The Vorkosigan Companion - Lillian Stewart Carl [59]
To the remaining conspirators, working without the test's instrument readings, the accident looks like just a fluke of traffic. The full-size device might well work.
If it works as planned and the wormhole permanently collapses, Barrayar will be cut off from galactic civilization, since it has only one wormhole to the outside, the one through Komarr—a new Time of Isolation will begin that may last hundreds or thousands of years or longer.
A trivial side technology is a necklace with a small globe of Barrayar accurate down to the one-meter scale.
A Civil Campaign begins back on Barrayar. Two technologically inspired issues involving inheritance of countships are important to the story.
Count René Vorbretten just had an unpleasant encounter with technology when he and his countess went for gene analysis, preparatory to starting their first baby in a uterine replicator. The analysis showed that René's grandfather, the seventh count of the line, was not descended from the sixth count, but from a Cetagandan invader and the sixth count's wife.
A family branch with an untainted bloodline sued in the Council of Counts for the fraudulent inheritance to be voided and the countship to be passed to the senior male in their line.
In another case, Count Vorrutyer died suddenly and his sister, Lady Donna Vorrutyer, filed a motion of impediment with the Council of Counts to block the automatic inheritance of a hated cousin Richars. Then, Lady Donna disappeared on her way to Beta Colony. Speculation is rife on what she'll bring back, an unknown brother or a clone of her late brother, the count. The surprise comes when she returns as the brother of the late count, having had a Betan sex-change operation.
Beta Colony's technical supremacy means that the sex change from Lady Donna to Lord Dono is fully functional with cloned and force-grown parts. In particular, the testicles (the part necessary for inheritance) are her DNA with the Y chromosome taken from her late brother (incidentally made genetic-defect-free in the process).
Now, Lord Dono wants to inherit the district countship from "his" brother, claiming status as the closest "male" relative.
The final technological issue is the side story of Mark, who returns to Barrayar for the summer and the Emperor's wedding with eight thousand incredibly ugly bugs and their creator.
The bugs are simply the carriers of a "carefully-orchestrated array of symbiotic bacteria" which take the ingested food and produce "bug butter," the perfect food, completely nutritionally balanced. But the "butter bugs" are repulsive.
Because the bug's ugliness is a marketing problem, Ekaterin is hired to create a "glorious" bug. Once the bug's creator modifies the bugs' genetics to make them breed true in the new appearance, a lot of the sales resistance melts away.
Body modifications, a space habitat, and bioweapons are the starring technologies in Diplomatic Immunity, as the belated honeymoon of Miles and Ekaterin gets interrupted to solve a crisis in a remote corner of the wormhole nexus.
Four-armed, free-fall-adapted quaddies have made their home in a remote, planetless solar system. A Komarran trade fleet with Barrayaran military escort has become enmeshed with the quaddies when an officer disappears. Several liters of the officer's blood (confirmed by DNA analysis) are found on the deck in an empty ship loading bay.
Another character is a human-amphibian who survives an attack from a Cetagandan bioweapon.
A Cetagandan ba has "kidnapped" a thousand haut children, yet to be born and still in their uterine replicators. The ba is fleeing pursuit desperately and is willing to use the haut bioweapons on as many people as necessary to escape. The ba's main weapon is an engineered organism that reproduces in the blood of the victim and builds reservoirs of chemicals. When a critical mass is reached,