Miles Errant - Lois McMaster Bujold [23]
"Suppose," said another group leader even more hesitantly, "they cut off our air again? Permanently?"
"Then," said Miles smoothly, "they lose their hard-won position one-up on the IJC, which they've gone to enormous trouble to gain. It's a propaganda coup they've been making much of lately, particularly since our side, in the stress of the way things are going back home, hasn't been able to maintain its own troops in style, let alone any captured Cetagandans. The Cetagandans, whose published view is that they're sharing their Imperial government with us out of cultural generosity, are claiming this as a demonstration of their superior civilization and good manners—"
Some jeers and catcalls marked the prisoners' view of this assertion, and Miles smiled and went on. "The death rate reported for this camp is so extraordinary, it's caught the IJC's attention. The Cetagandans have managed to account for it so far, through three separate IJC inspections, but 100% would be a bit extreme even for them to justify." A shiver of agreement, compressed rage, ran through his rapt listeners.
Miles sat again. Oliver leaned over to him to whisper, "How the hell did you come by all that information?"
Miles smirked. "Did it sound convincing? Good."
Oliver sat back, looking unnerved. "You don't have any inhibitions at all, do you?"
"Not in combat."
Tris and her group leaders spent the next two hours laying out chow call scenario flow charts, and their tactical responses at each branching. They broke up to let the group leaders pass it on to their chosen subordinates, and Oliver to his crew of supplementary Enforcers.
Tris paused before Miles, who had succumbed to gravity sometime during the second hour and now lay in the dirt staring somewhat blankly at the dome, blinking in an effort to keep his blurring eyes open. He had not slept in the day and a half before entering this place. He was not sure how much time had passed since then.
"I thought of one more scenario," Tris remarked. "What do we do if they do nothing at all? Do nothing, change nothing."
Miles smiled sleepily. "It seems most probable. That attempted double-cross on the last chow call was a slip on their part, I think."
"But in the absence of an enemy, how long can we go on pretending we're an army?" she persisted. "You scraped us up off the bottom for this. When it runs down at last, what then?"
Miles curled up on his side, drowning in weird and shapeless thoughts, and enticed by the hint of an erotic dream about a tall aggressive redhead. His yawn cracked his face. "Then we pray for a miracle. Remind me to discuss miracles with you . . . later. . . ."
He half-woke once when somebody shoved a sleeping mat under him. He gave Beatrice a sleepy bedroom smile.
"Crazy mutant," she snarled at him, and rolled him roughly onto the pad. "Don't you go thinking this was my idea."
"Why Suegar," Miles muttered, "I think she likes me." He cuddled back into the entwining limbs of the dream-Beatrice in fleeting peace.
* * *
To Miles's secret dismay, his analysis proved right. The Cetagandans returned to their original rat bar routine, unresponsive again to their prisoners' internal permutations. Miles was not sure he liked that. True, it gave him ample opportunity to fine-tune his distribution scheme. But some harassment from the dome would have directed the prisoners' attention outward, given them a foe again, above all broken the paralyzing boredom of their lives. In the long run, Tris must prove right.
"I hate an enemy who doesn't make mistakes," Miles muttered irritably, and flung his efforts into events he could control.
He found a phlegmatic prisoner with a steady heartbeat to lie in the dirt and count his own pulse, and began timing distribution, and then working on reducing timing.
"It's a spiritual exercise," he announced when he had his fourteen quartermasters start issuing the rat bars 200 at a time, with thirty-minute breaks between groups.
"It's a change of pace," he explained in an aside to Tris. "If we can't induce the