Captain Tuomonen arranged to rendezvous with Miles and Tien in the lobby of the Vorsoissons’ residence building, rather than at the Terraforming Project offices, a blandly sociable gesture that did not fool Miles for a moment. The Imperial Auditor was to be saddled with an ImpSec guard whether he’d ordered one or not, it appeared. Miles almost looked forward to seeing the test of Tuomonen’s polite ingenuity that this security determination was doubtless going to demonstrate.

At the bubble-car platform across the park, Miles seized the opportunity to shunt Tien into another car and claim a private one for himself and Tuomonen, the better to decant the night’s news from him. A few early morning commuters crowded in with the administrator, and his car slid away into the tubes. But as soon as the next pair of Komarrans, already hesitant at the sight of the green Imperial uniform, got close enough to make out the ImpSec eyes on the captain’s collar, they sheered off hastily from any attempt to join Miles’s little party.

“Do you always get a bubble-car to yourself?” Miles inquired of Tuomonen as the canopy closed and the car began to move.

“When I’m in uniform. Works like a charm.” Tuomonen smiled slightly. “But if I want to eavesdrop on Serifosans, I make sure to wear civvies.”

“Ha. So what’s the status on Radovas’s library this morning?”

“I dispatched one of the compound guards last night to hand-carry it to HQ in Solstice. Solstice is three time zones ahead of us; their analyst should have started on it by now.”

“Good.” Miles’s brow wrinkled. Compound guards? “Um . . . just how big is ImpSec Serifosa, Captain Tuomonen?”

“Well, there’s myself, my desk sergeant, and two corporals. We keep the database, coordinate information flow to HQ, and provide support for any investigators HQ sends out on special projects. Then there is my lieutenant who commands the guards at the Sector Sub-Consulate compound. He has a unit of ten men to cover security there.”

The Imperial Councilor was how the Barrayaran Viceroy of Komarr was styled, in deference to local custom. Miles’s incognito arrival in Serifosa had excused him, or so he’d chosen to pretend, from a courtesy call on the Councilor’s Serifosa Sector regional deputy. “Only ten men? For around the clock, all week?”

“I’m afraid so.” Tuomonen smiled wryly. “Not much goes on in Serifosa, my lord. It was one of the least active Domes in the Komarr Revolt, a tradition of political apathy it has since maintained. It was the first Sector to have its occupying Imperial garrison withdrawn. One of my Komarran in-laws facetiously blames the lack of urban renewal in the Dome’s central section on the previous generation’s failure to arrange for it to have been leveled by Imperial forces.” That aging and decrepit area was visible now in the distance, as the car reached the top of an arc and bumped into an intersecting tube. They rotated and began to descend toward Serifosa’s newer rim.