"Oh Superman where are you now?
When everything's gone wrong somehow
The men of steel, men of power
Are losing control by the hour."
-- Genesis, Land of Confusion

*

The Imperial Seal rotated once more, and then vanished in a garbled mess. AUTOMATED INTEGRATION FAILURE blinked twice in small letters near the bottom of the projection. A room resolved; Laisa recognized it as Fazliu's studio. One of the chairs was still toppled, and the display still showed the Cetagandan Empire.

"…remember where the least-exposed exit is," a male voice said

The image of the studio dissolved again, and the vid-image shuffled through half a dozen views in computerized succession, punctuated with static.

A new and radically different image flashed up, and stayed. CORRESPONDANT MODE, the small letters now read. In contrast with the clean lines of the room that they had just seen, this holoprojection was barely holding together. Not enough light, perhaps, or unstable holocam work. A dark room was revealed, with what looked like racks of high-tech equipment stacked up to the low ceiling.

Laisa suddenly and belatedly recognized the earlier voice as Admiral Naismith's. Vague silhouettes sketched themselves on the table and then dissolved.

She turned to ask Galeni something, but he seemed just as baffled as she was.

"Are they gone?" a woman's voice asked. Galeni stiffened in sudden shock.

"Duv, what is it?"

The commodore wasn't looking at her, though, but at the projection. "Vorkosigan, you idiot," he hissed.

"No. But if they were going to get away clean, they needed to have left by now," Naismith's voice said calmly. "None of their shuttles have taken off and they can't secure the whole complex with three or four squads. Not while keeping well over a thousand hostages pacified or stunned. They've done their sweeps, and they're holed up somewhere in the upper floors waiting for the inevitable assault. It should be fairly safe to move around down here."

"Well, until ImpSec breaks down the door," a different rumbling female voice added.

Duv stared balefully at the display. "He's dragged that journalist wherever he's hiding. Her jewelry must be hooked into the studio's holo-imaging network," he explained to Laisa in a tight voice.

"Does he know we can see him?"

"I don't think so."

"Does she know we can see him?"

"That's a more interesting question…"

Of course, Laisa thought, the prior broadcast hadn't only been for their benefit here. Hijacking emergency communication channels, it had gone out to all Komarr. Further, even, hitching rides on jumpships and propagating along spacelanes at the speed of light, racing to Escobar and Pol and Rho Ceta and the galaxy beyond. Whatever else the terrorists had hoped to accomplish, they had at least achieved one goal. No power in the universe could suppress their message now. But now someone else had modified the broadcast, parasitically substituting... this? But why?

Within the projection, the door of the room opened. Faint emergency lighting illuminated a drab-looking corridor beyond. Naismith was now clearly visible – or half of him was. The side of him that faced the invisible holoimager was fully mapped, but only that side. All in all, it was a truly bizarre effect. Still in his dress uniform and wearing all of his magpie medals, he seemed merely the hollow shell of a man.

His enormous Amazon bodyguard was dressed in the black fatigues of the Service, her silver hair cropped short. She ducked through the door first, scanning the hallway.

"Looks clear," she said quietly. "Which way?"

"Left," Naismith said, slipping past her. "Looks like the whole building's in primary lockdown. We'll need to get through some security doors. You did bring my intrusion kit, Taura?"

The sergeant nodded. A long backpack was slung diagonally across her back, easily as tall as Naismith.

"Aren't we going to be seen?" the invisible third woman said nervously. Laisa drew in a breath. It was Fazliu!

Naismith didn't look back. "Depends."

"On what?"

"On whether I cut the right data conduits back there. I wouldn't worry too much about it, ma'am."

The ceilings of the Administration Dome underworks were too low for Naismith's bodyguard to stand upright, so she was forced to a crouching lope as she squeezed through. Naismith ignored the first labeled stairwell the small group passed, instead stopping at a location where the corridor roof was heavily reinforced by closely spaced pillars. He stared at a narrow side door before retrieving a small shoulderbag from his bodyguard's pack.

"I don't think we're going to be able to get out, Admiral," the sergeant said. "Not through four commando squads."

Naismith shrugged and half-grinned back at her. "We can take a look." He rooted one-handed through his bag for a mysterious device, pointed it at the small door's lock, and twitched it sideways in a semi-circle. The door clicked open, revealing a cramped chamber with a ladder going up. "But yeah, you're probably right." Flipping a large red switch beside the ladder, he hauled himself up and through an unlocked hatch.

"What's up there?" Fazliu asked. "Aren't we…trespassing?" She sounded very nervous.

"Freight lift." Naismith said, ignoring her other question. He came back into view as his companions climbed the ladder. "Watch the gravity." He reached a hand down to pull Fazliu up and tether her so that she wouldn't drift away.

The freight lift shaft was perhaps six meters by six meters. The walls were distant enough to be slightly out of focus, wavering a little in the projection. The shaft rose about five meters before a massive horizontal blast door sealed it off. Two meters off the ground, a pair of lift doors were set into one wall.

Naismith floated casually in the microgravity, anchoring himself one-handed on the last ladder rung. After Sergeant Taura hauled herself out of the hatch, he kicked off from the floor, reaching for another tool. Using a small hand-tractor to anchor himself to the wall, he pried the lift doors open with a few arcane mechanical manipulations. After the doors slid open a grudging half-meter, he grabbed one edge, pulled himself through, and vanished.

"Are you really a sergeant?" Fazliu asked Naismith's bodyguard, a bit nervously. "I thought you were a man, at first."

"Master sergeant, actually. I was the senior commando squad leader in the Dendarii fleet, but I decided to retire here and look after the li- the admiral."

"I meant a Barrayaran sergeant," the Komarran woman awkwardly clarified.

"I'm that too, yes." Taura tapped her collar insignia, "Imperial Security special operations, protective division." She looked a little amused. "Do you want my serial number?'

"I didn't realize they let women do things like that."

"They generally don't, but I insisted." Taura stretched in the microgravity, letting her large pack float up off her back. "None of their men can keep up with him anyway. His ImpSec tails are perennially useless."

"Have we heard from his detail?" Galeni asked a junior officer. He recieved a headshake in reply.

"But, I mean, is it a real role?" Fazliu asked. "Can you order soldiers around? Do they even listen to you?"

The sergeant smiled, showing the sharp pointed teeth in her wolflike muzzle. "They listen if they're smart. I've got more combat experience than any of them."

"Taura!" Naismith called from above.

"You'd better hang on," Taura said to Fazliu. Her startling yellow eyes were narrowed in concentration as she looked up at the lift doors.

"I am hanging on," Fazliu said uneasily.

"I mean to me. Grab my pack." Facing away from the imager, the sergeant pulled the hatch closed and leapt. The holoimage completely failed to integrate for a second. As it refocused Taura shoved a shoulder into the door opening and forced the doors wide. Beyond them was a corridor with yellow striping on all sides, warning of the variable gravity area. A featureless security door sealed off the corridor less than two meters from the lift doors.

Naismith could now be seen lying on his stomach on the alcove's ceiling, having cut himself an access hole. One knee was braced against the lift door frame, his shoulderbag's strap was looped twice around his neck, and his polished boots dangled downward. He sorted thoughtfully through a tangle of optic threads. "This could take a while," he said.

"Why are you – what are you – argh," Fazliu said, sounding more than a little nauseous in the free fall. "I suppose I shouldn't talk to you right now."

"This isn't actually all that hard. It's just very tedious." Naismith spared a quick glance downward. "Go on."

"Are you insane?"

He slowly blinked. Taura, crammed awkwardly into the alcove, chuckled lowly.

"How do you mean?" he said with a small smile.

"Halfway through the interview I was wondering if ImpSec was going to come and take me away. Three-quarters of the way through I was wondering if ImpSec was going to come and take you away," she snarled up at him.

Naismith gave her an ominously psychotic little grin and murmured. "They can try…"

"And then you drag me into the basement for no good reason and start babbling about commando death squads…"

"He's not being paranoid," the tall sergeant said, craning her neck to look down. "The universe really is out to get him."

"Though not today, I guess," Naismith said. "No sign of pursuit, which is bizarre. I don't know who else in the building would rate four drop shuttles. It's overkill for a snatch and run."

"They're not running," Taura said grimly.

"True . But it's seriously underkill for a coup." Naismith's expression flattened as he severed another optic thread to splice in something sinister-looking from his toolkit. "I apologize, Dr. Fazliu, for, um, dragging you into my line of fire. I wasn't expecting…" he waved a temporarily free hand vaguely "this." He peered at a readout. "What the hell…?"

"Problems?" his bodyguard asked.

"The network is not responding normally at all."

"Do you think you've triggered something?"

"Oh, yeah, sure, this'll be tripping alarms all over the place at Cockroach Junior," Naismith said absently, upside-down. "That's not the issue, though. This is local, and it's weird." He glanced back at Fazliu and the holoimager. "It might be best if we left you down here. You'll certainly be safer behind the security doors."

She seemed wholly unconvinced. "What happens to me if you get yourself killed? What happens if the building burns down?"

"That's…unlikely," Naismith said. "The dome's almost certainly busted enough to smother a major blaze."

"I remember the Equinox Hospital siege," she added coldly. Laisa, remembering too, swallowed.

The admiral winced. "I think…"

Her voice rose in a slightly hysterical shriek. "There's no food in here. There's no bathrooms in here. There's no gravity in here! If ImpSec catches any Komarrans down here they throw them to their wolfhounds—"

"Who told you that?" he interrupted, bemused.

"—and you stole my comlink so nobody knows where I am!"

"If we're still alive in six hours you can go fish it out," Naismith said. He sounded tired. "Even though the walls are communication-shielded like crazy, there's interior pickups all through here and they can pinpoint transmission sources to within a centimeter. I'm not going to make their job easier."

"They're not going to be looking for me." Fazliu protested.

Naismith seemed amused. "If I were looking for me right now, I'd start with you," he said.

"How do I know you're not working with these people?" she asked, her voice still high and sharp. "You're the mercenary. Maybe you're the one pulling a coup here."

The Admiral's brows suddenly drew down, and he stopped working a moment, "Do you have any idea how much danger you're in…? No." His expression flattened. "I suppose not."

"…are you threatening me, Admiral?"

He rubbed a hand through his hair, which had fluffed out crazily in the gravity-free environs. "I don't think you realize how hazardous it is to be a civilian in my vicinity. I nearly got Gregor Vorbarra spaced once." He hastily backtracked at Fazliu's unseen reaction. "Accidentally!"

"God, Miles, why did we ever give you a security clearance?" Galeni grumbled.

"Is that true then?" Laisa asked. Her surprise was echoed by Fazliu on the vid, who sputtered "How do you accidentally space the Emperor?"

The Admiral looked somewhat shifty. "He was standing next to me and thus, by Oser's logic, clearly up to no good… I mean, I was going out the airlock too at that point."

"I don't know anything about this," Galeni said at Laisa's inquiring look. His brow creased.

"What was the Emperor doing with you in the first place?" Fazliu asked, baffled.

"Uh…" Naismith said, seeming to think briefly about the wisdom of continuing with the conversation. He shrugged. "Screwing in lightbulbs."

A baffled silence. "Is that…supposed to be some sort of euphemism?" Fazliu asked very carefully after a moment.

"No," he said, turning back to his work. After about four seconds, he paused, his brows snapped down and he dropped head-down in a free-floating spin from the ceiling to her eye level. Absolutely blindsided, his expression wavered between shock and outrage. "No."

Laisa watched this interplay with great interest. She'd always half-suspected a past affair between her husband and the galactic admiral. It would explain so much.

"I didn't mean to imply…" the Komarran woman said quickly. Naismith's open and friendly manner had shifted to hostile in the blink of an eye, and as he got in her face she scrambled a little closer to Taura. For someone his size he could be very intimidating when he wanted to be. Laisa could see some echoes of Count Vorkosigan in his body language now, although normally it would never have occurred to her to compare the two.

"Yes you did," Naismith growled.

"Your story still doesn't make any sense," she sputtered.

"Do you normally go about accusing people of, of incestuous homosexual... carrying-on?" His anger was ebbing now, and he merely looked exasperated.

"I don't know, Miles," the sergeant put in. "You two would be kind of cute together, now that I think about it."

Naismith looked utterly betrayed. "Taura!" he yelped. Laisa started giggling despite herself.

"It wouldn't really be incest, would it?" the sergeant pondered.

"He's my foster brother by proxy and we're related about five or six other ways." His brow furrowed. "I suppose it wouldn't technically…" Breaking off, he stared at the pair of them. "How did we ever get on this topic? God."

Sergeant Taura grinned quietly.

"I've sworn off dating my cousins in any case," Naismith growled at her. "No good can possibly come of it." With one last baleful look at Gita Fazliu, he dismissed the issue, launching himself back up to the ceiling.

"But what was the Emperor doing with the lightbulbs?" Fazliu asked curiously.

"Tell you what, lady," Naismith said, immersed again in a sea of cables. "You ask him." He fiddled with a splice. "Nearly got it…" Finger poised on a button, he looked down. "Taura, you ready to go?"

"Any time," she said.

His eyes shifted towards the other woman. "Dr. Fazliu, if you step through that door with us, you will stay silent unless we talk to you, and you will follow our instructions to the letter. We're safe in here, but that's not going to be true out there. If you can't manage that, we will stun you and leave you somewhere. Do you understand?"

"I understand," she said tonelessly. Taura clipped a mystery device to her pack strap and adjusted it, unholstering a wicked-looking autoneedler.

"The door will close again in twenty seconds," Naismith said. "Go."

Taura twisted a knob on the device, erasing the noise of the door opening. She slipped through it with a grace out of proportion to her height, pulling Fazliu along with her. Naismith dropped through about five seconds later with a handful of electronics gear that he stowed once more in Taura's pack. The door slid shut behind them, and Naismith forged ahead.

The lighting on this floor was intermittent, apparently due to Naismith's manipulations. He led the three of them into an unlit stairwell, and they hurried up two floors. The admiral paused a few feet from a narrow window in the stairwell, peering out.

"Dead bodies in the plaza," he whispered, only half-audible past the noise-canceling.

The next level was fully lit, but Naismith strode on without hesitation. He didn't stop, not even when the lights flashed once and then kept flashing in an irregular pattern. His bodyguard slowed however, looking around. "Miles..." she mouthed, and turned down the sound canceller.

"I see it. But who?"

"It has to be a trap," Taura said uneasily. Her gaze flicked over every potential hiding place in sight, staring even at the ceiling and the floor as if they might hide enemies in ambush.

"Either way, we're nabbed," Naismith muttered. "Nowhere to run. Nowhere you two could follow, anyway." He flitted across the corridor as the lights flashed out again. The holoimager wasn't adjusting properly to the changes in illumination.

"What's happening?" Fazliu, this time.

"Someone's thowing old Fleet signals at me. But who the hell…?" Another flash illuminated Naismith's pensive face, and then the patterns stopped, replaced by a traveling line of lights that illuminated an open side door near the end of the hall.

At the very edge of the vid-plate's projection, Naismith flattened himself quite effectively into a nearby doorframe. Taura's hand snapped up from her side, training her auto-needler on the far door with rock-steady aim.

In the tense silence that followed Laisa was startled by footsteps behind her. It was only Galeni again, however. Brow furrowed, the Chief of Komarran Affairs stared intently at the projection. The silence continued for many seconds.

"Sir?" Taura asked, risking a glance back. Fazliu's gaze followed hers, but the corridor behind them was just as empty.

"Oh, screw it," Naismith growled. "I want to know what's going on." Unpeeling himself from his makeshift shelter, he set off decisively down the corridor. Taura frowned and silently moved to shield him from forward fire, taking the first peek through the open door herself.

Only fragments of the room beyond could be seen past Taura as Fazliu approached. It contained four broad-shouldered men in brown and silver livery, all of whom looked extremely unhappy. A very young corporal in Imperial Security dress greens was also hovering nervously. His eyes went extremely wide at the sight of the enormous sergeant, and a hand covertly twitched in a warding gesture.

As Taura ducked inside and stopped blocking lines of sight, the room began to resolve itself on the vidplate. An apparently empty station chair faced a bank of monitors, half deactivated, half clearly malfunctioning. The faint drone of conversation came from one hidden screen.

"Hold on," a Barrayaran-accented voice ordered. The station chair swiveled, revealing a diminutive dark-haired man sitting cross-legged on it. There could of course be no question who he was. Frail and sharing his near-twin Naismith's peculiar deformities, Lord Auditor Piotr Vorkosigan was unmistakable. A chain of heavy gold links was wrapped around his left wrist and he held a seal bearing the Imperial arms.

"Oh," Naismith said from out of sight, sounding suddenly enlightened. "It's you." He stepped around Fazliu and into view, leaning against the doorframe.

"Who else?" Lord Vorkosigan asked, eyebrows rising.

Naismith's mouth twitched up in bleak humor. "I was wondering if Quinn had suddenly decided to sack Komarr without telling me first... what the hell is going on?"

All hint of levity disappeared from Vorkosigan's features. Unlike his terminally flippant younger brother, Count Vorkosigan's eldest son and heir could be forbiddingly reserved at times. "We have a… situation," he said.

"So I gathered. Hello Pym, Roic." Returning the ImpSec corporal's salute with an absent wave, Naismith brushed past the armsmen to peer over his brother's shoulder. As Fazliu entered the room Laisa made out Count Vorkosigan's low, slurred voice in the background.

Naismith stopped dead. "Oh god," he said in a choked voice, squinting at the small screen. "Is this the crusty old fogies of the Komarr Revolt reunion tour?"

"Belike," Lord Vorkosigan sighed. He waved a hand at one of the armsmen. "Close the door, please."

As Naismith took in the details, his grip on the back of his brother's chair tightened. "Damn," he finally said. "I suppose there's a reason these people aren't dead yet…?"

"Hostage situation on the top floors," Vorkosigan confirmed. "They were piping this out live to all Komarr until just now. They're in all the systems – I've been trying to keep them out, with little luck."

"Even with your override?" Naismith asked. He glanced at his brother, eyebrows rising.

"I have a subordinate override, Miles," Lord Vorkosigan said quietly.

Naismith's brow furrowed. "No, you… oh shit. Gregor's here?"

Vorkosigan nodded curtly.

"What the hell's he doing on Komarr?"

"He's been here since last week." Vorkosigan looked extremely puzzled. "You didn't know?"

"I spent six days on a fast courier, just got downside this morning and went straight into interview prep," Naismith growled. "My security briefing never caught up with me." He squinted at his brother. "Come to think of it, what the hell are you doing on Komarr?"

"I'm back from Eta Ceta, actually."

Naismith's eyebrows went up. "Oh?"

"The usual."

The admiral smirked. "Saving their empire?"

"Mm," Lord Vorkosigan said.

Naismith's brows shot up further. "What, again?" he asked, bright-eyed. "How many times has it been now?"

"Three or four…it depends how you count." Some of the half-listening ImpSec personnel in the control room turned to watch, startled.

Naismith grinned in malicious amusement. "You really need a new hobby," he drawled. "Did they give you another medal?"

Vorkosigan made a neutral noise. Noticing that the ImpSec corporal was looking increasingly scandalized, Admiral Naismith reached up to clap him on the shoulder. "I get to twit my brother," he explained in a gentle tone. "It was specifically written in to my feudal submission to Gregor."

Lord Vorkosigan's expression was sphinxlike. "Sadly true."

Naismith looked up at the ceiling, eyes narrowed in thought. "Getting away from the total incompetence of other peoples' Imperial Security, is it just me or has Galactic Affairs completely gone to shit since Tugalov retired? How the hell do you lose track of that many Komarrans at once?"

"I wouldn't complain about that sort of thing in public," Lord Vorkosigan said dryly. "It's a rear admiral's billet. They might draft you."

Galeni made a small choking noise. The admiral froze.

"But yes," Vorkosigan continued, "you're quite right."

"It was my impression that General Allegre wanted me nowhere near his chain of command," Naismith said carefully. "I can't imagine Haroche would be too thrilled either."

"Well, they could swear at you from five jumppoints away, then." Lord Vorkosigan smirked, before relenting. "Relax. It hasn't been seriously suggested."

"Hmph. So where's the Empress? Given the circumstances, that's actually pretty important."

"Not here. She was this morning, though."

"What about the little prince?" Taura asked.

"With her. I think she was visiting family. I can't get external comms working, so…" Lord Vorkosigan shrugged. "Whatever ancient wide-spectrum jammer Ezar installed back in the day, it's extremely effective. Everything's snow except the holobroadcast, and that's so strong it's effectively jamming too. We're on our own."

"How deep are they in our network?" Naismith asked.

Vorkosigan rubbed his forehead. "They've got the Imperial Seal and a whole suite of infowarfare weapons. Not amateur work, either, these were designed to cripple our systems. There's clearly a major government of some sort backing them. It's a total mess. We'll have to wipe everything and start fresh, and by everything I mean most of Komarr. Fortunately, it's enough of a mess that they can't get too much done either."

"With this level of funding, someone's playing proxy war." Naismith said. "Obvious enough. But who?"

A shrug from Vorkosigan, who refused to speculate. "The only thing that's still working properly right now is their holobroadcast. I can't do anything about the jammer – that's Gregor's seal on it, and the networks are too flooded to detect and de-authorize its use. But I managed to cut off the external broadcast some time ago and restore normal programming." He waved his hand at the screen. "That's still going out on the internal network, so hopefully it'll take them some time to realize they're grandstanding to themselves."

"Heh," Naismith said, staring a moment more at the small screen. He shook his head in grim disgust. "And here I always thought old Lutang was the least crazy of that family."

"Why is it important that you know where the Empress is?" Fazliu asked.

"Contingency plans for the Emperor's incapacitation," Vorkosigan said crisply. "To be blunt, who's in charge. Fortunately, Gregor has made his will known on the subject with crystal clarity."

"It would be crystal clear on Barrayar, anyway," Naismith put in with a frown.

"Quite," Lord Vorkosigan sighed. He rubbed his forehead again, looking suddenly very tired.

"The issue is that the general staff officers assigned to Komarr tend not to like Komarrans very much," Naismith said to Fazliu after a moment.

"Are you allowed to say that out loud?" she asked, sounding a little bemused.

"He's not really, no." Lord Vorkosigan's lip twisted. "It…does make the situation infinitely more complicated. It's quite possible the Empress has been captured or incapacitated too, we simply don't know. Even if she's free, if something's happened to the Prince…"

"Who's in charge if she's out of the picture?" Taura asked.

"At that point the Regency officially descends to me," Lord Vorkosigan said, "While I'd need to take oaths, my Auditorial authority would probably be sufficient to issue interim commands."

"You're next after him, I know that." the giant woman said, looking down at the Admiral.

Lord Vorkosigan looked very amused. Naismith cleared his throat and looked awkward.

"Oh dear God," Fazliu sounded appalled.

"Yeah," Naismith said.

"After that it's unstated, but it would normally default to Father," Lord Vorkosigan continued. "Much to his chagrin, I'm sure."

They all looked at the small screen briefly.

"And after that?" Taura asked

"Then," Lord Vorkosigan sighed, "it gets complicated."

"Screaming power vacuum," Naismith said gloomily. "If we all manage to get ourselves killed... Luck to Laisa out there, for sure." He looked at his brother. "We need to get you out too."

"There are secret exits," Lord Vorkosigan said. "Unfortunately, we've compared notes here, and none of us actually know where they are. I don't suppose anybody told you?"

"Of course not." Naismith sounded irritated. "Nobody tells me anything in this army."

"The Count would know, and the Emperor, and likely certain of the Imperial armsmen and the more senior ImpSec staff," Pym said. "But I, personally, was never briefed."

"Nor I," Taura mused. "Seems like a serious oversight."

"We can't go out, certainly, and we can't stay here either. If I can get to a secure command comconsole, I should be able to run interference more effectively. What I'm doing here can be traced if they're not idiots. Fortunately, all the garbage they're dumped on the networks is obfuscating everything." Lord Vorkosigan cupped his chin in one hand and looked thoughtful. "We'll have to go up… and take our chances."