Miles in Love - Lois McMaster Bujold [64]
Miles met again with Tuomonen at lunchtime over mediocre cafeteria food in the executive dining room off the building's atrium; the displaced executives were forced to go elsewhere. They exchanged reports on their morning's conversations. Tuomonen hadn't found any breakthroughs either.
"No one expressed a dislike of Trogir, but she seems damned elusive," Tuomonen noted. "The Waste Heat department has a reputation for keeping itself to itself, apparently. The one woman in Waste Heat who was supposed to be her friend didn't have much to say. I wonder if I ought to get a female interrogator?"
"Mm, maybe. Though I thought Komarrans were supposed to be more egalitarian about such things. Maybe a Komarran female interrogator?" Miles sighed. "D'you know that according to the latest statistics, half of the Barrayaran women who take advanced schooling on Komarr don't go home again? There's a small group of alarmist bachelors who are trying to get the Emperor to deny them exit visas. Gregor has declined to hear their petition."
Tuomonen smiled slightly. "Well, there's more than one solution to that problem."
"Yes, how have your Komarran in-laws taken the announcement of the Emperor's betrothal to the Toscane heiress?"
"Some of them think it's romantic. Some of them think it's sharp business practice on Emperor Gregor's part. Coming from Komarrans, that's a warm compliment, by the way."
"Technically, Gregor owns the planet Sergyar. You might point that out to anyone who theorizes he's marrying Laisa for her money."
Tuomonen grinned. "Yes, but is Sergyar a liquid asset?"
"Only in the sense of Imperial funds gurgling down the drain, according to my father. But that's an entire other set of problems. And what do the Barrayaran expatriates around here think of the marriage?"
"In general, it's favored." Tuomonen smiled dryly into his coffee cup. "Five years ago, my colleagues thought I was cutting my career throat by my own marriage. I'd never get promoted out of Serifosa, they said. Now I am suspected of secret genius, and they've taken to regarding me with wary respect. I think . . . it's best if I be amused."
"Heh. You are a wise man, Captain." Miles finished off a starchy and gelid square of pasta-and-something, and chased it with the last of his cooling coffee. "So what did Trogir's friends think of Radovas?"
"Well, he's certainly managed to give a consistent impression of himself. Nice, conscientious guy, didn't make waves, kept to Waste Heat, his elopement a surprise to most. One woman thought it was your math fellow Cappell who was sweet on Trogir, not Radovas."
"He sounded more sour than sweet to me. Frustrated, perhaps?" Miles's back-brain sketched a nice, straightforward scenario of jealous murder, involving pushing Radovas out an airlock on a trajectory that only just by coincidence matched that of some soletta debris. You can wish. And anyway, it seemed more logical that any homicidal maniac wishing to clear a path to Trogir's side ought to have started with Andro Farr, and what the hell did any of this tragic romance have to do with an ore freighter swinging off course and smashing into the soletta array anyway? Unless the jealous maniac was Andro Farr . . . the Serifosa Dome police were supposed to be looking into that possibility.
Tuomonen grunted. "I will say, I got more of a sense of Trogir's personality from the few minutes I spent with Farr than I have from the rest of this crew all morning. I want to talk with him again, I think."
"I want to go topside, dammit. But whatever the end of the story is, up there, it certainly has to have begun here. Well . . . onward, I guess."
Soudha supplied Miles with more human sacrifices in the form of employees called back from the experiment