“About this weekend,” Ryk began again, then, “…permission to speak freely, milady?”
“If you haven’t been speaking freely these past twenty years, it’s a surprise to me.” She gave him a nod nonetheless.
“It wouldn’t be my business, except that it is. The outward face of things, belike.”
She drew a long breath, for patience. “Acknowledged.”
“Was this a one-time event, or is it to be ongoing? A resumption of the former, um, system?”
Not quite the same questions Oliver had been asking, but uncomfortably like. Barrayarans. “Ongoing, I trust. The former-system part…I’m not sure you can call it a system when the whole benign conspiracy is down to one armsman. Does that make it easier or harder for you?”
“I don’t quite know, milady. Ongoing where? To what end?”
“I don’t think either of us knows, yet.” She added after a somber moment, “Though not another Barrayaran-style marriage, for me. It’s not—no reflection on Oliver, mind you—it’s just…not.”
He gave a short nod, Fair enough.
“Look, it’s not as if Oliver is, is, I don’t know. As if I’m running off with the gardener’s boy, or, or, a Cetagandan spy or whatever. He’s a loyal and very senior Barrayaran officer who has been a good and kind friend for twenty-three years. What those old Time-of-Isolationists would call an eligible connection.”
“Gentleman Jole, the troops call him.”
Cordelia laughed. “Do they? Well, I have heard him remark, You must never start a war at a cocktail party by accident. Lady Alys would doubtless agree.”
“Born a prole, though.”
“So was I.”
He rocked his head in a can’t-disagree-with-the-facts-but gesture. “Betan…is not the same thing.”
“You were born a prole, for that matter.”
He was beginning to look harassed. “That’s not the point I’m trying to make, milady. It’s not what I think, it’s what other people will think. As soon as—if ever—something is known to be going on, some people are going to start wondering how long it has been going on.”
“Like with poor Simon and Alys? My goings-on have been going on for one weekend, so far.” And a lovely weekend it was. “And that is true in every sense that most matters.”
He drew his own breath for patience. “M’lord was often careless. It gave us fits.”
Cordelia shook her head. “In the list of all the deadly Barrayaran political secrets we shared over the years, that little bit of—personal privacy—didn’t even make the top five.” She frowned into the past. “Ten.” And, after another moment: “Fifteen.”
His brows flicked. “See your fifteen and raise you twenty?”
She shrugged, her lips twitching. “I might have to fold at twenty.” She sighed. “All right, Ryk. If any of these nebulous people should approach you, it’s the same drill as always. Rumors are neither confirmed nor denied nor acknowledged. It’s pointless to do otherwise, since people will believe whatever the hell they want anyway, and damn it!”
Ryk jumped, or at least flinched.
“This is not some crisis, real or manufactured,” Cordelia boiled on. “Any widow or widower can date again, or, or whatever, after a decent interval. In general, their friends are pleased for them.”
“Not everyone is your friend, milady.”
Her palms came up, half fending, half accepting. “I decline to give them a Betan vote.” She placed her hands carefully back on the desk. “This is all very hypothetical, so far. So just keep an ear out as usual, and if you do hear anything substantial that you think I should know, pass it along. Preferably someplace out of earshot, in case I have to scream.”
He nodded shortly.
She considered further. Was his palpable unease personal as well as professional? “You do know, since those six embryos have proved viable, I plan to resign the viceroyalty within the year.” Armsman Rykov had necessarily been in on that from the time she’d collected the freezer case back on Barrayar. Although she hadn’t mentioned Oliver’s addendum to him, subsequently. No saying whether that would ever be his business.
Another head-duck.
“You’ll have a choice at that point—retirement here on Sergyar, or, always, employment in my private household. Though it will no doubt be smaller and duller than the current circus.” I hope. “But you will always have a place if you desire it.” Ma Ryk as well, although the armsman’s wife was presently pursuing an independent vocation as a primary school teacher here in Kareenburg. A readily relocatable career, Cordelia couldn’t help reflecting. She could name a dozen outlying schools that would kill to get more teachers, and regularly pelted the Viceroy’s Office with petitions to that effect.
His head drew back in mild offense at her implied doubt of his implied doubt. “I never feared for that, milady.”
“Right-oh, then.”
On that somewhat ambiguous note, he withdrew. Cordelia nibbled her sandwich and took up arms against her comconsole once more, trying to remember what she’d been about before Ryk had come in. If she finished her work—hah, now there was a fantasy, this work would never be finished, only abandoned, or, all right, passed on—she might squeeze out another day off by next weekend. Her lips curved up despite themselves at the memory of Oliver in the crystal canoe, gazing as entranced as a boy at his newly discovered underwater Sergyar. O brave new world, that has such people in it…!
* * *
“Thank you, Lieutenant Vorinnis,” said Jole, settling at his desk and accepting his first morning offering of coffee. “And how was your weekend?”
“Not sure, sir.” Kaya wrinkled her nose. “I took your advice, but I don’t think it worked quite the way I thought it would.”
“My advice?” What had he said, again…?
“About doing something outdoors.”
“Ah, yes.” Well, it certainly worked for me…
“So I invited Lord ghem Soren out to the firing range. He seemed very interested. But not very expert. He picked it up pretty fast, though,” she conceded.
“Firing range!” Jole’s brows rose. “I would not have thought of that.”
“I took a first back in basic in small-arms,” Kaya explained. “And my mother always told me not to beat the boys at games and things because then they wouldn’t ask you out. So I took him out to the range and trounced him. And a couple of other fellows who were hanging around. Except then he turned around and found some place outside Kareenburg that rents horses, and asked me to go with him again.”
Jole rubbed any untoward expression from his mouth. “Mm…More of a backfiring-range date, then?”
“I guess.”
“Did he seem to show any special interest about any other aspects of the base or our military arrangements?”
“Not as far as I could tell, sir.” She seemed more disappointed than otherwise at this failure of her modest venture into counterintelligence.
Lord ghem Soren, Jole gathered, would have proved far more interesting to the lieutenant if he had behaved in a more spylike fashion. Not that this indicated anything one way or another. The good agents, you didn’t see coming.
She added, in a tone of fairness, “He looked a lot better with his face paint washed off, I have to say.”
Someone must have finally advised the attaché on local dress. Or perhaps he’d figured it out for himself. “The ghem—and the haut—are in general very symmetrical in their physical features,” Jole allowed.
“How was your weekend, sir?” she asked politely in turn.
“Good. I, ah, had a long conference with the Vicereine. We flew out to inspect Lake Serena.”
Vorinnis shook her head in wonder. “Don’t you two ever take a day off?” She made her way back to her battlements in the outer office.
Jole bit back a grin and bent to fire up his comconsole and triage the first complaints of the week. A batch of tightbeam memos from Komarr Command came up.
After a few
minutes, he spoke aloud, half-consciously. “What the hell? This has to be a mistake!”
Vorinnis appeared in the doorway. “Sir? Did I make a mistake?” If so, she would be keen to correct it, her posture proclaimed.
“No, not…not really. Though you might have marked it…” Urgent? No. “For special attention,” he finished vaguely. “They’re decommissioning the Prince Serg!”
“Oh, yes, saw that one, sir.” She nodded. “But I though the mothballing protocols were considered routine…?”
Barrayaran warships tended to be not so much mothballed as hoarded. The eldest members of the General Staff were notorious for an attitude toward ordnance that resembled that of a famine survivor stashing foodstuffs, and perhaps for analogous reasons. Ships that most Nexus militaries would have sent directly to the scrapyards were instead tucked away to age a few more decades like dodgy food in the back of a refrigerator, out of sight, before the Staff—or more likely, its successors—was finally persuaded to give them up. Just such an elephant’s graveyard was part of Jole’s patch, hidden discreetly out of sight a couple of jumps into the blind wormhole that led nowhere. Someday, the Imperium would finally give in and declare it a museum.
The words were jerked from him nonetheless: “Yes, but the ship—it was the flagship of the Hegen Hub fleet. We still had civilian crews on board building it when Aral ordered it out of the space docks at Komarr. We tried to leave some of the crews on Pol, but there was no time. They were still installing and patching when the battle was over.” The memories came back in a spate. “It had the longest-range gravitational lance going, up to that time.”
“I believe it’s considered short nowadays,” said Vorinnis cautiously.
“Insanely short, now, certainly. The Cetagandans probably thought we were trying to ram them. At the time, it was bleeding edge, and a hell of a surprise to them.” He nodded in remembered satisfaction of the wild whoops going up in the tactics room, under the rank-revived-for-the-purpose Admiral Vorkosigan’s command. Aral’s last military command, as it had proved. He would have considered that the best part of the victory.
“But the Serg is over twenty years old!” Vorinnis protested blankly.
It was the newest ship to me. Back when he had been a lieutenant not that much older than Vorinnis. We were all agog for it. And now, for a tiny stretch of time, it would come under his command.
Most of its weapons and minor systems would have been removed, sealed, or shut down in Komarr dock. Whatever scant ceremonies were bestowed upon the event would have also been completed there. A skeleton crew would bring the skeleton ship to Sergyar. There were no formalities left for the Admiral of Sergyar Fleet to observe.
“Mm. Nevertheless…schedule me an upside inspection of the old beast. Just…in passing. Try to slot in a time that won’t delay either of us unduly.”
“Yes, sir.” Vorinnis withdrew, baffled but obedient.
Chapter Eight
On the grim anniversary that week that Jole had not marked on his calendar, he only saw Cordelia at a joint morning meeting between military and civil engineers to discuss Gridgrad infrastructure, or, more accurately, lack of infrastructure, and whose fault it was going to be. It ran long. In the hallway afterward, she touched his hand in passing, looking away; he caught hers and squeezed, and hers spasmed hard before opening again.
“Will you be all right, tonight?” he murmured.
She nodded shortly. “Dinner at the Betan consulate. I expect to be lobbied, and lobby back unmercifully. Immigration issues. You?”
“A queue of tightbeam reports from Ops HQ to read. Some to answer. Desplains and I are arm-wrestling over jump-point station logistics this week.”
“Good luck pinning him down. I mean to stop in at the rep center on the way home, after, for a quick visit. Just…” Her throat moved.
“…because.”
“Yeah.”
In this place, all he could give her was a nod, so he did. Her lips twitched up in silent understanding. As a smile, it was a travesty; as acknowledgement, sufficient unto the day.
* * *
Jole was able to organize another jaunt to inspect Lake Serena that weekend, though only a day-trip. To his regret, it was too breezy for the crystal canoe, but to his delight, the breeze sped the little sailboat around to the leeward side of the peninsula, where they found a quiet nook to tie up under some trees that bent to trail curtaining branches in the water. It was almost like a bower woven of wood, and decidedly more inviting for an intimate hour than bobbing around rudderless out in the open. The new radial-repellant spray seemed to work well, its brisk masking perfume more redolent of camp life than ballrooms. Alas for his late fantasy, the boat was notably less comfortable than the old bed, but a determined, if sometimes giggling, cooperation overcame all obstacles. Even a barked elbow failed to impede his blissful post-coital snooze, while his pillowing Cordelia seemed content to drift in quiet meditations of her own.
They shoved off again at length with just time for one tack across the wider part of the lake. As they approached the opposite shore, the sound of power-hammering drifted out over the water.
“Looks like Sergeant Penney’s getting a neighbor,” Cordelia observed, shading her eyes with the flat of her hand.
“And a mere five kilometers away,” Jole agreed. “I wonder if he’ll think Lake Serena is becoming too crowded?”
Her lips turned up. “His own fault, then, for renting his place and allowing Kayburg to find out about it.”
* * *
By Vorbarr Sultana standards, Kareenburg boasted little in the way of fine dining, but midweek they managed to engineer a not-too-working dinner at the same terrace restaurant where Cordelia had so upended his life recently with the gametes offer. They nibbled and talked through a fine fair sunset, and watched the town lights come on below in competition with the stars above. The stars were still winning, but probably not for much longer.
At one point, Cordelia bent forward with laughter at some turn of phrase, reaching out to touch his arm, but then her glance shifted beyond Jole’s shoulder toward the nearby table where her ImpSec bodyguard lurked attentively, and she withdrew her hand and straightened with a sigh.
“It’s not that the ImpSec duenna-corps that Chief Allegre sends me aren’t all nice, earnest boys and girls, but sometimes I wish I could drop them all in an oubliette. Why don’t I have an oubliette?” she added, as if suddenly struck by this lack. “I could have designed one into the Viceroy’s Palace when we were building it, easily enough. No foresight.”
He laughed. “It would go with your moniker.”
“I have a moniker?”
“Haven’t you heard it? They call you the Red Queen.”
She blinked and tossed back her last sip of wine. “Wasn’t she the chess piece who went around yelling ‘Off with their heads’? Or is it a bio-evolutionary reference?”
“I believe the bloodthirsty queen was a playing card. The chess queen was known for her sprinting.”
“You do wonder sometimes what they were ingesting, back on Old Earth. But yes, I certainly do have to run as fast as I can to stay in the same place. Though I suppose I could hope it’s for my hair. Is it intended as a compliment, or the reverse?”
“That seems to be malleable according to the tone of voice in which it is delivered.” Though he had come down sharply on one grumbler who had used it pejoratively in his hearing.
“Well…there have been worse political nicknames in Barrayaran history.”
“Mm,” said Jole, not disagreeing. Speaking of security, he was himself the recipient of a painfully polite memo from the local head of ImpSec-Sergyar, Colonel Kosko, pointing out that Jole’s own last physical-security short course was many years overdue for a refresher, and would he please not let the Vicereine’s notorious carelessness on the subject override his own mature judgment. That Kosko had sent a memo, and not just dropped a word in his ear when they’d seen each other in person, betrayed either a shre
wd sense of just how unwelcome such comments were in his superior’s hearing, or a nervous desire for documentation. “But you do have to allow that if you were killed on their watch, there’d be nothing for the poor bastards to do, once the forms were filed and the court-martials concluded, but eat their own nerve disruptors. En masse.”
She grimaced. “If Aral had been assassinated back in Vorbarr Sultana…” She did not quite complete the thought. She didn’t have to.
“Possibly.” He shrugged. “My feelings would hardly have been less complicated.”
She tapped his arm firmly, this time, in a gesture of strong negation. “Sergyar is safer. At least in terms of organized plots. Disorganized plots, well…”
“It only takes one nutcase to decide that you, not he, are the reason his life sucks, and set out to even the score. Nutcases are not in short supply here.”
She sighed in agreement. “Even though everything else seems to be.”
“Indeed. Did you get any reply yet from your son Mark about entrepreneurs we could lure to Gridgrad to set up a materials plant? The offer of land?”
“He says he’ll put the word out, but he notes that as the land does not seem to come with streets, buildings, utilities, or a workforce, it’s not quite the bait one would hope.”
After dinner, they rode back to the Viceroy’s Palace in her vicereinal groundcar, driven by the alert bodyguard. They did not shed this appurtenance until they reached the double front doors, where he was smoothly excluded by Armsman Rykov. Cordelia led Jole upstairs to the door of her personal office—her public office was now in the converted barracks across the back garden. It made a short and pretty walk to work.
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