Miles in Love - Lois McMaster Bujold [155]
"Captain Vorgier and I discussed this possibility with the military commander, my lord. He wasn't happy with the prospect of a sudden influx of, um, randomly selected, uncleared persons onto his station."
Miles bet not. "I'll speak with him." He sighed.
Vorgier's "operations center" turned out to be the local ImpSec offices; the central communications chamber did indeed bear a passing resemblance to a warship's tactics room, Miles had to allow. Vorgier called up a holovid display of the Southport docks and locks area, one with rather better technical detail than the one Miles had spent the last hour studying. He ran over the expected placement of his men and the projected timing and technique of his assault. It wasn't a bad plan, as assaults went. In his youth, out on covert ops, Miles had come up with things just as bravura and idiotic on equally short notice. All right . . . more idiotic, he admitted ruefully to himself. Someday, Miles, his boss ImpSec Chief Simon Illyan had once said to him, I hope you live to have a dozen subordinates just like you. Miles hadn't realized till now that had been a formal curse on Illyan's part.
Vorgier's sales pitch kept fading out in Miles's mind, displaced by an instant-replay of the recording of the last message from Ekaterin, which Vorgier had thoughtfully supplied Miles by tight-beam. He'd memorized every nuance of it in the last three hours. I'm in a loading bay control booth—they're getting the door open-- She hadn't said anything about the novel device. Unless some report had been going to follow the Tell Lord Vorkosigan—tell ImpSec—part, which had been so rudely interrupted by the red-faced Soudha's paw abruptly descending on the comconsole control. Nothing could be seen in the fuzzy background, however computer-enhanced, but the dull control booth. And the mathematician, Cappell, gripping a wrench he looked ready to use for something other than tightening bolts, but evidently hadn't; ImpSec had received vids via the loading bay airlock's safety channel of both women being bundled alive into it, before Soudha had cut off the signal feed. Those brief images too burned in Miles's brain.
"All right, Captain Vorgier," Miles interrupted. "Hold your plan as a possible last resort."
"To be implemented under what circumstances, my Lord Auditor?"
Over my dead body, Miles did not reply. Vorgier might not understand it wasn't a joke. "Before we start blowing walls down, I want to try to negotiate with Soudha and his friends."
"These are Komarran terrorists. Madmen—you can't negotiate with them!"
The late Baron Ryoval had been a madman. The late Ser Galen had been a madman, without question. And the late General Metzov hadn't exactly been rowing with both oars in the water, either, come to think of it. Miles had to admit, there had been a definite negative trend to all those negotiations. "I'm not without experience in the problem, Vorgier. But I don't think Dr. Soudha is a madman. He's not even a mad scientist. He's merely a very upset engineer. These Komarrans may in fact be the most sensible revolutionaries I've ever met."
He stood a moment, staring unseeing at Vorgier's colorful, ominous tactical display, the logistics of the station evacuation warring in his head with guesses about the Komarrans' state of mind. Delusion, political passion, personality, judgment . . . visions of Ekaterin's terror and despair spun in his back-brain. If so spacious a containment as a Komarran dome gave her claustrophobia . . . stop it. He pictured a thick sheet of glass sliding down between him and that personal maelstrom of anxiety. If his authority here was absolute, so was his obligation to keep his thinking clear.
"Every hour buys lives. We'll play for time. Get me a channel to the military station's commander," Miles ordered. "After that, we'll see whether Soudha will answer his comconsole."
The deliberately blank chamber in which Miles sat might as easily have been on the nearby military station, or a ship