Cold Cargo

An adventure of Lord Auditor Miles Vorkosigan

I.

At fifty, Miles Vorkosigan had discovered that his most fearsome adversary was not Cetaganda, not Jackson’s Whole, and not even the Barrayaran aristocracy. It was the staircase of Vorkosigan House — all eighty-six steps of it, personally counted, three times a day.

“Use the lift tube, m’lord,” said Armsman Roic, without looking up from the morning reports. Roic had gray hair now too, which Miles regarded as a personal insult.

“Lift tubes are for old men.”

“Yes, m’lord.”

Downstairs, in the dining room, Aral Alexander was waiting for him — standing, in a posture Miles recognized instantly: the stance of an eighteen-year-old who has rehearsed a speech in front of a mirror. His son was a meter eighty-five tall. Ekaterin’s genes, the uterine replicator, and the complete absence of soltoxin had accomplished what had taken Miles thirty surgeries and a lifetime of sheer stubbornness.

“Father. I’ve submitted my application to the Imperial Service Academy. The examinations are in a month.”

There it was. Miles sat down, slowly, and poured himself tea to buy three seconds. At seventeen I fell off the wall on the training course and broke both my legs in front of the examination board. Then I built an entire mercenary fleet just to prove them wrong. His son would not fall. His son would simply pass.

“The physical examination,” said Miles, “is Thursday morning. I’ll come and watch.”

“You don’t have to—”

“I’ll come and watch,” Miles repeated, and at that moment the comm on his wrist chimed with that particular tone which only one man on the planet had the right to use.

Emperor Gregor Vorbarra was fifty-five and looked, as always, like a man carrying an entire empire in his jacket pocket, and the pocket was wearing through.

“Miles. Sorry about the hour. We have a ship.”

“We all have ships, Gregor. You have the most.”

“This one went missing forty-nine years ago.”

Miles set down his cup.

II.

The ship was called the Zora — an ImpSec courier, a class two generations old, which had departed Barrayar’s orbital station at the height of Vordarian’s Pretendership and never arrived at Komarr. The official version: destroyed in the jump. The real version, as it turned out: a failed Necklin drive, an emergency exit into an unfrequented side branch of the route, and forty-nine years of drifting in the dark, until a Komarran survey vessel picked up a transponder broadcasting a code no living traffic controller remembered.

“Crew of seven,” Roic reported, as the jump ship carried them toward the rendezvous. “According to the archives — a courier mission under a classification that has never been lifted.”

“A classification from Vordarian’s day that nobody has lifted in fifty years.” Miles rubbed his chin. “Roic, do you know what that is?”

“Trouble, m’lord?”

“It’s archaeological trouble. The worst kind. Ordinary trouble shoots at you. Archaeological trouble waits patiently until you’re certain it’s all over.”

The Zora hung in the dark like a frozen fish — hull whitened by micrometeorite erosion, viewports dead. The Komarran salvage tug was already docked to her, along with a suspiciously gleaming vessel belonging to the “insurance assessor” from the syndicate that had acquired the salvage rights. Miles listened to the assessor — a smooth man named Ser Galvin — for a full four minutes before deciding he didn’t believe him. Not because of the words. Because of the boots. Magnetic, brand new, but with fresh sealant along the seams — the boots of a man who had already walked the hull of the Zora before arriving officially.

Inside it was minus one hundred and ten, and absolutely silent. Their lamp beams passed through crystals of frozen air. In the aft compartment they found the answer to the question Miles had not wanted to ask: five bodies, laid out with military precision, and two improvised cryochambers, welded into the backup power line with a desperate, brilliant carelessness.

“The engineer sacrificed five lives to keep two chambers running,” Miles said quietly. “Or the five voted. One chamber failed… decades ago, judging by the readouts. The other…”

The other was blinking. Green.

The man inside was twenty-two years old. He had been twenty-two years old for forty-nine years. Lieutenant Danilo Vorlev, ImpSec courier, with a case shackled to his wrist — and inside, on a sheet of real paper, because in those days no one trusted compromised computers: a list. Names of counts and officers who had pledged support to Vordarian, gathered by an agent inside the palace itself. Names, half of which now adorned monuments, ministerial offices, and one currently occupied count’s residence.

“M’lord,” said Roic very calmly, reading over his shoulder. “The third name.”

“I see it, Roic.”

The grandfather of the man currently financing the salvage operation. The grandfather of the employer of Ser Galvin with the new boots.

“M’lord — the charge!” Roic was already moving.

Galvin was fast, for a civilian. Roic was faster than his bulk promised. Their collision in zero gravity looked like a fight between two pieces of furniture, but it ended the only way it could have — with Galvin pinned to a bulkhead, and a small thermal charge detached from the cryosystem with one minute and forty seconds to spare, which by Miles’s standards practically counted as a holiday.

Then, of course, came the seizure. Stress always collected its due. Miles came to on the deck of the tug, with the familiar taste in his mouth and Roic imperturbably returning the stimulator to its case.

“How much did I miss?”

“Nothing, m’lord. I waited for you before arresting anyone officially. I know how you hate missing that part.”

III.

The interrogation of Lieutenant Vorlev — after the waking, the doctors, the hysterics, and three cups of hot tea — was the saddest thing Miles had done in years.

“So… Vordarian is dead?” asked the young man with the fifty-year-old eyes.

“For forty-nine years. Beheaded. Long story — in which, as it happens, my mother features prominently.”

“And the Regent? Lord Vorkosigan?”

“Passed away. With full honors. I’m his son.” A pause. “Your list, Lieutenant, was delivered. Half a century late, but delivered. On Barrayar, that counts as on time.”

Miles wrote the Auditor’s ruling that same night, personally, without a secretary. The old count on the list had been dead for twenty years; his grandson had committed no treason — only an old, ugly fear of dishonor, which had turned into one demolition charge and one botched act of sabotage, for which he would answer under the perfectly ordinary criminal code. The list went to Gregor, sealed, with a recommendation: the truth — into the archive, quietly, all of it; the vengeance — none. Dead traitors could not be punished, and their living grandsons should not inherit guilt, just as Miles had inherited neither the stature nor the sins of his own era.

“Time,” he wrote in the conclusion, “is the only adversary that cannot be outflanked. But occasionally it can be outlived.”

To Lieutenant Vorlev, the Imperium owed forty-nine years of back pay, with interest. Miles personally saw to it that the account was honored to the last mark, and enjoyed the expression on the faces of ImpSec’s accounting department rather more than was seemly for a man wearing an Auditor’s chain.

IV.

On Thursday morning Miles stood beside Ekaterin at the edge of the Academy training course and watched his son take the wall — that wall — in two strides and one pull-up, without even breathing hard.

“He didn’t fall,” Ekaterin observed, and her fingers found his.

“No,” Miles agreed. “A disappointingly efficient generation. It took me two broken bones, five thousand mercenaries, and a stolen fleet to enter the Imperium’s service. He’ll manage it with one signature.”

“Do you regret it?”

Miles considered. Somewhere above Komarr, a twenty-two-year-old lieutenant was taking a crash course in fifty years of history and complaining that uniforms no longer had proper collars. Somewhere in Gregor’s archive, a list was sleeping its well-earned sleep. And here his son was already running toward the next obstacle without looking back — because he didn’t need to.

“No,” said Lord Auditor Miles Vorkosigan. “But next time, I’m taking the lift tube.”

An original work of fan fiction set in the Vorkosigan Saga universe created by Lois McMaster Bujold. Written by Claude, an AI made by Anthropic — with love for the canon, and with apologies to Count Vorkosigan about the staircase.