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.”
“That seems fairly appropriate,” Cordelia said cautiously.
“Yes, except they’re my quarters.” His face scrunched in dismay, presumably at the vision of a week of his evenings locked up in the exclusive company of a surly distraught teenager. “Damn but I wish her mother would come out.” He shook his head and trudged off for the back door of the guard station.
Cordelia and Oliver, too, went inside. At this point Cordelia figured her sole reason for still being there was to make sure Lon ghem Navitt made it back to his people without incident, so the two of them sat back out of the way while the rest of the variously upset parents trailed in to retrieve their erring offspring. Cordelia had the subliminal impression that the Kayburg guardsmen didn’t get overly exercised about anything that didn’t involve extracting actual dead bodies from hard-to-reach places, such as the insides of smashed lightflyers or sick skatagators. Nonetheless, they performed a pretty good Stern-And-Grim to put the wind up all concerned, and with luck spare themselves a repeat of this event. They only threatened, but did not invoke, any formal charges—it may have helped that one of the town boys was the son of a woman who clerked for the guard station.
Just as Cordelia was slipping over from seriously hungry to savagely starving, and starting to wonder if the Cetagandan consul was planning to leave his son overnight in jail for a life-lesson, the cultural attaché Lord ghem Soren arrived, in the same formal face paint and attire he’d worn to her garden party last week. He smelled of strange esters—perfumes, inebriants? in any case, not Barrayaran-style alcoholic beverages—and looked faintly harassed. The hand-off hit a snag when it was determined that he was not Lon’s actual parent.
Cordelia intervened smoothly, assuring the dubious guard sergeant that as an officer of the consulate, ghem Soren constituted a legal authority sufficient to the purpose.
“Where are Lord and Lady ghem Navitt tonight, Lord ghem Soren?” Cordelia inquired easily.
“Hosting a moon-poetry party at the consulate, Your Excellency. An autumn observance at the Celestial Garden on Eta Ceta, which, uh, it is there now. Autumn. They couldn’t leave the ceremony in the middle, so they sent me.”
Did that mark ghem Soren as a trusted confidant, or low man on the duty roster? The latter, Cordelia decided, which simultaneously explained his otherwise after-hours aroma. Oliver looked enlightened and amused. Bean Plant No. 3 made no objection, seeming more relieved than disappointed at this substitution. In any case, the pair traipsed out again with as little further interaction with the local authorities as ghem Soren could manage.
It was now officially Bloody Late, and Cordelia still had a string of report files to read before her morning meetings. She let Oliver escort her up the main street with no more than the briefest detour through an all-night sandwich shop, one of the few places still open in downtown Kayburg on this dull midweek night. They walked on toward the Viceroy’s Palace munching their sandwiches out of their wrappings. At the corner of the side street that led to Kayross, she balled up the paper in her hand, dropped it in a trash receptacle, and hesitated, staring down toward the half-lit facade of the replicator clinic.
Oliver followed her glance, and gave her a lopsided smile. “Did you want to stop in and see Aurelia?”
“They keep a night staff, but it isn’t really visiting hours.”
“I’m sure they’d make an exception for you.”
“I’m sure they would, too. But I shouldn’t impose. And there really isn’t that much to see even on the magnifying monitor yet. People are pretty blobby at this stage.”
Oliver wasn’t buying her nonchalance. Was she that transparent, or was he just being Oliver? “You still want.”
“Well…yes.”
He turned her firmly leftward. “It’s been a long day, and tomorrow is another one. Grab your treat while you can.”
“Are you thinking of keeping me in a good mood for the sake of my oppressed subordinates?” She took his arm as they started off again.
“Maybe it’s enlightened self-interest, then.”
“Ha.”