The considerable remainder, along with a startling volume of souvenirs, would continue the journey back to Barrayar with most of their little entourage: Ekaterin's personal maid, Miss Pym, and, to Miles's greater regret, both of Roic's relief armsmen. It occurred to him belatedly, as he and Ekaterin fitted themselves into their new shared cabin, that he ought to have mentioned how cramped their quarters would be. He'd traveled on similar vessels so often during his own years in ImpSec, he took their limitations for granted—one of the few aspects of his former career where his undersized body had worked to his advantage.

So while he did spend the remainder of the day in bed with his wife after all, it was primarily due to the absence of other seating. They folded back the upper bunk for head space and sat up on opposite ends, Ekaterin to read quietly from a hand viewer, Miles to plunge into Gregor's promised Pandora's box of reports from the diplomatic front.

He wasn't five minutes into this study before he uttered a Ha!

Ekaterin indicated her willingness to be interrupted by looking up at him with a reciprocal Hm?

“I just figured out why Graf Station sounded familiar. We're headed for Quaddiespace, by God.”

“Quaddiespace? Is that someplace you've been before?”

“Not personally, no.” This was going to take more politic preparation than he'd anticipated. “Although I actually met a quaddie once. The quaddies are a race of bioengineered humans developed, oh, two or three hundred years ago. Before Barrayar was rediscovered. They were supposed to be permanent free fall dwellers. Whatever their creators' original plan for them was, it fell through when the new grav technologies came in, and they ended up as sort of economic refugees. After assorted travels and adventures, they finally settled as a group in what was at the time the far end of the wormhole Nexus. They were wary of other people by then, so they deliberately picked a system with no habitable planets, but with considerable asteroid and cometary resources.