Wait and I’ll fix it. Trust me. That’s what you said the last time. And the time before that, and the time before that… Who is betrayed? Tien, you’re running out of time, can’t you see it?

She turned for her kitchen, mentally revising her planned family dinner to include a Vor lord from the Imperial capital. White wine? Her limited experience of the breed suggested that if you could get them sufficiently sloshed, it wouldn’t matter what you fed them. She put another of her precious imported-from-home bottles in to chill. No… make that two more bottles.

She added another place to the table on the balcony off the kitchen that they routinely used for a dining room, sorry now she’d not engaged a servitor for the evening. But human servants on Komarr were so expensive. And she’d wanted this bubble of domestic privacy with Uncle Vorthys. Even the staid official newsvid reps were badgering everyone involved in the investigation; the arrival of not one but two Imperial Auditors on-site in Komarr orbit had not calmed the fever of speculation, but only redirected it. When she’d first spoken with him shortly after his arrival on-site, on a distance-delayed channel that defeated any attempt at long conversation, normally-patient Uncle Vorthys’s description of the public briefings into which he’d been roped had been notably irritated. He’d hinted he would be glad to escape them. Since his years of teaching must have inured him to stupid questions, Ekaterin wondered if the true source of his irritation was that he couldn’t answer them.

But mostly, she had to admit, she just wanted to recapture the flavor of a happier past, greedily for herself.