Memory

Madame Koudelka looked on benignly. It made a nice tableau, and would do much toward repairing whatever damages still lingered to Galeni's reputation from Haroche's calculatedly clumsy arrest of him here a few weeks ago. With four sisters in all, Galeni was on his way to gaining an array of major Barrayaran clan co

A rich, raspy baritone voice over his shoulder said, "Congratulations on your promotion, sir."

Miles gri

"I admit," said Viceroy Count Aral Vorkosigan, "I was thinking of your Imperial Auditorship, but I understand from Gregor you slipped a captaincy in there somehow as well. You hadn't mentioned it. Congratulations on that, too, though . . . that has to be the most roundabout method of acquiring a set of blue tabs I've ever heard of."

"If you can't do what you want, do what you can. Or how you can. The captaincy . . . completed something, for me."

"I'm glad you survived long enough to finally grow into yourself. So, you're not losing your forward momentum with age, are you, boy?" The Count refrained from following this up with one of those we're-getting-so-old complaints mainly designed to invite the listener to offer a contradiction.

"I don't think so." Miles's eyes narrowed in a brief moment of introspection. His new calmness was still there, inside, but it did not feel at all weary. Quite the opposite. "It's just taking another direction. Vorhovis tells me I'm the youngest Imperial Auditor since the Time of Isolation. It's not a post you ever held, I understand."

"No. I missed that one, somehow. Your grandfather never held it, either. Nor your great-grandfather. In fact . . . I'll have to look it up, but I don't think any Count or Lord Vorkosigan has ever been an Auditor."

"I did. None has. I'm the first in the family," Miles informed him smugly. "I am unprecedented."

The Count smiled. "This is not news, Miles."

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Miles stood in the concourse just outside Customs Processing on one of Komarr's larger orbital transfer stations. Smells like a space station, oh, yeah. It was not a sweet perfume, that odd acridity compounded of machinery, electronics, humanity and all its effluvia, and chill air run through filters which never quite succeeded in reducing its complexity. But it was familiar, universal, and an enormously nostalgic odor for him: Admiral Naismith's atmosphere, subliminally electrifying even now.

The station was one of a dozen orbiting the system's only semihabitable planet. Three more deep-space stations circled Komarr s feeble star, and each of the six wormhole exits they all served boasted both a military station and a commercial one. In this far-flung network cargo and passengers loaded, unloaded, and shuffled, bound not only for Barrayar but for Pol, the Hegen Hub, Sergyar, Escobar beyond it, and a dozen other co

Qui

He'd seen the Count and Countess off from this station yesterday, on their way back to Sergyar, having hitched a ride with them as far as Komarr in their government courier ship. Five days in the relatively uninterrupted confines of a jump-ship had actually given them time enough to talk, for a change. He had also seized the opportunity to beg an Armsman for himself from his father, the comfortable Pym by choice. The Countess grumbled they should have held out for Ma Kosti in exchange, but gave up her favorite Armsman to him nonetheless; the Count promised to send him a couple more in due time, chosen from those whose wives and families had been the most bitterly unhappy at having been forcibly transplanted from their familiar city to the wilds of Chaos Colony.

The crowd around the exit door from Customs Processing thickened, as inbound passengers began to spill through and hurry to their further destinations, or greet waiting parties with businesslike decorum or familial enthusiasm. Miles rose on his toes, futilely. Nine-tenths of this outrush dissipated before Qui

She too craned to look for him, murmured a "Heh," of satisfaction upon spotting him waving a hand behind a few other shoulders, and wove through the crowd. Her stride stretched as she neared; she dropped the gray duffel she swung and they embraced with an impact that nearly knocked Miles off his feet. The scent of her made up for any number of defective space station atmospheric filters. Qui