Komarr

'All right …' he said slowly. 'But I don't think … I don't think it was murder. To set up that scene, and then call you . . .'He shook his head. 'Manslaughter at most. Death by misadventure.'

'Death from stupidity,' she said bitterly. 'Consistent to the end.'

He glanced up at her, his eyes not so much startled as aware, and questioning. 'Ah?'

'Lord Auditor Vorkosigan.' She swallowed; her throat was so tight it felt like a muscle spasm. The silence in the building, and outside, was eerie in its emptiness. She and Vorkosigan might as well have been the only two people left alive on the planet. 'You should know, when I said Foscol called as I was leaving … I was leaving. Leaving Tien. I'd told him so, when he came home from the department tonight, and just before he went back, I suppose, to get you. What did he do?'

He took this in without much response at first, as if thinking it over. 'All right,' he echoed himself softly at last. He glanced across at her. 'Basically, he came in babbling about some embezzlement scheme which had been going on in Waste Heat Management, apparently for quite some time. He sounded me out about declaring him an Imperial Witness, which he seemed to think would save him from prosecution. It's not quite that simple. I didn't commit myself.'

'Tien would hear what he wanted to hear,' she said softly.

'I … so I gathered.' He hesitated, watching her face. 'How long . . . what do you know about it?'

'And how long have I known it?' Ekaterin grimaced, and rubbed her face free of the lingering irritation of her own mask. 'Not as long as I should have. Tien had been talking for months . . . You have to understand, he was irrationally afraid of anyone finding out about his Vorzohn's Dystrophy.'

'I actually do understand that,' he offered tentatively.

'Yes . . . and no. It's Tien's older brother's fault, in part. I've cursed the man for years. When his symptoms began, he took the Old Vor way out and crashed his lightflyer. It made an impression on Tien he never shook off. Set an impossible example. We'd had no idea his family carried the mutation, till Tien, who was his brother's executor, was going through the records and effects, and we realized both that the accident was deliberate, and why. It was just after Nikki was born …'

'But wouldn't it have … I'd wondered when I read your file—the defect should have turned up in the gene scan, before the embryo was started in the uterine replicator. Is Nikki affected, or . . . ?'

'Nikki was a body-birth. No gene scan. The Old Vor way. Old Vor have good blood, you know, no need to check anything.'

He looked as if he'd bitten into a lemon. 'Whose bright idea was that?'

'I don't . . . quite remember how it was decided. Tien and I decided together. I was young, we were just married, I had a lot of stupid romantic ideas … I suppose it seemed heroic to me at the time.'

'How old were you?'

'Twenty.'

'Ah.' His mouth quirked in an expression she could not quite interpret, a sad mixture of irony and sympathy. 'Yes.'

Obscurely encouraged, she went on. 'Tien's scheme for dealing with the dystrophy without anyone ever finding out he had it was to go get galactic treatment, somewhere far from the Imperium. It made it much more expensive than it needed to be. We'd been trying to save for years, but somehow, something always went wrong. We never made much progress. But for the past six or eight months, Tien's been telling me to stop worrying, he had it under control. Except . . . Tien always talks like that, so I scarcely paid attention. Then last night, after you went to sleep … I heard you tell him straight out you wanted to make a surprise inspection of his department today, I heard you—he got up in the night and called Administrator Soudha, to warn him. I listened … I heard enough to gather they had some sort of payroll falsification scheme going, and I'm very much afraid … no. I'm certain Tien was taking bribes. Because—' she stopped and took a breath '—I broke into Tien's comconsole this morning and looked at his financial records.' She glanced up, to see how Vorkosigan would take this. His mouth renewed the crooked quirk. 'I'm sorry I ripped at you the other day, for looking through mine,' she said humbly.

His mouth opened, and closed; he merely gave her a little encouraging wave of his fingers and slumped down a bit more in his chair, listening with an air of uttermost attention. Listening.

She went on hurriedly, not before her nerve broke, for she scarcely felt anything now, but before she dragged to a halt from sheer exhaustion. 'He'd had at least forty thousand marks that I couldn't see where they'd come from. Not from his salary, certainly.'

'Had?'

'If the information on the comconsole was right, he'd taken all forty thousand and borrowed sixty more, and lost it all on Komarran trade fleet shares.'

'All?'

'Well, no, not quite all. About three-quarters of it.' At his astonished look, she added, 'Tien's luck has always been like that.'

'I always used to say you made your own luck. Though I've been forced to eat those words often enough, I don't say it so much anymore.'

'Well … I think it must be true, or how else could his luck have been so consistently bad? The only common factor in all the chaos was Tien.' She leaned her head back wearily. 'Though I suppose it might have been me, somehow.' Tien often said it was me.

After a little silence, he said hesitantly, 'Did you love your husband, Madame Vorsoisson?'

She didn't want to answer this. The truth made her ashamed. But she was done with dissimulation. 'I suppose I did, once. In the beginning. I can hardly remember anymore. But I couldn't stop . . . caring for him. Cleaning up after him. Except my caring got slower and slower, and finally it … stopped. Too late. Or maybe too soon, I don't know.' But if, of course, she had not broken from Tien just then, in just that way, he would not tonight have . . . and, and, and, along the whole chain of events that led to this moment. That if- only could, of course, be said equally for any link in the chain. Not more, not less. Not repairable. 'I thought, if I let go, he would fall.' She stared at her hands. 'Eventually. I didn't expect it to happen so soon.'

It began to be borne in upon her what a mess Tien's death was going to leave in her lap. She would be trading the painful legalities of separation for the equally painful and difficult legalities of sorting out his probably bankrupt estate. And what was she supposed to do about his body, or any kind of funeral, and how to notify his mother, and . . . yet solving the worst problem without Tien seemed already a thousand times easier than solving the simplest with Tien. No more deferential negotiations for permission or approval or consensus. She could just do it. She felt . . . like a patient coming out of some paralysis, stretching her arms wide for the first time, and surprised to discover they were strong.

She frowned in puzzlement. 'Will there be charges? Against Tien?'

Vorkosigan shrugged. 'It is not customary to try the dead, though I believe it was done occasionally in the Time of Isolation. Lord Vorventa the Twice-Hung springs to mind. No. There will be investigations, there will be reports, oh my head the reports, ImpSec's and my own and possibly the Serifosa Sector's security—I anticipate argument over jurisdiction—there may be testimony required of you in the prosecution of other persons …' He broke off, to hitch himself around with difficulty in his chair, and shove a now somewhat less stiff-from-cold hand into his pocket. 'Persons who I suppose got away with my stunner …' His expression changed to one of dismay, and he spasmed to his feet and turned out both his trouser pockets, then checked his jacket, shucked it off, and patted his gray tunic. 'Damn.'

'What?' asked Ekaterin in alarm.

'I think the bastards took my Auditor's seal. Unless it just fell out of my pocket, somewhere in all the horsing around tonight. Oh, God. It'll open any government or security comconsole in the Empire.' He took a deep breath, then brightened. 'On the other hand, it has a locator-circuit. ImpSec can trace it, if they're close enough— ImpSec can trace them. Ha!' With difficulty, he forced his red and swollen fingers to open a channel on his comm link. 'Tuomonen?' he inquired.

'We're on our way, my lord,' Tuomonen's voice came back instantly. 'We're in the air, about halfway there