"No permanent harm done, then."
"Except to my reputation. Your Colonel Vorreedi just blew in, I thought you might like to know. At least he took me seriously. We had a long talk just now about Lord Yenaro. Vorreedi didn't strike me as a booted paranoid, by the way." Ivan let the implication, So hadn't you better go see him?, hang in the air; Miles left it there.
"Good. I think. You didn't mention, ah—?"
"Not yet. But if you don't cough up some explanations, I'm going back to him for another pass."
"Fair enough." Miles sighed, and steeled himself. As briefly as the complications permitted, he summed up his conversation with the haut Rian Degtiar for Ivan, leaving out only a description of her incredible beauty, and his own stunned response to it. That was not Ivan's business. That especially was not Ivan's business.
"... so it seems to me," Miles ran down at last, "that the only way we can certainly prove that Barrayar had nothing to do with it is to find which satrap governor has the real Great Key." He pointed orbit-ward.
Ivan's eyes were round, his mouth screwed up in an expression of total dismay. "We? We? Miles, we've only been here for two and a half days, how did we get put in charge of the Cetagandan Empire? Isn't this Cetagandan security's job?"
"Would you trust them to clear us of blame?" Miles shrugged, and forged on into Ivan's hesitation. "We only have nine days left. I've thought of three strings that could maybe lead us back to the right man. Yenaro is one of them. A few more words in our protocol officer's ear could put the machinery of ImpSec here into tracing Yenaro's connections, without bringing up the matter of the Great Key. Yet. The next string is Ba Lura's murder, and I haven't figured out how I can pull that one. Yet. The other string lies in astro-political analysis, and that I can do. Look." On the comconsole, Miles called up a schematic three-dimensional map of the Cetagandan empire, its wormhole routes, and its immediate neighbors.
"The Ba Lura could have foisted that decoy key onto any number of outlander delegations. Instead, it picked Barrayarans, or rather, its satrap-governor master did. Why?"
"Maybe we were the only ones there at the right time," Ivan suggested.
"Mm. I'm trying to reduce the random factors, please. If Yenaro's backer is the same as our man, we were picked in advance to be framed. Now." He waved at the map. "Picture a scenario where the Cetagandan empire breaks apart and the pieces begin an attempt to expand. Which, if any, benefit from trouble with Barrayar?"
Ivan's brows went up, and he leaned forward, staring at the glowing array of spheres and lines above the vid plate.
"Well . . . Rho Ceta is positioned to expand toward Komarr, or would be, if we weren't sitting on two thirds of the wormhole jumps between. Mu Ceta just got a bloody nose, administered by us, when it attempted to expand past Vervain into the Hegen Hub. Those are the two most obvious. These other three," Ivan pointed, "and Eta Ceta itself are all interior, I don't see any benefit to them."
"Then there's the other side of the nexus," Miles waved at the display. "Sigma Ceta, bordering the Vega Station groups. And Xi Ceta, giving onto Marilac. If they were seeking to break out, it might be expedient for them to have the empire's military resources tied up far away against Barrayar."
"Four out of eight. It's a start," Ivan conceded.
Ivan's analysis matched his own, then. Well, they'd both had the same strategic training, it stood to reason. Still Miles was obscurely comforted. It wasn't all the hallucination of his own over-driven imagination, if Ivan could see it too.
"It's a triangulation," said Miles. "If I can get any of the other lines of investigation to eliminate even part of the list, the final overlap ought to ... well, it would be nice if it all came down to one."
"And then what?" Ivan demanded doggedly, his brows drawn down in suspicion. "What do you have in mind for us to do then?"
"I'm . . . not sure. But I do think you'd agree that a quiet conclusion to this mess would be preferable to a splashy one, eh?"
"Oh, yeah." Ivan chewed on his lower lip, eyeing the wormhole nexus map. "So when do we report?"
"Not . . . yet. But I think we'd better start documenting it all. Personal logs." So that anybody who came after them—Miles trusted not posthumously, but that was the unspoken thought—would at least have a chance of unraveling the events.
"I've been doing that since the first day," Ivan informed him grimly. "It's locked in my valise."
"Oh. Good." Miles hesitated. "When you talked to Colonel Vorreedi, did you plant the idea that Yenaro had a high-placed backer?"
"Not exactly."
"I'd like you to talk to him again, then. Try to direct his attention toward the satrap governors, somehow."
"Why don't you talk to him?"
"I'm . . . not ready. Not yet, not tonight. I'm still assimilating it all. And technically, he is my ImpSec superior here, or would be, if I were on active duty. I'd like to limit my, um ..."
"Outright lies to him?" Ivan completed sweetly.
Miles grimaced, but did not deny it. "Look, I have an access in this matter that no other ImpSec officer could, due to my social position. I don't want to see the opportunity wasted. But it also limits me—I can't get at the routine legwork, the down-and-dirty details I need, I'm too conspicuous. I have to play to my own strengths, and get others to play to my weaknesses."
Ivan sighed. "All right. I'll talk to him. Just this once." With a tired grunt, he heaved himself out of his chair, and wandered toward the door. He looked back over his shoulder. "The trouble, coz, with your playing the spider in the center of this web, pulling all the strings, is that sooner or later all the interested parties are going to converge back along those strings to you. You do realize that, don't you? And what are you going to do then, O Mastermind?" He bowed himself out with all-too-effective irony.
Miles hunched down in his station chair, and groaned, and keyed up his list again.
The next morning, Ambassador Vorob'yev was called away from what was becoming his customary breakfast with Barrayar's young envoys in his private dining room. By the time he returned, Miles and Ivan had finished eating.
The ambassador did not sit down again, but instead favored Miles with a bemused look. "Lord Vorkosigan. You have an unusual visitor."
Miles's heart leapt. Rian, here? Impossible . . . His mind did a quick involuntary review of his undress greens, yes, his insignia were on straight, his fly was fastened—"Who, sir?"
"Ghem-colonel Dag Benin, of Cetagandan Imperial Security. He is an officer of middle rank assigned to internal affairs at the Celestial Garden, and he wants to speak privately with you."
Miles tried not to hyperventilate. What's gone wrong . . . ? Maybe nothing, yet. Calm down. "Did he say what about?"
"It seems he was ordered to investigate the suicide of that poor ba-slave the other day. And your, ah, erratic movements brought you to his negative attention. I thought you'd come to regret getting out of line."
"And . . . am I to talk to him, then?"
"We have decided to extend that courtesy, yes. We've shown him to one of the small parlors on the ground floor. It is, of course, monitored. You'll have an embassy bodyguard present. I don't suspect Benin of harboring any murderous intentions, it will merely be a reminder of your status."
We have decided. So Colonel Vorreedi, whom Miles still had not met, and probably Vorob'yev too, would be listening to every word. Oh, shit. "Very good, sir." Miles stood, and followed the ambassador. Ivan watched him go with the suffused expression of a man anticipating the imminent arrival of some unpleasant form of cosmic justice.