“If Chief Illyan had spotted anything critical, he would certainly have reported it. Though maybe not on my level…”
Simon might have, at that. But to whom? So why aren’t I in that need-to-know loop? I bloody need to know! “Ask around,” Ivan suggested, shrugging. “Ah, excuse me. Admiral Desplains is paging me. Gotta go.”
Raudsepp, reluctantly, parted with him for now. That line about Desplains would have been a good lie for cutting himself loose, Ivan thought, if only it had been a lie. Wasted for now, but perhaps he could file it for future reference. He turned to hastily muster the requested files. Another, God spare Ops, interdepartmental meeting in forty minutes. Wormhole jump station Logistics versus Budget amp; Accounting with spreadsheets at twenty paces at dawn, aiming to kill unless someone-and Ivan knew just what someone would be expected to pitch in-could persuade them to delope. He rose to report to the inner office.
Tej and Rish arrived, yawning, at the Arqua hotel suite to find everyone else up betimes. Even, it appeared, Byerly, just exiting in tow of Jet, who had drafted him for a local guide. By spared Rish a grimace of a smile; she spared him a grimace of one back. Tej thought, Why don’t you two just kiss each other and get it over with? They so obviously wished to. But they exchanged greetings and farewells in nearly the same breaths, and parted at the lift tubes both looking back over their shoulders in dissatisfied ways.
Inside the suite-should she start thinking of it as House Cordonah HQ in Exile? — everyone seemed to be pursuing a different project at a different comconsole terminal, Star and Pearl at one, Pidge and Em at another, Dada at yet a third. Grandmama sat in the center and regarded it all benignly.
The Baronne greeted her directly with “Tej! Do I understand correctly that you can drive in Vorbarr Sultana?”
“Yes…?”
“Excellent. We will have work for you shortly. Don’t run off. Rish, Star needs you.”
Rish, with another grimace, went off to join the little subcommittee at Star’s terminal in the next room.
“But I don’t have a vehicle.” Ivan had taken his sporty groundcar to work, and besides, it would only hold one other Arqua at a time. Although that might not be a disadvantage.
“Then you can also take charge of obtaining rentals as needed. Good, I had been wondering what to do with you.”
As if Tej were a spare puzzle piece that didn’t fit in anywhere, perhaps accidentally included from another set. And here came another. Amiri wandered in with a coffee cup in his hand, looking vaguely at a loss, but he brightened when he saw Tej.
“Is there more of that?” asked Tej, nodding at the coffee.
“Yes, right this way…” He guided her to the credenza.
“What’s Jet up to? I saw him going out with By.” She poured, added cream, and drank. Mere hotel coffee, but the cream had that extraordinary mouth-filling taste that told of a real organic origin, not from a biovat like Station dairy products. Having now seen pictures of the organic origin, Tej wasn’t sure she wanted to think too closely about it, but she had to admit that the result was amazing.
“Decoy. Sort of. Whichever of us Vorrutyer is with, or who is with Vorrutyer, is supposed to switch to decoy mode. With eleven of us, Dada figures we can keep him occupied. What was Rish thinking, to pick him up?”
Tej, remembering the exchange of scents at that first historic meeting in Ivan’s Komarr flat, wasn’t sure that thinking had had as much to do with it as either Byerly or Rish would likely claim. “He found us first, really. But it was a different situation then. We were both looking for cover.”
“Not the way I should have preferred my sisters to obtain it, but done’s done I guess. Gods, Tej!” He shook his head, his crisp hair moving with it. “I’m so relieved the Baronne and Dada have found you two. Maybe, if they can bring off this damned treasure hunt, they’ll let me go back to the clinic on Escobar.”
“Is that what you want?”
“Of course it is. I was just getting my teeth into my first big post-doc project. It broke my heart to be dragged away. I’d thought I was done with House Cordonah and all its works, I thought I’d made my escape. All right, I can understand that Dada and the Baronne have just had this big scare, and why they want to keep us all collected under their eyes for a time, but I do not want to be drafted as a replacement heir for Eric. Not only would either Star or Pidge be better, they’d want it.”
Tej wrinkled her nose, and lowered her voice. “I’m not sure of the dynamics of that. Star and Pidge both accepted Eric as heir. Do you think either of them would accept the other?”
Amiri looked as if he took the point. “Well…in either case, it wouldn’t be my problem.” He drank again.
“How long have the rest of you known about the treasure hunt?” Tej asked.
“Just since last night. After we got back from Lady Vorpatril’s. Dada and Grandmama and the Baronne called a family meeting and told us the new scheme. They’d really kept it tight before then-I suppose because they weren’t sure yet that the bio-bunker-thing would still be here. I thought we were just coming here to get you two, and I’d wondered why we all had to be dragged five wormhole jumps when we could have just sent one rep. And much more discreetly.”
Tej wondered what she and Rish would have done if just one Arqua had turned up, demanding they depart at once. Might have depended on which one…
“Why did they haul you along?” Tej asked.
“That was the big mystery to me, too, till last night. They seem to have some idea of fencing any interesting old Cetagandan bio-stuff out through Lily Durona. I wonder if they’d told her about it all? That would explain why she was so ready to let me go, at least. Makes me feel a bit better.” Amiri paused, then countered, “How long have you known?”
“Only since yesterday afternoon, when Rish was briefing the rest of you on local terrain. But did they tell you what the Barrayarans have planted on top of Grandmama’s old place?”
“Yeah, that sounded a bit…challenging. But Dada seemed to think he had it all under control.” An uncertain tone entered Amiri’s voice. Dada and the Baronne had presumably thought they’d had Cordonah Station under control, once, too.
Amiri turned to Tej with more urgency. “But you have to help make sure this comes off, Tej, you have to. My whole life is riding on it.”
What about my whole life? Tej stemmed the rebellious thought. Of course Amiri’s life was more important. Amiri did things. Tej, as her family never seemed to tire of pointing out, didn’t. She sighed. “I’ll try, Amiri.”
“Don’t just try, do,” he urged. “It’s really important to me. To everybody, really, but especially to me.”
“Yes, yes…” said Tej, distracted. I was prepared to jump off a damned balcony for you. Shouldn’t that be enough? She was beginning to rethink that balcony business. True, it had been as much to escape the exhaustion and the being-afraid-all-the-time as it had been for imagined family heroism. None of which had been a problem since…since Ivan Xav, really. He was not the balcony type.
I like that in a man. She was just beginning to realize how much.
The Baronne was calling her away to consult on local transportation logistics with Dada. She sighed and trudged off to do her Arqua duty.
Ivan woke, not as late as he’d have liked, on his first day off after the Invasion of the Arquas to an unexpectedly empty bed. A gulping moment of panic was quelled, as he sat up, by the sound of voices from the next room and someone rattling around in the bathroom.
Ivan had needed to work yesterday; Tej had spent all the long day and into the evening driving assorted Arquas around town on mysterious errands which she’d barely talked about. From years of practice with his cousin, Ivan could recognize evasion both when he heard it, and when he didn’t hear it. He wasn’t reassured by either mode. He’d held her attention briefly with Raudsepp’s account of the intercepted bounty hunters, which she’d assured him she would pass on to her folks, but with unfeigned tiredness she had slipped- away, perhaps? — into sleep shortly thereafter.