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breath as she asked, "Why do you let Barrayar screw you over?""It s the hand
I was dealt.""By whom? I don t get it.""It s all right. It just happens to be very
important to me to win with the hand I was dealt. So be it.""Your funeral."
Her lips were muffled on his mouth."Mmm."
She drew back a moment. "Can I still jump your bones? Carefully, of course.
You ll not go away mad, for turning you
down? Turning Barrayar down, that is. Not you, never you . . ."
I m getting used to it. Almost numb . . . "Am I to sulk?" he inquired lightly.
"Because I can t have it all, take none, and go off in a huff? I d hope you d
bounce me down the corridor on my pointed head if I were so dense."
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She laughed. It was all right, if he could still make her laugh. If Naismith was
all she wanted, she could surely have him. Half a loaf for half a man. They
tilted bedward, hungry-mouthed. It was easy, with Quinn; she made it so.
Pillow talk with Quinn turned out to be shop talk. Miles was unsurprised.
Along with a sleepy body-rub that turned him to liquid in danger of pouring
over the edge of the bed into a puddle on the deck, he absorbed the rest of her
complete report on the activities and discoveries of the London police. He in
turn brought her up to date on the events of the embassy, and the mission on
which he d dispatched Elena Bothari-Jesek. And all these years he d thought
he needed a conference room for debriefing. Clearly, he d stumbled into an
unsuspected universe of alternative command style. Sybaritic had it all over
cybernetic.
"Ten more days," Miles complained smearily into his mattress, "until Elena
can possibly return from Tau Ceti. And there s no guarantee she can bring the
missing money with her even then. Particularly if it s already been sent once.
While the Dendarii fleet hangs idly in orbit. You know what we need?"
"A contract."
"Damn straight. We ve taken interim contracts before, in spite of Barrayaran
Imperial Security having us on permanent retainer. They even like it; it gives
their budget a break. After all, the less taxes they have to squeeze out of the
peasantry, the easier Security gets on the domestic side. It s a wonder they ve
never tried to make the Dendarii Mercenaries a revenue-generating project.
I d have sent our contract people out hunting weeks ago if we weren t stuck in
Earth orbit till this mess at the embassy gets straightened out."
"Too bad we can t put the fleet to work right here on Earth," said Elli. "Peace
seems to have broken out all over the planet, unfortunately." Her hands
unknotted the muscles in his calves, fiber by fiber. He wondered if he could
persuade her to work on his feet next. He d done hers a while ago, after all,
albeit with higher goals in view. Oh, joy, he wasn t even going to have to
persuade her . . . he wriggled his toes in delight. He d never suspected that his
toes were sexy until Elli d pointed it out. In fact, his satisfaction with his
entire pleasure-drenched body was at an all-time high.
"There s a blockage in my thinking," he decided. "I m looking wrong at
something. Let s see. The Dendarii fleet isn t tied to the embassy, though I am.
I could send you all off . . ."Elli whimpered. It was such an unlikely noise,
coming from her, that he risked muscle spasm to twist his neck and look over
his shoulder at her. Brainstorming," he apologized.
"Well, don t stop with that one."
"And anyway, because of the mess at the embassy, I m not anxious to strip
myself of my private backup. It s there s something very wrong going on
there. Which means that any more sitting around waiting for the embassy to
come through is dumber than rocks. Well. One problem at a time. The
Dendarii. Money. Odd jobs . . . hey!"
"Hey?"
"What says I ve got to contract out the entire fleet at a time? Work. Odd jobs.
Interim cash flow. Divide and conquer! Security guards, computer techs,
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anything and everything anyone can come up with that will generate a little
cash income "
"Bank robberies?" said Elli in a tone of rising interest.
"And you say the police let you out? Don t get carried away. But I m sitting on
a labor pool of five thousand variously and highly trained people. Surely
that s a resource of even greater value than the Triumph. Delegate! Let them
spread out and go scare up some bloody cash!"
Elli, sitting cross-legged on the foot of his bed, remarked in aggravation, "I
worked for an hour to get you relaxed, and now look! What are you, memory-
plastic? Your whole body is coiling back up right before my eyes . . . Where
are you going?"
"To put the idea into action, what else?"
"Most people go to sleep at this point. . . ." Yawning, she helped him sort
through the pile of uniform bits on the floor nearby. The black T-shirts
proved nearly interchangable. Elli s was distinguishable by the faint scent of
her body lingering in it Miles almost didn t want to give it back, but reflected
that keeping his girlfriend s underwear to sniff probably wouldn t score him
points in the savoir-faire department. The agreement was unspoken but
plain: this phase of their relationship must stop discreetly at the bedroom
door, if they were to disprove Admiral Naismith s fatuous dictum.
The initial Dendarii staff conference, at the start of a mission when Miles
arrived on fleet station with a new contract in hand, always gave him the
sense of seeing double. He was an interface, conscious of both halves, trying
to be a one-way mirror between the Dendarii and their true employer the
Emperor. This unpleasant sensation usually faded rapidly, as he concentrated
his faculties around the mission in question, re-centering his personality;
Admiral Naismith came very near to occupying his whole skin then.
"Relaxing" wasn t quite the right term for this alpha-state, given Naismith s
driving personality; "unconstrained" came closer.He had been with the
Dendarii an unprecedented five months straight, and the sudden re-intrusion
of Lieutenant
Vorkosigan into his life had been unusually disruptive this time. Of course, it
wasn t normally the Barrayaran side of things that was screwed up. He d
always counted on that command structure to be solid, the axiom from which
all action flowed, the
standard by which subsequent success or failure was measured. Not this
time.
This night he stood in the Triumph s briefing room before his hastily called
department heads and ship captains, and was seized by a sudden, schizoid
paralysis: what was he to say to them? You re on your own, suckers. . . .
"We re on our own for a while," Admiral Naismith began, emerging from
whatever cave in Miles s brain he dwelt in, and he was off and running. The
news, made public at last, that there was a glitch in their contract payment
inspired the expected dismay; more baffling was their apparently serene
reassurance when he told them, his voice heavy with menacing emphasis, that
he was personally investigating it. Well, at least it accounted from the
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Dendarii point of view for all the time he d spent stuffing the computers in the
bowels of the Barrayaran embassy. God, thought. Miles, I swear I could sell
them all radioactive farmland.
But when challenged they unleashed an impressive flurry of ideas for short-
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