barrayar | (no subject)

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"Sir-- stop."

It's terse, bitten off. They're not in a good situation. Cut off from the drop-ship and all the support that might come with it, comms jammed, hostiles trawling the corridors looking for them. Anderson isn't afraid, just professional, alert. Her weapon is in-hand and angled at the floor, but she isn't looking around the corner when she tells the Admiral to stop: her gaze is unfocused, straight ahead.

Damn it. There's no way around revealing this now. Sergeant Anderson has become a mask she's put on, somehow cleaving truer to her real self than Judge Anderson ever did, but a mask all the same, composed of irritatingly necessary deceptions and secrets. Nothing harmful, but things Anderson doesn't want to have to explain, doesn't want to be used for. She's had enough of being someone else's weapon in that particular way. She'll shoot anyone who deserves it and not lose any sleep over the fact, but imposing law and order on citizens who deserve better, using her mental powers to discriminate and persecute at someone else's say-so, removed from the streets she policed-- she left that far, far behind.

Using a gun is straightforward, easy. Anyone can do it. Maybe not well, but they can. Anderson's special, unique talents... These days, she uses them just for herself and her own curiosity. And apparently to save the skin of her admiral, who, despite herself, she's reluctantly come to like. It was instinctual to warn him of the minds she feels coming this way, out of her mouth before she quite realizes what it'll inevitably imply that she can detect people approaching without audio or visual cues.

As soon as she announces the warning, not a moment later, armed security forces troop by, and they hold their breath in the shadow of the alcove until they pass.

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Miles may be a dumbass, but he's not an idiot. He stops instinctively at her words. Freezing, ducking back, catching his breath. He can't help an appreciative look up at her - momentarily in love, as he is with all badass women who save his neck. The feeling fades quickly into a normal sort of gratitude. "Thank you," he says once the troops are past. He pokes his head around the corner just enough to see if he can spot anyone else coming. "I'm impressed you heard them."

He hadn't heard a damned thing, and he'd been listening quite closely, he thought. Sharper hearing? Some kind of augmentation? He genuinely has to wonder about that second part. While Miles doesn't know all of his Denarii well, he prides himself on knowing a reasonable amount. Anderson is a relatively blank slate to him. Picked up somewhere along the way, proved to be a hell of a soldier. And now saving his tiny Vor ass. "Hear anything else that way?" he asks, cocking his head at the hallway in front of him. What he hopes to be the quickest way out of the compound, if not back to the ship.

But he's curious too. It flickers like a light weaving through his thoughts, tinging his mind with brightness. He swore he didn't hear them coming. So - how did she?

Heard them, right. That's a convenient excuse, but it's a slippery slope, and she's not sure it's going to continue to hold up if they're going to make it out of here. Normally Anderson prefers working alone as much as possible for just this reason. She's scarily efficient on solo jobs, and she always has a nice, pat explanation when she gets back with the results. She cares about people-- she wants to protect them, an inevitable consequence of being able to feel their thoughts all the time-- but somehow, over time, she's ended up more and more distanced from them.

As much as she hates that that's become her reality, there's a curious undertow to that position, an internal resistance to it changing that Anderson doesn't know what to do with. All she can do is respond in the moment to what's in front of her.

Reluctantly, she adds, "We should make a detour." Maybe she can just not explain herself for now. And she knows it's for now. Anderson tries not to eavesdrop on people without an explicit, justified purpose, but it's a bit like going around with her eyes closed; sometimes she can't help it, and she opens them, and things slip through. Due to this, she's familiar with how lightning-sharp and sometimes also sharp-edged Miles's mind can be, and she knows that with better timing, there's going to be some questions, voiced or unvoiced.

He's giving her an out for now, anyway, but the questions will come back. He is, in fact, mentally going through the missions she's gone on for the Dendarii. There's a reason why he asked her onto this one, after all. Though not due to any suspicions of telepathy, goodness. Just her brutal efficiency.

"All right," he says. Yes, he trusts her enough for this, even if it still rouses his curiosity. "I assume you've something specific in mind?"

Anderson, as a former Judge, is extremely good at coming up with official, above-aboard stories for what her end results had been. It's one of the reasons she'd quit being a Judge. Far too much justification for her doing what was right rather than what was lawful, and if she has less moral scrutiny as a Dendarii, she still uses those skills to hide her abilities. She ends up hiding one thing or another, it seems...

Her eyes flick back and forth across the open hallway, gauging where she feels the bright-edge spark of mental focus and attention. Trained people looking for enemies are as lit up as a neon light in her scan.

"This way, please, sir," she says steadily at last, checking her weapon by pure mechanical habit as she moves out. "Is our top priority getting out without being seen, or just getting out? I know this was meant to be a covert operation." Hence the extremely small team. Anderson had been internally quite frustrated he'd insisted on tagging along, in fact, rather than delegating it to her alone, but nothing for that now.

Miles is perpetually here to cause problems; that’s just what he does. If he doesn’t, then he’s dead, and even then cooperation is not guaranteed. He nods at her direction at least, though, and falls in line with the absolute trust he provides all of his mercenaries. Well, the ones that have proved themselves.

“The latter,” Miles admits as he follows her. “With the former greatly preferred.” But, well. Miles knows how these sorts of ops go.

Anderson nods, accepting this wordlessly. She doesn't blindly or always follow orders, but when she doesn't, she doesn't waste any breath on arguing them - she just does what she thinks is right. It makes her seem more obedient than she really is to anyone not paying attention. Still, she respects the chain of command, and she accepts the implicit consequence that getting out quietly will mean using her abilities.

She lets out a breath as she guides them down the hall, cautious, weapon steadily pointed at the floor. Anderson has a military precision that makes it obvious she was not always a mercenary, though she's never answered questions about her past beyond admitting she's from Earth.

She tries not to let herself get too distracted from mentally scouting, but it's tough when her own thoughts keep veering wildly into trying to decide how to handle her secrets. Get it over with and admit it? She'd never thought she could keep them forever. But the habit of being isolated and aloof is now hard to break. Trust doesn't come easily to her - perhaps even less easily than to people who can't read minds, because Anderson knows just how often people lie, and she can't catch everything.

At the end of the day, though, she'd be stupid to shoot herself in the foot and endanger what she has now out of cowardice. She knows her best chance of acceptance is with the Dendarii. Sergeant Taura is proof enough.

"If I promise to explain afterward, do you think you could keep from distracting me for the next twenty minutes?" she finally asks, palpably reluctant.

Part of why he likes her, to be honest. Miles is also prone to cheerfully agreeing to orders and then just doing whatever the hell needs to be done. The difference is that he doesn't usually have to do that in the Dendarii - one perk of being the Admiral.

When Anderson turns back to him, Miles' eyes are bright with curiosity ... but not surprise. He's not blind, okay. There's clearly something unusual going on with her, but he thoughts are correct: Taura is a very good indication of what Miles' attitude will be here. Minus, perhaps, a few specific aspects of their relationship, anyway.

"You drive a hard bargain," he says, grinning a little. "But I accept."

When Anderson had left Earth, she'd thought, with the blind belief of someone raised in a fascist totalitarian system, that everywhere was like that. Even knowing it was propaganda, she'd ended up swallowing some of it. Coming to find out that there were other places, other people, where her every move wasn't being watched for disobedience had been electrifying. For all it'd felt at the time like she'd taken a short step out of a dropship without a parachute, Cassandra never intends to go back to living that way.

Some of her on-the-job facade drops to spare him a wry look. "I've seen what you're like when you think someone's hiding something interesting from you, sir." And it's doubly distracting when it's a quick flash of successive imagines zipping along at the edge of her awareness while he tries to figure it out.

She really tries not to listen in without a good reason, but Miles has loud thoughts, and if she's learned a few things like what his real relationship is with Sergeant Taura, Anderson steadfastly ignores it.

Oh yes, Miles is terribly noisy. An unusually sharp brain even before you take into account the fact that he got there due to his own body being kind of frail and terrible, which just dialed it up to eleven. He's clamoring even now, trying to guess at what it is she's going to tell him. Cetagandan spy gone rogue? Secret Jackson's Whole experiment? Love confession?

... All right, probably not that last one. But a man can dream.

"My apologies," he says with a wry little bow in turn. "I am insatiable, I suppose."

But he shoulders his stunner, heading out to give her a bit of space. Twenty minutes, eh. He can do that.

With Anderson intending to explain afterward, there's not much point in keeping a lid on what she can do. She falls into the mindset of a Judge without thinking. Used to making lightning-fast judgments while applying a complex set of laws and facing off against overwhelming odds, to Anderson, getting one man out undetected is a walk in the park compared to something like Peach Trees, the case that had been her final graduation exam.

Most Judges become closed-off, impassable as a rock wall as they perform their duty. Anderson has never allowed that for herself, and she's merely focused, looking inward as much as she's looking outward. She guides them around detection as much as possible, making abrupt changes in direction or ducking around a corner or into a room without warning. When she can't duck someone, she assesses whether they're an innocent victim caught up in a bad situation or a perp - categories she can't seem to leave behind - in less than a second, having to wait only for them to register her presence to feel their resulting intent. Sometimes, unwillingly, she gets part of their life that way, too, often with an overwhelming fear that she'll kill them. It always leaves a sour taste in her mouth.

Anderson takes out the perpetrators with brutal efficiency, leaving their corpses where they drop, but spares a moment to quietly instruct those who meet her invisible criteria of 'victim' to pretend they never saw her or the Admiral.

Twenty minutes ends up not being an overestimation for how long it takes for her to get them to the extraction point. Anderson doesn't relax until they're boarded on the shuttle, and even then it takes time for each muscle to untense. She's too used to fight-or-flight, not used to it's-safe-now. Nerves start to return to her, and she goes through her automatic weapons check to have something to do with her hands.

They can't really talk yet until they get back to the flagship and to a private room, and in the meantime, Anderson feels thoroughly sick of stretching out to listen to everyone, perpetually on edge. It reminds her of being a Judge too much, where she's always being watched and she's always watching everyone else. She shuts off her mental perception, relieved at being able to settle back into visual and auditory input only.

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