Cordelia blinked. Now it was her turn for a cautious tone. “Lake Serena rumors?”
“From your repeated inspection trips out there with Admiral Jole, recently. There are several. First is that it is being planned as a new development site, perhaps for a military installation. It’s started a flurry of land speculation out in that sector—you can probably look for a spate of proposals submitted to the Office soon.”
“Two of them popped up on my comconsole this morning,” Ivy confirmed this. “I wondered where they were coming from.” She regarded Cordelia with alert interest.
We were just taking some time off! Cordelia converted this indignant protest into a leading, “Hm, and…?”
“Next, that some new hazard has been discovered out that way. Biological or volcanic. The Kareenburg development community has been denying that one as loudly as they can.”
“Ah, well, they would. I think we can leave them to get on with it. Anything else?”
“Oh, that Lake Serena has been discovered to have a carbon dioxide inversion zone, like that weird lake south of Mount Stewart.”
Cordelia had managed to get that one named Lake Lethal on the map, in hopes of discouraging settlers. An utterly fascinating place, scientifically speaking. Lethal was a deep lake with volcanic gas seepage under it. The weight of the water, above, acted like a cap on a soda water bottle, trapping the gas until, every fifty or a hundred years, some chain reaction of a disturbance released it all at once. The colorless, odorless, heavy gas then erupted from the water and spread through the low places nearby, asphyxiating any animal life that unluckily chanced to be present. It was especially dangerous in windless conditions.
“Good grief, Serena is much too shallow for that!”
“Do you want me to issue a denial to that effect?”
“Lord, no. The conspiracy theorists would go wild, and we’d never hear the end of it. Let the science boffins at the university correct them. Or try to correct them.” Sergyar’s sole university was, well, not quite as primitive as Penney’s Shack One, but it certainly was trying hard to get big education out of tiny budgets. Cordelia slung it what support she could. “Dignified silence, that’s the ticket.”
Blaise, with a kicked-puppy look, stopped mentally writing a bulletin. “What was it all about, then? Is it secret?”
“Not at all. Admiral Jole very kindly…took me sailing. It’s something we used to enjoy with Aral, you know. Because a nice day off outdoors helps keep people sane and happy. So I can come back to a week of this”—a vague wave around took in the Viceroy’s Office as an entity as well as a building—“and not be driven as mad as Emperor Yuri. Think of it as…nautical therapy, or something.” We were dating, dammit! She wasn’t sure whether she was relieved or piqued that this didn’t seem to be part of the gossip.
Ivy shot her a curious look, but then it was time to break things up and go tend to the water-fight. Cordelia only wished it could be with real water, and not with words. More words.
Chapter Nine
Dinner at the terrace restaurant followed by a confidential conference at the Viceroy’s Palace had worked so well the prior week, they repeated it midweek. Worked again, Jole thought, swimming muzzily up out of his sex-stunned haze to find a warm, naked Cordelia tucked up under his arm. He lifted his head to find her eyes slitted open, silvery-gray in the night-gleam, not asleep but just as obviously not going anywhere in particular right now. He squinted past her hair, tickling his nose, at the bedside chrono, and made a faint disgruntled noise.
“Hm?” Cordelia inquired, still not moving.
“Should get up an’ go. Doan’ wanna.”
“Don’t, then.” She backed a little more firmly into him.
“Mm…” He sighed, thinking of his empty bed back in his base apartment, and how small and cold the place had grown of late. “Should.”
“See, there’s another advantage to a public relationship. You could stay here all night. Get more sleep. Be fresher for work in the morning.”
“Temptress. You know a man’s susceptibilities, don’t you.”
She smiled sleepily. “Only my men.”
He grinned into her hair and kissed the top of her head. “Lake Serena again this weekend?”
Her lips pursed in doubt. “It has been brought to my attention that maybe we ought to vary our pattern. Our repeated trips out there seem to have triggered a spate of speculation, and not the sort I would have thought. Apparently, nobody under thirty thinks anyone over fifty has sex, so the explanations, while inventive, are bound to lead people astray.”
He returned a disappointed mm. Just having a pattern seemed a nice change. He could imagine this one repeating for quite a long time before he became bored with it. Months at least. Maybe years. A regular schedule that no one had to fret about. Nevertheless…
“We’ll have to vary the pattern anyway. My upside rotation starts next week.” An utterly routine inspection tour of the wormhole stations guarding the two blank-or-might-as-well-be wormholes. This supervisory task had slipped from exciting to dull with repetition, but not nearly as dull as the station-keeping duty itself. The brief, artificial excitement of their sector commander’s personal attention was about the only validation the fellows manning the wormhole forts ever received, and while boring was good on a space station, considering the alternatives, there were morale issues to consider. And, once in a great while, a real problem to uncover, preemptively making sure no one literally died of boredom. These inspections were worthwhile on several levels; Jole had never resented them before.
It was Cordelia’s turn to make a disappointed noise. “Ah, that’s right.” She rolled over; Jole obligingly turned on his back and let her rearrange herself with her head on his shoulder, her arm draped possessively over his chest. “I suppose vid sex is right out. I can’t see how it would work with several light-hours of time delay, anyway.”
Jole sniggered. “No. Not that I wouldn’t love to see that, mind you.”
“You, ImpSec, anyone on the tightbeam repeater-route with the clearance to tap the link…”
“Exactly what I was thinking. Don’t want to share.” He gave her a hug with his woman-weighted arm. “At least…if anything happened to you while I was out there, this time I could order myself home.”
She raised her eyebrows at him. “Hm?”
“I was just thinking of that frantic mess during my second trade-fleet escort tour.” He had advanced to exec on the New Athens, a then-new ship and a plum posting, he’d thought. “We were out halfway past Earth, at about the farthest jump on our route, when the news of the Prime Minister’s heart attack came through. I could do nothing, stuck where I was. And no one to talk to. Oh, there was plenty of political gossip and speculation, and of course everyone knew I’d been on his staff for years, so people interrogated me, sure. That was excruciating, even with the few who realized he wasn’t just a figure to me, but a friend. No basis to ask for compassionate leave, no way to get home in much less time than the fleet itself was going to take…I was never closer to deserting.”
Cordelia sighed. “I’m sorry my bulletins were so terse. Things were utterly crazy in Vorbarr Sultana, what with Miles missing-presumed-dead, and Mark coming in from the cold, and all the medical anxieties…I won’t say it was worse than the Pretender’s War, but it gave me flashbacks.”