Miles Errant - Lois McMaster Bujold [248]
"I'll get up," said Mark. "And I'll get washed. But I won't put on the uniform, or any uniform."
"You'll do as you're told, mister."
"That's a Barrayaran officer's uniform. It represents real power, and they guard it accordingly. They hang people who wear fake uniforms." He tossed off the covers and sat up. He was a little dizzy.
"My gods," said Quinn in a choked voice. "What have you done to yourself?"
"I suppose," he allowed, "you can still try to stuff me into the uniform. But you might want to consider the effect." He staggered to the washroom.
While washing and depiliating, he inventoried the results of his escape attempt. There just hadn't been enough time. True, he'd regained the kilos he'd had to lose to play Admiral Naismith at Escobar, plus maybe a slight bonus, and in a mere fourteen days instead of the year it had taken them to creep on in the first place. A hint of a double chin. His torso was notably thickened, though, his abdomen—he moved carefully—achingly distended. Not enough, not enough to be safe yet.
Quinn being Quinn, she had to convince herself, and she tried the Barrayaran uniform on him anyway. He made sure to slump. The effect was . . . very unmilitary. She gave up, snarling, and let him dress himself. He chose clean ship-knit pants, soft friction-slippers, and a loose Barrayaran civilian-style tunic of Miles's with big sleeves and an embroidered sash. It took him a moment of careful consideration to decide whether it would annoy Quinn more to see the sash positioned across his rounding belly, equatorially, or under the bulge like a sling. Judging from the lemon-sucking look on her face, under it was, and he left it that way.
She sensed his fey mood. "Enjoying yourself?" she inquired sarcastically.
"It's the last fun I'll get today. Isn't it?"
Her hand opened in dry acquiescence.
"Where are you taking me? For that matter, where are we?"
"Komarr orbit. We are about to pod over, secretly, to one of the Barrayaran military space stations. There we are going to have a very private meeting with Chief of Imperial Security Captain Simon Illyan. He came by fast courier all the way from ImpSec headquarters on Barrayar on the basis of a rather ambiguous coded message I sent him, and he's going to be extremely hot to know why I've interrupted his routine. He's going to demand to know what the hell was so important. And," her voice wavered in a sigh, "I'm going to have to tell him."
She led him out of his cabin-cell through the Peregrine. She had evidently dismissed his door guard when she'd first come in, but in fact all the corridors seemed deserted. No, not deserted. Cleared.
They came to a personnel pod hatch and ducked through to find Captain Bothari-Jesek herself at the controls. Bothari-Jesek and no one else. A very private party indeed.
Bothari-Jesek's usual coolness seemed particularly frigid today. When she glanced over her shoulder at him, her eyes widened, and her dark winged brows drew down in startled disapproval of his pasty, bloated appearance.
"Hell, Mark. You look like a drowned corpse that's floated to the surface after a week."
I feel like one. "Thank you," he intoned blandly.
She snorted, whether with amusement, disgust, or derision he was not sure, and turned her attention back to the pod control interface. Hatches sealed, clamps retracted, and they sped silently away from the side of the Peregrine. Between the zero-gee and the accelerations, he found his attention centered on his stretched stomach again, and he swallowed against the nausea.
"Why is the ImpSec head man only ranked as captain?" Mark inquired, to take his mind off his queasiness. "It can't be for secrecy, everybody knows who he is."
"Another Barrayaran tradition," Bothari-Jesek said. Her tone put a slightly bitter spin on the term tradition. At least she was speaking to him. "Illyan's predecesor in the post, the late great Captain Negri, never