Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen - eARC

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  “Hm,” said Jole.

  Cordelia glanced at him.

  “That’s the ghem Navitt clan face paint today, I see.” Very recognizable, even at a distance. “Any, ah, diplomatic concerns about that, Vicereine?”

  Cordelia stared thoughtfully. “On the whole…no.”

  “Right-oh, then.” Jole settled back and drank more cider.

  A familiar, but surprising, voice hailed him from the side, “Admiral Jole!”

  He turned and waved a welcome. “Dr. Gamelin, Dr. Dobryni! Glad you could make it.” The Uni bio department was the only outside group Jole himself had personally invited, after it had become clear that there was no keeping this blow-out from proliferating. The two professors were trailed by four others—from their ages, students; from their gawking, newbie visitors. He encouraged introductions, and indeed, they turned out to be those Escobaran grad students Gamelin had threatened, quite startled to find themselves meeting the Vicereine. From their expressions, this smiling, tousled woman in picnic clothes toasting them with local cider was not what they had expected. Cordelia was an effect Jole never tired of watching.

  “We heard you had a hexaped!” said Dr. Dobryni.

  “Yes, and very bilateral it is, too. Right over there.” Jole pointed cordially. “Help yourselves.”

  Ciders in hand—one student was looking very hard at the murk, clearly wishing for a bioscanner—they shuffled off to marvel at the biota, and soon Jole heard Dobryni’s voice drifting back, “No, don’t try to pet it…”

  Thwacks and cries drew their attention back to the field.

  “What odds d’you give today?” Miles asked him.

  “Well, the base boys are bigger and rougher, but they also have more standing issues with the Kayburg guard. The ISWA girls are smaller—which may be an advantage in this heat—can you speak to that?”

  “Sometimes true. No doubt why high command sent me to the arctic, on my first assignment.”

  Jole chuckled. “And they’ve probably been drinking less all day. And the women’s teams are generally better at keeping their attention on getting the ball in their basket, instead of disabling opposing players. So I wouldn’t count them out.”

  Miles explained aside to Ekaterin: “With three teams, the obvious strategy is to hang back and let the other two wear each other down, then swoop in. Everybody knows this, so they pay attention to not letting each other slack off. For a game so devoted to bashing each other, it’s remarkably cooperative.” Though such cooperation could shift around suddenly and rapidly.

  “Are they allowed to hit each other with those sticks?” A clatter echoed from the field. The sticks resembled field hockey sticks, but with a larger, curved blade, the better for scooping up the cranium-sized ball and lobbing it.

  “Well, there’s no hitting, grabbing, or tackling. Or bludgeoning. But tripping—hooking—is permitted. If a player’s stick breaks, they’re not allowed to replace it till the next goal change, so there’s some motive not to get too carried away.”

  The goals were three baskets sited around the field according the evil ingenuity of the crew laying it out. Today, one was out on the far side of the field, one was fastened to the highest point of the rocky outcrop, and one was stuck down in the creek bed, under water. With each point scored the teams rotated baskets, to keep the playing field even.

  Taurie, watching the players shift and run, bounced with excitement. Lizzie went off to covet her neighbor’s hexaped and pelt the biologists with questions. Could they be tamed to ride? Pull a cart…? The disappointing scientific consensus was not, but human attempts to domesticate Sergyaran creatures were barely begun, so what might the future bring…?

  “Where are all the twins?” Jole asked, finally noticing that Ekaterin was actually sitting down for a change, and that the cloud of chaos surrounding the Vorkosigans was oddly reduced.

  “Gone off with their nanny and two ImpSec minders to that swimming hole upstream. I hope they’re all right.” She glanced uneasily at her wristcom.

  The organizers had dammed the creek with rocks three days ago and allowed it to fill up to provide a pool for the picnickers—cleared of skatagators and other aquatic biohazards—and, not secondarily, to provide a water reservoir for the fireworks tonight, just in case.

  Jole had glimpsed it earlier. He sighed. “I suppose it really doesn’t have enough scope to try out the bateau.” Cordelia smiled and drank more cider. That trial would have to wait for another day. There will be time, Jole told himself, and then, Will there?

  Miles studied him sideways. “Nice boat, that.”

  “Gorgeous.”

  “Be kind of hard to fit in a space officer’s luggage allotment, though.”

  His mother frowned at him. “At Oliver’s rank, I’m sure his allotment could be expanded to include anything up to and including his lightflyer.”

  “Eh, I suppose.” Miles subsided.

  It’s not my biggest possessions that are the hitch, Jole reflected. It’s the three smallest.

  Cries of triumph and outrage sounded from the field as the ersatz head was lobbed into a goal basket, and he returned his attention to the game.

  * * *

  In due course, the boot polo slammed to its close-fought close, and Cordelia handed out the award ribbons and the donated cases of beer. The blue shirts won today, to the applause of their dates, spouses, and kids, who carried them off in triumph to, probably, fix dinner. The losing teams glumped away, a good portion of them to the med tent. If they’d kept their minds more on the game in front of them and less on old outside grudges, Jole thought the final results might have been different, but so it went.

  There had been a wail of protest midgame from Lizzie at the waste of a perfectly good hexaped, bought off with a consoling paternal murmur of, It’s all right, honey, it’s just run off home to all its brother and sister hexapeds, which seemed to suffice. Jole found himself taking mental notes on the spin-doctoring technique.

  Then it was time to gather up their party and go to their designated roasting pit node and eating area. Jole was just as glad to be strolling in late. Their dinner group was loaded with the same senior tech officers responsible for the crystal bateau, whose idea of setting up a campsite ran to such suggestions as, “Hey, let’s try speed-starting the fire with an infusion of pure oxygen!” Because inside every senior tech officer was a junior tech officer who’d been on a short leash for a long time.

  However, everything had settled down by the time Jole, Cordelia, and the Vorkosigan clan arrived to be distributed among a couple of dozen portable tables. The side dishes were a pleasant mix of contributions from family potlucks and the base mess. The roast was about half a cow, resurrected from the fire pit to either a divine culinary apotheosis, or a gruesome field dissection, depending on one’s point of view—Lizzie’s was right at the servers’ elbows, asking questions. Since that crew included two ship’s surgeons and three medtechs, the resemblance to a teaching autopsy grew marked.

  Special vat-meat briskets were provided for the moderns, headed by but not limited to Cordelia. She sighed at her Barrayaran family’s unselfconscious carnivory, but passed no censure. In due course, Alex and Helen were cleaned of their coating of grease and sauce and, trailed by their ImpSec minder, a female sergeant named Katsaros, allowed to go find Freddie.

  The level rays of evening, throwing long shadows through the slender trees, shifted toward sunset and the swift twilight of the tropics. Unlike in higher latitudes, no one here was going to have to wait till going-on-midnight for the final official treat of the day. Which suggested to Jole that a midevening getaway with Cordelia might actually gift them with some real private time before their well-earned exhaustion set in. Was this too ambitious a fantasy for a man of—he barely winced anymore—fifty? Around the picnic area, the fizz of sparklers and snap and squeal of bottle rockets and other small private fireworks enlivened the air, foretastes of the booming pleasures to come.

  Jole was mel
lowing out with his umpteenth bottle of cold cider—it wasn’t that high in alcohol, but people kept handing them to him—when Cordelia’s wristcom chimed with the ImpSec code.

  By her side, Jole came uneasily alert as she raised the comlink to her lips. “Vorkosigan here.”

  “Vicereine? Sergeant Katsaros here. We’re having a bit of a situation over by that Cetagandan attaché’s, um, art installation. It’s under control now, but I think we need you. Neither of the kids were hurt, really.”

  That last fetched her; she was on her feet and moving in an instant. Jole lumbered up to pursue her, more for intense curiosity than any belief that Cordelia was going to need his slightly inebriated help. Miles and Ekaterin were delayed by their scramble to make sure the other four children were still present and accounted for at the dinner, and covered, before they could follow on. Cordelia waved them back with a, “I’ll call you if you’re wanted!”

  Cordelia and Jole headed at a jog-trot out of the picnic grove and across the open area in front of the viewing stand, now undergoing its final decorations for the upcoming fireworks. Beyond the clearing, he could see the roped-off staging area where the official display was being prepared under the supervision of a volunteer crew of base explosives experts. The evening crowd was thickening rather than thinning down, as a lot of not-necessarily-invited Kayburgers streamed in for the promise of a show pushed right up to the borderline between fireworks and munitions.

  The Discernment Garden hove into sight—or its remains. The wall panels had been flattened, the tables overturned, the flowers kicked out of their pots, and the most repulsive stink rose from the ruins, apparently the effect of smashing all the bottles of scents and flavors together on the ground. Half-a-dozen each of uniformed base security personnel and Kayburg guards held at stunner-point what looked like most of the base men’s losing boot-polo team, cross-legged on the ground with their hands behind their heads—some looking sheepish, some scared, some surly, and all drunk. A few red-shirted bodies lay in silent, stunned heaps. One man was stretched out on his back, moaning.

  Alex, Helen, and Freddie were clustered around Sergeant Katsaros, who stood boots apart, stunner drawn, scowling at the guardsmen’s catch. Lon ghem Navitt hovered anxiously over Mikos ghem Soren, sitting bent over clutching his stomach, some fist-sized red marks showing on his face, his nose leaking blood. Apparently attracted by the stench, a smattering of radials bobbed about, making tentative passes on the just and the unjust alike or mustering in little gleaming phalanxes around the puddles.

  Cordelia drew in a very long breath. Jole, prudently, stepped back a pace to give her room to swing. Her glance took in the clues, assembling the probable course of events, hardly mysterious. However much force the uniformed guards were presenting now, it was plain they must have turned, if not a blind eye, a very nearsighted one in this direction when the altercation had first commenced, or the vandalism could not have reached this stage.

  Alex looked shaken, Helen was seething with fury, and Freddie had retreated into that sturdy stolidity he’d last seen her assume when standing next to a hard-to-explain burnt-out aircar. Cordelia’s first words were mild and directed at the juniors. “You kiddos all right, here?”

  “Yes, Grandmama,” Alex mumbled, but Helen burst out, “They were breaking down the stuff we helped put up! And they knocked down Lon! We had to do something!”

  “I told her we were too outnumbered to mix in!” said Alex. “But then that guy picked her up, so I had to go in after her!”

  A hand stemmed the spate. She asked the dirt-smeared Freddie, “Did you get banged around any in all this?”

  “Eh.” She shrugged. “Maybe a little.”

  By which Jole gathered she was in the No arterial blood or broken bones, no foul, camp. Fyodor, he was sure, was going to take a very different view—that she had not yet called him was self-evident. It would be wrong to look forward to that…

  Cordelia was continuing her initial assessment. “Sergeant, report?”

  “I’m sorry, Your Excellency. The kids got ahead of me. I shot the jerk who was shaking Helen, and shouted ImpSec, halt! but some of them were too stupid-drunk to hear, or listen.”

  “I kicked him, first,” Helen offered. She sniffed in satisfaction.

  “Backup arrived”—Katsaros glowered at the security teams—“eventually. And here we are.”

  “So we are.” That flat, unfriendly tone reminded Jole that Cordelia had been a ship captain, once.

  She walked in among the late boot-polo team, who scrunched and exchanged mutters of Crap, the Vicereine! and You morons! Reaching down, she jerked the supine moaner half up by his T-shirt, and growled, “Are you the man who laid hands on Aral Vorkosigan’s granddaughter?”

  “If I’da known who she was,” he gasped out, “I wouldn’ta touched her!”

  “You know,” said Cordelia after a reflective moment, “that argument doesn’t help your cause nearly as much as you think.”

  “…she hit me first…?”

  For all his stubble, muscle, and stink, the fellow couldn’t have been much more than twenty, Jole estimated. Cordelia, he suspected, was making a like evaluation, for the next thing she said was, “Do you have sisters?”

  “Yes?”

  “How many?”

  “Three?”

  “Older or younger?”

  “Both?”

  “I see.” She let go of his shirt, and he thumped abruptly back to the ground. She stood up and sighed.

  “All right. I rule that this is not an ImpSec matter.” Not treason, in other words, or treasonlike, or in any case an order of magnitude more hurt than any of these goons on the ground had ever imagined coming down on them before. “Base Security can take them in hand.” Base Security braced; the Kayburg people stepped back, looking relieved to unload this mess onto their military colleagues. “Put them all in the base tank for tonight. I’m sure you can work out suitable charges. Don’t forget unprovoked attack on a diplomatic guest. And you can let your chain-of-command know that I will be following up personally tomorrow.”

  “As will I,” said Jole. It was hard to make out which, the arresters or the arrestees, looked more apprehensive.

  A couple of medics finally turned up, and Cordelia directed them on to Lon and Mikos. Brushing off a few more radials that tried to bumble into her hair, she added, “Oliver, could you escort Helen and Alex back to the grove for me? I’ll be along soon.”

  “Certainly.” He gestured the kids away. Freddie, perhaps out of some dim sense of standing by her troops, went to help Lon.

  “Is Grandmama very mad at us?” Alex whispered as they turned to make their way back across the parade ground.

  “Angry, certainly, but not at you,” Jole reassured him. “Of all the people involved here, you two have the best excuses for acting like eleven-year-olds.”

  Helen frowned, apparently scorning this defense.

  Alex looked up and stared. “What is that?”

  Jole followed his gaze, then stopped and scrunched his eyes a few times for focus. A vast cloud of blur was spiraling in toward them—ah. Yes. “That’s a radial swarm.” Just like the one he’d had to have scrubbed off his lightflyer a few months ago, followed by a refinishing job. “You don’t usually see them gathered in those numbers at this altitude. Good grief!”

  Other people, across the grounds and in the stands, had spotted the swarm, and were yelling and pointing in dismay.

  “They’re coming this way,” said Helen uneasily.

  “They certainly are.” As he hesitated, wondering whether to hurry the kids back to the trees—no, definitely not—or forward to the bleachers, better, an enthusiastic soldier holding a large-sized bottle rocket, its fuse burning, came charging out of a cluster of his friends to position himself beneath the cloud.

  “This’ll drive them off!” he yelled.

  From behind him, Jole heard Cordelia scream at the top of her lungs, “No, don’t!” just as the trail of red spa
rks began to streak upward in the gathering dusk. Too late…

  Time seemed to stretch, but not very far. Jole reached deep into himself and found a parade-ground voice the like of which he’d seldom used before, a reverberating bellow: “COVER THE KIDS!”

  An instant later, the firework burst in a brilliant flare of blue and gold, spreading out like a flower. An instant after that, the sparks struck the myriad of floating radials.

  The firestorm was astounding. With a vast bass whoomp, it spread out through the mass of creatures; as each exploded, the incendiary fragments of its demise spread in turn, in a chain reaction of chemical conflagration, to ignite any that had escaped the first bombardment, which exploded in turn. The heat and light and sound pulsed in waves. There was nowhere to run. There was no time to run.

  Jole ripped off his shirt, flung it around the twins, clutched them to his torso, and bent over them. “Stay tight!” he yelled into their hair as they tried to bolt, or maybe just to see out. “Keep your faces down!”

  And then his world turned into a pelting rain of flaming snot.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The patter of firedrops trailed off around them, and Jole dared to look up and around. He blinked against the kaleidoscope combination of neon afterimages, and fragments of radial on the ground burning out yellow-orange-red, then dark. A few last splats sounded as those bits that had exploded upward, and therefore had farther to fall, hit late but hard.

  The twins squirmed in protest of his grip, but he seized them tighter as his head swiveled around to check the ohdearGOD! fireworks staging area on the far side of the parade ground. The adrenaline surge of purified terror that he had experienced only a few times in his life sluiced through his body, and he froze, unsure whether to run, dragging the kids along, or throw them on the ground with himself on top. After a second, his dazzled eyes made out that the frantic activity over there was not people sprinting away in all directions, just figures grabbing up assorted fire-dousing equipment, raised at the ready against this unexpected assault from the skies. The incendiary shower had fallen just short of them. And therefore mostly around him, but in that instant he was willing to consider it a fair trade.