A Civil Campaign

to see Miles tonight. Maybe. He sighed, and shoved off to don the tunic of his undress greens, and head out for the Imperial Residence and the day's tasks.

* * *

Mark rang the chime on the Vorthys's door, shifted from foot to foot, and gritted his teeth in anxiety. Enrique, let out of Vorkosigan House for the occasion, stared around in fascination. Tall, thin, and twitchy, the ectomorphic Escobaran made Mark feel more like a squat toad than ever. He should have given more thought to the ludicrous picture they presented when together . . . ah. Ekaterin opened the door to them, and smiled welcome.

'Lord Mark, Enrique. Do come in.' She gestured them out of the afternoon glare into a cool tiled entry hall.

'Thank you,' said Mark fervently. 'Thank you so much for this, Madame Vorsoisson—Ekaterin—for setting this up. Thank you. Thank you. You don't know how much this means to me.'

'Goodness, don't thank me. It was Kareen's idea.'

'Is she here?' Mark swiveled his head in search of her.

'Yes, she and Martya were just a few minutes ahead of you both. This way . . .' Ekaterin led them to the right, into a book-crammed study.

Kareen and her sister sat in spindly chairs ranged around a comconsole. Kareen was beautiful and tight-lipped, her fists clenched in her lap. She looked up as he entered, and her smile twisted bleakly upward. Mark surged forward, stopped, stammered her name inaudibly, and seized her rising hands. They exchanged a hard grip.

'I'm allowed to talk to you now,' Kareen told him, with an irritated toss of her head, 'but only about business. I don't know what they're so paranoid about. If I wanted to elope, all I'd have to do is step out the door and walk six blocks.'

'I, I . . . I'd better not say anything, then.' Reluctantly, Mark released her hands, and backed off a step. His eyes drank her in like water. She looked tired and tense, but otherwise all right.

'Are you all right?' Her gaze searched him in turn.

'Yeah, sure. For now.' He returned her a wan smile, and looked vaguely at Martya. 'Hi, Martya. What are you doing here?'

'I'm the duenna,' she told him, with a grimace quite as annoyed as her sister's. 'It's the same principle as putting a guard on the picket line after the horses are stolen. Now, if they'd sent me along to Beta Colony, that might have been of some use. To me, at least.'

Enrique folded himself into the chair next to Martya, and said in an aggrieved tone, 'Did you know Lord Mark's mother was a Betan Survey captain ?'

'Tante Cordelia?' Martya shrugged. 'Sure.'

'A Betan Astronomical Survey captain . And nobody even thought to mention it! A Survey captain. And nobody eventold me.'

Martya stared at him. 'Is it important?'

'Is it important. Is it important! Holy saints, you people!'

'It was thirty years ago, Enrique,' Mark put in wearily. He'd been listening to variations on this rant for two days. The Countess had acquired another worshipper in Enrique. His conversion had doubtless helped save his life from all his coreligionists in the household, after the incident with the drains in the nighttime.

Enrique clasped his hands together between his knees, and gazed up soulfully into the air. 'I gave her my dissertation to read.'

Kareen, her eyes widening, asked, 'Did she understand it?'

'Of course she did. She was a Betan Survey commander , for God's sake! Do you have any idea how those people are chosen, what they do? If I'd completed my postgraduate work with honors, instead of all that stupid misunderstanding with the arrest, I could have hoped, only hoped, to put in an application, and even then I wouldn't have had a prayer of beating out all the Betan candidates, if it weren't for their off-worlder quotas holding open some places specifically for non-Betans.' Enrique was breathless with the passion of this speech. 'She said she would recommend my work to the attention of the Viceroy. And she said my sonnet was very ingenious. I composed a sestina in her honor in my head while I was catching bugs, but I haven't had time to get it down yet. Survey captain!'

'It's . . . not what Tante Cordelia is most famous for, on Barrayar,' Martya offered after a moment.

'The woman is wasted here. All the women are wasted here.' Enrique subsided grumpily. Martya turned half-around, and gave him an odd raised-brows look.

'How's the bug roundup going?' Kareen asked him anxiously.

'One hundred twelve accounted for. The queen is still missing.' Enrique rubbed the side of his nose in reminded worry.

Ekaterin put in, 'Thank you, Enrique, for sending me the butter bug vid model so promptly yesterday. It speeded up my design experiments vastly.'

Enrique smiled at her. 'My pleasure.'

'Well. Perhaps I ought to move along to my presentations,' said Ekaterin. 'It won't take long, and then we can discuss them.'

Mark lowered his short bulk into the last spindly chair, and stared mournfully across the gap at Kareen. Ekaterin sat in the comconsole chair, and keyed up the first vid. It was a full- color three-dimensional representation of a butter bug, blown up to a quarter of a meter long. Everyone but Enrique and Ekaterin recoiled.

'Here, of course, is our basic utility butter bug,' Ekaterin began. 'Now, I've only run up four modifications so far, because Lord Mark indicated time was of the essence, but I can certainly make more. Here's the first and easiest.'

The shit-brown-and-pus-white bug vanished, to be replaced with a much classier model. This bug's legs and body were patent-leather black, as shiny as a palace guardsman's boots. A thin white racing stripe ran along the edges of the now-elongated black wing carapaces, which hid the pale pulsing abdomen from view. 'Ooh,' said Mark, surprised and impressed. How could such small changes have made such a large difference? 'Yeah!'

'Now here's something a little brighter.'

The second bug also had patent-black legs and body parts, but now the carapaces were more rounded, like fans. A rainbow progression of colors succeeded each other in curved stripes, from purple in the center through blue-and-green-and-yellow-and-orange to red on the edge.

Martya sat up. 'Oh, now that's better. That's actually pretty .'

'I don't think this next one will quite be practical,' Ekaterin went on, 'but I wanted to play with the range of possibilities.'

At first glance, Mark took it for a rose bud bursting into bloom. Now the bug's body parts were a matte leaf-green faintly edged with a subtle red. The carapaces looked like flower petals, in a delicate pale yellow blushing with pink in multiple layers; the abdomen too was a matching yellow, blending with the flower atop and receding from the eye's notice. The spurs and angles of the bug's legs were exaggerated into little blunt thorns.

'Oh, oh,' said Kareen, her eyes widening. 'I want that one! I vote for that one!'