Mirror dance by Lois McMaster Bujold Read Free Book Online Page B

leaden knot materialized in the pit of his stomach. "Where is Bel Thorne?"
    By eye, they elected Elena Bothari-Jesek as spokesperson. That was an extremely bad sign. "Miles," she said hesitantly, "was Bel supposed to be back before you?"
    "Back? Where did Bel go?"
    She was looking at him as though he'd lost his mind. "Bel left with you, in the Ariel , three days ago."
    Quinn's head snapped up. "That's impossible."
    "Three days ago, we were still en route to Escobar," Miles stated. The leaden knot was transmuting into neutron star matter. He was not dominating this room at all well. In fact, it seemed to be tilting.
    "You took Green Squad with you. It was the new contract, Bel said," Elena added.
    " This is the new contract," Miles tapped the comconsole. A hideous explanation was beginning to suggest itself to his mind, rising from the black hole in his stomach. The looks on the faces around the table were also beginning to divide into two uneven camps, appalled surmise from the minority who had been in on that mess on Earth two years ago—oh, they were right with him—total confusion from the majority, who had not been directly involved. . . .
    "Where did I say I was going?" Miles inquired. His tone was, he thought, gentle, but several people flinched.
    "Jackson's Whole." Elena looked him straight in the eye, with much the steady gaze of a zoologist about to dissect a specimen. A sudden lack of trust . . .
    Jackson's Whole. That tears it. "Bel Thorne? The Ariel ? Taura? With ten jumps of Jackson's Whole?" Miles choked. "Dear God."
    "But if you're you," said Truzillo, "who was that three days ago?"
    " If you're you," said Elena darkly. The initiate crowd were all getting that same frowning look.
    "You see," Miles explained in a hollow voice to the What-the-hell-are-they-talking-about? portion of the room, "some people have an evil twin. I am not so lucky. What I have is an idiot twin."
    "Your clone," said Elena Bothari-Jesek.
    "My brother," he corrected automatically.
    "Little Mark Pierre," said Quinn. "Oh . . . shit ."

CHAPTER THREE
    His stomach seemed to turn inside out, the cabin wavered, and shadow darkened his vision. The bizarre sensations of the wormhole jump were gone almost as soon as they began, but left an unpleasant somatic reverberation, as if he were a struck gong. He took a deep, calming breath. That had been the fourth jump of the voyage. Five jumps to go, on the tortuous zigzag through the wormhole nexus from Escobar to Jackson's Whole. The Ariel had been three days en route, almost halfway.
    He glanced around Naismith's cabin. He could not continue to hide out in here much longer, pretense of illness or Naismithian black mood or not. Thorne needed every bit of data he could supply to plan the Dendarii raid on the clone-creche. He had used his hibernation well, scanning the Ariel 's mission logs back through time, all the way past his first encounter with the Dendarii two years ago. He now knew a great deal more about the mercenaries, and the thought of casual conversation with the Ariel 's crew was far less terrifying.
    Unfortunately there was very little in the mission log to help him reconstruct what his first meeting with Naismith on Earth had looked like from the Dendarii point of view. The log had concentrated on rehabilitation and refit reports, dickerings with assorted ship's chandlers, and engineering briefings. He'd found exactly one order pertinent to his own adventures embedded in the data flow, advising all ship masters that Admiral Naismith's clone had been seen on Earth, warning that the clone might attempt to pass himself off as the Admiral, giving the (incorrect) information that the clone's legs would show up on a medical scan as normal bone and not plastic replacements, and ordering use of stunners-only in apprehending the imposter. No explanations, no later revisions or updates. All of Naismith/Vorkosigan's highest-level orders tended to be verbal and undocumented anyway, for