Miles in Love (19 page)

"And what is your opinion, Dr. Soudha? I'd really like to get a sense of the man, and of Trogir. Do you have any ideas?"

Soudha shook his head. "I confess, this turn in their relationship took me by surprise. But I don't pry into my employees' private lives."

"So you've said. But you worked closely with the man for five years. What were his outside interests, his politics, his hobbies, his obsessions?"

"I . . ." Soudha shrugged in frustration. "I can give you his complete work record. Radovas was a quiet sort of fellow, never made trouble, did first-rate technical work—"

"Yes, why did you hire him? Waste Heat Management does not appear to have been his previous specialty."

"Oh, he had a great deal of station expertise—as you may know, getting rid of excess heat topside is a standard engineering challenge. I thought his technical experience might bring some new perspectives to our problems, and I was right. I was very pleased with his work—Section Two of the reports I gave you yesterday were mostly his, if you would like to examine them to get a real sense of the man. Power generation and distribution. Hydraulics, in Section Three, was mostly mine. The basis of heat exchange through liquid transfer is most promising—"

"I've looked over your report, thanks."

Soudha looked startled. "All of it? I had really understood Dr. Vorthys would be wanting it. I'm afraid it's a bit thick on the technical detail."

Oh, sure, I speed-read all two hundred thousand words before bed last night.
Miles smiled blandly. "I accept your evaluation of Dr. Radovas's technical competence. But if he was so good, why did he leave? Was he bored, happy, frustrated? Why did this change in his personal circumstances lead to change in his work? I don't see a necessary connection."

"For that," said Soudha, "I'm afraid you will have to ask Marie Trogir. I strongly suspect the driving force in this peculiar decision came from her, though they both resigned and left together. She had far less to lose, leaving here, in pay and seniority and status."

"Tell me more about her."

"Well, I truly can't. Barto hired her himself and worked with her on a daily basis. She barely came to my attention. Her technical ability appears to have been adequate—although, come to think of it, those evaluations were all supplied by Barto. I don't know." Soudha rubbed his forehead. "This is all pretty upsetting. Barto, dead.
Why?
" The distress in his voice seemed genuine to Miles's experienced ear, but his shock appeared more surprise than the deep grief from loss of a close friend; Miles would, perhaps, have to look elsewhere for the insights into Radovas he now sought.

"I'd like to examine Dr. Radovas's office and work areas."

"Oh. I'm afraid his office was cleared and reassigned."

"Have you replaced him?"

"Not yet. I'm still collecting applications. I hope to start interviewing soon."

"Radovas must have been friends with somebody. I want to speak with his coworkers."

"Of course, my Lord Auditor. When would you like me to set up appointments?"

"I thought I'd just drop in."

Soudha pursed his lips. "Several of my people are on vacation, and several more are out at the experiment station, running a small test this morning. I don't expect them to be done before dark. But I can get you started with the people here, and have some more in by the time you're done with the first."

"All right . . . ."

With the air of a man throwing a sacrifice to the volcano god, Soudha called in two subordinates, whom Miles interviewed one at a time in the same conference chamber they'd used day before yesterday for the VIP briefing. Arozzi was a younger man, scarcely older than Miles, an engineer who was temporarily scrambling to take over Radovas's abandoned duties, and perhaps, he hinted, hoping for promotion into the dead man's shoes. Would my Lord Auditor like to see some of his work? No, he had not been close friends with his senior. No, the office romance had been a surprise to him, but then Radovas had been a private sort of fellow, very discreet. Trogir had been a bright woman, bright and beautiful; Arozzi had no trouble appreciating what Radovas had seen in her. What had she seen in Radovas? He had no idea, but then, he wasn't a woman. Radovas dead? Dear God . . . No, he had no idea what the man had been doing topside. Maybe the couple had been trying to emigrate?

Cappell, the department's resident mathematician, was hardly more useful. He was a bit older than Arozzi, and a trifle more cynical. He took in the news of Radovas's death with less change of expression than either Arozzi or Soudha. He hadn't been close to Radovas or Trogir either, not on a social basis, though he worked often with the engineer, yes, checking calculations, devising projections. He'd be glad to show my Lord Auditor a few thousand more pages of his work. No? What was Trogir like? Well-enough looking, he supposed, but rather sly. Look what she'd done to poor Radovas, eh? Did he think Trogir might be dead as well? No, women were like cats, they landed on their feet. No, he'd never actually experimented with testing that old saying on live cats; he didn't have any pets himself. Nor a wife. No, he didn't want a kitten, thank you for the offer, my Lord Auditor . . . .

Miles met again with Tuomonen at lunchtime over mediocre cafeteria food in the executive dining room off the building's atrium; the displaced executives were forced to go elsewhere. They exchanged reports on their morning's conversations. Tuomonen hadn't found any breakthroughs either.

"No one expressed a dislike of Trogir, but she seems damned elusive," Tuomonen noted. "The Waste Heat department has a reputation for keeping itself to itself, apparently. The one woman in Waste Heat who was supposed to be her friend didn't have much to say. I wonder if I ought to get a female interrogator?"

"Mm, maybe. Though I thought Komarrans were supposed to be more egalitarian about such things. Maybe a Komarran female interrogator?" Miles sighed. "D'you know that according to the latest statistics, half of the Barrayaran women who take advanced schooling on Komarr don't go home again? There's a small group of alarmist bachelors who are trying to get the Emperor to deny them exit visas. Gregor has declined to hear their petition."

Tuomonen smiled slightly. "Well, there's more than one solution to that problem."

"Yes, how have your Komarran in-laws taken the announcement of the Emperor's betrothal to the Toscane heiress?"

"Some of them think it's romantic. Some of them think it's sharp business practice on Emperor Gregor's part. Coming from Komarrans, that's a warm compliment, by the way."

"Technically, Gregor owns the planet Sergyar. You might point that out to anyone who theorizes he's marrying Laisa for her money."

Tuomonen grinned. "Yes, but is Sergyar a
liquid
asset?"

"Only in the sense of Imperial funds gurgling down the drain, according to my father. But that's an entire other set of problems. And what do the Barrayaran expatriates around here think of the marriage?"

"In general, it's favored." Tuomonen smiled dryly into his coffee cup. "Five years ago, my colleagues thought I was cutting my career throat by my own marriage. I'd never get promoted out of Serifosa, they said. Now I am suspected of secret genius, and they've taken to regarding me with wary respect. I think . . . it's best if I be amused."

"Heh. You are a wise man, Captain." Miles finished off a starchy and gelid square of pasta-and-something, and chased it with the last of his cooling coffee. "So what did Trogir's friends think of Radovas?"

"Well, he's certainly managed to give a consistent impression of himself. Nice, conscientious guy, didn't make waves, kept to Waste Heat, his elopement a surprise to most. One woman thought it was your math fellow Cappell who was sweet on Trogir, not Radovas."

"He sounded more sour than sweet to me. Frustrated, perhaps?" Miles's back-brain sketched a nice, straightforward scenario of jealous murder, involving pushing Radovas out an airlock on a trajectory that only just by coincidence matched that of some soletta debris.
You can wish
. And anyway, it seemed more logical that any homicidal maniac wishing to clear a path to Trogir's side ought to have started with Andro Farr, and what the hell did any of this tragic romance have to do with an ore freighter swinging off course and smashing into the soletta array anyway? Unless the jealous maniac
was
Andro Farr . . . the Serifosa Dome police were supposed to be looking into that possibility.

Tuomonen grunted. "I will say, I got more of a sense of Trogir's personality from the few minutes I spent with Farr than I have from the rest of this crew all morning. I want to talk with him again, I think."

"
I
want to go topside, dammit. But whatever the end of the story is, up there, it certainly has to have begun here. Well . . . onward, I guess."

Soudha supplied Miles with more human sacrifices in the form of employees called back from the experiment station. They all seemed more interested in their work than in office gossip, but perhaps, Miles reflected, that was an observer-effect. By late afternoon, Miles was reduced to amusing himself wandering around the project offices and terrorizing employees by taking over their comconsoles at random and sampling data, and occasionally emitting ambiguous little "Hm . . ." noises as they watched him in fearful fascination. This lacked even the challenge of dissecting Madame Vorsoisson's comconsole, since the government-issue machines all opened everything immediately to the overrides in his Auditor's seal, regardless of their security classification. He mainly learned that terraforming was an enormous project with a centuries-long scientific and bureaucratic history, and that any individual who attempted to sort clues through sheer mass data assimilation had to be frigging insane.

Now,
delegating
that task, on the other hand . . . 
Who do I hate enough in ImpSec?

He was still pondering this question as he browsed through the files on Venier's comconsole in the Administrator's outer office. The nervous Venier had fled after about the fourth "Hm," apparently unable to stand the suspense. Tien Vorsoisson, who had intelligently left Miles pretty much to his own devices all day, poked his head around the corner and offered a tentative smile.

"My Lord Auditor? This is the hour at which I normally go home. Do you wish anything else from me?"

Departing employees had been trickling past the open doorway for the past several minutes, and office lights had been going out all down the corridor. Miles sat back and stretched. "I don't think so, Administrator. I want to look at a few more files, and talk to Captain Tuomonen. Why don't you go on. Don't wait your dinner." A mental picture of Madame Vorsoisson, moving gracefully about preparing delectable aromatic food for her husband's return, flashed unbidden in his brain. He suppressed it. "I'll be along later to collect my things."
Or better yet . . . 
"Or I may send one of Tuomonen's corporals for them. Give your lady wife my best thanks for the hospitality of her household." There. That finished that. He wouldn't even have to say good-bye to her.

"Certainly, my Lord Auditor. Do you, ah, expect to be here again tomorrow?"

"That rather depends on what turns up overnight. Good evening, Administrator."

"Good evening, my lord." Tien withdrew quietly.

A few minutes later, Tuomonen wandered in, his hands full of data disks. "Finding anything, my lord?"

"I got all excited for a moment when I found a personal seal, but it turned out to be just Venier's file of Barrayaran jokes. Some of them are pretty good. Do you want a copy?"

"Is that the one that starts out: `ImpSec Officer: What do you mean he got away? Didn't I tell you to cover all the exits?—ImpSec Guard: I did sir! He walked out through one of the entrances.' "

"Yep. And the next one goes, `A Cetagandan, a Komarran, and a Barrayaran walked into a genetic counselor's clinic—' "

Tuomonen grimaced. "I've seen that collection. My mother-in-law sent it to me."

"Ratting on her disaffected Komarran comrades, was she?"

"I don't think that was her intent, no. I believe it was more of a personal message." Tuomonen looked around the empty office and sighed. "So, my Lord Auditor. When do we break out the fast-penta?"

"I've found nothing, here, really." Miles frowned thoughtfully. "I've found
too much
of nothing here. I may have to sleep on this overnight, let my back-brain play with it. The library analysis may provide some direction. And I certainly want to see Waste Heat's experiment station tomorrow morning, before I go back topside. Ah, Captain, it's tempting. Call out the guards, descend in force, freeze everything, full financial audit, fast-penta everyone in sight . . . turn this place upside down and shake it. But I need a
reason
."

"
I
would need a reason," said Tuomonen. "With full documentation, and my career on the line if I spent that much of ImpSec's budget and guessed wrong. But you, on the other hand, speak with the Emperor's Voice.
You
could call it a drill." There was no mistaking the envy in his voice.

"I could call it a quadrille." Miles smiled wryly. "It may come to that."

"I could call HQ, have them put a flying squad on alert," murmured Tuomonen suggestively.

"I'll let you know by tomorrow morning," Miles promised.

"I need to stop by my own office and tend to some routine matters," said Tuomonen. "Would you care to accompany me, my Lord Auditor?"

So you can guard me at your convenience?
"I still want to potter around here a bit. There's something . . . something that's bothering me, and I haven't figured out what it is yet. Though I would like a chance to talk to the Professor on a secured channel before the evening is out."

"Perhaps, when you're ready to leave, you could call me and I can send one of my men to escort you."

Miles considered refusing this ingenuous offer, but on the other hand, they could swing by the Vorsoissons' apartment and collect Miles's clothes on the return trip; Tuomonen would have his security, and Miles would have a minion to carry his luggage, a win-win scenario. And having the guard in tow would give Miles an excuse not to linger. "All right."