Miles in Love - Lois McMaster Bujold [146]
It was like having a gun with one bullet in it. You'd want to pick your target very carefully.
Suppose Soudha still imagined he possessed a wormhole-collapser, albeit one with a few bugs in the design. There were six active wormholes in Komarr local space, but Miles hadn't any doubt which one Soudha would go for.
The sole jump to Barrayar. Cut us off at one stroke, yeah. From a Komarran viewpoint that was a plot worth all of these five years of devotion, all the sweat and risk: closing Barrayar's only gate to the galactic wormhole nexus. A bloodless revolution, by God, sure to appeal to these tech types. They'd return Komarr to the good old days of its glory a century ago— and Barrayar to its bad old days, in a new Time of Isolation. Whether everyone, or indeed, anyone on either Komarr or Barrayar wanted to go there or not. Did the conspirators imagine they'd be permitted to live, once the truth was unraveled?
Probably not. But if Riva spoke straight, the process was not reversible; the wormhole, once collapsed, could not be reopened. The deed would be done, and no tears or prayers would undo it. Like an assassination. Soudha and his friends might imagine themselves as a new and more effective generation of Martyrs, content to be enshrined after death. They had seemed too practical, but who knew? One could be hypnotized by the hard choices in ways that had nothing to do with one's intelligence.
Yes. Miles now knew where the Komarrans were going, if they weren't there already. The civilian—or the military? No, the civilian transfer station which served the wormhole jump to Barrayar.
You just sent Ekaterin there. She's there now.
So was the Professora, and so were several thousand other innocent people, he reminded himself. He fought panic, to follow out his thread of thought to the end. Soudha might have a bolt-hole of some kind set up on the station, prepared perhaps months or years in advance. He would plan to set up his novel device, aim it at the wormhole, draw power from—where? If from the station, someone might notice. If they mounted it aboard a ship, (and it had to have been on some kind of ship to get out there), they could draw ship's power. But traffic control and the Barrayaran military were unlikely to tolerate any ship hanging around the wormhole without a filed flight plan, from which it had better not deviate.
Ship, or station? He had insufficient data to decide. But if Soudha had not seriously modified his device, the plot which began with a bloodless plan to collapse the wormhole could end in the bloody chaos of a major disaster to the transfer station. Miles had seen space disasters on various scales. He didn't want to ever see another.
Miles could imagine a dozen different scenarios from the data they had in hand, but only this one gave him no time or room to be wrong. Go. He reached for the secured comconsole and punched up ImpSec Komarr HQ at Solstice.
"This is Lord Auditor Vorkosigan. Give me General Rathjens, immediately. It's an emergency."
Vorthys looked up from the long table. "What?"
"I've just figured out that if there's any action coming up, it's got to be at the transfer station by the Barrayar jump."
"But Miles—surely Soudha would not be so foolish as to try again, after his initial disaster!"
"I don't trust Soudha in any way. Have you heard from Ekaterin or your wife?"
"Yes, Ekaterin messaged when you were out getting your, ah, supplies. She'd reached her hostel safely and was off to meet the Professora."
"Did she leave a number?'
"Yes, it's on the