Komarr

'That makes the last body, though. Good,' said Miles. 'It's so distressing for the relatives when they lose one altogether. When I was—' He cut off the rest, When I was a covert ops fleet commander, we'd move the heavens to try and get the bodies of our casualties back to their people. That chapter of his life was closed, now.

Madame Vorsoisson, splendid woman, handed him black coffee. She then inquired what her guests would like for breakfast; Miles maneuvered Vorthys into answering first, and volunteered for groats along with him. As she bustled around serving, and mopping up after Nikolai, Administrator Vorsoisson said, 'My department's presentation will be ready for you this afternoon, Auditor Vorthys. This morning Ekaterin wondered if you would like to see Nikolai's school. And after the presentation, perhaps there will be time for a flyover of some of our projects.'

'Sounds like a fine itinerary.' Professor Vorthys smiled at Nikolai. In all the hustle of their hurried departure from Barrayar, he—or perhaps the Professora—had not forgotten a gift for his great-nephew. I should have brought something for the kid, Miles decided belatedly. Surest way to please a mother. 'Ah, Miles . . .?'

Miles tapped the stack of data disks beside his bowl. 'I suspect I'll have enough to occupy myself here this morning. Madame Vorsoisson, I noticed a comconsole in your workroom; may I use it?'

'Certainly, Lord Vorkosigan.'

With a polite murmur about getting things in order for them at his department, Vorsoisson took his leave, and the breakfast party broke up shortly thereafter, each to their assorted destinations. Miles, new disks in hand, returned to Madame Vorsoisson's workroom/guest room.

He paused before seating himself at her comconsole, to stare out the sealed window at the park, and the transparent dome arcing over it to let in the free solar energy. Komarr's wan sun was not directly visible, risen to the east behind this apartment block, but the line of its morning light crept across the far edge of the park. The damaged insolation mirror, following it, had not yet risen over the horizon to double the shadows it cast.

So does this mean seven thousand years bad luck?

He sighed, darkened the window's polarization—scarcely necessary—seated himself at the comconsole, and began feeding it data disks. A couple of dozen good-sized new pieces of wreckage had been retrieved overnight; he ran the vids of them turning in space as the salvage ships approached. Theory was, if you could find every fragment, take precise recordings of all their spins and trajectories, and then run them backward, you could end up with a computer-generated picture of the very moment of the disaster, and so diagnose its cause. Real life never worked out quite that neatly, alas, but every little bit helped. ImpSec Komarr was still canvassing the orbital transfer stations for any casual vid-carrying tourists who might have been panning that section of space at the time of the whatever-and-collision. Futilely by now, Miles feared; usually, such people came forward immediately, excited and wanting to be helpful.

Vorthys and the probable-cause crew were now of the opinion that the ore tow had already been in more than one piece at the moment it had struck the mirror, a speculation which had not yet been released to the general public. So had the evidence-destroying explosion of the engines been cause or consequence of that catastrophe? And at what point had those tortured fragments of metal and plastic acquired some of their more interesting distortions?

Miles reran, for the twentieth time that week, the computer's track of the freighter's course prior to the collision, and contemplated its anomalies. The ship had carried only its pilot, on a routine—indeed, dead boring— slow run in from the asteroid mining belt to an orbital refinery. The engines had not been supposed to be thrusting at the time of the accident; acceleration had been completed and deceleration was not yet due to begin. The tow ship had been running about five hours ahead of schedule, but only because it had departed early, not because it had boosted hotter than usual. It had been coasting off-course by about six percent, within normal parameters and not yet ready for course correction, though the pilot might have been amusing herself trying to achieve more precision with some unscheduled microboosting. Even with the minor course correction due, the tow ship's route had been several hundred comfortable kilometers from the soletta array, in fact farther away than if it had been precisely on course.

What the course variation had done was take the freighter's track almost directly across one of Komarr's unused worm-hole jump points. Komarr local space was unusually rich in active jump points, a fact of strategic and historic consequence; one of the jumps was Barrayar's only gateway to the wormhole nexus. It was for control of the jump points, not for possession of the chilly planet, that Barrayar's invasion fleet had poured through here thirty-five years ago. As long as the Imperium's military held that high ground, its interest in Komarr's downside population and their problems was, at best, mild.

This jump point, however, supported neither traffic nor trade nor strategic threat. Explorations through it had dead-ended either in deep interstellar space, or close to stars that did not support either habitable planets or economically recoverable system resources. Nobody jumped out through there; nobody should have jumped in through there. The immediate vision of some unmotivated pirate- villain popping out of the worm-hole, potting the innocent ore freighter—by some weapon that left no traces, mind you—and popping back in again was currently unsupported by any evidence whatsoever, though the area had been scoured for it. It was the news media's current favorite scenario. But none of the five-space trails generated by ships taking wormhole jumps had been detected, either.

The five-space anomaly of the jump point was not even observable by ordinary means from three-space; it should not, just sitting there, have affected the freighter in any way even if the ship had passed directly across its central vortex. The freighter was a dedicated inner-system ship, and lacked Necklin rods and jump capacity. Still … the jump point was there. Nothing else was.

Miles rubbed his neck and turned to the new autopsy report. Gruesome, as always. The pilot had been a Komarran woman in her mid-fifties. Call it Barrayaran sexism, but female corpses always bothered Miles more. Death was such a malicious destroyer of dignity. Had he looked that disordered and exposed when he'd gone down to the sniper's fire? The pilot's body showed the usual progression: smashed, decompressed, irradiated, and frozen, all quite typical of deep-space impact accidents. One arm torn off, somewhere in the initial crunch rather than later, judging from the close-up vids of the freezing-effects of liquids lost at the stump. It had been a quick death, anyway. Miles knew better than to add, Almost painless. No traces of illicit drugs or alcohol had been found in her frozen tissues.

The Komarran medical examiner, along with his six final reports, included a message wanting to know if he had Miles's permission to release the bodies of the six members of the mirror's station-keeping crew back to their waiting families.

Good God, hadn't that been done yet? As an Imperial Auditor, he wasn't supposed to be running this investigation, just observing and reporting on it. He did not desire his mere presence to freeze anyone's initiative. He fired off the permission immediately, right from Madame Vorsoisson's comconsole.

He started working his way through the six reports. They were more detailed than the prelims he'd already seen, but contained no surprises. By this time, he wanted a surprise, something, anything beyond Spaceship blows up for no reason, kills seven. Not to mention the astronomical property damage bill. With three reports assimilated, and his bland breakfast becoming a regret in his stomach, he backed out for a short period of mental recovery.

Idly, while waiting for the queasiness to pass, he sorted through Madame Vorsoisson's data files. The one titled Virtual Gardens sounded pleasant. Perhaps she wouldn't mind if he took a virtual stroll through them. The Water Garden enticed him. He called it up on the holovid plate before him.

It was, as he had guessed, a landscape design program. One could view it from any distance or angle, from a miniature-looking total overview to a blown-up detailed inspection of a particular planting; one could program a stroll through its paths at any given eye level. He chose his own, at ahem-mumble-something under five feet. The individual plants grew according to realistic programs taking into account light, water, gravitation, trace nutrients, and even attacks by programmed pests. This garden was about a third filled, with tentative arrangements of grasses, violets, sedges, water lilies, and horsetails; it was currently suffering an outbreak of algae. The colors and shapes stopped abruptly at the unfinished edges, as if an invasion from some alien gray geometric universe were gobbling it all up.

His curiosity piqued, in best approved ImpSec style he dropped to the program's underlayer and checked for