Her eyes narrowed in amusement. "How can I resist such an invitation? Of course I will." She sobered. "Would it violate security for me to send a message to Nikki telling him we'll be late?"
"Not at all. Send it from the Kestrel, though. It'll get through faster."
She nodded. "I've never been away from him so long before. I wonder if he's been lonely?"
Nikki had been left, on Ekaterin's side of the family, with four uncles and a great-uncle plus matching aunts, a herd of cousins, a small army of friends, and his Grandmother Vorsoisson. On Miles's side were Vorkosigan House's extensive staff and their extensive families, with Uncle Ivan and Uncle Mark and the whole Koudelka clan for backup. Impending were his doting Vorkosigan step-grandparents, who had planned to arrive after Miles and Ekaterin for the birthday bash, but who now might beat them home. Ekaterin might have to travel ahead to Barrayar, if he couldn't cut through this mess in a timely fashion, but by no rational definition of the word, alone.
"I don't see how," said Miles honestly. "I expect you miss him more than he misses us. Or he'd have managed more than that one monosyllabic note that didn't catch up with us till Earth. Eleven-year-old boys can be pretty self-centered. I'm sure I was."
Her brows rose. "Oh? And how many notes have you sent to your mother in the past two months?"
"It's a honeymoon trip. Nobody expects you to . . . Anyway, she's always gotten to see the reports from my security."
The brows stayed up. He added prudently, "I'll drop her a message from the Kestrel too."
He was rewarded with a League of Mothers smile. Come to think of it, perhaps he would include his father in the address as well, not that his parents didn't share his missives. And complain coequally about their rarity.
* * *
An hour of mild chaos completed their transfer to the Barrayaran Imperial courier ship. Fast couriers gained most of their speed by trading off carrying capacity. Miles was forced to divest all but their most essential luggage. The considerable remainder, along with a startling volume of souvenirs, would continue the journey back to Barrayar with most of their little entourage: Ekaterin's personal maid, Miss Pym, and, to Miles's greater regret, both of Roic's relief armsmen. It occurred to him belatedly, as he and Ekaterin fitted themselves into their new shared cabin, that he ought to have mentioned how cramped their quarters would be. He'd traveled on similar vessels so often during his own years in ImpSec, he took their limitations for granted—one of the few aspects of his former career where his undersized body had worked to his advantage.
So while he did spend the remainder of the day in bed with his wife after all, it was primarily due to the absence of other seating. They folded back the upper bunk for head space and sat up on opposite ends, Ekaterin to read quietly from a hand viewer, Miles to plunge into Gregor's promised Pandora's box of reports from the diplomatic front.
He wasn't five minutes into this study before he uttered a Ha!
Ekaterin indicated her willingness to be interrupted by looking up at him with a reciprocal Hm?
"I just figured out why Graf Station sounded familiar. We're headed for Quaddiespace, by God."
"Quaddiespace? Is that someplace you've been before?"
"Not personally, no." This was going to take more politic preparation than he'd anticipated. "Although I actually met a quaddie once. The quaddies are a race of bioengineered humans developed, oh, two or three hundred years ago. Before Barrayar was rediscovered. They were supposed to be permanent free fall dwellers. Whatever their creators' original plan for them was, it fell through when the new grav technologies came in, and they ended up as sort of economic refugees. After assorted travels and adventures, they finally settled as a group in what was at the time the far end of the wormhole Nexus. They were wary of other people by then, so they deliberately picked a system with no habitable planets, but with considerable asteroid and cometary resources. Planning to keep themselves to themselves, I guess. Of course, the explored Nexus has grown around them since then, so now they get some foreign exchange by servicing ships and providing transfer facilities. Which explains why our fleet came to be docked there, although not what happened afterwards. The, ah . . ." He hesitated. "The bioengineering included a lot of metabolic changes, but the most spectacular alteration was, they have a second set of arms where their legs should be. Which is really, um, handy in free fall. So to speak. I've often wished I'd had a couple of extra hands, when I was operating in vacuum."
He passed the viewer across and displayed the shot of a quaddie, dressed in bright yellow shorts and a singlet, handing himself along a gravity-less corridor with the speed and agility of a monkey navigating through treetops.
"Oh," gulped Ekaterin, then quickly regained control of her features. "How, uh . . . interesting." After a moment she added, "It does look quite practical, for their environment."
Miles relaxed a trifle. Whatever her buried Barrayaran reflexes were regarding visible mutations, they would be trumped by her iron grip on good manners.
The same, unfortunately, did not appear to be true of their fellow members of the Imperium now stranded in the quaddies' system. The difference between deleterious mutation and benign or advantageous modification was not readily grasped by Barrayarans from the backcountry. Given that one officer referred to them as horrible spider mutants right in his report, it was clear that Miles could add racial tensions to the mix of complications they were now racing toward.
"You get used to them pretty quickly," he reassured her.
"Where did you meet one, if they keep to themselves?"
"Um . . ." Some quick internal editing, here . . . "It was on an ImpSec mission. I can't talk about it. But she was a musician, of all things. Played the hammer dulcimer with all four arms." His attempt to mime this remarkable sight resulted in his banging his elbow painfully on the cabin wall. "Her name was Nicol. You would have liked her. We got her out of a tight spot. I wonder if she ever made it home?" He rubbed his elbow and added hopefully, "I'll bet the quaddies' free fall gardening techniques would interest you."
Ekaterin brightened. "Yes, indeed."
Miles returned to his reports with the uncomfortable certainty that this was not going to be a good task to plunge into underprepared. He mentally added a review of quaddie history to his list of studies for the next few days.
CHAPTER TWO
"Is my collar straight?"
Ekaterin's cool fingers made businesslike work upon the back of Miles's neck; he concealed the shiver down his spine. "Now it is," she said.
"Clothes make the Auditor," he muttered. The little cabin lacked such amenities as a full-length mirror; he had to use his wife's eyes instead. This did not seem a disadvantage. She stepped back as far as she could, a half-pace to the bulkhead, and looked him up and down to check the effect of his Vorkosigan House uniform: brown tunic with his family crest in silver thread upon the high collar, silver-embroidered cuffs, brown trousers with silver side piping, tall brown riding boots. The Vor class had been cavalry soldiers, in their heyday. No horse within God knew how many light-years now, that was certain.
He touched his wrist com, mate in function to the one she wore, though hers was made Vor-lady-like with a decorative silver bracelet. "I'll give you a heads-up when I'm ready to come back and change." He nodded toward the plain gray suit she'd already laid out on the bunk. A uniform for the military-minded, civvies for the civilians. And let the weight of Barrayaran history, eleven generations of Counts Vorkosigan at his back, make up for his lack of height, his faintly hunched stance. His less visible defects, he didn't need to mention.
"What should I wear?"
"Since you'll have to play the whole entourage, something effective." He smiled crookedly. "That red silk thing ought to be distractingly civilian enough for our Stationer hosts."
"Only the male half, love," she pointed out. "Suppose their security chief is a female quaddie? Are quaddies even attracted to downsiders?"
"One was, apparently,"
he sighed. "Hence this mess. . . . Parts of Graf Station are null-gee, so you'll likely want trousers or leggings instead of Barrayaran-style skirts. Something you can move in."
"Oh. Yes, I see."
A knock sounded at the cabin door, and Armsman Roic's diffident voice, "My lord?"
"On my way, Roic." Miles and Ekaterin exchanged places—finding himself at her chest height, he stole a pleasantly resilient hug in passing—and he exited to the courier ship's narrow corridor.
Roic wore a slightly plainer version of Miles's Vorkosigan House uniform, as befitted his liege-sworn armsman's status. "Do you want me to pack up your things now for transfer to the Barrayaran flagship, m'lord?" he asked.
"No. We're going to stay aboard the courier."
Roic almost managed to conceal his wince. He was a young man of imposing height and intimidating breadth of shoulder, and had described his bunk above the courier ship's engineer as Sort of like sleeping in a coffin, m'lord, except for the snoring.
Miles added, "I don't care to hand off control of my movements, not to mention my air supply, to either side in this squabble just yet. The flagship's bunks aren't much bigger anyway, I assure you, Armsman."
Roic smiled ruefully, and shrugged. "I'm afraid you should've brought Jankowski, sir."
"What, because he's shorter?"
"No, m'lord!" Roic looked faintly indignant. "Because he's a real veteran."
A Count of Barrayar was limited by law to a bodyguard of a score of sworn men; the Vorkosigans had by tradition recruited most of their armsmen from retiring twenty-year veterans of the Imperial Service. By political need, in the last decades they'd mostly been former ImpSec men. They were a keen but graying bunch. Roic was an interesting new exception.
"When did that become a concern?" Miles's father's cadre of armsmen treated Roic as a junior because he was, but if they were treating him as a second-class citizen . . .
"Eh . . ." Roic waved somewhat inarticulately around the courier ship, by which Miles construed that the problem lay in more recent encounters.
Miles, about to lead off down the short corridor, instead leaned against the wall and folded his arms. "Look, Roic—there's scarcely a man in the Imperial Service your age or younger who's faced as much live fire in the Emperor's employ as you have in the Hassadar Municipal Guard. Don't let the damned green uniforms spook you. It's empty swagger. Half of 'em would fall over in a faint if they were asked to take down someone like that murderous lunatic who shot up Hassadar Square."
"I was already halfway across the plaza, m'lord. It would've been like swimming halfway across a river, deciding you couldn't make it, and turning around to swim back. It was safer to jump him than to turn and run. He'd 'a had the same amount of time to take aim at me either way."
"But not the time to take out another dozen or so bystanders. Auto-needler's a filthy weapon." Miles brooded briefly.
"That it is, m'lord."
For all his height, Roic tended to shyness when he felt himself to be socially outclassed, which unfortunately seemed to be much of the time in the Vorkosigans' service. Since the shyness showed on his surface mainly as a sort of dull stolidity, it tended to get overlooked.
"You're a Vorkosigan armsman," said Miles firmly. "The ghost of General Piotr is woven into that brown and silver. They'll be spooked by you, I promise you."
Roic's brief smile conveyed more gratitude than conviction. "Wish I could've met your grandfather, m'lord. From all the tales they told of him back in the District, he was quite something. My great-grandfather served with him in the mountains during the Cetagandan Occupation, m'mother says."
"Ah! Did she have any good stories about him?"
Roic shrugged. "He died of t' radiation after Vorkosigan Vashnoi was destroyed. M'grandmother would never talk about him much, so I don't know."
"Pity."
Lieutenant Smolyani poked his head around the corner. "We're locked on to the Prince Xav now, Lord Auditor Vorkosigan. Transfer tube's sealed and they're ready for you to board."
"Very good, Lieutenant."
Miles followed Roic, who had to duck his head through the oval doorway, into the courier's cramped personnel hatch bay. Smolyani took up station by the hatch controls. The control pad twinkled and beeped; the door slid open onto the airlock and the flex tube, beyond it. Miles nodded to Roic, who took a visible breath and swung himself through. Smolyani braced to a salute; Miles returned him an acknowledging nod and a "Thank you, Lieutenant," and followed Roic.
A meter of stomach-lifting zero-gee in the flex tube ended at a similar hatchway. Miles grasped the handgrips and swung himself through and smoothly to his feet in the open airlock. He stepped from it into a very much more spacious hatch bay. On his left, Roic loomed formally, awaiting him. The flagship's door slid closed behind him.
Before him, three green-uniformed men and a civilian stood stiffly to attention. Not one of them changed expression at Miles's un-Barrayaran physique. Presumably Vorpatril, whom Miles barely recalled from a few passing encounters in Vorbarr Sultana's capital scene, remembered him more vividly, and had prudently briefed his staff on the mutoid appearance of Emperor Gregor's shortest, not to mention youngest and newest, Voice.
Admiral Eugin Vorpatril was of middle height, stocky, white-haired, and grim. He stepped forward and gave Miles a crisp and proper salute. "My Lord Auditor. Welcome aboard the Prince Xav."
"Thank you, Admiral." He did not add Happy to be here; no one in this group could be happy to see him, under the circumstances.
Vorpatril continued, "May I introduce my Fleet Security commander, Captain Brun."
The lean, tense man, possibly even grimmer than his admiral, nodded curtly. Brun had been in operational charge of the ill-fated patrol whose hair-trigger exploits had blown the situation from minor legal brangle to major diplomatic incident. No, not happy at all.
"Senior Cargomaster Molino of the Komarran fleet consortium."
Molino too was middle-aged, and quite as dyspeptic-looking as the Barrayarans, though dressed in neat dark Komarran-style tunic and trousers. A senior cargomaster was the ranking executive and financial officer of the limited-term corporate entity that was a commercial convoy, and as such bore most of the responsibilities of a fleet admiral with a fraction of the powers. He also had the unenviable task of being the designated interface between a potentially very disparate bunch of commercial interests, and their Barrayaran military protectors, which was usually enough to account for dyspepsia even without a crisis. He murmured a polite, "My Lord Vorkosigan."
Vorpatril's tone took on a slightly gritty quality. "My fleet legal officer, Ensign Deslaurier."
Tall Deslaurier, pale and wan beneath a lingering touch of adolescent acne, managed a nod.
Miles blinked in surprise. When, under his old covert ops identity, he had run a supposedly independent mercenary fleet for ImpSec's galactic operations, Fleet Legal had been a major department; just negotiating the peaceful passage of armed ships through all the varied local space legal jurisdictions had been a full-time job of nightmarish complexity. "Ensign." Miles returned the nod, and chose his wording carefully. "You, ah . . . would seem to have a considerable responsibility, for your rank and age."
Deslaurier cleared his throat, and said in a nearly inaudible voice, "Our department chief was sent home earlier in the voyage, my Lord Auditor. Compassionate leave. His mother'd died."
I think I'm getting the drift of this already. "This your first galactic voyage, by chance?"
"Yes, my lord."
Vorpatril put in, possibly mercifully, "I and my staff are entirely at your disposal, my Lord Auditor, and are ready with our reports as you requested. Would you care to follow me to our briefing room?"
"Yes, thank you, Admiral."
Some shuffling and ducking through the corridors brought the party to a standard military briefing room: bolted-down holovid-equipped table and station chairs, friction matting underfoot harboring the faint musty odor of a sealed and
gloomy chamber that never enjoyed sunlight or fresh air. The place smelled military. Miles suppressed the urge to take a long, nostalgic inhalation, for old times' sake. At his hand signal, Roic took up an impassive guard's stance just inside the door. The rest waited for him to seat himself, then disposed themselves around the table, Vorpatril on his left, Deslaurier as far away as possible.
Vorpatril, displaying a clear understanding of the etiquette of the situation, or at least some sense of self-preservation, began, "So. How may we serve you, my Lord Auditor?"
Miles tented his hands on the table. "I am an Auditor; my first task is to listen. If you please, Admiral Vorpatril, describe for me the course of events from your point of view. How did you arrive at this impasse?"
"From my point of view?" Vorpatril grimaced. "It started out seeming no more than the usual one damned thing after another. We were supposed to be in dock here at Graf Station for five days, for contracted cargo and passenger transfers. Since there was no reason at that time to think that the quaddies were hostile, I granted as many station leaves as possible, which is standard procedure."
Miles nodded. The purposes of Barrayaran military escorts for Komarran ships ranged from overt to subtle to never-spoken. Overtly, escorts rode along to repel hijackers from the cargo vessels and supply the military part of the fleet with maneuvering experience scarcely less valuable than war games. More subtly, the ventures provided opportunity for all sorts of intelligence gathering—economic, political, and social, as well as military. And it provided cadres of young provincial Barrayaran men, future officers and future civilians, with seasoning contact with the wider galactic culture. On the never-spoken side were the lingering tensions between Barrayarans and Komarrans, legacy of the, in Miles's view, fully justified conquest of the latter by the former a generation ago. It was the Emperor's express policy to move from a stance of occupation to one of full political and social assimilation between the two planets. That process was proving slow and rocky.