Miles in Love (17 page)

"Certainly, my Lord Auditor."

"Did you find out anything interesting?" Ekaterin inquired generally, resetting the lock behind them.

"Mm, Madame Radovas had no suggestions as to how her wandering husband had wandered into our soletta wreck," said Uncle Vorthys. "I'd been hoping she might."

"It's so sad. They had seemed like such a nice couple, the few times I met them."

"Well, you know middle-aged men." Tien shrugged reprovingly, clearly excluding himself from the class.

Ah, Tien. Why couldn't you be the one to run off with a younger, richer woman? Maybe you'd be happier. You could scarcely be less happy. Why does your one virtue have to be fidelity?
As far as she knew, anyway. Though she had wondered, during that thankfully-over weird period when he'd been accusing her, why an act she found unthinkable had so obsessed him. Maybe he didn't find it so unthinkable at all? She hardly had the energy to care.

She offered a late-night snack, an invitation only Uncle Vorthys accepted, and they all parted company for their respective sleeping quarters. By the time her uncle had finished eating and said good night, and she tidied up and made her way to her own bedroom, checking on Nikolai on the way, Tien was already in bed on his side with his eyes closed. Not sleeping yet; he had a very distinctive near-snore when he was truly asleep. When she slipped in beside him, he rolled over and flung his arm over her, and snugged her in tight.

He does love me, in some inept way.
The thought almost made her want to weep. Yet what other human connections did Tien have, aside from her and Nikolai? His distant mother, remarried, and the ghost of his dead brother. Tien clutched her at night sometimes like a drowning man clutching his log.

If there was a hell, she hoped Tien's brother was in it. A Vor hell. He had done the proper thing, oh yes he had, cutting out his own mutation, and setting an example for Tien impossible to—so to speak—live up to. Tien had tried to emulate him, twice early on and once later, running up to suicide attempts so half-hearted as to barely qualify as gestures. The first two times she had been utterly terrified. For a period she had believed her loyalty and dependency were the only things holding him to life. By the third, she was numb. Much more of this, and she wouldn't be human at all. She felt barely human now.

Hoping to pretend her way to the real thing, she let her breathing slow, and feigned sleep. After a time, Tien, who was no more asleep than she, got up and went to the bathroom. But instead of returning to bed, he plodded quietly across the bedroom and out toward the kitchen. Maybe he'd changed his mind about that snack. Would he like it if she heated him some milk with brandy and spices in it? It was an old family recipe and remedy her great-aunt had brought to South Continent; comfort-drink for a visiting sick niece, though the larger of the generous portions had always somehow seemed to find its way into the old lady's own cup. Ekaterin smiled in memory, and padded after Tien.

Not the refrigerator but the kitchen comconsole terminal made the only faint light ahead of her. She paused in the doorway, puzzled. In her parent's household, the only allowable reason to call anyone at this hour of the night was to announce either a birth or a death, a rule she'd found she had internalized.

"What the hell was Radovas's body doing up there?" Tien, his back to her, spoke hoarsely and lowly to the torso over the vid-plate. Startled, Ekaterin recognized his subordinate Administrator Soudha. Soudha was not, as she would have expected, in pajamas, but still dressed for the day. Working this late at home? Well, engineers were like that. She drew back a little more into the shadows in the hallway. "You told me he'd quit."

"He did," said Soudha. "It's not our problem what happened to him afterward."

"The hell it's not. We're going to have frigging ImpSec all over the department tomorrow. The real thing, not just a VIP tour we can run around in circles and feed dinner and wave good-bye to. I could see Tuomonen getting this shitty-eyed look just thinking about it."

"We'll handle them. Go back to bed, Vorsoisson."

Lord Auditor Vorkosigan told you pointblank he wanted to make a surprise inspection, Tien. He speaks with the Emperor's Voice. What are you doing?
She began to breathe through her mouth, soundlessly, starting to feel sick to her stomach.

"They're going to find out all about your sweet little scheme, and then we'll all be in it to our eyebrows," said Tien.

"No, they won't. We're tight in town. Just keep them away from the experiment station, and we'll grease them in and out without a squeak."

"The experiment station is a hollow shell. You haven't
got
a department, except in the files. What if they want to interview one of your ghost employees?"

"Such as yourself?" Soudha's mouth twisted in a thin smile. "Relax."

"I am not going down with you."

"You think you have a choice?" Soudha snorted. "Look. It'll be all right. They can audit all day long, and all they'll find is a lot of columns that add perfectly. Lena Foscol in Accounting is the most meticulous thief I've ever met. We're so far ahead of them they'll never catch up."

"Soudha, they're going to ask to interview people who
don't exist
. Then what?"

"Gone on vacation. Out on field work. We can stall."

"For how long? And then what?"

"Go to
bed
, Vorsoisson, and stop twitching."

"Goddammit, I've had two Imperial Auditors in my
house
for the last three days." He stopped and took a gulping breath; Soudha offered him a sympathetic shrug. Tien went on again in a lowered tone. "That's . . . another thing. I need an advance on my stipend. I need another twenty thousand marks. And I need it now."

"
Now?
Oh, sure, with ImpSec looking on, no doubt. Vorsoisson, you are gibbering."

"Dammit, I
have
to have the money. Or else."

"Or else what? Or else you're going to ImpSec and turn
yourself
in? Look, Tien." Soudha ran his hands through his hair in a harried swipe. "Lie low. Keep your mouth shut. Be sweet like sugar to the nice ImpSec lads, give them to me, and we'll handle them. Let's just take this one day at a time, all right?"

"Soudha, I know you can produce the twenty thousand. There has to be at least fifty thousand marks a month flowing out of your department's budget and into your pockets from the dummy employees alone, and God knows how much from the rest of it—though I'm sure your pet accountant does—what if they decide to fast-penta
her
?"

Ekaterin stepped backward, her bare feet seeking silence from the floor near the wall.
Dear God. What has Tien done now?
It was all too easy to fill in the blanks. Embezzlement and bribery at the very least, and on a grand scale.
How long has this been going on?

The muffled voices from the kitchen exchanged a few more curt words, and the blue reflection from the holovid winked out, leaving the hallway obliquely lit only by the amber lights in the park outside. Heart pounding, Ekaterin slipped back down the hall into her bathroom and locked its door. She quickly flushed the commode and stood trembling at the sink, staring at her dim reflection in the glass. The faint nightlight made drowned sparks in her dilated eyes. After another minute, the bed creaked as Tien made his way back into it.

She waited a long time, but when she crept out, he was still awake.

"Hm?" he said muzzily as she slid under the covers again.

"Not feeling too well," she muttered. Truthfully.

"Poor Kat. Something you ate, you think?"

"Not sure." She curled up away from him, not having to pretend the sick ache in her belly.

"Take something, eh? If you're batting around all night, neither of us will get any sleep."

"I'll see."
I must know.
After a time she added, "Did you get anything arranged about our galactic trip today?"

"God, no. Much too busy."

Not to busy to complete the transfer of her funds to his own account, she'd noticed. "Would you . . . like me to take over making all the arrangements? There's no reason you should carry all that burden, I have plenty of time. I've already researched off-world medical facilities."

"Not
now
, Kat! We can deal with this later. Next week, after your uncle goes."

She let it drop, staring into the darkness.
Whatever it is he needs twenty thousand marks for, it's not to fulfill his word to me.

Eventually, he slept, about two hours; Ekaterin watched the time ooze by, black and slow as tar.
I must know.

And after you know, then what? Will you deal with it later, too?
She lay waiting for the dawn's light.

The light is broken, remember?

The routine of dealing with Nikolai's needs steadied her in the morning. Uncle Vorthys left very early, to catch his orbital flight.

"Will you be coming back down?" she asked him a little wanly, helping him on with his jacket in the vestibule.

"I hope I might, but I can't promise. This investigation has already gone on longer than I expected, and has taken some peculiar turns. I really have no idea how long it will take to finish up." He hesitated. "If it drags on beyond the end of the term at the District University, perhaps the Professora might come out to join me for a time. Would you like that?"

Not trusting herself to speak, she nodded.

"Good. Good." He seemed about to say more, but then just shrugged and smiled, and hugged her good-bye.

She managed to evade almost all contact with Tien and Vorkosigan by accompanying Nikki to school in the bubble-car, an escort he scorned, and taking the long route home. As she had hoped, the apartment was empty on her return.

She washed down more painkillers with more coffee, then, with reluctant steps, entered Tien's office and sat before his comconsole.
I wish I'd taken Lord Vorkosigan up on his offer to teach me how to do this.
Her outrage at the mutie lord yesterday in the bubble-car now seemed to her all out of proportion. Misplaced. How much could her intimate knowledge of Tien make up for her lack of training in this sort of snooping? Not enough, she suspected, but she had to try.

Get started. You are deliberately delaying.

No. I am desperately delaying
.

She keyed on the comconsole.

Tien's financial accounts, on this his personal machine, were not locked under a code seal. Income matched his salary; outgo . . . when all the routine outgo was accounted for, the amount left over should have been a modest respectable savings. Tien did not indulge himself with unshared luxuries. But the account was almost empty. Several thousand marks had disappeared without trace, including the transfer she had made to him yesterday morning. No, wait—that transfer was still on the list, hastily entered, not erased or hidden yet. And it was a transfer, not an expenditure, to a file that had appeared nowhere else.

She followed its transfer marker to a hidden account. The comconsole produced a palm-lock form above the vid-plate.

When she and Tien had first set up their accounts on Komarr, less than a year ago, they had taken prudent thought for one or the other parent being temporarily disabled; each had emergency access to the other's accounts. Had Tien set this up entirely separately, or as a daughter-cell of his larger financial program, letting the machine do the work for him?
Maybe ImpSec covert ops doesn't have all the advantages
, she thought grimly, and placed her right hand in the light box. If only you were willing to betray a trust, why, the most amazing range of possible actions opened up to you.

So did the file.

She took a deep breath, and started reading.

By far the largest portion of what was under the seal turned out to be a huge research clip-file much like her own on the subject of Vorzohn's Dystrophy. But Tien's new obsession, it appeared, was Komarran trade fleets.

Komarr's economy was founded, of course, on its wormholes, and providing services to the trade ships of other worlds that passed through them. But once you had amassed all those profits, how to reinvest them? There were, after all, a physically limited number of wormholes in Komarr local space. So Komarr had gone on to develop its own trade fleets, going out into the wormhole nexus on long complicated circuits of months or even years, and returning, sometimes, with fabulous profits.

And sometimes not. Stories of all the best, most legendary returns were highlighted in Tien's files. The failures, admittedly fewer in number, were brushed aside. Tien was nothing if not an optimist, always. Every day was going to bring him his lucky break, the shot that would take him directly to the top with no intervening steps. As if he really believed that was how it was done.

Some of the fleets were closely held to the famous family corporations, Komarr's oligarchy, such as the Toscanes; others sold shares on the public market to any Komarran who cared to place his bet. Almost every Komarran did, at least in a small way; she'd heard one Barrayaran bureaucrat joke that it replaced the need for most other sorts of gambling in the Komarran state.

And when on Komarr, do as the Komarrans do?
With dread in her heart, she switched to the financial portion of the file.

Where in God's name did Tien get a hundred thousand marks to buy fleet shares?
His salary was barely five thousand marks a month. And then—having done so—why had he put all hundred thousand on the
same
fleet?

She turned her attention to the first question, which was at least potentially answerable with reference to facts of record, without requiring psychological theory. It took her some time to break the credit stream apart into its various sources. The partial answer was, he'd borrowed sixty thousand marks on short term at a disturbingly high interest rate, secured with his pension fund and forty thousand marks worth of fleet shares he'd bought with—what? With money that came from nowhere, apparently.

From Soudha?
Was that what he had meant by a
ghost employee
?