Captain Vorpatril's alliance mv-14

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  Inside the suite—should she start thinking of it as House Cordonah HQ in Exile?—everyone seemed to be pursuing a different project at a different comconsole terminal, Star and Pearl at one, Pidge and Em at another, Dada at yet a third. Grandmama sat in the center and regarded it all benignly.

  The Baronne greeted her directly with “Tej! Do I understand correctly that you can drive in Vorbarr Sultana?”

  “Yes…?”

  “Excellent. We will have work for you shortly. Don’t run off. Rish, Star needs you.”

  Rish, with another grimace, went off to join the little subcommittee at Star’s terminal in the next room.

  “But I don’t have a vehicle.” Ivan had taken his sporty groundcar to work, and besides, it would only hold one other Arqua at a time. Although that might not be a disadvantage.

  “Then you can also take charge of obtaining rentals as needed. Good, I had been wondering what to do with you.”

  As if Tej were a spare puzzle piece that didn’t fit in anywhere, perhaps accidentally included from another set. And here came another. Amiri wandered in with a coffee cup in his hand, looking vaguely at a loss, but he brightened when he saw Tej.

  “Is there more of that?” asked Tej, nodding at the coffee.

  “Yes, right this way…” He guided her to the credenza.

  “What’s Jet up to? I saw him going out with By.” She poured, added cream, and drank. Mere hotel coffee, but the cream had that extraordinary mouth-filling taste that told of a real organic origin, not from a biovat like Station dairy products. Having now seen pictures of the organic origin, Tej wasn’t sure she wanted to think too closely about it, but she had to admit that the result was amazing.

  “Decoy. Sort of. Whichever of us Vorrutyer is with, or who is with Vorrutyer, is supposed to switch to decoy mode. With eleven of us, Dada figures we can keep him occupied. What was Rish thinking, to pick him up?”

  Tej, remembering the exchange of scents at that first historic meeting in Ivan’s Komarr flat, wasn’t sure that thinking had had as much to do with it as either Byerly or Rish would likely claim. “He found us first, really. But it was a different situation then. We were both looking for cover.”

  “Not the way I should have preferred my sisters to obtain it, but done’s done I guess. Gods, Tej!” He shook his head, his crisp hair moving with it. “I’m so relieved the Baronne and Dada have found you two. Maybe, if they can bring off this damned treasure hunt, they’ll let me go back to the clinic on Escobar.”

  “Is that what you want?”

  “Of course it is. I was just getting my teeth into my first big post-doc project. It broke my heart to be dragged away. I’d thought I was done with House Cordonah and all its works, I thought I’d made my escape. All right, I can understand that Dada and the Baronne have just had this big scare, and why they want to keep us all collected under their eyes for a time, but I do not want to be drafted as a replacement heir for Eric. Not only would either Star or Pidge be better, they’d want it.”

  Tej wrinkled her nose, and lowered her voice. “I’m not sure of the dynamics of that. Star and Pidge both accepted Eric as heir. Do you think either of them would accept the other?”

  Amiri looked as if he took the point. “Well…in either case, it wouldn’t be my problem.” He drank again.

  “How long have the rest of you known about the treasure hunt?” Tej asked.

  “Just since last night. After we got back from Lady Vorpatril’s. Dada and Grandmama and the Baronne called a family meeting and told us the new scheme. They’d really kept it tight before then—I suppose because they weren’t sure yet that the bio-bunker-thing would still be here. I thought we were just coming here to get you two, and I’d wondered why we all had to be dragged five wormhole jumps when we could have just sent one rep. And much more discreetly.”

  Tej wondered what she and Rish would have done if just one Arqua had turned up, demanding they depart at once. Might have depended on which one…

  “Why did they haul you along?” Tej asked.

  “That was the big mystery to me, too, till last night. They seem to have some idea of fencing any interesting old Cetagandan bio-stuff out through Lily Durona. I wonder if they’d told her about it all? That would explain why she was so ready to let me go, at least. Makes me feel a bit better.” Amiri paused, then countered, “How long have you known?”

  “Only since yesterday afternoon, when Rish was briefing the rest of you on local terrain. But did they tell you what the Barrayarans have planted on top of Grandmama’s old place?”

  “Yeah, that sounded a bit…challenging. But Dada seemed to think he had it all under control.” An uncertain tone entered Amiri’s voice. Dada and the Baronne had presumably thought they’d had Cordonah Station under control, once, too.

  Amiri turned to Tej with more urgency. “But you have to help make sure this comes off, Tej, you have to. My whole life is riding on it.”

  What about my whole life? Tej stemmed the rebellious thought. Of course Amiri’s life was more important. Amiri did things. Tej, as her family never seemed to tire of pointing out, didn’t. She sighed. “I’ll try, Amiri.”

  “Don’t just try, do,” he urged. “It’s really important to me. To everybody, really, but especially to me.”

  “Yes, yes…” said Tej, distracted. I was prepared to jump off a damned balcony for you. Shouldn’t that be enough? She was beginning to rethink that balcony business. True, it had been as much to escape the exhaustion and the being-afraid-all-the-time as it had been for imagined family heroism. None of which had been a problem since…since Ivan Xav, really. He was not the balcony type.

  I like that in a man. She was just beginning to realize how much.

  The Baronne was calling her away to consult on local transportation logistics with Dada. She sighed and trudged off to do her Arqua duty.

  * * *

  Ivan woke, not as late as he’d have liked, on his first day off after the Invasion of the Arquas to an unexpectedly empty bed. A gulping moment of panic was quelled, as he sat up, by the sound of voices from the next room and someone rattling around in the bathroom.

  Ivan had needed to work yesterday; Tej had spent all the long day and into the evening driving assorted Arquas around town on mysterious errands which she’d barely talked about. From years of practice with his cousin, Ivan could recognize evasion both when he heard it, and when he didn’t hear it. He wasn’t reassured by either mode. He’d held her attention briefly with Raudsepp’s account of the intercepted bounty hunters, which she’d assured him she would pass on to her folks, but with unfeigned tiredness she had slipped—away, perhaps?—into sleep shortly thereafter.

  Yawning, he dragged on trousers and went in search of caffeine. Tej was in the comconsole niche, talking to someone—a Barrayaran, a commercial clerk of some sort, apparently. She switched to Barrayaran Russian in mid-sentence; the man brightened and became more voluble. And cooperative? In any case, her business was concluded by the time Ivan came back with a steaming mug in his hand.

  Ivan nodded at the comconsole. “How did you know that fellow’s mother tongue? He had a pretty urban accent.”

  Tej gestured to the now-blank vid-plate. “I can hear it in their voices. Can’t you?”

  “Accents, sure. But he sounded pure Vorbarr Sultana to me.”

  “Not really. I haven’t got all the District dialect variations sorted out yet, though. Sixty-times-four plus South Continent. I have to pick up more local geography.”

  “Do you expect to? Sort them all out?”

  She shrugged. “If I’m here long enough, they’ll sort themselves.”

  “Tej…” He wanted to follow up that ambiguous-sounding if I’m here long enough, but stuck to his first thought. “How many languages do you speak?”

  “I dunno.” Her nose wrinkled. “Since I came here—nine?”

  “That’s a lot.”

  “Not really. Good translator earbugs will handle hundreds. Why bother m
aking work out of it, when the ones you need likely won’t be the ones you learned anyway? I never even heard of Barrayaran Russian before I came here. Or your local Greek dialect, which is pretty corrupt—well, altered—see, I didn’t say mutated. I mean, learning them yourself isn’t a practical hobby. The earbugs do it better.” A crooked smile. “Kind of fun, though. I like fun.”

  “Fun,” said Ivan, bemusedly reflecting on all the lack of fun he’d had in his school language drills.

  Rish emerged from the bathroom, fully dressed. “Tej, did you get the ground-van and the big speakers? Are we ready to go now?”

  “Yes and yes.” Tej popped up and offered Ivan a placatory kiss on the cheek. “Gotta run.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “The Jewels wanted a place for some dance practice, since this is the first they’ve been together for ages, and Simon found us this nice park. There wasn’t any place big enough in the hotel. I’m doing tech on the music.”

  “Outdoors? In this weather?” Ivan wandered to a window and peered blearily out. All right, the angled winter sun was shining brightly, and it was windless and well above freezing, but still.

  “It’s really pretty nice out today. Supposed to change tomorrow, though, so I really have to go now…”

  She and Rish blew out.

  Ivan munched groats, a little later, with his uneasiness growing. He shaved, dressed, and, with extreme reluctance, called his mother.

  “Mamere,” he said, when her impeccably groomed features appeared over the vid plate, wearing an expression of surprised inquiry. “Do you know anything about some dance practice place Simon recommended to the Jewels? A park or commons, outdoors.” Vorbarra Sultana had dozens of such nooks.

  “Oh, yes, he mentioned that. He’s gone off to watch. I thought it was good for him to get out. I’d have loved to go with him, but I’m running a diplomatic luncheon at the Residence today for Laisa, as she had to go down to that Vorbarra District economics conference in Nizhne-Whitekirk.”

  “Where? The dance practice, I mean.”

  “He suggested the little park across the street from ImpSec headquarters. Hardly anyone ever uses it, you know. Except those poor fellows with that seasonal affective problem, who come out to eat their lunches sometimes. Simon did make full-spectrum lighting an allowable requisition, years back.”

  “Um, yeah. Thanks.” About to sign off, he hesitated. “Mamere—has Simon told you anything about what Shiv had to say to him? Or vice versa?”

  Her smile never shifted. So why did he get the impression of her putting on her most diplomatic poker-face? “He said they had a very enjoyable exchange. I was pleased. I quite liked Udine and Moira, you know. Such adventurous lives! Earth! I’ve never been further than Komarr.” She sighed.

  “You should get Simon to take you,” Ivan suggested. “Or take him. Lever him out of his comfy rut. Four, pushing five years since his retirement, all the really hot stuff in his head—whatever’s left of it—has to have cooled off some by now. Doesn’t he think it’s safe to travel out of the Empire yet?”

  Her brows rose in a thoughtful way. “He’s never suggested travel farther than the south coast. He was really…extremely exhausted, immediately after all that—” a flick of her hand summed the nightmare weeks of Simon’s chip breakdown. And nightmare decades of its full function, before that, Ivan supposed. “More so than I think he let on.”

  “He always was pretty closed,” said Ivan, in what had to be the understatement of the century. “It’s not like you could tell the difference from the outside.”

  “No, I suppose you couldn’t.”

  Ivan heard the faint emphasis on that you. Which presumably did not include her. Her thirty years of working with Simon hadn’t exactly been like one of those long marriages where people started finishing each other’s sentences, but it did perhaps partake of some of the elements. Ivan tried to remember what had been the longest time he’d ever stuck with one girlfriend. Or vice versa. Surely at least one of them had been more than a year? Almost a year? More than a half-year…?

  “Delightful for you to call, but I must go,” his mother said firmly. “Tomorrow, we really must come up with something else to do with your visitors. Properly, it would be their turn to invite us to dinner, but they may not like to do so in that hotel.”

  “Um, right,” said Ivan, and let her cut the com.

  * * *

  It being the last weekend before the start of Winterfair proper, parking around ImpSec HQ was not as impossible as usual. Ivan only had to walk about a block before the bare little park, and the great gloomy building across from it, came into view.

  The security headquarters had an imposing façade, utterly windowless, with the wide stairs leading up to the front doors deliberately designed to be higher than most people could comfortably step. The great bronze doors were, as far as Ivan knew, rarely opened—everyone with business here went around to the human-scale entrances on the sides or the back. The stone face of the building was severely plain, except for a stylized bas-relief frieze of pained-looking creatures that Miles had once dubbed pressed gargoyles which entirely circled the edifice.

  At the time of the reign of Mad Yuri, the gargoyles had possessed some political/artistic/propagandistic metaphorical meaning, which had once been explained to Ivan, but that he had promptly forgotten. Ivan thought the poor things just looked constipated. The people of Vorbarr Sultana, over time, had named them all, and endowed them with varied personalities; there were running jokes about the conversations they had up there, frozen in their frieze, and some of them regularly appeared as editorial cartoon characters. And a short-lived children’s animated show, Ivan dimly remembered from his youth.

  The whole was surrounded in turn by a cobblestone courtyard and high stone walls topped with iron spikes not unlike the ones around Vorkosigan House, though already archaically outdated for actual defense even at the time they’d been built. All the real defenses were electronic and invisible. The wall was pierced fore and aft by two gates, the gate guards armed with energy weapons. Muskets would have seemed more in-period.

  The park was indeed sunny, if only because ImpSec had never permitted trees, kiosks, bathrooms, or bushes installed to impede the line of sight, or fire. Grass, a little brown after the first frosts but neatly groomed, held up well due to the small number of pedestrians who ventured to cut across it.

  Five brightly-dressed people were milling about on the turf—Rish, Jet, Em, Pearl, and Star—while Tej knelt at the side messing with a portable comconsole and some wireless speakers. Under Star’s direction, Tej stood up and shifted one of the speakers a few meters. Tej saw Ivan and waved, but didn’t come over to greet him. Star, with Jet consulting, also shifted around a couple of brightly-colored sticks topped with sparkly pom-poms; counting off strides, taking a line of sight, and sticking them back in the ground.

  Simon, wrapped in an aged military greatcoat, was sitting on a bench at the grass’s verge benignly overlooking the show. Hatless—Mamere would have had words—with his thinning, graying hair making him look very much like some retired old man watching youngsters at play. Which Ivan supposed he was. Sort of. In some pig’s eye somewhere.

  A uniformed ImpSec officer without a coat—a major, Ivan saw as he approached—was standing talking to Simon, looking back and forth from his former chief to the dance practice which was just getting rolling again. Bright music blared. Jewels were suddenly in motion, swaying, stomping, gesturing, rising and dipping. Jet, in a bravura moment, suddenly began a series of back-flips that ran in a straight diagonal all across the park, and ended with him balanced first on one hand, and then on one foot.

  “That’s impressive,” the major said to Simon, as Ivan came up. The fellow’s eyes shifted from Jet to check out Ivan, in civvies because this was his day off dammit; his face cleared. “Captain Vorpatril, is it? Ops?”

  Ivan granted him a nod, in lieu of a salute. “Yes, sir.”

  “So you woul
d know what all this is in aid of…?”

  “A rather high-energy galactic dance troupe who have been cooped up on jumpships for too long, celebrating their reunion, is the tale I was told,” said Ivan easily. Did Simon smile, there, into his lack of a beard?

  “I had never seriously watched dance,” Simon remarked to the major, “before my retirement. Lady Vorpatril has her own box at the Vorbarr Sultana Hall, you know. She has been kind enough to invite me to escort her there, many times since. It’s been a real artistic education. Of a style I’d never had time for, earlier in my life. Old dogs, new tricks, who knows where it could all end?”

  “Hm. Well. If they’re with you, sir…” The major, with a restraint that practically seemed to break something—perhaps his heart—visibly kept himself from saluting his former chief, managing a mere curt farewell nod before turning away to dodge traffic across the street and slip back through the front gate.

  Ivan slung himself down on the bench beside Simon, who had twisted a bit to watch the fellow retreat.

  “That’s the fifth man who has come out so far to check this out,” Simon observed, turning back. “The ranks keep getting higher.”

  “Have they,” said Ivan, neutrally.

  Star, all slicked-back hair, green eyes, and long leggings, bopped out and moved the sparkly pom-poms again. The music started up once more, a slower beat this time. Jewels glittered, in an eye-grabbing and athletic whirl. Jet repeated the astonishing back-flip routine, on the park’s other diagonal.

  “I had always considered,” Simon mused after a bit, “that for a building housing a cadre of men whose insignia”—he touched his civilian shirt collar, where no Eye-of-Horus pins now hung—“proclaimed to the Imperium, sees all, knows all, to have no damned windows allowing them to see out, to be some sort of cosmic irony.”

  Ivan leaned forward slightly to glance around Simon at the looming façade. “I expect they were more worried at the time about windows being blown in.” The techno-eyes were mostly non-obvious, but for some antennae and reception dishes peeking over the crenellated roof edge. “They have electronic surveillance, surely.”