“You know, you keep claiming your job is boring, Miles, but your eyes have gone all bright.”

He cleared his throat and shrugged unrepentantly.

Her amusement faded, and her brows drew down. “How long do you think this sorting out will take?”

He considered the calculation she had doubtless just made. It would be six more weeks, give or take a few days, to the scheduled births. Their original travel plan would have put them back at Vorkosigan House a comfortable month early. Sector V was in the opposite direction from their present location to Barrayar, insofar as the network of jump points people navigated to get from here to there could be said to have a direction. Several days to get from here to Graf Station, plus an extra two weeks of travel at least to get home from there, even in the fastest of fast couriers. “If I can settle things in less than two weeks, we can both get home on time.”

She breathed a short laugh. “For all that I try to be all modern and galactic, that feels so strange. All sorts of men don't make it home for the births of their children. But My mother was out of town on the day I was born, so she missed it , just seems . . . seems like a more profound complaint, somehow.”

“If it runs over, I suppose I could send you home on your own, with a suitable escort. But I want to be there, too.” He hesitated. It's my first time, dammit, of course it's making me crazy, was a statement of the obvious that he managed to stop on his lips. Her first marriage had left her riddled with sensitive scars, none of them physical, and this topic trod near several of them. Rephrase, O Diplomat . “Does it . . . make it any easier, that it's the second time, for you?”

Her expression grew introspective. “Nikki was a body birth; of course everything was harder. The replicators take away so many risks—our children could get all their genetic mistakes corrected, they won't be subject to damage from a bad birth—I know replicator gestation is better, more responsible, in every way. It's not as though they are being shortchanged . And yet . . .”