"But—" Ekaterin raised a hand in futile protest, too late. "Drat." And then, after a moment, "Damn it!"
Retrieving Tien from the experiment station would be a two-hour chore, at least. She would first have to take a bubble-car to a public flyer livery, and rent a flyer, since she had no authority to requisition one from Tien's department. She'd been seriously considering sleeping on a park bench tonight, just to save her pittance of funds for the uncertain days to come until she found some form of paying work, except that the dome patrollers didn't permit vagrants to loiter in any of the places where she might feel safe. Foscol hadn't said if Lord Vorkosigan was with Tien, which suggested he was not, which meant that she'd have to fly back to Serifosa alone with Tien, who would insist on taking the controls, and what if he finally got serious about his suicide threats when they were halfway back, and decided to take her down with him? No. It wasn't worth the risk. Let him rot out there till morning, or let him call someone else.
Her hand upon her case again, she reconsidered. Still hostage to fortune in this mess, or at least to everyone's good behavior, was Nikki. Tien's relationship to his son was mostly neglectful, interspersed with occasional bullying, but with enough spasms of actual attention that Nikki, at least, still seemed to show attachment to him. The two of them were always going to have a relationship separate from her own. She and Tien would be forced to cooperate for Nikki's sake: an iron-cladding of surface courtesy that must never crack. Tien's anger or potential brutality were no more of a threat to her future than some belated attempt on his part at affection or placation. She could face down either, now, she thought, with equal stoniness.
I am not here to vent my feelings. I am here to achieve my goals. Yes. She could foresee that was going to be her new mantra, in the weeks to come. With a grimace, she opened her case and retrieved her personal breath mask, checked its reservoirs, pulled on her parka, and headed out for the bubble-car station.
The delays were every bit as aggravating as Ekaterin had foreseen. Komarrans sharing her bubble-car forced two extra stops. She suffered a thirty-minute clog in the system within sight of her goal; by the time it spat her out at the westernmost dome lock, she was quite ready to chuck her plan of courtesy and go back to the apartment, except for the thought of facing another thirty-minute delay en route. The lightflyer they issued to her was elderly and not very clean. Alone at last, flying through the vast silence of the Komarran night, her heart eased a little, and she toyed with the fantasy of flying somewhere else, anywhere, just to extend the heavenly solitude. There might be more to pleasure than the absence of pain, but she couldn't prove it just now. The absence of pain, of other human beings and their needs pressing down upon her, seemed paradise enough. A paradise just out of reach.
Besides, she had no elsewhere. She could not even return to Barrayar with Nikki without first earning enough to pay for their passage, or borrowing the money from her father, or her distant brothers, or Uncle Vorthys. Distasteful thought. What you feel doesn't count, girl, she reminded herself. Goals. You'll do whatever you have to do.
The bright lights of the experiment station, isolated in this barren wilderness, made a glow on the horizon that drew the eye from kilometers off. She followed the black silky gleam of the river that wound past the facility. As she neared, she made out several vehicles grounded in the station's lot and frowned in anger. Foscol had lied about there being no one left at the station to give Tien a lift. On the other hand, this raised the possibility that Ekaterin might get a ride back to Serifosa with someone else . . . she checked her impulse to turn the flyer around in midair, and landed in the lot instead.
She adjusted her breath mask, released the canopy, and walked to the office building, hoping to arrange another ride before she saw Tien. The airlock opened to her touch on the control pad. There was not much reason to leave anything locked up way out here. She turned up the first well-lit hallway, calling, "Hello?"
No one answered. No one appeared to be here. About half the rooms were bare and empty; the rest were rather messy and disorganized, she thought. A comconsole was opened up, its insides torn out . . . melted, in fact. That must have been a spectacular malfunction. Her footsteps echoed hollowly as she crossed through the pedestrian tube to the engineering building. "Hello? Tien?" No answer here, either. The two big assembly rooms were shadowed and sinister, and deserted. "Anyone?" If Foscol hadn't lied after all, why were all those aircars and flyers in the lot? Where had their owners gone, and in what?
He'll be waiting for you outside on the northwest side. . . . She had only a vague idea which side of the building was the northwest; she'd half-expected Tien to be waiting in the parking lot. She sighed uneasily, and adjusted her breath mask again, and stepped out through the pedestrian lock. It would only take a few minutes to circle the building. I want to fly back to Serifosa, right now. This is weird. Slowly, she started around the building to her left, her footsteps sounding sharp on the concrete in the chill and toxic night air. A raised walkway, really the level edge of the building's concrete foundation, skirted the wall, with a railing along the outside as the ground fell away below. It made her feel as though she were being herded into some trap, or a corral. She rounded the second corner.
Halfway down the walk, a small human shape huddled on its knees, arms outflung, its forehead pressed against the railing. Another bigger shape hung by its wrists between two wide-spaced posts, its body dangling down over the edge of the raised concrete foundation, feet a half-meter from the ground. What is this? The dark seemed to pulsate. She swallowed her panic and hastened toward the odd pair.
The dangling figure was Tien. His breath mask was off, twisted around his neck. Even in the colored half-light from the spots in the vegetation below, she could see his face was mottled and purple, with a cold doughy stillness. His tongue protruded from his mouth; his bulging eyes were fixed and frozen. Very, very dead. Her stomach churned and knotted in shock, and her heart lumped in her chest.
The kneeling figure was Lord Vorkosigan, wearing her second-best jacket that she had been unable to find while packing a short eternity ago. His breath mask was still up—he turned his head, his eyes going wide and dark as he saw her, and Ekaterin melted with relief. The little Lord Auditor was still alive, at least. She was frantically grateful not to be alone with two corpses. His wrists, she saw at last, were chained to the railing's posts just as Tien's were. Blood oozed from them, soaking darkly into the jacket's cuffs.
Her first coherent thought was unutterable relief that she had not brought Nikki with her. How am I going to tell him? Tomorrow, that was a problem for tomorrow. Let him play away tonight in the bubble of another universe, one without this horror in it.
"Madame Vorsoisson." Lord Vorkosigan's voice was muffled and faint in his breath mask. "Oh, God."
Fearfully, she touched the cold chains around his wrists. The torn flesh was swollen up around the links, almost burying them. "I'll go inside and look for some cutters." She almost added, Wait here, but closed her lips on that inanity just in time.
"No, wait," he gasped. "Don't leave me alone—there's a key . . . supposedly . . . on the walk back there." He jerked his head.
She found it at once, a simple mechanical type. It was cold, a slip of metal in her shaking fingers. She had to try several times to get it inserted in the locks that fastened the chains. She then had to peel the chain out of Vorkosigan's blood-crusted flesh as if from a rubber mold, before his hand could fall. When she released the second one, he nearly pitched head-first over the edge of the concrete. She grabbed him and dragged him back toward the wall. He tried to stand, but his legs would not at first unbend, and he fell over again. "Give yourself a minute," she told him. Awkwardly, she tried to massage his legs, to restore circulation; even through the fabric of his gray trousers she could feel how cold and stiff they were.
She stood, holding the key in her hand, and stared in bewilderment at Tien's body. She doubted she and Vorkosigan together could lift that dead weight back
up to the walk.
"It's much too late," said Vorkosigan, watching her. His brows were crooked with concern. "I'm s-sorry. Leave him for Tuomonen."
"What is this on his back?" She touched the peculiar arrangement, what appeared to be a plastic packet fixed in place with engineering tape.
"Leave that," said Lord Vorkosigan more sharply. "Please." And then, in more of a rush, stuttering in his shivering, "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I c-couldn't b-break the chains. Hell, he couldn't either, and he's s-stronger than I am. . . . I thought I c-could break my hand and get it out, but I couldn't. I'm sorry. . . ."
"You need to come inside, where it's warm. Here." She helped pull him to his feet; with a last look over his shoulder at Tien, he suffered himself to be led, hunched over, leaning on her and lurching on his unsteady legs.
She led him through the airlock into the office building, and guided him to an upholstered chair in the lobby. He more fell than sat in it. He shivered violently. "B-b-button," he muttered to her, holding up his hands like paralyzed paws toward her.
"What?"
"Little button on the s-side of wrist com. Press it!"
She did so; he sighed and relaxed against the seat back. His stiff hands yanked at his breath mask; she helped him pull it off over his head, and pulled down her own mask.
"God I am glad to get out of that thing. Alive. I th-thought I was gonna have a seizure out there. . . ." He rubbed his pale face, scrubbing at the red pressure-lines engraved in the skin from the edges of the mask. "And it itched." Ekaterin spotted the control on a nearby wall and hastily tapped in an increase of the lobby's temperature. She was shivering too, though not from the cold, in suppressed shocky shudders.
"Lord Vorkosigan?" Captain Tuomonen's anxious voice issued thinly from the wrist com. "What's going on? Where the hell are you?!"
Vorkosigan lifted his wrist toward his mouth. "Waste Heat experiment station. Get out here. I need you."
"What are you— Should I bring a squad?"
"Don't need guns now, I don't think. You'll need forensics, though. And a medical team."
"Are you injured, my lord?" Tuomonen's voice grew sharp with panic.
"Not to speak of," he said, apparently oblivious to the blood still leaking from his wrists. "Administrator Vorsoisson is dead, though."
"What the hell—you didn't check in with me before you left the dome, dammit! What the hell is going on out there?!"
"We can discuss my failings at length, later. Carry on, Captain. Vorkosigan out." He let his arm fall, wearily. His shivering was lessening, now. He leaned his head back against the upholstery; the dark smudges of exhaustion under his eyes looked like bruises. He stared sadly at Ekaterin. "I am sorry, Madame Vorsoisson. There was nothing I could do."
"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.