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.
After a few minutes, he spoke aloud, half-consciously. “What the hell? This has to be a mistake!”
Vorinnis appeared in the doorway. “Sir? Did I make a mistake?” If so, she would be keen to correct it, her posture proclaimed.
“No, not…not really. Though you might have marked it…” Urgent? No. “For special attention,” he finished vaguely. “They’re decommissioning the Prince Serg!”
“Oh, yes, saw that one, sir.” She nodded. “But I though the mothballing protocols were considered routine…?”
Barrayaran warships tended to be not so much mothballed as hoarded. The eldest members of the General Staff were notorious for an attitude toward ordnance that resembled that of a famine survivor stashing foodstuffs, and perhaps for analogous reasons. Ships that most Nexus militaries would have sent directly to the scrapyards were instead tucked away to age a few more decades like dodgy food in the back of a refrigerator, out of sight, before the Staff—or more likely, its successors—was finally persuaded to give them up. Just such an elephant’s graveyard was part of Jole’s patch, hidden discreetly out of sight a couple of jumps into the blind wormhole that led nowhere. Someday, the Imperium would finally give in and declare it a museum.
The words were jerked from him nonetheless: “Yes, but the ship—it was the flagship of the Hegen Hub fleet. We still had civilian crews on board building it when Aral ordered it out of the space docks at Komarr. We tried to leave some of the crews on Pol, but there was no time. They were still installing and patching when the battle was over.” The memories came back in a spate. “It had the longest-range gravitational lance going, up to that time.”
“I believe it’s considered short nowadays,” said Vorinnis cautiously.
“Insanely short, now, certainly. The Cetagandans probably thought we were trying to ram them. At the time, it was bleeding edge, and a hell of a surprise to them.” He nodded in remembered satisfaction of the wild whoops going up in the tactics room, under the rank-revived-for-the-purpose Admiral Vorkosigan’s command. Aral’s last military command, as it had proved. He would have considered that the best part of the victory.
“But the Serg is over twenty years old!” Vorinnis protested blankly.
It was the newest ship to me. Back when he had been a lieutenant not that much older than Vorinnis. We were all agog for it. And now, for a tiny stretch of time, it would come under his command.
Most of its weapons and minor systems would have been removed, sealed, or shut down in Komarr dock. Whatever scant ceremonies were bestowed upon the event would have also been completed there. A skeleton crew would bring the skeleton ship to Sergyar. There were no formalities left for the Admiral of Sergyar Fleet to observe.
“Mm. Nevertheless…schedule me an upside inspection of the old beast. Just…in passing. Try to slot in a time that won’t delay either of us unduly.”
“Yes, sir.” Vorinnis withdrew, baffled but obedient.
Chapter Eight
On the grim anniversary that week that Jole had not marked on his calendar, he only saw Cordelia at a joint morning meeting between military and civil engineers to discuss Gridgrad infrastructure, or, more accurately, lack of infrastructure, and whose fault it was going to be. It ran long. In the hallway afterward, she touched his hand in passing, looking away; he caught hers and squeezed, and hers spasmed hard before opening again.