Miles Errant - Lois McMaster Bujold [299]
One wall-hanging was ironic, personal, and obvious: an old metal leg-brace, crossed, military-museum fashion, with a Vor sword. Half joke, half defiance. Both obsolete. A cheap photonic reproduction of a page from an ancient book was matted and mounted in a wildly expensive silver frame. The text was all out of context, but appeared to be some sort of pre-jump religious gibberish, all about pilgrims, and a hill, and a city in the clouds. Mark wasn't sure what that was all about; nobody had ever accused Miles of being the religious type. Yet it was clearly important to him.
Some of these things aren't prizes, Mark realized. They are lessons.
A holovid portfolio box rested on the bedside table. Mark sat down and activated it. He expected Elli Quinn's face, but the first videoportrait to come up was of a tall, glowering, extraordinarily ugly man in Vorkosigan armsmen's livery. Sergeant Bothari, Elena's father. He keyed through the contents. Quinn was next, then Bothari-Jesek. His parents, of course. Miles's horse, Ivan, Gregor: after that, a parade of faces and forms. He keyed through faster and faster, not recognizing even a third of the people. After the fiftieth face, he stopped clicking.
He rubbed his face wearily. He's not a man, he's a mob. Right. He sat bent and aching, face in his hands, elbows on his knees. No. I am not Miles.
Miles's comconsole was the secured type, in no way junior to the one in the Count's library. Mark walked over and examined it only by eye; his hands he shoved back deep into his trouser pockets. His fingertips encountered Kareen Koudelka's crumpled flowerlets.
He drew them out and spread them on his palm. In a spasm of frustration, he smashed the blooms with his other hand, and threw them to the floor. Less than a minute later he was on his hands and knees frantically scraping the scattered bits up off the carpet again. I think I must be insane. He sat on his knees on the floor and began to cry.
Unlike poor Ivan, no one interrupted his misery, for which he was profoundly grateful. He sent a mental apology after his Vorpatril cousin, Sorry, sorry . . . though odds were even whether Ivan would remember anything about his intrusion come the morning. He gulped for control of his breath, his head aching fiercely.
Ten minutes delay downside at Bharaputra's had been all the difference. If they'd been ten minutes faster, the Dendarii would have made it back to their drop shuttle before the Bharaputrans had a chance to blow it up, and all would have unfolded into another future. Thousands of ten-minute intervals had passed in his life, unmarked and without effect. But that ten minutes had been all it took to transform him from would-be hero to permanent scum. And he could never recover the moment.
Was that, then, the commander's gift: to recognize those critical minutes, out of the mass of like moments, even in the chaos of their midst? To risk all to grab the golden ones? Miles had possessed that gift of timing to an extraordinary degree. Men and women followed him, laid all their trust at his feet, just for that.
Except once, Miles's timing had failed. . . .
No. He'd been screaming his lungs out for them to keep moving. Miles's timing had been shrewd. His feet had been fatally slowed by others' delays.
Mark climbed up off the floor, washed his face in the bathroom, and returned and sat in the comconsole's station chair. The first layer of secured functions was entered by a palm-lock. The machine did not quite like his palm-print; bone growth and subcutaneous fat deposits were beginning to distort the pattern out of the range of recognition. But not wholly, not yet; on the fourth try it took a reading that pleased it, and opened files to him. The next layer of functions required codes and accesses he did not know, but the top layer had all he needed for now: a private, if not secured, comm channel to ImpSec.
ImpSec's