Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen

Chapter Fifteen

On the day of the picnic Jole woke at his usual time, wasted half an hour trying to get back to sleep, failed, gave up, and arose to seek coffee. He should have spent last night at the Palace despite the thundering herd of Miles’s family and entourage that filled it, tromping freely through Cordelia’s privacy—two-year-olds especially being not clear on respecting boundaries, closed doors, or the possibility that someone might have an agenda not including them. Some forty-three-year-olds, as well? Surely they all had to go home soon. Wasn’t there a district back on Barrayar missing its count? As it was, he wouldn’t see Cordelia today till she picked him up at noon.

He took his mug and went up on the roof to look out over the base, a favored and relatively private viewing spot, not yet baking in the morning air. The weather seemed to be auspicious for the day. People had been trickling back and forth to the picnic site, some twenty kilometers out in the country, for a couple of days, including a convoy last night of teams to set up the pit roasts—real carcasses, not vat meat, sorry, Cordelia—and portable latrines. As he watched, another small caravan departed out the front gate, military and private vehicles mixed.

The base would nevertheless not be stripped of its preparedness—Haines had made sure there were plenty of short straws to go around. And then there was Jole’s entire working upside fleet, from Sergyar orbit to the wormhole jump-point stations, out of luck except for the rota of personnel on downside leaves or duties. He wondered how Bobrik was getting along up there. Now, if there had been no party, there could have been no such unfairness—ha, there was a counterargument that came too late.

I am fifty.

It was the first, though it probably wouldn’t be the last, time that realization had come to him today. How strange. I used to think fifty was old.

His eye was drawn to Kareenburg in the distance, spilling out of the broken side of the mountain and onto the red plain. This place had been his home for the last dozen years—but one way or another, not for much longer. The building boom was getting a grip in Gridgrad, despite the fierce starved competition for materials and labor. He realized he had been looking forward to that move as a fresh start, and not just for the region’s more attractive environs, water-braided, gray-green and alive after its own peculiar Sergyaran fashion.

Back in his apartment, he found the call light blinking on his comconsole. He sat down to find a message from Ops Vorbarr Sultana, stamped eyes-only but without an urgent flag. He eyed it with a faint and entirely futile dread, albeit not dread of surprise.

Sure enough, the image of Admiral Desplains formed over his vid plate. The Ops chief smiled affably.

“Good day, Oliver. If I have this calculated right, this should reach you just in time to congratulate you on your birthday. Welcome to your next decade. Looking back on my own fifties, it wasn’t too bad. Looking ahead—well, who knows.

“I trust my prior message reached you—the pingback said so. If it has somehow gone astray, a copy is attached hereunder.

“I thought I would have heard from you by now, but a check shows that you’re having your week’s downside leave. I imagine you’re out sailing somewhere suitably flat and wet, and that this will find you promptly on your return from the wilds.”

His leave, Jole realized gloomily, had so far included no sailing at all, and only two nights with Cordelia. Between the inspection tour out to the Serg and the war-game/theft-prevention training exercises, it had all been pretty un-leavelike, so far.

“Again, best wishes on the day. Desplains out.”

It was a perfectly cordial-sounding reminder, camouflaged under the birthday greeting, except that they were both keenly aware it shouldn’t have required a reminder at all. Jole, answer your damned mail! scarcely needed to be said more explicitly.

Desplains wouldn’t expect an answer today. Nor tonight, assumed correctly to be devoted to some celebration or another, though Jole doubted Desplains pictured the scope of the field maneuvers so unstoppably in progress. Nor even tomorrow morning, command being fairly tolerant of traditional Barrayaran hangovers as long as they didn’t occur during some crunch. But by tomorrow afternoon…

Desplains needed his answer; if yes, to start making plans, if no, to resume his headhunt. Jole couldn’t let this decision drag out past noon tomorrow.

He blew out his breath and pushed up to head for the shower.

The canopy of the vicereinal aircar closed over them as Oliver slid into his seat beside Cordelia. Rykov—with Ma Rykov beside him in the driver’s compartment—glanced back over his shoulder to assure that all was secure, and slipped them into the air.

Cordelia took in Oliver’s summer-weight undress greens, standard downside office wear. “Goodness, you look a tad formal for a picnic.”

He touched his chest. “The jacket comes off as soon as the opening ceremonies are concluded. It’ll be shirtsleeves after that, I promise you.” He added after a moment, “Besides, I had a message to record before I left.”

Her heart lurched. Had he finally replied to Desplains? And what has his answer been? Nothing about his face or posture conveyed a clue.

He did make a vaguely dissatisfied gesture. “I wanted to say something to all my people out on space duty. Took a bit of thinking so it didn’t come out like one of those dire vacation greetings, Having a fine time, wish you were here.”

“That seems a reversal, for someone’s birthday. Aren’t you the one supposed to be getting the greetings?”

“Yes, I spent a good bit of time this morning fielding those. But I thought my troops and techs manning all our—God spare us—budget-built Imperial equipment out there deserved some kind of well done acknowledgement from me this day. They get little enough, in peacetime.” His mouth twisted. “Usually, the more effusive lip service from on high was a preamble to attempts to cut our supplies and personnel and make it harder to do our actual jobs. We learned to be suspicious of floating praise.”

Cordelia snorted appreciation. “Did you at least bring sandals?” She extended her own semi-bare foot, and wriggled it.

“You may risk plague worms, fire radials, and sand rashes in the name of fashion if you choose. I’ll stick to my nice regulation shoes, thanks.”

And so well polished, but perhaps that wouldn’t last the day. At least, she hoped he would eventually relax. This wasn’t an Imperial military review, for pity’s sake.

He went on, “You, on the other hand, look just like a picnic. Makes me want to open the basket right here.” Finally remembering to kiss her hello, he trailed a friendly hand down over her sage-green tank top and rusty-red trousers, floppy in the legs after the Komarran fashion and therefore, she hoped, cool enough while still providing protection. “Did you mean to look like you’re planning camouflage?”

“I was thinking about Alys Vorpatril’s stern lectures on color coordination, mostly.” She flipped at her gauzy swing coat, pretty but delicate—she would probably abandon it about the same time Oliver peeled down.

“You’re dressing to match your planet?”

She chuckled. “Maybe that’s it.”

“So, where are Miles and Ekaterin and the horde?”

“Went on ahead in more cars. They’ll meet us there. The kids are really excited. There has been much speculation about cake.” Seizing what she figured would be their last opportunity today, she kissed him back, and all too soon, there became here.

“Happy birthday, by the way,” she said as the aircar descended and they broke off.

“We’ll see,” he said, in a tone of foreboding. Or perhaps forbearing; he was being pretty amiable about all this.

She glanced out. “Oh, my! It looks like a cross between a nomadic tribal camp and Hassadar Fairgrounds. How many people did you say were going to show up for this?”

“Originally, I thought it was only supposed to be a couple hundred base people, max. That was before half of Kayburg invited itself along.”

“I suppose someone will have a head-count…”

The picnic area was spread out on a slight rise along a trickling watercourse, well supplied with spindly trees, though it would be inaccurate to call it a shady grove. An irregular tent-and-booth village was laid out near the center, banks of latrines backing it, with what Cordelia recognized as a brigade-sized military medical tent at the near end and a viewing stand and open area at the far end. Aromatic smoke rose from dozens of widely scattered fire pits, with clusters of people and their picnic supplies defending each, divided by what rationale Cordelia was not sure—by unit? Garrison versus townie? Spacer versus ground-pounder? Half-a-dozen improvised parking areas were filling with a motley assortment of civilian lightflyers, aircars, and lift vans mixed with sturdier-looking military transport vehicles, float-bikes, ground rovers, and possibly wheelbarrows. And, no joke, some horse-drawn wagons and carts, though they seemed to have been unloaded from parked lift vans.

A length of the rise, some outcrops of rocks, and a portion of the watercourse about two hundred meters on a side were marked off, surrounded by cheering people; a scrum of red, yellow, and blue T-shirted figures heaved across it. The boot-polo team elimination rounds had been going on since midmorning, she understood.

The aircar oozed down to a patented Rykov landing that would not have spilled her champagne had she been blessed with any, followed at close range by the ImpSec car that had been shadowing them. Dutifully, she waited until Kosko’s boys and girls had first got out, had their look-round, and opened the canopy for her. A large public venue and, in a bit, public speeches meant that she couldn’t legitimately arm-wrestle them into backing off.

A subcommittee of Oliver’s officers hurried up to greet them and pass on the final, no really, these are the last changes, schedule of events. By whatever persuasion—broad hints through Kaya?—Oliver had managed to get them to front-load the congratulatory ceremonies, rather than having them fall more naturally between dinner and the fireworks. Thus the last half of the picnic might simulate a day off for its principal. Plotting an early getaway with her? Cordelia hoped so.

Being early for a gig that was running typically late, they seized the chance for a stroll up what Cordelia mentally dubbed the midway. Several open-sided tents housed branches from Kayburg eateries, plus two bars, not yet very busy. At this time of the day, with people’s children running all over, their adults gamely trailing, the smaller booths that offered ice cream, cold snacks, and gimcrack toys were a shrewder sell.

SWORD, she was amused to see, really had put up the free kissing booth that Dr. Tatiana had threatened, staffed at the moment by two attractive women and a striking young man. Unlike the restaurants, they were not selling any of their regular services today—Haines had discouraged this with an eye to objections from the base spouses, and Cordelia had softened the economic blow by hinting that really, everyone deserved a day off sometime. Stacks of Dr. T’s educational book-discs sat at the ready, one being handed out gratis with every kiss, which Cordelia hoped might help with some people’s—and not just the younger ones—tangled lives, provided that what was tangling them was lack of accurate information.

Showing support, Cordelia pressed Oliver’s arm and they turned in to collect a kiss each, to the applause of a few onlooking picnickers of both sexes, which made Oliver blush quite fetchingly. Oliver only aimed for one of the women, but the other wouldn’t let him get away without giving her a turn. Cordelia tried the cute fellow, who grinned bashfully through the kiss, though really, he was much too young for her tastes—thirty, probably. Her lips quirked as Oliver tried not to turn his head at the kid, though their eyes tracked each other briefly.

“Dare you to kiss that one,” she whispered in his ear as they turned away, and “Choose your ground,” he murmured back.

Music from an amateur band spilled out of another tent, where they also found Cordelia’s family. Up front, a gaggle of children were dancing to steps of their own devising, while their elders perched on chairs resting in the shade. Miles, gravely attentive, was being hung off two-handed by his daughter Simone, stomping happily to the beat. Ekaterin sat in the front row holding his cane. Cordelia slid in beside her.

“Is he going to be all right without that?” she asked her daughter-in-law.

“Lots of painkillers tonight,” Ekaterin murmured back, “but would you stop them?”

“Not for worlds.”

Taurie, brimming with energy and, as far as Cordelia had yet been able to tell, entirely devoid of social fear—or any other sort—bee-lined for Oliver and demanded him as a partner, too. Ah, the old Oliver-magic, still working. Given her athleticism and his practiced skills they actually turned in a quite dancelike performance, as he guided her neatly through turns and twirls, if under his elbow rather than in his arms. The morning’s odd tension in his face gave way to amusement as she bounced and giggled.

The band, who knew very well who they were, swung promptly into another old backcountry jig, playing even faster.

Cordelia looked around. “Where are Helen and Alex?”

“They went off with Freddie—she and her friends are helping Lon ghem Navitt who is helping that cultural attaché fellow with something or another.”

“Ah, Oliver told me about that. We’ll have to go check it out.”

When Oliver’s shoes were no longer quite so shiny, and his face was pleasingly flushed, she mercifully extracted him from her granddaughter’s clutches. They made their way slowly along the makeshift promenade, receiving cheery greetings from garrison and town alike; Oliver seemed to remember an astonishing number of his people’s names. Cordelia, too, did her best to recognize people back, though years of practice had made faking it no stretch.

Oliver’s hand brushed the back of her neck, and she prepared to emit an encouraging purr, but he flicked his fingers down.

“Radial,” he explained, trying to squash the hazard with his shoe, but the thumbnail-sized creature evaded death and bobbed erratically away. “As windless as today is, I’ll bet they’ll come out in force from around that creek at dusk.”

“Ah, yes. We’ll have to slather the kids with repellent before then.” There was a supply in the boot of the vicereinal aircar; she hoped she’d brought enough to coat the whole clan.

Beyond the open area, tucked up under some trees, stood what appeared to be a small, panel-walled maze, its entrance made fetching with flowers in pots, leaves drooping in the still heat. Discernment Garden, read the hand-calligraphed sign, and Test your perceptions! Sight, sound, smell, touch, taste—which is your strength? Mikos ghem Soren waited hopefully by the entrance to shepherd visitors inside. Nowhere about it did the word Cetaganda appear, by which Cordelia detected Kaya Vorinnis’s shrewder sense of marketing, though ghem Soren, dressed appropriately enough for a picnic in shirtsleeves, trousers, and sandals, still defiantly sported his clan’s colorful face decal. Kaya’s hand, too, might be behind the shift in the come-on’s tone from vaguely patronizing to cheerful challenge.

Lon drooped rather like the flowers at ghem Soren’s elbow, drafted minion—the others, Cordelia discovered upon inquiry, had helped finish setting up the display and then gone off to explore the creek. A quick cross-check on her wristcom assured her that their ImpSec minder had them all in sight, so Cordelia turned her attention back to this earnest effort at cultural outreach.

Diplomatically concealing his lack of enthusiasm, Oliver permitted them to be escorted within, though Cordelia’s ImpSec bodyguard went first. “Sight” offered a display of colored cards that reminded Cordelia of optical illusion demos, “touch” a like array of concealed textures that one felt without being able to see. For “sound” ghem Soren presented a row of chimes—no electronics allowed, she gathered. Would that be considered cheating? “Scent” was supplied by a queue of saturated sponges in little bowls, “taste” by apparently identical colorless liquids in, necessarily, tiny disposable plastic cups evidently scavenged from the medical tent—that last compromise plainly pained their host, who explained that the proper presentation involved dedicated hand-made porcelain vessels. To her relief, it turned out that she was not expected to drink the stuff, merely to dip in her tongue and let the flavors seep around her mouth. Ghem Soren was taken aback when Oliver made no errors in his sorting-out, but cheered up visibly when Cordelia did and he could gently correct her in, she gathered, a style copied from some long-ago Cetagandan kindergarten teacher. The kids probably would like this, she decided, and regarded ghem Soren more favorably. Alas, the piece of Cetagandan artwork that they were invited to contemplate at the end of all this perceptual fitness training remained as baffling as ever.

“At least we didn’t have to lick it,” Oliver muttered to her ear as they exited again. “I’d have drawn the line at that.”

She snorfled, covertly.

Ghem Soren, engaged in one last follow-up bit of lecture, interrupted himself to stare in surprise at his left arm, where a grape-sized radial had stealthily attached itself. To Cordelia and Lon’s unified chorus of “Don’t slap it!” he slapped it.

He did not emit anything so undignified as a yelp, but his mouth did open on a huff of hurting surprise.

“Don’t scratch it, either!” Cordelia restrained his right hand, maternally, as it made to do just that. “The remains stick to everything like gum”—though the more usual description was snot—“and the acid keeps right on eating away into the skin underneath. Your choices are either to go to the creek and wash it off immediately, or go to the med tent, where they have a concoction to neutralize all that interesting biochemistry. On the whole, I recommend the med tent.”

So authoritatively directed, the attaché jogged off, though not without pausing to give Lon a string of last-minute instructions on holding the fort till his return, which Lon, to Cordelia’s eye, took in with all the responsiveness of any other fifteen-year-old boy presented with an unwanted chore. Just like pushing pudding uphill. And then Oliver’s wristcom chimed with the news that they were finally ready for them at the music tent, if you could come over now, sir?

With a call over her shoulder to Lon of, “And do water those plants you’re holding prisoner. Their lives depend on you, you know,” they headed for the next event.

The crowd at the temporarily repurposed music tent, Cordelia estimated, was just about that core two hundred or so of space officers, dates, and families who had started this whole thing off, back when. The picnic and outdoor atmosphere would at least keep the formalities from being too formal, she trusted. In the background, Blaise Gatti dodged around taking the official vids—she’d had to browbeat him a few times to train him to be unobtrusive about those duties, but the lesson seemed finally to have stuck.

The cheery officer acting as birthday master of ceremonies was a lieutenant commander from Orbital Traffic Control, apparently just as much of an organizer out of uniform as in it. He guided the pair of them to seats on the dais behind a comfortingly defendable table, and launched into a suitable opening spiel to welcome the guest of honor, the military cadre, the Vicereine, and the Vicereine’s visiting family, who now occupied the whole of the front row, only squirming a little. She was surprised that Alex and Helen had returned for the boring bits—maybe she’d underestimated the draw of cake. Beside her, Oliver braced himself to be fêted with whatever Barrayaran military humor ruled the day.

The first birthday offering, carted up to the table by a grinning lieutenant from the shuttle pilot pool, was a two-liter beer mug, frosty but not filled with beer—the contents were a clear faint green, and clinked with ice. Cordelia had never been sure whether those mugs were a joke, a challenge, or a sign of someone too lazy to reach for refills. The crowd applauded as Oliver dutifully lifted it to his lips and swallowed. His eyes widened, but he set it calmly back on the table and called back, “What, are we having an ice shortage out here today?” which won about the chuckle it merited.

“What?” whispered Cordelia, to which he responded by shoving it a few centimeters her way in invitation to sample.

“Frieda didn’t mix this one.”

She tasted it, nearly choked on the lethal potency, and hastily shoved it back. “Your patch, I think.”

“Are they trying to render me legless before we even start?”

“You don’t know your reputation?”

“Which one?”

“You think no one ever noticed you knocking back drinks at Palace receptions? You’re widely believed to have the hardest head in the Sergyaran Service.”

“It was generally hot. I was thirsty,” he muttered plaintively. He toasted the crowd and took another sip, sensibly ignoring the calls to chug it. “At least it beats Cetagandan art.”

The next foray into military humor was the presentation of a fake campaign medal about the size of a saucer, hung on a colorful ribbon, “for surviving Admiral Jole’s inspections.” This Oliver received with bemused good will, though then a puckish glint came into his eyes and he capped the moment by turning around and re-presenting it to Cordelia, slipping the ribbon over her head. By the slightly stuffed looks that came over Miles’s and Ekaterin’s faces, they caught the personal subtext; she hoped no one else here did.

“Is this anything like when the young ladies compete to get their fellows’ old dog tags off them?” she asked, resisting the urge to kiss him right there in front of them all.

“You win,” he said simply.

There followed a few obligatory retrospectives from some of his senior officers, occasionally dipping into roast but not, to her relief, into tastelessness. And then it was her turn to stand up and deliver her own short speech, to be followed, she understood, by the Serious Gift. She had to take care not to let any of the too-practiced stock phrases from most of the past three years slip out, not least because Oliver would recognize them—We come to praise Caesar, not to bury him, thankfully. Appreciation, not eulogy.

Though if Oliver left for Vorbarr Sultana, it occurred to her, there would be a change-of-command ceremony entailed. Military ceremonies, like all ceremonies, tended to echo each other. Eulogies then, perhaps.

Cordelia wondered what his officers had finally decided on for the gift. A subcommittee spearheaded by Kaya Vorinnis had tackled her in her office the other day for a short but intense exploration of the possibilities, and gone away looking thoughtful. They had given no hint of their budget, though considering the size of the group and its heavy loading with senior personnel, it probably wasn’t going to be like a typical impoverished-junior-officers whip-round.

A stir came from the front of the tent, people making way. “Stand back, Admiral’s birthday present coming through…!” An aisle opened up, and down it came two officers hauling, to Cordelia’s intense surprise—was it the crystal canoe from Penney’s? No, not quite. It was longer and wider, and the stern was cut off square, suitable for attaching a propulsion unit. Shallow draft, flat bottom, perfect for detailed underwater viewing. Call it a crystal bateau, perhaps. A large red ribbon was wrapped around its midsection, tied in a quite passable bow.

Oliver’s mouth dropped open in astonishment; his face lit up, and it was only then that one realized how reserved it had been heretofore. “Woah!”

“We got ’im,” chortled a happy voice from the mob. “Ha!” Laughter and applause at the success of their surprise.

Oliver, stirring to get up and come down, turned to her. “Was this your doing?”

“No!”

He tilted his head in disbelief.

“It wasn’t me. I did point them in Penney’s direction, but I thought they were going to go for, I don’t know, a gift certificate for a weekend out there or something.” In part because she’d hinted around, without ever being able to say it outright, that perhaps they had better pick something that was either immediately consumable, or could be packed up to take back by jumpship to Vorbarr Sultana. Someone must have researched further. And had a better idea.

She followed him as he stepped eagerly down off the dais for a closer look, and touch, as if he didn’t quite believe his eyes. The lines of the craft were enchantingly elegant—it seemed to promise to slip over the water like a dragonfly.

She asked the grinning—yes, engineering officer, “Was it expensive?”

“Naw. We fabricated it ourselves. A vat of canopy plastic and a night in the shop with the big printer, easy.”

Oliver, she was reminded, rode herd on a cadre of people who routinely repaired spaceships. She should not have underestimated them, or their resources, or their design skills, even though it appeared some of those resources were borrowed from Imperial supplies.

She murmured to the officer, “If anyone questions the use of equipment or material, you can tell them the Vicereine authorized it.”

His eyes twinkled. “Thank you, Your Excellency.”

“Does it float?” Oliver asked, a bit breathlessly.

“Yep, we had it out for field trials this morning,” another officer told him smugly, watching him run loving hands over the smooth thwarts. Instant infatuation, it appeared, wasn’t just for romance anymore. “It floats in any attitude you put it, including upside down, longitudinally, or full of water.”

All right, any well-liked officer might get a birthday whip-round in his honor. But this had taken real time and thought, and a shrewd awareness that could not be plucked off the shelves in the base exchange. More—he’d invited plenty of his colleagues out on the water with him over the years, they all knew about that interest; she’d have guessed they would have presented him with a sailing hull, not something so, so on-top of his latest changes. Yeah. Oliver’s command style was not much like Aral’s, and he’d always imagined it as inferior therefore. But in this, she thought, they were alike; each had won loyalty by first giving it. How can he abandon this life?

After some more of the attendees milling around and taking turns crowding up to get a better look at the Serious Gift, she quietly recommended to their emcee to move it forward or face a cake riot from the front row. Yeah, let them eat cake. He took the directive to heart, and shortly the group was transmuted into people standing around trying to balance their portions of carbohydrates, grease and sugar on the inevitable too-flimsy disposable plates. Or smearing same on their faces, depending on their ages and/or degree of inebriation. The base mess had supplied cake abundantly.

She and Oliver recaptured their chairs, which came with the only usable table in the tent. With the thoroughness that distinguished him, Oliver ate his piece, alternating with sips from the giant drink, which must have been a horrifying taste combination. Cordelia took advantage and slipped her portion to the nearest frosting-smeared grandchild doing an unconvincing impersonation of a famine victim.

“You don’t have to drink all that,” she advised Oliver, who was still valiantly sipping. “No hapless potted plants in here, but outside you’ll have an entire desert to slip it into, and no one the wiser.”

“But they gave me the expensive stuff,” he protested, by which she concluded that the alcohol was already gaining on him. Although Oliver’s weirder frugal impulses while drunk weren’t only from his early prole upbringing—space duty reinforced parsimony. Like gilding the lily in reverse.

Making a Viceregal decision, she took it away from him, which he did not protest, and no one else dared object to. At long last, he divested his uniform jacket and opened the round collar of his shirt, looking vastly more comfortable and, oddly, more himself thereby. And then, after a short conference to assure that the crystal bateau would be safely delivered to temporary storage back at the base—for which, of course! it appeared the techs had already made provision—it was time to decamp for the boot polo field.

“Have you ever played boot polo, Oliver?” Ekaterin asked in curiosity as they were ushered to a row of canvas seats under an awning, reserved for the honored guests. Lesser watchers had taken to ground sheets laid out on the slope overlooking the playing field.

Jole shook his head. “Not me. I’m an officer.”

She looked surprised. “Is it against regs, then?”

He chuckled. “There are no regulations for boot polo. The game started back in the Time of Isolation as a camp and garrison pastime for bored soldiers. They made it up themselves for themselves out of what they had on hand, including the rules, such as they are—of which the first was no officers allowed. That’s part of why there’s no set number of players to a team, either, though in play they do try to keep the teams near-even.”

The Admiral and Vicereine’s party had arrived in time for the deciding match of the day, between the surviving teams of the prior rounds. As a result, the sides were more varied than usual, with the winners of the base men’s, the ISWA women’s, and the Kayburg town sets pitted against each other. Upholding Kayburg’s honor was the team from the municipal guard, mixed in gender, but salted with a few Service veterans who had obviously provided expertise. The base men, in the red T-shirts, were considered stronger but tireder, the ISWA women in blue lighter but smarter, and the yellow-shirted Kayburg team featured a pair of players, a large guard sergeant and a skinny female secretary, who had shown a killer knack for hooking. The secretary, Jole understood, was the more vicious, with a fiendish skill at rolling opposing players through the fire-radial mounds, of which today’s field boasted four, all rather flattened by now.

Cordelia leaned over to confide to Ekaterin, “Aral was the first Barrayaran to discover that underground species of radial, you know. On our opening hike here.”

Ekaterin looked suitably impressed; Jole tried not to laugh. He’d heard that story.

Miles escorted Taurie and Lizzie off for a look around; after a bit his voice floated back: “No, darling, you can’t pet the hexaped. It would bite your hand off, and then your Grandmama would execute it, which wouldn’t be fair to the poor beast, now would it?” A surly hiss underscored this.

Jole craned his neck; Ekaterin turned anxiously in her seat. Down on the sidelines stood a large cage containing one of the region’s iconic native creatures. It was about the mass of a pig, though with longer legs ending in clawed feet: six-limbed, flat-faced and neckless, with a sharp and heavy parrotlike beak. Its rust-red fur, Jole considered, was about the only attractive part of it, assuming you ignored the smell.

The mini-zoo expedition returned shortly, all hands still accounted for, Miles grinning. Jole watched him as he sat with an oof. “So why do we have a hexaped today? Did someone decide they needed a mascot?”

“I’m told there are a number of local rules here for wildlife hazards on the playing field.”

“This is true.”

“Trouble is, every creature able to move has evidently fled far from your noisy occupation. So a hunting party went out last night and caught some, so as to be able to release one per game onto the field. Keeping it fair and even, y’see.”

Jole made an amused face. “All right, the players are all armed with their sticks, but what about the innocent bystanders?”

“All the refs are carrying stunners. Though whether for obstreperous hexapeds or argumentative players, my informant didn’t quite make clear.”

“And, ah…how has this worked out so far?”

“Disappointingly, I was told. Almost all of them dashed straight through the crowd and ran off, except for one that went to ground in a hole in the creek bank and still hasn’t come out.”

“I see.” Jole grinned and took a swig of his hard cider. A float-pallet load of cases had been bestowed on them a bit ago by one of his officers from B&L, whose sister-in-law owned an orchard and cidery north of New Hassadar. After a long start-up, this was the first year of production, but only enough for the extended family—commercial amounts were hoped for next year, when they would also have to start pasteurizing. The brew was smooth and tasty, he had to admit, if also cloudy and a peculiar color—full of vitamins and animals, certainly. The Vicereine, always a supporter of colonial enterprise, had accepted the offering with pleasure, and the B&L officer had gone off to comm his relatives and brag about it.

The crowd stirred as the players filed onto the field and a ref carried out the wooden ball, about the size of a cantaloupe and brightly painted. The original balls had often been cannon balls, readily found lying about in rusting stacks in old forts, but wood and even solid plastic was preferred these days because players could get a better loft and more distance with them. The painting was a tradition that had started during the Occupation.

“Hm,” said Jole.

Cordelia glanced at him.

“That’s the ghem Navitt clan face paint today, I see.” Very recognizable, even at a distance. “Any, ah, diplomatic concerns about that, Vicereine?”

Cordelia stared thoughtfully. “On the whole…no.”

“Right-oh, then.” Jole settled back and drank more cider.

A familiar, but surprising, voice hailed him from the side, “Admiral Jole!”

He turned and waved a welcome. “Dr. Gamelin, Dr. Dobryni! Glad you could make it.” The Uni bio department was the only outside group Jole himself had personally invited, after it had become clear that there was no keeping this blow-out from proliferating. The two professors were trailed by four others—from their ages, students; from their gawking, newbie visitors. He encouraged introductions, and indeed, they turned out to be those Escobaran grad students Gamelin had threatened, quite startled to find themselves meeting the Vicereine. From their expressions, this smiling, tousled woman in picnic clothes toasting them with local cider was not what they had expected. Cordelia was an effect Jole never tired of watching.

“We heard you had a hexaped!” said Dr. Dobryni.

“Yes, and very bilateral it is, too. Right over there.” Jole pointed cordially. “Help yourselves.”

Ciders in hand—one student was looking very hard at the murk, clearly wishing for a bioscanner—they shuffled off to marvel at the biota, and soon Jole heard Dobryni’s voice drifting back, “No, don’t try to pet it…”

Thwacks and cries drew their attention back to the field.

“What odds d’you give today?” Miles asked him.

“Well, the base boys are bigger and rougher, but they also have more standing issues with the Kayburg guard. The ISWA girls are smaller—which may be an advantage in this heat—can you speak to that?”

“Sometimes true. No doubt why high command sent me to the arctic, on my first assignment.”

Jole chuckled. “And they’ve probably been drinking less all day. And the women’s teams are generally better at keeping their attention on getting the ball in their basket, instead of disabling opposing players. So I wouldn’t count them out.”

Miles explained aside to Ekaterin: “With three teams, the obvious strategy is to hang back and let the other two wear each other down, then swoop in. Everybody knows this, so they pay attention to not letting each other slack off. For a game so devoted to bashing each other, it’s remarkably cooperative.” Though such cooperation could shift around suddenly and rapidly.

“Are they allowed to hit each other with those sticks?” A clatter echoed from the field. The sticks resembled field hockey sticks, but with a larger, curved blade, the better for scooping up the cranium-sized ball and lobbing it.

“Well, there’s no hitting, grabbing, or tackling. Or bludgeoning. But tripping—hooking—is permitted. If a player’s stick breaks, they’re not allowed to replace it till the next goal change, so there’s some motive not to get too carried away.”

The goals were three baskets sited around the field according the evil ingenuity of the crew laying it out. Today, one was out on the far side of the field, one was fastened to the highest point of the rocky outcrop, and one was stuck down in the creek bed, under water. With each point scored the teams rotated baskets, to keep the playing field even.

Taurie, watching the players shift and run, bounced with excitement. Lizzie went off to covet her neighbor’s hexaped and pelt the biologists with questions. Could they be tamed to ride? Pull a cart…? The disappointing scientific consensus was not, but human attempts to domesticate Sergyaran creatures were barely begun, so what might the future bring…?

“Where are all the twins?” Jole asked, finally noticing that Ekaterin was actually sitting down for a change, and that the cloud of chaos surrounding the Vorkosigans was oddly reduced.

“Gone off with their nanny and two ImpSec minders to that swimming hole upstream. I hope they’re all right.” She glanced uneasily at her wristcom.

The organizers had dammed the creek with rocks three days ago and allowed it to fill up to provide a pool for the picnickers—cleared of skatagators and other aquatic biohazards—and, not secondarily, to provide a water reservoir for the fireworks tonight, just in case.

Jole had glimpsed it earlier. He sighed. “I suppose it really doesn’t have enough scope to try out the bateau.” Cordelia smiled and drank more cider. That trial would have to wait for another day. There will be time, Jole told himself, and then, Will there?

Miles studied him sideways. “Nice boat, that.”

“Gorgeous.”

“Be kind of hard to fit in a space officer’s luggage allotment, though.”

His mother frowned at him. “At Oliver’s rank, I’m sure his allotment could be expanded to include anything up to and including his lightflyer.”

“Eh, I suppose.” Miles subsided.

It’s not my biggest possessions that are the hitch, Jole reflected. It’s the three smallest.

Cries of triumph and outrage sounded from the field as the ersatz head was lobbed into a goal basket, and he returned his attention to the game.

In due course, the boot polo slammed to its close-fought close, and Cordelia handed out the award ribbons and the donated cases of beer. The blue shirts won today, to the applause of their dates, spouses, and kids, who carried them off in triumph to, probably, fix dinner. The losing teams glumped away, a good portion of them to the med tent. If they’d kept their minds more on the game in front of them and less on old outside grudges, Jole thought the final results might have been different, but so it went.

There had been a wail of protest midgame from Lizzie at the waste of a perfectly good hexaped, bought off with a consoling paternal murmur of, It’s all right, honey, it’s just run off home to all its brother and sister hexapeds, which seemed to suffice. Jole found himself taking mental notes on the spin-doctoring technique.

Then it was time to gather up their party and go to their designated roasting pit node and eating area. Jole was just as glad to be strolling in late. Their dinner group was loaded with the same senior tech officers responsible for the crystal bateau, whose idea of setting up a campsite ran to such suggestions as, “Hey, let’s try speed-starting the fire with an infusion of pure oxygen!” Because inside every senior tech officer was a junior tech officer who’d been on a short leash for a long time.

However, everything had settled down by the time Jole, Cordelia, and the Vorkosigan clan arrived to be distributed among a couple of dozen portable tables. The side dishes were a pleasant mix of contributions from family potlucks and the base mess. The roast was about half a cow, resurrected from the fire pit to either a divine culinary apotheosis, or a gruesome field dissection, depending on one’s point of view—Lizzie’s was right at the servers’ elbows, asking questions. Since that crew included two ship’s surgeons and three medtechs, the resemblance to a teaching autopsy grew marked.

Special vat-meat briskets were provided for the moderns, headed by but not limited to Cordelia. She sighed at her Barrayaran family’s unselfconscious carnivory, but passed no censure. In due course, Alex and Helen were cleaned of their coating of grease and sauce and, trailed by their ImpSec minder, a female sergeant named Katsaros, allowed to go find Freddie.

The level rays of evening, throwing long shadows through the slender trees, shifted toward sunset and the swift twilight of the tropics. Unlike in higher latitudes, no one here was going to have to wait till going-on-midnight for the final official treat of the day. Which suggested to Jole that a midevening getaway with Cordelia might actually gift them with some real private time before their well-earned exhaustion set in. Was this too ambitious a fantasy for a man of—he barely winced anymore—fifty? Around the picnic area, the fizz of sparklers and snap and squeal of bottle rockets and other small private fireworks enlivened the air, foretastes of the booming pleasures to come.

Jole was mellowing out with his umpteenth bottle of cold cider—it wasn’t that high in alcohol, but people kept handing them to him—when Cordelia’s wristcom chimed with the ImpSec code.

By her side, Jole came uneasily alert as she raised the comlink to her lips. “Vorkosigan here.”

“Vicereine? Sergeant Katsaros here. We’re having a bit of a situation over by that Cetagandan attaché’s, um, art installation. It’s under control now, but I think we need you. Neither of the kids were hurt, really.”

That last fetched her; she was on her feet and moving in an instant. Jole lumbered up to pursue her, more for intense curiosity than any belief that Cordelia was going to need his slightly inebriated help. Miles and Ekaterin were delayed by their scramble to make sure the other four children were still present and accounted for at the dinner, and covered, before they could follow on. Cordelia waved them back with a, “I’ll call you if you’re wanted!”

Cordelia and Jole headed at a jog-trot out of the picnic grove and across the open area in front of the viewing stand, now undergoing its final decorations for the upcoming fireworks. Beyond the clearing, he could see the roped-off staging area where the official display was being prepared under the supervision of a volunteer crew of base explosives experts. The evening crowd was thickening rather than thinning down, as a lot of not-necessarily-invited Kayburgers streamed in for the promise of a show pushed right up to the borderline between fireworks and munitions.

The Discernment Garden hove into sight—or its remains. The wall panels had been flattened, the tables overturned, the flowers kicked out of their pots, and the most repulsive stink rose from the ruins, apparently the effect of smashing all the bottles of scents and flavors together on the ground. Half-a-dozen each of uniformed base security personnel and Kayburg guards held at stunner-point what looked like most of the base men’s losing boot-polo team, cross-legged on the ground with their hands behind their heads—some looking sheepish, some scared, some surly, and all drunk. A few red-shirted bodies lay in silent, stunned heaps. One man was stretched out on his back, moaning.

Alex, Helen, and Freddie were clustered around Sergeant Katsaros, who stood boots apart, stunner drawn, scowling at the guardsmen’s catch. Lon ghem Navitt hovered anxiously over Mikos ghem Soren, sitting bent over clutching his stomach, some fist-sized red marks showing on his face, his nose leaking blood. Apparently attracted by the stench, a smattering of radials bobbed about, making tentative passes on the just and the unjust alike or mustering in little gleaming phalanxes around the puddles.

Cordelia drew in a very long breath. Jole, prudently, stepped back a pace to give her room to swing. Her glance took in the clues, assembling the probable course of events, hardly mysterious. However much force the uniformed guards were presenting now, it was plain they must have turned, if not a blind eye, a very nearsighted one in this direction when the altercation had first commenced, or the vandalism could not have reached this stage.

Alex looked shaken, Helen was seething with fury, and Freddie had retreated into that sturdy stolidity he’d last seen her assume when standing next to a hard-to-explain burnt-out aircar. Cordelia’s first words were mild and directed at the juniors. “You kiddos all right, here?”

“Yes, Grandmama,” Alex mumbled, but Helen burst out, “They were breaking down the stuff we helped put up! And they knocked down Lon! We had to do something!”

“I told her we were too outnumbered to mix in!” said Alex. “But then that guy picked her up, so I had to go in after her!”

A hand stemmed the spate. She asked the dirt-smeared Freddie, “Did you get banged around any in all this?”

“Eh.” She shrugged. “Maybe a little.”

By which Jole gathered she was in the No arterial blood or broken bones, no foul, camp. Fyodor, he was sure, was going to take a very different view—that she had not yet called him was self-evident. It would be wrong to look forward to that…

Cordelia was continuing her initial assessment. “Sergeant, report?”

“I’m sorry, Your Excellency. The kids got ahead of me. I shot the jerk who was shaking Helen, and shouted ImpSec, halt! but some of them were too stupid-drunk to hear, or listen.”

“I kicked him, first,” Helen offered. She sniffed in satisfaction.

“Backup arrived”—Katsaros glowered at the security teams—“eventually. And here we are.”

“So we are.” That flat, unfriendly tone reminded Jole that Cordelia had been a ship captain, once.

She walked in among the late boot-polo team, who scrunched and exchanged mutters of Crap, the Vicereine! and You morons! Reaching down, she jerked the supine moaner half up by his T-shirt, and growled, “Are you the man who laid hands on Aral Vorkosigan’s granddaughter?”

“If I’da known who she was,” he gasped out, “I wouldn’ta touched her!”

“You know,” said Cordelia after a reflective moment, “that argument doesn’t help your cause nearly as much as you think.”

“…she hit me first…?”

For all his stubble, muscle, and stink, the fellow couldn’t have been much more than twenty, Jole estimated. Cordelia, he suspected, was making a like evaluation, for the next thing she said was, “Do you have sisters?”

“Yes?”

“How many?”

“Three?”

“Older or younger?”

“Both?”

“I see.” She let go of his shirt, and he thumped abruptly back to the ground. She stood up and sighed.

“All right. I rule that this is not an ImpSec matter.” Not treason, in other words, or treasonlike, or in any case an order of magnitude more hurt than any of these goons on the ground had ever imagined coming down on them before. “Base Security can take them in hand.” Base Security braced; the Kayburg people stepped back, looking relieved to unload this mess onto their military colleagues. “Put them all in the base tank for tonight. I’m sure you can work out suitable charges. Don’t forget unprovoked attack on a diplomatic guest. And you can let your chain-of-command know that I will be following up personally tomorrow.”

“As will I,” said Jole. It was hard to make out which, the arresters or the arrestees, looked more apprehensive.

A couple of medics finally turned up, and Cordelia directed them on to Lon and Mikos. Brushing off a few more radials that tried to bumble into her hair, she added, “Oliver, could you escort Helen and Alex back to the grove for me? I’ll be along soon.”

“Certainly.” He gestured the kids away. Freddie, perhaps out of some dim sense of standing by her troops, went to help Lon.

“Is Grandmama very mad at us?” Alex whispered as they turned to make their way back across the parade ground.

“Angry, certainly, but not at you,” Jole reassured him. “Of all the people involved here, you two have the best excuses for acting like eleven-year-olds.”

Helen frowned, apparently scorning this defense.

Alex looked up and stared. “What is that?”

Jole followed his gaze, then stopped and scrunched his eyes a few times for focus. A vast cloud of blur was spiraling in toward them—ah. Yes. “That’s a radial swarm.” Just like the one he’d had to have scrubbed off his lightflyer a few months ago, followed by a refinishing job. “You don’t usually see them gathered in those numbers at this altitude. Good grief!”

Other people, across the grounds and in the stands, had spotted the swarm, and were yelling and pointing in dismay.

“They’re coming this way,” said Helen uneasily.

“They certainly are.” As he hesitated, wondering whether to hurry the kids back to the trees—no, definitely not—or forward to the bleachers, better, an enthusiastic soldier holding a large-sized bottle rocket, its fuse burning, came charging out of a cluster of his friends to position himself beneath the cloud.

“This’ll drive them off!” he yelled.

From behind him, Jole heard Cordelia scream at the top of her lungs, “No, don’t!” just as the trail of red sparks began to streak upward in the gathering dusk. Too late…

Time seemed to stretch, but not very far. Jole reached deep into himself and found a parade-ground voice the like of which he’d seldom used before, a reverberating bellow: “COVER THE KIDS!”

An instant later, the firework burst in a brilliant flare of blue and gold, spreading out like a flower. An instant after that, the sparks struck the myriad of floating radials.

The firestorm was astounding. With a vast bass whoomp, it spread out through the mass of creatures; as each exploded, the incendiary fragments of its demise spread in turn, in a chain reaction of chemical conflagration, to ignite any that had escaped the first bombardment, which exploded in turn. The heat and light and sound pulsed in waves. There was nowhere to run. There was no time to run.

Jole ripped off his shirt, flung it around the twins, clutched them to his torso, and bent over them. “Stay tight!” he yelled into their hair as they tried to bolt, or maybe just to see out. “Keep your faces down!”

And then his world turned into a pelting rain of flaming snot.