Miles in Love (39 page)

Her aunt had grandchildren, Ekaterin thought, yet still seemed late-middle-aged rather than old. In the Time of Isolation, a Barrayaran woman would have been old at forty-five, waiting for death—if she made it even that far. In the last century, women's life expectancies had doubled, and might even be headed toward the triple-portion taken for granted by such galactics as the Betans. Had Ekaterin's own mother's early death given her a false sense of time, and of timing?
I have two lives for my foremothers' one.
Two lives in which to accomplish her dual goals. If one could stretch them out, instead of piling them atop one another . . . And the arrival of the uterine replicator had changed everything, too, profoundly. Why had she wasted a decade trying to play the game by the old rules? Yet a decade at twenty did not seem quite a straight trade for a decade at ninety. She needed to think this through . . . .

Away from the docks and locks area, the crowds thinned to an occasional passer-by. The station did not run so much on a day-and-night rhythm, as on a ships in dock, everybody switch, load and unload like mad because time was money, ships-out, quiet falls again pattern which did not necessarily match the Solstice-standard time kept throughout Komarr local-space.

Ekaterin turned up a narrow utility corridor she'd discovered earlier which provided a shortcut to the food concourse and her hostel beyond. One of the kiosks baked traditional Barrayaran breads and cannily vented their ovens into the concourse, for advertising; Ekaterin could smell yeast and cardamom and hot brillberry syrup. The combination was redolent of Barrayaran Winterfair, and a wave of homesickness shook her.

Coming down the otherwise-unpeopled corridor toward them along with the aromas was a man, wearing stationer-style dock-worker coveralls. The commercial logo on his left breast read SOUTHPORT TRANSPORT LTD., done in tilted, speedy-looking letters with little lines shooting off. He carried two large bags crammed with meal-boxes. He stopped short and stared in shock, as did she. It was one of the engineers from Waste Heat Management—Arozzi was his name.

He recognized her at once, too, unfortunately. "Madame Vorsoisson!" And, more weakly, "Imagine meeting you here." He stared around with a frantic, trapped look. "Is the Administrator with you . . . ?"

Ekaterin was just mustering a plan for,
I'm sorry, I don't believe I know you?
followed by dancing around him blankly, walking away without looking back, turning the corner, and dashing madly for the nearest emergency call box. But Arozzi dropped his bags, dug a stunner out of his pocket, and fumbled it right way round before she'd made it any further than, "I'm sorry—"

"So am I," he said with evident sincerity, and fired.

Ekaterin's eyes opened on a cockeyed view of the corridor ceiling. Her whole body felt like pins and needles, and refused to obey her urgent summons to move. Her tongue felt like a wadded-up sock, stuffed in her mouth.

"Don't make me stun you," Arozzi was pleading with someone. "I will."

"I believe you," came Aunt Vorthys's breathless voice, from just behind Ekaterin's ear. Ekaterin realized she was now aboard the float pallet, half-sitting up against her aunt's chest, her legs hung limply over the rearranged luggage in front of her. The Professora's hand gripped her shoulder. Arozzi, after a desperate look around, set his meal-boxes in her lap, picked up the float pallet's lead, and started off down the corridor as fast as the whining, overburdened pallet would follow.

Help
, thought Ekaterin.
I'm being kidnapped by a Komarran terrorist.
Her cry, as they turned down another corridor and passed a woman in a food service uniform, came out a low moan. The woman barely glanced at them. Not an unusual sight, this, two very jumpsick transients being towed to their connecting ship, or to a hostel, or maybe to the infirmary. Or the morgue . . . Heavy stun, Ekaterin had been given to understand, knocked people out for hours. This must be light stun. Was this a favor? She could not feel her limbs, but she could feel her heart beating, thudding heavily in her chest as adrenaline struggled uselessly with her unresponsive peripheral nervous system.

More turns, more drops, more levels. Was her map cube still in her pocket? They passed out of passenger-country, into more utilitarian levels devoted to freight and ship repair. At last they turned in at a door labeled SOUTHPORT TRANSPORT, LTD. in the same logo style as on the coveralls, and AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY in larger red print. Arozzi led them around a turn, through some more airseal doors, and down a ramp into a large loading bay. It smelled cold, all oil and ozone and a sharp sick scent of plastics. They were at the outermost skin of the station, anyway, whatever direction they'd come. She'd seen the Southport logo before, Ekaterin realized; it was one of those minor, shoestring-budgeted local-space shipping companies that eked out a living in the few interstices left by the big Komarran family firms.

A tall, squarely-built man, also in worker's coveralls, trod across the bay toward them, his footsteps echoing. It was Dr. Soudha. "Dinner at last," he began, then he caught sight of the float pallet. "What the hell . . . ? Roz, what is this? Madame Vorsoisson!" He stared at her in astonishment. She stared back at him in muzzy loathing.

"I ran smack into her when I was coming away from the food concourse," explained Arozzi, grounding the float pallet. "I couldn't help it. She recognized me. I couldn't let her run and report, so I stunned her and brought her here."

"Roz, you fool! The last thing we need right now is hostages! She's sure to be missed, and how soon?"

"I didn't have a choice!"

"Who's this other lady?" He gave the Professora a weirdly polite, harried, how-d'you-do nod.

"My name is Helen Vorthys," said the Professora.

"Not Lord Auditor Vorthys's wife—?"

"Yes." Her voice was cold and steady, but as sensation returned Ekaterin could feel the slight tremble in her body.

Soudha swore under his breath.

Ekaterin swallowed, ran her tongue around her mouth, and struggled to sit up. Arozzi rescued his boxes, then belatedly drew his stunner again. A woman, attracted by the raised voices, approached around a stack of equipment. Middle-aged, with frizzy gray-blond hair, she also wore Southport Transport coveralls. Ekaterin recognized Lena Foscol, the accountant.

"Ekaterin," husked Aunt Vorthys, "who are these people? Do you know them?"

Ekaterin said loudly, if a little thickly, "They're the criminals who stole a huge sum of money from the Terraforming Project and murdered Tien."

Foscol, startled, said "What? We did no such thing! He was alive when I left him!"

"Left him chained to a railing with an empty oxygen canister, which you never checked. And then called
me
to come get him. An hour and a half too late." Ekaterin spat scorn. "An exquisite setup. Madame. Mad Emperor Yuri would have considered it a work of art."

"Oh," Foscol breathed. She looked sick. "Is this true? You're lying. No one would go out-dome with an empty canister!"

"You knew Tien," said Ekaterin. "What do you think?"

Foscol fell silent.

Soudha was pale. "I'm sorry, Madame Vorsoisson. If that was what happened, it was an accident. We intended him to live, I swear to you."

Ekaterin let her lips thin, and said nothing. Sitting up, with her legs swung out to the deck, she was able to get a less dizzying view of the loading bay. It was some thirty meters across and twenty deep, strongly lit, with catwalks and looping power lines running across the ceiling, and a glass-walled control booth on the opposite side from the broad entry ramp down which they'd come. Equipment lay scattered here and there around a huge object dominating the center of the chamber. Its main part seemed to consist of a wriggly trumpet-shaped cone made of some dark, polished substance—metal? glass?—resting in heavily padded clamps on a grounded float cradle. A lot of power connections slotted in at its narrow end. The mouth of the bell was more than twice as tall as Ekaterin. Was this the "secret weapon" Lord Vorkosigan had posited?

And
how
had they ever got it, and themselves, past the ImpSec manhunt? ImpSec was surely checking every shuttle that left the planetary surface—now, Ekaterin realized. This thing could have been transported weeks ago, before the hunt even started. And ImpSec was probably concentrating its attention on jumpships and their passengers, not on freight tugs trapped in local space. Soudha's conspirators had had years to develop their false ID. They acted as though they owned this place—maybe they did.

Foscol spoke to Ekaterin's fraught silence, almost as tight-lipped as Ekaterin herself. "We are not murderers. Not like you Barrayarans."

"I've never killed anyone in my life. For not-murderers, your body count is getting impressive," Ekaterin shot back. "I don't know what happened to Radovas and Trogir, but what about the six poor people on the soletta crew, and that ore freighter pilot—and Tien. That's eight at least, maybe ten."
Maybe twelve, if I don't watch my step.

"I was a student at Solstice University during the Revolt," Foscol snarled, clearly very rattled by the news about Tien. "I saw friends and classmates shot in the streets, during the riots. I remember the out-gassing of the Green Park Dome. Don't you dare—a Barrayaran!—sit there and make mouth at me about murder."

"I was five years old at the time of the Komarr Revolt," said Ekaterin wearily. "What do you think I ought to have done about it, eh?"

"If you want to go back in history," the Professora put in dryly, "you Komarrans were the people who let the Cetagandans in on us. Five million Barrayarans died before the first Komarran ever did. Crying for your past dead is a piece of one-downsmanship a Komarran cannot win."

"That was longer ago," said Foscol a little desperately.

"Ah. I see. So the difference between a criminal and a hero is the
order
in which their vile crimes are committed," said the Professora, in a voice dripping false cordiality. "And justice comes with a sell-by date. In that case, you'd better hurry. You wouldn't want your heroism to spoil."

Foscol drew herself up. "We aren't planning to kill anyone. All of us here saw the futility of
that
kind of heroics twenty-five years ago."

"Things don't seem to be running exactly according to plan, then, do they?" murmured Ekaterin, rubbing her face. It was becoming less numb. She wished she could say the same for her wits. "I notice you don't deny being thieves."

"Just getting some of our own back," glinted Foscol.

"The money poured into Komarran terraforming doesn't do Barrayar any direct good. You were stealing from your own grandchildren."

"What we took, we took to make an investment for Komarr that will pay back incalculable benefit to our future generations," Foscol returned.

Had Ekaterin's words stung her? Maybe. Soudha looked as though he was thinking furiously, eyeing the two Barrayaran women.
Keep them arguing
, Ekaterin thought. People couldn't argue and think at the same time, or at least, a lot of people she'd met seemed to have that trouble. If she could keep them talking while her body recovered a little more from the stun, she could . . . what? Her eye fell on a fire and emergency alarm at the base of the entry ramp, maybe ten steps away. Alarm, false alarm, the attention of irate authorities drawn to Southport Transport . . . Could Arozzi stun her again in less than ten steps? She leaned back against her aunt's legs, trying to look very limp, and let one hand curl around the Professora's ankle, as if for comfort. The novel device loomed silently and mysteriously in the center of the chamber.

"So what are you planning to do," Ekaterin said sarcastically, "shut down the wormhole jump and cut us off? Or are you going to make—" Her voice died as the shocked silence her words had created penetrated. She stared around at the three Komarrans, staring at her in horror. In a suddenly smaller voice she said, "You can't do that. Can you?"

There was a military maneuver for rendering a wormhole temporarily impassable, which involved sacrificing a ship—and its pilot—at a mid-jump node. But the disruption damped out in a short time. Wormholes opened and closed, yes, but they were astrographic features like stars, involving time scales and energies beyond the present human capacity to control. "You can't do that," Ekaterin said more firmly. "Whatever disruption you create, sooner or later it will become passable again, and then you'll be in twice as much trouble as before." Unless Soudha's conspiracy was just the tip of an iceberg, with some huge coordinated plan behind it for all of Komarr to rise against Barrayaran rule in a new Komarr Revolt. More war, more blood under glass—the domes of Komarr might give her claustrophobia, but the thought of her Komarran neighbors going down to destruction in yet another round of this endless struggle made her sick to her stomach. The revolt had done vile things to Barrayarans, too. If new hostilities were ignited and went on long enough, Nikki would come of an age to be sucked into them . . . . "You can't hold it closed. You can't hold out here. You have no defenses."

"We can, and we will," said Soudha firmly.

Foscol's brown eyes shone. "We're going to close the wormhole
permanently.
We'll get rid of Barrayar forever, without firing a shot. A completely bloodless revolution, and there will be nothing they can do about it."

"An engineer's revolution," said Soudha, and a ghost of a smile curved his lips.

Ekaterin's heart hammered, and the echoing loading bay seemed to tilt. She swallowed, and spoke with effort: "You're planning to shut the wormhole to Barrayar with the Butcher of Komarr and three-fourths of Barrayar's space-based military forces on
this side
, and you actually think you're going to get a
bloodless
revolution? And what about all the people on Sergyar? You are idiots!"

"The original plan," said Soudha tightly, "was to strike at the time of the Emperor's wedding, when the Butcher of Komarr and three-fourths of the space forces would have been safely in Barrayar orbit."