Miles in Love (41 page)

"I was given to understand that power politics had chewed you up."

Surely she could not see scars through his gray suit. "Oh," Miles shrugged, "the prenatal damage was just the prologue. The rest I did to myself."

"If you could go back in time and change things, would you?"

"Prevent the soltoxin attack on my pregnant mother? If I could only pick one event to change . . . maybe not."

"What, because you wouldn't want to risk missing an Auditorship at thirty?" Her tone was only faintly mocking, softened by her wry smile. What the devil had Vorthys told her about him, anyway? She was highly aware, though, of the power of an Emperor's Voice.

"I almost arrived at thirty in a coffin, a couple of times. An Auditorship was never an ambition of mine. That appointment was a caprice of Gregor's. I wanted to be an admiral. It's not that." He paused, and drew in breath, and let it out slowly. "I've made a lot of grievous mistakes in my life, getting here, but . . . I wouldn't trade my journey now. I'd be afraid of making myself smaller."

She cocked her head, measuring his dwarfishness, not missing his meaning. "That's as fair a definition of satisfaction as any I've ever heard."

He shrugged. "Or loss of nerve." Dammit, he'd come out here to pick
her
brain. "So what do you think of the novel device?"

She grimaced, and rubbed her hands slowly, palm to palm. "Unless you want to posit that it was invented for the purpose of giving headaches to physicists, I think . . . it's time to break for lunch."

Miles grinned. "Lunch, we can supply."

Lunch, as threatened, was indeed military-issue ready-meals, though of the highest grade. They all sat around one of the tables in the long room, pushed aside chunks of equipment to make space, and tore off the wrappers from the self-heating trays. The Komarrans eyed their food dubiously; Miles explained how it could have been much worse, getting a giggle from Riva. The conversation became general, touching on husbands and wives and children and tenure and an exchange of scurrilous anecdotes about the fecklessness of former colleagues. D'Emorie had a couple of good ones about early ImpSec cases. Miles was tempted to top them with a few about his cousin Ivan, but nobly refrained, though he did explain how he'd once sunk himself and his personal vehicle in several meters of arctic mud. This led to the subject of the progress of Komarran terraforming, and so by degrees back to work. Riva, Miles noticed, grew quieter and quieter.

She maintained her silence as they all took to the comconsoles again after lunch. She did not resume her pacing. Miles watched her covertly, then less covertly. She reran several simulations, but did not play with further alterations. Miles knew damn well one couldn't hurry insight. This kind of problem-solving was a lot more like fishing than like hunting: waiting patiently and, to a degree, helplessly, for things to rise up out of the depths of the mind.

He thought about the last time he'd been fishing.

He considered Riva's age. She'd been in her teens at the time of the Barrayaran conquest of Komarr. In her twenties at the time of the Revolt. She'd survived, she'd endured, she'd cooperated; her years under Imperial rule had been good, including an obviously successful life of the mind, and a single marriage. She'd compared children with Vorthys, and spoken of an eldest daughter's upcoming wedding. No Komarran terrorist, she.

If you could go back in time and change things . . .

The only moment in time you could change things was the elusive
now
, which slipped through your fingers as fast as you could think about it. He wondered if she was thinking about that right now, too. Now.

Now, the Professora's ship from Barrayar would be getting ready for its final wormhole jump. Now, Ekaterin's ferry would be approaching the jump-point station. Now, Soudha and his crew of earnest techs would be doing . . . what? Where? Now, he was sitting in a room on Komarr watching a quietly brilliant woman who had stopped thinking.

He rose, and went to touch Major D'Emorie on his green-uniformed shoulder. "Major, can I have a word with you outside."

Surprised, D'Emorie shut down his comconsole, where he'd been checking out some question about available power transformers Vorthys had put to him. He followed Miles into the hall and down the corridor.

"Major, do you have a fast-penta interrogation kit available?"

D'Emorie's brows rose. "I can check, my lord."

"Do so. Get one and bring it to me, please."

"Yes, my lord."

D'Emorie went off. Miles lingered by the window. It was twenty minutes before D'Emorie returned, but he had the familiar case in his hand.

Miles took it. "Thank you. Now I would like you to take Dr. Youell for a walk. Discreetly. I'll let you know when you can come back in."

"My lord . . . if it's a matter for fast-penta, I'm sure ImpSec would want me to observe."

"I know what ImpSec wants. You may be assured, I will tell them what they need to know, afterward." Turnabout, hah, for all those briefings with vital pieces missing Lieutenant Vorkosigan had once endured . . . life was good, sometimes. Miles smiled a little sourly; D'Emorie, intelligently, veered off.

"Yes, my Lord Auditor."

Miles stood aside for D'Emorie to exit with Dr. Youell. When he entered the long room, he locked the door after himself. Both Professor Vorthys and Dr. Riva looked up at him in puzzlement.

"What's that for?" Dr. Riva asked, as he set the case on the table and opened it.

"Dr. Riva, I request and require a somewhat franker conversation with you than the one we had earlier." He held up the hypospray and calibrated the dosage for her estimated body mass. Allergy check? He didn't think he needed it, but it was standard operating procedure; if he didn't have to guess, he didn't have to guess wrong. He tore off a test-dot from the coiled strip of them and walked over to her station chair. She was too startled to resist at first when he took her hand, turned it over, and pressed the tester to the inside of her wrist, but she jerked back her arm at the prickle. He let it go.

"Miles," said Professor Vorthys in an agitated voice, "what is this? You can't fast-penta . . . Dr. Riva is my invited guest!"

That wording was one step away from the sort of Vor challenge that used to result in duels, in the bad old days. Miles took a deep breath. "My Lord Auditor. Dr. Riva. I have made two serious errors of judgment on this case so far. If I'd avoided either of them, your nephew-in-law would still be alive, we'd have nailed Soudha before he got away with all his equipment, and we would not now all be sitting at the bottom of a deep tactical hole playing with jigsaw puzzles. They were both at heart the same error. The first day we toured the Terraforming Project, I did not insist on Tien landing the aircar here, though I wanted to see the place. And on the second night, I did not insist on a fast-penta interrogation of Madame Radovas, though I wanted to. You're the failure analyst, Professor; am I wrong?"

"No . . . But you could not have known, Miles!"

"Oh, but I could have known. That's the whole point. But I didn't choose to do what was necessary, because I did not want to appear to use or abuse my Auditorial power in an offensive way. Especially not on here on Komarr, where everyone is watching me, the son of the Butcher, to see what I'll do. Besides, I spent a career fighting the powers-that-be. Now I am them. Naturally, I was a little confused."

Riva's hand was to her mouth; there was no hive or red streak on the inside of her arm. Well and good. Miles returned to the table and picked up the hypospray.

"Lord Vorkosigan, I do not consent to this!" said Riva stiffly as he approached her.

"Dr. Riva, I did not ask you to." His left hand guarded his right as in knife-play; the hypospray darted in to touch her neck even as she turned and began to rise from her chair. "It would be too cruel a dilemma." She sank back, glaring at him. Angry, but not desperate; she was divided in her own mind, then, which had doubtless saved them both the embarrassment of him chasing her around the room. Even at her age and dignity she could probably outrun him if she were truly determined to do so.

"Miles," said the Professor dangerously, "it may be your Auditorial privilege, but you had better be able to justify this."

"Hardly a privilege. Only my duty." He stared into Riva's eyes as her pupils dilated and she sank back limply in her chair. He didn't bother with the standard opening litany of neutral questions while waiting for the drug to cut in, but merely watched her lips. Their thin tension slowly softened to the stereotypical fast-penta smile. Her eyes remained more focused than those of the usual subject; he bet she could make this a lengthy and circuitous interrogation, if she chose. He'd do his best to cut that circuit as short as possible. The shortest way across a hostile District was around three sides.

"This was a really interesting five-space problem that Professor Vorthys set you," Miles observed to her. "Sort of a privilege to be brought in on it."

"Oh, yes," she agreed cordially. She smiled, frowned, her hands twitched, then her smile settled in more securely.

"Could be prizes and academic preferment, when it's all sorted out at last."

"Oh, better than that," she assured him. "New physics only come along once in a lifetime, and usually you're too young or too old."

"Strange, I've heard military careerists make the same complaint. But won't Soudha get the credit?"

"I doubt it was Soudha who thought of it. I'd bet it was the mathematician, Cappell, or maybe poor Dr. Radovas. It should be named after Radovas. He died for it, I suspect."

"I don't want anybody else to die for it."

"Oh, no," she agreed earnestly.

"What did you say it was, again, Professor Riva?" Miles did his best to pitch his voice like a bewildered undergraduate's. "I didn't understand."

"The wormhole collapsing technique. There ought to be a better name for it. I wonder if your Dr. Soudha calls it something shorter."

Lord Auditor Vorthys, who'd been watching with slit-eyed disapproval, sat slowly upright, his eyes widening, his lips moving.

The last time Miles had felt his stomach behave like this, he'd been on a combat drop from low orbit.
Wormhole collapsing technique? Does this mean what I think it does?

"Wormhole collapsing technique," he repeated blandly, in his best fast-penta interrogator style. "Wormholes collapse, but I didn't think anything people could do could cause them to. Wouldn't it take an awful lot of power?"

"They seem to have found a way around that. Resonance, five-space resonance. Amplitude augmentation, you see. Shut it down forever. Don't think it would work in reverse, though. Can't be anti-entropic."

Miles glanced at Vorthys. The words obviously meant something to
him
. Good.

Dr. Riva waved her hands dreamily in front of her. "Higher and higher and higher and—boop!" She giggled. It was a very fast-penta'ish sort of giggle, the disturbing sort which suggested that on some other level, in her drug-scrambled brain, she was not giggling at all. Maybe she was screaming. As Miles was . . . . "Except," she added, "that there's something very wrong somewhere."

No lie
. He walked over and picked up they hypospray of antagonist, and glanced up at Vorthys. "Anything you want to add while she'd still under? Or is it time to go back to normal mode?"

Vorthys still had an abstracted, inward look, his mind obviously ratcheting over everything he'd learned during the investigation in light of this new, revolutionary idea. He glanced up and over at the goofily grinning Riva. "I think we need all our wits about us." His brows drew down in something like pain. "One sees, of course, why she hesitated to confide her theory to us. In case it
is
right . . ."

Miles walked over to Riva with the second hypospray. "This is the fast-penta antagonist. It will neutralize the drug in your system in less than a minute."

To his astonishment, she threw up a restraining hand. "Wait. I had it. I could almost see it, in my mind . . . like a vid projection . . . energy transfers, flowing . . . field reservoir . . . wait."

She closed her eyes and leaned her head back; her feet tapped gently and rhythmically on the floor. Her smile came and went, came and went. Her eyes popped open at last, and she stared briefly and intently at Vorthys. "The keyword," she intoned, "is
elastic recoil
. Remember it." She glanced at Miles and held out a languid arm. "You may proceed, my lord." She giggled again.

He applied the hypospray over the blue vein inside her proffered elbow; it hissed briefly. He gave her an odd little half-bow, and stepped back, and waited. Her loose limbs tightened; she buried her face in her hands.

After about a minute, she looked up again, blinking. "What did I just say?" she asked Vorthys.

"Elastic recoil," he repeated, watching her intently. "What does it mean?"

She was silent a moment, staring at her feet. "It means . . . I compromised myself for nothing." Her lips thinned bitterly. "Soudha's device doesn't work. Or at any rate, it doesn't work to collapse a wormhole." She sat up, and shook herself out, stretching, the sense of her body doubtless coming back to her as the last of the antagonist chased through her system. "I thought that stuff would make me sick."

"Reactions vary wildly from subject to subject," said Miles. Indeed, he'd never seen one quite like
that
before. "A woman we interrogated the other day said she found it very restful."

"It had the
strangest
effect on my internal visualizations." She stared at the hypospray with speculative respect. "I may try it on purpose someday."

I want to be there if you do
. Miles had a sudden exciting vision of using the drug to augment his own insights—instant brains!—then remembered to his extreme disappointment that fast-penta didn't work like that on him.

Riva glanced at Miles. "If I ever get out of a Barrayaran prison. Am I under arrest now?"

Miles chewed his lip. "What for?"

"Isn't violating loyalty and security oaths treason?"