Miles in Love (18 page)

Ekaterin read on. The fleet upon which Tien had placed this borrowed bet had departed with much hype and fanfare; shares had been trading on the secondary market at rising prices for weeks after it had departed Komarr. Tien had even made a multicolored graph to track his electronic gains. Then the fleet had encountered disaster: an entire ship, cargo, and crew lost hideously to a wormhole mishap. The fleet, now unable to complete many of its planned trade chains that had been based in the lost cargo, had rerouted and come home early, tail between its imaginary legs. Some fleets returned two for one to their investors, though the average was closer to ten percent; the Golden Voyage of Marat Galen in the previous century was famous for having returned a fabulous fortune of a hundred to one for every share its investors had purchased, founding at least two new oligarchic clans in the process.

Tien's fleet, however, had returned a loss of four for one.

With his twenty-five thousand marks of residue, Ekaterin's four thousand marks, his personal savings, and his meager pension fund, Tien had been placed to pay back only two-thirds of his loan, now due. Pressingly overdue, apparently, judging from the aggressively-worded dunning notices accumulating in the file. When he had cried to Soudha that he needed twenty thousand marks now, Tien had not been exaggerating. She could not help calculating how many years it would take to scrimp twenty thousand marks from her household budget.

What a nightmare. It was almost possible to feel sorry for the man.

Except for the little problem of the origin of that magical first forty thousand marks.

Ekaterin sat back and rubbed her numb face. She had a horrible feeling she could guess the hidden parts of this whole chain of reasoning. This apparently complex and deeply entrenched scam in the Terraforming Project had not, she thought, originated with Tien. All his previous dishonesties had been petty: wrong change not returned, a little padding here and there on expense reports, the usual minor erosion of character almost every adult suffered in weak moments. Not grand theft. Soudha had been here in his job for over five years. This was surely a home-grown Komarran crime. But Tien, newly made head of the Serifosa Sector, had perhaps stumbled upon it, and Soudha had bought his silence. So . . . had the previous Barrayaran Administrator whom Tien had replaced been on the take as well? A question for ImpSec, to be sure.

But Tien was in far over his head and must have realized it. Hence the gamble with the trade fleet shares. If the fleet had returned four for one, instead of the other way around, Tien would have been placed to return his bribe, make restitution, get out from under. Had some such panicked thought been in the back of his mind?

And if he had been lucky instead of unlucky, would the impulse have survived to become reality?

And if Tien had pulled a hundred thousand marks out of his hat, and told you he won them on trade fleet shares, would you have asked the first question about their origin? Or would you have been overjoyed and thought him a secret genius?

She sat now bent over, aching in every part of her body, up her back, her neck, inside and outside her head. In her heart. Her eyes were dry.

A Vor woman's first loyalty was supposed to be to her husband. Even unto treason, even unto death. The sixth Countess Vorvayne had followed her husband right up to the stocks in which he had been hung to die for his part in the Saltpetre Plot, and sat at his feet in a hunger strike, and died, in fact a day before him, of exposure. Great tragic story, that one—one of the best bloody melodramas from the history of the Time of Isolation. They'd made a holovid of it, though in the vid version the couple had died at the same moment, as if achieving mutual orgasm.

Has a Vor woman no honor of her own, then? Before Tien entered my life, did I not have integrity all the same?

Yes, and I laid it on my marriage oath. Rather like buying all your shares in one fleet
.

If Tien had been afflicted with some great misguided political passion—thrown in his lot with the wrong side in Vordarian's Pretendership, whatever—if he had followed his convictions, she might well have followed him with all good will. But this was not allegiance to some greater truth, or even to some grandly tragic mistake.

It was just stupidity, piled on venality. It wasn't tragedy, it was farce. It was Tien all over. But if there was any honor to be regained by turning her own sick husband over to the authorities, she surely did not see it either.

If I grow much smaller, trying to keep my height under his, I believe I must soon disappear altogether.

But if she was not a Vor woman, what was she? To step away from her oath-sworn place at Tien's side was to step across a precipice into the dark, naked of any identity at all.

It was, what did they call it, a window of opportunity. If she left before the crisis broke, before this whole hideous mess came out in some public way, she would not be deserting Tien in his hour of greatest need, would she?

Ask your soldier's heart, woman. Is deserting the night before the battle any better than deserting in the heat?

Yet if she did not go, she tacitly acquiesced to this farce. Only ignorance was innocence, was bliss. Knowledge was . . . anything but power.

No one else would save her. No one else could. And even to open her lips and whisper "help" was to choose Tien's destruction.

She sat still as stone, in silence, for a very long time.

Captain Tuomonen arranged to rendezvous with Miles and Tien in the lobby of the Vorsoissons' residence building, rather than at the Terraforming Project offices, a blandly sociable gesture that did not fool Miles for a moment. The Imperial Auditor was to be saddled with an ImpSec guard whether he'd ordered one or not, it appeared. Miles almost looked forward to seeing the test of Tuomonen's polite ingenuity this security determination was doubtless going to demonstrate.

At the bubble-car platform across the park, Miles seized the opportunity to shunt Tien into another car and claim a private one for himself and Tuomonen, the better to decant the night's news from him. A few early morning commuters crowded in with the administrator, and his car slid away into the tubes. But as soon as the next pair of Komarrans, already hesitant at the sight of the green Imperial uniform, got close enough to make out the ImpSec eyes on the captain's collar, they sheered off hastily from any attempt to join Miles's little party.

"Do you always get a bubble-car to yourself?" Miles inquired of Tuomonen as the canopy closed and the car began to move.

"When I'm in uniform. Works like a charm." Tuomonen smiled slightly. "But if I want to eavesdrop on Serifosans, I make sure to wear civvies."

"Ha. So what's the status on Radovas's library this morning?"

"I dispatched one of the compound guards last night to hand-carry it to HQ in Solstice. Solstice is three time zones ahead of us; their analyst should have started on it by now."

"Good." Miles's brow wrinkled.
Compound guards?
"Um . . . just how big is ImpSec Serifosa, Captain Tuomonen?"

"Well . . . there's myself, my desk sergeant, and two corporals. We keep the data base, coordinate information flow to HQ, and provide support for any investigators HQ sends out on special projects. Then there is my lieutenant who commands the guards at the Sector Sub-Consulate compound. He has a unit of ten men to cover security there."

The Imperial Counselor
was how the Barrayaran Viceroy of Komarr was styled, in deference to local custom. Miles's incognito arrival in Serifosa had excused him, or so he'd chosen to pretend, from a courtesy call on the Counselor's Serifosa Sector regional deputy. "Only ten men? For around the clock, all week?"

"I'm afraid so." Tuomonen smiled wryly. "Not much goes on in Serifosa, my lord. It was one of the least active Domes in the Komarr Revolt, a tradition of political apathy it has since maintained. It was the first Sector to have its occupying Imperial garrison withdrawn. One of my Komarran in-laws facetiously blames the lack of urban renewal in the Dome's central section on the previous generation's failure to arrange for it to have been leveled by Imperial forces." That aging and decrepit area was visible now in the distance, as the car reached the top of an arc and bumped into an intersecting tube. They rotated and began to descend toward Serifosa's newer rim.

"Still—apathetic or not—how do you stay on top of things?"

"I have a budget for paid informers. We used to pay them on a piecework-basis, till I discovered that when they had no real news to sell, they'd make some up. So I cut their numbers in half and put the best ones on a part-time regular salary, instead. We meet about once a week, and I give them a little security workshop and we have a gossip swap. I try to get them to think of themselves as low-level civilian analysts, rather than merely informers. It seems to have significantly helped the reliability of my information flow."

"I see. Do you have anyone planted in the Terraforming Project?"

"No, unfortunately. Terraforming is not considered security-critical. I do have people at the shuttleport, in the Locks district, in the Dome police, and a few in the local Dome government offices. We also cover the power plant, atmosphere cycling, and water treatment both independently and in cooperation with local authorities. They check their job applicants for criminal records and psychological instability, we check them for potentially dangerous political associations. Terraforming has always been just too damn far down the list for my budget to cover. I will say its employment background check standards are among the lowest in the civil service."

"Hm. Wouldn't that policy tend to concentrate the disaffected?"

Tuomonen shrugged. "Many intelligent Komarrans still do not love the Imperium. They have to do something for a living. To qualify for the Terraforming Project, it is perhaps enough that they love Komarr. They have simply no political motivation for sabotage there."

Barto cared about the future of Komarr
, his widow had said. Might Radovas have been among the disaffected? And if he were, so what? Miles frowned in puzzlement as the car pulled into the stop in the station beneath the Terraforming Project offices.

As instructed, Tien Vorsoisson was waiting for them on the platform. He escorted them as before up through the atrium of his building to the floors of his domain; though a few doors were open on early morning activity in various departments as they passed, they were the first to arrive in Vorsoisson's office.

"Do you have any preference as to how to divide this up?" Miles asked Tuomonen, staring around meditatively as Vorsoisson brought up the lights.

"I managed to squeeze in a short interview with Andro Farr this morning," said Tuomonen. "He gave me some names of Marie Trogir's particular acquaintances at work. I believe I'd like to start with them."

"Good. If you want to start with Trogir, I'll start with Radovas, and we can meet in the middle. I want to begin by interviewing his boss, Soudha, I believe, Administrator Vorsoisson."

"Certainly, my Lord Auditor. Do you wish to use my office?"

"No, I think I want to see him in his own territory."

"I'll take you downstairs, then. I'll be at your disposal in just a moment, Captain Tuomonen."

Tuomonen seated himself at Vorsoisson's comconsole and eyed it thoughtfully. "Take your time, Administrator."

Vorsoisson, with a worried look over his shoulder, led Miles down one flight to the Department of Waste Heat Management. Soudha had not yet arrived; Miles dispatched Tien back to Tuomonen, then circled the engineer's office slowly, examining its decor and contents.

It was a rather bare place. Perhaps the department head had another, more occupied work area out at his experiment station. The book rack on the wall was sparsely filled, mostly with disks on management and technical references. There were works on space stations and their construction, to be sure close cousins of domes, but unlike Radovas's library, no more specialized texts on wormholes or five-space math than might be residue from Soudha's university days.

A heavy tread announced the room's owner; the curious look on Souda's face to find his office open and lit as he entered gave way to understanding as he saw Miles.

"Ah. Good morning, Lord Auditor Vorkosigan."

"Good morning, Dr. Soudha." Miles replaced the handful of disks in their former slots.

Soudha looked a bit tired; perhaps he was not a morning person. He gave Miles a weary smile of greeting. "To what do I owe the honor of this visit?" He muffled a yawn, pulled a chair up near his desk, and gave Miles a gesture of invitation to it. "Can I get you some coffee?"

"No, thank you." Miles sat, and let Soudha settle himself behind his comconsole desk. "I have some unpleasant news." Soudha's face composed itself attentively. "Barto Radovas is dead." He watched for Soudha's response.

Soudha blinked, his lips parting in dismay. "That's a shock. I thought he was in good health, for his age. Was it his heart? Oh, my, poor Trogir."

"No one's health stands up to exposure to vacuum without a pressure suit, regardless of their age." Miles decided not to include the details of the corpse's massive trauma, for now. "His body was found in space."

Soudha glanced up, his brows rising. "Do they think it has some connection to the soletta accident, then?"

Or why else would Miles be taking an interest, right. "Perhaps."

"Have they—what about Marie Trogir?" Soudha's lips thinned thoughtfully. "You didn't say she . . . ?"

"She's not been found. Or not yet. The probable-cause crews are continuing search sweeps topside, and ImpSec is now looking everywhere else. Their next task, of course, is to try to trace the couple from the time and place they were last seen, which was several weeks ago and here, apparently. We'll be requesting the cooperation of your department, of course."

"Certainly. This is . . . this is really a very horrifying turn of events. I mean, regardless of one's opinion of the way they chose to pursue their personal choices . . ."