Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen (9 page)

He was also getting a better sense of why Cordelia had been so insistent about those next-of-kin forms. Barrayaran history was full of details about what Aral had been doing during the first few years of the regency, which were also the first few years of his marriage—yet except for the shock of her cutting short the Pretender’s War by cutting short the Pretender, it was mostly silent about Cordelia. But what she’d mainly been occupied with had been infant Miles, during a period when it had been medically uncertain if the child would live. When she’d sent Aral off, for example, to that lethal slugging match for the Rho Cetan-route wormholes that was later dubbed the Third Cetagandan War, she’d been left to go it alone, still a stranger-sojourner on her adopted world—her father-in-law Count Piotr being more hazard than help at that point. What would that whole time have been like for Aral if there
hadn’t
been a Cordelia to entrust his beloved boy to?

Jole suspected that Miles might not have been the only casualty.

One expected the advent of children to rearrange one’s future. No one had told Jole that they could also rearrange one’s
past
. It seemed an extraordinary reach to have, for a set of boys who weren’t even blastospheres yet. He shook his head and followed Haines into the Admin building.

* * *

A few days later, Jole powered down his personal lightflyer on the pavement in front of the Viceroy’s Palace and slid out. Before he could step toward the front door, though, it opened partway, and Cordelia slipped through in a vaguely furtive manner. She was dressed for the backcountry in a sage-green T-shirt, sturdy tan trousers, and boots, and carried a canvas satchel. She waved at him and hurried over; he opened the passenger-side door and saw her safely within, then returned to the pilot’s seat.

“Away, fly away, before somebody else catches up to me with
Just one more thing, Your Excellency
…
!
”

“At your command, Vicereine.” Jole grinned and popped them into the air. “Where are we headed on our mystery errand, might I ask?”

“Mount Rosemont. I have the exact coordinates for when we get closer.”

Jole nodded and dutifully banked the lightflyer around. Mount Rosemont lay about two hundred kilometers to the southeast, and was the largest and most spectacular volcanic mountain of the scattered chain anchored by Kareenburg’s hollowed-out peak. One didn’t need coordinates to find it; even at this modest altitude he could see it, a broad and symmetrical shape on the horizon, its snowcapped top glowing like a beacon in the westering light of late afternoon.

“Thank you
so much
for the lift,” Cordelia added. “I really wanted some company for this errand. And not just to hold the vidcam.”

He was to hold a vidcam? Curious. “I thought you had plenty of company. Rykov, the ImpSec crew, your entire staff…?” In fact, she usually needed to be quite firm to successfully shed them.

She grimaced. “Not the right kind of company.”

“And I am?” Heartening notion.

She nodded, and leaned her head against the seatback in a gesture not, he thought, entirely of physical weariness. Kareenburg rapidly fell away behind them, and the outlying settlements strung along the watercourses passed as well. All signs of invading humanity soon vanished into the level red scrublands of the semi-desert.

“So…what’s in the satchel?” he tried, when she did not at once go on.

She grunted an almost-laugh, and burrowed her hand inside to lift out a sealed plastic bag containing about a kilogram of…?

“Sand,” she answered his raised eyebrows.

“Sand?”

“Betan sand. It arrived here by jump-transit a couple of days ago, but this is the first I’ve been able to break away.” She added after a second, “Have you had your dinner yet? I didn’t think to ask.” Which suggested just what part of her packed schedule she’d sacrificed to create this break.

“No, but I have ration bars in the boot along with the medkit, if we don’t get back in time for a civilized meal.” And if they did, might he persuade her to join him? Somewhere better than the officers’ mess, not that Kareenburg offered any wide array of choices.

She chuckled. “You would. Always prepared, Oliver. I suppose it’s habit by now.”

“Pretty much,” he conceded. “So. Sergyar has sand.” In a bewildering array of types and grades, judging by his recent experiences with the contractors. “Why are we importing it from Beta Colony?”

“It was sent.” She sighed. “I know you know something about how Aral and I first met, right here on Sergyar? Except it wasn’t named Sergyar yet. In my Survey log it was only an alphanumeric string and a stunning discovery.”

He nodded in a way that he hoped would not discourage her from going on. Jole had heard the tale several times, from Aral and from her, somewhat differently remembered; he never tired of the repeats, though, since some odd new detail seemed to pop up in every version. Not quite
How I met your mother
, but still personally riveting.

Aral’s version opened with him standing guard on the invasion-supply cache as captain of his old cruiser the
General Vorkraft
, in distant exile from Barrayaran HQ, Aral’s career being in deep political eclipse just then. He’d taken his ship on a scheduled patrol out through the short chain of wormholes leading toward Escobar, then returned to his orbital watch only to find that a Betan Astronomical Survey vessel had slipped in by another route and blithely set up shop while his back was turned. His attempt to peacefully, if firmly, intern the interloping Betans had been thoroughly botched by a group of politically motivated mutineers, who’d seized the opportunity to stage their coup when Aral had led a team downside to capture the Betan survey party led by Cordelia. Things had gone rapidly to hell thereafter, in both versions, though Cordelia’s usually included the most cutting editorial asides. How the pair of them, equally if differently abandoned by the ships they’d commanded, had teamed up to recapture the
General Vorkraft
and save Aral’s life and subsequent spectacular career was a legend by now. And, like most legends, distorted in the public retelling.

“My second-in-command, Reg Rosemont, was shot dead in that first melee—nerve disruptor, he never had a chance. I always think of him as the first casualty of the Barrayar-Escobar War. Well, him and Truth.”

Truth is always War’s first victim
, the old saying went. And Jole had reason to suspect that was…truer than usual, for that particular war. He nodded.

“Burying him before we left our Survey campsite was practically the first task Aral and I ever shared. Reg was our xeno-geologist—I think I told you that once—brilliant fellow. God, the waste of it all. Anyway, when we were officially slotting in names to go along with the grid numbers for all the mountains last year, I held out for renaming HJ-21 after him. It seemed…I don’t know. Something. I sure as hell wasn’t going to let them name anything else after Prince Serg.”

“Mm,” said Jole. Vorbarr Sultana politics had been a snake pit in Serg’s era, for all that the crown prince had died heroically—and, it seemed, luckily for the empire—at Escobar. Jole had once remarked to Aral that he was glad his own career hadn’t come along till much later. Aral had just said,
So am I
.

“So, I told the Barrayaran Embassy on Beta to pass that news along to whatever surviving family of Reg’s they could locate, which they dutifully did. In consequence, a couple of days ago, this”—she lifted the satchel—“turned up in the Palace mail, along with a letter from Reg’s sister. I think I met her once…twice? She was apparently the only family member who still remembered him much. Forty-five years ago, after all. There being no plans to disinter poor Reg and ship his remains to Beta, she thought this might be the next best thing—bring a little Betan soil to him. She asked me to put it on his grave. I thought we could get a vid of me doing so, and send it back to her.” She frowned down at the satchel in her lap, reverting to her old Betan Survey mode by adding, “It’s been sterilized for microorganisms, of course.”

“And she taps the Vicereine of Sergyar for this?”

“No, she taps Reg’s old commanding officer, I think.”

“That’s…nearly Barrayaran. Betan feudal ties?”

“Something like. Or whatever one can get, out of a generally uncaring and forgetful world.”

An updraft from a warm patch of ground below lifted the flyer with a lurch. Jole overrode the correctors before they dropped the flyer and its passengers back to the set course with undue jaw-clopping haste. Rising with the thermal was a faint, spiraling cloud: a flock of tiny radials, each one no bigger than a fingertip, shimmering like the soap bubbles they resembled. Unfortunately, as they splattered noisily against the canopy of a flyer plowing through them at several hundred kilometers an hour, they popped less like soap and more like snot. Jole grimaced and turned on the canopy sonics; the slime slithered away to the sides and was blown off.

This species of radial occupied somewhat the niche of parasitic insects, being blood-sucking biters of the local fauna; but being also very slow moving, they were easy for humans to brush away from their skin. Slapping them in place was not recommended, as the ensuing residue was more corrosive than the original bite would have been. He would have to hose down his lightflyer promptly when they got back to Kareenburg. “Gah!”

Cordelia grinned sideways at him. “I admit, I do not love those things myself. But I’d rather run into the little ones than the big ones.”

Which had an alarming tendency to not so much squash as explode. “Really. Any side bets as to which Sergyaran species will be the first to go extinct under their new human management?”

“No takers, I’m afraid.” She added after a reflective moment, “People petition for plasma arcs to defend themselves, but really, that’s overkill. Not at all sporting, either. You can take one of those big suckers out with a burning stick.” She added after another moment, “If you don’t object to setting your hair on fire.” And, after a longer, more meditative pause, “Or one can use a laser pointer.”

Jole bit back a smile. “Laser pointer? Really? How would you know this, Cordelia?”

“It was an experiment,” she returned, a bit primly.

“In biology, or sport?”

“Mm, some of both. I was doing the biology. Aral was considering the sporting aspects. Granted, he didn’t love the bloated little vampires either.”

The ground was starting to rise below them, changing from scrubland to scattered forest to solid forest as the altitude wrung more water out of the air. Cordelia supplied the exact coordinates, and the lightflyer beat upslope and partway around the mountain to a level where the forest began to again grow patchy and stunted, this time from the night chill of the heights.

“Have you been up here before? I mean, since that first time,” Jole inquired, looking for a safe landing zone in the spot that Cordelia and his nav system agreed looked about right. There was a nasty steep ravine to avoid, and uneven sloping ground, and lightflyer-grabbing branches from what passed for the Sergyaran version of trees. They shared the same generally fractal design as both Old Earth and Barrayaran trees, anyway, tending here to muted gray-green color schemes.

“Once, soon after we were assigned to Sergyar. We came up and burned a Barrayaran death-offering, by way of propitiation to whatever gods or ghosts haunt this place. The marker was still there all right back then…thirteen years ago, I suppose. But the ground could have subsided or shifted since, or animals, or…well, we’ll see.”

“Hm.” Glad he wasn’t trying to do this after dark, Jole found an opening and eased the lightflyer down to a reasonably level landing. He checked his sidearm—a mere stunner, but sufficient to drop most of Sergyar’s more hazardous wildlife without further argument—and joined Cordelia in the undergrowth. She peered around and began walking back and forth; she was soon puffing in the thin air. Not being entirely sure of what signs she was seeking, Jole followed along, sparing a look-round for the sake of wider situational awareness. The place seemed profoundly peaceful.

“Ah,” said Cordelia at last. She stopped before what was plainly a standard-issue Barrayaran military grave marker from three or four decades back, the corrosion-proof metal deeply incised with Rosemont’s full name, rank, numbers and dates. It had been part-camouflaged by a few saplings crowding it, taller than Jole. Cordelia scowled at them, then unshipped her own sidearm—a more robust plasma arc—set it to narrow beam, and unceremoniously nipped them off at ground level and tossed them out of the way. She then set the arc to wide beam, low power, and circled the marker, clearing a broader patch in a controlled burn. It looked darkly tidy when she finished, as if the grave had been tended all along.

She pulled a vidcam from one of her trouser pockets and handed it to Jole. “I guess I’ll wing this. Be sure to get a good close-up of the marker, and some pans around at the view. If we flub, we can do it again, although…well, I’ll try not to flub.” Taking the bag of sand in her hands, she took up a stance by the marker and lifted her chin, her face settling into that tilted expression one took on when recording a message to a person invisible except in the mind’s eye. Jole fiddled with the viewfinder—why did they have to make the controls so tiny these days?—and then nodded for her to begin.

“Hello, Jaceta. As you can see, I received your message and your gift safely.” She held up the sandbag. “I’m standing here by Reg’s grave at the three-thousand-meter level of Mount Rosemont.” She paused while Jole moved in to get some good shots of the marker. “As you can also see, it is a very beautiful spot.” No lie, that; he panned in turn up at the shoulders of the great peak looming in the middle distance, then slowly wheeled to take in the whole wide plain below. For good measure, he added a few close shots of the most attractive of the low-growing native plants nearby that had escaped Cordelia’s cleanup. He returned the focus to her and motioned her to continue, which she did, producing a few kindly, flattering reminiscences of the deceased officer, and then slowly scattering the sand as if it were the seeds of some precious healing balm. She’d certainly had more than enough practice speaking at memorials these last three years. Presumably concerned lest the ceremony seem too brusque, she went on with what he recognized as a modified version of her Sergyar sales pitch, which he illustrated with a few more pans around at the present lovely scene. If one had to die and be buried, it all seemed to imply, this spot on Sergyar was a fine and private place to do so. Jole couldn’t disagree.