Komarr b-11

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  He walked around it, staring, and came up to where Soudha was being frisked down and restrained. "My goodness. Your wormhole-collapser appears to have met with an accident. But it won't do you any good. We have the plans." Cappell and a man Miles recognized as the engineer who'd fled from Bollan Design stood nearby, glowering at him; Foscol struggled into earshot, barely controlled by her female arresting officer.

  "It wasn't us," sighed Soudha. "It was her." A jerk of his thumb drew Miles's attention to the inner door of the bay's personnel airlock. A metal bar was placed crookedly across the airseal door's jamb; the ends were melted onto floor and wall respectively.

  Miles's eyes widened, and his lips parted in breathless anticipation. "Her?"

  "The bitch from hell. Or Barrayar, which is almost the same thing to hear her tell it. Madame Vorsoisson."

  "Remarkable." The source of several oddly tilted responses on the Komarrans' part to his recent negotiations began at last to come clear to Miles. "Um . . . how? "

  All three Komarrans tried to answer him at once, with a medley of blame-casting which included a lot of phrases like, if Madame Radovas hadn't let her out, If you hadn't let Radovas let her out, How was I supposed to know? The old lady looked sick to me. Still does. If you hadn't put the remote down right front of her, If you hadn't left the damned control booth, If you had just moved faster, If you had run for the float cradle and cut the power, So why didn't you think of that, huh? by which Miles slowly pieced together the most glorious mental picture he'd had all day. All year. For quite a long time, actually.

  I'm in love. I'm in love. I just thought I was in love, before, now I really am. I must, I must, I must have this woman! Mine, mine, mine. Lady Ekaterin Nile Vorvayne Vorsoisson Vorkosigan, yes! She'd left nothing here for ImpSec and all the Emperor's Auditors to do but sweep up the bits. He wanted to roll on the floor and howl with joy, which would be most undiplomatic of him, under the circumstances. He kept his face neutral, and very straight. Somehow, he didn't think the Komarrans appreciated the exquisite delight of it all.

  "When we stuffed her in the airlock I welded it shut," said Soudha morosely. "I wasn't going to let her do us a third time." "Third time?" Miles said. "If that was the second, what was the first?"

  "When that idiot Arozzi first brought her down here, she damn near blew the whole thing right then by hitting the emergency alarm."

  Miles glanced aside at the alarm on the nearby wall. "And then what happened?"

  "We had a sudden influx of station accident control. I thought I'd never get rid of them."

  "Ah. I see." How curious. Vorgier never mentioned that part. Later. "You mean we've spent the last five hours scrambling to evacuate this station for nothing?"

  Soudha smiled sourly. "You coming to me for sympathy, Barrayaran?"

  "Heh. Never mind."

  Most of the prisoners were formed up and marched out; with a gesture, Miles ordered Soudha to be held behind.

  "Moment of truth, Soudha. Have you booby-trapped this thing?"

  "There is a motion-sensitive charge attached to the outer door. Opening it from this side should not set it off."

  With iron self-control, Miles watched as an ImpSec tech torched off the metal bar. It fell to the deck with a clang. He paused in one last moment of sick fear.

  "What are you waiting for?" asked Soudha curiously.

  "Just pondering the depth of your political ingenuity. Suppose this is set to go off and snatch our prize from us at the last."

  "Now? Why? It's over," said Soudha.

  "Revenge. Manipulation. Maybe you figure to drive me berserk and trigger a repeat of the Solstice Massacre all over again, writ somewhat smaller. That could be a propaganda coup. Whether it would be worth spending your lives for is all in your point of view, of course. Properly massaged, the incident could help start a new Komarr Revolt, I suppose."

  "You have a really twisted mind, Lord Vorkosigan," said Soudha, shaking his head. "Was it your upbringing, or your genetics?"

  "Yes." Miles sighed. After a brief moment of reflection, Miles waved the guards on, and Soudha was marched out after his colleagues.

  After a go-ahead nod from the Imperial Auditor, the tech tapped the control pad. The inner door whined, sticking halfway. Miles pressed it gently sideways with his boot, and it shuddered open.

  Ekaterin was on her feet, between the inner door and the Professora, who sat on the deck wearing her niece's vest over her own bolero. Ekaterin's face bore a red bruise, her hair was hanging every which way, her fists were clenched, and she looked perfectly demented and altogether gorgeous, in Miles's personal opinion. Smiling broadly, he held out both his hands and leaned inside.

  She glared back at him. "About time." She stalked past, muttering in a voice of loathing, "Men!"

  After the briefest lurch, Miles managed to convert his open arms into a smooth bow toward the Professora. "Madame Dr. Vorthys. Are you all right?"

  "Why, hello, Miles." She blinked at him, gray faced and very chilled-looking. "I've been better, but I believe I'll survive. "

  "I have a float pallet for you. These sturdy young men will help you to it."

  "Oh, thank you, dear."

  Miles stood back and waved the medtechs forward. The Professora looked perfectly content to be whisked aboard the medical pallet and covered with warm wraps. A cursory examination and a few words of debate resulted in a half-dose of synergine for her, but no IV; then the pallet rose into the air.

  "The Professor will be here shortly," Miles assured her. "In fact, he'll likely be along before you both are done at the station infirmary. I'll see he gets sent straight on to you."

  "I'm so pleased." The Professora motioned him nearer; when he bent over her, she grabbed him by the ear and planted a kiss on his cheek. "Ekaterin was wonderful," she whispered.

  "I know," he breathed. His eyes crinkled, and she smiled back.

  He stepped back from the pallet to Ekaterin's side, hoping her aunt's example might inspire her—he wouldn't mind salvaging some little show of appreciation—"You didn't seem surprised to see me," he murmured. The pallet started off, under the guidance of a medtech, and he and Ekaterin followed in procession; the ImpSec technicians politely waited till they'd cleared the chamber to plunge in to the airlock to disarm the charge.

  Ekaterin shoved a strand of hair back over one ear with a hand that trembled only slightly. Red bruises glared on her arms, too, as her sleeve slid back. Miles frowned at them. "I knew it had to be our side," she said simply. "Or else it would have been the other door."

  "Eh. Quite." Three hours, she'd had, to contemplate that possibility. "My fast courier was slow."

  They turned up the next corridor in reflective silence. Gratifying as it might have been to have her fling herself into his arms and weep relief into—well, if not his shoulder, at least the top of his head—in front of that herd of ImpSec fellows, he had to admit he admired this style even more. So what is this thing you have about tall women and unrequited love? His cousin Ivan would doubtless have some cutting things to say—he growled in anticipation, in his mind. He would deal with Ivan and other hazards to his courtship later.

  "Do you know you saved about five thousand lives?" he asked her.

  Her dark brows drew down. "What?"

  "The novel device was defective. If the Komarrans had managed to get it started, the gravitational back-blow from the wormhole would have taken out this station just like the soletta array, possibly with as few survivors. And I shudder at the thought of the property damage bill. To think how Illyan used to complain about my equipment losses back when I was just covert ops. …"

  "You mean … it didn't work after all? I did all that for nothing?" She stopped short, her shoulders sagging.

  "What do you mean, nothing? I've met Imperial generals who completed their entire careers with less to show for them. You should get a bloody medal, I think. Except that this whole thing is going to end up so classified, they're going to have to invent a whol
e new level of classification just to put it in. And then classify the classification."

  Her lips puffed, not quite mirthfully. "What would I do with so useless an object as a medal?"

  He thought bemusedly of the contents of a certain drawer at home in Vorkosigan House. "Frame it? Use it as a paperweight? Dust it?"

  "Just what I always wanted. More clutter."

  He grinned at her; she smiled back at last, clearly beginning to come off her adrenaline jag, and without breaking down, either. She drew breath and started forward again, and he kept pace. She had met the enemy, mastered her moment, hung three hours on death's doorstep, all that, and she'd emerged still on her feet and snarling. Oversocialized, hah. Oh, yeah, Da, I want this one.

  He stopped at the door to the infirmary; the Professora vanished within, borne off by her medical minions like a lady on a palanquin. Ekaterin paused with him.

  "I have to leave you for a time and check on my prisoners. The stationers will take care of you."

  Her brow wrinkled. "Prisoners? Oh. Yes. How did you get rid of the Komarrans?"

  Miles smiled grimly. "Persuasion."

  She stared down at him, one side of her lovely mouth curving up. Her lower lip was split; he wanted to kiss it and make it well. Not yet. Timing, boy. And one other thing.

  "You must be very persuasive."

  "I hope so." He took a deep breath. "I bluffed them into believing that I wouldn't let them go no matter what they did to you and the Professora. Except that I wasn't bluffing. We could not have let them go." There. Betrayal confessed. His empty hands clenched.

  She stared at him in disbelief; his heart shrank. "Well, of course not!"

  "Eh . . . what?"

  "Don't you know what they wanted to do to Barrayar?" she demanded. "It was a horror show. Utterly vile, and they couldn't even see it. They actually tried to tell me that collapsing the wormhole wouldn't hurt anyone! Monstrous fools."

  "That's what I thought, actually."

  "So, wouldn't you put your life on the line to stop them?"

  "Yes, but I wasn't putting my life—I was putting yours."

  "But I'm Vor," she said simply.

  His smile and his heart revived, dizzy with delight. "True Vor, milady," he breathed.

  A female medtech was approaching, murmuring anxiously, "Madame Vorsoisson?" Miles yielded to her shepherding motions, gave Ekaterin an analyst's salute, and turned away. He was humming, off-key, by the time he rounded the first corner.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  The station infirmary personnel insisted on keeping both Vor women overnight, a precaution with which neither argued. Despite her exhaustion Ekaterin did get dispensation to go pick up her valise from her never-used hostel room, under the watchful eye of a very young ImpSec guard who called her "Ma'am" in every sentence and was determined to carry her luggage.

  One message waited on her hostel room's comconsole: an urgent order from Lord Vorkosigan for her to take her aunt and flee the station at once, delivered in a tone of such intense conviction as to almost send her scurrying off despite its obviously outdated content. Instructions only, she noted; no explanations whatsoever. He really must have once held military command. The contrast between this strained, forceful lord and the almost goofy geniality of the young man who'd bowed her out of the airlock bemused her; which was the real Lord Vorkosigan? For all his apparently self-revealing babble, the man remained as elusive as a handful of water. Water in the desert. The thought popped unbidden into her mind, and she shook her head to clear it.

  After she returned to the infirmary, Ekaterin sat up for a while with her aunt, waiting for the Professor. Uncle Vorthys arrived in the next hour. He was unusually breathless and subdued as he sat on the edge of his wife's bed and embraced her. She hugged him back, tears starting in her eyes for almost the first time in this whole night's ordeal.

  "You shouldn't frighten me like that, woman," he told her in mock severity. "Running around getting kidnapped, thwarting Komarran terrorists, putting ImpSec out of a job … Your premature demise would entirely disarrange my selfish plan to drop dead first and leave you to pick up after me. Kindly don't do that!"

  She laughed shakily. "I'll try not to, dear." The patient gown she wore was not a very flattering fashion, but her color did look rather better, Ekaterin thought. Synergine, hot liquids, warmth, quiet, and safety were working to banish her more alarming symptoms without further medical intervention, so that even her anxious husband was fairly quickly reassured. Ekaterin let her aunt tell him most of the story of their harrowing hours with the Komarrans, only putting in a few murmurs of correction when she waxed too flattering of her niece's part in it all.

  Ekaterin reflected with bleak envy on the nature of a marriage that its principals could regard as prematurely threatened after a mere forty-plus years. Not for me. I've lost that option. The Professor and the Professora were surely among the fortunate few. Whatever personal qualities it took to achieve this happy state, it was abundantly plain to Ekaterin that she did not possess them. So be it.

  The Professor's booming voice and precise academic diction returned to usual as he proceeded to harry the medtechs, unnecessarily, on his wife's behalf. Ekaterin intervened to suggest firmly that what Aunt Vorthys needed most now was rest; after one last disruptive pass through the private room, he took himself off to find Lord Vorkosigan and tour the late battlefield at the Southport locks. Ekaterin didn't think she could ever sleep again, but after she cleaned up and crawled into her own infirmary bed, a medtech brought her a potion and invited her to drink it. Ekaterin was still complaining muzzily that such things didn't work for her when the bed sheets seemed to suck her right down.

  Whether due to the potion, exhaustion, sheer nervous collapse, or the absence of a nine-year-old demanding services, she slept late. The restful residue of the morning, spent chatting desultorily with her aunt, had drifted toward noon when Lord Vorkosigan trooped into the infirmary room. He was clean as a cat and his fine gray suit was crisp and fresh, though his face was traced with fatigue. He carried an enormous and awkward flower arrangement under each arm. Ekaterin hurried to help relieve him of them, sliding them onto a table before he dropped them both.

  "Good day, Madame Dr. Vorthys, you're looking much better. Excellent. Madame Vorsoisson." He ducked his head at her, and his white grin winked.

  "Wherever did you find such gorgeous flowers on a space station?" Ekaterin asked, astonished.

  "In a shop. It's a Komarran space station. They'll sell you anything. Well, not anything— that would be Jackson's Whole. But it stands to reason, with all the people meeting and greeting and parting through here, that there would be a market niche for this sort of thing. They grow them right here on the station, you know, along with all their truck garden vegetables. Why do they call them truck gardens, I wonder? I don't think they ever grew trucks in them, even back on Old Earth." He dragged over a chair and sat down near her, at the foot of the Professora's bed. "I believe that dark red fuzzy thing is a Barrayaran plant, by the way. It made me break out in hives when I touched it."

  "Yes, bloody puffwad," she agreed.

  "Is that its name, or a value judgment?"

  She smiled. "I believe it refers to the color. It comes from South Continent, on the western slopes of the Black Escarpment."

  "I was at the Black Escarpment for winter training once. Happily, these things must have been buried under several meters of snow at the time."

  "How shall we ever get them home, Miles?" said the Professora, half laughing.

  "Don't burden yourself," he recommended. "You can always give them to the medtechs when you leave."

  "But they must be very expensive," said Ekaterin in worry. Ridiculously so, for something they could only enjoy for a few hours.

  "Expensive?" he said blankly. "Automated weapons-control systems are expensive. Combat drop missions which go wrong are very expensive. These are cheap. Really. Anyway, it supports a business, which is good for the Imp
erium. If you get a chance, you ought to ask for a tour of the station's hydroponics section before you leave. I'd think you'd find it pretty interesting."

  "We'll see if there's time," said Ekaterin. "It's been such a bizarre experience. It's strange to realize I'm not even late getting back to pick up Nikki yet. Just a few more days to complete his treatment, and I'm done with Komarr."

  "Do you have everything in hand for that? Everything you need? Your aunt," he nodded at the Professora, "is with you now."

  "I expect I'll be able to handle anything that comes up this time," Ekaterin assured him.

  "I expect you will." That scimitar smile flickered over his face again.

  "We only missed the ship we were originally scheduled to take this morning because Uncle Vorthys insisted we wait and travel back to Komarr with him in his fast courier. Do you know when that will be? I should send a message to Madame Vortorren."

  "He has a few chores here yet. ImpSec Komarr sent us out a special squad of boffins and techs to clean up and document that mess you made in the Southport loading bay– "

  "Oh, dear. I'm sorry—" she began automatically.

  "No, no, it was a beautiful mess. Couldn't have made a better one myself, and I've made a few. Anyway, he will be overseeing them, and then returning to Komarr to set up a secret scientific commission to study the device, explore its limits and all that. And HQ sent me some high-powered interrogators whom I wanted to personally brief before they took charge of my prisoners. Captain Vorgier wasn't too happy that I wouldn't let any of his local people question our conspirators, but I've already declared all details of this case need-to-know under my Auditor's seal, so he's out of luck." He cleared his throat. "Your uncle and I have decided I get the job of going straight back to Vorbarr Sultana from here and making the preliminary report to Emperor Gregor in person. He's only been getting ImpSec digests."

  "Oh," she said, startled. "Leaving so soon . . . ? What about all your things—you shouldn't go off without your seizure stimulator, should you?"