Cetaganda

'There's a reason I ask,' Miles went on. 'When ghem-Colonel Benin interviewed me, he let slip that six haut-bubbles had entered the funeral rotunda during the time period the Ba Lura's body must have been placed at the foot of the bier, and that it presented him with a major puzzle. He didn't tell me which six, but I bet you could get him to disgorge the list. It's a brute-force triage of a major data dump, but—suppose you ran the markers of those six through your records, and checked for accidental duplicates among living haut-women. If the woman is serving the satrap governor, she might have served him in that murder, too. You might finger your traitoress without ever having to leave the Star Creche.'

Rian, momentarily alert, sat back with a weary sigh.

'Your reasoning is correct, Lord Vorkosigan. We could do that—if we had the Great Key.'

'Oh,' said Miles. 'Yeah. That.' He reverted from an eager parade-rest to a deflated at-ease. 'For what it's worth, my strategic analysis and what little physical evidence I've wrung from ghem-Colonel Benin so far suggests either Prince Slyke or the haut Ilsum Kety. With the haut Rond a distant third. But as Rho Ceta and Mu Ceta would bear the brunt of it if open conflict with Barrayar was actually engineered, my own choice has settled pretty firmly between Slyke and Kety. Recent . . . events point to Kety.' He glanced again around the circle. 'Is there anything any of the consorts have seen or heard, or overheard, that would help pin him more certainly?'

A murmur of negatives; 'Unfortunately, no,' said Rian. 'We have discussed that problem already this evening. Please begin.'

On your head be it, milady. Miles took a deep breath, and launched into the full true account, minus most of his opinions, of his experiences on Eta Ceta from the moment the Ba Lura lurched into their personnel pod. He paused occasionally, to give Rian a chance to hint him away from anything she wanted to conceal. She appeared to want to conceal nothing, instead drawing him on with skillful questions and prompts to disgorge every detail.

Rian had seen, he slowly realized, that the secrecy problem cut two ways. Lord X could assassinate Miles, maybe Rian as well. But even the most megalomanic Cetagandan politician must find it excessively challenging to try to get away with disposing of all eight satrap consorts. His voice strengthened.

He felt his underlying assumptions slowly wringing inside-out. Rian seemed less and less like a damsel in distress all the time. In fact, he was beginning to wonder if he was trying to rescue the dragon. Well, dragons need to be rescued too, sometimes. . . . Nobody even blinked at his description of his near- assassination the day before. If anything, there was a subliminal murmur of appreciation for its elegance of form and style, and of faintly sympathetic disappointment at its foiling. The judges had no appreciation for the governor's originality in attempting to muscle in on their own territory, though. The Sigma and Xi Cetan consorts looked increasingly stony, exchanging a raised-brow glance or a nod of understanding now and then.

There was a long silence when he'd finished. Time to present Plan B? 'I have a suggestion,' Miles said boldly. 'Recall all the duplicate gene banks from the satrap governors' ships. If they are all returned, you will have stripped him of his ability to carry out his larger plans. If he resists releasing it, you will have smoked him out.'

'Bring them back' said the haut Pel in dismay. 'Do you have any idea how much trouble we had getting them up there?'

'But he might take both bank and Key, and flee,' objected the brown-curled Consort of Rho Ceta.

'No,' said Miles. 'That's the one thing he can't do. There are too many Imperially guarded wormhole jumps between him and home. Speaking militarily, open flight is impossible. He'd never make it. He cannot reveal a thing about any of this till he's safely in orbit around . . . Something Ceta. In a weird way, we have him cornered till the funeral is over.' Which will be all too soon, now.

'That still leaves the problem of retrieving the real Key,' said Rian.

'Once you have the bank back, you may be able to negotiate the Key's return, in exchange for, say, amnesty. Or you can claim he stole it—perfectly true—and set your own security to get it back for you. Once the other governors are freed of the incriminating evidence they're holding, you may be able to cut him out of the herd, so to speak, with their goodwill. In any case, it will open up a lot of tactical options.'

'He may threaten to destroy it,' worried the Consort of Sigma Ceta.

'You must know Ilsum Kety better than anyone else here, haut Nadina,' said Miles. 'Would he?'

'He is … an erratic young man,' she said reluctantly. 'I am not yet convinced that he is guilty. But I know nothing about him that makes your accusations impossible.'

'And your governor, ma'am?' Miles nodded to the Consort of Xi Ceta.

'Prince Slyke is … a determined and brilliant man. The plot you describe is not beyond his capacities. I'm . . . not sure.'

'Well . . . you can re-create the Great Key, eventually, can't you?' Push or shove, the Empress's great plan would be canned for a generation. A very desirable outcome, from Barrayar's point of view. Miles smiled agreeably.

A faint groan went around the room. 'Recovering the Great Key undamaged is the highest priority,' Rian said firmly.

'He still wants to frame Barrayar,' said Miles. 'It may have started as cold-blooded astro-political calculation, but I'm pretty sure it's a personal motivation by now.'

'If I recall the banks,' said Rian slowly, 'we will entirely lose this opportunity to distribute them.'

The Consort of Sigma Ceta, the silver-haired Nadina, sighed, 'I had hoped to live to see the Celestial Lady's vision of new growth carried out. She was right, you know. I have seen the stagnation increasing in my lifetime.'

'Other opportunities will come,' said another silver-haired lady.

'It must be done more carefully next time,' said the brown-curled Consort of Rho Ceta. 'Our Lady trusted the governors too much.'

'I'm not so sure she did,' said Rian. 'I was only attempting to go as far as distributing inactive copies for backup. The Ba Lura felt our Mistress's desires keenly, but did not understand her subtlety. It wasn't my idea to attempt to distribute the Key now, and I'm not convinced it was hers, either. I don't know if the Ba had a separate understanding with her, or just a separate misunderstanding. And now I never will.' She bowed her head. 'I apologize to the Council for my failure.' Her tone of voice made Miles think of inward- turning knives.

'You did your best, dear,' said the haut Nadina kindly. But she added more sternly, 'However, you should not have attempted to handle it all alone.'

'It was my charge.'

'A little less emphasis on the my, and a little more emphasis on the charge, next time.'

Miles tried not to squirm at the general applicability of this gentle correction.

A glum silence reigned, for a time.

'We may need to consider altering the genome to make the haut-lords more controllable,' said the Rho Cetan consort.

'For renewed expansion, we need the opposite,' objected the dark consort. 'More aggression.'

'The ghem-experiment, filtering favorable genetic combinations upward from the general population, surely suffices for that' said the haut Pel.

'Our Lady, in her wisdom, aimed at less uniformity, not more,' conceded Rian.

'I believe we have long made a mistake in leaving the haut-males so entirely to their own devices,' said the Rho Cetan consort stubbornly.

Said the dark one, 'But how else should we select among them, if there is no free competition to sort them out?'

Rian held up a restraining hand. 'The time for this larger debate . . . must be soon. But not now. I myself have been convinced by these events that further refinement must come before further expansion. But that,' she sighed, 'is a new Empress's task. Now we must decide what state of affairs she will inherit. How many favor the recall of the gene banks?'

The ayes had it. Several were slow in coming, but in some occult way a unanimous vote was achieved through nothing more than an exchange of unreadable glances. Miles breathed relief.

Rian's shoulders slumped wearily. 'Then I so order you all. Return them to the Star Creche.'