Komarr b-11

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  His ImpSec comm-link was still strapped to his left wrist. He could not, of course, reach it with his right hand. Or– he tried—his head. He twisted his wrist around, to press it against the railing, but the screamer-button was recessed to prevent accidental bumps setting it off. Miles swore under his breath, and his breath mask. The mask appeared to be tightly fitted to his face, and he could feel the oxygen bottle still firmly strapped to his chest under his jacket—who had fastened his jacket up to his chin?—but he would have to be exquisitely careful not to jostle the mask till he had his hands free again to readjust it.

  So … had the stunner beam induced a seizure while he was unconscious, or was he still working up to one? His next was almost due. He stopped swearing abruptly and took a couple of deep, calming breaths that fooled his body not at all.

  A couple of meters to his right, he discovered Tien Vorsoisson similarly chained between two upright posts. His head lolled forward; he evidently wasn't awake yet. Miles tried to convince the knot of stressed terror in his solar plexus that this bit of cosmic justice was at least one bright point in the affair. He smiled grimly under his mask. All things considered, he'd rather Vorsoisson were free and able to try for help. Better still, leave Vorsoisson fastened there, free himself to try for help. But twisting his hands in their tight chains merely scraped his wrists raw.

  If they wanted to kill you, you'd be dead now, he tried to convince his hyperventilating body. Unless, of course, they were sadists, out for a slow and studied revenge. . . . What did I ever do to these people? Besides the usual offense of being Barrayaran in general and Aral Vorkosigan's son in particular. . . .

  Minutes crept by. Vorsoisson stirred and groaned, then fell back into flaccid unconsciousness, at least assuring Miles he wasn't dead. Yet. At length, the sound of footsteps on the concrete made Miles turn his head carefully.

  Because of the approaching figure's breath mask and padded jacket Miles was not at first sure if it was a man or a woman, but as it neared he recognized the curly gray-blond hair and brown eyes of a woman who'd been at that first VIP orientation meeting—it was the accountant, the meticulous one who'd been sure to have a duplicate copy of her department's records for Miles, hah. Foscol, read the name on her breath mask.

  She saw his open eyes. "Oh, good evening, Lord Auditor Vorkosigan." She raised her voice to a good loud clarity, to be sure her words penetrated the muffling of her mask.

  "Good evening, Madame Foscol," he managed in return, matching her tone. If only he could get her talking, and listening—

  She drew her hand from her pocket, and held up something glittering and metallic. "This is the key to your wrist locks. I'll set it over here, out of the way." She placed it carefully on the concrete walkway about halfway between Miles and the Administrator, next to the wall of the building. "Don't let anyone accidentally kick it over the side. You'd have a heck of a time finding it down there." She glanced thoughtfully over the rail at the dark vegetation below.

  Implying that someone might be expected: a rescue party? Also implying that Foscol, Soudha, and Madame Radovas– Madame Radovas, what is she doing here?— did not expect to be around to supply the key in person when that happened.

  She rummaged in her pocket again and came up with a data disk wrapped in protective plastic. "This, my Lord Auditor, is the complete record of Administrator Vorsoisson's acceptance of bribes, in the amount of some sixty thousand marks over the last eight months. Account numbers, data trail, where his money was embezzled in the first place—everything you should need for a successful prosecution. I'd been going to mail it to Captain Tuomonen, but this is better." Her eyes crinkled in a smile at him, above her breath mask. She bent and taped it securely to the back of Vorsoisson's jacket. "With my compliments, my lord." She stepped back and dusted her hands in the gesture of a dirty job well done.

  "What are you doing?" Miles began. "What are you people doing out here, anyway? Why is Madame Radovas with—"

  "Come, come, Lord Vorkosigan," Foscol interrupted him briskly. "You don't imagine that I'm going to stand around and chat with you, do you?"

  Vorsoisson stirred, groaned, and belched. Despite the utter contempt in her eyes, lingering on his huddled figure, she waited a moment to be sure he wasn't going to vomit into his breath mask. Vorsoisson stared wearily at her, blinking in bewilderment and, Miles had no doubt, pain.

  Miles clenched his fists and jerked against his chains. Foscol glanced at him and added kindly, "Don't hurt yourself, trying to get loose. Someone will be along eventually to collect you. I only regret I won't be able to watch." She turned on her heel and strode away, down the walk and around the corner of the building. After another minute, the faint sounds of a lift-van taking to the air drifted around the building. But they were on the opposite side of the building to the approach from Serifosa, and the departing van did not cross into Miles's limited line of sight.

  Soudha's a competent engineer. I wonder if he's set the reactor here to destroy itself? was the next inspired thought to enter Miles mind. That would erase all the evidence, Vorsoisson, and Miles, too. If he timed it just right, Soudha might be able to take out the ImpSec rescue squad as well . . . but it seemed Foscol meant the evidence pinned to Vorsoisson's back to survive, at least, which argued against a scenario that would turn the experiment station into a glowing glass hole in the landscape resembling the lost city of Vorkosigan Vashnoi. Soudha and Company did not seem to be thinking militarily. Thank God. This scene seemed engineered for maximum humiliation, and one could not embarrass the dead.

  Their next-of-kin, however . . . Miles thought of his father and shuddered. And Ekaterin and Nikolai, and, of course, Lord Auditor Vorthys. Oh, yes.

  Vorsoisson, coming to full consciousness at last, reared up and discovered the limits of his bonds. He swore muzzily, then with increasing clarity of expression, and yanked his arms against their chains. After about a minute, he stopped. He stared around and found Miles.

  "Vorkosigan. What the hell is going on here?"

  "We appear to have been parked out of the way while Soudha and his friends finish decamping from the experiment station. They seem to have realized their time had run out." Miles wondered if he ought to mention to Vorsoisson what was taped to his back, then decided against it. The man was already breathing heavily from his struggles. Vorsoisson swore some more, monotonously, but after a bit seemed to become aware that he was repeating himself, and ran down.

  "Tell me more about this embezzlement scheme of Soudha's," Miles said into the eerie silence. No insect or bird chirps enlivened the Komarran night, and no tree leaves rustled in the faint, chill breeze. No further sounds came from the buildings behind them. The only noise was the susurration of their breath masks' powered fans, filters, and regulators. "When did you find out about it?"

  "Just . . . yesterday. A week ago yesterday. Soudha panicked, I think, and tried to bribe me. I didn't want to embarrass Kat's Uncle Vorthys by blowing it wide open while he was here. And I had to be sure, before I started accusing people right and left."

  Foscol says you lie. Miles wasn't sure which of them he trusted least by now. Foscol could have invented her evidence against Vorsoisson using the same skills she had apparently called on to hide Soudha's thefts. He would have to let the ImpSec forensic specialists sort it out, and carefully.

  Miles simultaneously sympathized with and was deeply suspicious of Vorsoisson's claimed hesitation, a dizzying state of mind to endure on top of a stunner migraine. He had never thought of fast-penta as a medicine for headache, but he wished he had a hypospray of it to jab in Vorsoisson's ass right now. Later, he promised himself. Without fail. "Is that all that's going on, d'you think?"

  "What do you mean, all?"

  "I don't quite … if I were Soudha and his group, fleeing the scene of our crime . . . they did have some lead time to prepare their retreat. Maybe as long as three or four weeks, if they knew Radovas's body was likely to be found topside." And what the hell was Radovas
's body doing up there anyway? I still don't have a clue. "Longer, if they kept their emergency backup plans up to date, and Soudha is an engineer if ever I met one; he's got to have had fail-safes incorporated into his schemes. Wouldn't it make more sense to scatter, travel light, try to get out of the Empire in ones and twos . . . not leave in a bunch with two lift-vans full of … whatever the hell they needed two lift-vans to transport? Not their money, surely."

  Vorsoisson shook his head, which shifted his breath mask slightly; he had to rub his face against the railing to reseat it. After a few minutes he said in a small voice, "Vorkosigan . . . ?"

  Miles hoped from the humbler tone the man might be going to edge toward true confession after all. "Yes?" he said encouragingly.

  "I'm almost out of oxygen."

  "Didn't you check—" Miles tried to bring up the image in his pulsing brain of the moment Vorsoisson had snatched his breath mask out of the cabinet, back in his office, and donned it. No. He hadn't checked anything about it. A fully-charged mask would support twelve to fourteen hours of vigorous outdoor activity, under normal circumstances. Miles's visitor's mask had presumably been taken from a central store, where some tech had the job of processing and recharging used masks before setting them on the rack ready for reuse. Don't forget to put your mask on the recharger, Vorsoisson's wife had said to him, and been snapped at for nagging. Was Vorsoisson in the habit of stuffing his equipment away uncleaned? In his office, Madame Vorsoisson couldn't very well pick up after him the way she doubtless did at home.

  At one time, Miles could have crushed his own fragile hand bones and drawn his hand out through a restraint before his flesh began to swell enough to trap it again. He'd actually done that once, on a hideously memorable occasion. But the bones in his hands were all sturdy synthetics now, less breakable even than normal bone. All that his applied strength could do was make his chafed wrists bleed.

  Vorsoisson's wrists began to bleed too, as he struggled more frantically against his chains.

  "Vorsoisson, hold still!" Miles called urgently to him. "Conserve your oxygen. There's supposed to be someone coming. Go limp, breathe shallowly, make it last." Why hadn't the idiot mentioned this earlier, to Miles, to Foscol even . . . had Foscol intended this result? Maybe she'd meant both Miles and Vorsoisson to die, one after the other . . . how long till the promised someone came to collect them? A couple of days? Murdering an Imperial Auditor in the middle of a case was considered an act of treason worse than murdering a ruling District Count and only barely short of assassinating the Emperor himself. Nothing could be more surely calculated to send ImpSec's entire forces in frenzied pursuit of the fleeing embezzlers, with an implacable concentration reaching, potentially, across decades and distance and diplomatic barriers. It was a suicidal gesture, or unbelievably foolhardy. "How much do you have left?"

  Vorsoisson wriggled his chin and tried to peer down over his nose into the dim recesses of his jacket to see the top of the canister strapped there. "Oh, God. I think it's reading zero."

  "Those things always have some safety margin. Stay still, man! Try for some self-control!"

  Instead Vorsoisson began to struggle ever more frantically. He threw himself forward and backward with all his considerable strength, trying to break the railing. Blood drops flew from the flayed skin of his wrists, and the railing reverberated and bent, but it did not break. He pulled up his knees and then flung himself down through the meter-wide opening between the posts, trying to propel his full body weight against the chains. They held, and then his backward-scrambling legs could not regain the walkway. His boot heels scraped and scrabbled on the wall. His dizzied choking, at the last, led to vomiting inside his breath mask. When it slipped down around his neck in his final paroxysms, it seemed almost a mercy, except for the way it revealed his distorted, purpling features. But the screams and pleas stopped, and then the gasps and gulpings. The kicking legs twitched, and hung limply.

  Miles had been right; Vorsoisson might have had a full twenty or thirty minutes more oxygen if he had hunkered down quietly. Miles stood very still, and breathed very shallowly, and shivered in the cold. Shivering, he recalled dimly, used more oxygen, but he could not make himself stop. The silence was profound, broken only by the hiss of Miles's regulators and filters, and the beating of the blood in his own ears. He had seen many deaths, including his own, but this was surely one of the ugliest. The shocky shudders traveled up and down his body, and his thoughts spun uselessly: they kept circling back to the spuriously calm observation that a barrel of fast-penta would be no damned use to him now.

  If he went into a convulsion and dislodged his breath mask in the process, he could be well on his way to asphyxiating before he even returned to consciousness. ImpSec would find him hanging there beside Vorsoisson, choked identically on his own spew. And nothing was more likely to set off one of his seizures than stress.

  Miles watched the slime begin to freeze on the sagging corpse's face, scanned the dark skies in the wrong direction, and waited.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Ekaterin set down her cases next to Lord Vorkosigan's in the vestibule, and turned for one last automatic check of the premises, one last patrol of her old life. All lights were out. All windows were sealed. All appliances were off … the comconsole chimed just as she was leaving the kitchen.

  She hesitated. Let it go. Let it all go. But then she reflected it might be Tuomonen or someone, trying to reach Lord Vorkosigan. Or Uncle Vorthys, though she was not sure she even wanted to talk to him, tonight. She turned back to the machine, but her hand hesitated again with the thought that it might be Tien. In that case, I will simply cut the com. If it was Tien, about to attempt some other plea or threat or persuasion, at least it was a guarantee he was someplace else, and not here, and she could still walk away.

  But the face that formed over the vid-plate at her reluctant touch was that of a Komarran woman from Tien's department, Lena Foscol. Ekaterin had only met her in person a couple of times, but Soudha's words over this same vid-plate last night leapt to her mind: Lena Foscol in Accounting is the most meticulous thief I've ever met. Oh, God. She was one of them. The background was out of focus, but the woman was wearing a parka, thrown open over dome-wear, suggesting she was either on her way to or on her way back from some outside expedition. Ekaterin regarded her with concealed revulsion.

  "Madame Vorsoisson?" Foscol said brightly. Without waiting for Ekaterin's answer, she went on, "Please come pick up your husband at the Waste Heat experiment station. He'll be waiting for you outside on the northwest side of the Engineering building."

  "But—" What was Tien doing out there at this time of night? "How did he get out there, doesn't he have a flyer? Can't he get a ride back with someone else?"

  "Everyone else has left." Her smile widened, and she cut the com.

  "But—" Ekaterin raised a hand in futile protest, too late. "Drat." And then, after a moment, "Damn it!"

  Retrieving Tien from the experiment station would be a two-hour chore, at least. She would first have to take a bubble-car to a public flyer livery, and rent a flyer, since she had no authority to requisition one from Tien's department. She'd been seriously considering sleeping on a park bench tonight, just to save her pittance of funds for the uncertain days to come until she found some form of paying work, except that the dome patrollers didn't permit vagrants to loiter in any of the places where she might feel safe. Foscol hadn't said if Lord Vorkosigan was with Tien, which suggested he was not, which meant that she'd have to fly back to Serifosa alone with Tien, who would insist on taking the controls, and what if he finally got serious about his suicide threats when they were halfway back, and decided to take her down with him? No. It wasn't worth the risk. Let him rot out there till morning, or let him call someone else.

  Her hand upon her case again, she reconsidered. Still hostage to fortune in this mess, or at least to everyone's good behavior, was Nikki. Tien's relationship to his son was mostly neglectful, interspersed
with occasional bullying, but with enough spasms of actual attention that Nikki, at least, still seemed to show attachment to him. The two of them were always going to have a relationship separate from her own. She and Tien would be forced to cooperate for Nikki's sake: an iron-cladding of surface courtesy that must never crack. Tien's anger or potential brutality were no more of a threat to her future than some belated attempt on his part at affection or placation. She could face down either, now, she thought, with equal stoniness.

  I am not here to vent my feelings. I am here to achieve my goals. Yes. She could foresee that was going to be her new mantra, in the weeks to come. With a grimace, she opened her case and retrieved her personal breath mask, checked its reservoirs, pulled on her parka, and headed out for the bubble-car station.

  The delays were every bit as aggravating as Ekaterin had foreseen. Komarrans sharing her bubble-car forced two extra stops. She suffered a thirty-minute clog in the system within sight of her goal; by the time it spat her out at the westernmost dome lock, she was quite ready to chuck her plan of courtesy and go back to the apartment, except for the thought of facing another thirty-minute delay en route. The lightflyer they issued to her was elderly and not very clean. Alone at last, flying through the vast silence of the Komarran night, her heart eased a little, and she toyed with the fantasy of flying somewhere else, anywhere, just to extend the heavenly solitude. There might be more to pleasure than the absence of pain, but she couldn't prove it just now. The absence of pain, of other human beings and their needs pressing down upon her, seemed paradise enough. A paradise just out of reach.