Miles Errant - Lois McMaster Bujold [233]
"I'll see what I can do." Thorne nodded and withdrew.
When the door hissed shut behind Thorne, Bothari-Jesek asked Quinn, "Have you reported all this to Barrayar yet?"
"No."
"Any of it?"
"No. I don't want to send this one over any commercial comm channel, not even in code. Illyan may have a few deep cover agents here, but I don't know who they are or how to access them. Miles would have known. And . . ."
"And?" Bothari-Jesek raised an eyebrow.
"And I'd really like to have the cryo-chamber back first."
"To shove under the door along with the report? Quinnie, it wouldn't fit."
Quinn shrugged one defensive shoulder.
After a moment Bothari-Jesek offered, "I agree with you about not sending anything through the Jacksonian jump-courier system, though."
"Yes, from what Illyan's said, it's riddled with spies, and not just the Great Houses checking up on each other, either. There's nothing Barrayar could do to help us in the next day-cycle anyway."
"How long," Mark swallowed, "is that how long I have to go on playing Miles?"
"I don't know!" said Quinn sharply. She gulped back control of her voice. "A day, a week, two weeks—at least till we can deliver you and the cryo-chamber to ImpSec's galactic affairs HQ on Komarr. Then it will be out of my hands."
"How the hell do you think you're going to keep all this under wraps?" Mark asked scornfully. "Dozens of people know what really happened."
" 'Two can keep a secret, if one of them is dead'?" Quinn grimaced. "I don't know. The troops will be all right, they have the discipline. The clones I can keep incommunicado. Anyway, we're all going to be bottled up on this ship till we reach Komarr. Later . . . I'll deal with it later."
"I want to see my . . . the . . . my clones. What you've done with them," Mark demanded suddenly.
Quinn looked as if she was about to explode, but Bothari-Jesek cut in, "I'll take him down, Quinnie. I want to check on my passengers too."
"Well . . . as long as you escort him back to his cabin when you're done. And put a guard on his door. We can't have him wandering around the ship."
"Will do." Bothari-Jesek chivvied him out quickly, before Quinn decided to have him bound and gagged as well.
The clones had been housed in three hastily-cleared freight storage chambers aboard the Peregrine, two assigned to the boys and one to the girls. Mark ducked through a door behind Bothari-Jesek into one of the boys' chambers, and looked around. Three rows of bedrolls, which must have been podded over from the Ariel, filled the floor space. A self-contained field latrine was strapped into one corner, and a field shower hastily connected in the other, to keep any need for the clones to move about the ship to a minimum. Half jail, half refugee camp, crowded—as he walked down a row between bedrolls the boys glowered up at him with the hollow faces of prisoners.
I freed you all, dammit. Don't you know I freed you?
It had been a rough rescue, true. During that hideous night of siege the Dendarii had been liberal with the most dire threats, to keep their charges under control. Some clones now slept, exhausted. The stunned ones were waking up sick and disoriented; a female Dendarii medic moved among them administering synergine and soothing words. Things were . . . under control. Suppressed. Silent. Not jubilant; not grateful. If they believed our threats, why don't they believe our promises? Even the active boys who had cooperated enthusiastically in the excitement of siege and firefight now stared at him with renewed doubt.
The blond boy was one of them. Mark stopped by his bedroll and hunkered down. Bothari-Jesek waited, watching them. "All this," Mark waved vaguely at the chamber, "is temporary, you know. It's