She finally settled on, “And in other good news, Oliver and I have started dating. It’s been like finding water in the desert. For both of us, I gather.”
Of all the people on her short list, Alys and Simon were the most likely to understand just how much complexity that simplicity concealed. She left it at that.
This upside rotation, Jole at length decided, was the slowest eight weeks of his life, including the time he’d spent in hospital back in his twenties. Not that there wasn’t plenty to do, hitting every wormhole jump-point military station between Sergyar and Nowhere. Although there was a certain useful entertainment to be had by springing different emergency drills at each station en route, occasionally skipping one just to keep the opposition guessing.
Vorinnis trailed in his wake as secretary and aide, because all his usual office tasks followed him by tightbeam. As this counted on her records as space duty, she was remarkably perky about the rotation. She was also, he was pleased to discover, a useful surprise-drill co-conspirator.
“We’re not only testing readiness, or even just observing the mechanics and looking for ways to improve them,” he told her during one of these exercises. “At this level, I’m just as interested in how each senior officer handles his people. Especially when things go wrong. All part of the, hm, process of earmarking candidates for further promotion.”
“Isn’t that kind of hard on any officer who gets some duds in his personnel roster?” she inquired. “I mean, the screw-ups might not be his fault.”
“We try to weed out the duds early on and send them to less critical downside duties. Unfairly for Fyodor,” he reflected. “But any officer can be made to look good by fortunate staffing. Getting the most out of your people when you aren’t so lucky is a better test, really.” What had that ship of Aral’s been nicknamed, way back when? Vorkosigan’s Leper Colony, that was it. Granted, Aral’s lepers had been as likely to be political screw-ups as military ones, in those fraught days.
Her eyebrows twitched, considering this. “So, this earmarking. How do you…learn how to decide? If it’s not just perfect scores on the drills?”
“Practice,” he sighed. “Repeated observation. Aral seemed to do it by some sort of Vor instinct, like breathing, but I suppose he’d got all his practice in before I came along.” Jole’s process still felt conscious, but at least he worked through it a lot faster these days.
His communications with the Vicereine were few, brief, unprivate, and depressingly utilitarian. He did beg her to beam him another popular book on Sergyaran biology when he’d finished the first two that he’d brought along, and was surprised to be told that there weren’t any more. She scrounged up a more technical journal from the University, instead—also the only publication on the topic, it appeared. Its ten years—only ten years?—of back issues promised to keep him diverted for a while, at least.
The knowledge of those three frozen embryos in the Kareenburg clinic was an itch in the corner of his mind that he determinedly did not scratch. Except that, somehow, all the articles on reproductive biology in the back issues caught his attention first. The reproductive strategies of Sergyaran fauna—and flora, for that matter, when you could tell them apart—were weird. They did put what he was doing—thinking of doing—not-thinking of doing—into perspective, he supposed.
At last this rotation ran out of minutes, even subjectively lengthened ones. He’d been counting. He hadn’t proposed to linger upside—even he was due some days off after such stints, though he’d seldom taken them all. His plans were altered when he learned that the Vicereine was away at Gridgrad with Haines, wrestling the locals for infrastructure or, as Cordelia phrased it when he’d dropped in directly from orbit, squeezing stones from blood.
Apart from one brief handclasp and a speaking look, he was forced to share her the rest of the day with committees. It did catch him up with the Gridgrad base progress, at first hand rather than via the reports he’d still need to read later if only to compare-and-contrast. The suborbital shuttle hop back to Kareenburg was infested with Fyodor’s staff and her own; the first group they shed at the base, but the second accompanied them almost to the Vicereine’s Palace. She sent them all home firmly. It wasn’t till the bloody front door had closed behind them that he got his proper welcome-home kiss. He made it a good one, dancing her across the wide entry hall.
“Alone at last,” he murmured, and “Finally!” she huffed into his mouth.
“Dinner first?” she asked, drawing back to comb her fingers pleasurably through his hair. “Or a conference?”
“Conference.” He dotted tasty kisses across her forehead. “Have Rykov bring dinner on a tray.”
“I admire your efficiency, Admiral.”
He closed in for more-lingering seconds. Snaked a hand around her butt and pressed her hips inward, which made her grin through the kiss at the implicit, not to mention explicit, promise. He could feel her day’s tension start to unwind under his stroking hands. Alas that sweeping her off her feet and carrying her up the stairway was physically impractical, more likely to result in a trip to the emergency clinic than to the bedroom. They slow-danced toward the stairs, instead.
A happy, breathless young voice cried, “Grandma!”
Cordelia’s eyes widened as she stared over his shoulder. “Oh, crap,” she breathed; only Jole heard her. They flinched apart.
He turned, then had to brace her against the impact of two short bodies who’d dashed from the archway and flung their arms possessively around her waist. Leaving no room for him.
The shrieking sprog attack continued in a second wave. A shorter and a more-shorter child galloped in, to compete with their siblings for a turn at the matriarchal torso. A pair of toddlers followed, clearly not quite understanding what all the excitement was about, or who these tall grownups were, but determined not to be left out.
Jole had not seen the Vorkosigan offspring in person for three years, when the squad had been smaller and he had been grimly distracted, but from viewing some of Cordelia’s vid messages he had no trouble sorting them out. Alex and Helen, a dark-haired boy and an auburn-haired girl, now about eleven years old; twins only by the shared date that their replicators had been opened. Elizabeth, eight, and Taura, five, more naturally, or at least more traditionally, spaced. Selig and Simone, another set of not-twins of identical ages, two-ish; the pair, the last of the planned family as Jole understood it, had been started very shortly after Aral’s funeral. Their father Miles feeling the breath of mortality on his neck, perhaps, or so Cordelia had theorized. They all had eye colors ranging from gray to blue, genetically enough, their parents having gone with the natural roll of the dice on that issue, apparently. Jole’s mind darted to those frozen embryos downtown; he jerked it back.
“Where are your Mama and Da?” Cordelia asked the mob. “When did you get here?”
Helen took it upon herself to be spokes-sprog. “Couple of hours ago. Da said we were to be a surprise. Were you surprised, Granma?”
Cordelia, recovering quickly, rose to the challenge: “Like Winterfair in midsummer,” she told the girl, ruffling her hair fondly with one hand and her brother’s with the other. “And here, I take it, is Father Frost.”