Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen

Chapter Five

Full dark had fallen by the time their lightflyer approached the fading red-orange ring of the creeping brush fire. Cordelia craned her neck. The blaze had burned itself out beyond the lip of a low river valley, probably for lack of fuel, and seemed in process of suppression both up and downstream, due to the dampness of the vegetation in this tail-end of the rainy season. Parked partway up the riverbank, a scorched-looking aircar was…no longer on fire, apparently. At the center of the irregular semicircle of destruction, a possible solution to the mystery presented itself: a small group of human figures cowering on a sandbar in midstream. The lightflyer swooped closer.

“Get some light on this, Oliver,” Cordelia said, and he nodded and switched on his landing spots. Those individuals who were looking up shaded their eyes against the sudden glare. Cordelia counted six: one was waving at them frantically, another was trying to stop him; one sat on the sand with his head buried in his knees; one sturdy figure just stood spread-legged, staring up at them dourly. The other two…milled, Cordelia feared, although how only two people could create a mill was a bit of a puzzle. It looked like two females and four males, or rather—two girls, four boys. “It’s a bunch of kids from Kayburg. Good grief, isn’t that Freddie Haines down there?” She was the one glowering upward. “Maybe they’re brats from the base. That would be your patch, Oliver.”

Oliver’s gaze, too, swept the scene below. “Isn’t that lanky one Lon ghem Navitt, the Cetagandan consul’s son? That makes this a diplomatic matter. Your patch, Cordelia.”

“Oh, thanks,” she muttered, but accepted the return-of-serve. “Can you land us on that sandbar?”

Oliver eyed the proposed landing site with disfavor. “Land, yes. Take off again—depends on how solid the footing proves.”

“Well, it’s not quicksand, or those kids would be up to their necks by now.”

He grunted agreement and gingerly set the flyer down, as close as he could get to the middle of the bar and still be far enough away from the group to not squash anybody underneath. Touchdown was not quite the solid thunk one would prefer, but the flyer did not tilt precipitously, so it sufficed. Any landing that you walk away from is a good one the saying went, Cordelia was reminded.

They slid out of their respective sides of the flyer and closed ranks in front of it, starting toward the group. The boy who had been waving ran forward eagerly, only to skid to a halt and take several steps back as he recognized them. “It’s the Vicereine!” he wailed, unflatteringly appalled.

The other girl grabbed Freddie Haines’s arm in equal dismay. “And Admiral Jole!” Freddie gulped, but stood her ground.

Cordelia mentally ratcheted through a choice of several voices, and decided upon dryly ironic, as opposed to Crisp Command or Concerned Maternal. “So, what’s all this, then?”

Freddie’s female friend more-or-less pushed her forward, or at least ducked behind her. A couple of the others also looked toward her, silently drafting her as spokes-kid. By which Cordelia guessed that Freddie possessed the highest-ranking parent among the military brats here. Or that she was the ringleader. Or both, of course.

Freddie swallowed and found her voice. “We only wanted to show Lon how the vampire balloons blow up!”

The Cetagandan boy, looking undecided whether to speak or not, compromised by nodding. The larval form of the ghem, Cordelia reflected, was just as unprepossessing as anybody else’s teenagers. At age fifteen, Lon had acquired nearly his full adult height, and his people ran to tall; the rest of his development still lagged behind. The general effect was of one of those primary-school science experiments where Bean Plant No. 3 was raised without enough light, growing long and thin and pale and barely able to stand upright.

The boy who was curled up with his face to his knees lifted it long enough to cry, in a voice of anguish, “My mom’s aircar!”

Oliver broke in firmly. “First of all, is everybody here, and is anybody injured?”

Freddie braced herself under his cool eye. “Everyone present and accounted for, sir. We all waded out to the river when the fire…started.” All by itself, this seemed to imply.

“Ant got a little scorched,” volunteered the female friend, pointing to the boy crouched on the sand. “We told him it was too late to save anything!”

The picture slotted in rapidly. It had been an expedition to the backcountry for one of Sergyar’s more exciting sights, at least if you were really, really bored: exploding radials. The biggest ones, party-balloon sized, clustered in the watercourses and came out in force on windless nights. The animals did not, of course, explode naturally.

Had this expedition been parentally authorized, or not? Cordelia’s eye took in the sidearm holstered at Freddie’s hip, a military-issue plasma arc, and decided Not. Anyway, six kids were never going to fit into the absence of a back seat in Oliver’s lightflyer.

Several of the youths were wearing wristcoms. “Has anyone called their parents yet?” Cordelia inquired. A telling silence fell. She sighed and raised her own wristcom to her lips.

Kayburg’s municipal guard commander was home eating dinner, Cordelia discovered, which reminded her that she hadn’t eaten hers yet, which made her quite cheerily ruthless about interrupting his. While Oliver hauled the burned boy around to the boot of his lightflyer for a visit with his first-aid kit, she explained the situation bluntly and succinctly, and extracted a promise of the immediate dispatch of a guard flyer big enough to carry the miscreants back to Kayburg for subsequent sorting and returning-to-senders, or at least to families. She added a roster of names and parental names, extracted against some resistance from their catch. A couple of the youths looked as if they might have held out against fast-penta, but with the application of a sufficiently cold vicereinal eyeball, their friends ratted them out soon enough. Siblings Anna and Ant-short-for-Antoine were base brats; the other two boys were Kayburg civilian offspring, and Lon ghem Navitt was of course in a class by himself, though sharing a classroom at the Kareenburg middle school with the rest of them, hence their association.

Oliver returned with the singed Ant, the boy’s red face now glistening with a thick smear of pain-killing antibiotic gel, his blistered hands likewise anointed and wrapped in gauze. Oliver released him back into the concerned arms of his young comrades.

“Nothing too serious, but I’ll bet it hurts like hell,” Oliver murmured to Cordelia. “I gave him a shot of synergine to help calm him down. He was having a bit of a meltdown about the aircar, understandably.”

“That should hold for now,” she murmured back. “The municipal guard is sending a lift-van to collect them. I’d expect them within the half-hour.”

Oliver nodded in relief, and looked over the distraught little company once more. He grimaced and motioned Freddie aside.

Freddie Haines looked rather like her father, perhaps not entirely fortunately, though she was healthily robust and plump with thick dark hair. A trifle spotty, an affliction she would doubtless outgrow in due course. The few times Cordelia had glimpsed her heretofore, she’d seemed confident and not unduly shy for her age, but her current situation was enough to tax anyone’s backbone. She kept hers straight, but Cordelia sensed the strain. Oliver, staring down at her, took a moment to compose his opening line. Freddie seemed to take the stretching silence for an ominous sign, and swallowed in anticipation.

“Is that your da’s plasma arc?” he asked, quite mildly under the circumstances Cordelia thought, though Freddie wilted.

“Yes, sir,” she managed.

“Did he give you permission to take it off base?”

“He said no one should go out into the backcountry unarmed, on account of the hexapeds,” she returned.

Oliver allowed this ambiguous statement to hang in the air, palpably unaccepted. Freddie squirmed under that sardonic gaze, opened her mouth, closed it, and finally broke. “No, sir.”

“I see.”

A quick mental review of military sidearm regulations suggested that this took the girl well over the line from unfortunate accident to illegal act, complicated but not improved by her status as a minor. It wasn’t exactly a bonus for Fyodor Haines, either.

“But it was good we had it!” she said, in a tone of desperate protest. “A couple of those big skatagators tried to come up on the island after us, and I fired it into the sand and scared them away!”

Oliver’s eyebrows twitched, though he managed not to betray any other sign of unbending. The skatagators were low-slung, amphibious, and carnivorous native hexapeds that infested the rivers and did sometimes attack people, when their tiny brains were triggered by the right wrong motions. By the time their senses of taste and smell signaled wrong prey, it was usually pretty messy. A bright plasma-arc blast into the wet sand and the resultant steam explosion would have sent them scuttling back into the turbid water in a hurry, Cordelia had no doubt. Shooting one of the skatas instead would have been a bad move; the thrashing wounded animal or dead carcass would quickly have attracted more scavengers, including its cannibalistic brethren. She considered the familiar conundrum inherent in complimenting a child for doing something well in the course of what ought not to have been done at all, and kept her peace.

“You’d better give it to me,” said Oliver, holding out his hand. “I’ll undertake to return it to your father.”

“Yes, Admiral Jole, sir.” Freddie unbuckled the holster and handed the weapon across to its duly constituted Imperial authority.

Without the least outward sign of a man burying a hot potato, Oliver quietly made it disappear into the boot of his lightflyer. Cordelia wondered if the girl appreciated what he’d just done for her. Perhaps her da would point it out later. She couldn’t decide if she longed to be a fly on the wall for that conversation or not. She gave Oliver a silent nod of approval as he rounded the lightflyer once more; he gave her a silent nod of acknowledgment.

In a very few minutes more, the municipal guard lift-van arrived to clear the scene. They followed it back to town.

Fyodor Haines was the first parent to arrive, turning in to the parking lot behind the municipal guard’s main station mere moments after Oliver had put down their lightflyer in a painted circle. Haines pulled up his groundcar beside them. The two men got out and greeted each other; Haines spared a semi-salute for his Vicereine.

“What the hell is this about, Oliver?” Haines asked in a worried voice. “They said none of the kids were hurt—is that right?”

Oliver gave a quick summation of events, glanced around to be sure they were still having a private moment, and handed back the plasma arc wrapped in its holster. Haines swore under his breath and made it vanish again into his car.

“Damn. Thank you. I didn’t know she had that.”

“Don’t you keep your sidearms locked up, in quarters?”

“I always did when the boys were young. I thought girls preferred, like, dolls.” Haines, vexed, set his teeth.

“Freddie didn’t strike me as the doll type,” said Cordelia, “not that I’ve had much experience raising girls. But leaving aside the idiocy of what the kids were doing out there in the first place, she does seem to have kept her head rather well when things got out of hand on them.”

Haines rubbed his mouth, taking in this paternal consolation. “Hm. We’ll have to have words. Confine her to quarters for a week, at least.”

“That seems fairly appropriate,” Cordelia said cautiously.

“Yes, except they’re my quarters.” His face scrunched in dismay, presumably at the vision of a week of his evenings locked up in the exclusive company of a surly distraught teenager. “Damn but I wish her mother would come out.” He shook his head and trudged off for the back door of the guard station.

Cordelia and Oliver, too, went inside. At this point Cordelia figured her sole reason for still being there was to make sure Lon ghem Navitt made it back to his people without incident, so the two of them sat back out of the way while the rest of the variously upset parents trailed in to retrieve their erring offspring. Cordelia had the subliminal impression that the Kayburg guardsmen didn’t get overly exercised about anything that didn’t involve extracting actual dead bodies from hard-to-reach places, such as the insides of smashed lightflyers or sick skatagators. Nonetheless, they performed a pretty good Stern-And-Grim to put the wind up all concerned, and with luck spare themselves a repeat of this event. They only threatened, but did not invoke, any formal charges—it may have helped that one of the town boys was the son of a woman who clerked for the guard station.

Just as Cordelia was slipping over from seriously hungry to savagely starving, and starting to wonder if the Cetagandan consul was planning to leave his son overnight in jail for a life-lesson, the cultural attaché Lord ghem Soren arrived, in the same formal face paint and attire he’d worn to her garden party last week. He smelled of strange esters—perfumes, inebriants? in any case, not Barrayaran-style alcoholic beverages—and looked faintly harassed. The hand-off hit a snag when it was determined that he was not Lon’s actual parent.

Cordelia intervened smoothly, assuring the dubious guard sergeant that as an officer of the consulate, ghem Soren constituted a legal authority sufficient to the purpose.

“Where are Lord and Lady ghem Navitt tonight, Lord ghem Soren?” Cordelia inquired easily.

“Hosting a moon-poetry party at the consulate, Your Excellency. An autumn observance at the Celestial Garden on Eta Ceta, which, uh, it is there now. Autumn. They couldn’t leave the ceremony in the middle, so they sent me.”

Did that mark ghem Soren as a trusted confidant, or low man on the duty roster? The latter, Cordelia decided, which simultaneously explained his otherwise after-hours aroma. Oliver looked enlightened and amused. Bean Plant No. 3 made no objection, seeming more relieved than disappointed at this substitution. In any case, the pair traipsed out again with as little further interaction with the local authorities as ghem Soren could manage.

It was now officially Bloody Late, and Cordelia still had a string of report files to read before her morning meetings. She let Oliver escort her up the main street with no more than the briefest detour through an all-night sandwich shop, one of the few places still open in downtown Kayburg on this dull midweek night. They walked on toward the Viceroy’s Palace munching their sandwiches out of their wrappings. At the corner of the side street that led to Kayross, she balled up the paper in her hand, dropped it in a trash receptacle, and hesitated, staring down toward the half-lit facade of the replicator clinic.

Oliver followed her glance, and gave her a lopsided smile. “Did you want to stop in and see Aurelia?”

“They keep a night staff, but it isn’t really visiting hours.”

“I’m sure they’d make an exception for you.”

“I’m sure they would, too. But I shouldn’t impose. And there really isn’t that much to see even on the magnifying monitor yet. People are pretty blobby at this stage.”

Oliver wasn’t buying her nonchalance. Was she that transparent, or was he just being Oliver? “You still want.”

“Well…yes.”

He turned her firmly leftward. “It’s been a long day, and tomorrow is another one. Grab your treat while you can.”

“Are you thinking of keeping me in a good mood for the sake of my oppressed subordinates?” She took his arm as they started off again.

“Maybe it’s enlightened self-interest, then.”

“Ha.”

The medtech who came, after a few minutes, to the front door buzzer did indeed recognize her at once, and let them in without demur. He cross-checked the records and led them back through several doors to a freshly arrayed bank of replicators, and sorted through to the right monitor. The light level was muted, the picture indeed tiny and blobby, like some low form of sea life.

Oliver peered dubiously over her shoulder. “So strange. And yet amazing.” He glanced around as if wondering in what freezer his own future hopes were being stored. But he didn’t quite muster the boldness to ask.

“Yes,” she had to agree.

“You’re smiling.”

“Yes,” she had to admit. Her smile crept wider, igniting a reflecting glint in Oliver’s eyes. Even the medtech, when he let them out and locked the doors again, smiled back, as if infected by her compressed joy. Her weary stride widened to almost an Oliver-stretch as they turned up the main street once more.

At the Palace gate, Cordelia apologized for keeping him up past his bedtime and hers. “I didn’t anticipate all the complications on that outing. I suppose one never does.”

“If you anticipated them, they wouldn’t be complications, eh?”

She laughed and bade him goodnight.

Cordelia woke in the small hours, as she so often did these days, with an old memory floating up out of her dream fragments. An unvoiced huh of bemusement shook her.

She’d been in her twenties, eager to advance into her adult life. Tops in her Survey classes, clumsy in her social interactions, she’d been thrilled to at last acquire her first real sexual partner. Their affair had been sporadically renewed as their duties in the Betan Astronomical Survey permitted, culminating in a several-month voyage as declared affiliates, sharing a cabin and junior-officer duties. They’d made plans for the future. Equals in love and life, she’d thought, till it came time to put in for the same promotion.

He would go first, they decided; she would take downside duties to raise their allotted two kids, and then it would be her turn. She applied for and took the desk job as planned, but somehow the declaration of co-parent status and the fertilizations were not forthcoming, though she’d had her egg extraction and signed up for her mandatory parenting course. But he’d had no time to attend to those details before he shipped out in his first captaincy; too many new duties to get atop of right now. It had seemed reasonable.

All ran to plan till he’d returned from that first voyage with a different woman in tow, a junior ensign and xeno-chemist uninterested in having children. We just made a mistake, Cordelia, he told her, as if correcting an error in her navigational math. It’s nobody’s fault, really.

Even if she’d been the scene-making type, she wouldn’t have made protest in the public place he’d prudently chosen for this revelation, and she’d let him slither away, imagining his lie undetected. It wasn’t as if she’d wanted him back. He’d gone on to a steady career in the B.A.S.—even, eventually, the two kids, with a partner a few down the line from either Cordelia or her replacement. And the next year, the captaincy of the René Magritte had opened up for her, a better ship than his if the truth be told, so, no harm done, right?

And two voyages after that she’d discovered this planet and Aral, and the rest was, very literally, history.

The tale of that duplicity was the first intimate secret about herself she’d shared with Aral, during their fraught trek here, in fair trade for one of his own, considerably more blood-soaked and lurid. Aral had come by his gift for the dramatic honestly, she had to concede, and she smiled to recollect how even at age eighty he could still electrify a room just by walking into it.

Which made, in retrospect, her Betan clot’s betrayal the best thing he’d ever done for her. Was it too late to send him a thank-you note? She wondered if her face was as much of a blur in his mind by now as his was in hers. All that lingered of him was the picture of the pain, not even the pain itself, of that stab through the center of her soul. An image still strangely clear.

Catastrophic events had conspired against Aral’s hopes to repair that old wound of hers, yet decades later he’d made sure to leave in her hands the means to do so herself, if she chose. Trust Aral to honor even a tacit promise grandly.

These weren’t tales she could share with Oliver, she realized, at the moment or perhaps ever. He might take them the wrong way. In fact, they were of no use to anyone at all, not even to her, now were they? Sighing, she folded the memories back into herself, and turned over in the dark.

Jole arrived at his downside base office the next morning to find his aide neither late, nor hung-over.

“How was the party at the Cetagandan consulate last night, Lieutenant?” he asked her, as she presented him with a sacrificial offering of coffee. “Did you learn anything interesting?”

“Very odd.” Vorinnis wrinkled her nose in distaste. “The food was…tricky. And then they passed around these things that you were supposed to sniff, but I only pretended to inhale.” Jole gathered that this was less for the sake of virtue than of paranoia. “And then my so-called date went off and left me halfway through. I had to sit through about an hour and a half of this weird poetry recital all by myself. By the time Lord ghem Soren got back, he’d lost his turn at reciting, which made him all miffed and not much company.”

Jole suppressed a smile. “Ah. I’m afraid that was not exactly his fault. Lon ghem Navitt was picked up with a group of his classmates by the Kayburg guard after an, er, self-inflicted accident out in the backcountry last night, and the guard wouldn’t let the kids go till they had inconvenienced all the parents sufficiently to make their point. Ghem Soren was apparently told off by his boss to go collect the lad. For what it’s worth, he didn’t seem too happy with being assigned the detail.”

“Oh.” Vorinnis blinked, taking this in. She did not then inquire, How do you know all this, sir? Was he simply presumed to be omniscient? But she grew a shade less peeved. “Other than that, he mainly seemed to want to tell me all about his family tree. Did you know he had a Barrayaran ancestor? Ancestoress, I guess.”

Jole raised his eyebrows. That tidbit had not been in the cursory ImpSec dossier he’d read on the fellow, though it had named a couple of unexceptionably Cetagandan-sounding parents from ghem Soren’s planet of origin, a lesser satrap world which lay beyond the higher-status capital of Eta Ceta from Barrayar. “No, I didn’t. Do tell.”

“It seems his great-grandmother on his father’s side was a Barrayaran collaborator during the Occupation, and got taken along with the family when the Cetagandans pulled out. I can’t quite figure out if she was Vor or prole, or a servant or mistress or what, though he called her a third wife. Sounded like some kind of concubine to me.”

“Mm, more than a servant, anyway. That’s a status with official standing and rights, but her children would certainly be lower in rank than their senior half-siblings.” Jole sipped coffee and considered his next leading question in this engaging debriefing. “And what sorts of things did he ask you about?”

“He wanted to know if I rode horses, back on Barrayar. He seemed to think all Vor did. I mean, all the time, to get around. And carriages.”

“And, ah, did you ride? As a sport, of course.” Aral had instructed him in horseback riding on those long-ago country weekends down at Vorkosigan Surleau, though they had both preferred the sailing. He’d apologized that he was not so expert a cavalryman as his late father General Count Piotr Vorkosigan had been, and sounded almost sorry that he could not gift Jole with this superior mentor; Simon Illyan had just muttered, Count your blessings.

“Not really, except a couple of times when I visited some cousins. My family lives in Ouest Higgat.” The Vorinnis’s District capital, that, and like most such cities a major political and commercial hub. “My father works in the District Bureau of Roads and Bridges. Mostly on the lightflyer traffic control systems. He’d been an orbital-and-air traffic controller back when he was in the Service, which was how he got into that line. Mikos seemed sort of, I don’t know, disappointed when I told him that.”

“What, is our ghem lord a historical romantic?”

“Well, that’s another explanation,” she allowed.

“As opposed to…?”

“He’s a twit?” But her tone was by no means definitive.

“Mm,” said Jole, declining to commit to an opinion on this point yet. “I wonder if this supposed connection to Barrayar is why his superiors assigned him to this post? Or if it was the other way around—exploring his roots?”

“I…we didn’t get that far.”

“I also wonder if that’s why we find a ghem of his age and lord’s rank on the civilian side. Did that little Barrayaran blot in his genetics bar him from the military brotherhood?”

“We didn’t get that far, either. I wonder…if I shouldn’t have been quite so short with him.” She frowned in fresh doubt. “Maybe I should invite him back. To do something. Give him another chance.”

Jole shrugged noncommittally. “Some innocuous outdoor activity, perhaps? Gives him an opportunity to amend his lapses without committing you to any implied, ah, implications.” Although not, by preference, a night hunt for vampire balloons, despite the chance to demonstrate the Barrayaran cultural passion for fireworks; they were not in need of more brushfires. He bit back the impulse to pass on Cordelia’s tip about the laser pointers. Although he rather thought that he would pay money to see the Vicereine deploy that technique.

Vorinnis’s thick brows drew down. “I’ll have to think about that, sir.”

And then his coffee cup was empty and it was time to gather up the agendas and move on to the next materials-procurement meeting. Jole, glancing out the window at the light-drenched morning activities of the base, wondered how all his youthful dreams of military glory had come down to this. On the other hand, these current mundane labors might silently serve some future smoking sod who’d had glory dumped on him, who wouldn’t have to spare a single frantic thought for Where the hell can I land this thing? Invisible victories, eh.

Aral, he thought, would understand.

It was late afternoon when Cordelia called him on his office comconsole. He hit the key that would signal No Interruptions to Lieutenant Vorinnis in the outer office, and leaned back in his station chair. The look on Cordelia’s face over the vidplate was amicable enough, but her lips were compressed.

“What’s afoot, Your Excellency?”

“Not a great deal, unfortunately. I received an interim report from my people on your Plas-Dan friends.”

“Ah? Anything I can use?”

“I don’t yet see how. They were able to trace the, I guess you could call it a life-history, of your mixer. It was an order that was cancelled in the middle of its production run last year when the customer switched to a cheaper product. Plas-Dan couldn’t force them to take it, though they tried. So there it sat, a blockage in their overheated yard, till some bright soul figured out they could shift it onto you, solving the problem on their end. They think they’ve done nothing wrong. Or at least—alas—nothing actionable. We checked that out, too.”

Jole grimaced. “At least not any kind of action we’re allowed to take. Granted, suppliers have been foisting overpriced crap and spoiled goods onto their military customers since armies were invented. You would think they would be more cautious about who they were offending.”

“Given that you and I between us are the biggest on-going customers on the planet, yes. There are, hm, things we can do back to them, down the line. Their trick seems short-sighted.”

“We may be the biggest, but we aren’t necessarily the most profitable. A lot of civilian projects are willing and able to outbid us, or so I am lately told. If all of Plas-Dan’s production is tied up with our large, low-margin orders, they can’t squeeze in the plums.” He hesitated. “Also, I can’t help wondering if they’re trying to sabotage the move to Gridgrad. Or at least delay it.”

Cordelia tapped her lips, considering this. “Delay to what end?”

“The arrival of a new, more pliable viceroy?”

“Mm, but I haven’t discussed my retirement plans with anyone but you. I don’t see how anybody else could anticipate it.”

That was…flattering. If also slightly alarming. “You still haven’t told Gregor yet? Or Miles?”

“Gregor’s heads-up will be next. Once Aurelia passes the one-month mark safely, I figured. Eight months should be plenty of time for him to look around for my replacement. Or a bit longer, maybe—there’s room in the Palace for one baby, but I’d really like to be out of there before her first sister comes along. I don’t think Gregor’ll send me an idiot, do you? Nor some political remittance-man he just wants exiled from Vorbarr Sultana. Though he does need to corner a candidate both able plus willing.”

Jole smiled a little, though the vision of having to work with some other civilian boss than Cordelia opened at his feet like an unexpected sinkhole in the road. He hadn’t really thought ahead to that aspect, had he? “I think you may find it harder to let go than you imagine. You’ve had it your own way on Sergyar with very little Imperial oversight. I know the Komarran Imperial Councilor gets far closer attention.”

“Well, Komarr.” She shrugged. “Anyway, the point is, there is some wriggle-room in my nine-month goal. Maybe some time to break in the new Viceroy, before I run?”

Historically, Jole thought, such changes-of-command were usually more sharp-cut, reflected and reinforced by the elaborate formal hand-off ceremonies. And for good reasons. “You might not have to linger. If you’re on the same planet, they can always track you down for consults on the comconsole. You can run, but you can’t hide.”

Her lips twisted in new repugnance. “Hadn’t thought about that. Oh, lord, do you imagine they’ll still want speeches?”

He hid a laugh in a cough. “Probably. You’ll just have to learn to say no, Cordelia.”

“I say no to people all day long. They don’t like it one bit.”

“It’s true you’re at odds with a lot of the investment money and energy in Kareenburg, right now. You haven’t made a secret of your long-term plans for the place.”

She swiped her hands through her hair. “What part of ‘Let’s not site the planetary capital next to an active volcano’ do they find hard? This place should be a nature reserve. All right, maybe a historical park, later on. But then when that damned mountain next goes off it’ll only take out dozens or hundreds of people, not millions.”

“I’ve never disagreed,” he placated her. “I will be entirely willing to shift all of the downside Imperial Service headquarters and its economic impact to the new base—once it is built. An aim not aided by cost overruns before we even break ground, I must point out.” Hell, they were still building Gridgrad. Lack of infrastructure was an understatement.

Cordelia wrinkled her nose in doubt. “Is this overrun likely to prove fatal?”

“Not…really. I expect we’ll endure much worse before we’re done, unavoidably. And I’m fairly sure Plas-Dan realizes that as well as we do. It’s the sly calculation of this one that ticks me off.” He scowled.

“Is there any way you can recycle that stuff into some earlier project? At least recover some of your costs. Or break ground early?” She gave a frugal housewifely sniff. “Build the runway right now?”

“I wish. It’s not just materials, it’s labor.”

“You have an army. Of sorts.”

“And we’ll be using them, but untrained or trained-for-something-else grunt labor isn’t as useful as one would think. You still need experienced people to supervise, and to drill the crews to keep them from killing each other with the machinery. If you think safety is expensive, try pricing an accident, as the sign says. And it’s a multi-part puzzle much of which has to be assembled in strict order, and if a critical piece or person goes missing the whole parade grinds to a halt.” He pursed his lips in reflection. “And this is a relatively forgiving project, if a large one, in a forgiving environment. All my career I’ve ridden in jumpships, trusting them. And their manufacturers. I’m glad I didn’t know then what I know now. I’d have been paralyzed with terror.”

This won a laugh from her. “An empire built by the lowest bidders? I suppose that explains much.” She sighed. “I’m sorry I can’t be more helpful. If I get any clever ideas, I’ll let you know.” She gave him a half-salute and cut the com.

He blew out his breath and sat back. He’d almost wished for some clever evil plot, which they could then engage to out-clever. It could be surprisingly hard to counter Plain Stupid. Even by heroic measures.

As he tapped open his calendar to make a note, his eye fell on a familiar date coming up next week, and his heart seemed to clench cold to half its size. Three whole years already? Of course Cordelia would have seen it coming too; of course she would not have mentioned it aloud. As far as he knew there weren’t any further formal civic observances planned, thankfully. On that first mortal anniversary there had been a dedication and a speech, which he had attended in support of the widowed Vicereine, but they’d had no chance to get drunk together afterward. Last year, they’d been running on separate tracks—he’d been off on the scheduled inspection tour of the military wormhole stations out toward Escobar, she’d been downside dealing with the colony crisis du jour. There was no tradition for this, either public or private, between them. That makes us free, doesn’t it?

Perhaps, on that day, he might try to take her sailing…? No. Not on that day. He wanted a day where forgetting was possible. This weekend? That might not be too close.

And just what exactly do you mean by sailing, Oliver? Half his mouth tried to smile. Comfort sex, they had once proved, was no comfort at all; they’d just distressed each other to breaking. And for all of the too-rare-in-retrospect extraordinary experiences they’d shared with Aral—the unholy scheduling they had required!—sharing Aral, had they ever really made love to each other? Had she ever once indicated that might be her desire? Had that strange, subliminal, never-spoken-aloud little distance she’d always kept even when they had touched skin-to-skin been for her sake, or his, or his?

And if he dared ask for more now, would he be putting their long friendship to the test, or to the torch? His lips quirked. No, that was too melodramatic for his downright Cordelia, wasn’t it? She’d just say no, or, more probably, No, thank you, and if he was particularly unlucky that hour, treat him to one of her hilariously dreadful Betan-style psychological cold-packs for his bruises. His ridiculous sense of risk was not for the degree of danger, just for the weight of the bet.

He reached for his comconsole and tapped into his address file. He hadn’t used this one for several years, but there it still was…his fingers seemed to move of their own accord, the assured, easy phrases falling from them quite as if his small, cold heart were not pushing into his throat.

Hello, Sergeant Penney. Do you still have your place, and do you still rent your boats? If so, I’d like to book an exclusive for this weekend, as I would have a special guest…