forbarrayar | [ february i log ]

Entry tags:

[ february i log ]

Who: Everyone
What: New arrivals, desperate times, whispers down the hall.
When: February 1st - 18th
Where: Barrayaran camp / Cetagandan base
Warnings: TBD

Quick links:
Barrayar: Barrayaran camp / Missions
Cetaganda: Cetagandan base / Missions

welcome to barrayar.
It's the dark of night when you come to in the foothills. Snow on the ground, chill winter wind whistling -- in fact, it's dangerously cold, and all you have is the clothes on your back.. A steep mountain range towers just ahead, its peaks illuminated by the light of two moons. Whatever you last remember, it isn't how you got here, and you feel oddly jetlagged, slightly queasy.

And you're not alone. There are a few other people close by, all looking equally lost and confused. But before any of you have a chance to figure out what's going on, the soldiers arrive.
There's a war on, they say, and you unlucky bastards have just been dropped right smack in the middle of it.

barrayar
The cold snap hits the guerrilla camp hard, especially with a handful of new people to care for. On the 1st, a few people from Riverfall Village come to the camp, Village Speaker Yakiv Gura among them, who seems to have a rapport with Piotr. They bring extra supplies with them, such as clothing, heavy wool blankets and bedrolls, as well as extra firewood to help fend off the cold. The new outsiders are accommodated the best they can -- they're all provided bedrolls and any extra clothing they (probably) need -- but the Barrayarans don't have an extra tent to spare, so that means all twelve outsiders are force to share a tent that ordinarily sleeps ten. On the plus side, it should provide some warmth. The cold is

A young boy comes in tow of the villagers; Speaker Gura tells Piotr that the boy turned up a week ago and insisted on helping them with the supply haul, despite his small size. He's clearly Barrayaran, and looks as though he might have been living on hisown for a while. He doesn't speak mcuh, and when asked his name, will only give it as Negri -- first or last, no one's sure, but the boy doesn't seem easily fazed. Piotr tells the villagers he has no room in his camp for lost children, but somehow the day after the villagers leave, Negri turns up in camp again. He's curious, but quiet and unobtrusive, wherever he is in camp. He's a very good listener…even when you might not want him to be.

On the 3rd, the Barrayarans and outsiders awake to discover that the part of the cave where they've kept the majority of their food supply has collapsed, either blocking their access to the cache or destroying it entirely. It's impossible to tell. The villagers can't spare much more than they already have been -- certainly not enough to feed the hundred and fifty-odd soldiers in the camp -- so while they try to find out a way to recoup their food supply, they have no choice but to slaughter their own horses for food. Food will be heavily rationed, but fairly -- the outsiders receive no less than the rest. The prisoners, on the other hand, get nothing. There probably isn't enough wild game in the area to sustain the camp, but Piotr sends out hunting parties, and when they get wind of a Cetagandan supply drop on its way, they organize a raid on the supply lines.

camp
With temperatures well below freezing, no food, and excruciatingly little in the way of advantage against the Cetagandans after their last infiltration attempt, morale is beginning to drop. Piotr and Olivia remain bastions of perseverance as always, but Sonia is beginning to buckle and wilt as the days go on. The soldiers do their best to entertain themselves and keep morale up, but all they've got are maple mead, and old card and dice games. They could use some new forms of entertainment. Maybe a snowball fight might get the blood moving -- assuming you can stand the wind chill. Thankfully, there's no shortage of warm clothes and wool scarves.

The cave isn't big enough to simply move all of camp inside, but the sickbay and mess tents are moved where it's a little warmer and out of the harsh wind. It's generally crowded with off-duty soldiers despite the food shortage, because no one wants to be out in the cold right now. Things get a little better after the mostly successful raids, but food is still heavily rationed.

missions
The hunting parties are only moderately successful; there isn't much wild game out there right now, and while the soldiers fare alright, the outsiders' hunting party fails miserably. The raiding parties yield a little more in the way of relief, enough now that they don't have to keep eating horse meat, but Pearl was captured by enemy forces in the chaos.

Maine helps Piotr with a very successful final interrogation of ghem-Miko, the Cetagandan scientist taken prisoner last month. He reveals that the Cetagandans have been studying the locations where exotics appeared, as it seems to be linked to wormhole technology, and that the Cetagandans are planning on building a device to control it. They have the technology, they're almost sure, but it's a puzzle they haven't solved yet. Ghem-Miko doesn't live long past his interrogation -- public execution by decapitation is his sentence, and when it's done, a few soldiers carry off his body and severed head.

Piotr's interrogation of Duv Galeni goes about as well but, blessedly, less fatally. It becomes known that Duv is from Komarr, the planet that sold Barrayar out to the Cetagandans, and that Duv Galeni is really David Galen, a relative of a few Counselors in the head of Komarran government. However, he's able to successfully convince Piotr that he isn't allied with the Cetagandans, and after a few days of agony, Duv is granted parole at Piotr's discretion.

On the evening of the 15th, Maine, Beth and Byerly inadvertently catch Vorhalas in the act of trying to sabotage what little of their food supply they've been able to recoup. He tries both fight and flight, but the three outsiders are able to take him down and drag him to Piotr's doorstep. It quickly becomes apparent that Vorhalas was responsible for the cave-in earlier in the month. Piotr is both furious and victorious; he now has a lead on the traitor conspiracy among his men, and his esteem of Beth, Maine and Byerly has gone up considerably for their part. Vorhalas is up next in the interrogation chair, and this one won't be pretty.

The unabridged event writeup is here.

cetaganda
The recent supply drop not only provides resources for the base and for distribution to their other outposts, but also brings fresh species for transplant into the gardens at the Grow Labs. The arrival of a handful of new exotics gives rise to a fresh wave of buzzing curiosity around the base. All of the new exotics are given thorough physicals, just as the first wave were, and provided with fatigues and anything else they might need. They make an even dozen now, their bunk at capacity. The Cetagandans are beginning to become accustomed to having the exotics on base, some of them even forward enough with their curiosity to be friendly. Darkstalker now has a small following of ghem lady scientists who regularly feature him as a subject in their art.

New arrivals will be processed as the first were -- once everyone has been whisked out of the extreme cold, everyone is subject to a thorough physical, including a number of scans that may or may not seem totally arcane to you. Other than a blood sample, nothing they're doing is at all invasive. Lady Diya d'Zefyst, while not a physician, is present at all physicals. She is easily notable not only for her striking, almost ethereal beauty as is typical of the haut, but, as the only haut on base, she is easily distinguishable by her lack of facepaint.

While the exotics still have freedom of movement around the base, the recent extreme temperatures have their hosts diplomatically suggesting they travel as much as possible, they are provided cold weather wear, as the mess hall and medbay are in separate buildings from the barracks. Weather warning aside, they encourage the exotics to take advantage of the non-restricted recreational facilities -- exercise rooms, art rooms, the lush gardens in the Grow Labs -- and will satisfy any reasonable curiosities.

base
In an effort to make the exotics feel more at home, the Cetagandans decide to put on the sort of function they might for visiting diplomats, full of art of all sorts, to show that they're just as willing to share their culture with the exotics as they're asking the exotics to share with them. The function is hosted on the evening of the 7th in an annex to the Grow Labs apparently meant for this express purpose, as it shows off the most beautiful and elegant of the Grow Labs' specimens, and acts as a live arboretum in and of itself, and quite vibrantly beautiful.

If there's one thing the Cetagandans are good at (besides art, and language, and genetics) it's throwing a good party. Functions like this are always an opportunity for Cetagandans to try and socially one-up one another; everyone is in their most fashionable dress in the latest fashions they manage to keep off-planet, or at least a dress uniform, wearing fanciful scents and vibrant facepaint they might not otherwise on the job. For the artistically inclined ghem (read: a lot of them), this is the chance to show off their artistic endeavors as well -- large sculptures of unusual and improbable materials, walkable installations meant to engage every sense, and of course the living art engineered by the ghem ladies, ranging from relatively simple and tame pieces such as koi fish patterned with clan insignia or black roses and blue orchids, to complex combinations of non-human DNA to create some genetic sculpture. There is, of course, food and drink -- in the usual flagrant Cetagandan style, although the hors d'oeuvres and drinks are even more ecletic than the usual mess hall fare. It seems as though the Cetagandan passion for genetic art extends even into the culinary realm.

At the center of the party is a particular kind of art installation called a discernment garden. Housed in a beautiful, improbably architectural tent, the discernment garden consists of a series of rooms, each meant to test the refinement of the senses -- not unlike a varietal wine tasting. Each room is dedicated to a single sense, inviting participants to judge a collection of samples and suss out the differences, or match tastes and smells and textures to labels; the end of the garden presents its visitors with a final art piece incorporating all five senses, as a final test of one's refinement. Some of the ghem might (a bit wryly) confess that this is actually more of an education tool used for Cetagandan children, but this is meant as a gesture of good will toward the exotics.

missions
On the evenings of the 6th and the 8th, some of the exotics do a little sneaking around, and not for the first time. York lends Kaidan his access badge to the R&D Lab on the 6th and Kaidan, along with Sans and Symmetra, stumble onto a whole lot of wormhole data and schematics to construct a device capable of controlling the phenomena of the exotics' appearance. On the 8th, Deanna and Natasha sneak around to the tactical buildings and overhear some marital discord between Zahal and Diya, and a troubling glimpse at their diverging plans.

On the evening of the 13th, Jasper, York and Daryl are all in the medbay when a biocontainment breach sends it into automatic lockdown, trapping them inside. They overhear Diya arguing with one of her subordinates over unauthorized use of ba genetic material, whatever that is.

The unabridged event writeup is here.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"I'm sorry." I didn't ask to show up here. I didn't mean to-- But that's not going to help. Even apologizing isn't going to do much. If she's damned all of Barrayar, nothing she can do now can fix it. "I--I don't know how it spreads. Maybe I didn't bring it with me."

But even with an abbreviated science education, she knows how unlikely that is. Everyone thought it was airborne at home. Maybe waterborne, but it spread so quickly--and now another planet might end up overrun with walkers.

"I'm sorry," she says again, her nails digging into her palms. The horror in Byerly's face looks like it belongs someplace else; he's suddenly a different man, staring at her like he just discovered the Cetagandans weren't Barrayar's biggest threat after all.

But after a moment more of staring, he presses his hands to his temples, and squeezes shut his eyes - and then takes in a single quick breath and drops his hands. He still doesn't look entirely the same. There's a focus in his face and his manner, a brisk sort of intelligence that isn't exactly at odds with his earlier arch nastiness, but which certainly didn't show up before. His voice is quick and his manner firm as he says to her, "You didn't ask to be brought here. Don't apologize to anyone, least of all to me."

And then he takes a breath, folding his hands on the table in front of him. There's a moment of quiet, and then he says, "The easiest thing to do would to be to kill someone in a way that would cause this sickness to activate. To see if they'll do this...thing." He doesn't look like he's joking.

It's the other kind of sorry, she wants to say--the I'm sorry your world is in danger rather than I'm sorry I put it there. Both are true, admittedly, but it's hard not to have sympathy for someone who might be staring down the end of everything he knows. Wouldn't it be worse to realize it could be happening? Worse than school closing and neighbors huddling near, murmuring how the CDC will have an answer any day now, they'll have a solution for everyone quarantined in the barn. They'd had hope, even if they'd had no idea what was going on. She'd thought her mother and brother would get better.

That's not it, she realizes, not worse to see the possibility spread before him. It's harder, but at least it's not blindness to reality.

When he brings up killing a person, she perks up, her eyes sharp. Byerly's absolutely right--and more importantly, they don't even have to do the killing. Count Vorkosigan, for all his other faults, did them a favour.

"What do they do with corpses?" she asks, her voice taking on a certain, somewhat urgent quality. They can do something, and that always makes her feel a little better. "After they execute somebody."

"I...don't know," he admits, rubbing at his mouth. A moment, and then he says, "If they're Barrayaran, then Vorkosigan might exert himself to return the body to the family. More likely with Vor than with proles. Cetagandans...Hm. Most likely disposing of the body somewhere, holding onto the head as a trophy. Or just the scalp." Byerly's mouth twists. "They liked to take Cetagandan scalps during this era."

He blows out a breath, then says, "But the standard mode of execution is death by decapitation. As you saw. Which would prevent these changes which you predict, wouldn't it?" He hesitates, then says, "What we need is someone to die for the crime of treason. Those who commit treason...The standard punishment for that is death by exposure and starvation. That would leave the body intact to rise from death again if it has been infected."

Byerly falls silent. And then, abruptly, he gives a short but heartfelt laugh. What else can you do? The absurdity of it - the dire, bleak hilarity - it's simply too much. "Good heavens," he says thereafter, and rubs at his eyes.

"Not if they didn't get the brain. That's all you need." Considering how many walkers she's seen who are falling apart, there's no reason to hope a dead skull with an intact brain would escape that fate. I'm sorry we left you that way, Daddy. "Sometimes it takes an hour or two. We have to find the corpse."

Nobody's freaking out here, which says they still have time. She kind of doubts everything would be so calm if a grey-skinned monster had woken while somebody sliced off its hair. (Which is incredibly gross, by the way, but they don't have time to ponder just how gross right now.)

"So if they take the scalp. What then? Do you burn them or leave them out for the animals or what?" She's getting up as she asks. As loath as she is to leave the scant warmth of the tent, they need to find those remains. "We should probably get it away from camp--just to be safe."

"I don't know," he admits reluctantly. He's distracted - dangerously distracted - and so, without thinking, he starts, "This isn't exactly my - " Time period, he was about to admit; he clamps his teeth shut on it. Miles wheedled an oath out of him that he'd make no allusions to time travel; By might think this prohibition stupid, but, well...one's word is one's word.

"In any case. I - don't know, but I can find out." He rubs at his forehead a moment, then sighs - "Give me...fifteen minutes. I'll speak with my contacts. And then we'll meet up at the entrance to camp. Agreed?"

Tell him you want to come.

And make him rethink the whole idea?

What if he's planning to get some people together and kill you? To see whether you're going to screw things up for Barrayar?

It's Byerly. He probably wouldn't.

It's Byerly. Why wouldn't he?

Because I'm the only one with any experience with it. Anyway, you weren't worried before.

That was before he decided we should split up and he should go talk to...whoever.

She's torn, and that strange, weary look on his face doesn't give her a lot to go on. The only thing she has over him is her knife, and that's not going to make much difference if she isn't careful. But if she has more than just a knife...

"Okay," she says, firm, and again, "okay. I'll see you there."

And in the meantime, she's going to make a stop at the armory and wheedle a sword out of them.

And Byerly...will simply be fulfilling his promise, nothing more than that. Stopping by to chat with a soldier, to split a few swallows of mead with him, and to gossip about where that corpse ended up. Oh, yes, I've got a girl I want to show it to, is his cover story, and what a marvel; that's not even a lie, is it? So, only about ten minutes later than promised, he shows up. By this time, he's recovered from his initial shock, and so his expression is once again a leer of arrogance and half-drunk ill intent...

Though that fades again when he sees she's armed. Startlingly heavily. "A sword?" he mutters incredulously. "Do you even know how to fight with a sword? Won't a knife suffice to put the creature down if it rises again?"

Beth waits at the entrance to camp--and worries and debates going back inside, where it's almost warm, and worries some more--until Byerly finally shows up. He's alone, thank God, and he looks more confused than anything by the fact that she has more than her knife at her waist. Maybe worried.

"Yeah," she says, meeting his gaze. There's no way in hell she's explaining the sword; the word she gave to the guard at the armory was that she needed to practice and would bring it back in an hour. All true, especially now that it looks like Byerly was a man of his word about what he was up to. (One of these days, maybe she'll learn to trust him. Maybe.) "Did you find out where the body is?"

She looks at him, fierce and intense, and he spreads his hands in a shrug. Very well, then. Carry your sword and refuse explanations.

"In theory," he responds. "Who know how to sort truth from lies." And with that unhelpful comment, he takes off, striding in the direction of the little glade where they have apparently stored the corpse. "The rumor is that Count Vorkosigan wants it for something. Wants to preserve it. One shudders to consider why."

Beth follows with quick strides, in hopes of matching his long ones. The sword taps quietly against her thigh with every step.

"You don't normally do that here?" It's not normal at home, either, but plenty of what Barrayarans do isn't normal by Earth standards. "What do you think he wants it for?"

Mostly, she wants his opinion--since he's likely to have an educated guess or two--but letting him voice that opinion kind of feels like doing him a favour. He loves to talk, if he loves anything.

"Cannibalism? We're quite hungry, after all." He cocks an eyebrow at her, but then pushes his hands into his pockets and says, "Sending a message, would be my guess. Returning their scientist in pieces, perhaps. It would be - hm - an unambiguous message, to be sure. And certainly the sort that old Piotr would want to send."

"We're not that hungry," she answers, not without some amusement. Not a lot, admittedly, but as long as there are horses, they don't have to start frying up enemies. His other idea is a more solid one--grotesque, but believable. Beth nods, mulling it over, and eventually, she asks, "What do you usually do? With the dead."

He shoots her a wry glance when he hears that amusement - hah, score one for him - and then takes a breath to address her question. "Burial," he says. "Our planet was, ah, very badly terraformed for a very long time. We didn't want to waste any earth-descended organic matter. So - burial." A small shrug. "We burn offerings to the dead at their gravesites. If we care to."

"We bury ours," she offers in return. Fair's fair--if she wants to ask him, she can stand to offer something in answer. And after refusing to trust him (the sword bumps against her knee), she feels like she kind of owes it to him to try to trust him now, just a little bit. "If they aren't, we burn them. We'd never stop digging graves otherwise."

And it seems like a bad idea to put too much sickened flesh into the ground. Everything rots eventually, that's just common sense--but not everything rots like walkers.

"Up there?" she asks, nodding to a place where the trees grow a little thinner.

He glances over, a little surprised when she volunteers that information. Not that he lets it show, of course - oh, no, someone smooth and suave like himself certainly wouldn't ever be showy about being startled; rather, he simply raises an eyebrow at her. He answers her question first - "So they say" - and then takes a moment before asking his own. Admittedly, he...doesn't know if he wants to know the answer to this.

"If...indeed, this sickness will create...living dead," he says. He hesitates, then says, "Does death en masse so inevitably follow? Why have so many been killed where you are from?"

"We didn't know what it was, at first. And there were cities." Maybe that can be a comfort here--that they're in a tiny mountain camp, not even a village, and it's not like they're entertaining people from all over Barrayar right now. "People got on planes with it. It was all over the world before we realized what it did."

She shrugs. If she had to show up on the planet, carrying the disease with her, at least she didn't wind up in a city. She's tempted to tell him all about the way things happened--the way they could only see what was happening in retrospect and only partially, imperfectly--but it's an instinct she shakes off. "But we know about it. We can make sure people stay dead."

"Yes. I suppose so." But if it's really enough simply to make sure people stay dead, then why is her home as it is now? It's clear enough from what she's said that everything is in a terrible state. Chaos everywhere. Destruction. The complete breakdown of civilization. For that to happen to Barrayar -

No. No. He won't let it. He thinks that fiercely. No matter what happens, no matter what he has to do, what lines he has to cross, he won't permit that to happen. Never. And yet, when he glances over at Beth -

Well. That's for later. Later. Yes. After they have all the facts.

"So what is it, exactly? What makes it happen? Have you figured that out? It all does seem quite impossible - rising from the dead, et cetera."

"It's a pathogen." That much, she knows for sure. "I know people who went to the CDC--the Center for Disease Control."

Byerly, after all, has no reason to know what that means. She tries to remember what she heard, second- and thirdhand. "There was only one scientist left. Everybody who could have figured out how to stop it ended up dying."

She falls quiet, because all she has left after that is what her father had said about Jesus raising the dead--how nobody had wanted it to mean this.

"Well," he says quietly - and then suddenly, abruptly laughs. "Well," he says, a little louder, "at the very least, we'll have some of the finest Cetagandan scientific minds of this generation on the problem. One of whom - "

They break into the little clearing to find the corpse before them. The cold and the death alike are starting to get to the figure; ghem-Miko's skin is ghastly, purpling, hideous. His head is horribly expressionless, slack, and vacant. Byerly tries hard to look unconcerned and casual; he ends up looking nauseated and unsteady.

"Lies before us. What a sight."

Beth crouches down in the snow, politely ignoring the way Byerly looks like he's never seen a body before. It's not easy, and she knows it; even now, she hates looking at the discoloured skin, and she's come across more than her share of worse-looking walkers. (At least this one has skin.) If he doesn't like this, that's a good thing, right? Nobody should like this.

"It hasn't turned." Her voice is low, in deference to the decapitated head. It feels wrong to have a casual conversation over somebody who was executed. Beth straightens back up. "But it took a while, in the beginning. We might have to wait."

"Wait," he repeats, low and rather miserable - but she's right; this is a duty he cannot shirk. And so he takes a breath, rubs at his eyes, and then tugs his coat closer. Keeping vigil over a severed head, to see if it'll come back to life...Lovely. What'll happen if it does? Will it start chattering with them? Will they be able to continue the interrogation of the unfortunate ghem-Miko? What a thought...

"Well," he says, trying to sound jaunty. It falls flat. "What shall we talk about in the meantime? Hopes, dreams? Aspirations? I suppose we can't discuss literature, or the latest holodramas - I suspect you don't watch the same serials as I do."

"Unless you want to sneak it back to camp." She'd rather do that, if they have to do something, but that's not only dangerous, it risks incurring the count's wrath. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that that would be a terrible idea. "Or you could come back--it's not going anywhere."

But I'm staying here. Anything else would be wrong. It's her fault that they're out here in the first place; it's her duty to find out whether she's doomed an entire planet. The weight of that knowledge makes it hard to reply to Byerly's forced lightness, but she kind of owes it to him to make conversation. If he's going to be out here...

...Well, either way, they aren't talking about TV. Holodramas. Whatever. She gives him as much of her attention as she can summon in the presence of a potential walker. "Okay. Tell me about your hopes and dreams."

He hadn't meant that literally. That was supposed to be ironic and mocking. Why must this girl be so damnably earnest? Ah, well. Any honest answer would be either depressing or would completely blow his cover, and so he answers instead with something he's quite adept at giving: total lies. They even manage to sound cheery and convincing, in spite of the setting of their grim vigil.

"My word, I have so many. Capturing a rich heiress - old, preferably, and in ill health, so that she'll pass on quickly enough, leaving me with both a fabulous fortune and freedom...A widow would also do. Likewise, old and sick, please. What else? Ah, I want to star in a holodrama myself - I've the face for it, don't you think? A certain je ne sais quois? - because holodrama stars inevitably get free drinks wherever they go. Free drinks and rampant admiration of beautiful women. Ah, and I also want to start my own high-end winery. Producing fine champagne. My face will go on the label." He forms his thumbs and forefingers into a general rectangular shape and holds them up to his face, framing himself to demonstrate how the label will look.

Then he drops his hands and rolls his head over to look at her. "And yourself? Hopes and dreams?"

Beth knows a rhetorical question when she sees one, but there's something interesting about trying to hold Byerly to it. Seeing how he'll squirm out of actually answering, if he does (and he does), hearing what there is to aspire to on planets she's never heard of before. More than anything, she's starting to get the idea that getting Byerly talking--keeping him talking--will make the time go faster. He can go on and on, when he has a mind to.

Of course, then he turns it back on her, and that's not nearly as fun for her. But it's inevitable, she guesses, and what's he going to do with her hopes and dreams if she tells them to him? He can't get to her home any more than she can; the most he can do is try to stomp all her wishes flat, and she's determined not to let him.

"I want to see my sister again," she says, her gaze shifting occasionally from Byerly to the corpse and back again. "And my brother-in-law. Everyone else in our family's dead."

She pauses then, wondering if it's enough to be pointedly honest, or if she should try to get him to say something true--actually true--too. Wait, something in her says. At least see what he has to say.

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