A Civil Campaign

Enrique looked quite stunned, his mouth slightly open. 'Goodness. Yes, that could be done . . .'

'This design might possibly work for—I suppose you'd call them—the farmed or captive bugs,' said Ekaterin. 'I think the carapace petals might be a little too delicate and awkward for the free-range bugs that were expected to forage for their own food. They might get torn up and damaged. But I was thinking, as I was working with these, that you might have more than one design, later. Different packages, perhaps, for different microbial synthesis suites.'

'Certainly,' said Enrique. 'Certainly.'

'Last one,' said Ekaterin, and keyed the vid.

This bug's legs and body parts were a deep, glimmering blue. The carapace halves flared and then swept back in a teardrop shape. Their center was a brilliant yellow, shading immediately to a deep red-orange, then to light flame blue, then dark flame blue edged with flickering iridescence. The abdomen, barely visible, was a rich dark red. The creature looked like a flame, like a torch in the dusk, like a jewel cast from a crown. Four people leaned forward so far they nearly fell off their chairs. Martya's hand reached out. Ekaterin smiled demurely.

'Wow, wow, wow,' husked Kareen. 'Nowthat is a glorious bug!'

'I believe that was what you ordered, yes,' murmured Ekaterin.

She touched a vid control, and the static bug came to life momentarily. It flicked its carapace, and a luminous lace of wing flashed out, like a spray of red sparks from a fire. 'If Enrique can figure out how to make the wings bio-fluoresce at the right wavelength, they could twinkle in the dark. A group of them might be quite spectacular.'

Enrique leaned forward, staring avidly. 'Nowthere's an idea. They'd be a lot easier to catch in dim locations that way . . . There would be a measurable bio-energy cost, though, which would come out of butter production.'

Mark tried to imagine an array of these glorious bugs, gleaming and flashing and twinkling in the twilight. It made his mind melt. 'Think of it as their advertising budget.'

'Which one should we use?' asked Kareen. 'I really liked the one that looked like a flower . . .'

'Take a vote, I guess,' said Mark. He wondered if he could persuade anyone else to go for the slick black model. A veritable assassin-bug, that one had looked. 'A shareholder's vote,' he added prudently.

'We've hired a consultant for aesthetics,' Enrique pointed out. 'Perhaps we should take her advice.' He looked over to Ekaterin.

Ekaterin opened her hands back to him. 'The aesthetics were all I could supply. I could only guess at how technically feasible they were, on the bio-genetic level. There may be a trade-off between visual impact, and the time needed to develop it.'

'You made some good guesses.' Enrique hitched his chair over to the comconsole, and ran through the series of bug vids again, his expression going absent.

'Time is important,' Kareen said. 'Time is money, time is . . . time is everything. Our first goal has to be to get some saleable product launched, to start cycling in capital to get the basic business up, running, and growing. Then play with the refinements.'

'And get it out of Vorkosigan House's basement,' muttered Mark. 'Maybe . . . maybe the black one would be quickest?'

Kareen shook her head, and Martya said, 'No, Mark.' Ekaterin sat back in a posture of studied neutrality.

Enrique stopped at the glorious bug, and sighed dreamily. 'This one,' he stated. One corner of Ekaterin's mouth twitched up, and back down. Her order of presentation hadn't been random, Mark decided.

Kareen glanced up. 'Faster than the flower-bug, d'you think?'

'Yes,' said Enrique.

'Second the motion.'

'Are you sure you don't like that black one?' said Mark plaintively.

'You're outvoted, Mark,' Kareen told him.

'Can't be, I own fifty-one percent . . . oh.' With the distribution of shares to Kareen and to Miles's cook, he'd actually slipped below his automatic majority. He intended to buy them back out, later . . .

'The glorious bug it is,' said Kareen. She added, 'Ekaterin said she'd be willing to be paid in shares, same as Ma Kosti.'

'It wasn't that hard,' Ekaterin began.

'Hush,' Kareen told her firmly. 'We're not paying you for hard. We're paying you for good. Standard creative consultant fee. Pony up, Mark.'

With some reluctance—not that the workwoman was unworthy of her hire, but merely covert regret for the additional smidge of control slipping through his fingers—Mark went to the comconsole and made out a receipt of shares paid for services rendered. He had Enrique and Kareen countersign it, sent off a copy to Tsipis's office in Hassadar, and formally presented it to Ekaterin.

She smiled a little bemusedly, thanked him, and set the flimsy aside. Well, if she took it for play-money, at least she hadn't supplied play-work. Like Miles, maybe she was one of those people who was incapable of any speeds but off and flat-out . All things done well for the glory of God, as the Countess put it. Mark glanced again at the glorious bug, which Enrique was now making cycle through its wing-flash some more. Yeah.

'I suppose,' said Mark with a last longing look at Kareen, 'we'd better be going.' Time-the-essence and all that. 'The bug hunt has stopped everything in its tracks. R and D is at a standstill . . . we're barely maintaining the bugs we have.'

'Think of it as cleaning up your industrial spill,' Martya advised unsympathetically. 'Before it crawls away.'

'Your parents let Kareen come here today. Do you think they'd at least let her come back to work?'

Kareen grimaced hopelessly.

Martya screwed up her mouth, and shook her head. 'They're coming down some, but not that fast. Mama doesn't say much, but Da . . . Da has always taken a lot of pride in being a good Da, you see. The Betan Orb and, well, you, Mark, just weren't in his Barrayaran Da's instruction manual. Maybe he's been in the military too long. Although truth to tell, he's barely handling Delia's engagement without going all twitchy, and she is playing by all the old rules. As far as he knows.'

Kareen raised an inquiring eyebrow at this, but Martya did not elaborate.

Martya glanced aside to the comconsole, where the glorious bug sparked and gleamed under Enrique's enraptured gaze. 'On the other hand—the guard-parents haven't forbidden me to go over to Vorkosigan House.'

'Martya . . .' Kareen breathed. 'Oh, could you? Would you?'

'Eh, maybe.' She glanced under her lashes at Mark. 'I was thinking maybe I could stand to get into some of this share-action myself.'

Mark's brows rose. Martya? Practical Martya? To take over the bug hunt and send Enrique back to his genetic codes, without sestinas? Martya to maintain the lab, to deal with supplies