Captain Vorpatril's alliance

“They did,” whispered Star back. “But something shifted when we were out today, and this all came spilling out of the wall again. Dada says Jet has to come back and clean it up again before we start hauling goods out.”

“What the hell is this…?” whispered Ivan Xav sharply, holding his cold light down to illuminate the pile. The bones sprang out in harsh relief.

“It’s poor Sergeant Abelard,” Tej whispered back. “I didn’t actually find that dog‑tag necklace on the floor of a garage. He was wearing it.”

Ivan Xav knelt, staring wide‑eyed, not touching.

“He was in a collapsed tunnel that our tunnel crossed. Or at least his foot was; Jet made the hole. I didn’t think that was such a good idea, but, you know, brothers. Well, I suppose you don’t know brothers. Guys, then.”

Ivan Xav’s hand turned up a flap of backpack, then drew back.

“I do not have claustrophobia,” he…well, it was still a whisper, but it had a lot of snarl in it. It seemed he actually did possess emotional range beyond peeved. “I do, however, have a quite active unexploded bombs phobia. This could be‑anything. Unstable, for example. Are you people insane?”

“It can’t be too unstable,” said Star, unsympathetically. “It didn’t go off when it fell in here, and it didn’t go off when Pidge tripped over it and kicked it a bit ago. I wouldn’t play with it, mind, but it’s not going to do anything spontaneous, I don’t think.”

Unlike Ivan Xav, who looked quite close to something spontaneous, possibly combustion. But he just stood up and waved them on.

Their next check was at a point where the Mycoborer tunnel split into five channels. Three of them wrapped around a large‑diameter pipe, from which the sound of rushing water filtered faintly. Ivan stared at it, listening, then shook his head. He muttered something that sounded like, Oh, sure, of course there’s water, but didn’t expand.

“Uh, which way?” Tej asked Star. She hadn’t made it quite this far the other day; but neither had the Mycoborer.

Star counted, then pointed. “That one.”

They trudged after her, slippered feet shuffling. After a number of meters and a few kinks, but no more loop‑the‑loops, a faint viridescent glow showed up ahead. They rounded one more bend and climbed a slope to find a new vestibule, brightly lit by wavering cold lights, dead‑ended against a flat wall and full of silent, milling Arquas.

Dada and the Baronne looked around and spotted Ivan Xav. “Tej!” whispered the Baronne, with a shocked gesture at her Barrayaran.

“It’s all right,” Tej whispered, coming over to them. “He’s with me.”

Dada scowled. “But is he with us?”

“He will be,” she promised. Ivan Xav smiled tightly behind his mask, but did not gainsay her. Yet.

Amiri was just fitting some sort of hand‑pumped suction device to an oval in the wall showing signs of work by cutting fluid and maybe something more physical. He motioned Jet forward; shoulders straining, they shifted the slab out of the wall and let it down slowly and silently.

Amiri tossed in a couple of cold lights‑Tej could hear them hit something and roll to a stop‑adjusted his mask, and stuck his head through. Nine other Arquas, a ghem Estif, and one Vorpatril held their breaths. Or was that, eight other Arquas, one ghem Estif, and two Vorpatrils…?

“What can you see?” demanded Dada. His hand reached out to clasp the Baronne’s. She gripped back just as hard.

Amiri’s voice floated back: “Marvelous things!”

Chapter Twenty‑One

Ivan had never thought of his nightmares as being insufficiently imaginative, before tonight. Dark, wet, constricted, underground, check. How had he left out biohazards? After all that, the frigging unexploded bomb just seemed a…a redundant redundancy. And the stray corpse a mere decoration. How did I get into this mess? Miles isn’t even here.

Though the labyrinthine results of the Mycoborer were impressive as well as alarming, he had to admit. The discovery of the supposedly‑empty Cetagandan bunker had been interesting, though Ivan wouldn’t have been human if he hadn’t found its transmutation to a ghem‑generals’ lost treasure vault riveting, as irresistible to him as to any Arqua. But the belated news of its original provenance as a Cetagandan haut bio‑lab, which Tej hadn’t let drop till they were almost here – had to make it the most entirely resistible temptation he had ever encountered.

And that idiot Amiri was going inside. Ivan hadn’t had cause to dislike his new brother‑in‑law before now, but this was just wrong. Amiri turned to politely help his haut grandmama over the threshold of the oval they’d cut into the wall, incidentally compromising any biohazard containment integrity the old lab had still held, but hey, who cared about that? Not the intent Arquas, it seemed. The tall woman bent her head and twitched her long coat through the aperture, as dignified as an aged queen returning to her country after some long exile. Other Arquas filed through eagerly after her. Tej glanced back over her shoulder as she followed, bright‑eyed with triumph.