Miles in Love (45 page)

Vorgier stiffened. "My Lord Auditor. I appreciate your concern, but I believe this will be most quickly and effectively concluded as a military operation. Civilian authority can help best by staying out of the way and letting the professionals do their job."

The ImpSec deck had dealt him two men in a row of exceptional competence, Tuomonen and Gibbs; why, oh why, couldn't good things come in threes? They were supposed to, dammit. "This is
my
operation, Captain, and I will answer personally to the Emperor for every detail of it. I spent the last ten years as an ImpSec galactic agent and I've dealt with more damned
situations
than anyone else on Simon Illyan's roster and I know just
exactly
how fucked-up a
professional
operation can get." He tapped his chest. "So climb down off your Vor horse and brief me properly."

Vorgier looked considerably taken aback; Husavi tamped out a smile, which told Miles all too much about how things had been going here. To Vorgier's credit, he recovered almost instantly, and said, "Come this way, my Lord Auditor, to the operations center. I'll show you the details, and you can judge for yourself."

Better
. They started off down the corridor, almost quickly enough for Miles's taste. "Has there been any change or increase in power-draw into the Southport Transport area?"

"Not yet," Husavi answered. "As you ordered, my engineers shut down their lines to just that necessary to run their life support. I don't know how much power the Komarrans are able to tap from the local system freighter they have docked there. Soudha has said if we try to capture or remove the ship, they'll open the airlock on the Vor ladies, so we've waited. Our remote sensors don't indicate any unusual readings from there yet."

"Good." Baffling, but good. Miles could not imagine why the Komarrans hadn't switched on their wormhole-collapsing device yet, in a last-ditch effort to accomplish their long-sought goal. Had Soudha figured out its inherent defect? Corrected it, or tried to? Was it not quite ready yet, and the Komarrans even now frantically preparing it? In any case, once it was powered up they were all in deep-deep, because the Professor and Riva had concluded, with some pretty unreassuring hand-waving, something like a fifty percent probability of an immediate gravitational back-blow from the wormhole the moment it was switched off, ripping the station apart. When Miles had inquired what the technical difference was between
a fifty-fifty chance
and
we don't know
, he hadn't got a straight answer from them. Further theoretical refinements had come to an abrupt halt, when the news had come through about the stand-off here; the Professor was on his way now to the jump point, just a few hours behind Miles.

They turned a corner and entered a lift-tube. Miles asked, "What's the current status of the station evacuation?"

Husavi replied, "We've waved off all incoming ships that could be diverted. A couple had to dock in order to refuel, or they couldn't have made it to an alternate station." He waited till they'd exited into another corridor before continuing. "We've managed to remove most of the transient passengers and about five hundred of our nonessential personnel so far."

"What story are you giving them?"

"We're telling them it's a bomb scare."

"Excellent."
And effectively true.

"Most are cooperating. Some aren't."

"Hm."

"But there's a serious problem with transportation. There are simply not enough ships in range to remove everyone in less than ten hours."

"If the power-draw to the Southport bay spikes suddenly, you'll have to start shuttling people over to the military station." Though Miles was by no means sure the gravitational event, if it occurred, wouldn't suck in and damage or destroy the military station as well. "They'll have to help out."

"Captain Vorgier and I discussed this possibility with the military commander, my lord. He wasn't happy with the prospect of a sudden influx of, um, randomly selected, uncleared persons onto his station."

Miles bet not. "I'll speak with him." He sighed.

Vorgier's "operations center" turned out to be the local ImpSec offices; the central communications chamber did indeed bear a passing resemblance to a warship's tactics room, Miles had to allow. Vorgier called up a holovid display of the Southport docks and locks area, one with rather better technical detail than the one Miles had spent the last hour studying. He ran over the expected placement of his men and the projected timing and technique of his assault. It wasn't a bad plan, as assaults went. In his youth, out on covert ops, Miles had come up with things just as bravura and idiotic on equally short notice. All right . . . more idiotic, he admitted ruefully to himself.
Someday, Miles
, his boss ImpSec Chief Simon Illyan had once said to him,
I hope you live to have a dozen subordinates just like you
. Miles hadn't realized till now that had been a formal curse on Illyan's part.

Vorgier's sales pitch kept fading out in Miles's mind, displaced by an instant-replay of the recording of the last message from Ekaterin, which Vorgier had thoughtfully supplied Miles by tight-beam. He'd memorized every nuance of it in the last three hours.
I'm in a loading bay control booth—they're getting the door open--
She hadn't said anything about the novel device. Unless some report had been going to follow the
Tell Lord Vorkosigan—tell ImpSec—
part, which had been so rudely interrupted by the red-faced Soudha's paw abruptly descending on the comconsole control. Nothing could be seen in the fuzzy background, however computer-enhanced, but the dull control booth. And the mathematician, Cappell, gripping a wrench he looked ready to use for something other than tightening bolts, but evidently hadn't; ImpSec had received vids via the loading bay airlock's safety channel of both women being bundled alive into it, before Soudha had cut off the signal feed. Those brief images too burned in Miles's brain.

"All right, Captain Vorgier," Miles interrupted. "Hold your plan as a possible last resort."

"To be implemented under what circumstances, my Lord Auditor?"

Over my dead body
, Miles did not reply. Vorgier might not understand it wasn't a joke. "Before we start blowing walls down, I want to try to negotiate with Soudha and his friends."

"These are Komarran terrorists. Madmen—you can't negotiate with them!"

The late Baron Ryoval had been a madman. The late Ser Galen had been a madman, without question. And the late General Metzov hadn't exactly been rowing with both oars in the water, either, come to think of it. Miles had to admit, there had been a definite negative trend to all those negotiations. "I'm not without experience in the problem, Vorgier. But I don't think Dr. Soudha is a madman. He's not even a mad scientist. He's merely a very upset engineer. These Komarrans may in fact be the most sensible revolutionaries I've ever met."

He stood a moment, staring unseeing at Vorgier's colorful, ominous tactical display, the logistics of the station evacuation warring in his head with guesses about the Komarrans' state of mind. Delusion, political passion, personality, judgment . . . visions of Ekaterin's terror and despair spun in his back-brain. If so spacious a containment as a Komarran dome gave her claustrophobia . . . 
stop it.
He pictured a thick sheet of glass sliding down between him and that personal maelstrom of anxiety. If his authority here was absolute, so was his obligation to keep his thinking clear.

"Every hour buys lives. We'll play for time. Get me a channel to the military station's commander," Miles ordered. "After that, we'll see whether Soudha will answer his comconsole."

The deliberately blank chamber in which Miles sat might as easily have been on the nearby military station, or a ship lying several thousand kilometers off-station, as the few hundred meters from the Southport bay it actually was. Soudha's location, when his face formed at last over the vid-plate, was not so anonymous; he sat in the same glass-walled control booth from which Ekaterin had sent her alarm. Miles wondered what techs were monitoring the corridors for moves on ImpSec's part, and who was keeping a nervous finger on the personnel airlock's outer door control. Had they arranged it as a dead-man's switch?

Soudha's face was drawn and sincerely weary, no more the bland bluff liar. Lena Foscol sat tensely to the right of his station chair on a rolling stool, looking like some frumpy vizier. Madame Radovas too looked on, her face half-shadowed behind him, and Cappell stood off to the side, almost out of focus. Good. A Komarran stockholders' voting quorum, if he read the signs right. At least they honored his Imperial Auditor's authority to that extent.

"Good evening, Dr. Soudha," Miles began.

"You're out here?" Soudha's brows rose as he took in the lack of transmission lag.

"Yes, well, unlike Administrator Vorsoisson, I got out of my chains at the experiment station alive. I still don't know if you intended me to survive."

"He didn't really die, did he?" Foscol interrupted.

"Oh, yes." Miles made his voice deliberately soft. "I got to watch, just as you arranged. Every filthy minute of it. It was a remarkably ugly death."

She fell silent; Soudha said, "This is all beside the point now. The only message we want to receive from you people is that you have the jumpship ready to transport us to the nearest neutral space—Pol, or Escobar—whereupon you will get your Vor ladies back. If it's not that, I'm cutting this com."

"I have a few pieces of free information for you, first," said Miles. "I don't think they're ones you anticipate."

Soudha's hand hovered. "Go on."

"I'm afraid your wormhole-collapser no longer qualifies as a secret weapon. We caught up with your specs on file at Bollen Design. Professor Vorthys invited Dr. Riva, of Solstice University, in to consult. Are you aware of her reputation?"

Soudha nodded warily; Cappell's eyes widened. Madame Radovas stared wearily. Foscol looked deeply suspicious.

"Well, putting together your specs, the data from the soletta accident, and Riva's physics—there was a mathematician by the name of Dr. Youell in there too, if the name means anything to you—the Empire's top failure analyst and the Empire's top five-space expert have concluded that you did not, in fact, manage to invent a wormhole-collapser. What you managed to invent was a wormhole-boomerang. Riva says that when the five-space waves amplified the wormhole's resonance past its phase boundaries, instead of collapsing, the wormhole returned the energy to three-space in the form of a gravitational pulse. Tangling with this pulse was what destroyed the soletta array and the ore ship, and—I'm sorry, Madame Radovas—killed Dr. Radovas and Marie Trogir. The probable-cause crew finally found her body a few hours ago, I regret to report, wrapped up in some of the wreckage they'd retrieved almost a week back."

Only a puff of breath from Cappell marked his grief, but water glittered in his eyes.
Check
, thought Miles.
I thought he'd protested too much
. Nobody looked surprised, merely oppressed.

"So if you succeed in getting your thing working, what you will actually do is destroy this station, the five thousand or so people aboard, and yourselves. And tomorrow morning, Barrayar will still be there." Miles let his voice fall to a near whisper. "All for nothing, and less than nothing."

"He lies," said Foscol fiercely into the shocked silence. "He lies."

Soudha gave a weird snort, ran his hands through his hair, and shook his head. Then, to Miles's dismay, he laughed out loud.

Cappell stared at his colleague. "Do you really think that's why? That it malfunctioned like that?"

"It would explain," began Soudha. "It would explain . . . oh, God." He trailed off. "I thought it was the ore ship," he said at last. "Interfering somehow."

"I should also mention," Miles put in, still uneasily watching Soudha's odd reaction, "that ImpSec has arrested all the Waste Heat personnel and their families you left back at the Southport Transport facility at Solstice. And then there are all your other relatives and friends, the innocents who knew nothing. The hostage game is a bad game, a sad and ugly game that's a lot easier to start than end. The worst versions I've seen ended up with neither side in control, or getting anything they wanted. And the people who stand to lose the most in it frequently aren't even playing."

"Barrayaran threats." Foscol lifted her chin. "Do you think, after all this, we can't stand up to you?"

"I'm sure you can, but for what reason? There aren't too many prizes left in this mess. The biggest one is gone; you can't shut off Barrayar. You can't keep your secret or shield anyone you left behind on Komarr. About the only thing you can do now is kill more innocent people. Great goals can call for great sacrifices, yes, but your possible rewards are steadily shrinking." Yes, that was it; don't raise the pressure, lower the wall.

"We did not," husked Cappell, rubbing his eyes with the back of his hand, "go through all this just to deliver the weapon of the century straight into Barrayaran hands."

"It's already there. As a weapon, it appears to have some fundamental defects, so far. But Riva says there's evidence you got more power out of the wormhole than you put into it. This suggests possible future peaceful, economic uses, when the phenomena are better understood."

"Really?" said Soudha, sitting up. "How did she figure? What are her numbers?"

"Soudha!" said Foscol reprovingly. Madame Radovas winced, and Soudha subsided, albeit reluctantly, staring at Miles through narrowed eyes.

"On the other hand," Miles continued, "until further research assures us that collapsing a wormhole is indeed quite impossible, none of you are going anywhere, and especially not to any other planetary government. It's one of those ugly military decisions, y'know? And I'm afraid it's mine."
The Vor ladies are not expendable
, he'd told Vorgier. Was he lying then, or now? Well, if he couldn't figure it out, maybe the Komarrans wouldn't either.

"You are all headed, inexorably, for a Barrayaran prison," he went on. "The devil's bargain part about being Vor, which a lot of people including some Vor overlook, is that our lives are made for sacrifice. There is no threat, no torture, no slow murder you can apply to two Barrayaran women that will change your outcome."