Diplomatic Immunity (2 page)

He? Or
we
?

He glanced up at Ekaterin's pale profile; she turned her serious blue eyes toward him. He asked, "Do you want to go with me, or continue on home?"

"
Can
I go with you?" she asked doubtfully.

"Of course you can! The only question is, would you like to?"

Her dark brows rose. "Not the only question, surely. Do you think I'd be of any use, or would I just be a distraction from your work?"

"There's official use, and there's unofficial use. Don't bet that the first is more important than the second. You know the way people talk to you to try to get oblique messages to me?"

"Oh, yes." Her lips twisted in distaste.

"Well, yes, I realize it's tedious, but you're very good at sorting them out, you know. Not to mention the information to be obtained just from studying the kinds of lies people tell. And, ah—not-lies. There may well be people who will talk to you who won't talk to me, for one reason or another."

She conceded the truth of this with a little wave of her free hand.

"And . . . it would be a real relief for me to have someone along I can talk to freely."

Her smile tilted a little at this. "Talk, or vent?"

"I—hem!—suspect this one is going to entail quite a lot of venting, yes. D'you think you can stand it? It could get pretty thick. Not to mention boring."

"You know, you keep claiming your job is boring, Miles, but your eyes have gone all bright."

He cleared his throat and shrugged unrepentantly.

Her amusement faded, and her brows drew down. "How long do you think this sorting out will take?"

He considered the calculation she had doubtless just made. It would be six more weeks, give or take a few days, to the scheduled births. Their original travel plan would have put them back at Vorkosigan House a comfortable month early. Sector V was in the opposite direction from their present location to Barrayar, insofar as the network of jump points people navigated to get from
here
to
there
could be said to have a direction. Several days to get from here to Graf Station, plus an extra two weeks of travel at least to get home from there, even in the fastest of fast couriers. "If I can settle things in less than two weeks, we can both get home on time."

She breathed a short laugh. "For all that I try to be all modern and galactic, that feels so strange. All sorts of men don't make it home for the births of their children. But
My mother was out of town on the day I was born, so she missed it
, just seems . . . seems like a more profound complaint, somehow."

"If it runs over, I suppose I could send you home on your own, with a suitable escort. But I want to be there, too." He hesitated.
It's my first time, dammit, of course it's making me crazy,
was a statement of the obvious that he managed to stop on his lips. Her first marriage had left her riddled with sensitive scars, none of them physical, and this topic trod near several of them.
Rephrase, O Diplomat
. "Does it . . . make it any easier, that it's the second time, for you?"

Her expression grew introspective. "Nikki was a body birth; of course everything was harder. The replicators take away so many risks—our children could get all their genetic mistakes corrected, they won't be subject to damage from a bad birth—I know replicator gestation is better, more responsible, in every way. It's not as though they are being
shortchanged
. And yet . . ."

He raised her hand and touched her knuckles to his lips. "You're not shortchanging
me
, I promise you."

Miles's own mother was adamantly in favor of the use of replicators, with cause. He was reconciled now, at age thirty-odd, with the physical damage he had taken in her womb from the soltoxin attack. Only his emergency transfer to a replicator had saved his life. The teratogenic military poison had left him stunted and brittle-boned, but a childhood's agony of medical treatments had brought him to nearly full function, if not, alas, full height. Most of his bones had been replaced piecemeal with synthetics thereafter, emphasis on the
pieces
. The rest of the damage, he conceded, was all his own doing. That he was still alive seemed less a miracle than that he had won Ekaterin's heart.
Their
children would not suffer such traumas.

He added, "And if you think you're having it too luxuriously easy now to feel properly virtuous, why, just wait till they get
out
of those replicators."

She laughed. "Very good point!"

"Well." He sighed. "I'd intended this trip to show you the glories of the galaxy, in the most elegant and refined society. It appears I'm heading instead to what I suspect is the armpit of Sector V, and the company of a bunch of squabbling, frantic merchants, irate bureaucrats, and paranoid militarists. Life is full of surprises. Come with me, my love? For my sanity's sake?"

Her eyes narrowed in amusement. "How can I resist such an invitation? Of course I will." She sobered. "Would it violate security for me to send a message to Nikki telling him we'll be late?"

"Not at all. Send it from the
Kestrel
, though. It'll get through faster."

She nodded. "I've never been away from him so long before. I wonder if he's been lonely?"

Nikki had been left, on Ekaterin's side of the family, with four uncles and a great-uncle plus matching aunts, a herd of cousins, a small army of friends, and his Grandmother Vorsoisson. On Miles's side were Vorkosigan House's extensive staff and their extensive families, with Uncle Ivan and Uncle Mark and the whole Koudelka clan for backup. Impending were his doting Vorkosigan step-grandparents, who had planned to arrive after Miles and Ekaterin for the birthday bash, but who now might beat them home. Ekaterin might have to travel
ahead
to Barrayar, if he couldn't cut through this mess in a timely fashion, but by no rational definition of the word,
alone
.

"I don't see how," said Miles honestly. "I expect you miss him more than he misses us. Or he'd have managed more than that one monosyllabic note that didn't catch up with us till Earth. Eleven-year-old boys can be pretty self-centered. I'm sure
I
was."

Her brows rose. "Oh? And how many notes have you sent to
your
mother in the past two months?"

"It's a
honeymoon
trip. Nobody expects you to . . . Anyway, she's always gotten to see the reports from my security."

The brows stayed up. He added prudently, "I'll drop her a message from the
Kestrel
too."

He was rewarded with a League of Mothers smile. Come to think of it, perhaps he would include his father in the address as well, not that his parents didn't share his missives. And complain coequally about their rarity.

An hour of mild chaos completed their transfer to the Barrayaran Imperial courier ship. Fast couriers gained most of their speed by trading off carrying capacity. Miles was forced to divest all but their most essential luggage. The considerable remainder, along with a startling volume of souvenirs, would continue the journey back to Barrayar with most of their little entourage: Ekaterin's personal maid, Miss Pym, and, to Miles's greater regret, both of Roic's relief armsmen. It occurred to him belatedly, as he and Ekaterin fitted themselves into their new shared cabin, that he ought to have mentioned how cramped their quarters would be. He'd traveled on similar vessels so often during his own years in ImpSec, he took their limitations for granted—one of the few aspects of his former career where his undersized body had worked to his advantage.

So while he did spend the remainder of the day in bed with his wife after all, it was primarily due to the absence of other seating. They folded back the upper bunk for head space and sat up on opposite ends, Ekaterin to read quietly from a hand viewer, Miles to plunge into Gregor's promised Pandora's box of reports from the diplomatic front.

He wasn't five minutes into this study before he uttered a
Ha!
 

Ekaterin indicated her willingness to be interrupted by looking up at him with a reciprocal
Hm?
 

"I just figured out why Graf Station sounded familiar. We're headed for Quaddiespace, by God."

"Quaddiespace? Is that someplace you've been before?"

"Not personally, no." This was going to take more politic preparation than he'd anticipated. "Although I actually met a quaddie once. The quaddies are a race of bioengineered humans developed, oh, two or three hundred years ago. Before Barrayar was rediscovered. They were supposed to be permanent free fall dwellers. Whatever their creators' original plan for them was, it fell through when the new grav technologies came in, and they ended up as sort of economic refugees. After assorted travels and adventures, they finally settled as a group in what was at the time the far end of the wormhole Nexus. They were wary of other people by then, so they deliberately picked a system with no habitable planets, but with considerable asteroid and cometary resources. Planning to keep themselves to themselves, I guess. Of course, the explored Nexus has grown around them since then, so now they get some foreign exchange by servicing ships and providing transfer facilities. Which explains why our fleet came to be docked there, although not what happened afterwards. The, ah . . ." He hesitated. "The bioengineering included a lot of metabolic changes, but the most spectacular alteration was, they have a second set of arms where their legs should be. Which is really, um, handy in free fall. So to speak. I've often wished I'd had a couple of extra hands, when I was operating in vacuum."

He passed the viewer across and displayed the shot of a quaddie, dressed in bright yellow shorts and a singlet, handing himself along a gravity-less corridor with the speed and agility of a monkey navigating through treetops.

"
Oh
," gulped Ekaterin, then quickly regained control of her features. "How, uh . . . interesting." After a moment she added, "It does look quite practical, for their environment."

Miles relaxed a trifle. Whatever her buried Barrayaran reflexes were regarding visible mutations, they would be trumped by her iron grip on good manners.

The same, unfortunately, did not appear to be true of their fellow members of the Imperium now stranded in the quaddies' system. The difference between deleterious mutation and benign or advantageous modification was not readily grasped by Barrayarans from the backcountry. Given that one officer referred to them as
horrible spider mutants
right in his report, it was clear that Miles could add racial tensions to the mix of complications they were now racing toward.

"You get used to them pretty quickly," he reassured her.

"Where did you meet one, if they keep to themselves?"

"Um . . ." Some quick internal editing, here . . . "It was on an ImpSec mission. I can't talk about it. But she was a musician, of all things. Played the hammer dulcimer with all four arms." His attempt to mime this remarkable sight resulted in his banging his elbow painfully on the cabin wall. "Her name was Nicol. You would have liked her. We got her out of a tight spot. I wonder if she ever made it home?" He rubbed his elbow and added hopefully, "I'll bet the quaddies' free fall gardening techniques would interest you."

Ekaterin brightened. "Yes, indeed."

Miles returned to his reports with the uncomfortable certainty that this was not going to be a good task to plunge into underprepared. He mentally added a review of quaddie history to his list of studies for the next few days.

"Is my collar straight?"

Ekaterin's cool fingers made businesslike work upon the back of Miles's neck; he concealed the shiver down his spine. "Now it is," she said.

"Clothes make the Auditor," he muttered. The little cabin lacked such amenities as a full-length mirror; he had to use his wife's eyes instead. This did not seem a disadvantage. She stepped back as far as she could, a half-pace to the bulkhead, and looked him up and down to check the effect of his Vorkosigan House uniform: brown tunic with his family crest in silver thread upon the high collar, silver-embroidered cuffs, brown trousers with silver side piping, tall brown riding boots. The Vor class had been cavalry soldiers, in their heyday. No horse within God knew how many light-years now, that was certain.

He touched his wrist com, mate in function to the one she wore, though hers was made Vor-lady-like with a decorative silver bracelet. "I'll give you a heads-up when I'm ready to come back and change." He nodded toward the plain gray suit she'd already laid out on the bunk. A uniform for the military-minded, civvies for the civilians. And let the weight of Barrayaran history, eleven generations of Counts Vorkosigan at his back, make up for his lack of height, his faintly hunched stance. His less visible defects, he didn't need to mention.

"What should I wear?"

"Since you'll have to play the whole entourage, something effective." He smiled crookedly. "That red silk thing ought to be distractingly civilian enough for our Stationer hosts."

"Only the male half, love," she pointed out. "Suppose their security chief is a female quaddie? Are quaddies even attracted to downsiders?"

"One was, apparently," he sighed. "Hence this mess. . . . Parts of Graf Station are null-gee, so you'll likely want trousers or leggings instead of Barrayaran-style skirts. Something you can move in."

"Oh. Yes, I see."

A knock sounded at the cabin door, and Armsman Roic's diffident voice, "My lord?"

"On my way, Roic." Miles and Ekaterin exchanged places—finding himself at her chest height, he stole a pleasantly resilient hug in passing—and he exited to the courier ship's narrow corridor.

Roic wore a slightly plainer version of Miles's Vorkosigan House uniform, as befitted his liege-sworn armsman's status. "Do you want me to pack up your things now for transfer to the Barrayaran flagship, m'lord?" he asked.

"No. We're going to stay aboard the courier."

Roic almost managed to conceal his wince. He was a young man of imposing height and intimidating breadth of shoulder, and had described his bunk above the courier ship's engineer as
Sort of like sleeping in a coffin, m'lord, except for the snoring.