Miles in Love - Lois McMaster Bujold [156]
Soudha's face was drawn and sincerely weary, no more the bland bluff liar. Lena Foscol sat tensely to the right of his station chair on a rolling stool, looking like some frumpy vizier. Madame Radovas too looked on, her face half-shadowed behind him, and Cappell stood off to the side, almost out of focus. Good. A Komarran stockholders' voting quorum, if he read the signs right. At least they honored his Imperial Auditor's authority to that extent.
"Good evening, Dr. Soudha," Miles began.
"You're out here?" Soudha's brows rose as he took in the lack of transmission lag.
"Yes, well, unlike Administrator Vorsoisson, I got out of my chains at the experiment station alive. I still don't know if you intended me to survive."
"He didn't really die, did he?" Foscol interrupted.
"Oh, yes." Miles made his voice deliberately soft. "I got to watch, just as you arranged. Every filthy minute of it. It was a remarkably ugly death."
She fell silent; Soudha said, "This is all beside the point now. The only message we want to receive from you people is that you have the jumpship ready to transport us to the nearest neutral space—Pol, or Escobar—whereupon you will get your Vor ladies back. If it's not that, I'm cutting this com."
"I have a few pieces of free information for you, first," said Miles. "I don't think they're ones you anticipate."
Soudha's hand hovered. "Go on."
"I'm afraid your wormhole-collapser no longer qualifies as a secret weapon. We caught up with your specs on file at Bollen Design. Professor Vorthys invited Dr. Riva, of Solstice University, in to consult. Are you aware of her reputation?"
Soudha nodded warily; Cappell's eyes widened. Madame Radovas stared wearily. Foscol looked deeply suspicious.
"Well, putting together your specs, the data from the soletta accident, and Riva's physics—there was a mathematician by the name of Dr. Youell in there too, if the name means anything to you—the Empire's top failure analyst and the Empire's top five-space expert have concluded that you did not, in fact, manage to invent a wormhole-collapser. What you managed to invent was a wormhole-boomerang. Riva says that when the five-space waves amplified the wormhole's resonance past its phase boundaries, instead of collapsing, the wormhole returned the energy to three-space in the form of a gravitational pulse. Tangling with this pulse was what destroyed the soletta array and the ore ship, and—I'm sorry, Madame Radovas—killed Dr. Radovas and Marie Trogir. The probable-cause crew finally found her body a few hours ago, I regret to report, wrapped up in some of the wreckage they'd retrieved almost a week back."
Only a puff of breath from Cappell marked his grief, but water glittered in his eyes. Check, thought Miles. I thought he'd protested too much. Nobody looked surprised, merely oppressed.
"So if you succeed in getting your thing working, what you will actually do is destroy this station, the five thousand or so people aboard, and yourselves. And tomorrow morning, Barrayar will still be there." Miles let his voice fall to a near whisper. "All for nothing, and less than nothing."
"He lies," said Foscol fiercely into the shocked silence. "He lies."
Soudha gave a weird snort, ran his hands through his hair, and shook his head. Then, to Miles's dismay, he laughed out loud.
Cappell stared at his colleague. "Do you really think that's why? That it malfunctioned like that?"
"It would explain," began Soudha. "It would explain . . . oh, God." He trailed off. "I thought it was the ore ship," he said at last. "Interfering somehow."
"I