The competent Vorkosigan House staff, under the even more competent supervision of Lady Ekaterin Vorkosigan, had actually relieved him of the first of these tasks.  Canceling his own affairs had cost more of a pang, as he'd just worked up the courage to invite Miss Pym down to Hassadar to meet his parents for the first time.  But as an Armsman's child, Aurie had understood perfectly.  Courting his commander's daughter had been an oblique process this past year, rather like those Earth insects Lady Vorkosigan had described, where the male approached with painful caution lest he be mistaken for a meal by his intended.  But it was Armsman-commander Pym who would tear off Roic's head and eat it if he made a misstep.

Still, in less than a day they'd boarded the shuttle for orbital transfer to the jumpship, and begun three boring, if comfortable, weeks of travel to New Hope II, or Kibou-daini as it was called by the locals to distinguish it from two other planets and a transfer station of the same name in the wormhole nexus.  Kibou for short, thankfully.  M'lord, accustomed from his old days in Imperial Security not to waste travel time, had handed Roic quantities of homework about their destination, and himself plunged into even larger and more classified reports.

Roic himself couldn't figure this gig out.  Granted, Lord Vorkosigan was the only person Roic knew who had actually died and been cryo-revived, making him the hands-on expert in the subject among Gregor's Auditors, the emperor's personal stable of troubleshooters.  And he knew his galactics, no question there.  And he had just successfully concluded, in his other hat as the-Count-his-father's voting proxy to the Council of Counts, several years on committees devoted to upgrading Barrayaran law on reproductive technologies to galactic standards.  Cryonics, Roic supposed, was the other end of these life-tech issues, and so a logical extension.  But the Northbridge Invitational Conference on Cryonics, hosted by a consortium of Kibou-daini cryorevival corporations, had proved as harmless a hotel-full of misty-eyed science boffins and well-fed lawyers as Roic had ever seen.

"Don't underestimate the viciousness of academics when funding is at stake," m'lord had said, when Roic had pointed this out.  "Nor attorneys' command of ambush tactics."

"Yeah, but they don't generally use stunners or needlers," Roic had returned.  "It's all words.  My skills seem wasted.  When they start firing off those paragraph grenades, I'd rather hunker down behind you."

He'd spoken too soon, it seemed.