“Automated hot riveter,” said Bel after a moment. “He must have disconnected . . . quite a few safety devices, to make it do that.”

A slight understatement, Miles felt. But it did explain their assailant's uncertain aim. The device had been designed to throw its slugs with vast precision a matter of millimeters, not meters. Still . . . if the would-be assassin had succeeded in framing Miles's head for even a short burst—he glanced again at the shattered marble—no cryo-revival ever invented could have brought him back this time.

Ye gods—what if he hadn't missed? What would Ekaterin have done, this far from home and help, a messily decapitated husband on her hands before her honeymoon trip was even over, with no immediate support but the inexperienced Roic—If they're shooting at me, how much danger is she in?

In belated panic, he slapped his wristcom. “Roic! Roic, answer me!”

It was at least three agonizing seconds before Roic's drawl responded, “My lord?”

“Where are—never mind. Drop whatever you're doing and go at once to Lady Vorkosigan, and stay with her. Get her back aboard—” he clipped off the Kestrel . Would she be safer there? By now, any number of people knew that was where to look for Vorkosigans. Maybe aboard the Prince Xav , standing off a good safe distance from the station, surrounded by troops—Barrayar's finest, God help us all —”Just stay with her, till I call again.”

“My lord, what's happening?”

“Someone just tried to rivet me to the wall. No, don't come here,” he overrode Roic's beginning protest. “The fellow ran off, and anyway, quaddie security is beginning to arrive.” Two uniformed quaddies in floaters were entering the lobby even as he spoke. At a hostel employee's gesticulations, one rose smoothly up over the balcony; the other approached Miles and his party. “I have to deal with these people now. I'm all right. Don't alarm Ekaterin. Don't let her out of your sight. Out.”

He glanced up to see Dubauer unbend from examining a rivet-chewed marble drum, face very strained. The herm, hand still pressed to cheek, was visibly shaken as it walked over to glance at the riveter. Miles rose smoothly to his feet.

“My apologies, honorable herm. I should have warned you never to stand too close to me.”

Dubauer stared at Miles. Its lips parted in momentary bewilderment, then made a small circle, Oh . “I believe you two gentlepersons saved my life. I . . . I'm afraid I didn't see anything. Until that thing—what was it?—hit me.”

Miles bent and picked up a loose rivet, one of hundreds, now cooled. “One of these. Have you stopped bleeding?”

The herm pulled the pad away from its cheek. “Yes, I think so.”

“Here, keep it for a souvenir.” He held out the gleaming brass slug. “Trade you for my handkerchief back.” Ekaterin had embroidered it by hand, for a present.

“Oh—” Dubauer folded the pad over the bloodstain. “Oh, dear. Is it of value? I'll have it cleaned, and return it to you.”

“Not necessary, honorable herm. My batman takes care of such things.”

The elderly Betan looked distressed. “Oh, no—”

Miles ended the argument by reaching over and plucking the fine cloth from the clutching fingers, and stuffing it back in his pocket. The herm's hand jerked after it, and fell back. Miles had met diffident people, but never before one who apologized for bleeding. Dubauer, unused to personal violence on low-crime Beta Colony, was on the edge of distraught.

A quaddie security patrolwoman hovered anxiously in her floater. “What the hell happened here?” she demanded, snapping open a recorder.

Miles gestured to Bel, who took over describing the incident into the recorder. Bel was as calm, logical, and detailed as at any Dendarii debriefing, which possibly took the woman more aback than the crowd of witnesses who clustered eagerly around trying to tell the tale in more excited terms. To Miles's intense relief, no one else had been hit except for a few minor clips from ricocheting marble chips. The fellow's aim might have been imperfect, but he apparently hadn't intended a general massacre.

Good for public safety on Graf Station, but not, upon reflection, so good for Miles. . . . His children might have been orphaned, just now, before they'd even had a chance to be born. His will was spot up to date, the size of an academic dissertation complete with bibliography and footnotes. It suddenly seemed entirely inadequate to the task.

“Was the suspect a downsider or a quaddie?” the patrolwoman asked Bel urgently.

Bel shook its head. “I couldn't see the lower half of his body below the balcony rail. I'm not even sure it was male, really.”

A downsider transient and the quaddie waitress who'd been serving his drink on the lounge level chimed in with the news that the assailant had been a quaddie, and had fled down an adjoining corridor in his floater. The transient was sure he'd been male, although the waitress, now that the question was raised, grew less certain. Dubauer apologized for not having glimpsed the person at all.

Miles prodded the riveter with his toe, and asked Bel in an under-voice, “How hard would it be to carry something like that through Station Security checkpoints?”

“Easy,” said Bel. “No one would even blink.”

“Local manufacture?” It looked quite new.

“Yes, that's a Sanctuary Station brand. They make good tools.”

“First job for Venn, then. Find out where the thing was sold, and when. And who to.”

“Oh, yeah.”

Miles was nearly dizzy with a weird combination of delight and dismay. The delight was partly adrenaline high, a familiar and dangerous old addiction, partly the realization that having been potshotted by a quaddie gave him a stick to beat back Greenlaw's relentless attack on his Barrayaran brutality. Quaddies were killers too, hah. They just weren't as good at it. . . . He remembered Solian, and took back that thought. Yeah, and if Greenlaw didn't set me up for this herself. Now there was a nice, paranoid theory. He set it aside to reexamine when his head had cooled. After all, a couple of hundred people, both quaddies and transients—including all of the fleet's galactic passengers—must have known he'd be coming here this morning.

A quaddie medical squad arrived, and on their heels—immediately after them, Chief Venn. The security chief was instantly deluged with excited descriptions of the spectacular attack on the Imperial Auditor. Only the erstwhile victim Miles was calm, standing in wait with a certain grim amusement.

Amusement was an emotion notably lacking in Venn's face. “Were you hit, Lord Auditor Vorkosigan?”

“No.” Time to put in a good word—we may need it later. “Thanks to the quick reactions of Portmaster Thorne, here. But for this remarkable herm, you—and the Union of Free Habitats—would have one hell of a mess on your hands just now.”

A babble of confirmation solidified this view, with a couple of people breathlessly describing Bel's selfless defense of the visiting dignitary with the shield of its own body. Bel's eye glinted briefly at Miles, though whether with gratitude or its opposite Miles was not just sure. The portmaster's modest protests served only to firmly affix the picture of this heroism in the eyewitnesses' minds, and Miles suppressed a grin.

One of the quaddie security patrollers who had gone in pursuit of the assailant now returned, floating back over the balcony to jerk to a halt before Chief Venn and report breathlessly, “Lost him, sir. We've put all duty personnel on alert, but we don't have much of a physical description.”

Three or four people attempted to supplement this lack, in vivid and contradictory terms. Bel, listening, frowned more deeply.

Miles nudged the herm. “Hm?”

Bel shook its head and murmured back, “Thought for a moment he looked like someone I'd seen recently, but that was a downsider, so—no.”