Miles Errant - Lois McMaster Bujold [330]
"Rats," muttered Quinn.
"So that's another cross-connection," said Mark. "In fact, it's a damned cat's cradle of cross-connections, once you get hold of the right thread. But it doesn't explain, to me at least, why the Durona Group would conceal Miles from their own House Fell bosses. Yet they must have done so."
"If they have him," Quinn said, gnawing on her cheek.
"If," Mark conceded. "Although," he brightened slightly, "it would explain why that incriminating cryo-chamber ended up in the Hegen Hub. The Durona Group wasn't trying to hide it from ImpSec. They were trying to hide it from other Jacksonians."
"It almost all fits," said Thorne.
Mark opened his hands and held them apart palm to palm, as if invisible threads ran back and forth between them. "Yeah. Almost." He closed his hands together. "So here we are. And there we're going. Our first trick will be to re-enter Jacksonian space past Fell's jump point station. Captain Quinn has brought along quite a kit for doctoring our identities. Coordinate your ideas with her on that one. We have ten days to play with it."
The group broke up to study the new problems each in his, her, or its own way. Bothari-Jesek and Quinn lingered as Mark rose and stretched his aching back. His aching brain.
"That was quite a pretty piece of analysis, Mark," said Quinn grudgingly. "If it's not all hot air."
She ought to know. "Thank you, Quinn," he said sincerely. He too prayed it wouldn't all turn out to be hallucinatory, an elaborate mistake.
"Yes . . . he's changed a bit, I think," Bothari-Jesek observed judiciously. "Grown."
"Yeah?" Quinn's gaze swept him, up and down. "True . . ."
Mark's heart warmed in hungry anticipation of a crumb of approval.
"—he's fatter."
"Let's get to work," Mark growled.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
He could remember studying tongue-twisters, once. He could even picture a whole screen-list of them, black words on pale blue. Had it been for some sort of rhetoric course? Unfortunately, though he could picture the screen, he could only remember one of the actual lines. He struggled to sit upright in bed and try it. "Sheshells . . . shsh . . . she shells she shit!" He took a breath, and started over. Again. Again. His tongue seemed thick as an old sock. It felt staggeringly important to recover control of his speech. As long as he kept talking like an idiot, they were going to keep treating him like one.
It could be worse. He was eating real food now, not sugar-water or soft sludge. He'd been showering and dressing on his own for two whole days. No more patient gowns. They'd given him a shirt and pants, instead. Like ship knits. Their gray color at first pleased him, then worried him because he could not think why it pleased him. "She. Sells. Sea. Shells. By. The. Sea. Shore. Ha!" He lay back, wheezing in triumph. He glanced up to see Dr. Rowan leaning in the doorway, watching him with a slight smile.
Still catching his breath, he waved his fingers at her in greeting. She pushed off and came to sit at his side on his bed. She wore her usual concealing green smock, and carried a sack.
"Raven said you were babbling half the night," she remarked, "but you weren't, were you. You were practicing."
"Yuh," he nodded. "Gotta talk. C'mand—" he touched his lips, and waved vaguely around the room, "obey."
"You think so, do you?" Her brows arched in amusement but her eyes, beneath them, regarded him sharply. She shifted and swung his tray table across between them. "Sit up, my authoritarian little friend. I brought you some toys."
"Sec'on chil'hd," he muttered glumly, and shoved himself upright again. His chest only ached. At least he seemed done with the more repulsive aspects of his second infancy. A second adolescence still to come? God forbid. Maybe he could skip over that part. Why do I dread an adolescence I cannot remember?
He laughed briefly as she