Captain Vorpatril's Alliance

Chapter Nineteen

Ivan drove By to his mother’s building in his two-seater; despite, or perhaps because of, the heavy rain, the city traffic was relatively light. To Ivan’s secret relief, they found Simon alone for the evening. Mamere had gone off to the Imperial Residence to help coordinate some sort of feed, hosted by Gregor and Laisa, for those galactic diplomats By had complained of—a crowd guaranteed to clear a buffet table much the way Time of Isolation cavalry charges had cleared street riots. Ivan was only surprised neither of them had been roped in as native Barrayaran décor, as Mamere frequently did unto them for these things.

“Huh,” said Simon, looking them both over when they were guided into his study by the maidservant playing porter tonight. “You two again.” He set aside his reader, and took his slippered feet down from the hassock that had supported them in extended comfort. He was dressed in shirtsleeves and a sleeveless sweater, making him look in the lamplight like someone’s retired schoolteacher-uncle. “Close the door, would you please, Marie?”

“Yes, sir. Should I bring drinks?”

By looked briefly hopeful, but Ivan said firmly, “No, thank you, Marie.”

“Very good, Lord Ivan.” She withdrew, and the door shut rather more than firmly. It was extraordinarily quiet in this chamber, once that lock clicked. Byerly swallowed, and Ivan thought irritably, Welcome to Chez Vorpatril. Please, take a seat. I will be your spine for this evening…Not his favorite role under any circumstances.

“Well, gentlemen.” Simon waved genially to chairs, and tented his hands above his lap. “What brings you to me this rainy night? Why aren’t you out squiring your young ladies?”

By grimaced and barely shifted the comfy chairs; Ivan dragged them closer to their host, on whom he felt an unwanted responsibility to keep an eye. By sat on the edge of his.

“Sir,” By began, atop Ivan’s, “Simon…” They both stopped and waved each other on.

Ivan began again, since By seemed determined to outwait him. “Simon. What do you know that we don’t about what the Arqua clan is up to in front of ImpSec? Or under ImpSec, as it may be?”

Simon’s eyes crinkled, just slightly. “I can’t guess, Ivan. What do you two know?”

“That they think there’s something under there, probably Cetagandan and probably dating back to the Occupation, and Shiv and Udine Arqua think it’s valuable enough to fund their attempt to retake their House, which has got to be a high-end hobby. How the hell they think they can extract whatever it is right under ImpSec’s collective nose, not to mention get it out of the Empire, defeats me. But I think not you. Want to give me a clue?”

Simon murmured something under his breath that might have been, But you’re so much more amusing without one; Ivan didn’t ask him to repeat it. Simon went on, “Well, that’s proving more interesting than I thought at first glance. How do we know what we know? It’s really a very philosophical question.”

“Yeah, but I’m a practical kind of guy,” said Ivan, recognizing Simon-diversion. The man could keep interrogators going in circles for hours, at parties. All that practice, Ivan supposed. On both sides of the table. “And I’m tired and my wife’s stopped talking to me.”

“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that. Was it something you said?”

“Simon.”

Byerly mustered his nerve and got out, “Sir, did you make some kind of deal with Shiv Arqua? Or does he just think you did?”

“Mm…” said Simon, in a judicious tone. “I believe it was more in the nature of a bet.”

Ivan rubbed his face. “Just how drunk were you two, the other night?”

Simon…smirked. “Perhaps a little. But it was my favorite sort of bet, very rare in my experience—one I can’t lose.”

It was By’s turn to wail: “Sir.”

Simon held up a hand, abandoning, thank God, his sport upon his juniors. “To answer your first question first, Ivan, what the Arquas appear to be after is a Cetagandan bunker, built during the Occupation under the mansion that formerly stood on ImpSec HQ’s site. It was first mapped and marked cleared at the time the foundation for the headquarters was excavated. Under Mad Yuri’s and Increasingly Disturbed Dono’s civil engineering aegis, you know.”

“You mean I’ve been running in circles for a week chasing nothing?” said By indignantly.

“Not quite that,” said Simon.

“But ImpSec knew it was there, all this time?” said Ivan.

“Once again we return to the subtleties of the term, know. Or perhaps—remember. ImpSec’s records have been damaged many times, in the intervening decades. And even without that, people who know things transfer or retire or die, to be replaced with…people who know different things, let’s say. A kind of cumulative organizational amnesia. It’s possible there might be some half-a-dozen men in ImpSec now alive who have personally examined those original historical documents, but that’s likely a generous estimate.”

“Are you one of those men?” asked Ivan.

Simon shrugged. “I may have been. I did a great deal of such homework, when I was just taking over the place three-and-a-half decades ago and cleaning up after the Pretendership. And Negri, dear God. Almost worse than…anyway. All I can tell you now is that the information didn’t make enough of an impression upon me for much detail to be retained in my organic memory alongside my artificial one. Of course, there was a great deal of competition for my attention, back then.”

“That’s the old records,” said Ivan. “What about the bunker itself? Surely it has to still be on ImpSec’s own current site maps.”

“Oh, certainly it is.”

“And it’s just been left sitting there ever since Yuri’s day?” said By.

“More or less. My plan for that park was that it was to be the site of the new ImpSec building which, as you know, I never got. Whenever they excavated the foundations, the bunker would have been revisited, and after a quick check by us for safety issues, turned over to the University historians to get what they could, after which my contractors would continue. I had the archeological dig boss all picked out, in my mind.” Simon sighed.

Simon remembered quite a bit, apparently, along certain odd lines.

“Did Shiv promise to cut you in?” demanded Ivan. “For a percent of…um…nothing?”

“So who was doing who?” By muttered.

“And then—what?” Ivan continued, growing perturbed in a whole new way. “Just let them go on, falsely hoping? Watch them while they try to break into an empty vault? You’re a cruel bastard, Simon.”

“I always had to be. This time, however, the future of the Imperium and millions of lives don’t seem to be at stake, making it all much more relaxing. Not to mention the quite standard procedure of letting a suspect run to lead the observer to other contacts, which I should not have to explain to you, Byerly.”

That probably worked a lot better when the observer hadn’t been outed to the suspects, Ivan thought glumly.

Simon added after a reflective moment, “Also, I was extremely interested to see how far they would get. Something of a private test.”

“For Guy Allegre?” What did he ever do to you? “In that case, was it fair to cover for that damn mapping dance, yesterday morning? You know the Jewels would’ve been run off if you hadn’t been sitting there, nodding benignly.”

“Mm, not so much cover as catalyze, in my view. Speed things up.” Simon frowned, and added, “Although my presence should not have caused an alteration in security procedures. I mean to have words with Guy about that, later.” He added after another moment, “Mind you, my personal evaluation is that the civil engineering problems of tunneling in secret around ImpSec will defeat them, as they have the many who have tried before. And a smash-and-grab approach, say, driving down through the park dirt with a plasma beam some, what, some twenty or thirty meters and boiling a hole through the roof of the bunker, is simply not on. Nevertheless, if they manage some way through those challenges, and if they finally break in…then will be the right psychological moment to make my deal.”

Ivan’s eyes narrowed. “What are you playing for, Simon?”

“Wider strategic concerns.”

By made a kind of weak, inquiring, throat-clearing noise.

Simon cast a head-tilt his way. “Jackson’s Whole has always been a problem disguised as an opportunity, for ImpSec and the Imperium. Too far away for direct intervention, but sitting astride a major wormhole route out of the Cetagandan Empire, which gives the Cetas roughly similar strategic interests to our own. And the same problem with working through local contacts—they tend not to stay bought.

“House Fell has always been dangerous, but determinedly independent. Morozov believes that House Prestene has strong Cetagandan contacts—and it now controls two out of the five wormholes in a possible first move on a monopoly. The loss of House Cordonah was originally judged to make little difference in that count, as they were thought to be technically neutral but with personal ties to the Cetagandans through the Baronne. Having now met Moira ghem Estif I am…rethinking that.”

“I, uh…Shiv Arqua doesn’t strike me as material to be anybody’s puppet,” said Ivan. “Still less Shiv and Udine. Ours or the Cetas.”

“Puppet, no. Ally…perhaps. Even just having a reliable safe house for our agents in the Whole would be a tactical improvement over the present confusion.”

“So you’re thinking of offering him—them—what?” asked By.

“At present, nothing, till I’ve had a bit longer to evaluate the man.”

“Word in your ear, Simon,” Ivan put in uneasily. “The man and the woman. Evaluating Shiv without Udine would be like, like…trying to assess Uncle Aral and leaving out Aunt Cordelia. They seemed that tight, to me.”

Simon’s brows climbed. “Really.” His attention on Ivan was suddenly sharper. “How do you come by that impression?”

Ivan stirred uncomfortably. “Not any one thing. Just the way they add up.”

“Hm.” Simon’s lips pursed. “Not that I, in my capacity as a mere retired Imperial subject, am in a position to promise anything to anyone, of course. Shiv kept…not noticing that.”

Ivan refrained from blurting a raspberry through his lips at this disingenuity. It would have disturbed By.

“So,” said By slowly, “what is all this, then—an IQ test for a future ally?”

Simon’s smile flashed. “Nothing so simple, alas. Or unidirectional. The one other thing I would point out—but did either of you notice? I handed it to you, a few minutes ago.”

By shot Ivan an agonized look. Simon playing mentor sometimes reminded Ivan of his worst moments from his school days, or maybe one of those nightmares where you found yourself running to a test naked. And he’d been Miles’s boss for years; maybe that, too, explained something about his cousin. Simon sat back, clearly willing to wait till the coin dropped. For hours, if need be. And no end-of-period bell to save them.

Simon had always been very precise in his speech, a habit that had survived the chip-removal; his current pauses for memory-searches were hardly distinguishable from the old ones for—the same thing, only more reliable. He’d said, he’d just said…

“Marked cleared,” said Ivan. “Would that be the same thing as, um—was cleared?”

Simon’s smile at him grew briefly genuine. “It was not only before I took over ImpSec, it was before I was born. Who now knows?”

“Moira ghem Estif?” Ivan hazarded. “It’s plain she does think there’s something there. One of you has to be wrong.”

Simon nodded. “As for the marked cleared problem, I have someone looking into that. With suitable historical expertise. Privately, on the side, when he gets a spare moment.”

Ivan blinked. “You got Duv Galeni running inside searches for you? Won’t he get in trouble? And it’s not his department.”

“For all I know, it’s all declassified and stored in the Imperial University archives by now,” said Simon, “but in either case, Duv’s the man to most efficiently put his finger on it.”

“I should report this,” said By. “Er…should I report this…?”

“I don’t know, Byerly, should you?” Simon said.

“That’s…not fair, sir.”

“Not especially, no.” Simon took in By’s harassed look and measured out a small drop of mercy. “You have some time to meditate upon it. Shiv can only have started to tackle the tunneling problem. They need to line up local equipment, perhaps local contacts—if I were you I’d keep a close eye on Shiv and Star as the most likely to possess the technical expertise. The problem was always what to do with the tell-tale dirt, and the longer the shaft, the bigger the pile…well.”

Ivan admitted reluctantly, “Tej drives everyone everywhere.”

“And isn’t talking to you, you said. That’s actually rather convenient, right now. At least you know it’s not personal.”

Ivan wasn’t so sure.

“Which means the Arquas are under the gun to solve their visa extension problem, or they’ll never make it to the engineering ones. I am so tempted to help with that…”

Afraid your game will be over too soon, Simon?

In any case, Simon had apparently decided that it was time for this chat to be over, for he slid the conversation into amenities, and then somehow, a few minutes later, Ivan found himself and By being amiably escorted to the door. Ivan, calculating how soon his mother was likely to be back, allowed the eviction without protest.

“That was reassuring,” said Byerly, as they settled themselves in Ivan’s two-seater once more. “Illyan is on top of it. Might have known.”

Ivan’s lips twisted. “Eh…”

By glanced aside at him. “I didn’t notice anything addled about any of that. Did you?”

“No,” Ivan admitted. Addled isn’t exactly the problem, here. Where would Tej fall, if things played out the way Simon pictured—or if they didn’t, for that matter, but in any case, if she was forced to take sides? If she and Ivan each were?

By buckled up in a pointed manner; Ivan aimed his car out of the garage and turned into the street, and said, “Where do you want me to drop you? Your flat? Or back to the hotel?”

“No, I shan’t put any more Arquas to the trouble of finding new circles to lead me in tonight.” By sighed. “My flat, I suppose.”

Ivan took the turn that would lead on to the shabby-trendy parts of Old Town Vorbarr Sultana. By put his head back and closed his eyes, although, given the lack of any white-knuckled grips anywhere, presumably not at Ivan’s driving, which was if not sedate was at least equally fatigued. After a few minutes, apropos some unguessable chain of thought, By remarked, “I don’t usually get attached to my surveillance subjects.”

“Considering your usual crowd, I can see why,” said Ivan.

“Mm,” said By, not disagreeing. And after another minute, “Ivan, you’ve had a lot of girlfriends—”

Byerly Vorrutyer is about to ask me for relationship advice? Ivan didn’t know whether to be flattered or appalled. Or to distract his passenger with a few evasive lightflyer moves, somewhat impeded by being in a ground vehicle.

“—seems like every time I saw you, you had a different one hanging on your arm.”

“They weren’t all girlfriends. Mamere always made me do a lot of diplomatic and social escort duty.” Actual real take-to-bed girlfriends had been less abundant, though Ivan wasn’t about to explain this to By.

“You made them all look like girlfriends.”

“Well, sure.”

“How did you keep them all happy?”

The light-spangled night rain flickered by outside the canopy. The wet streets wanted background music, some soulful lament to urban loneliness…“You know,” and somehow, probably because of the damned rain, Ivan’s mouth went off on its own: “I’ve always wondered why nobody ever notices that lots and lots of girlfriends entail lots and lots of breakups.” Enough to learn all the road signs by heart, yeah.

By’s eyes opened; his brows climbed. “Huh. You never seemed to point up that part.”

“No.”

A lot of his troubles had seemed to start, come to think, with oblique or not-so-oblique pressure for a high Vor wedding, even from a couple of the women who were already married, which Ivan had naively thought would put a sock in the issue. He’d never had those troubles with Tej, hah. If he’d known how relaxing being married—as opposed to getting married—could be, he might have done this years ago, except then it wouldn’t have been with Tej, so it wouldn’t have been like this, now would it? He contemplated this paradox glumly.

By leaned back in his seat with a tired sigh. “Well, at least parting with Tej should be no challenge for you.”

Ivan could not, he supposed, stop his car in the middle of traffic and strangle an ImpSec agent, no matter how personally annoying the man was. Fortunately, By’s block came up before temptation overcame prudence. By bade him thanks and farewell with his usual boneless wave.

Ivan wondered whether Tej would be home yet. Or not. And then couldn’t decide whether to speed up or slow down, an irresolution that kept him tepidly at the speed limit all the way back to his building’s garage.

Ivan spent the next two days chasing Tej around the clock. She returned from the hotel very late, Rishless, when Ivan was already half comatose and shrinking from the thought of tomorrow morning’s alarm. The workweek resumed; Ivan’s shift ran over due to what seemed an unending stream of minor Ops cockups and stupidities eliciting a return of memos running a short range from the tart to the sarcastic, and had Ivan mentally composing a whole new level of the latter, searing. In any case, he missed dinner, and Tej, who was out doing more driving.

Ivan’s preemptive strike for the next evening—dinner reservations at a restaurant for Tej and her family, for which she’d have to show up if only because she’d have to ferry the rest of them—resulted in less than a quorum of Arquas, but still more than enough to prevent any serious personal discussions. Vapid tourist talk dominated the table. The public venue had been a bad idea. Ivan should invite them to his flat for the sort of intimate conclave he wanted—preferably with fast-penta served with the soup. Or maybe the predinner drinks. Alas that the truth drug could not be administered orally.

No private talk with Tej that night, either, nor even sex as a substitute, an evasion for which Ivan was beginning to think he might be willing to settle. Since the evening ended with Rish back on Ivan’s couch, presumably By’s bed-luck was equally dire, but it seemed an insufficient consolation. And in the morning, Tej let him oversleep too much—deliberately?—so that he had to rush off for his day of arm-wrestling with Ops’s finest idiots without talk, kisses, breakfast, or coffee.

This can’t go on.

The Mycoborer was misbehaving.

Tej adjusted her mask—a simple hospital filter mask, without electronic components, acquired by Amiri from who-knew-where—yanked on her plastic gloves, and prepared to follow Amiri, Grandmama, and Jet on the none-too-solid flex-ladder down the meter-wide black shaft. The chemical cold lights hooked to everyone’s belts bobbed as they descended, making a bright but unsteady illumination.

She had to admit, the results of the first three days of Mycoborer penetration were impressive. After that initial visit, Amiri and Jet had found their way to the garage on their own, by different routes each time, for once-a-day checks and repositionings of new myco-sticks as the old ones successively pooped out. But Tej was afraid Grandmama was going to have to report to her Earth friend that his straight route and uniform diameter goals were still a hope for the future. The black walls of the shaft wavered—and not just from her wobbling light—widened and constricted irregularly, and bent away. Tej arrived at a kind of foyer Amiri had made at the bottom of the shaft to store the bulk of their supplies, straightened, and caught her breath.

Amiri held a finger to his mask. “As little talking as possible, from here on,” he whispered. Jet and Tej nodded dutifully. They’d left their wristcoms in the locked utility room, and traded shoes for soft, muffling slippers. Tej’s had bunny faces on the toes, and Grandmama’s had kittens, which was what they got for letting Em do the shopping, she supposed. The floor felt odd, through them—rubbery, not solid.

The tunnel leading away toward the park was just wide enough to stand upright in, though Grandmama had to bend her head, except where it occasionally constricted, and they all had to duck through. Worse, it turned, randomly. Twice, they had to sit and slide around complete bends. It seemed less like traveling a tunnel than like crawling through a giant intestine.

Continuing the comparison, the tube also seemed to be growing appendixes. Most were no larger in diameter than Tej’s arm; she felt no impulse to stick her hand in, glove or no, but Jet, having taken a possessive attitude toward it all, demonstrated that one could. Tej made a face at him. Jet stopped at another irregular wide spot, his eyes bright over his mask.

Amiri was leading Grandmama on toward an inspection of the working face; he cast a look of irritation over his shoulder, but could not, of course, yell at them. Their lights bobbed away.

“Here!” Jet whispered, pointing with his light to his prize, or surprise, as he’d resolutely refused to tell his sister what the wildly wonderful thing that he’d found was.

A pale, skeletal foot was sticking through the wall, at about waist height.

Tej jumped back, and glared at her odd-brother. Even-brothers, odd-brothers, all brothers were the same. He apparently found it hilarious that she wasn’t allowed to scream, choking instead. She drew a calming breath, deciding that an unruffled front would be the best revenge. “Well, that’s one Barrayaran who won’t be bothering us.”

Jet snickered, and drew a long, folding steel knife from his jacket pocket. He opened it and held the point to the rubbery wall beside the foot, leaning in. After a moment of resistance, it poked through.

“What are you doing?” Tej demanded in a tight whisper, as he began to saw.

“The walls harden up after a couple of days, as they cure,” he whispered back. “Won’t be able to do this tomorrow without making noise. It’s now or never.”

Tej could see the logic of that, though she didn’t see the problem with never. Or at least, somebody else, much later. Jet, finding that he couldn’t pull the foot out of the wall even after he’d cut a small circle around it, started on a much larger circle. When he peeled that away, entirely too much dirt came through, and Tej wondered if she should run, and which way, but the stream trailed off. Jet dug a bit more, then stood up with his hand stuck through out of sight and a surprised expression on his face. “There’s space past here!”

“Another tunnel, maybe?” asked Tej. “That poor fellow has to have got all the way down here somehow.”

Jet knelt again, digging with canine enthusiasm. And style. After too much more dirt, he bent and wriggled through his opening. His voice came back after a moment: “Wow, you should see this!”

Tej wasn’t sure that was true, but…she couldn’t let her little brother go off exploring in a dangerous place on his own, now, could she? She nearly had a responsibility to follow him.

She stuffed her hair down her jacket collar, donned her knit hat, and wriggled after Jet.

He was crouching in a small, smelly space seemingly held upright by some bowed-looking timber supports. Not very much farther along, some other supports were crushed very flat. Had a cave-in trapped their corpse?

A long time ago, or the space would smell much worse. About half of the body was uncovered, face-down, skeletal arms out as if clawing. A tiny wisp of hair still clung to the skull, but otherwise most of the organics seemed to have decomposed, including some of his clothing. The synthetics still held up, shabbily; some woven straps, most of a backpack of some sort, flung out before him as if by his bony hands. Some metal bits were blobs of corrosion or rust, others still shiny, including those eye-pins she’d seen on the ImpSec men and a strange necklace around the skeleton’s neck. Tej worked it loose, to find a metal tag at the end with incised letters: an unfamiliar prole name, Abelard, V., the rank of sergeant—assuming that was what the abbreviation Ssgt. translated to—and a long alphanumeric string. “It looks like he was a Barrayaran soldier,” murmured Tej. “So what was he doing down here?”

She looked up to find Jet opening the backpack.

“Don’t touch that!” she said in a fierce whisper.

“Why not?” asked Jet, folding back the cover.

“I think it’s a bomb.”

Even Jet paused at this. He brought his cold light closer to reveal a wad of corroded and uncorroded but in any case dead electronics, and an even more mysterious gray mass. “Er,” he said, and backed up a little.

Tej pocketed the necklace and crawled over to look more closely. The gray mass, several kilos’ worth, was slumping, and old wires led into it. “Plastic explosive of some kind?” Tej hazarded.

Jet’s brow wrinkled. “Some really old kind. Maybe it’s deteriorated by now.”

“Maybe it’s not.”

“Um.”

A frightened whisper, Amiri’s voice, came from their hole. “Tej? Jet?”

Jet rolled over, stuck his head down, and whispered back, “Amiri, you have to come see this!”

“I told you to leave that damned foot alone.”

“Yes, but it’s attached to a whole guy! You’re the doctor—you might be able to tell how old he is!”

Some muffled swearing was followed, a few minutes later, by Amiri wriggling through their makeshift passage. Anger at his more adventurous siblings warred with curiosity, in his expression; with a visible mental IOU, curiosity won, temporarily. Amiri’s gloved fingers danced over the visible portions of the corpse, probing, pulling, checking.

“Can’t be sure without knowing more about Barrayaran soil ecology,” he whispered. “But it’s not very dry down here. Not less than twenty years. Not more than forty. A local forensics expert could likely date it more precisely.” His eye at last fell on the backpack, stretched out beyond the skeletal fingers. “Oh, crap. Don’t even touch that!”

Jet tried for an innocent grin, defeated by his medical mask.

“Told you,” whispered Tej.

“It might be too old to go off, though,” Jet suggested. “Maybe we should, like…try to take a little sample to analyze.”

This approach plainly appealed to the researcher in Amiri, but he did stick his head down their hole to whisper, “Grandmama! You’re more of a chemist than I am. Do plastic explosives deteriorate over time?”

“Some do,” her voice came back.

“Ah.” Amiri unceremoniously plucked the knife from Jet’s hand, knelt, and gently tried to carve out a few grams of gray blob. It had apparently hardened with the decades.

“…some become unstable,” Grandmama’s voice continued.

Amiri abruptly desisted.

“I vote we leave it alone,” said Tej. “Or at least come back later when everything else is done. If there’s time.”

“Yes,” said Amiri, reluctantly folding the knife up. He didn’t give it back to Jet.

Jet didn’t protest.

From the same pocket, Amiri withdrew a child’s toy compass, a very simple analog tool indeed. He held up his cold light and squinted at the quivering needle. “I wonder where he was heading?”

“Depends on if he was coming or going?” said Tej.

Amiri sighed, and pocketed the compass again. “I need to get down here and hand-draw a meter-by-meter map, so we don’t waste time sending the Mycoborer in the wrong direction. Some more.”

They wiggled after him back through their unauthorized hole to find Grandmama waiting, scowling at the pile of dirt.

“Jet, you will have to clean this up,” she said, pointing. “Thoroughly, or everyone will be tracking it all over. And put something over this hole you made. The idea!”

“But Grandmama, it was a dead body!”

“Barrayaran graveyards are full of them, if you want more,” she said unsympathetically. “And very unsanitary they are, too. Cremation is much better.”

That was the Cetagandan custom, certainly.

Leaving the two boys to clean up, Grandmama gestured Tej back along the tunnel. Amiri didn’t deserve the chore, but it was plain someone had to watch Jet.

As they went along, Tej studied the ceiling more warily. Was it bending down, at any point?

They arrived back in the vestibule and doffed their masks and gloves. “What was wrong at the tunnel face?” Tej asked.

“The Mycoborer split around an inclusion. Went off in four perfectly useless directions. We started another.”

“What kind of inclusion?”

“Mm, storm sewer, I would hypothesize. It was a cylindrical pipe, anyway, and we could hear water running on the other side.”

“This deep?”

“We are actually close to level with the river, at this stratum. Though it wasn’t Barrayaran work—far too well made. I think it probably dated back to the Ninth Satrapy.”

“Grandmama—could our tunnel collapse? Like on the poor Barrayaran…” bomber? Tej tested that word-string in her mind, trying to decide if it made sense. Yeah, probably. Even if the fellow had been a suicide bomber, that had to have been a horrid death. She fingered the identity necklace in her pocket, and wondered if Ivan Xav owned a similar one. She’d not seen it among his things.

“Certainly, in due course.” Grandmama frowned back down their tunnel. “You have to understand, a perfectly circular pipe is in effect two arches supporting each other—an extremely strong shape. I saw such arches back on Earth, built only of simple stones, that have survived three millennia, and that despite it being such a tectonically active planet.”

“But our tunnel isn’t perfectly circular. It’s more sort of…intestinal.”

“Yes, pity. Fortunately, it doesn’t have to last the ages, only a week or two.”

But what if it collapses on somebody? Tej wanted to ask, but Grandmama was already climbing the rickety flex-ladder. She sighed and followed the carefully-moving kitty-slippers.

That night, by some miracle, Ivan found himself and Tej both awake and in the same place at the same time; and better yet, it was his bedroom. Tej was restless, though, wandering about the place. She opened the top drawer of Ivan’s dresser, into which he swept all his miscellaneous junk, and peered curiously, turning an item over now and then.

“What are you looking for?”

“I was just wondering…do you have any kind of military identification necklace? I’ve never seen you wear one.”

“Necklace? Oh, dog tags.”

“What do dogs have to do with it?”

“Nothing, that’s just what they’re called. I dunno why. They’ve always been called that. Plural, though they only issue you the one. I suppose that’s what they are, but necklace probably sounded too girly for the grunts.”

“Oh.”

“I think mine are hung with my black fatigues in my closet.”

“Do Barrayaran soldiers only wear them with the fatigues?”

“They’re not for every day, at least not at HQ. Just if you’re out in the field. Going into some dicey situation, say. There was an argument going around Ops for subcutaneous identity inserts, with electronic trackers, but the troops didn’t like it, and then somebody pointed out that if we could find our guys with a ping, so might an enemy, and the idea died in committee.” Not to mention the possibility that the bad guys could be their guys, in some civil fracas. It had happened before.

“So…” She hesitated, looking over her shoulder at him, where he waited in what he hoped was a good tactical position on what had become his side of the bed. “So if you were going into danger, that’s how I’d know?”

“I would hope you would know because I’d tell you.”

“No…” Her gaze on him grew thoughtful. “I’m not sure you would.”

He cleared his throat. “Anyway, why do you ask?”

“I, uh…saw one today, and I wondered. About you.”

“Where?”

“I—found it on the floor of a parking garage. Here, wait…” She padded out, and padded back in again a minute later, a thin chain that clinked and winked dangling from her hand.

Ivan rolled up and received it, turning it over and reading the inscription. “This is a really old style. Mine look different. Somebody must have saved it for a souvenir. Maybe it dropped out of his pocket.” Ivan’s imagination flashed another, sadder picture. “Or hers.”

“That would make sense.”

“I bet they’ll want it back. Which garage?”

“Um, I don’t remember. There were so many.”

“Maybe I can look this fellow up tomorrow, in the Ops archives.”

“Oh! Can you?” Tej looked briefly cheered, then alarmed. “But maybe…I’d like to keep it as a souvenir myself.” Her hand reached uncertainly after the relic.

“If you want that, I can give you my old set. From when I was a lieutenant.” Ivan’s even older set, from when he’d been an ensign, had gone with some girlfriend or another and not come back, Ivan suddenly remembered. Proving that, as a girl-leash, they didn’t work, despite the name, though it seemed as if they ought to.

Tej at last sat on the edge of the bed, still looking abstracted. His stretch for her halted in midair when her next question was, “Ivan Xav…do you know anything much about old Barrayaran military plastic explosives?”

He sank back, flummoxed. “I hope you didn’t find any of that on the floor of a garage!”

“No, no.”

“How old?”

“Really old. Twenty years, maybe more?”

“I had a munitions course back at the Academy, but that was all about current stuff.”

“How long ago?”

“Er…seventeen years?”

“But that’s almost twenty years.”

Ivan blinked. “So it is. Um.” He re-marshaled his forces. “Anyway, if you ever run across anything that looks the least suspicious, what you do is call a bomb squad. Or call me, and I’ll call a bomb squad.”

“Is that what you’d do?”

“Of course! Well, except for that old guerilla cache Miles and Elena and I found up in the Dendarii Mountains when we were kids. But we were being very stupid kids, as everyone from Uncle Aral on down explained, very memorably, after the—never mind that now. Anyway, the point is, people can still find old, dangerous stuff lying around on this planet, and civilians shouldn’t fool with it.” Untangling himself from this digression, Ivan finally got back to the important question, which was, “Why do you ask?”

“No reason,” Tej said airily.

Right. Avocados probably did shifty better than Tej. It was most un-Jacksonian of her.

“It was just something I was reading about,” she added, finding who-knew-what in his expression. Consternation, belike.

“How’s about,” said Ivan after a minute, “I take some personal leave?” And to hell with whether any busy-ImpSec-body thought he was admitting to being a security risk. “If your family’s only going to be here for a while, I should seize the chance to get to know them better. It only makes sense.”

“Oh!” She looked briefly pleased, then dismayed. “I wouldn’t want to interfere with your work. I know your career is very important.”

“We’re not at war. This week, anyway. Ops can suffer along without me for a few days without collapsing, I expect. They always have before.”

Her eyes were bright, like those of an animal in the headlights. “Good, that’s settled. Let’s make love!”

It was a patent diversion. Dammit, she’d be faking orgasms, next.

…But not, it appeared, yet.

This means she likes me, right? some awkward young Ivan who still lived at the bottom of his brain urged, just before the physiologically induced lights-out.

Surly old Ivan could only think, Ivan, you idiot.

And not one Ivan on the whole pathetic committee had yet been able to muster aloud the only question that mattered. Tej, will you stay?