Komarr

CHAPTER TEN

Miles sat at Administrator Vorsoisson’s comconsole desk, methodically reading through the files of all the employees of the Waste Heat department. There seemed to be a lot of personnel, compared to some of the other departments; Waste Heat was definitely a favored child in the Project budget. Presumably most of them spent the bulk of their time out at the experiment station, since Waste Heat’s offices here were modest. In hindsight, always acute, Miles wished he’d begun his survey of Radovas’s life out there today, where there might have been some action to observe, instead of in this tower of bureaucratic boredom. More, he wished he’d dropped in on the experiment station during their first tour… well, no. He would not have known what to look for then.

And you know now? He shook his head in wry dismay and brought up another file. Tuomonen had taken a copy of the personnel list, and in due time would be interviewing most of these people, unless something happened to take the investigation off in another direction. Such as finding Marie Trogir-that was the first item now on Miles’s wish list for ImpSec. Miles shifted to ease the twinge in his back; he could feel his body stiffening from sitting still in a cool room too long. Didn’t these Serifosans know they needed to waste more heat?

Quick steps in the hallway paused and turned in at the outer office, and Miles glanced up. Tien Vorsoisson, a little out of breath, hung a moment in his office doorway, then plunged inside. He was carrying two heavy jackets, his own and the one of his wife’s that Miles had used the other day, and a breath mask labeled Visitor, Medium. He smiled at Miles in suppressed agitation. “My Lord Auditor. So glad to still find you here.”

Miles shut down the file and regarded Vorsoisson with interest. “Hello, Administrator. What brings you back tonight?”

“You, my lord. I need to talk with you right away. I have to… to show you something I’ve discovered.”

Miles opened his hand, indicating the comconsole, but Vorsoisson shook his head. “Not here, my lord. Out at the Waste Heat experiment station.”

Ah ha. “Right now?”

“Yes, tonight, while everyone is gone.” Vorsoisson laid the spare breath mask on the comconsole, rummaged in a cabinet in the far wall, and came up with his own personal mask. He yanked the straps over his neck and hastily adjusted his chest harness to hold the supplementary oxygen bottle in place. “I’ve requisitioned a lightflyer, it’s waiting downstairs.”

“All right…” Now what was this going to be all about? Too much to hope Vorsoisson had found Marie Trogir locked in a closet out there. Miles checked his own mask-power and oxygen levels indicated it was fully recharged-and slipped it on. He took a couple of breaths in passing, to test its correct function, then slid it down out of the way under his chin and shrugged on the jacket.

“This way…” Vorsoisson led off with long strides, which annoyed Miles considerably; he declined to run to keep up with the man. The Administrator perforce waited for him at the lift tube, bouncing on his heels in impatience. This time, when they reached the garage sub-level, the vehicle was ready. It was a less-than-luxurious government issue two-passenger flyer, but appeared to be in perfectly good condition.

Miles was less certain of the driver. “What’s this all about, Vorsoisson?”

Vorsoisson put his hand on the canopy and regarded Miles with an intensity of expression that was almost alarming. “What are the rules for declaring oneself an Imperial Witness?”

“Well… various, I suppose, depending on the situation.” Miles was not, he realized belatedly, nearly as well up on the fine points of Barrayaran law as an Imperial Auditor ought to be. He needed to do more reading. “I mean… I don’t think it’s exactly something one does for oneself. It’s usually negotiated between a potential witness and whatever prosecuting authority is in charge of the criminal case.” And rarely. Since the end of the Time of Isolation, with the importation of fast-penta and other galactic interrogation drugs, the authorities no longer had to bargain for truthful testimony, normally.

“In this case, the authority is you,” said Tien. “The rules are whatever you say they are, aren’t they? Because you are an Imperial Auditor.”

“Uh… maybe.”

Vorsoisson nodded in satisfaction, raised the canopy, and slid into the pilot’s seat. With reluctant fascination, Miles levered himself in beside him. He fastened his safety harness as the flyer lifted and glided toward the garage’s vehicle lock.

“And why do you ask?” Miles probed delicately. Vorsoisson had all the air of a man anxious to spill something very interesting indeed. Not for three worlds did Miles wish to frighten him off at this point. At the same time, Miles would have to be extremely cautious about what he promised. He’s your fellow Auditor’s nephew-in-law. You’ve just stepped onto an ethical tightrope.

Vorsoisson did not answer right away, instead powering the lightflyer up into the night sky. The lights of Serifosa brightened the faint feathery clouds of valuable moisture above, which occluded the stars. But as they shot away from the dome city, the glowing haze thinned and the stars came out in force. The landscape away from the dome was very dark, devoid of the villages and homesteads that carpeted less climatically hostile worlds. Only a monorail streaked away to the southwest, a faint pale line against the barren ground.

“I believe,” Vorsoisson said at last, and swallowed. “I believe I have finally accumulated enough evidence of an attempted crime against the Imperium for a successful prosecution. I hope I haven’t waited too long, but I had to be sure.”

“Sure of what?”

“Soudha has tried to bribe me. I’m not absolutely certain that he didn’t bribe my predecessor, too.”

“Oh? Why?”

“Waste Heat Management. The whole department is a scam, a hollow shell. I’m not really sure how long they’ve been able to keep this bubble going. They had me fooled for… for months. I mean… a building full of equipment on a quiet day, how was I supposed to know what it did? Or didn’t do? Or that there weren’t anything but quiet days?”

“How long-” have you known, Miles bit off. That question was premature. “Just what are they doing?”

“They’re bleeding off money from the project. For all I know, it may have started small, or by accident-some departed employee mistakenly kept on the roster, an accumulation of pay that Soudha figured out how to pocket. Ghost employees-his department is full of fictitious employees, all drawing pay. And equipment purchases for the ghost employees-Soudha suborned some woman in Accounting to go along with him. They have all the forms right, all the numbers match, they’ve slid it through I don’t know how many fiscal inspections, because the accountants HQ sends out don’t know how check the science, only the forms.”

“Who does check the science?”

That’s the thing, my Lord Auditor. The Terraforming Project isn’t expected to produce quick results, not in any immediately measurable way. Soudha produces technical reports, all right, plenty of them, right to schedule, but I think he mostly does them by copying other sectors’ previous-period results and fudging.”

Indeed, the Komarran Terraforming Project was a bureaucratic backwater, far down the Barrayaran Imperium’s urgent list. Not critical: a good place to park, say, incompetent Vor second sons out of the way of their families. Where they could do no harm to anyone, because the project was vast and slow, and they would cycle out and be gone again before the damage could even be measured. “Speaking of ghost employees-how does Radovas’s death connect with this alleged scam?”

Vorsoisson hesitated. “I’m not sure it does. Except to draw ImpSec down on it and burst the bubble. After all, he quit days before he died.”

“Soudha said he quit. Soudha, according to you, is a proven liar and data artist. Could Radovas have, say, threatened to expose Soudha and been murdered to assure his silence?”

“But Radovas was in on it. For years. I mean, all the technical people had to know. They couldn’t not know they weren’t doing the work the reports said.”

“Mm, that may depend on how much of an artistic genius Soudha was, arranging his reports.” Soudha’s own personnel certainly suggested that he was neither stupid nor second-rate. Might he have cooked those records as well? Oh, God. This means I’m not going to be able to trust any data off any console in the whole damned department. And he’d wasted hours today, decanting comconsoles. “Radovas might have had change of heart.”

“I don’t know,” said Vorsoisson plaintively. His glance flicked aside to Miles. “I want you to remember, I found this. I turned him in. Just as soon as I was sure.” His repeated insistence on that last point hinted broadly to Miles’s ear that his knowledge of this fascinating piece of peculation predated his assurance by a noticeable margin. Had Soudha’s bribe been not just offered, but accepted? Till the bubble burst. Was Miles witnessing an outbreak of patriotic duty on Vorsoisson’s part, or an unseemly rush to get Soudha and Company before they got him?

“I’ll remember,” Miles said neutrally. Belatedly, it occurred to him that going off alone in the night with Vorsoisson to some deserted outpost, without even pausing to inform Tuomonen, might not be the brightest thing he’d ever done. Still, he doubted Vorsoisson would be nearly this forthcoming in the ImpSec captain’s presence. It might be as well not to be too blunt with Vorsoisson about his chances of slithering out of this mess till they were safely back in Serifosa, preferably in the presence of Tuomonen and a couple of nice big ImpSec goons. Miles’s stunner was a reassuring lump in his pocket. He would check in with Tuomonen via his wrist comm link as soon as he could arrange a quiet moment out of Vorsoisson’s earshot.

“And tell Kat,” Vorsoisson added.

Huh? What had Madame Vorsoisson to do with any of this? “Let’s see this evidence of yours, then talk about it.”

“What you’ll mainly see is an absence of evidence, my lord,” said Vorsoisson. “A great empty facility… there.”

Vorsoisson banked the lightflyer, and they began to descend toward the Waste Heat experiment station. It was well lit with plenty of outdoor floodlamps, switched on automatically at dusk Miles presumed, and in high contrast to the surrounding dark. As they drew closer, Miles saw that its parking lot was not deserted; half a dozen lightflyers and aircars clustered in the landing circles. Windows glowed warmly here and there in the small office building, and more lights snaked through the airsealed tubes between sections. There were two big lift vans, one backing now into an opened loading bay in the large windowless engineering building.

“It looks pretty busy to me,” said Miles. “For a hollow shell.”

“I don’t understand,” said Vorsoisson.

Vegetation which actually stood higher than Miles’s ankle struggled successfully against the cold here, but it was not quite abundant enough to conceal the lightflyer. Miles almost told Vorsoisson to douse the flyer’s lights and bring them down out of sight over a small rise, despite the hike back it would entail. But Vorsoisson was already dropping toward an empty landing circle in the parking lot. He landed and killed the engine, and stared uncertainly toward the facility.

“Maybe… maybe you had better stay out of sight, at first,” said Vorsoisson in worry. “They shouldn’t mind me.”

He was apparently unconscious of the world of self-revelation in this simple statement. They both adjusted their breath masks, and Vorsoisson popped the canopy. The chill night air licked Miles’s exposed skin, above his breath mask, and prickled in his scalp. He dug his hands into his pockets as if to warm them, touched his stunner briefly, and followed the Administrator, a little behind him. Staying out of sight was one thing; letting Vorsoisson out of his sight was another.

“Try looking in the Engineering building first,” Miles called, his voice muffled by his mask. “See if we can get a look at what’s going on before you make contact with the en-er, try to speak to anyone.”

Vorsoisson veered toward the loading bay’s vehicle lock. Miles wondered if there was a chance anyone glancing out in the uncertain lighting might mistake him at first for Nikolai. The combination of Vorsoisson’s dramatic mystery and his own natural paranoia was making him twitchy indeed, despite a better part of his mind that calculated high odds on a harmless scenario involving Vorsoisson being wildly mistaken.

They entered the pedestrian lock into the loading dock and cycled through. The pressure differential in his ears was slight. Miles kept his breath mask up temporarily as they rounded the parked lift van. He would call Tuomonen as soon as he ditched-

Miles skidded to a halt a moment too late to avoid being spotted in turn by the couple who stood quietly next to a float-pallet loaded with machinery. The woman, who had the pallet’s control lead in her hand as she maneuvered the silently hovering load into the van, was Madame Radovas. The man was Administrator Soudha. They both looked up in shock at their unexpected visitors.

Miles was torn for a moment between whacking his wrist-comm’s screamer circuit or going for his stunner; but at Soudha’s sudden movement toward his own vest Miles’s combat reflexes took over, and his hand dove for his pocket. Vorsoisson half-turned, his mouth round with astonishment and the beginning of some warning cry. Miles would have thought I’ve just been led into ambush by that idiot, except that Vorsoisson was clearly much more surprised than he was.

Soudha managed to get his stunner out and pointed a half second before Miles did. Oh, shit, I never asked Dr. Chenko what a stunner blast would do to my seizure stimulator— the stunner beam took him full in the face. His head snapped back in an agony that was mercifully brief. He was unconscious before he hit the concrete floor.

Miles woke with a stunner migraine pinwheeling behind his eyes, metallic splinters of pure pain seemingly stuck quivering in his brain from his frontal lobes to his spinal column. He closed his eyes immediately against the too-bright glare of lights. He was nauseated to the point of vomiting. The realization immediately following, that he was still wearing his breath mask, caused his spacer’s training to cut in; he swallowed and breathed deeply, carefully, and the dangerous moment passed. He was cold, and held upright in an awkward position by restraints pulling on his arms. He opened his eyes again and looked around.

He was outdoors in the chill Komarran dark, chained to a railing along the walkway on the blank side of what appeared to be the Waste Heat engineering building. Colored floodlights positioned in the vegetation two meters below, prettily illuminating the building and raised concrete walk, were the source of the eye-piercing light. Beyond them, the view was singularly uninformative, the ground falling away from the building and then rising, beyond it, into blank barrenness. The railing was a simple one, metal posts set into the concrete at meter intervals and a round metal handrail running between them. He was slumped to his knees, the concrete hard and cold beneath them, and his wrists were chained-chained? yes, chained, the links fastened with simple metal locks-to two successive posts, holding him half-spread-eagled.

His ImpSec comm-link was still strapped to his left wrist. He could not, of course, reach it with his right hand. Or— he tried-his head. He twisted his wrist around, to press it against the railing, but the screamer-button was recessed to prevent accidental bumps setting it off. Miles swore under his breath, and his breath mask. The mask appeared to be tightly fitted to his face, and he could feel the oxygen bottle still firmly strapped to his chest under his jacket-who had fastened his jacket up to his chin?-but he would have to be exquisitely careful not to jostle the mask till he had his hands free again to readjust it.

So… had the stunner beam induced a seizure while he was unconscious, or was he still working up to one? His next was almost due. He stopped swearing abruptly and took a couple of deep, calming breaths that fooled his body not at all.

A couple of meters to his right, he discovered Tien Vorsoisson similarly chained between two upright posts. His head lolled forward; he evidently wasn’t awake yet. Miles tried to convince the knot of stressed terror in his solar plexus that this bit of cosmic justice was at least one bright point in the affair. He smiled grimly under his mask. All things considered, he’d rather Vorsoisson were free and able to try for help. Better still, leave Vorsoisson fastened there, free himself to try for help. But twisting his hands in their tight chains merely scraped his wrists raw.

If they wanted to kill you, you’d be dead now, he tried to convince his hyperventilating body. Unless, of course, they were sadists, out for a slow and studied revenge… What did I ever do to these people? Besides the usual offense of being Barrayaran in general and Aral Vorkosigan’s son in particular…

Minutes crept by. Vorsoisson stirred and groaned, then fell back into flaccid unconsciousness, at least assuring Miles he wasn’t dead. Yet. At length, the sound of footsteps on the concrete made Miles turn his head carefully.

Because of the approaching figure’s breath mask and padded jacket Miles was not at first sure if it was a man or a woman, but as it neared he recognized the curly gray-blond hair and brown eyes of a woman who’d been at that first VIP orientation meeting-it was the accountant, the meticulous one who’d been sure to have a duplicate copy of her department’s records for Miles, hah. Foscol, read the name on her breath mask.

She saw his open eyes. “Oh, good evening, Lord Auditor Vorkosigan.” She raised her voice to a good loud clarity, to be sure her words penetrated the muffling of her mask.

“Good evening, Madame Foscol,” he managed in return, matching her tone. If only he could get her talking, and listening-

She drew her hand from her pocket, and held up something glittering and metallic. “This is the key to your wrist locks. I’ll set it over here, out of the way.” She placed it carefully on the concrete walkway about halfway between Miles and the Administrator, next to the wall of the building. “Don’t let anyone accidentally kick it over the side. You’d have a heck of a time finding it down there.” She glanced thoughtfully over the rail at the dark vegetation below.

Implying that someone might be expected: a rescue party? Also implying that Foscol, Soudha, and Madame Radovas— Madame Radovas, what is she doing here?-did not expect to be around to supply the key in person when that happened.

She rummaged in her pocket again and came up with a data disk wrapped in protective plastic. “This, my Lord Auditor, is the complete record of Administrator Vorsoisson’s acceptance of bribes, in the amount of some sixty thousand marks over the last eight months. Account numbers, data trail, where his money was embezzled in the first place-everything you should need for a successful prosecution. I’d been going to mail it to Captain Tuomonen, but this is better.” Her eyes crinkled in a smile at him, above her breath mask. She bent and taped it securely to the back of Vorsoisson’s jacket. “With my compliments, my lord.” She stepped back and dusted her hands in the gesture of a dirty job well done.

“What are you doing?” Miles began. “What are you people doing out here, anyway? Why is Madame Radovas with-”

“Come, come, Lord Vorkosigan,” Foscol interrupted him briskly. “You don’t imagine that I’m going to stand around and chat with you, do you?”

Vorsoisson stirred, groaned, and belched. Despite the utter contempt in her eyes, lingering on his huddled figure, she waited a moment to be sure he wasn’t going to vomit into his breath mask. Vorsoisson stared wearily at her, blinking in bewilderment and, Miles had no doubt, pain.

Miles clenched his fists and jerked against his chains. Foscol glanced at him and added kindly, “Don’t hurt yourself, trying to get loose. Someone will be along eventually to collect you. I only regret I won’t be able to watch.” She turned on her heel and strode away, down the walk and around the corner of the building. After another minute, the faint sounds of a lift-van taking to the air drifted around the building. But they were on the opposite side of the building to the approach from Serifosa, and the departing van did not cross into Miles’s limited line of sight.

Soudha’s a competent engineer. I wonder if he’s set the reactor here to destroy itself? was the next inspired thought to enter Miles mind. That would erase all the evidence, Vorsoisson, and Miles, too. If he timed it just right, Soudha might be able to take out the ImpSec rescue squad as well… but it seemed Foscol meant the evidence pinned to Vorsoisson’s back to survive, at least, which argued against a scenario that would turn the experiment station into a glowing glass hole in the landscape resembling the lost city of Vorkosigan Vashnoi. Soudha and Company did not seem to be thinking militarily. Thank God. This scene seemed engineered for maximum humiliation, and one could not embarrass the dead.

Their next-of-kin, however… Miles thought of his father and shuddered. And Ekaterin and Nikolai, and, of course, Lord Auditor Vorthys. Oh, yes.

Vorsoisson, coming to full consciousness at last, reared up and discovered the limits of his bonds. He swore muzzily, then with increasing clarity of expression, and yanked his arms against their chains. After about a minute, he stopped. He stared around and found Miles.

“Vorkosigan. What the hell is going on here?”

“We appear to have been parked out of the way while Soudha and his friends finish decamping from the experiment station. They seem to have realized their time had run out.” Miles wondered if he ought to mention to Vorsoisson what was taped to his back, then decided against it. The man was already breathing heavily from his struggles. Vorsoisson swore some more, monotonously, but after a bit seemed to become aware that he was repeating himself, and ran down.

“Tell me more about this embezzlement scheme of Soudha’s,” Miles said into the eerie silence. No insect or bird chirps enlivened the Komarran night, and no tree leaves rustled in the faint, chill breeze. No further sounds came from the buildings behind them. The only noise was the susurration of their breath masks’ powered fans, filters, and regulators. “When did you find out about it?”

“Just… yesterday. A week ago yesterday. Soudha panicked, I think, and tried to bribe me. I didn’t want to embarrass Kat’s Uncle Vorthys by blowing it wide open while he was here. And I had to be sure, before I started accusing people right and left.”

Foscol says you lie. Miles wasn’t sure which of them he trusted least by now. Foscol could have invented her evidence against Vorsoisson using the same skills she had apparently called on to hide Soudha’s thefts. He would have to let the ImpSec forensic specialists sort it out, and carefully.

Miles simultaneously sympathized with and was deeply suspicious of Vorsoisson’s claimed hesitation, a dizzying state of mind to endure on top of a stunner migraine. He had never thought of fast-penta as a medicine for headache, but he wished he had a hypospray of it to jab in Vorsoisson’s ass right now. Later, he promised himself. Without fail. “Is that all that’s going on, d’you think?”

“What do you mean, all?”

“I don’t quite… if I were Soudha and his group, fleeing the scene of our crime… they did have some lead time to prepare their retreat. Maybe as long as three or four weeks, if they knew Radovas’s body was likely to be found topside.” And what the hell was Radovas’s body doing up there anyway? I still don’t have a clue. “Longer, if they kept their emergency backup plans up to date, and Soudha is an engineer if ever I met one; he’s got to have had fail-safes incorporated into his schemes. Wouldn’t it make more sense to scatter, travel light, try to get out of the Empire in ones and twos… not leave in a bunch with two lift-vans full of… whatever the hell they needed two lift-vans to transport? Not their money, surely.”

Vorsoisson shook his head, which shifted his breath mask slightly; he had to rub his face against the railing to reseat it. After a few minutes he said in a small voice, “Vorkosigan…?”

Miles hoped from the humbler tone the man might be going to edge toward true confession after all. “Yes?” he said encouragingly.

“I’m almost out of oxygen.”

“Didn’t you check-” Miles tried to bring up the image in his pulsing brain of the moment Vorsoisson had snatched his breath mask out of the cabinet, back in his office, and donned it. No. He hadn’t checked anything about it. A fully-charged mask would support twelve to fourteen hours of vigorous outdoor activity, under normal circumstances. Miles’s visitor’s mask had presumably been taken from a central store, where some tech had the job of processing and recharging used masks before setting them on the rack ready for reuse. Don’t forget to put your mask on the recharger, Vorsoisson’s wife had said to him, and been snapped at for nagging. Was Vorsoisson in the habit of stuffing his equipment away uncleaned? In his office, Madame Vorsoisson couldn’t very well pick up after him the way she doubtless did at home.

At one time, Miles could have crushed his own fragile hand bones and drawn his hand out through a restraint before his flesh began to swell enough to trap it again. He’d actually done that once, on a hideously memorable occasion. But the bones in his hands were all sturdy synthetics now, less breakable even than normal bone. All that his applied strength could do was make his chafed wrists bleed.

Vorsoisson’s wrists began to bleed too, as he struggled more frantically against his chains.

“Vorsoisson, hold still!” Miles called urgently to him. “Conserve your oxygen. There’s supposed to be someone coming. Go limp, breathe shallowly, make it last.” Why hadn’t the idiot mentioned this earlier, to Miles, to Foscol even… had Foscol intended this result? Maybe she’d meant both Miles and Vorsoisson to die, one after the other… how long till the promised someone came to collect them? A couple of days? Murdering an Imperial Auditor in the middle of a case was considered an act of treason worse than murdering a ruling District Count and only barely short of assassinating the Emperor himself. Nothing could be more surely calculated to send ImpSec’s entire forces in frenzied pursuit of the fleeing embezzlers, with an implacable concentration reaching, potentially, across decades and distance and diplomatic barriers. It was a suicidal gesture, or unbelievably foolhardy. “How much do you have left?”

Vorsoisson wriggled his chin and tried to peer down over his nose into the dim recesses of his jacket to see the top of the canister strapped there. “Oh, God. I think it’s reading zero.”

“Those things always have some safety margin. Stay still, man! Try for some self-control!”

Instead Vorsoisson began to struggle ever more frantically. He threw himself forward and backward with all his considerable strength, trying to break the railing. Blood drops flew from the flayed skin of his wrists, and the railing reverberated and bent, but it did not break. He pulled up his knees and then flung himself down through the meter-wide opening between the posts, trying to propel his full body weight against the chains. They held, and then his backward-scrambling legs could not regain the walkway. His boot heels scraped and scrabbled on the wall. His dizzied choking, at the last, led to vomiting inside his breath mask. When it slipped down around his neck in his final paroxysms, it seemed almost a mercy, except for the way it revealed his distorted, purpling features. But the screams and pleas stopped, and then the gasps and gulpings. The kicking legs twitched, and hung limply.

Miles had been right; Vorsoisson might have had a full twenty or thirty minutes more oxygen if he had hunkered down quietly. Miles stood very still, and breathed very shallowly, and shivered in the cold. Shivering, he recalled dimly, used more oxygen, but he could not make himself stop. The silence was profound, broken only by the hiss of Miles’s regulators and filters, and the beating of the blood in his own ears. He had seen many deaths, including his own, but this was surely one of the ugliest. The shocky shudders traveled up and down his body, and his thoughts spun uselessly: they kept circling back to the spuriously calm observation that a barrel of fast-penta would be no damned use to him now.

If he went into a convulsion and dislodged his breath mask in the process, he could be well on his way to asphyxiating before he even returned to consciousness. ImpSec would find him hanging there beside Vorsoisson, choked identically on his own spew. And nothing was more likely to set off one of his seizures than stress.

Miles watched the slime begin to freeze on the sagging corpse’s face, scanned the dark skies in the wrong direction, and waited.