Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen Read online

  Cordelia’s eyes were growing a little strained as she continued to push out words toward their unknown destination. Jole rolled a finger to indicate she could probably wind up now. She did so, in the end not giving some Betan quasi-military salute, but just bowing mutely over her hands placed palm-to-palm. Blessing? Apology? Jole cut the vid.

  “Oh-God-I-am-so-tired-of-death,” she declared in one unpent huff of breath, whether to the thin air or to him he was not quite sure. She unscrunched her eyes and smoothed her grimace, sighed, and trod over to collect the vidcam and stow it, plus the emptied plastic bag, in her satchel. “Hardly fair to Reg’s sister to say so, I suppose. My own fault, for stirring up whatever memories she had. No good deed goes unpunished and all that.”

  He wanted to give her some more-substantial comfort in her reminded grief, or whatever this was, but physical intimacy was not the cure. They’d tried that once, in mutual desperation soon after Aral had gone, and it had ended in tears in all senses. She’d not seemed arousable, and his interest had soon flagged, weighted down by the distractions of the hour. It had been like two eunuchs trying to make love. (He wondered briefly how the bioengineered sexless Cetagandan ba made out, if at all. Did they even have anything like sex lives or drives?) In retrospect, he’d realized, he and Cordelia weren’t as practiced as it might have seemed. They’d never really made love to each other; they’d made love to or for Aral simultaneously. The ghost between them had still been far too palpable. They’d both sheered off, in a spirit of forgiveness rather than recrimination, canning comfort-sex as a bad idea. Or just badly timed…?

  He wondered what memories were passing before her eyes, in this serene spot that had once hosted horrors. Something, for she stared a moment at the marker and said, “Huh! You know, you and Reg look—looked—something alike. Not in the shape of your face, but the height and the hair. His was light like yours. I wonder why I never noticed that before. I suppose…if he’d lived, he might look something like the way you do now.” She squinted at him, as if trying a new face on his form the way one would swap out clothes on a sales-vid image. “He was about three years younger than me. Four decades younger, now, frozen in time that he is.” She added after another moment, gazing down at the burned and sanded soil, “I expect he’s just clean bones down there. We had nothing for a coffin, or even a shroud—we stole his clothes for the living.”

  How close had she been to her dead exec? Jole wondered. And if forty-five years could not supply recovery, what hope was there for him? “It’s been a long time.”

  She scrubbed her hand through her curls in her typical impatient gesture. “We’d burned the hair once. It was all dead and buried well enough, till this damned sand thing brought it back up. I’m not sure there is any such thing as recovery; there’s only forgetting. One just has to…keep forgetting till one slowly gets better at it.”

  Her echo of his thought briefly unnerved him. He said, “It’s as if people have to die twice, that.”

  “Yeah,” she said, and neither of them needed to say which people. She wandered over to Jole, and they strolled arm-in-arm around the glade for a few minutes, letting the beauty of the mountain seep in. She was not trembling, nor showing any other outward signs of old traumatic stress renewed. But her mouth was still tight.

  “Will you pick a home site on a mountain, for the view, when you retire?” he asked, watching her look out over the vastness.

  Her lips relaxed a little. “Not me. Miles is the one who is in love with mountains. He’d adore this spot. No, I want to be on the water, right on it. I have a plan…I ought to show you the place sometime, but we’d need at least a day away from Kayburg, maybe two.”

  “That sounds interesting,” he encouraged this line of thought. A day or two away from work, together, at some less fraught task than this forced memorial, with time to talk; that could be…good. He refused to give it any more specific label. Keep it open. What, for escape? He was hardly going anywhere.

  She smiled, as if shy to be making this confession. “Actually, it’s more than a plan. I bought a stretch of shoreline some years back just as a bit of personal speculation, since I thought we’d be returning to Barrayar. Well, and because I’d fallen in love with it at first sight. It’s on a lobe of this sort of leaf-shaped natural sea harbor on the east side of the second continent. Far from the capital, old or proposed.”

  Indeed, the very first settlements on that continent had been approved only a few years back. They could be no more than hardscrabble hamlets by now.

  “I told myself it was prudently parental, because who knew where-all in the empire Miles’s or Mark’s kids will end up? One of them might want to move here…And then, well, plans changed. Everything changed. Things do that.”

  “Yeah.” He gave her a cautious hug around the shoulders. Less self-consciously, he fancied, she rested her head against him for a moment. They still stood in angled sunlight at this altitude, but the plains below had gone formless and gray with the rising dusk.

  Something dull orange glinted down there; a thin plume of smoke rose from the camouflaging shadows up into the light. “Huh. Is that a fire?”

  Cordelia lifted her head and narrowed her eyes, too. “Seems to be. Brush fire? There are no settlements over that way.” She corrected after a moment, “That are registered.”

  “Perhaps we ought to swing past and check it out.” It was time they were moving on anyway. When the dusk climbed to this level, some of Sergyar’s less-savory native creatures would be waking up and looking for breakfast. Mostly they didn’t know what to make of humans, but there were a few evil-tempered brutes that would try anything, and if they spat it out or threw it up later, that wasn’t much of a consolation to the mauled.

  “Fire,” Cordelia recited, in her most Betan tone, “is a natural part of the ecosystem. But yeah.” She glanced in the direction of Kareenburg, its nimbus of lights visible at this distance even if its details were not. “It isn’t that far out of our way.”

  By unspoken mutual agreement, they turned and made for the lightflyer.

  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.”