Black Hearts, Part Thirteen (PG)

[jeriendhal]

I am losing momentum, Miles thought, tapping his foot as he waited for the charge nurse to clear him to enter Chaos Colony’s ICU. It had been a six hour shuttle transit from Jump Station Four back down the Sergyar, so it made no sense to wave his Imperial Auditor credentials around to get past a five-minute wait now.

So if you’re in such a flaming hurry, boy, why did you take time out of the current crisis to see your father? It isn’t as if Mother wouldn’t be updating you hourly if you asked, or that the Count won’t be getting the colony’s finest care. Which in fact, Miles noted sourly, was not focused on the finer points of geriatric emergencies. Sergyar was a young frontier, with a younger population than the Barrayaran average, full of young minds that were either adventurous or dissatisfied enough with life on the home world to want to move away to Chaos Colony’s rough accommodations. It stood to reason that the hospital, though equipped for practically any emergency, was tuned towards injuries such as broken bones or odd diseases such as the worm plague, not the failing circulation system of the elderly Viceroy. So he had wanted to see Father, Miles admitted to himself, because he might not get another chance. Ever.

Finally the charge nurse buzzed him in, and Miles swiftly walked down the corridor to the Count’s private room. There he found his mother and Ekaterine sitting beside his father’s bed, chatting softly next to him. They looked up when he entered, and put such patently false smiles of reassurance on their faces when they saw him that he knew the situation had to be very bad indeed.

The Count lay in bed, unconscious, bare chested, covered in sensor pads. To Miles’ shock, he found his father’s head had been shaved, the better to place even more sensors across his scalp, so many that he appeared to be wearing a bizarre plastic skull cap. His father’s pallor had grown much worse, his skin gone completely gray and translucent, like waxed paper. An oxygen mask covered his face and his breathing was shallow, if regular.

“Hello, Miles,” Ekaterine said, rising up from her chair to kiss him briefly, not long enough nor intimately enough to hope to calm him down. “How are you?”

“Well enough, all things considered.” But his eyes spoke the truth to her, I need sleep, I need a shower, I need my father up, awake, and whole, not lying here like a near corpse. I need you. Well, at least he could get one of those things. He gripped Ekaterine’s hand and sat down beside her. “How are the kids?”

“Scared,” she admitted, “I tried to explain to them what’s going on, but I’m not sure how much they understood. They know Grandpa Aral is sick, but I don’t think they realize that he might not…” Her face twisted up in worry, and she spoke no more.

“Are things that bad, Mother?” Miles asked.

Cordelia nodded, looking grave. “It’s worse than when he had his heart attack. The burst blood vessels are deep in his brain, difficult repair work even with micro-surgical tools. They’ve got him on blood thinners to prevent further clots, but the doctors are debating on whether to proceed with surgery or attempt to stabilize him and place him in cryo-freeze to be shipped back to the Imperial Military Hospital in Vorbarr Sultana.”

Miles frowned. “Cryo-freezing a patient with brain trauma sounds very, ah, unwise.”

“Very,” his mother agreed. “The odds are an eighty percent chance for further brain damage, ranging from light to severe.” She shrugged helplessly. She looked haggard to his eyes, out of sorts. She fears for his life, worse, his mind. She’s so scared for him she can not put up a brave front for her family. Which meant that things were as bad as they could possibly get.

“What about just loading him onto a fast courier?” Even as he said it, Miles knew that the idea was absurd. Barrayar was weeks away, and even if the ship instead jumped for closer Komaar, the journey would be nearly a week. To long for a gravely ill man to be cut off from specialists and expensive surgical equipment in favor of what could be stuffed into a courier’s tight passenger accommodations. Anything more than a day’s travel was unacceptable. Father, if I could break the laws of physics and send you home directly…

The light that suddenly sparked in his eyes caught his mother’s attention. “What?” she asked, then realized what he was thinking, her own face coming alight. “Distances, Miles, what are the distances involved?” his mother demanded.

“What, is there a closer wormhole jump?” Ekaterine demanded.

“Not exactly, but there may be a way around it,” Miles answered, then paused, taking hold of her hand. “It’s got to do with the current crisis and the liner that was attacked. Ekaterine, love, I’m sorry, but this is all at the Slit Your Throat Before Reading level.” His wife, Barrayaran to the core and intimately aware of the high-level crises that her Auditor husband sometimes encountered, simply nodded and stepped outside the room. When she was gone he closed the door and sat down at the room’s small comconsole. “All right, given what Brushtail told of his fighter’s FTL speed …” Miles began tapping commands, bringing up an astronomy database and running numbers. Cutting away the cat’s cradle of wormhole jumps did wonders to eliminate unneeded system transits. “Eighteen hours as the crow flies!” he said triumphantly.

“In a small fighter cockpit, with a pilot who has no medical training,” Cordelia pointed out, frowning.

Miles shrugged. “It’s the only way to get him to ImpMil Hospital quickly,” he pointed out. Then he frowned. “There’s another consideration as well. I’d intended to have Brushtail chauffer me to Jackson’s Whole, to disrupt what I believe will be Chan’s attempt to auction off her own FTL drive to the highest bidder.”

Cordelia bit down on her lip. “Eighteen hours there, eighteen hours back, plus three days to Jackson’s Whole. Still, it would be faster than a jump ship.”

“Assuming they let Brushtail take off again once he lands on Barrayar and they get a good look at him,” Miles pointed out. “I’ll include an ‘Accommodate all requests with due speed’ letter for him to carry, but even with an Imperial Auditor seal on it I won’t guarantee it’ll work, or that Gregor won’t override it.” Hell, Brushtail’s landing would be the first word that the Emperor would have of the extraordinary events around Sergyar, having out raced the fast courier that Miles had dispatched.

His face twitched in his old nervous tic. “Which brings us to the other consideration. Assuming the worst happens to Mark and Kareen, do you imagine that Father would thank us for diverting Brushtail’s fighter to save him?”

His mother’s face fell, then she glanced over to her husband, lying helpless and ill on the bed. She took a deep breath. “Mark and Kareen are adults. They are most definitely not incompetent, nor helpless.”

Miles matched her look. “Will you say the same for the fifty other hostages, men, women, and children, not to mention Brushtail and Freeman’s friends and family?”

“Ah, no,” Cordelia agreed, after a long pause, and Miles died a little inside to see how admitting that point tore at her soul. “Aral would not thank us for that.”

“No, he wouldn’t,” Miles said.

TBC