Later, lying warm in the darkness in Vorkosigans room in the Count's town house, Cordelia remembered a curiosity. 'What did you say to the Emperor, about me?'
He stirred beside her, and pulled the sheet tenderly up over her bare shoulder, tenting them together. 'Hm? Oh, that.' He hesitated. 'Ezar had been questioning me about you, in our argument about Escobar. Implied that you had affected my nerve, for the worse. I didn't know then if I'd ever see you again. He wanted to know what I saw in you. I told him …' he paused again, and then continued almost shyly, 'that you poured out honor like a fountain, all around you.'
'That's weird. I don't feel full of honor, or anything else, except maybe confusion.'
'Naturally not. Fountains keep nothing for themselves.'
AFTERMATHS
The shattered ship hung in space, a black bulk in the darkness. It still turned, imperceptibly slowly; one edge eclipsed and swallowed the bright point of a star. The lights of the salvage crew arced over the skeleton. Ants, ripping up a dead moth, Ferrell thought. Scavengers …
He sighed dismay into his forward observation screen, and pictured the ship as it had been, scant weeks before. The wreckage untwisted in his mind—a cruiser, alive with patterns of gaudy lights that always made him think of a party seen across night waters. Responsive as a mirror to the mind under its Pilot's headset, where man and machine penetrated the interface and became one. Swift, gleaming, functional … no more. He glanced to his right, and cleared his throat self-consciously.
'Well, Medtech,' he spoke to the woman who stood beside his station, staring into the screen as silently and long as he had. 'There's our starting point. Might as well go ahead and begin the pattern sweep now, I suppose.
'Yes, please do, Pilot Officer.' She had a gravelly alto voice, suitable for her age, which Ferrell judged to be about forty-five. The collection of thin silver five-year service chevrons on her left sleeve made an impressive glitter against the dark red uniform of the Escobaran military medical service. Dark hair shot with grey, cut short for ease of maintenance, not style; a matronly heaviness to her hips. A veteran, it appeared. Ferrell's sleeve had yet to sprout even his first-year stripe, and his hips, and the rest of his body, still maintained an unfilled adolescent stringiness.
But she was only a tech, he reminded himself, not even a physician. He was a full-fledged Pilot Officer. His neurological implants and biofeedback training were all complete. He was certified, licensed, and graduated—just three frustrating days too late to participate in what was now being dubbed the 120 Day War. Although in fact it had only been 118 days and part of an hour between the time the spearhead of the Barrayaran invasion fleet penetrated Escobaran local space, and the time the last survivors fled the counterattack, piling through the wormhole exit for home as though scuttling for a burrow.
'Do you wish to stand by?' he asked her.
She shook her head. 'Not yet. This inner area has been pretty well worked over in the last three weeks. I wouldn't expect to find anything on the first four turns, although it's good to be thorough. I've a few things to arrange yet in my work area, and then I think I'll get a catnap. My department has been awfully busy the last few months,' she added apologetically. 'Understaffed, you know. Please call me if you do spot anything, though—I prefer to handle the tractor myself, whenever possible.'
'Fine by me.' He swung about in his chair to his comconsole. 'What minimum mass do you want a bleep for? About forty kilos, say?'
'One kilo is the standard I prefer.'
'One kilo!' He stared. 'Are you joking?'
'Joking?' She stared back, then seemed to arrive at enlightenment. 'Oh, I see. You were thinking in terms of whole—I can make positive identification with quite small pieces, you see. I wouldn't even mind picking up smaller bits than that, but if you go much under a kilo you spend too much time on false alarms from micrometeors and other rubbish. One kilo seems to be the best practical compromise.'
'Bleh.' But he obediently set his probes for a mass of one kilo, minimum, and finished programming the search sweep.
She gave him a brief nod and withdrew from the closet-sized Navigation and Control Room. The obsolete courier ship had been pulled from junkyard orbit and hastily overhauled with some notion first of converting it into a personnel carrier for middle brass—top brass in a hurry having a monopoly on the new ships—but like Ferrell himself, it had graduated too late to participate. So they both had been re-routed together, he and his first command, to the dull duties he privately thought on a par with sanitation engineering, or worse.
He gazed one last moment at the relic of battle in the forward screen, its structural girdering poking up like bones through sloughing skin, and shook his head at the waste of it all. Then, with a little sigh of pleasure, he pulled his headset down into contact with the silvery circles on his temples and midforehead, closed his eyes, and slid into control of his own ship.
Space seemed to spread itself all around him, buoyant as a sea. He was the ship, he was a fish, he was a merman; unbreathing, limitless, and without pain. He fired his engines as though flame leapt from his fingertips, and began the slow rolling spiral of the search pattern.
'Medtech Boni?' he keyed the intercom to her cabin. 'I believe I have something for you here.'
She rubbed sleep from her face, framed in the intercom screen. 'Already? What time—oh. I must have been tireder than I realized. I'll be right up, Pilot Officer.'
Ferrell stretched, and began an automatic series of isometrics in his chair. It had been a long and uneventful watch. He would have been hungry, but what he contemplated now through the viewscreens subdued his appetite.
Boni appeared promptly, and slid into the seat beside him. 'Oh, quite right, Pilot Officer.' She unshipped the controls to the exterior tractor beam, and flexed her fingers before taking a delicate hold.
'Yeah, there wasn't much doubt about that one,' he agreed, leaning back and watching her work. 'Why so tender with the tractors?' he asked curiously, noting the low power level she was using.
'Well, they're frozen right through, you know,' she replied, not taking her eyes from her readouts. 'Brittle. If you play hotshot and bang them around, they can shatter. Let's stop that nasty spin, first,' she added, half to herself. 'A slow spin is all right. Seemly. But that fast spinning you get sometimes—it must be very unrestful for them, don't you think?'
His attention was pulled from the thing in the screen, and he stared at her. 'They're dead, lady!'
She smiled slowly as the corpse, bloated from decompression, limbs twisted as though frozen in a strobe- flash of convulsion, was drawn gently toward the cargo bay. 'Well that's not their fault, is it?—one of our fellows, I see by the uniform.'
'Bleh!' he repeated himself, then gave vent to an embarrassed laugh. 'You act like you enjoy it.'
'Enjoy? No … But I've been in Personnel Retrieval and Identification for nine years, now. I don't mind. And of course, vacuum work is always a little nicer than planetary work.'
'Nicer? With that godawful decompression?'
'Yes, but there are the temperature effects to consider. No decomposition.'
He took a breath, and let it out carefully. 'I see. I guess you would get—pretty hardened, after a while. Is it true you guys call them corpse-sicles?'
'Some do,' she admitted. 'I don't.'
She maneuvered the twisted thing carefully through the cargo bay doors and keyed them shut. 'Temperature set for a slow thaw and he'll be ready to handle in a few hours,' she murmured.
'What do you call them?' he asked as she rose.
'People.'
She awarded his bewilderment a small smile, like a salute, and withdrew to the temporary mortuary set up next to the cargo bay.
On his next scheduled break he went down himself, drawn by morbid curiosity. He poked his nose around the doorframe. She was seated at her desk. The table in the center of the room was yet unoccupied.
'Uh—hello.'
She looked up with her quick smile. 'Hello, Pilot Officer. Come on in.'
'Uh, thank you. You know, you don't really have to be so formal. Call me Falco, if you want,' he said, entering.
