Komarr

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Ekaterin slept better than she’d expected to, but woke to the realization that she’d got through most of yesterday on adrenaline. Today, with its enforced wait for action, was going to be harder. I’ve been waiting nine years. I can manage nineteen more hours. Lying in bed allowed a kind of numb, foggy grief to descend, despite her release from the late chaos of Tien’s life. So she rose, dressed carefully, ducked around the guard in her living room, made breakfast, and waited.

The Auditors stirred soon thereafter and came out gratefully for food, but carried off their coffee to the secured comconsole. She ran out of things to clean up, and went out to her balcony, but found the presence of another guard on post inhibited her from resting there. So she gave the guards coffee, and retreated to her kitchen, and waited some more.

Lord Vorkosigan emerged again. He fended off her offers of more coffee, and instead seated himself at her table. “ImpSec sent me the autopsy report on Tien this morning. How much do you want to know about it?”

The vision of Tien’s congealed body, hanging in the frost, flashed in her memory. “Was there anything unexpected?”

“Not with respect to cause of death. They found his Vorzohn’s Dystrophy, of course.”

“Yes. Poor Tien. To spend all those years in a suppressed panic over his disease, only to die of another cause altogether.” She shook her head. “So much effort, so misplaced. How far advanced was it, could they tell?”

“The nervous lesions were very distinct, according to the examiner. Though how they can tell one microscopic blob from another… The outward symptoms, if I interpret the medical jargon correctly, would have been impossible to conceal very soon.”

“Yes. I think I knew that. It was the inward progress I wondered about. When did it start. How much of Tien’s, oh, bad judgment and other behavior was his disease.” Should she have somehow held on longer? Could she have? Until what other desperate denouement had played itself out?

“The damage builds slowly for a long time. Which parts of the brain are affected varies from person to person. For what it’s worth, his seemed concentrated in the motor regions and peripheral nervous system. Though it may be possible to blame some of his actions on the disease, later, if a face-saving gesture is needed.”

“How… politic. Face-saving for whom? I don’t wish it.”

He smiled a bit grimly. “I didn’t think you did. But I have the unpleasant conviction that this case is going to shift from its nice clean engineering parameters into some very messy politics sooner or later. I never discard a possible reserve.” He looked down at his hands, clasped loosely before him on the table. His gray sleeves imperfectly concealed the white bandages ringing his wrists. “How did Nikki take the news, last night?”

“That was hard. He started out-before I told him-trying to argue me into letting him stay and play another night. Getting passionate and sulking, you know how kids are. I so much wished I could simply let him go on, not having to know. I wasn’t able to prepare him as much as I would have liked. I finally had to sit him down and tell him straight out, Nikki, you have to come home now. Your Da was killed in a breath mask accident last night. It just… wiped him blank. I almost wished for the whining back.” Ekaterin looked away. She wondered what oblique forms Nikki’s reactions might eventually take, and whether she would recognize them. Or handle them well. Or not… “I don’t know how it’s going to go in the long run. When I lost my mother… I was older, and we knew it was coming, but it was still a shock, that day, that hour. I always thought there would be more time.”

“I’ve not yet lost a parent,” said Vorkosigan. “Grandparents are different, I think. They are old, it’s their destiny, somehow. I was shaken when my grandfather died, but my world was not. I think my father’s was, though.”

“Yes,” she looked up gratefully, “that’s the difference exactly. It’s like an earthquake. Something that isn’t supposed to move suddenly dumps you over. I think the world is going to be a scarier place for Nikki this morning.”

“Have you hit him with his Vorzohn’s Dystrophy news yet?”

“I’m letting him sleep. I’ll tell him after breakfast. I know better than to stress a kid who has low blood sugar.”

“Odd, I feel the same way about troops. Is there anything… can I help? Or would you prefer to be private?”

“I’m not sure. He doesn’t have school today anyway. Weren’t you taking my uncle out to the experiment station this morning?”

“Directly. It can wait an extra hour for this.”

“I think… I would like it if you can stay. It’s not good to make of the disease something all secret that’s too awful to even talk about. That was Tien’s mistake.”

“Yes,” he said encouragingly. “It’s just a thing. You deal with it.”

Her brows rose. “As in, one damn thing after another?”

“Yes, very like.” He smiled at her, his gray eyes crinkling. Through whatever combination of luck and clever surgery, no scars marred his face, she realized. “It works, as tactics if not strategy.”

True to his offer, Lord Vorkosigan drifted back into her kitchen as Nikki was finishing his breakfast. He lingered suggestively, stirring the coffee he took black and leaning against the far counter. Ekaterin took a deep breath and settled beside Nikki at the table, her own half-empty and cold cup a mere prop. Nikki eyed her warily.

“You won’t be going to school tomorrow,” she began, hoping to strike a positive note.

“Is that when Da’s funeral is? Will I have to burn the offering?”

“Not yet. Your Grandmadame has asked that we bring his body back to Barrayar, to bury beside your uncle who died when you were little.” Tien’s mother’s return message had come in by comconsole this morning, beamed and jumped through the wormhole-relays. In writing, as Ekaterin’s had been, and perhaps for similar reasons; writing allowed one to leave so much out. “We’ll do all the ceremonies and burn the offering then, when everyone can be there.”

“Will we have to take him on the jumpship with us?” asked Nikki, looking disturbed.

From the side of the room Lord Vorkosigan said, “In fact, ImpS-the Imperial Civil Service will take care of all those arrangements, with your permission, Madame Vorsoisson. He will probably be back home before you are, Nikki.”

“Oh,” said Nikki.

“Oh,” Ekaterin echoed. “I… I was wondering. I thank you.”

He sketched a bow. “Allow me to pass on your mother-in-law’s address and instructions. You have enough other things to do.”

She nodded, and turned back to her son. “Anyway, Nikki… you and I are going to Solstice tomorrow, to visit a clinic there. We never mentioned this to you before, but you have a condition called Vorzohn’s Dystrophy.”

Nikki made an uncertain face. “What’s that?”

“It’s a disorder where, with age, your body stops making certain proteins in quite the right shape to do their job. Nowadays the doctors can give you some retrogenes that produce the proteins correctly, to make up for it. You’re too young to have any symptoms, and with this fix, you never will.” At Nikki’s age, and on the first pass, it was probably not yet necessary to go into the complications it would entail for his future reproduction. She noticed dryly how she had managed to get through the long-anticipated spiel without once using the word mutation. “I’ve collected a lot of articles about Vorzohn’s Dystrophy, which you can read when you want to. Some of them are too technical, but there are a couple I think you could get through with a little help.” There. If she could avoid setting off his homework alarms, that ought to set up a reasonably neutral way to give him the information to which he had a right, and he could pursue it at his own pace thereafter.

Nikki looked worried. “Will it hurt?”

“Well, they will certainly have to draw blood, and take some tissue samples.”

Vorkosigan put in, “I’ve had both done to me, what seems like a thousand times over the years, for various medical reasons. The blood draw hurts for a moment, but not later. The tissue sampling doesn’t hurt because they use a medical micro-stun, but when the stun wears off, it aches for a while. They only need a tiny sample from you, so it won’t be much.”

Nikki appeared to digest this. “Do you have Vorzohn’s thing, Lord Vorkosigan?”

“No. My mother was poisoned with a chemical called soltoxin, before I was born. It damaged my bones, mainly, which is why I’m so short.” He wandered over to the table and sat down with them.

Ekaterin was expecting Nikki’s next to be something along the lines of, Will I be short? but instead, his brown eyes widened in extreme worry. “Did she die?”

“No, she recovered completely. Fortunately. For us all. She’s fine now.”

He took this in. “Was she scared?”

Nikki, Ekaterin realized, had not yet sorted out just who Lord Vorkosigan’s mother was, in relation to the people he’d heard about in his history lessons. Vorkosigan’s brows rose in some bemusement. “I don’t know. You can ask her yourself, someday, when-if you meet her. I’d be fascinated to hear the answer.” He caught Ekaterin’s unsettled gaze, but his eyebrows remained unrepentant.

Nikki regarded Lord Vorkosigan dubiously. “Did they fix your bones with retrogenes?”

“No, more’s the pity. It would have been much easier on me, if it had been possible. They waited till they thought I was done growing, and then they replaced them with synthetics.”

Nikki was diverted. “How d’you replace bones? How do you get them out?”

“Cut me open,” Vorkosigan made a slicing motion with his right hand along his left arm from elbow to wrist, “chop the old bone out, pop the new one in, reconnect the joints, transplant the marrow to the new matrix, glue it up and wait for it to heal. Very messy and tedious.”

“Did it hurt?”

“I was asleep-anesthetized. You’re lucky you can have retrogenes. All you have to have are a few fiddling injections.”

Nikki looked vastly impressed. “Can I see?”

After an infinitesimal hesitation, Vorkosigan unfastened his shirt cuff and pushed back his left sleeve. “That pale little line there, see?” Nikki stared with interest, both at Vorkosigan’s arm and, speculatively, at his own. He wriggled his fingers, and watched his arm flex as the muscles and bones moved beneath his skin.

“I have a scab,” he offered in return. “Want to see?” Awkwardly, he pushed up his pant leg to display the latest playground souvenir on his knee. Gravely, Vorkosigan inspected it, and agreed it was a good scab, and would doubtless fall off very soon now, and yes, perhaps there would be a scar, but his mother was very right to tell him not to pick it. To Ekaterin’s relief, everyone then refastened their clothes and the contest went no further.

The conversation lagging after that high point, Nikki pushed a few last smears of groats and syrup artistically around the bottom of his dish, and asked, “Can I be excused?”

“Of course,” said Ekaterin. “Wash the syrup off your hands,” she called after his retreating form. She watched him-run, not walk-out, and said uncertainly, “That went better than I expected.”

Vorkosigan smiled reassurance. “You were matter-of-fact, so you gave him no reason to be otherwise.”

After a little silence Ekaterin said, “Was she scared? Your mother.”

His smile twisted. “Spitless, I believe.” His eyes warmed, and glinted. “But not, I understand, witless.”

The two Auditors left for an on-site inspection of the Waste Heat experiment station shortly thereafter. Waiting carefully for a natural break in Nikki’s quiet play in his room, Ekaterin called him in to her workroom to read the simplest and most straightforward article she had found on the subject of Vorzohn’s Dystrophy. She sat him in her lap in her comconsole station chair, something she seldom did any more now he had become so leggy. It was a measure of his hidden unease this morning, she thought, that he did not resist the cuddle, nor her direction. He read through the article with fair understanding, stopping now and then to demand pronunciations and meanings of unfamiliar terms, or for her to rephrase or interpret some baffling sentence. If he had not been on her lap, she would not have detected the slight stiffening of his body as he read the line:… later investigations concluded this natural mutation first appeared in Vorinnis’s District near the end of the Time of Isolation. Only with the arrival of galactic molecular biology was it determined that it was unrelated to several old Earth genetic diseases which its symptoms sometimes mimic.

“Any questions?” Ekaterin asked, when they’d finally wended to the end of the thing.

“Naw.” Nikki elbowed off her lap and slid to his feet.

“You can read more whenever you want.”

“Huh.”

With difficulty, Ekaterin restrained herself from pursuing some more definite response from him, realizing she wanted it more for her sake than his own. Are you all right, is it all right, do you forgive me? He would not, could not, work through it all in an hour, or a day, or even a year; each day must have the challenge and response appropriate to it. One damn thing after another, Vorkosigan had said. But not, thank heavens, all things simultaneously.

The addition of Lord Vorkosigan to the expedition to Solstice made startling alterations in Ekaterin’s carefully calculated travel plans. Instead of rising in the middle of the night to catch economy-class seats on the monorail, they awoke at a leisurely hour to take passage on an ImpSec suborbital courier shuttle which waited their pleasure, and would cover the intervening time zones with an hour to spare for lunch before Nikki’s appointment.

“I love the monorail,” Vorkosigan had confided apologetically at her first startled protest at the news of this change, sprung on her late in the evening when the two Auditors returned from their day’s investigations. “In fact, I’m thinking of urging my brother Mark to invest in some of the companies trying to build more of them on Barrayar. But with this case heating up, ImpSec’s made it pretty clear they would rather I did not travel by public transportation just now thank you very much my lord.”

They also had two bodyguards. They wore discreet Komarran-style civilian clothes, which made them look exactly like a pair of Barrayaran military bodyguards in civvies. Vorkosigan seemed equally able to deal easily with them, or ignore them as though they were invisible, at will. He brought reports to read on the flight, but only glanced over them, seeming a little distracted. Ekaterin wondered if Nikki’s restlessness broke his concentration, and if she ought to try and suppress the boy. But a quiet word from Vorkosigan at apogee won an excited Nikki an invitation to come forward and spend ten minutes in the pilot’s compartment.

“How is the case going this morning?” Ekaterin asked him during this private interlude.

“Exactly as I predicted, unfortunately,” he said. “ImpSec’s failure to catch up with Soudha is growing more disturbing by the hour. I really thought they’d have nailed him by now. Between Colonel Gibbs’s group, and that team of earnest ImpSec boys we have counting widgets out at the experiment station, my parts list is starting to take shape, but it will be at least another day before it’s complete.”

“Did my uncle like the idea?”

“Heh. He said it was tedious, which I already knew. And then he appropriated it from me, which I take to indicate approval.” He rubbed his lips, introspectively. “Thanks to your uncle, we did get one spot of encouragement last night. He’d thought to confiscate Radovas’s personal library, when we visited Madame Radovas, and we sent it off to ImpSec HQ for analysis. Their analyst confirmed Radovas’s primary interest in jumpship technology and wormhole physics, which does not surprise me much, but then we got a bonus.

“Soudha or his techs did a superb job of erasing everyone’s comconsoles before ImpSec got to them, but evidently no one thought of the library. Some of the technical volumes had notes entered in the margin boxes. The Professor was quite excited about the mathematical fragments, but more obviously, there were reminders to confide this or that thought or calculation to some names jotted next to them. Mostly members of the Waste Heat group, but also a couple of others, including one who appears to be one of the late members of the station-keeping crew at the soletta array. We’re now positing that Radovas and his equipment, with inside help, had been smuggled up to the soletta for whatever it was they were trying to do, rather than being aboard the ore freighter. So was the soletta essential to what they were doing, or were they only using it for a test platform? ImpSec has agents out all over the planet today, questioning and requestioning colleagues, relatives, and friends of everyone on the soletta or having anything to do with their resupply shuttle. Tomorrow, I will get to read all those reports.”

Nikki’s return dried up this amiable flow of information, and they soon landed at one of ImpSec’s own private shuttle-ports on the edge of the vast sealed city of Solstice. Instead of taking a public bubble-car, they were provided with a floater and driver, who took them down into the restricted tunnels by some dizzying back route that brought them to their destination in about two-thirds the time of the bubble-car system.

The first stop was a restaurant atop one of Solstice’s highest towers, providing diners a spectacular view of the capital glittering halfway to the horizon; though the place was crowded, no one was seated near them while they ate, Ekaterin observed. The bodyguards did not join in the meal.

The menu had no prices, triggering a moment of panic in Ekaterin’s heart. She had no way to direct Nikki, or herself, for that matter, to the cheaper selections. If you have to ask, you can’t afford it. Her initial determination to argue possession of her portion of the bill with Vorkosigan sagged.

Vorkosigan’s height and appearance drew the usual covert double-takes. For the first time in his company, she became aware of being mistaken for a couple or even a family. Her chin rose defensively. What, did they think him too odd to attach a woman? It was none of their business anyway.

The next stop-and Ekaterin was very grateful she did not have to navigate to it herself-was the clinic, a comfortable quarter hour early. Vorkosigan did not appear to notice anything in the least remarkable about the whole magic carpet ride, though Nikki had been enthusiastically diverted throughout. Had Vorkosigan planned that? The boy grew suddenly very much quieter as they took the lift-tubes up to the clinic lobby.

When they were ushered to the booth of an admissions clerk, Vorkosigan pulled up a chair for himself just behind Ekaterin and Nikki, and the bodyguards faded discreetly out of range. Ekaterin presented identification and civil service payment documentation, and all seemed to go smoothly, until they came to the information that Nikki’s father was lately deceased, and the clinic comconsole demanded formal permissions from Nikki’s legal guardian.

That thing is much too well programmed, Ekaterin thought, and embarked on an explanation of the distance to Tien’s third cousin back on Barrayar, and the time-constrained need for Nikki’s treatment to be completed before their return. The Komarran clerk listened with understanding and sympathy, but the comconsole program did not agree, and after a couple of attempts to override it, the clerk went off to fetch her supervisor. Ekaterin bit her lip and rubbed her palms on her trouser knees. To come so far, to be so close, to get hung up on some legal technicality now…

The supervisor, a pleasant young Komarran man, returned with the clerk, and Ekaterin gave her explanation again. He listened, and rechecked all the documentation, and turned to her with an air of earnest regret.

“I’m sorry, Madame Vorsoisson. If you were a Komarran planetary shareholder, instead of a Barrayaran subject, the rules would be very different.”

“All Komarran planetary shareholders are Barrayaran subjects,” Vorkosigan pointed out from behind her, in a bland tone.

The supervisor managed a pained smile. “I’m afraid that’s not quite what I meant. The thing is, a similar problem came up for us just a few months ago, regarding treatment under quasi-emergency conditions of a Vor child of Komarr-resident Barrayarans. We went with what seemed to us to be the common-sense approach. The child’s legal guardian later disagreed, and the judicial, er, negotiations are still going on. It proved to be a very costly error of judgment for the clinic. Given that Vorzohn’s Dystrophy is a chronic and not an immediately life-threatening condition, and that you should in theory be able to obtain your legal permissions in a week or two, I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to reschedule.”

Ekaterin took a deep breath, whether to argue or scream she was not sure. But Lord Vorkosigan leaned past her shoulder and smiled at the supervisor. “Hand me that read-pad, will you?”

The puzzled supervisor did so; Vorkosigan rummaged in his pocket and pulled out his gold Auditor’s seal, which he uncapped and pressed to the pad, along with his right palm. He spoke into the vocorder. “By my order, and for the good the Imperium, I request and require all assistance, to wit, suitable medical treatment for Nikolai Vorsoisson. Vorkosigan, Imperial Auditor.” He handed it back. “See if that doesn’t make your machine happier.” He murmured aside to Ekaterin, “Just like swatting flies with a laser cannon. The aim’s a bit tricky, but it sure takes care of the flies.”

“Lord Vorkosigan, I can’t…” Her tongue stumbled to a halt. Can’t what? This wasn’t like waffling over the lunch bill; Tien’s benefits would be paying for Nikki’s treatment, if only the Komarrans could be persuaded to disgorge it. Vorkosigan’s offered contribution was entirely intangible. “Nothing your esteemed uncle would not have done for you, if I could have spared him to you today.” He gave her one his ghost-bows, seated.

The supervisor’s expression changed from suspicious to stunned as his comconsole digested this new data. “You are Lord Auditor Vorkosigan?”

“At your service.”

“I… er… uh… in what capacity are you here, my Lord?”

“Friend of the family.” Vorkosigan’s smile twisted just slightly, “Red tape cutter and general expediter.” To his credit, the supervisor managed not to gibber. He dismissed the clerk and sped them through processing, and himself escorted them upstairs and into the hands of the medtechs in the genetics department. He then vanished, but things ran blazingly quickly thereafter.

“It almost seems unfair,” Ekaterin murmured, when Nikki was whisked away briefly by a tech to pee into a sampler, “to think Nikki just jumped the queue, there.”

“Yes, well… I found last winter that an Auditor’s seal had the same enlivening effect on ImpMil’s veteran’s treatment division, whose hallways are much draftier and drab than these, and whose queue times are legendary. Quite ridiculous. I was charmed.” Vorkosigan’s face grew more introspective, and sober. “I’m afraid I’ve not quite found my balance with this Imperial Auditor thing yet. What is the just use of power, what is its abuse? I could have ordered Madame Radovas to be fast-penta’d, or ordered Tien to land us at the experiment station that first evening, and events would now be… well, I don’t quite know what they would now be, except different than this. But I did not wish to…” He trailed off, and for just a flash, Ekaterin caught an impression of a much younger man beneath his habitual mask of irony and authority. He is no older than me, after all.

“Did you anticipate that problem with the permissions? I should have thought of it, I suppose, but they took all the information when I made the appointment, and didn’t say anything, so I thought, I assumed-”

“Not specifically. But I hoped I might have a chance to do some little service or another today. I’m pleased it was so easy.”

Yes, she realized enviously, he could just wave all ordinary problems out of his path. Leaving only the extraordinary ones… her envy ebbed. It occurred belatedly to Ekaterin that he too might feel some guilt about Tien’s death, and that was why he was going to such lengths to assist Tien’s widow and orphan. So intense a concern seemed unnecessary, and she wondered how to reassure him that she did not blame him without creating more awkwardness than she erased.

A battery of tests was completed upon Nikki in about half the time Ekaterin had mentally allotted for them. The Komarran physician met with them in her comfortable office very shortly thereafter; Vorkosigan dismissed the bodyguards to lurk in the corridor.

“Nikki’s gene scan shows the dystrophy complex to be very much in the classic mode,” the doctor told them, when Ekaterin and Nikki were seated side by side in front of her comconsole desk. Vorkosigan, as usual, took a backseat and just watched. “He has a few idiosyncratic complications, but nothing our lab can’t handle.”

She illustrated her talk with a holovid of the actual offending chromosomes, and a computer-generated vid of exactly how the retrovirus would deliver the splice that would work to supplement their deficiencies. Nikki did not ask as many questions as Ekaterin had hoped he would-was he intimidated, weary, bored?

“I believe our gene techs can have the retrovirus personalized for Nikki in about a week,” the doctor concluded. “I’m going to have you return for the injection then, Nikki. Plan to stay overnight in Solstice for a recheck the following day, Madame Vorsoisson, and if possible, visit us again just before you leave Komarr. Nikki will need to be reexamined monthly thereafter for three months, which you can have done at a clinic I will recommend to you in Vorbarr Sultana. We’ll give out a disk with all the records, and they should be able to pick it up from there. After that, assuming all goes well, a early checkup should suffice.”

“That’s all?” said Ekaterin, weak with relief.

“That’s all.”

“There was no damage yet? We are in time?”

“No, he’s fine. It’s hard to project, with Vorzohn’s Dystrophy, but I would guess in his case the onset of detectable gross cellular damage would have begun to appear in his late teens or early twenties. You are in good time.”

Ekaterin held Nikki’s hand hard as they exited, her steps firm, to keep her feet from dancing. With an, “Aw, Mama,” Nikki extracted himself, and walked with independent dignity beside her. Vorkosigan, his hands shoved deep in his gray trouser pockets, followed smiling.

Nikki fell asleep in the shuttle, with his head pillowed on Ekaterin’s lap. She watched him fondly, and stroked his hair, lightly so as not to wake him.

Vorkosigan, sitting across from them with his reader on his knees again, watched her in turn, and murmured, “Is it well?”

“It’s well,” she said softly. “But it feels so strange… Nikki’s illness has been the whole focus of my life for so long. I gradually pared away all the other impossibilities to concentrate wholly on this, the one main thing. It feels as though I had been steeling myself to batter down some unscalable wall. And then, when I finally took a deep breath and put my head down and charged, it just… fell, all in a heap, like that. And now I’m stumbling around in the dust and the bricks, blinking. I feel very unbalanced. Where am I now? Who am I now?”

“Oh, you’ll find your center. You can’t have mislaid it totally, even if you have been revolving around other people. Give yourself time.”

“I thought my center was to be Vor, like the women before me.” She glanced across at him, feeling inarticulate and urgent. And then I chose Tien… you have to understand, it was my choice. My marriage was arranged, offered, but it wasn’t forced, I wanted it, wanted to have children, form a family, carry on the pattern. Make my place in this, I don’t know, generational pageant.”

“I am the eleventh of my name. I know about the Vor pageant.”

“Yes,” she said gratefully. “It wasn’t that I didn’t choose what I wanted, or gave away my center, or any of those things. But somehow, I didn’t end up with the beautiful Vor pattern-weave I was trying to make. I ended up with this… tangle of strings.” Her fingers wriggled in air, miming chaos.

His lips quirked, introspective and ironic. “I know tangles, too.”

“But do you know-well, of course you would, but… The business with the brick wall. Failure, failure was grown familiar to me. Comfortable, almost, when I stopped struggling against it. I did not know achievement was so devastating.”

“Huh.” He was leaning back, now, his reader forgotten on his lap, regarding her with his entire attention. “Yes… vertigo at apogee, eh? And the reward for a job well done is another job, and what have you done for us lately, and is that all, Lieutenant Vorkosigan, and… yes. Achievement is devastating, or at least disorienting, and they don’t warn you in advance. It’s the sudden change of momentum and direction, I think.”

She blinked. “How very strange. I expected you to tell me I was being foolish.”

“Deny your perfectly correct perception? Why should you expect that?”

“Habit… I suppose.”

“Mm. You can learn to enjoy the sensation of winning, you know, once you get over the initial queasiness. It’s an acquired taste.”

“How long did it take you to acquire it?”

He smiled slowly. “Once.”

“That’s not a taste, that’s an addiction.”

“It’s one that would look well on you.”

His eyes were uncomfortably bright. Challenging? She smiled in confusion, and stared out the port at the darkening Komarran sky as the shuttle began its descent. He rubbed his lips, not quite erasing their odd quirk, and returned his attention to his reports.

Uncle Vorthys met them at the apartment door, data disks in his hand and a vague distracted smile on his face. He gave Ekaterin’s hand a warm grasp, and fended off Nikki’s immediate attempt to appropriate him and carry him off to hear about the wonders of the ImpSec shuttle.

“Just a moment, Nikki. We shall go to the kitchen for dessert, and you can tell me all about it. Ekaterin. I’ve heard from the Professora. She’s taken ship on Barrayar, and will be here in three days’ time. I didn’t like to tell you till she was sure she could get away.”

“Oh!” Ekaterin almost jumped with delight, mitigated immediately by concern. “Oh, no, sir, do you meant to say you are dragging that poor woman through five wormhole jumps from Barrayar to Komarr for me? She gets so jumpsick!”

“It was Lord Vorkosigan’s idea, actually,” said Uncle Vorthys.

Vorkosigan put on a bright, trapped smile at this, and shrugged warily.

“Although I had fully intended to drag her here for my own sake,” Uncle Vorthys continued, “at the end of the term. This just advanced the timetable. She does like Komarr, once she gets here and has a day to recover from the jump-lag. I thought you would like it.”

“You shouldn’t have-but oh, I do like it, very much.”

Vorkosigan straightened at these words, and his smile relaxed into a self-satisfaction that amused her vastly. Ekaterin wasn’t sure if she was reading the subtleties of his expression better now, or if he was concealing them less.

“If I get you a ticket, would you go out to meet her at the jump-point station?” Uncle Vorthys added. “I’m afraid I won’t have time, and she hates traveling alone. You could see her a day earlier, and have some time together on the last leg downside.”

“Certainly, sir!” Ekaterin almost shivered with the realization of how much she longed to see her aunt. She’d been living in Tien’s orbit so long, she’d become used to her isolation as the norm. Ekaterin counted the Professora as one of the few non-disheartening relatives she possessed. A friend-an ally! The Komarran women Ekaterin had met were nice enough, but there was so much they didn’t understand… Aunt Vorthys might make acerbic comments, but she understood deeply.

“Yes, yes, Nikki-” said Uncle Vorthys. “Miles. When you are ready, I’ll meet you in my room, and we can go over today’s progress on the comconsole.”

“Have we some? Is it interesting?”

Uncle Vorthys made a balancing gesture with his free hand. “I’d be interested in what pattern you see emerging, if any.”

“At your convenience. Knock on my door when you’re ready.” Vorkosigan smiled at Nikki, gave the Professor a vague salutelike gesture, and withdrew.

Nikki, impatiently waiting his turn, now dragged his great-uncle off to the kitchen as promised; Ekaterin could only be grateful that of his day’s events the ImpSec shuttle seemed to loom so much larger than the medical examinations. She followed, satisfied.