Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen

Chapter Seven

Jole woke early the next morning in the old bed with Cordelia tucked up under his arm, bonelessly relaxed, her breath moving slowly with a sound too dainty to be called snoring, quite. He inhaled the warm smell of her hair, the slick of her skin, next to his face on the pillow. Elation, he decided, was the name for this emotion, excited and a little scared. In an infinite number of ways, he was glad he wasn’t a teenager anymore, but it was heartening to still find that wild western boy, buried yet alive down under his layers of age and experience.

Without the youthful insecurity, though. He was glad to have lost that part. Yesterday had been good. Far better than his first—in retrospect—highly impractical naughty nautical visions. So often, reality disappointed imagination; not this time. It was going to be all right. Or at least…all right for now. He kissed her awake and set about proving to them both that yesterday hadn’t been a fluke. She was all sleepy little cat noises and welcoming limbs, with the odd practical jink that was so utterly Cordelia.

Quite a good time later, she rolled off him, flopped down with a thump, and muttered, “Hungry.” He wanted to linger on in Shack Number One for, oh, the rest of the year, maybe. But their food cooler had only been stocked for a day, not this unplanned extension. Like an army in the Time of Isolation, this reduced them to scavenging for provisions from the nearby civilian population. Ma Penney, it turned out, was entirely prepared for this incursion, and they ended up picnicking on her front porch with boiled eggs, bread and butter, dried fruit, homemade coffeecakes, and strong, welcome tea with cream.

The morning was warm and windless, the surface of the lake like glass, mirroring the farther shore and the cloudless sky. One last sail before they departed was obviously off the menu. Far from being disappointed, Cordelia eagerly organized an excursion in that bizarre transparent canoe that had so caught her eye yesterday. Rykov and Penney helped them hoist it up off its sawhorses—it was surprisingly lightweight—and carry it to the water. As Rykov handed him down his paddle, Jole tried to read the armsman’s opinion of this new turn in his widowed liege lady’s life, but the man was typically expressionless. Which told its own tale, perhaps—if he’d approved, he might actually have smiled. It was not unknown for him to do so, now and then. On the other hand, if he’d seriously disapproved, there were a dozen ways he could have subtly interrupted or interfered before now. Rykov…well, Rykov was Cordelia’s chain-of-command, not Jole’s. She’d know how to handle him.

Cordelia had taken the rear seat, which gave her the best view through the hull and the task of steering. She aimed them left along the shore, up toward the quiet backwaters that headed this arm of the lake. Jole enjoyed the slowly moving shoreline, and the kiss of the sun on his face and through his thin shirt. A lone, red-furred hexaped drinking from the water raised its neckless head, froze, and stared at them, its four eyes unblinking. It clacked its triangular beak a few times, then scuttered away into the undergrowth. At the lake’s shallow end, the strange-colored water plants hissed over the hull as they slid through them. The little radials were out, floating about in iridescent clouds, a confetti-celebration of the morning.

“Oh, you have to see all this,” said Cordelia, the first words she had spoken for a while. “Turn around and take a look.”

Jole shipped his paddle, grasped the thwarts, and swung around with all the due care of a fully dressed man not wishing to convert his boat ride into a swim. The canoe was broad in the beam, however, and quite stable for its class. He stared down through the hull, and then, after a moment, slid to his knees for a closer view. And then to his hands and knees.

It was like being a bird looking down through an alien forest. He could count three…six, eight different sorts of little creatures moving through the shading stems. Even more shapes than the round and six-limbed models familiar from dry land, and remarkable subtle colors, reds and blues, silvery and orange, in stripes and spots and chevrons. A larger ovoid slid past, then jerked aside; its…meal?…escaped in a gold flash and a cloud of bronze smoke, and Jole laughed half in surprise, half in delight. “What are all those things? What are they called?” And why, for all the times he’d skimmed over this very lake, had he never noticed them before?

“No idea. It’s possible most of them don’t even have names, yet. We still don’t have enough people doing basic science surveys. Even after forty years, most of this planet is a mystery. What bio-people we have got are mostly tied up doing evaluations of the proposed settlement sites, looking for hazards. Finding ’em, too, sometimes. Though generally the first colonists do a bang-up job of that all on their own.” Cordelia vented a particularly vicereinal sigh.

Jole grinned, still staring downward. “This is like looking through some magic mirror in a kids’ story. It’s like there’s this whole other, secret Sergyar down there! That no one knows about!”

“Yep.” Her voice was warm, pleased with his pleasure.

After a few more minutes of staring down, Jole waved his arm vaguely about. “Take us around. Let’s see more.”

“Aye-aye, Admiral.”

She dipped her paddle, and more strange sights slid past. His nose was nearly pressed to the plastic, now. A skatagator—a small one, no longer than his arm—scooted by just below him, close enough to have touched had this hull been the un-barrier it seemed. It bumped up curiously, or at least, reactively, against the keel, then drifted off. The canoe brought him silently over a bed of stones very near the shore, where the shapes and colors of the living things changed yet again, then on another long line through the water-forest; then, at last, out into a deeper channel, where the light fell away into mystery once more.

He sat up blinking as if from a trance, wondering when the back of his neck had acquired a prickle that was going to become a cheery red sunburn, later. Cordelia was smiling with all the fascination he had just bestowed on this surprise Sergyar, except that she was looking at him. “What?” he said.

“You like this stuff.”

“Well…yeah.” He rolled his shoulders. “I’m just wondering how I missed it, in all the time I’ve spent on this water.”

“You only came out on windy days, when the water’s too ruffled to see through? You sensibly stuck to the deep sections?”

“I guess.”

She glanced at the sun, rising high and hot, and at the chrono on her wristcom. “I suppose we’d best break off. You want to take the rear seat, going home?”

“Sure.”

He slid himself down flat on his back, centered above the keel. She grasped both thwarts and edged over him, stopping to lower herself for a kiss in passing. “Not in a canoe, I suppose,” she murmured in regret.

“I think we both would have to be much younger.”

“Ha.” She grinned into his mouth. Her smile tasted…just fine.

With them both safely upright in their respective seats once more, he dug his paddle into the silken waters and aimed them back toward Penney’s Place. “I wonder if I could get one of these glass boats?”

She glanced over her shoulder, her still-lean muscles moving smoothly under her only-slightly-age-softened skin as she swung and dipped her paddle. “Ask Penney. Or his stepson. New Hassadar, didn’t he say?”

“Ah, yes.”

“I expect you could order a sailing hull, and have both kinds of boat at once.”

“Mm, perhaps. All-purpose tends to be no-purpose, sometimes. It would depend on one’s primary aim.”

“Since when has your primary aim when presented with a lake not been sailing?”

Since about an hour ago? That…was a thought too new to examine closely, lest it pop like one of the soap bubbles the radials were not. “Moot point anyway, till I get more time.”

“That is unfortunately true.”

Time, yeah. They’d pushed theirs to the limit, and probably past. Pull up your shorts, Cinderfella, the dance is over…for now. They matched their strokes and put their backs into a straighter, mid-lake course to the distant dock.

Settling up with Penney took Jole very little time; he added a generous bonus for the extension—and, tacitly, the discretion—which made the man shake his hand, grin, and invite him to bring his guests again. Rykov had already packed their meager belongings into the aircar. Jole and Cordelia slid into the rear compartment together once more, and pressed their faces to the canopy for a last fond look as Lake Serena fell away behind them.

Jole scooted closer and slid his arm around Cordelia’s shoulders, and she snuggled into him. She’d caught a rosy touch of sun across her nose and cheeks as well. They were both a little manky in yesterday’s clothes, after two days of varied holiday activities and no wash-up but a pitcher and basin and Penney’s outdoor showerhead, but it was a good camp-people smell.

“When shall we two meet again?” he inquired lightly.

She blinked. “I’m sure there are a couple of committee meetings on the calendar this week, but I don’t think that’s what you mean.”

“We two, not we ten, yeah.”

Her lips sneaked up. “Not unless we want to put on a show, no.”

“I think not.” But then his smile was swallowed in another thought. “How, uh…I suppose we’d better get our signals straight. How do you want to play this thing, publicly?”

“This new thing? New old thing?”

“New thing.” Though he could never wish the old thing away. His mind was drawn sideways despite himself. “Uh…do you still have your old Betan sex-toy collection?” Not all of which had been Betan, to be fair, but it was a useful and distancing shorthand.

“Mostly not. In a fit of something—depression, probably—I disposed of it a couple of years ago.” She glanced up at him through her eyelashes. “Do you still have yours?”

“Mostly not,” he admitted. “Same reason.”

“Huh.” It was not quite a laugh. “Maybe we can go catalog-shopping together some night.”

“Brilliant idea.” He kissed her curls, nestled under his nose. “When?”

“My schedule this week is packed.”

“On purpose?” he asked quietly.

“Yeah.”

He nodded. “Mine, too.” Though with the Gridgrad Base project swinging into high gear, he hadn’t needed to look for extra time-and-thought-absorbing tasks. Well, this was nothing new. Back in the old days, spontaneity had seldom been an option, though it had tended to be memorable when it occurred. “You’d think it easier to schedule a spot of privacy for two people than three.”

She frowned, although into space, not at him. “Shouldn’t think we’ll need that much privacy. What do you imagine us to be doing?”

“I…um…”

“If the word you are groping for is dating, Oliver, it’s not illegal, immoral, or fattening. Unless we go out to a great many meals together, I suppose.”

“Dating sounds…a bit adolescent, somehow.”

“Seeing each other?”

“Vague. Invites…unrestrained speculation.”

“Courting?”

“Too Time-of-Isolation.”

“Fucking?”

“Don’t you dare!”

“Well, screwing, if you want a politer utterance. I wasn’t actually planning to write a press release, you know.”

“I’m relieved.”

She gave him an amused but admonishing poke.

“I’m just trying to figure out how to describe this.” Aside from private, nobody’s-business judgments such as joyous or astounding, he supposed.

“Ambushed by your need for categories, again? Most categories are arbitrary, though I admit people do tend to find them reassuring.”

“I guess the category I’m groping for here is, what security level are we on?”

“Ah.” She rolled out from his arm and frowned, perhaps by chance, at the back of the piloting Rykov’s head, distorted through two thankfully sound-blocking canopies.

“I mean to be done with such things,” she said after a moment. “I grant you there was real need, once. Surely not now. I gave forty-three years to Barrayar, and I’m not asking for a refund, but the next forty-three years are mine. After that, Barrayar can negotiate.”

“You will never not be a public figure, Cordelia.”

Her fist swiped the air, a negating gesture. “No, I’m going to escape. They’ll all forget soon enough.” She settled back once more. “Though if you insist on going all Old-Barrayaran, I suppose we could tell people I’m your mistress.”

He snorted involuntarily. “Are you trying to get me strung up? Also, not to channel your nephew Ivan, but that’s just wrong.”

She raised her chin and considered this. “There’s a model for you. Alys and Simon. They weren’t, and then one day they’d always been. Very smooth transition, that.”

Lady Alys Vorpatril, Cordelia’s longtime friend and the Emperor’s diplomatic hostess for the better part of three decades, and Simon Illyan, Aral’s Chief of Imperial Security for most of that same period, had become a known romantic item very shortly after Illyan’s own medical retirement. “Had they always been? There was speculation, after.” If not, perhaps, unrestrained. Jole had known both of them well, earlier in Vorbarr Sultana in the course of his work for Aral and later on the couple’s few holiday visits to Sergyar, and even he wasn’t sure. That occluded view was nonreciprocal; Simon had certainly known everything about Jole. Once. They’d all moved on since then.

“Mm, let’s say they had valued each other very much for a very long time. But no, alas, they didn’t get started on anything worthy of proper salacious gossip—is that an oxymoron?—till after Alys no longer had to compete for Simon’s attention with his memory chip and the security of a three-planet empire. I thought they’d wasted a heartbreaking amount of potential happiness, but—not my decision, that one. At least they seem to be happy now.” Her lips curved in unselfconscious gladness for her old friends. Their old friends, truly.

She added after a little, “Why are you uncomfortable with being open? Just habit?”

“Safety.”

“Habit, in other words. Appealing to reason, instead—just for a change, you know—I would point out that open is safer. No one can make blackmail or scandal out of something that was never a secret in the first place.”

He thought she underestimated the ingenuity of persons determined to be hostile. And the degree to which she could be a target in her own right. Decades of standing next to Aral could do that to a person, he had to concede.

Her brows drew down. “Unless this is your oblique way of hinting that you feel this should be a one-time event? Cold feet?”

“No!” he said, panicked.

“Well, I didn’t think so…” Her eyes crinkled at him, and he subsided, slightly embarrassed. “To get back to your original question, then, let’s both keep an eye out for some coordinated opportunity next weekend, and I will undertake not to climb to the roof of the Viceroy’s Palace and shout to all of Kayburg, ‘Admiral Jole is a great lay!’”

“Thank you,” he said austerely. “I think.”

“And I shall in the meanwhile engage to be boringly discreet while we both mull on it.”

“I’m not saying you’re not right,” he protested weakly. “It’s just…”

“Conditioning. I know, love,” she sighed. “I know.”

Kayburg was coming up all too soon, rising on the horizon. They might get some snatches of time to talk later in the week, but probably not to kiss. He pulled her to him, and, till the town limits passed below, they used the time more profitably.

The vicereinal aircar dropped him off in front of his base quarters. He made an effort to transit the walkway into the building suitably sternly, like an officer just returned from a mission-critical weekend conference with his boss. As if looking forward to the queue of his duties on his comconsole, not back at the aircar lifting off with his wildest dreams.

Cordelia’s first priority upon hitting the Viceroy’s Palace was a shower, but after that the pile-up on her comconsole absorbed her attention till dinnertime. Didn’t anyone else on Sergyar ever take the bloody weekend off? She ordered sandwiches at her desk when the tasks overran the dinner hour; they were brought not by Frieda, but by Ryk. He laid out the plates and her tea with his usual military precision, and then stood back and cleared his throat in the time-honored signal meaning, I am about to tell you something you don’t want to hear.

“Yes, Ryk?” She bit proactively into her first sandwich.

“Begging your pardon, milady, but I thought you might like to know that the lieutenant of your ImpSec security detail has laid a formal protest before his boss, asserting that Admiral Jole’s ImpSec training is too out-of-date to make him a substitute for a proper perimeter.”

“The little twerp!” said Cordelia, spitting a few crumbs. She rounded them up and put them more daintily back on her plate while she chewed this through. Her small crew of ImpSec Palace guards, arriving from home very excited to be guarding the Vicereine of Sergyar, were usually disappointed to discover their duties more nearly resembled something that could have been done by any hired commercial security service. Cheaper. The senior-most officers of ImpSec-Sergyar tended to be more focused on the neighbors—Cetaganda, Escobar, and transiting commercial ships of other flags—and upside station and wormhole security, and mostly dealt with Oliver. Who, having been trained on and by Simon Illyan, back in the day, handled it all with his usual unruffled efficiency, and seldom troubled Cordelia with anything but a short and accurate précis.

“I strongly disagree,” she said, when she’d sluiced down her bite with a swallow of tea. “And I am seriously annoyed. Oliver was judged fit to be last-man-standing next to Aral when that kid was still in diapers!” Her lower lip stuck out. “And he might say the same of you, for that matter. Does he include you in that…assertion?”

“No, milady, but only because he hasn’t thought of it. Naturally, I did not point it out.”

“I commend your restraint.”

He shrugged. “Seemed prudent.”

She supposed he was right. For all of Aral’s public life, which was nearly all the time she’d been married to him, his score of liveried retainers sworn to him as Count Vorkosigan had needed to work closely with the Imperial security appertaining from his wider duties. Cannily rendered smoother by Aral frequently recruiting his armsmen from Dendarii-district-born ImpSec veterans—Ryk was just such a one, who’d retired a twenty-year man and gone on into his Count’s personal service almost two decades ago. But ImpSec and the armsmen had always been two separate chains of command, with all the tension and arcane communication protocols that entailed.

Rykov’s official—and personal—loyalty was to the Dowager Countess Vorkosigan, not to the Vicereine of Sergyar. Well, now to Count Miles, she supposed, technically. But Ryk, among the armsmen that Aral had hauled along when he was appointed viceroy, had seldom worked with Miles, and barely knew him. Ryk had brought his wife and half-grown children in the baggage train; the four youths had adapted with alacrity to Sergyar, and were now all pursuing their adult lives here. Which was why Ryk and Ma Ryk had petitioned to return with the widowed Cordelia, a boon that Miles had readily granted upon his mother’s advice.

Ryk had first arrived at Vorkosigan House in Vorbarr Sultana at about the midpoint of Aral’s prime ministership, when Oliver was already a fixture. He had been discreetly introduced to the special security arrangements occasioned by the Vorkosigans’ three-sided marriage—because even then, she’d recognized Oliver as her co-spouse in all but name, though neither he nor Aral would ever have used the Betan term—by his armsman-commander and brother-armsmen of the day. Whatever Old-Barrayaran shock Rykov had felt had never been displayed to her, at least, and he’d settled into the household’s routine quickly. Everyone had had bigger things to worry about, back then.

“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.