Komarr

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Ekaterin watched morosely as the sonic toilet ate her shoes with scarcely a burp.

“It was worth a try, dear,” said Aunt Vorthys, glancing at her expression.

“There are too many fail-safe systems on this space station,” Ekaterin said. “This worked for Nikki, on the jumpship coming out here. What an uproar there was. The ship’s steward was so upset with us.”

“My grandchildren could make short work of this, I’ll bet,” agreed the Professora. “It’s too bad we don’t have a few nine-year-olds with us.”

“Yes,” sighed Ekaterin. And no. That Nikki was safely back on Komarr right now was a source of liberating joy in some secret level of her mind. But there ought to be some way to sabotage a sonic toilet that would light up a station tech’s board and bring an investigation. How to turn a sonic toilet into a weapon was just not in Ekaterin’s job training. Vorkosigan probably knew how, she reflected bitterly. Just like a man, to be underfoot in her life for days and then a quarter of a solar system away when she really needed him.

For the tenth time, she felt the walls, tried the door, inventoried their clothes. Practically the only flammable item in the room was the women’s hair. Setting a fire in a room in which one was locked did not much recommend itself to Ekaterin’s mind, though it was a possible last resort. She stuck her hands in the wall slot and turned them, letting the sonic cleaner loosen the dirt, and the UV light bathe away the germs, and the air fan, presumably, whisk their little corpses away. She drew her hands out again. The engineers might swear the system was more effective, but it never made her feel as fresh is an old-fashioned water wash. And how were you supposed to put a baby’s bottom in the thing? She glowered at the sanitizer. “If we had any kind of a tool at all, we ought to be able to do something with this.”

“I had my Vorfemme knife,” said the Professora sadly. “It was my best enameled one.”

“Had?”

“It was in my boot-sheath. The boot I threw, I believe.”

“Oh.”

“You don’t carry yours, these days?”

“Not on Komarr. I was trying to be, I don’t know, modern.” Her lips twisted. “I do wonder about the cultural message in the Vorfemme knife. I mean, yes, it made you better armed than the peasants, but never as well-armed as the two-sword men. Were the Vor lords afraid of their wives getting the drop on them?”

“Remembering my grandmother, it’s possible,” said the Professora.

“Mm. And my Great-Aunt Vorvayne.” Ekaterin sighed, and glanced worriedly at her present aunt.

The Professora was leaning on the wall with one hand supporting her, looking still very pale and shaky. “If you are done with the attempted sabotage, I think I would like to sit down again.”

“Yes, of course. It was a stupid idea anyway.”

The Professora sank gratefully onto the only seat in the tiny lavatory, and Ekaterin took her turn leaning on the wall. “I am so sorry I dragged you into this. If you hadn’t been with me… One of us must get away.”

“If you see a chance, Ekaterin, take it. Don’t wait for me.”

“That would still leave Soudha with a hostage.”

“I don’t think that’s the most important issue, just now. Not if the Komarrans were telling the truth about what that great ugly thing out there does.”

Ekaterin rubbed her toe over the smooth gray deck of the lav. In a quieter voice, she asked, “Do you suppose our own side would sacrifice us, if it came to a standoff?”

“For this? Yes,” said the Professora. “Or at any rate… they certainly ought to. Do the Professor and Lord Auditor Vorkosigan and ImpSec know what the Komarrans have built?”

“No, not as of yesterday. That is, they knew Soudha had built something-I gather they had almost managed to reconstruct the plans.”

“Then they will know,” said the Professora firmly. And a little less firmly, “Eventually…”

“I hope they won’t think we ought to sacrifice ourselves, like in the Tragedy of the Maiden of the Lake.”

“She was actually sacrificed by her brother, as the tradition would have it,” said the Professora. “I do wonder if it was quite so voluntary as he later claimed.”

Ekaterin reflected dryly on the old Barrayaran legend. As the tale went, the town of Vorkosigan Surleau, on the Long Lake, had been besieged by the forces of Hazelbright. Loyal vassals of the absent Count, a Vor officer and his sister, had held out till the last. On the verge of the final assault, the Maiden of the Lake had offered up her pale throat to her brother’s sword rather than fall to the ravages of the enemy troops. The very next morning, the siege was unexpectedly lifted by the subterfuge of her betrothed-one of their Auditor Vorkosigan’s distant ancestors, come to think of it, the latterly famous General Count Selig of that name-who sent the enemy hurriedly marching away to meet the false rumor of another attack. But it was, of course, too late for the Maiden of the Lake. Much Barrayaran historical sympathy, in the form of plays and poems and songs, had been expended upon the subsequent grief of the two men; Ekaterin had memorized one of the shorter poems for a school recitation, in her childhood. “I’ve always wondered,” said Ekaterin, “if the attack really had taken place the next day, and all the pillage and rape had proceeded on schedule, would they have said, ‘Oh, that’s all right, then’?”

“Probably,” said Aunt Vorthys, her lips twitching.

After a time, Ekaterin remarked, “I want to go home. But I don’t want to go back to Old Barrayar.”

“No more do I, dear. It’s wonderful and dramatic to read about. So nice to be able to read, don’t you know.”

“I know girls who pine for it. They like to play dress-up and pretend being Vor ladies of old, rescued from menace by romantic Vor youths. For some reason they never play dying in childbirth, or vomiting your guts out from the red dysentery, or weaving till you go blind and crippled from arthritis and dye poisoning, or infanticide. Well, they do die romantically of disease sometimes, but somehow it’s always an illness that makes you interestingly pale and everyone sorry and doesn’t involve losing bowel control.”

“I’ve taught history for thirty years. One can’t reach them all, though we try. Send them to my class, next time.”

Ekaterin smiled grimly. “I’d love to.”

Silence fell for a time, while Ekaterin stared at the opposite wall and her aunt leaned back with her eyes closed. Ekaterin watched her in growing worry. She glanced at the door, and said at last, “Do you suppose you could pretend to be much sicker than you really are?”

“Oh,” said Aunt Vorthys, not opening her eyes, “that would not be at all difficult.”

By which Ekaterin deduced that she was already pretending to be much less sick than she really was. The jump-nausea seemed to have hit her awfully hard, this time. Was that gray-faced fatigue really all due to travel-sickness? Stunner fire could be unexpectedly lethal for a weak heart-was there a reason besides bewilderment that her aunt had not tried to struggle or cry out under Arozzi’s threats?

“So… how is your heart, these days?” Ekaterin asked diffidently.

Aunt Vorthys’s eyes popped open. After a moment, she shrugged. “So-so, dear. I’m on the waiting list for a new one.”

“I thought new organs were easy to grow, now.”

“Yes, but surgical transplant teams are rather less so. My case isn’t that urgent. After the problems a friend of mine had, I decided I’d rather wait for one of the more proven groups to have a slot available.”

“I understand.” Ekaterin hesitated. “I’ve been thinking. We can’t do anything locked in here. If I can get anyone to come to the door, I thought we might try to feign you were dangerously sick, and get them to let us out. After that-who knows? It can’t be worse than this. All you’d have to do is go limp and moan convincingly.”

“I’m willing,” said Aunt Vorthys.

“All right.”

Ekaterin fell to pounding on the door as loudly as she could, and calling the Komarrans urgently by name. After about ten minutes of this, the lock clicked, the door slid back, and Madame Radovas peeked in from a slight distance. Arozzi stood behind her with his stunner in his hand.

“What?” she demanded.

“My aunt is ill,” said Ekaterin. “She can’t stop shivering, and her skin is getting clammy. I think she may be going into shock from the jump-sickness and her bad heart and all this stress. She has to have a warm place to lie down, and a hot drink, at least. Maybe a doctor.”

“We can’t get you a doctor right now.” Madame Radovas peered worriedly past Ekaterin at the limp Professora. “We could arrange the other, I guess.”

“Some of us wouldn’t mind having the lav back,” Arozzi muttered. “It’s not so good, all of us having to parade up and down the corridor to the nearest public one.”

“There’s no other safe place to lock them up,” said Madame Radovas to him.

“So, put them out in the middle of the room and keep an eye on them. Stick them back in here later. One’s sick, the other has to take care of her, what can they do? It’s no good if the old lady dies on us.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” said Madame Radovas to Ekaterin, and closed the door again.

In a little while she came back, to escort the two Barrayaran women to a cot and a folding chair set up at the edge of the loading bay, as far as possible from any emergency alarm. Ekaterin and Madame Radovas supported the stumbling Professora to the cot, and helped her lie down, and covered her up. Leaving Arozzi to guard them, Madame Radovas went off and returned with a steaming mug of tea and set it down; Arozzi then turned the stunner over to her and returned to his work. Madame Radovas drew up another folding chair and sat down a few prudent meters away from her captives. Ekaterin supported her aunt’s shoulders while she drank the tea, blinked gratefully, and sank back with a moan. Ekaterin made play of feeling the Professora’s forehead, and rubbing her chill hands, and looking very concerned. She stroked the tousled gray hair, and stared covertly around the loading bay she’d merely glimpsed before.

The device still sat in its float cradle, but more power lines snaked across the floor to it now; Soudha was overseeing the attachment of one such cable to the awkward array of converters at the base of the horn. A man she did not recognize busied himself in the glass-walled control booth. At his gestures, Cappell drew careful chalk lines on the deck near the device. When he finished, he consulted with Soudha, and Soudha himself took the float cradle’s remote control, stepped back, and with exquisite care set the cradle to lift, move forward till it almost touched the outer wall, and gently land again in precise alignment with the chalk marks. The horn was now aimed not quite square-on with the inner door of the large freight lock. Were they getting ready to load it aboard a ship, and take it out to point at the wormhole? Or could they use it right from here?

Ekaterin drew her map cube from her pocket. Madame Radovas sat up in alarm, aiming the stunner, saw what it was, and settled back uneasily, but did not move to take the map from her. Ekaterin checked the location of the Southport Transport docks and locks; the company had leased three loading bays in a line, and Ekaterin was not sure just which she was now in. The three-dimensional vid projection did not supply any exterior orientation, but she rather thought they were on the same side of the station as the wormhole, which might well put this lock in line-of-sight to it. I don’t think there’s very much time left at all.

In addition to the ramp by which she’d entered and the door to the lavatory, there appeared to be two other airsealed exits from the bay. One was clearly a personnel lock to the exterior, next to the freight lock. Another went back into a section which might be offices, if this was indeed the center bay of the three. Ekaterin mentally traced a route through it to the nearest public corridor. Several Komarrans had come and gone through that door; perhaps they were all camping back there. In any case, it seemed more heavily populated than the door she’d come in. But closer. The control booth was a dead end.

Ekaterin eyed her fellow-widow. Strange to think that their different domestic paths had brought them both to the same place in the end. Madame Radovas looked tired and worn. This has been a nightmare for everyone.

“How do you imagine you’re going to get away, after this?” Ekaterin asked her curiously. Will you take us along? Surely the Komarrans would have to.

Madame Radovas’s lips thinned. “We hadn’t planned to. Till you two came along. I’m almost sorry. It was simpler before. Collapse the wormhole and die. Now it’s all possibilities and distractions and worries again.”

“Worries? Worse than expecting to die?”

“I left three children back on Komarr. If I were dead, ImpSec would have no reason to… bother them.”

Hostages all round, indeed.

“Besides,” said Madame Radovas, “I voted for it. I could do no less than my husband did.”

“You took a vote? On what? And how do you divide up Komarran-style voting shares in a revolt? You had to have taken everyone along-if anyone who knew anything had been left to be questioned under fast-penta, it would have been all up.”

“Soudha, Foscol, Cappell, and my husband were considered the primary shareholders. They decided I had inherited my husband’s voting stock. The choices were simple enough-surrender, flee, or fight to the last. The count was three to one for this.”

“Oh? Who voted against it?”

She hesitated. “Soudha.”

“How odd,” said Ekaterin, startled. “He’s your chief engineer now-doesn’t that worry you?”

“Soudha,” said Madame Radovas tartly, “has no children. He wanted to wait and try again later, as though there would be a later. If we do not strike now, ImpSec will shortly hold all our relatives hostage. But if we close the wormhole and die, there will be no one left for ImpSec to threaten with their harm. My children will be safer, even if I never see them again.” Her eyes were bleak and sincere.

“What about all the Barrayarans on Komarr and Sergyar who will never see their families again? Cut off, not ever knowing their fate…” Mine, for instance. “They’ll be the same as dead, to each other. It will be the Time of Isolation all over again.” She shivered in horror at the cascading images of shock and grief.

“So be glad you’re on the good side of the wormhole,” Madame Radovas snapped. At Ekaterin’s cold stare, she relented a little. “It won’t be like your old Time of Isolation at all. You have a fully developed planetary industrial base, now, and a much larger population, which has experienced a hundred-year-long inflow of new genes. There are plenty of other worlds which scarcely maintain any galactic contact, and they get along just fine.”

The Professora’s eyes slitted open. “I think you are underestimating the psychological impact.”

“What you Barrayarans do to each other, afterwards, is not my responsibility,” said Madame Radovas. “As long as you can never do it to us again.”

“How… do you expect to die?” asked Ekaterin. “Take poison together? Walk out an airlock?” And will you kill us first?

“I expect you Barrayarans will take care of those details, when you figure out what happened,” said Madame Radovas. “Foscol and Cappell think we will escape, afterwards, or that we might be permitted to surrender. I think it will be the Solstice Massacre all over again. We even have our very own Vorkosigan for it. I’m not afraid.” She hesitated, as if contemplating her own brave words. “Or at any rate, I’m too tired to care anymore.”

Ekaterin could understand that. Unwilling to murmur agreement with the Komarran woman, she fell silent, staring unseeing across the loading bay.

Dispassionately, she considered her own fear. Her heart beat, yes, and her stomach knotted, and her breath came a bit too fast. Yet these people did not frighten her, deep down, nearly as much as she thought they ought to.

Once upon a time, shortly after one of Tien’s unfathomable uncomfortable jealous jags had subsided back to whatever fantasy world it came from, he’d earnestly assured her that he had thrown his nerve disrupter (illegally owned because he did not carry it in issuance from their District liege lord) from a bridge one night, and got rid of it. She hadn’t even known he’d possessed it. These Komarrans were desperate, and dangerous in their desperation. But she had slept beside things that scared her more than Soudha and all his friends. How strange I feel.

There was a tale in Barrayaran folklore about a mutant who could not be killed, because he hid his heart in a box on a secret island far from his fortress. Naturally, the young Vor hero talked the secret out of the mutant’s captive maiden, stole the heart, and the poor mutant came to the usual bad end. Maybe her fear failed to paralyze her because Nikki was her heart, and safe away, far from here. Or maybe it was because for the first time in her life, she owned herself whole.

A few meters away across the loading bay, Soudha crossed again to the novel device, aimed the remote at the float cradle, and adjusted its position fractionally. Cappell called some question from the other side of the bay, and Soudha set the remote down on the edge of the cradle and paced along one of the power cables, examining it closely, till he reached the wall slot Cappell was fussing over. They bent their heads together over some loose connection or other. Cappell yelled a question to the man in the glass booth, who shook his head, and went out to join them.

If I think about this, the chance will be gone. If I think about this, even my mutant’s heart will fail me.

Had she the right to take this much risk upon herself? That was the real fear, yes, and it shook her to her core. This wasn’t a task for her. This was a task for ImpSec, the police, the army, a Vor hero, anyone but her. Who are not here. But oh, if she tried and failed, she failed for all Barrayar, for all time. And who would take care of Nikki, if he lost both parents in the space of barely a week? The safe thing to do was to wait for competent grownup male people to rescue her.

Like Tien, yeah?

“Are you getting any warmer now, Aunt Vorthys?” Ekaterin asked. “Have you stopped shivering?” She rose, and bent over her aunt with her back to Madame Radovas, and pretended to tuck the blanket tighter, while actually loosening it. Madame Radovas was shorter than Ekaterin, and slighter, and twenty-five years older. Now, Ekaterin mouthed to the Professora.

Moving smoothly but not suddenly, she turned, paced toward Madame Radovas, and flung the blanket over the woman’s head as she jumped to her feet. The chair banged over backward. Another two paces and she was able to wrap her arms around the smaller woman, pinning her arms to her side. The stunner’s beam splashed, buzzing, on the deck at their feet, and the nimbus made Ekaterin’s legs tingle. She lifted Madame Radovas off her feet and shook her. The stunner clattered to the deck, and Ekaterin kicked it toward her aunt, who was fighting to get upright on her cot. Ekaterin flung the blanket-muffled Komarran woman away from her as hard as she could, turned, and sprinted for the float cradle.

She snatched up the remote control and spun away toward the glass control booth as fast as her legs could push her, her sweating bare feet firm against the smooth surface. The men at the wall outlet shouted and started toward her. She didn’t look back.

She galloped around the corner and up the two stairs to the booth in one leap. She batted frantically at the door control pad. The door took forever to slide shut; Cappell was almost to the steps before she was able, after two tries with her shaking fingers, to activate the lock. Cappell hit the door with a resounding thud and began pounding on it.

She did not, dared not, look back to see what was happening to the Professora. Instead, she raised the remote and pointed it through the glass at the float cradle. The controls included six buttons and a four-pronged knob. She’d never been good at this sort of coordination. Fortunately, subtlety was not her object now.

The third stab of her fingers on a button found the up vector. All too slowly, the float cradle began to rise off the loading bay deck. Perhaps there were some sort of sensors in it which kept it level; the first four combinations she tried seemed to do nothing. Finally, she was able to make the thing begin to rotate. It bumped into the catwalks above, making nasty grinding noises. Good. Power cables snapped off and whipped around; the strange man barely dodged the spitting sparks. Soudha was screaming, trying to jump up at the glass wall in front of her. She could barely hear him. The glass, after all, was supposed to stand up to vacuum. He scrambled back and aimed a stunner at her. The beam splashed harmlessly off the window.

At last, she was able to make the sensor program appear in the remote’s little readout. She canceled its running instructions, and then the cradle became more lively. She’d achieved an almost 180-degree rotation, bottom to top. Then she turned the cradle’s power off.

It was only about a four-meter drop from the catwalks to the deck. She had no idea what material the huge horn was fabricated from. She anticipated having to try a couple of times, to achieve some dent or crack Soudha could not repair in the day it would take for her and her aunt to be missed at the ferry. Instead, the bell burst like-like a flower pot.

The boom shook the bay. Shards big and small skittered off across the deck like shrapnel. One jagged piece whanged past centimeters from Soudha’s head and smacked into the booth’s glass, and Ekaterin ducked involuntarily. But the glass held. Amazing material. She was glad the device’s horn hadn’t been cast of it. Laughter bubbled out of her throat, bravura berserker joy. She wanted to destroy a hundred devices. She turned on the float cradle’s power again and bounced the smashed remains on the deck a few more times, just because she could. The Maiden of the Lake fires back!

The Professora was sitting on the deck by the far wall, bent over. Not running away, not even close to making an escape. Not good. Madame Radovas was on her feet and had recovered her stunner. Cappell the mathematician was beating on the control booth’s door with a meter-long high-torque wrench he’d found somewhere. Arozzi, his face running with blood from a flying piece of horn-shrapnel, dissuaded him before he rendered it unopenable; Soudha came running up with a handful of electronic tools, and he and Arozzi disappeared below the door’s window. Scratchy sounds penetrated by the door lock, more sinister even than Cappell’s frantic blows.

Ekaterin caught her breath and looked around the control booth. She couldn’t empty the air from the loading bay, her aunt was out there, too. There, there was the comconsole. Should she have gone for it first? No, she was doing this in he right order. No matter how screwed up ImpSec’s response vas, no matter how misapplied or incompetent their tactics, hey could not possibly lose Barrayar now.

“Hello, Emergency?” Ekaterin panted as the vid-plate activated. “My name is Ekaterin Vorsoisson-” She had to stop, as the automated system tried to route her to her choice of traveler’s aids. She rejected Lost amp; Found, selected Security, and started over, not certain she’d reached a human yet, and praying it would all be recorded. “My name is Ekaterin Vorsoisson. Lord Auditor Vorthys is my uncle. I’m being held prisoner, along with my aunt, by Komarran terrorists at the Southport Transport docks and locks. I’m in a loading bay control booth right now, but they’re getting the door open.” She glanced over her shoulder. Soudha had defeated the lock; the airseal door, bent from Cappell’s efforts with the wrench, whined and refused to retreat into its slot. Soudha and Arozzi put their shoulders to it, grunting, and it inched open. “Tell Lord Auditor Vorkosigan-tell ImpSec-”

Then the swearing Soudha slipped sideways through the door, followed by Cappell still clutching his wrench. Laughing hysterically, tears running down her cheeks, Ekaterin turned to face her fate.