Black Hearts, Part Seven
Feb. 11th, 2007 07:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jeriendhalTags: Vorkosivese, Terinu, Mark, Mavra Chan, PG-13.
Notes: I'm not entirely satisfied with Mark and Mavra's characterizations here, but it was the best I could do. Writing good cat and mouse conversations is a damned difficult thing to do.
His escort marched him down several corridors, up towards the prow of the ship. Several times he passed more... not aliens, please... Creo and Galen. At one point they paused, waiting for a lift, which eventually arrived and disgorged a mangy looking female wearing stained coveralls, who looked for all the world like an anthropomorphic fox. The new alien gave the bald human a half-hearted salute and reported in a nasally voice, “Tell Lady Mavra and the Captain that the bleedin' star trackers are functionin' just fine, Brooks. It ain't my fault they don't know what they're lookin' at.” She then sneezed and wiped her black nose on her coverall sleeve.
“Check 'em again, Frani,” Brooks told her gruffly. “If I find out you and the rest of your techs ha' been slackin' off on maintenance, I'll cut that baldin' tail of yours off with a laser cutter.”
“Yessir.” The fox alien gave him a slightly more respectful salute and scurried off, patchy tail tucked between her legs.
“Techs,” Brooks muttered to the guards as they entered the elevator. “Can't live without 'em, can't fraggin' shoot 'em.”
After traveling up two levels, they eventually shoved him into a spacious dining room, with windows that looked out onto an anonymous black starfield. Seated at the head of the table was a tall, rangy woman who's body appeared to be made entirely of angles, from the squared off crop top of her hair, to her hawk-like nose, to the wiry muscles of her bare arms and shoulders. She wore a corset made of composite armor plating, and had an old-fashioned (and Mark suspected, razor sharp) heavy knife strapped to her upper-left arm. Her right eye, in proper piratical fashion, was missing, the lens of its electronic replacement fashioned to resemble a targeting reticle, a completely impractical but certainly intimidating touch.
“Dis is the ponce you wanted, Lady Chan,” Brooks announced. He took up station behind her, while the guards watched Mark's back from their position at either side of the doorway.
“Lord Vorkosigan,” Lady Chan greeted, giving him a predator's smile and gesturing to the chair to her right, “please sit down.”
“Lord Mark actually,” he corrected automatically, “my brother is Lord Vorkosigan.” He remained standing, letting Killer do a threat evaluation of the room. Given the element of surprise, he just might be able to take out the two guards behind him with a quick elbow strike and a roundhouse kick. Which would leave Brooks and Chan plenty of time to shoot him across the two meters of table that separated himself from them. Right. Negotiation first, he thought firmly, and set Killer back in his corner.
“Lord Mark,” Chan said agreeably. “Now, sit down and make yourself comfortable. I insist."
“Thank you.” He settled himself into the chair at the other end of the table, his toes left dangling above the floor. “To what do I owe the honor, Lady Chan?”
“I seem to have a bit of a problem, Lord Mark,” she said without preamble. “Two days ago my ship got very lost, after we hit a gravity anomaly that sent us well off course from where we ought to have been. So far off that the nav computer couldn't figure out our position and we couldn't even raise an FTL com relay. Then we had the good luck to find the liner you were on. The ship's configuration was a little odd, but I wasn't going to argue with the good luck of being able to plunder another ship's database. Needless to say, when I started reading it, I was little surprised.”
FTL com? Mark thought. “You aren't the only one. Up until about fifteen minutes ago, I didn't believe aliens existed outside the realm of cheap entertainment vids.” Still, much became clear now. Five space math was thankfully something he'd avoided during his apprenticeship under Ser Galen, but the phrase gravity anomaly suggested that the ship had slipped through a fluctuating wormhole. They're from somewhere way, way off the Nexus. Probably from the early colonial expansion period nearly a millennium ago. Some colony ship misjumped far from here, found itself among alien races, and made a home. Now they've found a way back.
“So I gathered. What do you think of my little mouse with the great long tail?”
“I don't know, we didn't talk much,” Mark said, then immediately realized his error when Chan's smile sharpened to a razor thin edge.
“Really? You seemed to be having quite the conversation, I thought.” She touched a control on her chair and a holographic image appeared between them, obviously taken from some camera hidden in the cell block. He heard himself say, ...your friend Matt was feeding you against standing orders? and winced. “Don't worry, I already knew about Townsend feeding Mouse on the sly. Terinu thinks I'm trying to starve him into submission, even though we both know that would just result in him going into hibernation.”
“Then why?” Mark asked.
“Mouse doesn't want his old friend Matt to be punished for helping him. That gives me leverage over him. Meanwhile, Townsend has dug himself into a nice little hole, which he is going to have to pay dearly to be let out of when I call him on it. Win-win, for me at least.” Chan looked thoughtful. “I do wonder if I should give them a few moments of free time together. Brooks thinks they're lovers, but Townsend seems painfully straight, and Mousie letting his guard down that far for anyone is fairly laughable. Arranging a little stolen tryst for them both might answer so many questions.”
“What an... intriguing idea,” Mark agreed, while mentally sitting on Grunt's highly imaginative suggestions as to what the boys might do if left alone. “Which begs the question, why are you telling me all of this?”
She steepled her fingers and looked him over. “I don't normally take hostages in raids. Arranging the transfer of payment and handing them over to their rescuers makes me entirely too vulnerable to intervention by law enforcement authorities. But the liner didn't have much in the way of cargo, and I was intrigued when I saw that you and your wife were marked for special consideration on the ship's passenger manifest. A little search on the general database we copied from the liner told me the rest. Your public record is positively intriguing, Lord Mark. A clone of your brother Miles, created on a world founded by pirates, commissioned for a high-risk substitution and sabotage plot, then improbably taken in by your genetic parents family after the plot collapsed. It makes me wonder how wild the off the record story is.”
“It's the same,” Mark said flatly. “I figured out a long time ago that the fewer secrets I keep, the less leverage anyone who discovers them has over me. And my acceptance by House Vorkosigan is not so surprising, if you understood the people who comprised it better.” He clasped his hands behind his back, fingering the Vorkosigan signet ring he wore on his left hand. “If you know that much about me, then you must know the rest. I am the brother of the Eighth Imperial Auditor. I am the son of the Viceroy and Vicerine of Sergyar, the former also once the Imperial Regent and later Prime Minister of Barrayar. My wife is the daughter of the woman who served as personal bodyguard for both Gregor and his late mother during his minority and her father was the Regent's personal secretary.”
Chan raised an eyebrow. “Your point?”
“There are richer and more critical Vor Houses on Barrayar, but none more trusted by Emperor Gregor,” Mark said. He took a deep breath and plowed on. “Now, in the eyes of the greater Galactic Nexus, Barrayar may be backward as hell, but it does have the one virtue of totally lacking any sense of humor when its citizens are threatened. You are a single, lost ship. I don't know where you came from or how you found so many alien races when the rest of Nexus has been searching for them since the jump drive was invented, but I can assure you that you are completely over matched, whatever abilities they might bring into play. Drop myself, my wife, and the rest of the hostages off at the next inhabited planet or station you find, and ImpMil might leave you be. Try to ransom us, or otherwise threaten our persons in any way, and you are going to die. If you're lucky it'll be in the heat of battle. If you aren't, it'll be when you get to see the endgame of the Empire's cheerfully backward and medieval court system.”
Lady Chan chuckled once, then laughed out loud. “Oh, I don't think they'll be catching us. You see, we're not from around here.”
“How's that supposed to help you? You already said...”
She spoke slowly, as if addressing an idiot child. “This ship. Is not. From your universe.”
Mark blinked. “Huh?”
“Where I come from, Earth got invaded and conquered by the Varn, then wasted two generations throwing them off again, and in the process freeing the Creo, the Galen, and several other races from the Varn Dominion. And now I find myself here, where history says there are no aliens, and the human race has been expanding like a virus through the universe, completely unimpeded by anything except the limitation of the wormholes they have to transit to get to another star.”
It suddenly occurred to him that Terinu hadn't been that insane after all. You'd think you'd be able to recognize lunatics better, they run in the family after all.
Chan grinned. “Except that I don't have that limitation. I don't need wormholes, I don't need some brain-hacked cybernetic goon to pilot the Marauder where it needs to go. I just point it in the right direction and off we fly, faster than light.”
“Faster than light?” Mark asked, trying to find his footing. She's serious. She really means it. And that means...
Her ship didn't need to transit a wormhole to go to another star system. Could avoid those choke points all together. Which means ImpMil won't be able to track its progress, and ImpSec won't be able to guess where it will go next. Oh, shit.
“Which brings me back to my original difficulty,” she went on. “I'm a bit lost. I'm a pirate lord who just lost most of her fleet. I've got one hell of a wildcard, but that doesn't give me an advantage unless I'm in a place to properly use it. Fortunately, thanks to the liner's database, I know exactly where to go to establish maximum leverage.”
“Where?” Mark asked.
She kicked back in her chair, resting her feet on the table. “Why, to Jackson's Whole, of course. And you, House Bharaputra clone, are going to be my native guide.”
TBC
Notes: I'm not entirely satisfied with Mark and Mavra's characterizations here, but it was the best I could do. Writing good cat and mouse conversations is a damned difficult thing to do.
His escort marched him down several corridors, up towards the prow of the ship. Several times he passed more... not aliens, please... Creo and Galen. At one point they paused, waiting for a lift, which eventually arrived and disgorged a mangy looking female wearing stained coveralls, who looked for all the world like an anthropomorphic fox. The new alien gave the bald human a half-hearted salute and reported in a nasally voice, “Tell Lady Mavra and the Captain that the bleedin' star trackers are functionin' just fine, Brooks. It ain't my fault they don't know what they're lookin' at.” She then sneezed and wiped her black nose on her coverall sleeve.
“Check 'em again, Frani,” Brooks told her gruffly. “If I find out you and the rest of your techs ha' been slackin' off on maintenance, I'll cut that baldin' tail of yours off with a laser cutter.”
“Yessir.” The fox alien gave him a slightly more respectful salute and scurried off, patchy tail tucked between her legs.
“Techs,” Brooks muttered to the guards as they entered the elevator. “Can't live without 'em, can't fraggin' shoot 'em.”
After traveling up two levels, they eventually shoved him into a spacious dining room, with windows that looked out onto an anonymous black starfield. Seated at the head of the table was a tall, rangy woman who's body appeared to be made entirely of angles, from the squared off crop top of her hair, to her hawk-like nose, to the wiry muscles of her bare arms and shoulders. She wore a corset made of composite armor plating, and had an old-fashioned (and Mark suspected, razor sharp) heavy knife strapped to her upper-left arm. Her right eye, in proper piratical fashion, was missing, the lens of its electronic replacement fashioned to resemble a targeting reticle, a completely impractical but certainly intimidating touch.
“Dis is the ponce you wanted, Lady Chan,” Brooks announced. He took up station behind her, while the guards watched Mark's back from their position at either side of the doorway.
“Lord Vorkosigan,” Lady Chan greeted, giving him a predator's smile and gesturing to the chair to her right, “please sit down.”
“Lord Mark actually,” he corrected automatically, “my brother is Lord Vorkosigan.” He remained standing, letting Killer do a threat evaluation of the room. Given the element of surprise, he just might be able to take out the two guards behind him with a quick elbow strike and a roundhouse kick. Which would leave Brooks and Chan plenty of time to shoot him across the two meters of table that separated himself from them. Right. Negotiation first, he thought firmly, and set Killer back in his corner.
“Lord Mark,” Chan said agreeably. “Now, sit down and make yourself comfortable. I insist."
“Thank you.” He settled himself into the chair at the other end of the table, his toes left dangling above the floor. “To what do I owe the honor, Lady Chan?”
“I seem to have a bit of a problem, Lord Mark,” she said without preamble. “Two days ago my ship got very lost, after we hit a gravity anomaly that sent us well off course from where we ought to have been. So far off that the nav computer couldn't figure out our position and we couldn't even raise an FTL com relay. Then we had the good luck to find the liner you were on. The ship's configuration was a little odd, but I wasn't going to argue with the good luck of being able to plunder another ship's database. Needless to say, when I started reading it, I was little surprised.”
FTL com? Mark thought. “You aren't the only one. Up until about fifteen minutes ago, I didn't believe aliens existed outside the realm of cheap entertainment vids.” Still, much became clear now. Five space math was thankfully something he'd avoided during his apprenticeship under Ser Galen, but the phrase gravity anomaly suggested that the ship had slipped through a fluctuating wormhole. They're from somewhere way, way off the Nexus. Probably from the early colonial expansion period nearly a millennium ago. Some colony ship misjumped far from here, found itself among alien races, and made a home. Now they've found a way back.
“So I gathered. What do you think of my little mouse with the great long tail?”
“I don't know, we didn't talk much,” Mark said, then immediately realized his error when Chan's smile sharpened to a razor thin edge.
“Really? You seemed to be having quite the conversation, I thought.” She touched a control on her chair and a holographic image appeared between them, obviously taken from some camera hidden in the cell block. He heard himself say, ...your friend Matt was feeding you against standing orders? and winced. “Don't worry, I already knew about Townsend feeding Mouse on the sly. Terinu thinks I'm trying to starve him into submission, even though we both know that would just result in him going into hibernation.”
“Then why?” Mark asked.
“Mouse doesn't want his old friend Matt to be punished for helping him. That gives me leverage over him. Meanwhile, Townsend has dug himself into a nice little hole, which he is going to have to pay dearly to be let out of when I call him on it. Win-win, for me at least.” Chan looked thoughtful. “I do wonder if I should give them a few moments of free time together. Brooks thinks they're lovers, but Townsend seems painfully straight, and Mousie letting his guard down that far for anyone is fairly laughable. Arranging a little stolen tryst for them both might answer so many questions.”
“What an... intriguing idea,” Mark agreed, while mentally sitting on Grunt's highly imaginative suggestions as to what the boys might do if left alone. “Which begs the question, why are you telling me all of this?”
She steepled her fingers and looked him over. “I don't normally take hostages in raids. Arranging the transfer of payment and handing them over to their rescuers makes me entirely too vulnerable to intervention by law enforcement authorities. But the liner didn't have much in the way of cargo, and I was intrigued when I saw that you and your wife were marked for special consideration on the ship's passenger manifest. A little search on the general database we copied from the liner told me the rest. Your public record is positively intriguing, Lord Mark. A clone of your brother Miles, created on a world founded by pirates, commissioned for a high-risk substitution and sabotage plot, then improbably taken in by your genetic parents family after the plot collapsed. It makes me wonder how wild the off the record story is.”
“It's the same,” Mark said flatly. “I figured out a long time ago that the fewer secrets I keep, the less leverage anyone who discovers them has over me. And my acceptance by House Vorkosigan is not so surprising, if you understood the people who comprised it better.” He clasped his hands behind his back, fingering the Vorkosigan signet ring he wore on his left hand. “If you know that much about me, then you must know the rest. I am the brother of the Eighth Imperial Auditor. I am the son of the Viceroy and Vicerine of Sergyar, the former also once the Imperial Regent and later Prime Minister of Barrayar. My wife is the daughter of the woman who served as personal bodyguard for both Gregor and his late mother during his minority and her father was the Regent's personal secretary.”
Chan raised an eyebrow. “Your point?”
“There are richer and more critical Vor Houses on Barrayar, but none more trusted by Emperor Gregor,” Mark said. He took a deep breath and plowed on. “Now, in the eyes of the greater Galactic Nexus, Barrayar may be backward as hell, but it does have the one virtue of totally lacking any sense of humor when its citizens are threatened. You are a single, lost ship. I don't know where you came from or how you found so many alien races when the rest of Nexus has been searching for them since the jump drive was invented, but I can assure you that you are completely over matched, whatever abilities they might bring into play. Drop myself, my wife, and the rest of the hostages off at the next inhabited planet or station you find, and ImpMil might leave you be. Try to ransom us, or otherwise threaten our persons in any way, and you are going to die. If you're lucky it'll be in the heat of battle. If you aren't, it'll be when you get to see the endgame of the Empire's cheerfully backward and medieval court system.”
Lady Chan chuckled once, then laughed out loud. “Oh, I don't think they'll be catching us. You see, we're not from around here.”
“How's that supposed to help you? You already said...”
She spoke slowly, as if addressing an idiot child. “This ship. Is not. From your universe.”
Mark blinked. “Huh?”
“Where I come from, Earth got invaded and conquered by the Varn, then wasted two generations throwing them off again, and in the process freeing the Creo, the Galen, and several other races from the Varn Dominion. And now I find myself here, where history says there are no aliens, and the human race has been expanding like a virus through the universe, completely unimpeded by anything except the limitation of the wormholes they have to transit to get to another star.”
It suddenly occurred to him that Terinu hadn't been that insane after all. You'd think you'd be able to recognize lunatics better, they run in the family after all.
Chan grinned. “Except that I don't have that limitation. I don't need wormholes, I don't need some brain-hacked cybernetic goon to pilot the Marauder where it needs to go. I just point it in the right direction and off we fly, faster than light.”
“Faster than light?” Mark asked, trying to find his footing. She's serious. She really means it. And that means...
Her ship didn't need to transit a wormhole to go to another star system. Could avoid those choke points all together. Which means ImpMil won't be able to track its progress, and ImpSec won't be able to guess where it will go next. Oh, shit.
“Which brings me back to my original difficulty,” she went on. “I'm a bit lost. I'm a pirate lord who just lost most of her fleet. I've got one hell of a wildcard, but that doesn't give me an advantage unless I'm in a place to properly use it. Fortunately, thanks to the liner's database, I know exactly where to go to establish maximum leverage.”
“Where?” Mark asked.
She kicked back in her chair, resting her feet on the table. “Why, to Jackson's Whole, of course. And you, House Bharaputra clone, are going to be my native guide.”
TBC
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2007-02-12 01:44 am (UTC)typos - l 3, female, not overalls, looks like fox; 3rd from last para - not a start system
no subject
Date: 2007-02-12 08:08 am (UTC)And if either Miles or Mark want a scour of Jackson's Whole, I think Mavra's going to hand them an excuse real soon. *grins*
Mistakes:
Mavra telling Mark to sit. "I insist. - missing closing (")
I seem to have a it of a problem, Lord Mark - shouldn't that be a "bit" not a "it"?
Not sure about this one: a FTL - doesn't _an_ FTL fit better?
(not really an error, but "vids" could be "holovids" *winks*)
a millenia I think it's "a millennium" and "several millennia", as in, millennia is plural (and with double n)
razor thin edge or, razor-thin edge (not sure about this one)
“Than why?” Mark asked. - ThEn why?
Komaar - Komarr
You are one, lost ship. - I think, either omit the comma, or use 'have'.
Gah. Don't get me wrong. I love this one!!! :) Mark is scared, possibly scared for the first time since Mirror Dance, and I think he'll not like that one little bit.
Isn't Mavra aware that there are Barrayar agents on Jackson's Whole as well, though? I mean, ImpSec and all. Should she show up and drop a hint she has Mark... I certainly hope they'll move a LOT fast this time.
I mean, Mavra does have a very strong wildcard, but not unbeatable, not when a team lead by Cordelia has an access to another FTL (and I'd say if Rufus's ship has an archive of how that's made, the Nexus is up to some SIGNIFICANT changes).
Oh dear. The political implications of those two ships for the Nexus are amazing!
And all the things that go wrong for Mavra's nice win-win plans. I rather like that.
Shows I'm for the good guys, right? *grins*
no subject
Date: 2007-02-12 10:38 am (UTC)And yeah, Rufus' fighter will come in handy, though its advantages are limited. The thing about FTL is that it gives a ship greater freedom of momvement, allowing to pick and choose what star systems it transits, that advantage is slightly mitigated by the fact that it must physically cross the distance between stars. Meanwhile, Jumps are instantaneous, but limited in their direction. It evens out.
no subject
Date: 2007-02-12 10:41 am (UTC)Yes, the advantages even out, if everybody has a choice. But when there are just two FTL ships in the universe, and one is rather small... the advantage is still on Mavra's side.
I think.
For now.
After all, this is the chance brothers we are talking about!
no subject
Date: 2007-02-12 01:22 pm (UTC)You are evil, aren't you?
(And what does it say about me, who am dying to see that happen? LOL!)