Yeah, not contradicting things is my main issue. When I first got this plot-bunny, I sat down right away to try to get a take on how long I could reasonably have between Aral arriving back on Barrayar and Cordelia getting there. (And came to somewhere around three months, allowing for Aral leaving Sergyar not long after Cordelia does. Which seemed to allow time for both his decent as seen in Shards, and for the overlapping story I wanted to tell.)

(Of course, your write-first, math-later approach is what got us "Black Ice", which I am still enamored of, so I'm not complaining!)

And on bio-clocks...ha, we were cross-posting.