Miles in Love (24 page)

"I would scarcely think so!"

He looked around, squinting, and added abruptly, "Power plant!"

"What about it?" asked Ekaterin.

"Gotta check before the troops arrive. I spent a lot of time wondering if it might have been sabotaged, when I was tied up out there."

His legs were still not working right. He almost fell over again as he tried to turn on his heel; she rose and just caught him, under his elbow.

"Good," he said vaguely to her, and pointed. "That way."

She was evidently drafted as support. He hobbled off in determination, clinging to her arm without apology. The forced action actually helped her to recover, if not calm, a sort of tenuous physical coherence; her shudders damped out, and her incipient nausea passed, leaving her belly feeling hot and odd. Another pedestrian tube led down to the power plant, next to the river. The river was the largest in the Sector, and the proximate reason for siting the experiment station here. By Barrayaran standards it would have been called a creek. Vorkosigan barged awkwardly around the power plant's control room, examining panels and readouts. "Nothing
looks
abnormal," he muttered. "I wonder why they didn't set it to self-destruct?
I
would have . . . ." He fell into a station chair.

She pulled up another one, and sat opposite him, watching him fearfully. "What
happened
?"

"I—we came out, Tien brought me out here—how the devil did
you
come here?"

"Lena Foscol called me at home, and told me Tien wanted a ride. She almost didn't catch me. I'd been about to leave. She didn't even tell me
you
were out here. You might still be . . ."

"No . . . no, I'm almost certain she'd have made some other arrangement, if she'd missed you altogether." He sat up straighter, or tried to. "What time is it now?"

"A little before 2100."

"I . . . would have guessed it was much later. They stunned us, you see. I don't know how long . . . What time did she call you?"

"It was just after 1900 hours."

His eyes squeezed shut, then opened again. "It was too late. It was already too late by then, do you understand?" he asked urgently. His hand jerked toward hers, on her knee as she leaned toward him to catch his hoarse words, but then fell back.

"No . . ."

"There was something questionable going on in the Waste Heat department. Your husband brought me out here to show me—well, I don't quite know what he thought he was going to show me, but we ran headlong into Soudha and his accomplices in the process of decamping. Soudha got the drop on me—stunned us both. I came to, chained to that railing out there. I don't think—I don't know . . . . I don't think they meant to kill your husband. He hadn't checked his breath mask, y'see. His reservoirs were almost empty. The Komarrans didn't check it either, before they left us. I didn't know, no one did."

"Komarrans wouldn't," Ekaterin said woodenly. "Their mask-check procedures are ingrained by the time they're three years old. They'd never imagine an adult would go outside the dome with deficient equipment." Her hands clenched, in her lap. She could picture Tien's death now.

"It was . . . quick," Vorkosigan offered. "At least that."

It was not. Neither quick nor clean
. "Please do not lie to me. Please do not ever lie to me."

"All right . . ." he said slowly. "But I don't think . . . I don't
think
it was murder. To set up that scene, and then call
you
 . . ." He shook his head. "Manslaughter at most. Death by misadventure."

"Death from stupidity," she said bitterly. "Consistent to the end."

He glanced up at her, his eyes not so much startled as aware, and questioning. "Ah?"

"Lord Auditor Vorkosigan." She swallowed; her throat was so tight it felt like a muscle spasm. The silence in the building, and outside, was eerie in its emptiness. She and Vorkosigan might as well have been the only two people left alive on the planet. "You should know, when I said Foscol called as I was leaving . . . I was
leaving
. Leaving Tien. I'd told him so, when he came home from the department tonight, and just before he went back, I suppose, to get you. What did he do?"

He took this in without much response at first, as if thinking it over. "All right," he echoed himself softly at last. He glanced across at her. "Basically, he came in babbling about some embezzlement scheme which had been going on in Waste Heat Management, apparently for quite some time. He sounded me out about declaring him an Imperial Witness, which he seemed to think would save him from prosecution. It's not quite that simple. I didn't commit myself."

"Tien would hear what he wanted to hear," she said softly.

"I . . . so I gathered." He hesitated, watching her face. "How long . . . what do you know about it?"

"And how long have I known it?" Ekaterin grimaced, and rubbed her face free of the lingering irritation of her own mask. "Not as long as I should have. Tien had been talking for months . . . You have to understand, he was irrationally afraid of anyone finding out about his Vorzohn's Dystrophy."

"I actually do understand that," he offered tentatively.

"Yes . . . and no. It's Tien's older brother's fault, in part. I've cursed the man for years. When
his
symptoms began, he took the Old Vor way out and crashed his lightflyer. It made an impression on Tien he never shook off. Set an impossible example. We'd had no idea his family carried the mutation, till Tien, who was his brother's executor, was going through the records and effects, and we realized both that the accident was deliberate, and why. It was just after Nikki was born . . ."

"But wouldn't it have . . . I'd wondered when I read your file—the defect should have turned up in the gene scan, before the embryo was started in the uterine replicator. Is Nikki affected, or . . . ?"

"Nikki was a body-birth. No gene scan. The Old Vor way. Old Vor have
good
blood, you know, no need to check anything."

He looked as if he'd bitten into a lemon. "Whose bright idea was
that
?"

"I don't . . . quite remember how it was decided. Tien and I decided together. I was young, we were just married, I had a lot of stupid romantic ideas . . . I suppose it seemed heroic to me at the time."

"How old were you?"

"Twenty."

"Ah." His mouth quirked in a expression she could not quite interpret, a sad mixture of irony and sympathy. "Yes."

Obscurely encouraged, she went on. "Tien's scheme for dealing with the dystrophy without anyone ever finding out he had it was to go get galactic treatment, somewhere far from the Imperium. It made it much more expensive than it needed to be. We'd been trying to save for years, but somehow, something always went wrong. We never made much progress. But for the past six or eight months, Tien's been telling me to stop worrying, he had it under control. Except . . . Tien always talks like that, so I scarcely paid attention. Then last night, after you went to sleep . . . I heard you tell him straight out you wanted to make a surprise inspection of his department today, I
heard
you—he got up in the night and called Administrator Soudha, to warn him. I listened . . . I heard enough to gather they had some sort of payroll falsification scheme going, and I'm very much afraid . . . no. I'm certain Tien was taking bribes. Because—" she stopped and took a breath "—I broke into Tien's comconsole this morning and looked at his financial records." She glanced up, to see how Vorkosigan would take this. His mouth renewed the crooked quirk. "I'm sorry I ripped at you the other day, for looking through mine," she said humbly.

His mouth opened, and closed; he merely gave her a little encouraging wave of his fingers and slumped down a bit more in his chair, listening with an air of uttermost attention.
Listening.

She went on hurriedly, not before her nerve broke, for she scarcely felt anything now, but before she dragged to a halt from sheer exhaustion. "He'd had at least forty thousand marks that I couldn't see where they'd come from. Not from his salary, certainly."

"Had?"

"If the information on the comconsole was right, he'd taken all forty thousand and borrowed sixty more, and lost it all on Komarran trade fleet shares."

"
All?
"

"Well, no, not quite all. About three-quarters of it." At his astonished look, she added, "Tien's luck has always been like that."

"I always used to say you made your own luck. Though I've been forced to eat those words often enough, I don't say it so much anymore."

"Well . . . I think it must be true, or how else could his luck have been so
consistently
bad? The only common factor in all the chaos
was
Tien." She leaned her head back wearily. "Though I suppose it might have been me, somehow."
Tien often said it was me.

After a little silence, he said hesitantly, "Did you love your husband, Madame Vorsoisson?"

She didn't want to answer this. The truth made her ashamed. But she was done with dissimulation. "I suppose I did, once. In the beginning. I can hardly remember anymore. But I couldn't stop . . . caring for him. Cleaning up after him. Except my caring got slower and slower, and finally it . . . stopped. Too late. Or maybe too soon, I don't know." But if, of course, she had not broken from Tien just then, in just that way, he would not tonight have . . . and, and, and, along the whole chain of events that led to this moment. That
if-only
could, of course, be said equally for any link in the chain. Not more, not less. Not repairable. "I thought, if I let go, he would fall." She stared at her hands. "Eventually. I didn't expect it to happen so soon."

It began to be borne in upon her what a mess Tien's death was going to leave in her lap. She would be trading the painful legalities of separation for the equally painful and difficult legalities of sorting out his probably bankrupt estate. And what was she supposed to do about his body, or any kind of funeral, and how to notify his mother, and . . . yet solving the worst problem without Tien seemed already a thousand times easier than solving the simplest
with
Tien. No more deferential negotiations for permission or approval or consensus. She could just
do
it. She felt . . . like a patient coming out of some paralysis, stretching her arms wide for the first time, and surprised to discover they were strong.

She frowned in puzzlement. "Will there be charges? Against Tien?"

Vorkosigan shrugged. "It is not customary to try the dead, though I believe it was done occasionally in the Time of Isolation. Lord Vorventa the Twice-Hung springs to mind. No. There will be investigations, there will be reports, oh my head the reports, ImpSec's and my own and possibly the Serifosa Sector's security—I anticipate argument over jurisdiction—there may be testimony required of you in the prosecution of other persons . . ." He broke off, to hitch himself around with difficulty in his chair, and shove a now somewhat less stiff-from-cold hand into his pocket. "Persons who I suppose got away with my stunner . . ." His expression changed to one of dismay, and he spasmed to his feet and turned out both his trouser pockets, then checked his jacket, shucked it off, and patted his gray tunic. "
Damn
."

"What?" asked Ekaterin in alarm.

"I think the bastards took my Auditor's seal. Unless it just fell out of my pocket, somewhere in all the horsing around tonight. Oh, God. It'll open any government or security comconsole in the Empire." He took a deep breath, then brightened. "On the other hand, it has a locator-circuit. ImpSec can trace it, if they're close enough—ImpSec can trace
them
. Ha!" With difficulty, he forced his red and swollen fingers to open a channel on his comm link. "Tuomonen?" he inquired.

"We're on our way, my lord," Tuomonen's voice came back instantly. "We're in the air, about halfway there I estimate. Will you
please
leave your channel open?"

"Listen. I think my assailants have taken off with my Auditor's seal. Delegate someone to start trying to track it at once. Find it and you'll find them, if it's not just been dropped around here somewhere. You can check that possibility when you get here."

Vorkosigan then insisted on a tour of the building, drafting Ekaterin once more as occasional support, though he stumbled very little now. He frowned at the melted comconsole, and at the empty rooms, and stared with narrowed eyes at the jumbles of equipment. Tuomonen and his men arrived just as they were reentering the lobby.

Lord Vorkosigan's lips twitched in bemusement as two half-armored guards, stunners at the ready, leaped through the airseal door. They gave Vorkosigan anxious nods, which he acknowledged with a wry salutelike gesture, then pelted after each other through the facility for a rather noisy security check. Vorkosigan hitched himself into a deliberately more relaxed posture, leaning against an upholstered chair. Captain Tuomonen, another Barrayaran soldier in half-armor, and three men in medical gear followed into the lobby.

"My lord!" said Tuomonen, pulling down his breath mask. His tone of voice sounded familiarly maternal to Ekaterin's ear, halfway between
Thank God you're safe
and
I'm going to strangle you with my bare hands
.

"Good evening, Captain," said Vorkosigan genially. "So glad to see you."

"You didn't notify me!"

"Yes, it was entirely my mistake, and I'll be certain to note your exoneration in my report," Vorkosigan said soothingly.

"It's not that, dammit!" Tuomonen strode over to him, motioning a medic in his wake. He took in Vorkosigan's macerated wrists and bloody hands. "Who did that to you?"

"I did it to myself, rather, I'm afraid." Vorkosigan's pose of studied ease slipped back into his original grimness. "It could have been worse, as I will show you directly. Around back. I want you to record everything, a complete scan. Anything you're in doubt of, leave for the experts from HQ. I want a top forensics team scrambled from Solstice immediately. Two teams, one for out here, one for those royally buggered comconsoles at the Terraforming offices. But first, I think," he glanced at the medtechs, and at Ekaterin, "we should get Administrator Vorsoisson's body down."