"Paranoia strikes deep
Into your life it will creep
It starts when you're always afraid
Step out of line, the man come and take you away"
--Buffalo Springfield, For What It's Worth

*

"We have to talk," Lord Vorkosigan said, lidding his eyes. "May I enter?"

"As this is currently a diplomatic residence, I am under no legal obligation to let you in," the Cetagandan replied, though he holstered his plasma arc. His eyes slid off Vorkosigan to stare nervously at Taura, who was looking even more threatening than usual.

"Have people been giving you trouble, ghem-General?" the Auditor asked solicitously. "There's been a bit of a security breach."

The ghem-officer nearly laughed. "Some unpleasant and heavily armed individuals stopped by, but happily decided not to needlessly provoke my government."

"Ah? Hmm. I don't suppose you could identify them further?" Vorkosigan asked without much hope.

As he spoke, Admiral Naismith stepped out from around Taura. His posture was straighter than it usually was, and his body language was somehow vastly different. He seemed closed and hostile, like an emotionless predator.

"They seemed to be a similar breed to the lowlifes your degenerate brother once commanded," the general said. Benin, right, she'd met him at the wedding. Gregor had been growling about unspecified Cetagandans at breakfast, but she hadn't realized the ghem-general was back in the Imperium. Benin was watching Naismith now, a curious lift to his painted brow. Tapping one finger to the side of his lip, he frowned and pointed to Taura. "She stays in the hall. The rest of you may come in."

Naismith and Taura exchanged a glance. After the rest of the group tromped inside, the admiral finally stepped through the door, leaving his bodyguard behind.

"You seem to have switched uniforms since last we met, Admiral Naismith," the Cetagandan noted.

"That's not actually true," Naismith said, and his Betan accent was gone. "We ended up getting a double brain transplant to confuse the issue further." Lord Vorkosigan relaxed into an uninvited sprawl on Benin's couch behind the ghem-general's back. He started grinning.

Laisa closed her eyes, but when she opened them in she was just as disoriented as before. With another tiny shift in body language, each brother fully seemed to be the other. Naismith's Barrayaran accent was the least of it. If their objective was to put the ghem-general off balance, it was working brilliantly. The effect was extraordinarily creepy.

"What are you doing here, anyway?" the brother in the admiral's uniform asked. "By the paint, it doesn't seem to be… official business." He traced a set of invisible stripes across his own face with the fingers of one hand, approximating the Imperial pattern that Benin wasn't wearing.

"He's assigned to their embassy as the new military attaché." The Auditor's accent didn't actually change, but his intonation was pure Naismith. Laisa was so used to identifying the brothers by accent and attitude that she had sudden difficulty remembering which one he was supposed to be. "It would be impolite to point out how completely overqualified for the post he is, so don't."

"How strange." The other brother considered Benin. "You're not defecting, are you?" he asked suddenly.

Even under the face-paint, the ghem-general's revulsion to the concept was clear. "Some loyalties cannot be sold… Admiral."

Naismith gave him a terribly Barrayaran little bow. His eyes gleamed in amusement.

"But it's interesting to see you here, Lord Vorkosigan, on such a historic morning." The ghem-General continued, walking over to where the other brother had seated himself. "You seem to be the prince-candidate of the moment, your competition…" he made a little gesture, "swept away."

Both brothers bristled violently. Benin smirked.

"I'm no prince, Dag," the Auditor said coldly, recovering his composure.

"But your illustrious father has said as much, just now," the ghem-General said, raising an eyebrow. "Surely your status does not change, even if you unwisely choose not to play the game."

The large vid screen in Benin's main room was indeed showing the trial. Count Vorkosigan's head lolled forward, and drool trailed from his mouth. "Ges managed to get himself killed first, but I've certainly murdered other men. The first was Yuri, I suppose, though my father actually slew him. Ezar had the last cut, but he was dead by then."

"Emperor Vorbarra is my father's foster-son," Lord Vorkosigan said tightly. "He is my brother. That is not a relationship I will ever betray."

"This was the Dismemberment of Emperor Yuri?" Albescu asked.

"Well, we could hardly dismember him twice," Vorkosigan's father said. "All of us had to be equally guilty, every Count or his heir. Even old Xav took a slice. Barely a papercut, but Xav was never keen on torture. I had a uniform then, you know. Me, thirteen, gawky. Yuri laughed at it. I still have it, somewhere. I was saving it to give to Miles, but he never grew into it."

"I suppose I must concede the point." Benin said with a faint smirk, though it was clear he felt he'd proved it. What was the brother of an Emperor, if not a prince? Laisa had never had any illusions about where the Emperor's foster family stood in the grand hierarchy of things.

"You must be the famous Admiral Naismith," a woman's voice said. Her Cetagandan accent was more refined than even the ghem-General's, her alto voice bell-clear. Naismith's eyes narrowed as she appeared in an interior doorway.

Vorkosigan showed no surprise, and his personal armsman Roic merely looked blankly professional. The effect on the other men, though, was marked. The woman in the doorway was extraordinary beautiful, something which came across in full even through the imperfect vid projection. She had a completely symmetric face, with a high forehead and sharp Cetagandan features that instantly drew the eye, and her skin tone was unnaturally even, with a peculiar luster like oiled dark walnut.

Laisa had never seen a haut-lady outside her bubble before. She had no doubt whatsoever that this was one.

"An unexpected pleasure, Lady…" Naismith looked sidelong at the ghem-lord. "d'Benin?" he hazarded.

The ghem-general's expression remained very neutral indeed. "No."

Naismith frowned. His eyes narrowed again, at his brother this time.

"This is the haut Beiru Degtiar, Miles." The Auditor's voice was neutral too.

Naismith blinked at her. He turned back to his brother, boggled. "You're not bringing her home to Mother, are you?"

"It's complicated." he said flatly. "The short answer is no."

"Of course I didn't kill my wife!" the Count exclaimed in the background, agitated and babbling. "Do I look like I go around shooting women for fun?"

The haut-lady's hair was dark brown in color, nearly black. Some of it hung in tight spiral curls about her face, but the rest dropped in wavy wisps and braids all the way to the floor. Her sharp black eyes raked over Admiral Naismith. "Curious. In the Celestial Domain we do not have," her mouth moved around the foreign word, "twins. Does it bother you, that you are not unique?"

Naismith looked up at her. She was a very tall woman, about half a meter taller than him and perhaps half a meter shorter than the absent Sergeant Taura. "Uh," he said.

"I killed two men in duels over her, though, in the last days," the Count continued in the background. "Lexi Vorhalas and… I can never remember his name, one of the Vorgustafsons."

Naismith's head jerked towards the vid. "You are shitting me," he hissed out, now completely distracted. Lord Vorkosigan's brow furrowed. He silently stood and walked to the vid-screen controls, using his seal to disable the screen with a few short movements.

"I'll be filing a protest over that, Vorkosigan," Benin said sharply. "You don't have free run of these apartments."

"Your tenure here is at the pleasure of the Emperor, and you were supposed to have left by now for your ship out," the Auditor said. "I'm not going to tolerate espionage."

"You're beaming this into space on the public networks," the ghem-General said with a pained look. "You can't seriously think you can suppress it."

"We're not, actually," Vorkosigan said. "I'm going to insist that you turn over your personal recording of this now. I suggest you not argue about it. You can file what protests you please at a later date."

Galeni winced.

"I am, as you well know, a diplomatic emissary of my Celestial Master," Benin said. "My possessions are inviolate, and an assault on me is an assault on him."

Vorkosigan's lip twisted up in a tiny smile. While the ghem-General was distracted, Naismith drifted over to the vid-display's side table. Just before he could grab the innocent-looking data-organizer interfacing with the vid there, Benin's hand slammed down on it.

"You are a little thief, aren't you," the ghem-General said to Naismith with contempt. The admiral looked utterly unrepentant.

"Your Emperor is irrelevant," Vorkosigan said. He ambled back to the couch, deliberately staying in Benin's blind spot. "After all, we know who you are." He caught Naismith's eye, and Naismith suddenly grinned.

Benin looked disgusted. "Not this again," he said.

The haut-woman watched this interplay with curiosity, ignoring the stares she was still getting from the armsmen. A short androgynous individual with feathery black hair and a unibrow flitted to her side and then out of sight again.

"Your father was a war bastard in Vorkosigan Vashnoi," Naismith said. "We've established this. By traditional Barrayaran law, a foreign bastard is wholly outlaw. Not a subject, not deserving of protection."

"Your forces left us with quite a plague of ghem-bastards," Vorkosigan added. "The only difference between your father's blood and theirs is that your grandfather took him home." Benin showed no reaction, and his eyes did not leave Naismith for a second.

"That's why Xav wrote the Bastard Law," Naismith said. His accent was more ambiguous now, but still closer to Barrayaran than Betan. "Every child of an unmarried Barrayaran mother born on Barrayar during the war was ordained to be Dorca's subject. And your grandmother, well, wasn't. Married, I mean."

"Even if she secretly was, it would have been polygamous, and we don't recognize that," Vorkosigan added.

"He wasn't Vor," Naismith smirked. "He was stealing her honor."

"And you yourself are your father's legitimate son," Vorkosigan said. "You have inherited his legacy"

"More critically, you've inherited his liege-status, which completely torpedos any possible claim you might have for diplomatic immunity here in the Imperium," Naismith was grinning now.

"That's ridiculous," Benin said.

"This would all have been fairly trivial to sort out at an embassy, Dag. Your father never did. And as of noon yesterday, which was the last time I checked, neither have you." Vorkosigan's eyes flashed. "Unfortunate, that. For you, I mean."

"This is when we start talking about espionage again," Naismith said.

"Service in the armed forces of a foreign power," Vorkosigan added, leaning against a wall. The tiny smile was back on his face.

"In short," Naismith finished, "all sorts of treason." He grinned.

The ghem-general's hand drifted down to his plasma arc. Seeing his opening, Naismith swiped the data organizer in the blink of an eye.

Benin snarled under his breath. Both brothers looked very pleased with themselves.

"You're under house arrest, Dag," Vorkosigan said briskly. "Understand I'm being lenient. You can plead your case to Gregor later."

"Of course, if you want to tag along with us and be helpful, that'd work too." Naismith said with sunny cheer. His eyes gleamed. "You might even get a medal. If you're good."

"I have a responsibility to ensure the haut Beiru's safety," Benin said coldly.

"She could come along…" Vorkosigan mused, suddenly very Naismith.

Benin looked appalled at the thought. Beiru looked… intrigued.

"My mother was right about you, Lord Vorkosigan," she said. "You do things differently."

"Yes," he said.

"It is interesting to watch. But I think I must decline your offer."

Vorkosigan bowed. "Until later, then." His brother Naismith ambled out the door, giving Benin one last sharklike grin. The ghem-General watched them leave in cold dislike.

The Auditor wasn't even halfway done sealing the door when his brother leveled an unamused look his way. "Okay, spill."

"It's not really your business."

"Like hell it isn't. Are you marrying that woman or not?"

"Fletchir and I had an argument about that," Vorkosigan growled. "I won. Sort of."

"If you won, what's she doing here?"

The Auditor sighed. "Beiru's in an interesting situation... she's Pel's daughter, I should mention."

Naismith looked baffled. "But Pel's… and she's… How does that work?"

"They're haut," Vorkosigan snarled. "Don't think about it too hard. In any case, all of the women of Pel's generation were planning for a future that never came about. And they have a, hmm, excess of ambitious and talented daughters about Beiru's age. Like Rian."

"Ah." Naismith sounded enlightened. "And Fletchir can't marry them all, right, got it. Go on..."

"Why don't we go back to talking about you and Lady Donna?" Vorkosigan said through his teeth.

"Piotr doesn't really have a love life," Naismith explained to Fazliu. "He amuses himself by pointedly not dating the landscaper. So this is new."

A flash of utter rage from Lord Vorkosigan. Taura's brows lifted.

"But seriously, Piotr," Naismith said, and he looked deadly serious now, "you have to be following my train of thought here. Giaja has an excess of future Empresses – so he drops one on you?"

"It was my bad luck to be single, I suppose," Vorkosigan said.

Naismith's eyes narrowed and he put one hand on his hip. "You heard Benin's talk about prince-candidates. Think like a Cetagandan here. Fletchir Giaja backstabbed half his male relatives for power before he was thirty." He waved an arm in the vague direction of the Komarran terrorists, "What if all this is some arcane hautish idea of a favor?"

The Lord Auditor blinked. "What an appalling thought," he breathed.

"Isn't it," his brother said.

"I don't think you're right, but…" Vorkosigan shook his head, looking greatly disturbed.

Naismith glanced at Fazliu, then said something scathing in Russian to his brother that Laisa couldn't make out.

As the group got moving, the brothers dropped back to well behind the zone covered by Taura's sound-canceling gear to continue their heated but incomprehensible discussion.

"What are they saying?" she whispered to Galeni.

"I have no idea," he said.

"I thought you spoke Russian?"

"I can read Standardized Russian," Galeni said. "What he speaks is some bastard anglicized Dendarii hill dialect that's only still around because the Cetagandans tried to ban it. Do you know why they tried to ban it? Their autotranslators couldn't cope. Even if I could decipher the dialect, I don't have half the context, they're talking over each other, and Naismith's using Betan vowels on top of that."

The sound of a weapon going off, muffled strangely, echoed over the vid. Somebody shoved Fazliu to the ground, which obscured most of what was going on from the holovid pickups. There was a brief, chaotic array of sounds, and a loud thud. Within three seconds all weapon fire had stopped. Naismith, crouching nearby, stood and rushed forward, while Lord Vorkosigan leaned on his cane and gave Fazliu a hand up.

As she stood, it became clear that whoever they'd run into around the corridor hadn't had time to know what hit them. Three bodies, all looking dead to varying degrees, sprawled out. Taura was crouched over another, one of her knees pinning him to the floor. She held one clawed hand over his mouth and frisked him for weapons with the other.

"Oh, interesting. Not mercs, these men." Naismith said. The sergeant's captive looked Komarran. Like the men who had been guarding Count Vorkosigan, he was only lightly armored, and was wearing a formal suit. "Well done, Taura."

"Yes, excellent work," Lord Vorkosigan said. He reached into a suit pocket for a small data case. "Spinal stun please."

Naismith's massive bodyguard stood, pulling the captive upright and immobilizing him as she did so. Poised on his toes and looking almost like an ancient bullfighter, Naismith circled the desperately struggling Komarran, fiddled with his stunner, and shot the man in the back at point-blank range. The man's lower body went completely limp. His arms twitched, but did not seem to be under his control.

Vorkosigan, meanwhile, was sorting through his data case. After Taura enlisted help from a couple of the armsmen to lay the prisoner out on the floor, the Auditor retrieved a minuscule hypospray, knelt behind the man's head and made a precise injection.

He's done this before, Laisa thought, fascinated and faintly horrified at the same time. She'd never thought of Lord Auditor Vorkosigan as a military man, what with his obvious disabilities, but she now was suddenly and uncomfortably reminded that he'd spent a decade in the secret police. It was fast-penta, it must be. Did Lord Auditor Vorkosigan normally wander around with interrogation drugs just in case? It seemed a little paranoid even for him.

"Public relations nightmare," Duv grumbled from beside her. He had a data organizer out and was preparing to take notes.

"I'd rather know what's going on, though." Laisa said.

"I'd rather everyone else didn't."

The image wavered, swinging back and forth. Fazliu's shocked attention seemed to be shifting between the Vorkosigan brothers and their prisoner. Her fingertips floated briefly in view as her hand moved to cup her mouth.

"Actually, ma'am, you can help here," Lord Vorkosigan said, catching her eye. His expression was frighteningly neutral.

"What?" Fazliu asked incredulously, echoing Laisa's thoughts exactly.

"Sit… there," he directed. "Hold his hand, smile, and stay calm."

"He might be rude," Naismith observed. "You should warn her about that."

"Whatever he does, stay calm." Vorkosigan said firmly.

"Um…" Fazliu said in a small voice, half protesting. Her hand became visible as it reached out and took the prisoner's limp hand tentatively.

The Komarran's expression was very strange, and he didn't seem to be entirely aware of his surroundings. Eventually his eyes glazed over slightly, his breathing becoming less panicked and more even.

"Can you hear me?" Lord Vorkosigan asked the question softly, but the accent that came out of his mouth was utterly unfamiliar. It was pure Komarran, with the hint of an Equinox Dome brogue. He remained kneeling behind the man's head, out of sight.

"Yes…" the prisoner mumbled.

"We've just put you back together again. What's your name?" There was idle curiosity in Vorkosigan's tone, but no malice.

"Antonin," The prisoner said. He tried to choke back a giggle, but it flowed out like water, hiccupy and high-pitched.

"What is your full name?" Vorkosigan repeated calmly.

"Paoli. Antonin Paoli."

"Where were you born, Antonin?"

"I was born in Tunis," he said.

"Was your father Komarran?"

"Ya. And mum." The man nodded.

"Who are you working for right now?" Vorkosigan asked.

"Obis called a bunch of the old crowd. Felt them out first, then said he had the cash and the backing to take Komarr back, for real. Moretti too. You could feel history happening, right there, those two working together. He found some mercs, but he didn't tell them he was going for the whole thing." Paoli giggled harder. "Barrayarans can't stop us. They'll be gooone. Can't stop the people."

"Who gave the money to Obis?"

The Komarran giggled some more. "Cash, toys, I don't know. We prove we can take the fucking fascists, no one will dare mess with us. The occupation's all built on lies, and they can't handle the truth about themselves." He blinked. "You're pretty, lady. How'd you like to be first..."

"Stop," the Auditor said swiftly. The man stopped, mouth agape, staring at Fazliu with a puppylike expression on his face. "Where are you holding the Barrayaran Emperor?"

"I don't know exactly. Ninth floor somewhere. Around there." Vorkosigan exchanged a look with his brother. Both looked peculiarly exasperated.

"Milady," Galeni said. "Admiral Lord Vorventa is here to see you."

She brushed some hair from her face, turned her head, and there he was.