"Lieutenant Koudelka is in hospital this morning."
"Hospital! Good God, why wasn't I told at once? What happened?"
"We were told Commander Illyan would be bringing a full report, my lord. The guard commander . . . thought he'd wait for him."
Alarm struggled with annoyance on Vorkosigan's face. "How bad is he? It's not some . . . delayed aftereffect of the sonic grenade, is it? What happened to him?"
"He was beaten up, my lord," said the footman woodenly.
Vorkosigan sat back with a little hiss. A muscle jumped in his jaw. "You get that guard commander in here," he growled.
The footman evaporated instantly, leaving Vorkosigan tapping a spoon nervously and impatiently on the table. He met Cordelia's horrified eyes and produced a small false smile of reassurance for her. Even Piotr looked startled.
"Who could possibly want to beat up Kou?" asked Cordelia wonderingly. "That's sickening. He couldn't fight back worth a damn."
Vorkosigan shook his head. "Someone looking for a safe target, I suppose. We'll find out. Oh, we will find out."
The green-uniformed ImpSec guard commander appeared, to stand at attention. "Sir."
"For your future information, and you may pass it on, should any accident occur to any of my key staff members, I wish to be informed at once. Understood?"
"Yes, sir. It was quite late when word got back here, sir. And since we knew by then that they were both going to live, Commander Illyan said I might let you sleep. Sir."
"I see." Vorkosigan rubbed his face. "Both?"
"Lieutenant Koudelka and Sergeant Bothari, sir."
"They didn't get into a fight, did they?" asked Cordelia, now thoroughly alarmed.
"Yes. Oh—not with each other, Milady. They were set upon."
Vorkosigan's face was darkening. "You had better begin at the beginning."
"Yes, sir. Um. Lieutenant Koudelka and Sergeant Bothari went out last night. Not in uniform. Down to that area in back of the old caravanserai."
"My God, what for?"
"Um." The guard commander glanced uncertainly at Cordelia. "Entertainment, I believe, sir."
"Entertainment?"
"Yes, sir. Sergeant Bothari goes down there about once a month, on his duty-free day, when my lord Count is in town. It's apparently some place he's been going to for years."
"In the caravanserai?" said Count Piotr in an unbelieving tone.
"Um." The guard commander eyed the footman in appeal.
"Sergeant Bothari isn't very particular about his entertainment, sir," the footman volunteered uneasily.
"Evidently not!" said Piotr.
Cordelia questioned Vorkosigan with her eyebrows.
"It's a very rough area," he explained. "I wouldn't go down there myself without a patrol at my back. Two patrols, at night. And I'd definitely wear my uniform, though not my rank insignia . . . but I believe Bothari grew up there. I imagine it looks different to his eyes."
"Why so rough?"
"It's very poor. It was the town center during the Time of Isolation, and it hasn't been touched by renovation yet. Minimal water, no electricity, choked with refuse . . ."
"Mostly human," added Piotr tartly.
"Poor?" said Cordelia, bewildered. "No electricity? How can it be on the comm network?"
"It's not, of course," answered Vorkosigan.
"Then how can anybody get their schooling?"
"They don't."
Cordelia stared. "I don't understand. How do they get their jobs?"
"A few escape to the Service. The rest prey on each other, mostly." Vorkosigan regarded her face uneasily. "Have you no poverty on Beta Colony?"
"Poverty? Well, some people have more money than others, of course, but . . . no comconsoles?"
Vorkosigan was diverted from his interrogation. "Is not owning a comconsole the lowest standard of living you can imagine?" he said in wonder.
"It's the first article in the constitution. 'Access to information shall not be abridged.' "
"Cordelia . . . these people barely have access to food, clothing, and shelter. They have a few rags and cooking pots, and squat in buildings that aren't economical to repair or tear down yet, with the wind whistling through the cracks in the walls."
"No air-conditioning?"
"No heat in the winter is a bigger problem, here."
"I suppose so. You people don't really have summer. . . . How do they call for help when they're sick or hurt?"
"What help?" Vorkosigan was growing grim. "If they're sick, they either get well or die."
"Die, if we're lucky," muttered Piotr. "Vermin."
"You're not joking." She stared back and forth between the pair of them. "That's horrible . . . why, think of all the geniuses you must be missing!"
"I doubt we're missing very many, from the caravanserai," said Piotr dryly.
"Why not? They have the same genetic complement as you," Cordelia pointed out the, to her, obvious.
The Count went rigid. "My dear girl! They most certainly do not! My family have been Vor for nine generations."
Cordelia raised her eyebrows. "How do you know, if you didn't have gene typing till eighty years ago?"
Both the guard commander and the footman were acquiring peculiar stuffed expressions. The footman bit his lip.
"Besides," she went on reasonably, "if you Vor got around half as much as those histories I've been reading imply, ninety percent of the people on this planet must have Vor blood by now. Who knows who your relatives are on your father's side?"
Vorkosigan bit his linen napkin absently, his eyes gone crinkly with much the same expression as the footman, and murmured, "Cordelia, you can't . . . you really can't sit at the breakfast table and imply my ancestors were bastards. It's a mortal insult here."
Where should I sit? "Oh. I'll never understand that, I guess. Oh, never mind. Koudelka, and Bothari."
"Quite. Go on, duty officer."
"Yes, sir. Well, sir, they were coming back, I was told, about an hour after midnight, when they were set on by a gang of area toughs. Evidently Lieutenant Koudelka was too well dressed, and besides there's that walk of his, and the stick . . . anyway, he attracted attention. I don't know the details, sir, but there were four deaths and three in the hospital this morning, in addition to the ones that got away."
Vorkosigan whistled, very faintly, through his teeth. "What was the extent of Bothari's and Koudelka's injuries?"
"They . . . I don't have an official report, sir. Just hearsay."
"Say, then."
The duty officer swallowed a little. "Sergeant Bothari has a broken arm, some broken ribs, internal injuries, and a concussion. Lieutenant Koudelka, both legs broken, and a lot of, uh . . . shock burns." His voice trailed off.
"What?"
"Evidently—I heard—their assailants had a couple of high-voltage shock sticks, and they discovered they could get some . . . peculiar effects on his prosthetic nerves with them. After they'd broken his legs they spent . . . quite a long time working him over. That's how it was Commander Illyan's men caught up with them. They didn't clear off in time."
Cordelia pushed her plate away and sat trembling.
"Hearsay, eh? Very well. Dismissed. See that Commander Illyan is sent to me immediately he arrives." Vorkosigan's expression was introspective and grim.
Piotr's was sourly triumphant. "Vermin," he asserted. "You ought to burn them all out."
Vorkosigan sighed. "Easier to start a war than finish it. Not this week, sir."
* * *
Illyan attended on Vorkosigan within the hour, in the library, with his informal verbal report. Cordelia trailed in after them, to sit and listen.
"Sure you want to hear this?" Vorkosigan asked her quietly.
She shook her head. "Next to you, they are my best friends here. I'd rather know than wonder."
The duty officer's synopsis proved tolerably accurate, but Illyan, who had talked to both Bothari and Koudelka at the Imperial Military H
ospital where they had been taken, had a number of details to add, in blunt terms. His puppy-dog face looked unusually old this morning.
"Your secretary was apparently seized with a desire to get laid," he began. "Why he picked Bothari as a native guide, I can't imagine."
"We three are the sole survivors of the General Vorkraft," Vorkosigan replied. "It's a bond, I suppose. Kou and Bothari always got on well, though. He appeals to Bothari's latent fatherly instincts, maybe. And Kou's a clean-minded boy—don't tell him I said that, he'd take it as an insult. It's good to be reminded such people still exist. Wish he'd come to me, though."
"Well, Bothari did his best," said Illyan. "Took him to this dismal dive, which I gather has a number of points in its favor from Bothari's point of view. It's cheap, it's quick, and nobody talks to him. It's also far removed from Admiral Vorrutyer's old circles. No unpleasant associations. He has a strict routine. According to Kou, Bothari's regular woman is almost as ugly as he is. Bothari likes her, it appears, because she never makes any noise. I don't think I want to think about that.
"Be that as it may, Kou got mismatched with one of the other employees, who terrified him. Bothari says he asked for the best girl for him—hardly a girl, woman, whatever—and apparently Kou's needs were misinterpreted. Anyway, Bothari was done and kicking his heels waiting while Kou was still trying to make polite conversation and being offered an assortment of delights for jaded appetites he'd never heard of before. He gave up and fled back downstairs at last, where Bothari was by this time pretty thoroughly tanked. He usually has one drink and leaves, it seems.
"Kou, Bothari, and this whore then got into an argument over payment, on the grounds that he'd burned up enough time for four customers versus—most of this won't be in the official report, all right?—she couldn't get his circuits working. Kou forked over a partial payment—Bothari's still grumbling over how much, insofar as he can talk at all through that mouth of his this morning—and they retreated in disorder, a lousy time having been had by all."
"The first obvious question that arises," said Vorkosigan, "is, was the attack ordered by anyone from that establishment?"
"To the best of my knowledge, no. I threw a cordon around the place, once we'd found it, and questioned everyone inside under fast-penta. Scared the shit out of them all, I'm glad to say. They're used to Count Vorbohn's municipal guards, whom they bribe, or who blackmail them, and vice versa. We turned up a lot of information on petty crimes, none of which was of the least interest to us—do you want me to pass it on to the municipals, by the way?"
"Hm. If they're innocent of the attack, just file it. Bothari may want to go back there someday. Do they know why they were questioned?"
"Certainly not! I insist my men work clean. We're here to gather information, not pass it out."
"My apologies, Commander. I should have known. Carry on."
"Well, they left the place about an hour after midnight, on foot, and took a wrong turn somewhere. Bothari's pretty upset about that. Thinks it's his fault, for getting so drunk. Bothari and Koudelka both say they saw movements in the shadows for about ten minutes before the attack. So they were stalked, apparently, until they were manuevered into a high walled alley, and found themselves with six in front and six behind.
"Bothari pulled his stunner and fired—got three, before he was jumped. Someone down there is richer by a good service stunner this morning. Kou had his swordstick, but nothing else.
"They ganged up on Bothari first. He took out two more, after he'd lost the stunner. They stunned him, then tried to beat him to death after he was down. Kou had been using his stick as a quarterstaff up till then, but at that point he popped the cover off. He says now he wished he hadn't, because this murmur of 'Vor!' went up all around, and things got really ugly.
"He stabbed two, until somebody struck the sword with a shock stick, and his hand went into spasms. The five that were left sat on him and broke both his legs backwards at the knees. He asked me to tell you it wasn't as painful as it sounds. He says they broke so many circuits he had hardly any sensation. I don't know if that's true."
"It's hard to tell with Kou," said Vorkosigan. "He's been concealing pain for so long, it's almost second nature. Go on."
"I have to jump back a bit now. My man who was assigned to Kou followed them down into that warren by himself. He wasn't one of the men who are familiar with the place, supposedly, and he wasn't dressed for it—Kou had two reservations for some live musical performance last night, and until three hours before midnight that's where we thought he was going. My man went in there and vanished, between the first and second hourly checks. That's what has me going this morning. Was he murdered? Or kidnapped? Rolled and raped? Or was he a plant, a setup, a double agent? We won't know till we find the body, or whatever.
"Thirty minutes after the missed check my people sent in another tail. But he was looking for the first man. Kou was uncovered for three solid bloody hours last night before my night shift supervisor came on duty and woke to the fact. Fortunately, Kou'd spent most of that time in Bothari's old whore's retirement home.
"My night shift man, whom I commend, redirected the field agent, and put a patrol in the air to boot. So when the field agent finally got to that revolting scene, he was able to call a flyer down on top of it almost immediately, and drop half a dozen of my uniformed bruisers in to break up the party. That business with the shock sticks—it was bad, but not as bad as it might have been. Kou's assailants evidently lacked the sort of, hm, imaginative approach that, say, the late Admiral Vorrutyer might have had in the same situation. Or maybe they just didn't have time to get really refined."
"Thank God," murmured Vorkosigan. "And the deaths?"
"Two were Bothari's work, clean blows, one was Kou's—cut him across the neck—and one, I'm afraid, was mine. The kid went into anaphylactic shock in an allergic reaction to fast-penta. We zipped him over to ImpMil, but they couldn't get him going again. I don't like it. They're autopsying him now, trying to find out if it was natural or a planted defense against questioning."
"And the gang?"
"Appears to be a perfectly legitimate—if that's the word—caravanserai mutual benefit society. According to the survivors we captured, they decided to pick on Kou because he 'walked funny.' Charming. Although Bothari wasn't exactly walking in a straight line, either. None of the ones we captured is an agent for anybody but themselves. I cannot speak for the dead. I supervised the questioning personally, and will swear to it. They were quite shocked to find themselves of interest to Imperial Security."
"Anything else?" said Vorkosigan.
Illyan yawned behind his hand, and apologized. "It's been a long night. My night shift man got me out of bed after midnight. Good man, good judgment. No, that about wraps it up, except for Kou's motivation for going down there in the first place. He went all vague, and started asking for pain medication, when we came to that subject. I was hoping you might have a suggestion, to ease my paranoias. Being suspicious of Kou gives me a crick in the neck." He yawned again.
"I do," said Cordelia, "but for your paranoia, not for your report, all right?"
He nodded.
"I think he's in love with someone. After all, you don't test something unless you're planning to use it. Unfortunately his test was a major disaster. I expect he'll be pretty depressed and touchy for quite some time."
Vorkosigan nodded understanding.
"Any idea who?" asked Illyan automatically.
"Yes, but I don't think it's your business. Especially if it's not going to happen."
Illyan shrugged acceptance, and left to pursue his lost sheep, the missing man who'd first been assigned to follow Koudelka.
* * *
Sergeant Bothari was back at Vorkosigan House, though not yet back on duty, within five days, a plastic casing on the broken arm. He volunteered no information on the brutal affair, and discouraged curious questioners with a sour glower and noncommittal grunts.
Drou
shnakovi asked no questions and offered no comments. But Cordelia saw her occasionally cast a haunted look at the empty comconsole in the library, with its double-scrambled links to the Imperial Residence and the General Staff Headquarters, where Koudelka usually sat to work while at Vorkosigan House. Cordelia wondered just how much detail of that night's events had been poured, searing as lead, into her ears.
Lieutenant Koudelka returned to curtailed light duties the following month, apparently quite cheerful and unaffected by his ordeal. But in his own way he was as uninformative as Bothari. Questioning Bothari had been like questioning a wall. Questioning Koudelka was like talking to a stream; one got back babble, or little eddies of jokes, or anecdotes that pulled the current of the discussion inexorably away from the original subject. Cordelia responded to his sunniness with automatic good grace, playing along with his obvious desire to slide over the affair as lightly as possible. Inwardly she was far more doubtful.
Her own mood was not the best. Her imagination returned again and again to the assassination scare of six weeks ago, dwelling uncomfortably on the chances that had almost taken Vorkosigan from her. Only when he was with her was she completely at ease, and he was gone more and more now. Something was brewing at Imperial HQ; he had been gone four times to all-night sessions, and had taken a trip without her, some flying inspection of military affairs, of which he gave her no details and from which he returned white-tired around the eyes. He came in and out at odd hours. The flow of military and political gossip and chitchat with which he was wont to entertain her at meals, or undressing for bed, dried up to an uncommunicative silence, though he seemed to need her presence no less.
Where would she be without him? A pregnant widow, without family or friends, bearing a child already a focal point of dynastic paranoias, inheritor of a legacy of violence. Could she get off-planet? And where would she go if she could? Would Beta Colony ever let her come back?
Even the autumn rain, and the fat lingering greenness of the city parks, began to fail to please her. Oh, for a breath of really dry desert air, the familiar alkali tang, the endless flat distances. Would her son ever know what a real desert was? The horizons here, crowded close with buildings and vegetation, seemed almost to rise around her like a huge wall at times. On really bad days the wall seemed to topple inward.
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