“That’s very conscientious.”
Haines shrugged. “Choose your ground, they say.” He opined after another brooding moment, “The only trouble with those uterine replicators is that they don’t do enough. Twenty! Why can’t some Betan boffin come up with one that keeps ’em in there till they’re twenty? I swear it would sell.” He sucked down the last of his iced tea, and crunched the ice.
As they walked back across the quadrangle for the afternoon rematch with B&L, Jole reflected that Cordelia seemed to be right about the secret parents’ club. He’d gained more insight into his general in the past hour than in fifty prior work-focused committee meetings. That Haines seemed willing to regard Jole as a…provisional prospective member?—seemed curiously encouraging. Though perhaps it was merely a case of misery-loves-company? Other people’s children had been a topic supremely uninteresting to Jole before now. He sensed those horizons shifting within his mind, opening up new vistas. Some of them were a little alarming.
Barrayaran warships did not carry families, and its far-flung stations, principally charged with protecting vital and potentially disputed wormholes, did not encourage dependents to occupy expensive upside residence. Military families therefore tended to collect in just such downside shuttleport support bases as were Haines’s patch. In his upside career, Jole had mostly dealt with such issues at a distance, as distractions to his techs and troops in their tasks. It was possible the ground general might have more to teach the space admiral than Jole would at first have thought.
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.