Komarr - Bujold Lois Mcmaster (читать книги бесплатно полностью без регистрации сокращений txt) 📗

"I—we came out, Tien brought me out here—how the devil did you come here?"

"Lena Foscol called me at home, and told me Tien wanted a ride. She almost didn't catch me. I'd been about to leave. She didn't even tell me you were out here. You might still be . . ."

"No . . . no, I'm almost certain she'd have made some other arrangement, if she'd missed you altogether." He sat up straighter, or tried to. "What time is it now?"

"A little before 2100."

"I … would have guessed it was much later. They stunned us, you see. I don't know how long . . . What time did she call you?"

"It was just after 1900 hours."

His eyes squeezed shut, then opened again. "It was too late. It was already too late by then, do you understand?" he asked urgently. His hand jerked toward hers, on her knee as she leaned toward him to catch his hoarse words, but then fell back.

"No …"

"There was something questionable going on in the Waste Heat department. Your husband brought me out here to show me—well, I don't quite know what he thought he was going to show me, but we ran headlong into Soudha and his accomplices in the process of decamping. Soudha got the drop on me—stunned us both. I came to, chained to that railing out there. I don't think—I don't know. … I don't think they meant to kill your husband. He hadn't checked his breath mask, y'see. His reservoirs were almost empty. The Komarrans didn't check it either, before they left us. I didn't know, no one did."

"Komarrans wouldn't," Ekaterin said woodenly. "Their mask-check procedures are ingrained by the time they're three years old. They'd never imagine an adult would go outside the dome with deficient equipment." Her hands clenched, in her lap. She could picture Tien's death now.

"It was . . . quick," Vorkosigan offered. "At least that."

It was not. Neither quick nor clean. "Please do not lie to me. Please do not ever lie to me."

"All right …" he said slowly. "But I don't think … I don't think it was murder. To set up that scene, and then call you . . ."He shook his head. "Manslaughter at most. Death by misadventure."

"Death from stupidity," she said bitterly. "Consistent to the end."

He glanced up at her, his eyes not so much startled as aware, and questioning. "Ah?"

"Lord Auditor Vorkosigan." She swallowed; her throat was so tight it felt like a muscle spasm. The silence in the building, and outside, was eerie in its emptiness. She and Vorkosigan might as well have been the only two people left alive on the planet. "You should know, when I said Foscol called as I was leaving … I was leaving. Leaving Tien. I'd told him so, when he came home from the department tonight, and just before he went back, I suppose, to get you. What did he do?"

He took this in without much response at first, as if thinking it over. "All right," he echoed himself softly at last. He glanced across at her. "Basically, he came in babbling about some embezzlement scheme which had been going on in Waste Heat Management, apparently for quite some time. He sounded me out about declaring him an Imperial Witness, which he seemed to think would save him from prosecution. It's not quite that simple. I didn't commit myself."

"Tien would hear what he wanted to hear," she said softly.

"I … so I gathered." He hesitated, watching her face. "How long . . . what do you know about it?"

"And how long have I known it?" Ekaterin grimaced, and rubbed her face free of the lingering irritation of her own mask. "Not as long as I should have. Tien had been talking for months . . . You have to understand, he was irrationally afraid of anyone finding out about his Vorzohn's Dystrophy."

"I actually do understand that," he offered tentatively.

"Yes . . . and no. It's Tien's older brother's fault, in part. I've cursed the man for years. When his symptoms began, he took the Old Vor way out and crashed his lightflyer. It made an impression on Tien he never shook off. Set an impossible example. We'd had no idea his family carried the mutation, till Tien, who was his brother's executor, was going through the records and effects, and we realized both that the accident was deliberate, and why. It was just after Nikki was born …"

"But wouldn't it have … I'd wondered when I read your file—the defect should have turned up in the gene scan, before the embryo was started in the uterine replicator. Is Nikki affected, or . . . ?"

"Nikki was a body-birth. No gene scan. The Old Vor way. Old Vor have good blood, you know, no need to check anything."

He looked as if he'd bitten into a lemon. "Whose bright idea was that?"

"I don't . . . quite remember how it was decided. Tien and I decided together. I was young, we were just married, I had a lot of stupid romantic ideas … I suppose it seemed heroic to me at the time."

"How old were you?"

"Twenty."

"Ah." His mouth quirked in an expression she could not quite interpret, a sad mixture of irony and sympathy. "Yes."

Obscurely encouraged, she went on. "Tien's scheme for dealing with the dystrophy without anyone ever finding out he had it was to go get galactic treatment, somewhere far from the Imperium. It made it much more expensive than it needed to be. We'd been trying to save for years, but somehow, something always went wrong. We never made much progress. But for the past six or eight months, Tien's been telling me to stop worrying, he had it under control. Except . . . Tien always talks like that, so I scarcely paid attention. Then last night, after you went to sleep … I heard you tell him straight out you wanted to make a surprise inspection of his department today, I heard you—he got up in the night and called Administrator Soudha, to warn him. I listened … I heard enough to gather they had some sort of payroll falsification scheme going, and I'm very much afraid … no. I'm certain Tien was taking bribes. Because—" she stopped and took a breath "—I broke into Tien's comconsole this morning and looked at his financial records." She glanced up, to see how Vorkosigan would take this. His mouth renewed the crooked quirk. "I'm sorry I ripped at you the other day, for looking through mine," she said humbly.

His mouth opened, and closed; he merely gave her a little encouraging wave of his fingers and slumped down a bit more in his chair, listening with an air of uttermost attention. Listening.

She went on hurriedly, not before her nerve broke, for she scarcely felt anything now, but before she dragged to a halt from sheer exhaustion. "He'd had at least forty thousand marks that I couldn't see where they'd come from. Not from his salary, certainly."

"Had?"

"If the information on the comconsole was right, he'd taken all forty thousand and borrowed sixty more, and lost it all on Komarran trade fleet shares."

"All?"

"Well, no, not quite all. About three-quarters of it." At his astonished look, she added, "Tien's luck has always been like that."

"I always used to say you made your own luck. Though I've been forced to eat those words often enough, I don't say it so much anymore."

"Well … I think it must be true, or how else could his luck have been so consistently bad? The only common factor in all the chaos was Tien." She leaned her head back wearily. "Though I suppose it might have been me, somehow." Tien often said it was me.