Captain Vorpatril's alliance mv-14

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  “As a tool? Or as a weapon?”

  Ivan sighed. “As a tool—it needs development. As a weapon—it seems good to go. But you really need the I.S.I. boffins on it.”

  Otto’s mouth twisted up in joyless understanding.

  Allegre, his hand to his earbug, trod over to them. “Otto. There’s a Captain Roux at the security perimeter, one of your boys. Do you need him now?”

  The new security perimeter, added due to Gregor’s, Ivan hoped temporary, complicating presence. Gregor was over having some possibly-stern words with Simon and Lady Alys; Tej was listening intently, and putting in a brave gloss now and then.

  “Yes, I do! Let him through,” said Otto.

  If mud made the engineer, Roux had to be some sort of boy genius, Ivan thought, as the captain cruised up and quickly dismounted from a float bike. Otto looked merely artistically flecked, by comparison. The salutes exchanged between Roux and his superior were almost as perfunctory as those of ImpSec analysts, as they got down quickly to business. Gregor, noting this arrival, strolled near enough to eavesdrop, but not enough to force an interruption.

  “We finally traced that damned storm sewer, Colonel,” Roux reported, slightly out of breath. “It empties into the river about a kilometer below the Star Bridge. It was blocked way the hell up; but it became unblocked in a hurry about an hour ago. We lost our remote probe—swept out in the mudflow. Thank God we hadn’t sent any men in yet. We were estimating efflux at one to three cubic meters a second.”

  Allegre, coming over in time to hear the tail end of this, said, “One to three cubic meters a minute are going to drain the water backup fairly quickly, yes?”

  Roux glanced up, took in the eye-pins and the general’s rank tabs, and managed a normal salute, courteously returned. “Not per minute, sir. Per second. And not rainwater. Mud. It’s like—it’s like a mud cannon. The stream was still shooting straight out about ten meters before it arced into the river, when I left.”

  Gregor, edging closer at this fascinating word-picture, stopped and looked at something across the street, his head tilting slightly.

  Allegre’s brow wrinkled. “So where is it all coming from?”

  “That’s a good question, and we’ll address ourselves to it as soon as we’ve dealt with your last five urgent requests, General,” said Colonel Otto, looking harassed. “Now, if you’ll just let my people get on with their jobs…”

  “Guy,” called Gregor, still staring. “Has ImpSec HQ always been sort of…tilted up on one side? Or is that an optical illusion?”

  Allegre looked around; his gaze grew arrested.

  Gregor went on, uncertainly, “I’d not seen it before from this angle of view. Maybe it’s just more of Dono Vorrutyer’s subtle disproportions devised from his cracked theories on the psychology of architecture.”

  Ivan wheeled around as well. So did everyone else. Simon, Alys clutching his arm, and Tej came over to Ivan’s side.

  Ivan blinked. He squinted. Gregor wasn’t wrong; the left side of ImpSec building did look slightly higher than the right. Or…the right side lower than the left…?

  In the courtyard, visible through the open iron gates, a lone cobblestone erupted out of its matrix and bounced, clacking. In a moment, a few more followed, looking and sounding like popcorn just starting to pop. Big, granite chunks of popcorn. A soldier crossing the courtyard yelped and dodged this unexpected, knee-capping bombardment.

  A loud crack; a visible fissure propagated up the unclimbable front steps, zigzagging. With a horrible, grinding shriek, the bronze doors topping the high front steps twisted slightly apart.

  “What the hell…?” said Allegre, starting forward.

  Otto grabbed his arm and held him back. “Wait, sir…!”

  “Oh, it’s straightening up,” said Tej. “Or…not…”

  “No…” said Otto, his engineer’s eye sweeping the crenellated roofline. “The other side is sinking. Too.”

  From both side doors, an efflux of men in green uniforms began, at a rate, Ivan guessed, of about a cubic meter a second.

  “They’re leaving their posts?” said Allegre, caught somewhere between approval and anguish.

  Simon, his teeth pressed into his lower lip, released the stress to say, “At a guess, those would be the fellows who grew up in earthquake country, Guy.” And after another minute, under his breath, as the evacuation continued more sporadically, “The ones still inside, you’ll want to commend. The ones outside, those are the ones I’d promote…”

  Allegre moved away, speaking harshly into his pickup, pausing to listen to his earbug. Colonel Otto, after one more wild-eyed stare, ran for his bank of comconsoles.

  Simon’s lips parted and his eyes grew big as the building continued, very slowly, to sink. It went as a unit, nothing collapsing; old Dono-the-Architect had been deranged, not incompetent. But inexorably, in the course of the next ten minutes, in a silence only broken by under-voiced swearing nearby and a few cries from beyond the spike-topped walls, its first story was entirely swallowed by the earth. The bronze doors hit ground level and kept going. The frieze of pressed gargoyles above them sank from view as if being dragged down to their old hell. The descent finally slowed at a point where occupants on the third floor could have stepped out of their windows to the ground, if there had been any windows. A few men rappelled off the roof, instead.

  “Well,” said Gregor, in a choked voice. “There’s…a surprise.”

  A startling cackle broke from Simon’s lips. He clapped a hand over his mouth, and managed in a more measured voice, “My God, I hope no one has been injured.” Except then he cackled again, louder. Lady Alys gripped his arm in worry.

  Gregor’s fretful armsmen finally managed to drag him away from this riveting show and back to his groundcar. Surrounded by its black-and-silver-clad outriders, it rose on its fans and slowly pulled away. Ivan thought he saw a familiar face pressed to the canopy, looking backward in still-stunned fascination, as it rounded the corner on the route back to the Residence.

  “We aren’t doing anything useful here, Simon-love,” said Lady Alys, after a few more silent, staring minutes. “Perhaps we should go home. Ivan—now you’re rescued—Tej, will you come with us? We want to hear more about your, your ordeal. And I’m sure anyone who wants us will be able to find us there.” She cast one more astounded glance back over her shoulder at the…the upper half of ImpSec Headquarters. Emergency teams of every description were thick on the ground now, arguing with each other about access.

  Said Simon, faintly, “I’m sure they will,” and allowed himself to be drawn off.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Tej had the impression, that afternoon, that ImpSec would have preferred to drop a giant, concealing tarp over their whole two-block area of Vorbarr Sultana, but it was much too late. Between the dramatic—not to mention noisy, muddy, and public—engineering rescue, the rumors of almost-stolen treasure, crime lords, off-world invasion, secret bombings, ugly kidnappings of beautiful women, smugglers, and much, much more, all playing out in the Eye of the Imperium that was the Old Town capital—and all of it overtopped by the swallowing of one of the most notorious structures on the planet by the planet—about the only thing the Barrayaran government managed to keep a lid on was the details of the Mycoborer itself.

  “The Arquas had better hope Gregor’s damage-control people succeed, on that one,” Ivan Xav advised Tej. “All the rest could just get them jailed. Barrayar is still traumatized from some of the Cetagandan weaponized biologicals and chemical warfare experiments during the Occupation. The news that you all have managed to release a mutant alien fungus into our biosphere could get you torn limb from limb. The Dismemberment of Mad Emperor Yuri would be nothing to it. The angry mobs would fill the city. They’d tear the pieces to pieces. And the military couldn’t stop them because most of the military would be joining them.”

  “But the Mycoborer was from Earth,” Tej offered hesitantly. “Not Cetagandan at all. Old Ea
rth is practically the definition of not alien. And Grandmama said it was safe.”

  “Big, big heaving mobs,” said Ivan Xav. “As far as the eye can see.”

  Simon Illyan nodded in reluctant agreement.

  The Arqua clan was released from ImpMil that evening with clean bills of health, and returned not to their hotel but to an empty apartment a few floors down from Lady Alys’s penthouse. Uniformed ImpSec guards stood at the foyer doors, with more patrolling downstairs. The Arquas’ things, minus all communications devices, arrived much later, transported from their hotel after a detour for close examination by whatever high-clearance security people could be spared at present. Ivan Xav wondered aloud just how many Winterfair leaves had been summarily cancelled over this, and indicated that this grudge, too, would be added on the debit side of the House Cordonah ledger, at least in the dark matter column.

  They were not yet officially arrested, though Tej heard that Ser Imola had been, satisfactorily. The legal phrase for their own state was detained at the Emperor’s pleasure, a term that had Pidge wrinkling her nose and, conducted by an impassive sentry, ascending to Lady Alys’s flat to look it up. Ivan Xav explained, morosely, that it would more accurately be described as detained at the Emperor’s displeasure. But it seemed it trumped, at least temporarily, their visa termination, though Tej gathered that deportation on that point could be brought back into play at any time.

  Requests for media interviews penetrated despite all the sequestration.

  Pidge said hesitantly, “It might be a way to start to put a good spin on all this. Pave the way for our defense.”

  “I,” said Lady ghem Estif austerely, “would be more than happy to give this benighted world a piece of my mind.”

  Baron and Baronne Cordonah looked at each other.

  “No interviews,” said the Baronne. “Not one word.”

  “Right,” sighed Dada.

  Evacuation of critical equipment and files continued out the roof of ImpSec HQ, under tight military escort, to be temporarily relocated in an assortment of nearby government buildings appropriated for this emergency. Illyan, wincing at the pictures in passing, muttered only, “God, but the evidence rooms are going to be a bitch. When they get down to them.”

  The edifice’s on-going descent, it was said, had slowed to an almost imperceptible rate. But by midnight, Lord Dono the Architect’s masterpiece had sunk to the fourth floor.

  * * *

  Simon kept his appointment the next day with Emperor Gregor. He returned over an hour late.

  “It is not often,” he remarked, either to Lady Alys or the air generally, it was hard to tell, “that Gregor permits himself the self-indulgence of sarcasm. I could see that it was very relieving for him.” With an added mutter of, “We live to serve,” he disappeared alone into his study and did not come out till dinner.

  * * *

  When the Imperial Accounting Office auditors inventorying the old Cetagandan bunker—under the general direction and command of Commodore Duv Galeni, pulled off his departmental duties for the special assignment—reached an estimate of eleven hundred million marks, they stopped publicly reporting.

  * * *

  “What,” said Pidge, peering over Ivan Xav’s shoulder, “is an Imperial Court of Inquiry”—she squinted—“most secret?”

  “You could think of it as a subpoena,” said Ivan Xav. “With fangs. But it would be…be…”

  “A charming understatement?” suggested Tej, peering over his other shoulder.

  “No,” said Ivan Xav, in a distant tone, “not charming…”

  * * *

  Ivan had looked forward to escorting Tej on her first trip to the Imperial Residence, but not under these circumstances. She stared up apprehensively at the sprawling pile, a great irregular rectangle of four-to-six-story-high wings with odd inner links, in style a bit like Vorkosigan House bloated by a factor of four but with modern additions dating back to one post-war rebuild or another. The East Portico was one of the older, more ornate and impressive entrances. Mamere’s groundcar was just finishing disgorging her and Simon and the senior Arquas (and one ghem Estif) as Ivan pulled up behind it in his two-seater; they caught up with the group at the double doors, to be herded through by Gregor’s own majordomo. The man’s expression this morning was grim and suspicious, though as he caught sight of Simon it took refuge in very, very blank. Ivan won grim and annoyed.

  Followed by a pair of Residence guards, to pick off stragglers presumably, the majordomo led around and, unusually, down. Ivan had not often seen this subterranean section of the Residence, devoted to a pocket of practical conference rooms, as it was never open during the assorted public ceremonies or festivities, such as the annual Imperial Winterfair Ball coming up soon. The chamber into which they were gated felt more like a small, if unusually well-appointed, university lecture hall than a courtroom. At the front was a lectern and a comconsole table, and more seats were arrayed in a semi-circle of gently ascending rows. It might have held forty people in a crush. Which this was apparently not to be, despite the milling other-Arquas-plus-Byerly who had arrived just before them. A table at the side was set up with, mercifully, coffee, teas, and an assortment of pastries; Ivan wasn’t sure if it represented hospitality or a sign that this was going to be a very long session.

  Ivan made certain Tej had coffee with cream—she declined the pastries with a wan smile, not a good sign—and edged over to By. “Did you get a personal invitation, or are you here as an ImpSec plainclothes guard?” he muttered.

  “Both,” By muttered back. “Courtesy of Gregor and Allegre. Though I’ve had my own debriefings with ImpSec.”

  “Plural? They had time?”

  “Oh, I’m special this week.” By grimaced. “And not in a good way. I told them I needed backup—never mind.”

  And then it was time for everyone to hastily put down their drinks and swallow their last bites as the majordomo announced simply, “Your attention, for Emperor Gregor Vorbarra.”

  Ivan, after much dithering, had chosen a good suit instead of his military dress greens for this; Gregor, curiously, had made a similar choice, severe in dark blue. He was trailed by his senior armsman and his chief secretary, who went to set things up at the lectern. Gregor accepted assorted uncertain head-ducks with a wave of his hand that seemed to say, Yes, but not yet; the armsman hurried to supply him with coffee and, Ivan saw with a twinge of guilt, a couple of painkiller tablets, which he swigged down before turning to take command of the front of the room. The rest were directed to seats: the seniors in the front row, along with Pidge, Tej, and Ivan at the end where he could see everyone without craning his neck, much; and Byerly and the remainder—Rish, Star, Pearl, Emerald, Amiri and Jet—in the next. The armsman took up a parade rest at the side of the room where he could keep an eye on everyone; the secretary seated himself at the comconsole table, preparing to record everything.

  Gregor set down his coffee on the lectern and turned to stare unamiably out over his captive audience.

  “There are a number of interlocking jurisdictions and issues, legal and practical, involved in last weekend’s events in my twice-capital. First are the questions of crimes, misdemeanors, and the creation of public hazards in the city of Vorbarr Sultana and the Vorbarra District. For this, the highest legal venue is the Vorbarra District Count’s Court, of which I am, as Count Vorbarra, senior judge and final arbiter. Next, what might be construed as an attack on a critical Imperial military installation, for which, as Commander-in-Chief of the Barrayaran Military Service, I am again the ultimate authority. And finally, there are matters involving the welfare of the Imperium as a whole, for which, as Emperor, I am—again—finally responsible.

  “It is my intention to stack up all of these jurisdictions”—he didn’t say, in one big heap, but Ivan fancied he could hear it—“and get through the major issues this morning all at once. In short, I offer you a Star Chamber. You have a choice whether to accept this offer and my authority
, and abide by the outcome, or not. You may have a moment to consult among yourselves before you reply.”

  Pidge rose and darted to the senior Arquas; Gregor went aside for more coffee and a bite of pastry. Ivan could only think, Yes, for the love of mercy get your blood sugar up, sire. He joined the huddle. Simon and Mamere, he noted, stayed seated.

  Pidge was saying, “If we want to hold off retribution for as long as possible with delaying actions, now is our chance. You know I had the sequence of court fights all mapped out—”

  “If I may advise?” said Ivan, pitching his voice low. Shiv put out a hand to quell Pidge, who scowled at the interruption.

  “Please do,” said the Baronne.

  “About ten thousand people are lined up behind you competing for a slice of Gregor’s time, but he’s offering you this morning on a platter. He won’t make that offer twice. Also, his clothes.”

  “What about them?” asked Shiv, his heavy face dark in bafflement.

  “Signal. If he’d planned to go after you about the local issues—including that damned Mycoborer—he’d have come dressed in his Vorbarra House black-and-silver. If he meant to crush you for what you did to his ImpSec headquarters, he’d be in his Service dress greens. But he’s wearing his politician-suit, instead. That means he wants something he doesn’t already have. That means there may be the offer of what you might call a deal, depending. If you don’t waste his time, and if you don’t piss him off.”

  “How does one piss him off?” asked Shiv, eyes narrowing.

  “Well, wasting his time would be a good way to start.”

  “And how can you tell?” asked Tej, with an anxious glance past his shoulder at the podium. “If he’s pissed off, I mean.”

  “Um…” Ivan hesitated. “You all probably can’t. But ask me.”

  He backed away, to give the Arquas one last chance to confer privately. To his intense relief, Shiv turned and stated, “House Cordonah chooses to abide by the authority of this Star Chamber.”