“Oh, no!” Jadwiga wailed, her little eyes filling with tears.
Enrique looked up from where he was opening a canister. “What’s all this?”
Vadim explained unhappily, “Any domestic animals that can’t be turned loose have got to be put down. It’s less cruel in the long run.”
Enrique blinked, then said reasonably, “Well, then, why don’t we move them to that back paddock at the Butterbug Ranch? We’re not using it for anything. We can declare it a quarantine zone. I should very much like to have some large mammals with prolonged exposure to the zone to study.”
Oh, bless you. Trust Enrique to see opportunities where everyone else just saw impossibilities. That his same speculative eye also fell on the three youths was an observation Ekaterin kept to herself. They’re large mammals too, I suppose.
In any case, Jadwiga dried up. “Is it a nice place?”
“Yes,” said Ekaterin, “and later you can come visit.”
“Oh.”
Boris looked heartened as well. All the disruption being forced on these people’s lives, and this offer was what got them all on board? Let it be for a lesson. This day had been entirely too full of lessons.
“We better go help Ma,” Boris sighed, “or she’ll be yellin’.”
“And cuffin’,” Jadwiga agreed cheerily, with no evident fear or resentment.
After some brief resistance from Ingi, who was much more interested in the radbugs and Enrique’s doings, Boris herded the other two off in rather standard big-brotherly style. Ekaterin thought of her son Nikki and the twins.
After that, the three adults fell to rapid and efficient bug-wrangling, with careful scans around for any deceased experimental subjects.
“What are you going to do with these bugs?” Ekaterin asked Enrique as he sealed down the first lid.
“Eh, that’s a bit of a puzzle. The first test run is now quantitatively disrupted, not to mention procedurally contaminated, though there’s enough in the qualitative results so far to send me back to the drawing board anyway.”
“Me, too, I’m afraid,” said Ekaterin with regret. “It seems I made the bugs too pretty, this time. Which is what kicked all this off.”
“No such thing as a too-pretty bug,” said Enrique stoutly. “But I’m thinking we want a modified design that will drill into the subsoil directly, like paracoprids, for the most efficient contaminant recovery. Maybe paired with a surface model, so this work isn’t wasted, necessarily.”
“Hm.” She eyed the ranger, who was still looking unhappy though not so congealed. “What were you going to do with them, Vadim?”
He cleared his throat, and muttered, “Put t’em back in the test plot.”
“Oh, dear, no!” said Enrique. “Worst choice. I’ll take them back to the Ranch, to the quarantine shed, and run their analysis separately. We’re going to have a careful counting job when we wind up the first test plot. Would you like me to fly your lightflyer back to the decontamination station, Ekaterin?” He sighted down the sleeve of his uncompromised rad suit. “Since it seems I’m the only one among us who isn’t going to be stuck the night at Hassadar General.”
“Yes, please.” And that was apparently that, as far as Enrique was concerned. Vadim grew slightly less rigid. That would not be that as far as Miles was concerned, but the ranger cadre was in his chain of command, not Ekaterin’s. One ugly job that wouldn’t land on her, great. Though she supposed she’d have to listen to Miles vent, later.
Vadim was just gathering up two filled canisters to lug to their vehicles, when a muffled shout sounded from the direction of the hut, of a deep timbre that could only be from Boris, and a frightened squeal that might be Jadwiga. Startled, Ekaterin stood, then started forward at a second cry. Then broke into a run as the hut came into sight, with smoke issuing not from its chimney, but from a side window. Vadim spat an oath and matched her stride. Perplexed, Enrique followed.
They all scrambled up the ladder and across the porch, banging open the door, then paused at an inexplicable scene. The bedding was on fire, smoking orange flickers stinking of some vile home-brewed distilled spirits used as an accelerant, the air churning acrid gray with it. Jadwiga cowered in a corner, crying, with Ingi hovering over her in a posture of uncertain protection. Boris and Ma Roga were locked together in the middle of the floor in a struggle over a long and wickedly sharp-looking kitchen knife.
Ma huffed in a demented determination, clenching and wrenching. Boris’s eyes were white-wide with horror. They stumbled, knocking over a table, kicking through the grocery sacks; food packages spilled across the floor.
Aghast, Vadim pulled his stunner and tried to take aim at the lunging, lurching Boris. Ekaterin saw his mistake at once, and snarled, “Give me that!”
She plucked the stunner from his fist, dropped to one knee, and fired.
Her shot took Ma Roga square in the head. Buzzed by the nimbus, Boris fell back wheezing and flung the knife away. It spun clattering under a burning bunk. Blood streaked scarlet on his neck and hands.
“Boris, carry Ma out! Vadim, get Ingi and Jadwiga out!”
“I’ll see what I can do about this fire,” said Enrique, passing her up. “Hold your breath and go.”
Yes, he was the only one wearing protective gear; his suit would give him some shielding from the heat, and full protection from smoke inhalation. Trained for all levels of chemical laboratory emergencies, he was, if not exactly calm, focused and unpanicked. Ekaterin turned to helping drag the distraught Jadwiga.
They heaved back out the door. Ma was a dead weight, Jadwiga worse for her squirming, but they manhandled everyone down the long ladder with no broken necks. They all stumbled a few meters off and turned to stare.
Burning bedding was pitched from the side window, and more through the door and over the porch. A few more miscellaneous flammables followed, flames choking out as they fell and bounced; and then, at length, Enrique, his white suit only a shade scorched. He climbed carefully down. “Got it out, I think,” he panted. “The cabin won’t go up, but don’t go back in till we’re sure.”
“Why,” gasped Vadim to Ekaterin, hands on his knees as he caught his breath, “did you shoot Ma?”
Shortly, she would be sick and shaking. In this stretched present, she was still floating on an adrenaline high the like of which she hadn’t felt since that incident of destruction in a Komarran jump-point station docking bay, lord, over five years ago. “Couldn’t you see? Boris wasn’t trying to knife Ma. Ma was trying to knife Boris.”
And then, presumably, Ingi and Jadwiga, in descending order of difficulty. And then turn the knife inward as the flames licked up, like some mad makeshift barbarian funeral sacrifice?
Boris and Ingi both nodded. Boris was not-quite-crying; Jadwiga was blubbering; Ingi could not look any paler, but his face was set and shocked. “Why?” he cried.
Ekaterin wished she didn’t understand this so very clearly. She struggled to put it in terms everyone here would grasp. “I suppose… she thought we were trying to take her family away. And she tried to take you back in the only way she knew how.” Murder, suicide, and a pyre all in one swift, final, defiant denial.
“That’s crazy,” whispered Ingi. Though Ekaterin thought Boris and Vadim saw, at least a little. Enrique stood back, as sober and polite as a stranger at a wake for none of his own. But Ekaterin bet he was taking it all in.
“It was a mistake,” Ekaterin went on. “We didn’t intend any such thing, necessarily. We could have talked it out. I should have been more clear…”
Through his smoke-smudged faceplate, Enrique’s brows twitched as if to argue this last, but he made no comment aloud.
Ekaterin sat on the ground with a jolt, cross-legged, and commenced to digging out her wristcom from under her suit sleeve. The trouble with emergency buttons was that when you were in the middle of the dratted emergency, there was no time to go for them. All you had time for was, was, grabbing a stunner and shooting. Which, she suppo
sed, was why Miles kept making her take those self-defense-course refreshers every dratted year.
God. Whatever else this day wanted from her, she had nothing more to give it.
Three tries with her shaking finger, and she managed to stab the screamer button. The response, at least, was gratifyingly instantaneous.
“Armsman Pym? I want backup.”
* * *
Ekaterin was grateful that she actually had time to finish her bland hospital dinner before Miles boiled in. Even he had to suffer a forced delay in the hallway, as the nurse on duty ushered the visitors into their required protective garb. Armsman Roic in his brown-and-silver duty uniform leaned over to half-salute-half-wave at her through the lead glass in her door, his smile anxious. She waved back in a good simulation of cheer, which seemed to comfort him.
After final inspection by the nurse, Miles was at last allowed to enter, Enrique trailing amiably. Ekaterin was relieved to see the two wore only standard disposable gowns over their clothes, with medical-style face masks and gloves, the simplest level of protection from contaminants. If Hassadar General’s experienced radiation unit wasn’t panicking about her, no one else needed to. Miles had left his cane in the hallway with Roic, which slowed his rush to her bedside to a mere limp. She could feel the heat of his hands through his oversized gloves as he grasped her own, any more expressive oh-god-you’re-all-right hugs thwarted by her—temporary, she trusted—quarantined state.
“Have you been home?” she overrode his beginning babble.
He shook his head. “Not yet. I’d have been here sooner, but there were people. In lines. Well, more climbing over each other. Eventually I channeled my Inner Piotr to shake them off.”
Enrique nodded, looking vaguely impressed.
She could just picture that—a useful trick, if sometimes startling. “I fielded a call from Aurie and Nikki before dinner. Nikki was a bit frantic, but I think I talked him down. You need to go home—no, first you need to stop wheezing. Then you need to go home and calm them, too.” She added after a moment, “Though Aurie says the twins are pretty oblivious, so far.”
“Right. Right.” He drew a long breath through his mask.
Enrique seemed more put-together—he’d evidently had time for a shower and a change of clothes since their return from the zone, and maybe a meal, or more likely a food bar shoved into his hand by Martya in passing. He had a meditative air, which was just the look one wanted on one’s expensive imported scientist, although on what track his train of thought would exit his labyrinthine brain was often a surprise. But it appeared he’d had time to debrief his eyewitness account directly to Miles.
“What’s going on out there?” she asked. “Did they put Ingi, Jadwiga, and Boris together in one room as I’d asked?” Whatever would follow tomorrow, tonight the traumatized little family needed to be together. Save one, she was reminded.
Miles nodded. “Not quite procedure, but your argument prevailed, given their similar levels of exposure. I haven’t had a chance to meet them yet, though I did glance through their window. Sitting in their beds and eating their dinners, it looked like.”
That did sound reassuring. “And Ma Roga?”
“They have her in a private locked room with a Hassadar guardsman stationed outside the door, regulation when treating an arrestee. She’s recovered from the stun all right. Seems to be silent and surly rather than combative, the nurses say.”
Ekaterin hitched up the sagging neckline of her unflattering hospital gown. “She hasn’t actually been arrested yet, has she? Because we need to think about that one.”
“The radiation isolation is enough to keep her locked down for the moment.”
“All right.” She rubbed her forehead. “Miles, your district is exhausting.”
“Yes,” he sighed, “I know.”
“Have you figured out yet why that, that encampment was allowed to go on for so long?”
He grimaced. “I’m going to be having words about that with my rangers tomorrow, once I’m sure I have the full story. It’s… almost a legacy problem, I suppose. In several senses.”
Hiking himself onto the side of her bed, he tapped his fingers on his paper-clad thigh and continued, “The zone boundary has always been more permeable in practice than in theory. In that first generation after the destruction, a lot of people who’d survived in the outlying areas kept trying to sneak back into their homes. A dedicated ranger cadre didn’t yet exist, so it was handled erratically by the district guard, military police and squads, and village speakers.
“Neither side was happy with the other, needless to say. Shooting people to keep them from dying had logical flaws obvious to everyone. At one point it was proposed to burn the standing homesteads, to block people going back. I’d call it a major row, except that in the shadow of Vashnoi, people had a new definition for major.”
Ekaterin nodded understanding. Enrique listened intently.
“Finally, Piotr ruled that anyone over age sixty could return, if they refused to be talked out of it. No children or young people allowed in. There was this weird little geriatric community around the edge of the zone for a while.
“The problem settled down—I suppose it would be too cruelly accurate to say died down—in a few years, well, decades. Younger people had no memory of the places and no desire to go back in. Plus the more sensible majority who wouldn’t go back on a bet. That phase was pretty much all over by the time I came along.”
“Not quite, it seems,” said Ekaterin.
“Yeah,” Miles agreed ruefully. “But it meant that however much it was against the later rules, once there were rules, it was established custom that old people on the fringes of the zone were left alone. So that dispensation Ma Roga claims Piotr gave her had precedent. It is not, mm, totally unreasonable that the newer rangers felt she was, so to speak, grandfathered in, even though she lingered there long past the time she… should have.”
“She could have come out ages ago,” said Ekaterin, considering that ghastly graveyard behind the hut-on-stumps. At least seventeen years, if not thirty. “And maybe saved more of those foundlings. Even if, in her isolation, she didn’t realize it, someone should have. Though, really, she doesn’t seem to have been in anything like a total news blackout. But she did try to take care of the abandoned kids, tried to save them. It seems hypocritical to criticize a woman for doing badly a task no one else was willing to do at all.” Ekaterin frowned into her lap. “I’m wondering if we should run DNA identifications on those bodies buried under the posts.”
“I could,” said Enrique. “What would you do with them?”
“That’s the hard question. Find the parents, plunge them into grief and guilt for a second time, when it all seemed over? To what benefit, for what change?”
Miles opened a gloved hand, full of acknowledgement, empty of solutions. One couldn’t fix the past, only the present.
“What are you going to do about Vadim?” she asked him.
Miles’s grimace this time seemed to go soul-deep. “He has to be fired, for violating any number of ranger regs. Which makes me feel like a faker. So I think we’ll call it terminated for reaching his rad limit, which he can’t prove he hasn’t, and maybe pass him along under the table to Mark. Who could find a dozen different jobs for him to do, yeah.”
“From one Vorkosigan to another?” Ekaterin smirked, secretly pleased. “Is there no escape?”
“Not for the competent. Which he is, but he was placed in a horrible fork.” Miles’s shrug was unrepentant. “I should get one self-indulgence out of all this. Vadim can be it.”
“We did get the milk goats safely to their new paddock at the Ranch,” Enrique offered. “The rangers have been detailed to bring the ponies tomorrow.”
“Oh,” said Ekaterin, “good. That’s one thing at least. Do you suppose you could stop by their room before you leave and tell those kids?”
“Certainly.” He hesitated. “Even I could see their animals meant a lo
t to them. It gives one hope, rather.”
Ekaterin’s mouth twisted up. “For what, their… rehabilitation, perhaps? No, reintegration is a better term, or would be if they’d ever been integrated in the first place. Really, it’s as if they’d been transported right from the Time of Isolation and plunked down here.” Doubtfully, she considered Jadwiga. There’d been that hint that Boris had once ventured out into the wider district, even if he’d fled back to the zone after. She needed to learn more about that. Ingi seemed both young enough and bright enough for a good social prognosis, but then there was his physical appearance. Or, more accurately, how other district youths would react to it. She glanced under her lashes at Miles.
“I was thinking,” said Enrique, a phrase that made Ekaterin prick her ears, “about that old bunkhouse for hired hands that’s sitting out back at the Ranch. After the docs here are done, it might serve as a sort of halfway house for them, while they acclimatize to modern Barrayar.” He did not add, Such as it is; good for him. “There are all kinds of tasks at all levels around the labs that need doing. Boris might be trained; Ingi absolutely could be.”
“And Jadwiga? …If she gets out of the hospital?” It would be days, if not weeks, before they could learn her medical fate, and there was nothing more Ekaterin could do to speed it up. For once, she identified with Miles’s deep-rooted impatience. She reminded herself sternly that Hassadar was as good as any hospital on Barrayar for treating radiation-related issues, as the fact that Miles hadn’t whisked her elsewhere proved.
Enrique waved a more optimistic hand. “Of course. If she can milk goats, she can do all sorts of responsible things. Maybe not as quickly as some, but the Ranch runs on its own schedule.”
Ekaterin wondered whether Enrique was craftily adding to his large mammal collection, or if Jadwiga’s joy in his bugs had simply won his heart. Maybe both. Did it matter? “That might work. Or at least might be worth trying.”