Cargo for Athos

An adventure of Admiral Elli Quinn and the Dendarii Free Mercenary Fleet

I. The Contract

By fifty-three, Admiral Elli Quinn had learned three rules of survival on the mercenary market and had carved them, metaphorically, over her cabin door: never sign a contract that looks too good; never work for a client you cannot name; and never, under any circumstances, get involved with genetics.

The contract Captain Herald brought her that morning in Escobar orbit violated all three.

“Retrieval of stolen biological property,” Herald read from the tablet, in the tone of someone who has already counted the zeroes twice. “Objective: a research compound on the planet Mirandel, an independent world two jumps from the Hegen Hub. Client: anonymous, through a triple chain of intermediaries. Payment—” she turned the tablet toward Quinn. “That’s the fleet’s annual budget, Admiral. Refits included.”

“So it’s a trap, or it’s something rotten.” Quinn took the tablet. “Or both, which is my standard package these days.”

The fleet was aging along with her. The Triumph was at the age when ships begin to be called “legendary,” because “old” reads badly in the promotional material. The last two contracts — convoy escort for the Polian League — had paid for fuel and a little pride on top. She was scrolling the inventory list of the “stolen property,” ready to decline, when she stopped at the third line.

Cryocontainer, G-7 series, Cetagandan military standard, approximate age 30 years.

Twenty-seven years later and half a galaxy away, her stomach still remembered that model of container. She had seen one once — on Kline Station, in the possession of a dead ghem-colonel, at the bottom of the strangest mission of her career.

“Herald,” she said slowly. “Assemble the staff. And pull everything we have in the archive on Operation Athos.”

“Athos?” Herald blinked. “The planet of… only men?”

“The planet of only men.” Quinn set the tablet down. “We’re taking the contract. But first we are going to dig up who is actually hiring us, because I have a very old, very bad feeling that has just woken from cryosleep.”

II. Millisor’s Ghost

She told them the story that evening, in the operations room, before a staff whose younger members had not been born when it happened.

“Thirty years ago a Cetagandan military project created a telepath. A real one. A working one. The project failed politically, the records were destroyed, the only surviving subject escaped with the complex’s cultures. A ghem-colonel named Millisor hunted him across three sectors with a fanaticism that cost him his life — on Kline Station, where I happened to be in the middle of the whole mess, along with a doctor from Athos. The subject and the cultures found refuge there: a planet with no women, no ties to Cetaganda, and no interest whatsoever in speaking to the outside universe. The Empire never reached for it. We assumed the story was buried.”

“And now somebody’s dug up the grave,” said Captain Dumas, the ground-force commander.

“Somebody with cryocontainers of the same series.” Quinn put on the screen the results of three days of the intelligence section’s quiet work. “The Mirandel compound is nominally owned by a Jacksonian shell — House Sarlo, small fish, they lease out biolabs and don’t ask questions. The real lessee hides behind seven layers of registration. The eighth layer is named Eret Millisor.”

Silence. Then Herald said:

“A relative?”

“A grandson. Clan Millisor lost the right to its colors after the scandal — for a ghem, that’s worse than a firing squad. Eret was born marked. An exile from birth, with exactly one possible redemption: finish his grandfather’s work and lay at the Empire’s feet the thing the old man lost.” Quinn swept her gaze around the table. “That is the riddle, ladies and gentlemen. Not what is in that compound — I can guess, and it turns my stomach. The riddle is who he is preparing it for. And who, in the name of every Escobaran saint, our client is — because somebody is paying a foreign mercenary fleet to extract this poison instead of sending their own people, and that means a client whose own people must not touch it.”

“Barrayar?” Dumas offered.

“Barrayar would send notes, Auditors, and finally a drop force, in that order.” Quinn shook her head. The trail of escrow accounts ran through a trade foundation with cultural connections whose elegance eluded her in a familiar way — like perfume caught in an empty room. “No. I think our client sits much higher up the food chain. Dumas — I want a recon team on Mirandel within seventy-two hours. Quiet. We only look.”

III. The Nine

Mirandel proved to be a world of failed terraforming — dusty plains, lichen, and one abandoned atmospheric station into whose bowels House Sarlo had built the laboratory compound like a cuckoo’s egg. Sergeant Tara of the recon platoon lay fourteen hours under camouflage film to feed a microdrone through a ventilation grille, and what the drone sent back kept the Triumph’s operations room silent for a long time.

A replicator hall — thirty uterine replicators of Cetagandan military pattern, empty, sterile, maintained. A cryobank — there was the G-7 container, powered up, tended like a relic. And a residential wing.

In the residential wing there were nine boys.

The youngest looked about four. The oldest — ten, perhaps eleven. A schoolroom, dormitories, a playground under an artificial sky. Uniformed tutors with holsters. The children ate, studied, played — and now and then, for no visible reason, all of them looked in the same direction at once, one second before an adult entered the room.

“We intercepted a schedule, too,” Tara reported. “‘Guests’ landing in six days. The code name in the traffic is ‘the Restorers.’ Millisor personally inspects the reception hall every day. He isn’t selling, Admiral. He’s preparing a gift.”

“Redemption by delivery,” Quinn said grimly. “The grandson presents to some ghem faction the thing the grandfather died for: working telepaths, nine units, plus the bank for producing more. Loyal to the Empire, raised by it.” She looked at the recording again: the boys lining up for dinner, and the oldest suddenly stopping, turning, and looking directly into the ventilation grille. Straight into the lens of a drone that emitted neither sound nor heat.

His lips moved soundlessly. Tara had run a lip-reading pass, but there was no need — Quinn read it herself.

Hurry.

“He doesn’t see the drone,” Tara said quietly. “He feels us. Our intent. Through eight hundred meters of rock.”

Quinn closed her eyes, and for a moment she seemed to hear the voice of a very short admiral from very long ago: Well, Quinn — are we going to leave children in the hands of a man who calls them “cargo”?

“Dumas,” she said. “The assault plan. We’re moving it up. We go in thirty hours.”

IV. The Assault

They attacked in the darkest hour of the Mirandel night, by a textbook Quinn had once helped write: jamming of the satellite link, two shuttles hugging the terrain below the radar horizon, and a third making a demonstrative landing at the main entrance to keep the guards looking the wrong way. Quinn commanded from the tactical shuttle and hated every second of the distance, exactly as she had hated it at twenty-five.

The defense was professional — the ghem-lord had brought in a private guard of Jacksonian veterans — but it was built to stop thieves, not a drop force of people who had once stormed Cetagandan prison camps. Dumas breached the perimeter in eleven minutes. In the twelfth, the surprises began.

“Admiral, residential wing secure, the children are with us, repeat, the children are with us—” Dumas’s voice, then a brief pause and a very strange note: “Uh. The oldest one says don’t touch the cryobank. Says their… uncle has wired it to die when he dies.”

“Translate.”

“Deadman switch, Admiral. Thermal charge in the bank, slaved to Millisor’s biomonitor. And the kid says he knows which cable it is, because the tech who installed it was afraid of him for three days, and fear, I quote, ‘smells like numbers.’”

They found Eret Millisor in the reception hall — alone, in a ceremonial robe without a single clan color, naked in the ghem sense of the word, holding a needler he did not even raise. Quinn went down for that part in person. She had earned it.

“Mercenaries,” he said, when they brought her in. He was looking at the scars on her armor, not at her face. “My grandfather was killed by mercenaries. There is symmetry.”

“Your grandfather was killed by his own mission. The symmetry is that it is killing you as well — only more slowly, and without requiring you to die.” Quinn nodded toward the ceiling, toward orbit. “Your Restorers are not coming, ghem-lord. We intercepted their confirmation before the assault — they cancelled the visit two days ago. Someone in the Empire gave you up. You were sold before you could manage to give yourself away.”

That broke him more surely than any interrogation — she watched the last account in his eyes count down to zero. The deadman switch never fired: the tech who smelled like numbers had left the circuit exactly where a nine-year-old’s fear had memorized it.

And as the shuttles lifted with the nine children, the cryobank, and the compound’s entire archive, a Cetagandan cruiser without identification colors detached from the system’s jump point and took up orbit around Mirandel, patient as a vulture with good manners. Quinn had no doubt whom they had come for. The Empire collected its own dirty laundry — she had merely removed from it the one item that must never be washed.

V. The Lady in the Sphere

The meeting with the client was arranged through the same triple chain of intermediaries: a neutral orbit around a nameless gas giant, a Cetagandan “trade” ship with engines far too good for it, and a salon Quinn entered alone, unarmed, under a protocol as old as diplomacy.

In the salon a pearl sphere awaited her, floating a meter above the deck. Behind its milky surface, a silhouette could just be made out.

“Admiral Quinn.” The voice was female, young and old at once, flawless like everything the Star Crèche produced. “I am the haut Niara Vetis. You have returned property of the haut genome. Our gratitude is sincere, insofar as that word has meaning between us.”

“The property is in my hold,” Quinn said. “The bank, the cultures, the archive, down to the last byte. My riddle was why the Crèche would hire outsiders. Then it came to me: because no ghem has the right even to look at what is inside. Millisor’s project stole from the haut genome itself. A heresy, committed by servants. You could not send servants to retrieve it.”

“You grasp it quickly — for a person from outside.” The sphere drifted a hand-span closer. “One item remains from the inventory. Nine items.”

“The children are not in the inventory.” Quinn said it calmly, in the tone with which one reports a course heading. “Check the contract, haut Niara. ‘Biological property: cryogenic and archival assets.’ The wording is your intermediaries’ own. The children are passengers on my ship, and they leave this meeting with me.”

The silence from the sphere had weight.

“They carry the sequences in their cells, Admiral. Nine scattered sparks from a fire that was never theirs. The Crèche does not leave sparks.”

“The Crèche already left one. Thirty years ago a carrier of this same complex vanished onto a world without women, without a Cetagandan presence, and without the slightest appetite for expansion — and for thirty years the Empire never lifted a finger, because it had judged that to be the project’s perfect grave: alive, content, and sealed.” Quinn took one step toward the sphere, which protocol probably forbade, and did not care. “I am offering you the same grave, enlarged by nine places. Athos takes in orphan boys. Nobody travels there. Nobody comes back. Genetically speaking, from your point of view, it is oblivion.”

A pause as long as one generation of haut patience. Then the voice said, with something that in another species might have passed for amusement:

“Athos. An acceptable oblivion.” The sphere rotated slightly. “Your contract is fulfilled, Admiral Quinn. The fee is doubled; with the doubled sum we purchase your silence, and the pleasure of never meeting again.”

“The second half,” said Quinn, “you can have for free.”

VI. Kline Station

Kline Station had not changed: the same smell of recycled air and quarantine soap, the same corridors down which, twenty-seven years earlier, a young mercenary had chased a ghem-colonel through the hydroponic farms. Quinn stood on the passenger transfer dock — women were not permitted to continue onward, down to Athos, and that rule she honored with an irony that over the years had ripened into something close to tenderness.

The delegation from Athos came up on the regular cargo run: three men in the modest dress of the Population Council, led by an elderly physician with white temples and eyes that had not forgotten how to open wide at the universe.

“Ethan,” said Quinn.

“Elli Quinn.” The Chairman of the Population Council of Athos, Dr. Ethan Urquhart, smiled with his whole face. “When your message arrived, Terrence said only: ‘She’s bringing presents again.’ He sends his greetings. And a list of names — the boys will need names, and he claims to have experience in choosing new ones.”

“He’ll have to negotiate.” Quinn nodded toward the observation window, beyond which the nine stood clustered, palms and noses pressed to the glass, gaping at the docks. “The oldest has already named all his brothers. Out of some adventure serial the tutors used to play them as a reward. He refuses to reveal the source, but the little one who talks now introduces himself as ‘Captain Thunderblast.’”

“Athos has survived worse names,” said Ethan solemnly, and then his gaze softened. “They will have homes within the month, Elli. We have a waiting list of fathers three years long. And as for their… other inheritance — Terrence has been waiting for this for a quarter of a century. No one on Athos will make them hide.”

On the way back to the Triumph, in the shuttle, Quinn wrote one letter — through four blind relays, to an address in Vorkosigan House, Vorbarr Sultana, which officially did not exist in her files.

Miles. Remember Athos? Today I buried another treasure there — nine carats. The client was of the very highest genome and has forwarded your grandpa Millisor’s bill to the family hell. The boys asked who taught me that people are not cargo. I told them: a very short admiral, long ago, in another galaxy. I did not correct myself. The fleet is well. I am well. The face is still the best in the sector. — Q.

The reply arrived in a record-for-four-relays eighteen hours, and consisted of two sentences:

I always knew my best operations would be conducted without me. P.S. Galeni sends his regards and asks why the invoice for “consulting services” is such a suspiciously round number.

Quinn laughed out loud on the bridge, to the scandal of the watch officer, then ordered a course for the jump point. Astern, Kline Station shrank into the dark, and further back, invisible, remained a world without women where tonight nine boys would fall asleep under a real sky for the first time, with no holstered tutors, dreaming — she very much hoped — of thunderblasts.

Her ship was her home. But on the way back from the next contract, Admiral Elli Quinn decided, the route would quite accidentally pass by Kline.