Chaos Colony

Cordelia's sitting at a table not too far from the bar, catching up on correspondence with a handheld reader, a mug of cinnamon-laced coffee and a half-eaten vat-chicken sandwich at her elbow. She's wearing ship knits rather than a Vor gown, a loose shirt and trousers in soft beige with warm brown accents, and flat slippers that match the trim.

Entirely botherable.

The note reads:

Lt. Gaeta -- these have been spreading around the bar a lot lately, and I thought you might find one useful. I've enclosed a copy of the instructions.

Look me up once you're on the network. My handle is incisiveMatriarch.

[illegible scrawl]
Cordelia Naismith Vorkosigan

There's a brief, blurred impression of the stone statue's hand and the curve of its wing, too close, much too close --

-- and everything whirls and ( turns inside out... )

She hasn't been avoiding Milliways, exactly. Really she hasn't.

But with Aral's injury last month, she's been busier than usual. She's been handling her own work, along with as much of Aral's work as he'll let her do. Over half; and the fact that he hasn't fought harder to do more of it is truly frightening, if she lets herself think about it too long).

The call on her personal commconsole takes her by surprise.

Count Aral Vorkosigan, Viceroy of Sergyar, scanned the flimsy the aide handed him and set down his coffee mug with a deep and profound sigh of relief.

Across the breakfast table from him, curled into an armchair and nibbling at a spiced bread roll, Cordelia raised her eyebrows. "Are we well?"

"We seem to be. No reports of any cases of the disease making it off-planet."

"And the cure?"

"Eighty-nine point two seven percent success rate. So far no relapses."

Cordelia let out a long breath. "Good."

He leaned foward, and searched her eyes. "Are you well?"

She looked at her hands, pressed thumbs and forefingers together, and considered the question. "No."

"Cordelia, this was not your fault."

She raised an eyebrow at him. "It's hard to see how it could have been more my fault, Aral."

He shook his head. "Guilt doesn't become you."

"I'm not sure guilt is the right word. Consciousness of sin, perhaps."

"Sin, or error?" he countered immediately.

She considered that. "The two ... aren't mutually exclusive. An error in judgment, rather than an error against judgment. But a culpable error nonetheless. The fact is, my love, that I have been criminally stupid, and people have died for it."

His blunt-fingered hands flattened and tensed on the table, as though to push himself to his feet. "And you don't consider your actions in ending the plague a mitigating factor?"

"You know better than that." With a tiny sigh, she dropped her gaze to the half-eaten roll in her hands, plucked fretfully at a scrap of crust. "This could have been prevented entirely if I had taken even the most elementary precautions. The sort I would have taken on any new planetary survey as a matter of course. In retrospect I'm astonished this hasn't happened sooner, or more often."

"Dear Captain...." Aral hesitated, and when he spoke his tone was studiedly neutral. "Will you go back?"

She watched her fingers shredding the crust of her roll, making a careful heap of fragments on the plate balanced in her lap. "I don't know."

"It's not like you to abandon a puzzle unsolved."

"This is not like other puzzles. I'm beginning to feel that it doesn't want to be solved."

Aral raised his eyebrows. "It's very unlike you to anthropomorphize."

Cordelia gave him a wry look, and opened her mouth to respond. And then closed it as the aide stepped back into the room, looking at her with an odd blend of apology and curiosity.

"My lady Vicereine? There's a Will Stanton here asking to see you."

Aral's head snapped around. Cordelia came up straight in her chair with a jerk.

"Show him in. At once."