Komarr local space was unusually rich in active jump points, a fact of strategic and historic consequence; one of the jumps was Barrayar’s only gateway to the wormhole nexus. It was for control of the jump points, not for possession of the chilly planet, that Barrayar’s invasion fleet had poured through here thirty-five years ago. As long as the Imperium’s military held that high ground, its interest in Komarr’s downside population and their problems was, at best, mild.

This jump point, however, supported neither traffic nor trade nor strategic threat. Explorations through it had dead-ended either in deep interstellar space, or close to stars that did not support either habitable planets or economically recoverable system resources. Nobody jumped out through there; nobody should have jumped in through there. The immediate vision of some unmotivated pirate-villain popping out of the worm-hole, potting the innocent ore freighter-by some weapon that left no traces, mind you-and popping back in again was currently unsupported by any evidence whatsoever, though the area had been scoured for it. It was the news media’s current favorite scenario. But none of the five-space trails generated by ships taking wormhole jumps had been detected, either.

The five-space anomaly of the jump point was not even observable by ordinary means from three-space; it should not, just sitting there, have affected the freighter in any way even if the ship had passed directly across its central vortex. The freighter was a dedicated inner-system ship, and lacked Necklin rods and jump capacity. Still… the jump point was there. Nothing else was.

Miles rubbed his neck and turned to the new autopsy report. Gruesome, as always. The pilot had been a Komarran woman in her mid-fifties. Call it Barrayaran sexism, but female corpses always bothered Miles more. Death was such a malicious destroyer of dignity. Had he looked that disordered and exposed when he’d gone down to the sniper’s fire? The pilot’s body showed the usual progression: smashed, decompressed, irradiated, and frozen, all quite typical of deep-space impact accidents.