Lois Bujold: Komarr

The deliberately blank chamber in which Miles sat might as easily have been on the nearby military station, or a ship lying several thousand kilometers off-station, as the few hundred meters from the Southport bay it actually was. Soudha’s location, when his face formed at last over the vid-plate, was not so anonymous; he sat in the same glass-walled control booth from which Ekaterin had sent her alarm. Miles wondered what techs were monitoring the corridors for moves on ImpSec’s part, and who was keeping a nervous finger on the personnel airlock’s outer door control. Had they arranged it as a dead-man’s switch?

Soudha’s face was drawn and sincerely weary, no more the bland bluff liar. Lena Foscol sat tensely to the right of his station chair on a rolling stool, looking like some frumpy vizier. Madame Radovas too looked on, her face half-shadowed behind him, and Cappell stood off to the side, almost out of focus. Good. A Komarran stockholders’ voting quorum, if he read the signs right. At least they honored his Imperial Auditor’s authority to that extent.

“Good evening, Dr. Soudha,” Miles began.

“You’re out here?” Soudha’s brows rose as he took in the lack of transmission lag.

“Yes, well, unlike Administrator Vorsoisson, I got out of my chains at the experiment station alive. I still don’t know if you intended me to survive.”

“He didn’t really die, did he?” Foscol interrupted.

“Oh, yes.” Miles made his voice deliberately soft. “I got to watch, just as you arranged. Every filthy minute of it. It was a remarkably ugly death.”

She fell silent. Soudha said, “This is all beside the point now. The only message we want to receive from you people is that you have the jumpship ready to transport us to the nearest neutral space-Pol, or Escobar-whereupon you will get your Vor ladies back. If it’s not that, I’m cutting this com.”

“I have a few pieces of free information for you, first,” said Miles. “I don’t think they’re ones you anticipate.”

Soudha’s hand hovered. “Go on.”

“I’m afraid your wormhole-collapser no longer qualifies as a secret weapon. We caught up with your specs on file at Bollan Design. Professor Vorthys invited Dr. Riva, of Solstice University, in to consult. Are you aware of her reputation?”

Soudha nodded warily; Cappell’s eyes widened. Madame Radovas stared wearily. Foscol looked deeply suspicious.

“Well, putting together your specs, the data from the soletta accident, and Riva’s physics-there was a mathematician by the name of Dr. Yuell in there too, if the name means anything to you-the Empire’s top failure analyst and the Empire’s top five-space expert have concluded that you did not, in fact, manage to invent a wormhole-collapser. What you managed to invent was a wormhole-boomerang. Riva says that when the five-space waves amplified the wormhole’s resonance past its phase boundaries, instead of collapsing, the wormhole returned the energy to three-space in the form of a gravitational pulse. Tangling with this pulse was what destroyed the soletta array and the ore ship, and-I’m sorry, Madame Radovas-killed Dr. Radovas and Marie Trogir. The probable-cause crew finally found her body a few hours ago, I regret to report, wrapped up in some of the wreckage they’d retrieved almost a week back.”

Only a puff of breath from Cappell marked his grief, but water glittered in his eyes. Check, thought Miles. I thought he’d protested too much. Nobody looked surprised, merely oppressed.

“So if you succeed in getting your thing working, what you will actually do is destroy this station, the five thousand or so people aboard, and yourselves. And tomorrow morning, Barrayar will still be there.” Miles let his voice fall to a near whisper. “All for nothing, and less than nothing.”

“He lies,” said Foscol fiercely into the shocked silence. “He lies.”

Soudha gave a weird snort, ran his hands through his hair, and shook his head. Then, to Miles’s dismay, he laughed out loud.

Cappell stared at his colleague. “Do you really think that’s why? That it malfunctioned like that?”

“It would explain,” began Soudha. “It would explain… oh, God.” He trailed off. “I thought it was the ore ship,” he said at last. “Interfering somehow.”

“I should also mention,” Miles put in, still uneasily watching Soudha’s odd reaction, “that ImpSec has arrested all the Waste Heat personnel and their families you left back at the Southport Transport facility at Solstice. And then there are all your other relatives and friends, the innocents who knew nothing. The hostage game is a bad game, a sad and ugly game that’s a lot easier to start than end. The worst versions I’ve seen ended up with neither side in control, or getting anything they wanted. And the people who stand to lose the most in it frequently aren’t even playing.”

“Barrayaran threats.” Foscol lifted her chin. “Do you think, after all this, we can’t stand up to you?”

“I’m sure you can, but for what reason? There aren’t too many prizes left in this mess. The biggest one is gone; you can’t shut off Barrayar. You can’t keep your secret or shield anyone you left behind on Komarr. About the only thing you can do now is kill more innocent people. Great goals can call for great sacrifices, yes, but your possible rewards are steadily shrinking.” Yes, that was it; don’t raise the pressure, lower the wall.

“We did not,” husked Cappell, rubbing his eyes with the back of his hand, “go through all this just to deliver the weapon of the century straight into Barrayaran hands.”

“It’s already there. As a weapon, it appears to have some fundamental defects, so far. But Riva says there’s evidence you got more power out of the wormhole than you put into it. This suggests possible future peaceful, economic uses, when the phenomena are better understood.”

“Really?” said Soudha, sitting up. “How did she figure? What are her numbers?”

“Soudha!” said Foscol reprovingly. Madame Radovas winced, and Soudha subsided, albeit reluctantly, staring at Miles through narrowed eyes.

“On the other hand,” Miles continued, “until further research assures us that collapsing a wormhole is indeed quite impossible, none of you are going anywhere, and especially not to any other planetary government. It’s one of those ugly military decisions, y’know? And I’m afraid it’s mine.” The Vor ladies are not expendable, he’d told Vorgier. Was he lying then, or now? Well, if he couldn’t figure it out, maybe the Komarrans couldn’t either.

“You are all headed, inexorably, for a Barrayaran prison,” he went on. “The devil’s bargain part about being Vor, which lot of people including some Vor overlook, is that our lives are made for sacrifice. There is no threat, no torture, no slow murder you can apply to two Barrayaran women that will change your outcome.”

Was this the right tack? Above the vid-plate their listening images were undersized, a little ghostly, hard to read. Miles wished he were having this conversation face-to-face. Half the subliminal clues, of body language, of the subtle nuances of expression and voice, were washed out in transmission and unavailable to his instincts. But handing himself over to them person to augment their hostage collection could only have served to stiffen their wavering resolve. The memory of a woman’s hand, slipping through his fingers into a screaming fog, flickered through his mind; his fists clenched helplessly in his lap. Never again, you said. Not expendable, you said. He watched the Komarrans’ faces intently for all flickers of expression he could get, reflections of truth, lies, belief, suspicion, trust.