By Name

An adventure of Elena Bothari-Jesek

I. The Contract

The joint communiqué of two governments that had fought each other sixty years earlier arrived at the office of “Jesek Line — Transport and Salvage Operations” on Escobar Orbital Station with two seals, one courier, and a history that had begun long before its addressee was born.

A survey ship of the Pediatrics program, mapping the side branches of the old war corridor, had found, in a distant orbit around a brown dwarf half a light-hour off the former route of the retreat, a dead ship. The Barrayaran troop transport Vortalon, lost during the Escobaran debacle with two hundred and twelve souls aboard — one hundred and ninety-eight Barrayarans and, per the manifest from her last port, fourteen Escobaran prisoners of war being carried to the collection camp. Sixty years on the lists of the missing. Sixty years of two hundred and twelve families on two worlds without a grave to visit.

Both governments wanted their dead home. Both governments did not want — this was not written in the communiqué, but it could be read between the seals — foreign warships in the disputed historical corridor, foreign hands on their dead, and foreign journalists around any of it. They needed a contractor: civilian, experienced, of impeccable reputation in deep salvage, acceptable to both capitals.

“Read the last paragraph,” said Baz Jesek, handing the tablet to his wife across a desk heaped with drive specifications. Thirty-five years of marriage had taught him when to deliver bad news in person. “Aloud, if you can.”

“‘The commission notes that the candidacy of the Jesek Line enjoys the exceptional support of both parties,’” read Elena Bothari-Jesek, “‘in view of the company’s professional record, and in view of the circumstance that its managing director was born of citizens of both belligerent parties and enjoys the confidence—’” She set the tablet down. Her hands were perfectly steady; she had paid for that steadiness for forty years. “Born of citizens of both belligerent parties. What a formulation. Six words, and in them my entire biography, ironed flat for the protocol.”

Baz said nothing. He waited, as only he knew how to wait.

“My father was in that war,” said Elena. “A ranker in the ground assault. You know what he did there; we both know it, I told you before the wedding, because you had the right to know what family you were marrying into. My mother was an Escobaran military technician. Their meeting was not a meeting. I am… I am the accounting remainder of the ugliest page of that war, Baz. And now two governments ask me — me, by name — to go and collect their dead for them.” She laughed, briefly and without mirth. “Do you know the most terrible part? That they are right. There is no more suitable person in the Nexus. And no less suitable one. It is the same face.”

“Will you refuse?”

Elena Bothari-Jesek, former captain of the Dendarii Free Mercenary Fleet, a woman who had left war behind thirty years ago by a decision she had not once reviewed, looked out the viewport at Escobar — her mother’s planet, beautiful and blue, on which she had never learned to feel at home, any more than on her father’s.

“No,” she said. “And I’m taking Cordelia. It is time my daughter saw where the family grows from. All of it. Uncut.”

II. The Vortalon

The Vortalon hung in the dark beside the brown dwarf like a drowned man in deep water — two hundred and forty meters of military transport from another era, dark, cold, her hull scored by sixty years of micrometeorites, and with a breach in engineering that told the whole story in one wound: an emergency jump during the retreat, a Necklin rod failure midway, emergence into nowhere, half a light-hour off the route, with no drives, no comms, and no hope that anyone would search for one transport in the panic of a routed armada.

The Jesek Line salvage ship took up parallel orbit and for three days only scanned, mapped, and kept silence — per the protocol Elena had written personally: one does not enter a dead ship until one has learned its story from the outside.

“Pressure zero in engineering and the stern sections,” reported Second Officer Cordelia Jesek, twenty-six, with her father’s engineer hands and her mother’s eyes, which at the moment were very focused and very quiet. “But the forward third held, Mother… Captain. The habitation decks, sickbay, the bridge. Airtight to this day. If the crew withdrew forward at the accident—”

“They withdrew,” said Elena. She was studying the thermal map: zero everywhere, sixty years of zero. “The question that will tell us everything about this ship is a different one. The transport carried fourteen prisoners, Cordelia. In the stern detention block. Which is decompressed.” A pause. “Check the hatches between the stern and the bow. Open or locked?”

Cordelia checked. She looked up from the console, and in her eyes was the beginning of an understanding her mother both wanted and did not want to be right about.

“Open. All of them. Unlocked with the captain’s code, fourteen minutes after the accident.”

“So someone on that bridge,” said Elena Bothari-Jesek slowly, “in the first quarter hour of his own death, went down or sent a man through five decks of chaos to unlock the cells of his enemies.” She straightened. “Suit up. This ship deserves to be read from cover to cover.”

III. The Scavengers

Before the covers, however, came the vultures.

The Jacksonian salvage vessel Kosser appeared on the twelfth day, with documents for a “priority find” dated — falsely, but carefully — before the official discovery, and with a captain whose smile Elena classified from the first sentence: a broker, not a bruiser, come to sell, not to fight.

“Madam Captain.” The voice on the link was oily as bilge water. “It appears we have overlapping claims. But House Sarlo is a reasonable house. The find is yours, the story is yours; we are merely… first visitors. We took a small souvenir from the stern sections before you arrived — clean salvage practice, nothing personal. Two hundred and twelve identification tags, madam. The personal markers of the crew and passengers. You can imagine what they’re worth — not on the market; there is no market for such things. To the two commissions. To the families. To you. Shall we discuss a price?”

On the bridge of the salvage ship it became very quiet. Cordelia Jesek looked at her mother — and saw for the first time in her life the thing about which the old Dendarii, guests at the house over the years, had lowered their voices: Captain Bothari-Jesek in working mode. Nothing changed in her face. What changed was the temperature of the room.

“Captain of the Kosser,” said Elena. “We will discuss a price. But first I will read you three facts, slowly, for the record, which I have been making since this conversation began. Fact one: you are holding remains and personal markers from a war grave under the joint jurisdiction of two governments — under the Tau Verde convention that is a felony on eleven worlds, including three where House Sarlo holds assets. Fact two: I am a former captain of the Dendarii Free Mercenary Fleet; I served with Admiral Quinn and Admiral Naismith, and with one message I can arrange for the name Kosser to be read aloud in every port where House Sarlo ever wants to refuel. Fact three — and listen to this one carefully, because it is the only one offering an exit: my commission has voted me a fund for ‘unforeseen operational expenses.’ I can spend it on lawyers who will disassemble you over two years. Or I can spend it on a ‘consulting fee for assistance with a localized find’ — today, against the tags, to the last one, with an inventory. The choice is yours. You have ten minutes; on the eleventh I begin with fact two.”

The tags arrived on the eighth minute, in a sealed container, with an inventory.

“Mother,” said Cordelia afterward, when the Kosser was already a dot at the edge of range, “were you bluffing at all?”

“I don’t know,” said Elena honestly. “That is the strength of a good bluff, daughter: that you don’t know either. Your grandfather on my side—” she paused; the word came out more easily than she had expected, “—your grandfather was the most frightening man I have ever known. From him I learned one thing: the frightening part is not what you do. The frightening part is what the other man believes you would do. I have spent my whole life taking care to use that lesson only on the side he never stood on. Come. Two hundred and twelve people are waiting for us, by name.”

IV. The Log

The ship’s log of the Vortalon survived in the bridge capsule, and when the technicians revived it — sixty-year-old military electronics, built, in Baz’s words, “by people who believed everything must outlive everyone” — Elena read it alone, first, through one night, because there are things a captain owes a captain.

The final entries of Captain-Lieutenant Voren Malk, thirty-one years old, commander of the troop transport Vortalon, covered eleven days. The accident. The diagnosis — final by the second day: no rods, no comms, off all routes. The inventory: air and water for seventy days under full discipline, food for less. And then — the decisions, day by day, in the hand of a man who knows he is writing for the archive of a death: the withdrawal of everyone to the forward third; the rationing; and on the fourth day, entered without explanation, fact only: “14:11. Unlocked the detention block. Ordered the prisoners moved forward, on common rations and common duties. Grounds: paragraph I don’t remember which. Real grounds: there are no longer two armies here. There is one crew.”

The following entries Elena read with cold hands. The Escobaran prisoners — nine surviving of the fourteen after the accident — had worked alongside the Barrayaran crew: a life-support technician who held the recyclers together for two extra weeks; a military physician, Dr. Ines Mora, who ran the sickbay to the end and was entered by Malk with the words “I take my hat off to her; if we live, I am putting her in for a decoration, if anyone exists to give it.” The attempt to rebuild the emergency transmitter. The failure. And the final pages, in an even hand to the last line: “Day 68. The air is ending on schedule. I have ordered the last ampoules of somnolent distributed to those who wish them — Dr. Mora insisted they be kept for the youngest; I lost the argument; she is a harder officer than I am. The crew is holding. The two flags in the mess have stood side by side since day 40 — I don’t remember who hung them that way, and I am glad I don’t remember, because it means it was natural. To whoever finds this log: it was not victors and vanquished who died here. It was one crew that died here, two hundred and twelve souls, by name — the list is appended, verified by me and by Dr. Mora, every name under two signatures. Bury them as you see fit, but read them together. That is how they ended. Capt.-Lt. V. Malk, commanding.”

In the morning Elena assembled both crews — her own and, by holo-link, the sensor team returned from the dwarf — and read them the last page aloud, to the end, without her voice breaking, because she had paid for that for forty years and it finally served a purpose.

“We work to Malk’s list,” she said then. “Two hundred and twelve people, every name under two signatures, Barrayaran and Escobaran. We will bring them out, identify them, and return them — together, as they ended. I expect no objections. Questions?”

There were no questions. There was work — forty days of quiet, careful, heavy work, the kind that is not shown on the news channels, and which the two crews of the Jesek Line performed in such a way that when the last sealed capsule was laid in the hold, the senior officer of the Barrayaran observer group — a colonel of years, silent through the whole operation — requested permission to shake the hand of every member of the salvage team. By name.

V. The Two Elenas

The ceremony on Escobar took place in the memorial park above the capital, under the two flags — hung, at the express insistence of the managing director of the Jesek Line, accepted by both commissions after a short silence, side by side, as in the mess of the Vortalon from day forty.

Elena Visconti came to the ceremony alone. Eighty-eight years old, spare, upright, with the eyes Elena remembered from a single meeting thirty-five years before — a meeting that had ended with a sentence her daughter had carried ever since like a piece of shrapnel too near the heart to be extracted: every time I look at you, I see him.

Now the old woman stood before the wall with the two hundred and twelve names, looking at one of them: Dr. Ines Mora. Elena took her place beside her, one pace off, without speaking first. That, too, she had learned from the trade: one does not step first into a minefield.

“We served together,” said Visconti at last, without turning. “Ines and I. One intake, one war. She was taken prisoner in the assault; she was carried as missing from then on. Sixty years.” A pause. “You brought her out. You brought them all out.”

“My crew did. I only commanded.”

“Commanding is that.” The old woman was silent a while. Then, still to the wall: “I read the log. They published it yesterday, all of it. The Barrayaran captain who unlocks the cells. Ines, returning the somnolent for the young ones.” Her voice, dry as paper, moved for the first time. “For sixty years I hated that war with everything in it. It turns out there was also this in it. I did not know. I did not want to know — it is easier when everything is one color.” She turned at last. She looked at her daughter — long, openly, for the first time in both their lives without barriers. “How old are you now?”

“Sixty.”

“Sixty.” Visconti nodded slowly. “Older than he ever lived to be.” She did not say the name; she never said it. But she went on, and every word cost her visibly, and she paid them all: “I said a cruel thing to you once. True — and cruel; the two do not exclude each other, unfortunately. I will not take it back — I don’t know how; I am old. I will say only what I have been looking at for an hour: you brought out of the dark two hundred and twelve people from both sides of the ugliest war of my life, and returned them to their families together, under two flags. Whatever I see when I look at you, girl — it is the lesser thing. The greater thing is this.” She held out her hand — dry, old, firm. “Elena Visconti.”

“Elena Bothari-Jesek,” said her daughter, and took the hand. The two Elenas stood so for one long moment, under the two flags, before the two hundred and twelve names.

“Bothari-Jesek,” the old woman repeated. And, with an effort that was an entire disarmament: “You carry it. The name.”

“I carry it,” said Elena. “He was a monster, Mother. And he guarded me with his life, every day, until he died. Both are true at once. It took me forty years to be able to say that in one sentence — and twenty more to understand that the sentence is not about him. It is about me. I am alive because, in a war made only of ugliness, two ugly fates crossed — and out of the crossing, by no one’s merit, came me. I owe that war nothing. But I owe myself not to carry it in one color. Today—” she looked at the wall, “—today I finished paying.”

“Grandmother?” said a voice behind them, young and careful. Cordelia Jesek, in the dress uniform of the Jesek Line, stood two paces off with the expression of a person who has rehearsed one word all morning and is still surprised to have pronounced it.

Elena Visconti looked at her granddaughter — twenty-six years old, with her father’s hands, her mother’s eyes, and nothing, absolutely nothing, of that other one — and something in the old face gave way, quietly and finally, like ice in spring.

“Come,” she said. “Come, child. Tell me about the ship. Tell me everything. We have…” she calculated, with Escobaran precision, “…we have sixty years to make up, and by my reckoning no more than ten at our disposal. We shall have to talk fast.”

VI. The Letter

The letter from Barrayar arrived a week later, through the usual channels of Vorkosigan House, in a hand Elena would have known at any distance.

Elena. I watched the ceremony on the relay recording — all of it, twice. Then I read Malk’s log, also twice, and both times I stopped at the same place: “there are no longer two armies here; there is one crew.” I want to tell you something I have owed you for many years, and since in person we never manage it, it will be in writing.

You left the fleet thirty years ago, and I — forgive me — did not fully understand at the time. I saw the captain I was losing and did not see the woman saving her life from a war that had begun for her before her birth. Today I look at what you have built: a line that brings the dead out of the dark and returns them by name; a daughter who calls you “Captain” with pride; and a bridge between the two halves of your biography, built with your own hands, with no one’s help — least of all mine. And I understand, three decades late: you did not desert our war, Elena. You were the only one of us who finished it. The rest of us are still turning over its accounts.

Your father — I know we say that name rarely and carefully — once saved my life at the price of everything he had. Today his daughter has brought two hundred and twelve people home. I do not know what redemption is, or whether it exists; my mother says that in its place there is only work done in the right direction. If she is right — and she is always right; it is our family curse — then no one in this story has done more right work than you.

Come visit us. Ekaterin asks after you, the children know the legends, and I am growing old and sentimental, which Ivan calls “your most terrifying phase yet.” Your brother in everything but blood — Miles.

Elena read the letter twice, then folded it and put it away in her desk drawer — with the picture of Baz from the wedding, with Cordelia’s first pilot certificate, and with one very old, very faded holo of a big ugly man in the livery of House Vorkosigan, who in the picture stood at attention and looked aside, because he did not like lenses.

“We’ll go,” she said to the drawer. “In the spring. The whole crew.”

VII. By Name

After the Vortalon operation, the Jesek Line received eleven more inquiries about the recovery of ships missing from old wars — from four governments and seven family foundations — and Elena accepted six of them, establishing for the purpose a separate division with a charter of one paragraph: “The company locates and returns lost crews regardless of flag, party, or lapse of time. Remains are delivered together; the lists are read together. Indivisible.”

Cordelia Jesek proposed that the division be named “Malk and Mora,” and the proposal passed unanimously.

And in the managing director’s office, on the wall facing the desk — so that she would see it every day, at every decision — there hung, framed, not the contract with the two commissions, not the letters of thanks of two governments, and not the press cuttings from eleven worlds. There hung a photocopy of one page of a ship’s log, in the even hand of a young dead captain, with the sentence Elena Bothari-Jesek — daughter of both sides of one war, captain retired, mother, director, and a woman who had at last finished all her accounts — had chosen for the motto of the remainder of her life:

Bury them as you see fit, but read them together. That is how they ended.