everyone inside under fast-penta. Scared the shit out of them all, I’m glad to say. They’re used to Count Vorbohn’s municipal guards, whom they bribe, or who blackmail them, and vice versa. We turned up a lot of information on petty crimes, none of which was of the least interest to us—do you want me to pass it on to the municipals, by the way?”
“Hm. If they’re innocent of the attack, just file it. Bothari may want to go back there someday. Do they know why they were questioned?”
“Certainly not! I insist my men work clean. We’re here to gather information, not pass it out.”
“My apologies, Commander. I should have known. Carry on.”
“Well, they left the place about an hour after midnight, on foot, and took a wrong turn somewhere. Bothari’s pretty upset about that. Thinks it’s his fault, for getting so drunk, Bothari and Koudelka both say they saw movements in the shadows for about ten minutes before the attack. So they were stalked, apparently, until they were manuevered into a high walled alley, and found themselves with six in front and six behind.
“Bothari pulled his stunner and fired—got three, before he was jumped. Someone down there is richer by a good service stunner this morning. Kou had his swordstick, but nothing else.
“They ganged up on Bothari first. He took out two more, after he’d lost the stunner. They stunned him, then tried to beat him to death after he was down. Kou had been using his stick as a quarterstaff up till then, but at that point he popped the cover off. He says now he wished he hadn’t, because this murmur of ’Vor!’ went up all around, and things got really ugly.
“He stabbed two, until somebody struck the sword with a shock stick, and his hand went into spasms. The five that were left sat on him and broke both his legs backwards at the knees. He asked me to tell you it wasn’t as painful as it sounds. He says they broke so many circuits he had hardly any sensation. I don’t know if that’s true.”
“It’s hard to tell with Kou,” said Vorkosigan. “He’s been concealing pain for so long, it’s almost second nature. Go on.”
“I have to jump back a bit now. My man who was assigned to Kou followed them down into that warren by himself. He wasn’t one of the men who are familiar with the place, supposedly, and he wasn’t dressed for it—Kou had two reservations for some live musical performance last night, and until three hours before midnight that’s where we thought he was going. My man went in there and vanished, between the first and second hourly checks. That’s what has me going this morning. Was he murdered? Or kidnapped? Rolled and raped? Or was he a plant, a setup, a double agent? We won’t know till we find the body, or whatever.
“Thirty minutes after the missed check my people sent in another tail. But he was looking for the first man. Kou was uncovered for three solid bloody hours last night before my night shift supervisor came on duty and woke to the fact. Fortunately, Kou’d spent most of that time in Bothari’s old whore’s retirement home.
“My night shift man, whom I commend, redirected the field agent, and put a patrol in the air to boot. So when the field agent finally got to that revolting scene, he was able to call a flyer down on top of it almost immediately, and drop half a dozen of my uniformed bruisers in to break up the party. That business with the shock sticks—It was bad, but not as bad as it might have been. Kou’s assailants evidently lacked the sort of, hm, imaginative approach that, say, the late Admiral Vorrutyer might have had in the same situation. Or maybe they just didn’t have time to get really refined.”
“Thank God,” murmured Vorkosigan. “And the deaths?”
“Two were Bothari’s work, clean blows, one was Kou’s—cut him across the neck—and one, I’m afraid, was mine. The kid went into anaphylactic shock in an allergic reaction to fast-penta. We zipped him over to ImpMil, but they couldn’t get him going again. I don’t like it. They’re autopsying him now, trying to find out if it was natural or a planted defense against questioning.”
“And the gang?”
“Appears to be a perfectly legitimate—if that’s the word—caravanserai mutual benefit society. According to the survivors we captured, they decided to pick on Kou because he ’walked funny.’ Charming. Although Bothari wasn’t exactly walking in a straight line, either. None of the ones we captured is an agent for anybody but themselves. I cannot speak for the dead. I supervised the questioning personally, and will swear to it. They were quite shocked to find themselves of interest to Imperial Security.”
“Anything else?” said Vorkosigan.
Illyan yawned behind his hand, and apologized. “It’s been a long night. My night shift man got me out of bed after midnight. Good man, good judgment. No, that about wraps it up, except for Kou’s motivation for going down there in the first place. He went all vague, and started asking for pain medication, when we came to that subject. I was hoping you might have a suggestion, to ease my paranoias. Being suspicious of Kou gives me a crick in the neck.” He yawned again.
“I do,” said Cordelia, “but for your paranoia, not for your report, all right?”
He nodded.
“I think he’s in love with someone. After all, you don’t test something unless you’re planning to use it. Unfortunately his test was a major disaster. I expect he’ll be pretty depressed and touchy for quite some time.”
Vorkosigan nodded understanding.
“Any idea who?” asked Illyan automatically.
“Yes, but I don’t think it’s your business. Especially if it’s not going to happen.”
Illyan shrugged acceptance, and left to pursue his lost sheep, the missing man who’d first been assigned to follow Koudelka.
Sergeant Bothari was back at Vorkosigan House, though not yet back on duty, within five days, a plastic casing on the broken arm. He volunteered no information on the brutal affair, and discouraged curious questioners with a sour glower and noncommittal grunts.
Droushnakovi asked no questions and offered no comments. But Cordelia saw her occasionally cast a haunted look at the empty comconsole in the library, with its double—scrambled links to the Imperial Residence and the General Staff Headquarters, where Koudelka usually sat to work while at Vorkosigan House. Cordelia wondered just how much detail of that night’s events had been poured, searing as lead, into her ears.
Lieutenant Koudelka returned to curtailed light duties the following month, apparently quite cheerful and unaffected by his ordeal. But in his own way he was as uninformative as Bothari. Questioning Bothari had been like questioning a wall. Questioning Koudelka was like talking to a stream; one got back babble, or little eddies of jokes, or anecdotes that pulled the current of the discussion inexorably away from the original subject. Cordelia responded to his sunniness with automatic good grace, playing along with his obvious desire to slide over the affair as lightly as possible. Inwardly she was far more doubtful.
Her own mood was not the best. Her imagination returned again and again to the assassination scare of six weeks ago, dwelling uncomfortably on the chances that had almost taken Vorkosigan from her. Only when he was with her was she completely at ease, and he was gone more and more now. Something was brewing at Imperial HQ; he had been gone four times to all-night sessions, and had taken a trip without her, some flying inspection of military affairs, of which he gave her no details and from which he returned white-tired around the eyes. He came in and out at odd hours. The flow of military and political gossip and chitchat with which he was wont to entertain her at meals, or undressing for bed, dried up to an uncommunicative silence, though he seemed to need her presence no less.
Where would she be without him? A pregnant widow, without family or friends, bearing a child already a focal point of dynastic paranoias, inheritor of a legacy of violence. Could she get off-planet? And where would she go if she could? Would Beta Colony ever let her come back?
Even the autumn rain, and the fat lingering greenness of the city parks, began to fail to please her. Oh, for a breath of really dry desert air, the familiar alkali tang, the endless flat distances. Would her son ever know what a real desert was? The horizons here, crowded close with buildings and vegetation, seemed almost to rise around her like a huge wall at times. On really bad days the wall seemed to topple inward.
She was holed up in the library one rainy afternoon, curled on an old high-backed sofa, reading, for the third time, a page in an old volume from the Count’s shelves. The book was a relic of the printer’s art from the Time of Isolation. The English in which it was written was printed in a mutant variation of the Cyrillic alphabet, all forty-six characters of it, once used for all tongues on Barrayar. Her mind seemed unusually mushy and unresponsive to it today. She turned out the light and rested her eyes a few minutes. With relief, she observed Lieutenant Koudelka
