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Miles was dragged again-his legs didn't respond at all to his will, only
jerking spasmodically. The leg braces seemed to have had some amplifying
effect on the shocks administered there, or maybe it was the combination with
the tangle-field. A long room like a barracks, with a row of cots down each
wall, swam past his vision. The goons heaved him, not unkindly, onto an empty
cot in the less-populated end of the room. The senior one made a dim sort of
effort to straighten him out, tossed a light blanket across his still
uncontrollably-twitching form, and they left him.
A little time passed, with nothing to distract him from the full enjoyment and
appreciation of his new array of physical sensations. He'd thought he'd
sampled every sort of agony in the catalogue, but the goons' shock-sticks had
found out nerves and synapses and ganglial knots he'd never known he
possessed. Nothing like pain, to concentrate the attention upon the self.
Practically solipsistic, it was. But it seemed to be easing-if only his body
would stop these quasi-epileptic seizures, which were exhausting him... A face
wavered into view. A familiar face.
"Gregor! Am I glad to see you," Miles burbled inanely. He felt his burning
eyes widen. His hands shot out to clench Gregor's shirt, a pale blue
prisoner's smock. "What the hell are you doing here?"
"It's a long story."
"Ah! Ah!" Miles struggled up onto his elbow and stared around wildly for
assassins, hallucinations, he knew not what. "God!
Where's-"
Gregor pushed him back down with a hand on his chest. "Calm down." And under
his breath. "And shut up!... You better rest a bit. You don't look very good
right now."
Actually, Gregor didn't look so good himself, sitting on the edge of Miles's
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cot. His face was pale and tired, peppered with beard stubble. His normally
military-cut and combed black hair was a tangle. His hazel eyes looked
nervous. Miles choked back panic.
"My name is Greg Bleakman," the emperor informed Miles urgently.
"I can't remember what my name is right now," Miles stuttered. "Oh-yeah.
Victor Rotha. I think. But how did you get from-"
Gregor looked around vaguely. "The walls have ears, I think?"
"Yes, maybe."
Miles subsided slightly. The man on the next cot shook his head with a
God-save-me-from-these-assholes look, turned over and put his pillow over his
head. "But, uh... did you get here, like, under your own power?"
"Unfortunately, all my own doing. You remember that time we were joking about
running away from home?"
"Yeah?"
"Well," Gregor took a breath, "it turned out to be a really bad idea."
"Couldn't you have figured that out in advance?"
"I-" Gregor broke off, to stare up the long room as a guard stuck his head in
the door to bawl, "Five minutes!"
"Oh, hell."
"What? What?"
"They're coming for us."
"Who's coming for who, what the hell is going on, Gregor-Greg..."
"I had a berth on a freighter, I thought, but they dumped me off here. Without
pay," Gregor explained rapidly. "Stiffed me. I
didn't have so much as a half-mark on me. I tried to get something on an
outbound ship, but before I could, I got arrested for vagrancy. Jacksonian law
is insane," he added reflectively. ''
"I know. Then what?"
"They were apparently making a deliberate sweep, press-gang style. Seems some
enterpreneur is selling tech-trained work gangs to the Aslunders, to work on
their Hub station, which is running behind schedule."
Miles blinked. "Slave labor?"
"Of a sort. The carrot is, when the sentence is up, we're to be discharged on
Aslund Station. Most of these techs don't seem to mind too much. No pay, but
we-they-will be fed and housed, and escape Jacksonian security, so in the end
they'll be no worse off than when they started, broke and unemployed. Most of
them seem to think they'll find berths outbound from Aslund eventually.
Being without funds is not such a heinous crime, there."
Miles's head pounded. "They're taking you away?"
Tension pooled in Gregor's eyes, contained, not permitted to seep over into
the rest of his stiff face. "Right now, I think."
"God! I can't let-"
"But how did you find me here-" Gregor began in turn, then looked in
frustration up the room, where blue-smocked men and women were grumbling to
their feet. "Are you here to-"
Miles stared around frantically. The blue-clad man on the cot next to his now
lay on his side, watching them with a bored glower. He wasn't over-tall...
"You!" Miles scrambled overboard, and crouched at the man's side. "You want to
get out of this trip?"
The man looked slightly less bored. "How?"
"Trade clothes. Trade ID's. You take my place, I take yours."
The man looked suspicious. "What's the catch?"
"No catch. I got a lot of credit. I was going to buy my way out of here in a
while." Miles paused. "There's going to be a surcharge for my resisting
arrest, though."
"Ah." A catch identified, the man looked slightly more interested.
"Please! I have to go with-with my friend. Right now." The babble was rising,
as the techs assembled in the room's far end by the exit. Gregor wandered
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around behind the man's cot.
The man pursed his lips. "Naw," he decided. "If whatever you're in for is
worse than this, I don't want anything to do with it."
He swung to a sitting position, preparing to rise and join the line.
Miles, still crouched on the floor, raised his hands in supplication.
"Please-"
Gregor, perfectly placed, pounced. He grabbed the man around the neck in a
neat choke and flipped him over the side of his cot, out of sight. Thank God
the Barrayaran aristocracy still insisted on military training for its scions.
Miles staggered to his feet, the better to obscure the view from up the room.
Some small thumping noises came from the floor. In a few moments, a prisoner's
blue smock skidded under the cot to fetch up at Miles's sandaled feet. Miles
squatted and pulled it on over his green silks-
fortunately, it was a bit oversized-then struggled into the loose trousers
that followed. Some shoving sounds, as the man's unconscious body was pushed
out of sight under the cot, and Gregor stood, panting slightly, very white. "I
can't get these damn belt strings," Miles said. They skittered from his
trembling hands.
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