeping watch over Gregor's immediate heirs. Keeping watch not only to protect them, but to protect the Imperium from any little plot got up by them, or by others seeking to use them. I am acutely conscious that the question of just who is Gregor's heir is rather tangled at present. I wish to hell he'd marry and get us all off the hook soon." Miles hesitated for a long moment. "By one interpretation, Lord Mark Pierre Vorkosigan has a place as heir-claimant to the Barrayaran Imperium second only to my own. That makes him not only ImpSec's business, it makes him our primary business. My personal pursuit of the Ariel is fully justified."
"Justifiable," Quinn corrected dryly.
"Whatever."
"If Barrayar—as you have often claimed—would not accept you as Emperor because of suspicion of mutation, I should think it'd go into spasms at the thought of your clone installed in the Imperial Residence," said Baz. "Twin brother," he amended hastily as Miles opened his mouth.
"It doesn't require the probability of success at gaining the Imperium to make the possibility of an attempt to do so into an ImpSec problem." Miles snorted. "It's funny. All the time the Komarrans thought of their faux-Miles as an imposter-claimant. I don't think either they or Mark realized they'd made a real claimant. Well, I'd have to be dead first anyway, so from my point of view the question is moot." He rapped the table and rose. "Let's get moving, people."
On the way out the door, Elena lowered her voice to ask him, "Miles—did your mother see those horrific investigation-reports of Illyan's about Mark, too?"
He smiled bleakly. "Who d'you think ordered them done?"
CHAPTER FIVE
He began donning the half-armor. First, next to his skin, a piece of the hottest new technology on the market: a nerve-disruptor shield-net. The field-generating net was worked into the fabric of a close-fitting gray body-suit and a hood that protected skull, neck, and forehead, leaving only his eyes, nose, and mouth peeping from the hole. And so the threat of one of the most fearsome anti-personnel weapons,