Cordelia's Honor

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  He shook his head regretfully. "But neither are they on the list of Vordarian's confirmed captures. I think they're hiding in the city. Vordarian's side is leaking information like a sieve, we'd know if any arrest that important had happened. I can only wonder if our own arrangements are so porous. That's the trouble with these damned civil affrays, everybody has a brother—"

  A voice from down the corridor hailed loudly, "Sir! Oh, sir!" Only Cordelia felt Aral flinch, his arm jerking under her hand.

  An HQ staffer led a tall man in black fatigues with colonel's tabs on the collar toward them. "There you are, sir. Colonel Gerould is here from Marigrad."

  "Oh. Good. I have to see this man now. . . ." Aral looked around hurriedly, and his eye fell on Droushnakovi. "Drou, please escort Cordelia to the infirmary for me. Get her checked, get her—get her everything."

  The colonel was no HQ desk pilot. He looked, in fact, as if he'd just flown in from some front line, wherever the "front" was in this war for loyalties. His fatigues were dirty and wrinkled and looked slept-in, their smoke-stink eclipsing Cordelia's mountain-reek. His face was lined with fatigue. But he looked only grim, not beaten. "The fighting in Marigrad has gone house-to-house, Admiral," he reported without preamble.

  Vorkosigan grimaced. "Then I want to hopscotch it. Come with me to the tactics room—what is that on your arm, Colonel?"

  A wide piece of white cloth and a narrower strip of brown circled the officer's black upper left sleeve. "ID, sir. We couldn't tell who we were shooting at, up close. Vordarian's people are wearing red and yellow, 's as close as they could come to maroon and gold, I guess. That's supposed to be brown and silver for Vorkosigan, of course."

  "That's what I was afraid of." Vorkosigan looked extremely stern. "Take it off. Burn it. And pass the word down the line. You already have a uniform, Colonel, issued to you by the Emperor. That's who you're fighting for. Let the traitors alter their uniforms."

  The colonel looked shocked at Vorkosigan's vehemence, but, after a beat, enlightened; he stripped the cloth hastily from his arm and stuffed it in his pocket. "Right, sir."

  Aral let go of Cordelia's hand with a palpable effort. "I'll meet you in our quarters, love. Later."

  Later in the week, at this rate. Cordelia shook her head helplessly, took in one last view of his stocky form as if her intensity could somehow digitize and store him for retrieval, and followed Droushnakovi into Tanery Base's underground warren. At least with Drou, Cordelia was able to overrule Vorkosigan's itinerary and insist on a bath first. Almost as good, she found half a dozen new outfits in her correct size, betraying Drou's palace-trained good taste, waiting for her in a closet in Aral's quarters.

  * * *

  The base doctor had no charts; Cordelia's medical records were of course all behind enemy lines in Vorbarr Sultana at present. He shook his head and keyed up a new form on his report panel. "I'm sorry, Lady Vorkosigan. We'll simply have to begin at the beginning. Please bear with me. Do I understand correctly you've had some sort of female trouble?"

  No, most of my troubles have been with males. Cordelia bit her tongue. "I had a placental transfer, let me see, three plus," she had to count it up on her fingers, "about five weeks ago."

  "Excuse me, a what?"

  "I gave birth by surgical section. It did not go well."

  "I see. Five weeks post-partum." He made a note. "And what is your present complaint?"

  I don't like Barrayar, I want to go home, my father-in-law wants to murder my baby, half my friends are running for their lives, and I can't get ten minutes alone with my husband, whom you people are consuming before my eyes, my feet hurt, my head hurts, my soul hurts . . . it was all too complicated. The poor man just wanted something to put in his blank, not an essay. "Fatigue," Cordelia managed at last.

  "Ah." He brightened, and entered this factoid on his report panel. "Post-partum fatigue. This is normal." He looked up and regarded her earnestly. "Have you considered starting an exercise program, Lady Vorkosigan?"

  Chapter Fourteen

  "Who are Vordarian's men?" Cordelia asked Aral in frustration. "I've been running from them for weeks, but it's like I've only glimpsed them in a rearview mirror. Know your enemy and all that. Where does he get this endless supply of goons?"

  "Oh, not endless." Aral smiled slightly, and took another bite of stew. They were—miracle!—alone at last, in his simple underground senior officer's apartment. Their supper had been brought in on a tray by a batman, and spread on a low table between them. Aral had then, to Cordelia's relief, ejected this hovering minion with a "Thank you, Corporal, that will be all."

  Aral swallowed his bite and continued, "Who are they? For the most part, anyone who was caught with an officer up along his chain of command who elected Vordarian's side, and who hasn't worked up the nerve, or in some cases the wit, to either frag the officer or desert his unit and report in elsewhere. And obedience and unit cohesion is deeply inculcated in these men. 'When the going gets rough, stick to your unit' is literally drilled into them. So the unfortunate fact that their officer is leading them into treason makes clinging to their squad-brothers even more natural. Besides," he grinned bleakly, "it's only treason if Vordarian loses."

  "And is Vordarian losing?"

  "As long as I live, and keep Gregor alive, Vordarian cannot win." He nodded in conviction. "Vordarian is imputing crimes to me as fast as he can invent them. Most serious is the rumor he's floating that I've made away with Gregor and seek the Imperium for myself. I judge this a ploy to smoke out Gregor's hiding place. He knows that Gregor's not with me. Or he'd be tempted to lob a nuclear in here."

  Cordelia's lips curled in aversion. "So does he want to capture Gregor, or kill him?"

  "Kill only if he can't capture. I will, when the time is right, produce Gregor."

  "Why not right now?"

  He sat back with a tired sigh, and pushed away his tray with a few bites of stew and a ragged bread shred still left in his bowl. "Because I wish to see how many of Vordarian's forces I can woo back to my side before the denoument. Desert to me is not quite the right term . . . come over, maybe. I don't wish to inaugurate my second year of office with four thousand military executions. All below a certain rank can be given a blanket pardon on the grounds that they were oath-bound to follow their officers, but I want to save as many of the senior men as I can. Five district counts and Vordarian are doomed now, no hope for them. Damn him for starting this."

  "What are Vordarian's troops doing? Is this a sitzkrieg?"

  "Not quite. He's wasting a lot of his time and mine, trying to gain a couple of useless strong points, like the supply depot at Marigrad. We oblige and draw him in, or out. It keeps Vordarian's commanders occupied, and their minds off the real high ground, which are the space-based forces. If only I had Kanzian!"

  "Have your intelligence people located him yet?" The admired Admiral Kanzian was one of the two men in the Barrayaran High Command whom Vorkosigan regarded as his superiors in strategy. Kanzian was an advanced space operations specialist; the space-based forces had great faith in him. "No horse manure stuck on his boots," was the way Kou had once expressed it, to Cordelia's amusement.

  "No, but Vordarian doesn't have him either. He's vanished. Hope to God he wasn't caught in some stupid street cross-fire and is lying unidentified on a slab somewhere. What a waste that would be."

  "Would going up help? To sway the space forces?"

  "Why d'you think I'm troubling to hold Tanery Base? I've considered the pros and cons of moving my field HQ aboard ship. I think not yet; it could be misinterpreted as the first step in running away."

  Running away. What a seductive thought. Far, far away from all this lunacy, till it was all reduced to the single dimension of a minor filler in some galactic news vid. But . . . run away from Aral? She studied him, as he sat back on the padded sofa, staring at but not seeing the remains of his supper. A weary middle-aged man in a green uniform, of no particular handsomeness (except perhaps fo
r the sharp grey eyes); a hungry intellect at constant internal war with fear-driven aggression, each fueled by a lifetime crowded with bizarre experience, Barrayaran experience. You should have fallen in love with a happy man, if you wanted happiness. But no, you had to fall for the breathtaking beauty of pain. . . .

  The two shall be made one flesh. How literal that ancient pious mouthing had turned out to be. One little scrap of flesh, prisoned in a uterine replicator behind enemy lines, bound them now like siamese twins. And if little Miles died, would that bond be slashed?

  "What . . . what are we doing about Vordarian's hostages?"

  He sighed. "That is the hard nut in the center. Stripped of everything else, as we are gradually doing, Vordarian still holds over twenty district counts and Kareen. And several hundred lesser folk."

  "Such as Elena?"

  "Yes. And the city of Vorbarr Sultana itself, for that matter. He could threaten to atomize the city, at the end, to get passage off-planet. I've toyed with the idea of dealing. Have him assassinated later. Can't just let him go free, it would be unjust to all those who've died already in loyalty to me. What burning could satisfy those betrayed souls? No.

  "So we're planning various rescue-raid options, for the end. The moment when the shift in men and loyalties reaches critical mass, and Vordarian really starts to panic. Meanwhile we wait. In the end . . . I'll sacrifice hostages before I'll let Vordarian win." His unseeing stare was black, now.

  "Even Kareen?" All the hostages? Even the tiniest?

  "Even Kareen. She is Vor. She understands."

  "The surest proof I am not Vor," said Cordelia glumly. "I don't understand any of this . . . stylized madness. I think you should all be in therapy, every last one of you."

  He smiled slightly. "Do you think Beta Colony could be persuaded to send us a battalion of psychiatrists as humanitarian aid? The one you had that last argument with, perhaps?"

  Cordelia snorted. Well, Barrayaran history did have a sort of weird dramatic beauty, in the abstract, at a distance. A passion play. It was close-up that the stupidity of it all became more palpable, dissolving like a mosaic into meaningless squares.

  Cordelia hesitated, then asked, "Are we playing the hostage game?" She was not sure she wanted to hear the answer.

  Vorkosigan shook his head. "No. That's been my toughest argument, all week, to look men in the eye who have wives and children up in the capital, and say No." He arranged his cutlery neatly on his tray, in its original pattern, and added in a meditative tone, "But they aren't looking widely enough. This is not, so far, a revolution, merely a palace coup. The population is inert, or rather, lying low, except for some informers. Vordarian is making his appeals to the elite conservatives, old Vor, and the military. The Count can't count. The new technoculture is producing plebe progressives as fast as our schools can crank them out. They are the majority of the future. I wish to give them some method besides colored armbands to distinguish the good guys from the bad guys. Moral suasion is a more powerful force than Vordarian suspects. What old Earth general said that the moral is to the physical as three to one? Oh, Napoleon, that was it. Too bad he didn't follow his own advice. I'd put it as five to one, for this particular war."

  "But do your powers balance? What about the physical?"

  Vorkosigan shrugged. "We each have access to enough weapons to lay Barrayar waste. Raw power is not really the issue. But my legitimacy is an enormous advantage, as long as weapons must be manned. Hence Vordarian's attempts to undercut that legitimacy with his accusations about my doing away with Gregor. I propose to catch him in his lie."

  Cordelia shivered. "You know, I don't think I would care to be on Vordarian's side."

  "Oh, there are still a few ways he could win. My death is entailed in all of them. Without me as a focus, the only Regent annointed by the late Ezar, what's to choose? Vordarian's claim is then as good as anyone's. If he killed me, and got possession of Gregor, or vice versa, he could conceivably consolidate from there. Till the next coup, and train of revolts and vengeance-killings rebounding into the indefinite future . . ." His eyes narrowed, as he contemplated this dark vision. "That's my worst nightmare. That this war won't stop if we lose, till another Dorca Vorbarra the Just arises to put an end to another Bloody Century. God knows when. Frankly, I don't see a man of that calibre among my generation."

  Check your mirror, thought Cordelia somberly.

  * * *

  "Ah, so that's why you wanted me to see the doctor first," Cordelia teased Aral that night. The doctor, once Cordelia had adjusted a few of his confused assumptions, had examined her meticulously, changed his prescription from exercise to rest, and cleared her to resume marital relations, with caution. Aral merely grinned, and made love to her as if she were spun glass. His own recovery from the soltoxin was nearly complete, she judged from this. He slept like a rock, only warmer, till the comconsole woke them at dawn. There must have been some military conspiracy at work, for it not to have lit up before then. Cordelia pictured some understaffer confiding to Kou, "Yeah, let's let the Old Man get laid, maybe he'll mellow out. . . ."

  Still, the miserable fatigue-fog lifted faster this time. Within a day, with Droushnakovi for escort, Cordelia was up and exploring her new surroundings.

  She ran across Bothari in the base gymnasium. Count Piotr had not yet returned, so once he'd debriefed to Aral Bothari had no duties either. "Got to keep in training," he told her shortly.

  "You been sleeping?"

  "Not much," he said, and resumed his running. Compulsively, too long, far past the optimum effect-for-time-spent trade-off. He sweated to fill time and kill thought, and Cordelia silently wished him luck.

  She caught up on the details of the war from Aral and Kou and the controlled newsvids. What counts were allied, who was known hostage and where, what units were deployed on each side and which were ripped apart and scattered to both; where fighting had taken place, what damages, which commanders had renewed oath . . . knowledge without power. No more, she judged, than her intellectualized version of Bothari's endless running; and even less useful for distracting her mind from unbroken concentration on all the horrors and disasters, past or impending, that she could presently do nothing about.

  She preferred her military history with more temporal displacement. A century or two in the past, say. She imagined some cool future scholar looking through a time-telescope at her, and gave him a mental rude gesture. Anyway, she now realized, the military histories she'd read had left out the most important part; they never told what happened to people's babies.

  No—they were all babies, out there. Every mother's son in a black uniform. One of Aral's reminiscences floated up in her memory, velvet voice rumbling, "It was about that time that soldiers started looking like children to me. . . ."

  She pushed away from the vidconsole, and went to search the bathroom for medication for pain.

  * * *

  On the third day she passed Lieutenant Koudelka in a corridor, stumping along at a near run, his face flushed with excitement.

  "What's up, Kou?"

  "Illyan's here. And he's brought Kanzian with him!"

  Cordelia followed him to a briefing room. Droushnakovi had to lengthen even her long stride to keep up. Aral, flanked by two staffers, sat with his hands clasped on the table before him, listening with utmost attention. Commander Illyan sat on the edge of the table, swinging one leg in rhythm to his voice. A bandage on his left arm was stained with yellow seepage. He was pale and dirty, but his eyes shone in triumph, gilded with a touch of fever. He wore civilian gear that looked as if it had been stolen out of someone's laundry, and then rolled downhill in.

  An older man was sitting beside Illyan—a staffer handed the man a drink, which Cordelia recognized as a potassium-salts-laced fruit-flavored pick-me-up for the metabolically depleted. He tasted it dutifully, and made a face, looking as if he would have preferred some more old-fashioned revivifier such as brandy. Overweight and undertall, greying where h
e was not balding, Admiral Kanzian was not a very martial-looking man. He looked grandfatherly—though only if one's grandfather was a research professor. His face was held together with an intensity of intellect that seemed to give the term "military science" real clout. Cordelia had met him in uniform; his air of quiet authority seemed unaffected by civilian shirt and slacks that might have come from the same laundry basket as Illyan's.

  Illyan was saying, "—and then we spent the next night in the cellar. Vordarian's squad came back the next morning, but—Milady!"

  His grin of greeting was blunted by a flash of guilt, as he glanced to and away from her waist. She'd rather he kept piffling on, excited, about his adventures, but her arrival seemed to deflate him, ghost of his most notable failure at his banquet of victory.

  "Wonderful to see you both, Simon, Admiral." They exchanged nods; Kanzian made to rise, but was unanimously waved back to his seat, which made his lip twist in bemusement. Aral signed her to sit next to him.

  Illyan continued in a more clipped fashion. His past two weeks of hide-and-seek with Vordarian's forces seemed to parallel Cordelia's, though in the far more complex setting of the seized capital. But Cordelia recognized the familiar terrors under his plain words. He brought his tale swiftly up to the present moment. Kanzian nodded an occasional confirmation.

  "Well done, Simon," said Vorkosigan when Illyan concluded. He nodded toward Kanzian. "Extremely well done."

  Illyan smiled. "Thought you'd like it, sir."

  Vorkosigan turned to Kanzian. "As soon as you feel able, I would like to brief you in the tac room, sir."

  "Thank you, my lord. I've been out of communications—except for Vordarian's newscasts—since I escaped Headquarters. Though there was much to be deduced from what we did see. By the way, I commend your strategy of restraint. Good so far. But you're close to its limits."

  "So I've sensed, sir."

  "What's Jolly Nolly doing at Jumppoint Station One?"