Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen (15 page)

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.