Cetaganda

Ivan was taking a long time, downstairs in the infirmary. Miles shucked on his black fatigues and, barefoot, fired up his comconsole for a quick review of the eight haut-lord satrap governors.

The satrap governors were all chosen from a pool of men who were close Imperial relations, half-brothers and uncles and great-uncles, in both paternal and maternal lines. Two current office-holders were of the Degtiar constellation. Each ruled his satrapy for a set term of only five years, then he was required to shift—sometimes to permanent retirement back at the capital on Eta Ceta, sometimes to another satrapy. A couple of the older and more experienced men had cycled this way through the entire empire. The purpose of the term limitation, of course, was to prevent the build-up of a personal local power base to anyone who might harbor secret Imperial pretensions. So far so sensible.

So … which among them had been tempted into hubris by the dowager empress, and Ba Lura? For that matter, how had she contacted them all? If she'd been working on her plan for twenty years, she'd had lots of time . . . still, that long ago, how could she have predicted which men would be satrap governors on the unknown date of her death? The governors must have all been brought into the plot quite recently.

Miles stared narrow-eyed at the list of his eight suspects. I have to cut this down somehow. Several somehows. If he assumed Lord X had personally murdered the Ba Lura, he could eliminate the weakest and most fragile elderly men … a premature assumption. Any of the haut-lords might possess a ghem- guard both loyal and capable enough to be delegated the task, while the satrap governor lingered front and center in the bier-gifting ceremonies, his alibi established before dozens of witnesses.

No disloyalty to Barrayar intended, but Miles found himself wishing he were a Cetagandan security man right now—specifically, the one in charge of whatever investigation was progressing on Ba Lura's supposed suicide. But there was no way he could insert himself inconspicuously into that data flow. And he wasn't sure Rian had the mind-set for it, not to mention the urgent necessity of keeping Cetagandan security's attention as far from her as possible. Miles sighed in frustration.

It wasn't his task to solve the Ba's murder anyway. It was his task to locate the real Great Key. Well, he knew in general where it was—in orbit, aboard one of the satrap governors' flagships. How else to finger the right one?

A chime at his door interrupted his furious meditations. He hastily shut down the comconsole and called, 'Enter.'

Ivan trod within, looking extremely dyspeptic.

'How did it go?' Miles asked, waving him to a chair. Ivan dragged a heavy and comfortable armchair up to the comconsole, and flung himself across it sideways, scowling. He was still wearing his undress greens.

'You were right. It was taken by mouth, and it metabolizes rapidly. Not so rapidly that our medics couldn't get a sample, though.' Ivan rubbed his arm. 'They said it would have been untraceable by morning.'

'No permanent harm done, then.'

'Except to my reputation. Your Colonel Vorreedi just blew in, I thought you might like to know. At least he took me seriously. We had a long talk just now about Lord Yenaro. Vorreedi didn't strike me as a booted paranoid, by the way.' Ivan let the implication, So hadn't you better go see him?, hang in the air; Miles left it there.

'Good. I think. You didn't mention, ah—?'

'Not yet. But if you don't cough up some explanations, I'm going back to him for another pass.'

'Fair enough.' Miles sighed, and steeled himself. As briefly as the complications permitted, he summed up his conversation with the haut Rian Degtiar for Ivan, leaving out only a description of her incredible beauty, and his own stunned response to it. That was not Ivan's business. That especially was not Ivan's business.

'… so it seems to me,' Miles ran down at last, 'that the only way we can certainly prove that Barrayar had nothing to do with it is to find which satrap governor has the real Great Key.' He pointed orbit-ward.

Ivan's eyes were round, his mouth screwed up in an expression of total dismay. 'We?We? Miles, we've only been here for two and a half days, how did we get put in charge of the Cetagandan Empire? Isn't this Cetagandan security's job?'

'Would you trust them to clear us of blame?' Miles shrugged, and forged on into Ivan's hesitation. 'We only have nine days left. I've thought of three strings that could maybe lead us back to the right man. Yenaro is one of them. A few more words in our protocol officer's ear could put the machinery of ImpSec here into tracing Yenaro's connections, without bringing up the matter of the Great Key. Yet. The next string is Ba Lura's murder, and I haven't figured out how I can pull that one. Yet. The other string lies in astro-political analysis, and that I can do. Look.' On the comconsole, Miles called up a schematic three-dimensional map of the Cetagandan empire, its wormhole routes, and its immediate neighbors.

'The Ba Lura could have foisted that decoy key onto any number of outlander delegations. Instead, it picked Barrayarans, or rather, its satrap-governor master did. Why?'

'Maybe we were the only ones there at the right time,' Ivan suggested.

'Mm. I'm trying to reduce the random factors, please. If Yenaro's backer is the same as our man, we were picked in advance to be framed. Now.' He waved at the map. 'Picture a scenario where the Cetagandan empire breaks apart and the pieces begin an attempt to expand. Which, if any, benefit from trouble with Barrayar?'

Ivan's brows went up, and he leaned forward, staring at the glowing array of spheres and lines above the vid plate.

'Well . . . Rho Ceta is positioned to expand toward Komarr, or would be, if we weren't sitting on two thirds of the wormhole jumps between. Mu Ceta just got a bloody nose, administered by us, when it attempted to expand past Vervain into the Hegen Hub. Those are the two most obvious. These other three,' Ivan pointed, 'and Eta Ceta itself are all interior, I don't see any benefit to them.'

'Then there's the other side of the nexus,' Miles waved at the display. 'Sigma Ceta, bordering the Vega Station groups. And Xi Ceta, giving onto Marilac. If they were seeking to break out, it might be expedient for them to have the empire's military resources tied up far away against Barrayar.'

'Four out of eight. It's a start,' Ivan conceded.

Ivan's analysis matched his own, then. Well, they'd both had the same strategic training, it stood to reason. Still Miles was obscurely comforted. It wasn't all the hallucination of his own over-driven imagination, if Ivan could see it too.

'It's a triangulation,' said Miles. 'If I can get any of the other lines of investigation to eliminate even part of the list, the final overlap ought to … well, it would be nice if it all came down to one.'

'And then what?' Ivan demanded doggedly, his brows drawn down in suspicion. 'What do you have in mind forus to do then?'

'I'm . . . not sure. But I do think you'd agree that a quiet conclusion to this mess would be preferable to a splashy one, eh?'

'Oh, yeah.' Ivan chewed on his lower lip, eyeing the wormhole nexus map. 'So when do we report?'

'Not . . . yet. But I think we'd better start documenting it all. Personal logs.' So that anybody who came after them—Miles trusted not posthumously, but that was the unspoken thought—would at least have a chance of unraveling the events.

'I've been doing that since the first day,' Ivan informed him grimly. 'It's locked in my valise.'

'Oh. Good.' Miles hesitated. 'When you talked to Colonel Vorreedi, did you plant the idea that Yenaro had a high-placed backer?'

'Not exactly.'

'I'd like you to talk to him again, then. Try to direct his attention toward the satrap governors, somehow.'

'Why don't you talk to him?'

'I'm . . . not ready. Not yet, not tonight. I'm still assimilating it all. And technically, he is my ImpSec superior here, or would be, if I were on active duty. I'd like to limit my, um …'