"And the space forces?"
"I was just coming to them, yes, Milady. Over half of their supplies come up from the shuttleports in Vordarian's District. For the moment, they're still holding out for a clear result rather than moving in to create one. But they've refused to openly endorse Vordarian. It's a balance, and whoever can tip it their way first will start a landslide. Admiral Vorkosigan seems awfully confident." Cordelia was not sure from the lieutenant's tone if he altogether shared that confidence. "But then, he has to. For morale. He says Vordarian lost the war the hour Negri got away with Gregor, and the rest is just maneuvering to limit the losses. But Vordarian holds Princess Kareen."
"Doubtless one of the losses Aral is anxious to limit. Is she all right? Vordarian's goons haven't abused her?"
"Not as far as we know. She seems to be under house arrest in her own rooms in the Imperial Residence. Several of the more important hostages have been secluded there."
"I see." She glanced sideways in the dim cabin at Bothari, who did not change expression. She waited for him to ask after Elena, but he said nothing. Droushnakovi stared bleakly into the night, at the mention of Kareen.
Had Kou and Drou made up? They seemed cool, civil, all duty and on duty. But whatever surface apologies had passed, Cordelia sensed no healing in them. The secret adoration and will-to-trust was all gone from the blue eyes that now and then flicked from the control interface to the man in the passenger seat. Drou's glances were merely wary.
Lights glowed ahead on the ground, the spatter of a middle-sized city, and beyond it, the jumbled geometrics of a sprawling military shuttleport. Drou went through code-check after code-check, as they approached. They spiraled down to a pad that lit for them, peopled with armed guards. Their guard-flyers passed on overhead to their own landing zones.
The guards surrounded them as they exited the flyer, and escorted them as fast as Koudelka's pace would permit to a lift tube. They went down, took a slide-walk, and went down again through blast doors. Tanery Base clearly featured a hardened underground command post. Welcome to the bunker. And yet a throat-catching whiff of familiarity shook Cordelia for a terrifying moment of confusion and loss. Beta Colony did a lot better on the interior decorating than these barren corridors, but she might have descended to the utility level of some buried Betan city, safe and cool. . . . I want to go home.
There were three green-uniformed officers, talking in a corridor. One was Aral. He saw her. "Thank you, dismissed, gentlemen," he said in the middle of someone's sentence, then more consciously, "We'll continue this shortly." But they lingered to goggle.
He looked no worse than tired. Her heart ached to look at him, and yet . . . Following you has brought me here. Not to the Barrayar of my hopes, but to the Barrayar of my fears.
With a voiceless "Ha!" he embraced her, hard to him. She hugged him back. This is a good thing. Go away, World. But when she looked up the World was still waiting, in the form of seven watchers all with agendas.
He held her away, and scanned her anxiously up and down. "You look terrible, dear Captain."
At least he was polite enough not to say, You smell terrible. "Nothing a bath won't cure."
"That is not what I meant. Sickbay for you, before anything." He turned to find Sergeant Bothari first in line.
"Sir, I must report in to my lord Count," Bothari said.
"Father's not here. He's on a diplomatic mission from me to some of his old cronies. Here, you, Kou—take Bothari and set him up with quarters, food chits, passes, and clothes. I'll want your personal report immediately I've seen to Cordelia, Sergeant."
"Yes, sir." Koudelka led Bothari away.
"Bothari was amazing," Cordelia confided to Aral. "No—that's unjust. Bothari was Bothari, and I shouldn't have been amazed at all. We wouldn't have made it without him."
Aral nodded, smiling a little. "I thought he would do for you."
"He did indeed."
Droushnakovi, taking up her old position at Cordelia's elbow the moment Bothari vacated it, shook her head in doubt, and followed along as Aral steered Cordelia down the corridor. The rest of the parade followed less certainly.
"Hear any more about Illyan?" Cordelia asked.
"Not yet. Did Kou brief you?"
"A sketch, enough for now. I don't suppose any more word's come in on Padma and Alys Vorpatril, then, either?"
He shook his head regretfully. "But neither are they on the list of Vordarian's confirmed captures. I think they're hiding in the city. Vordarian's side is leaking information like a sieve, we'd know if any arrest that important had happened. I can only wonder if our own arrangements are so porous. That's the trouble with these damned civil affrays, everybody has a brother—"
A voice from down the corridor hailed loudly, "Sir! Oh, sir!" Only Cordelia felt Aral flinch, his arm jerking under her hand.
An HQ staffer led a tall man in black fatigues with colonel's tabs on the collar toward them. "There you are, sir. Colonel Gerould is here from Marigrad."
"Oh. Good. I have to see this man now. . . ." Aral looked around hurriedly, and his eye fell on Droushnakovi. "Drou, please escort Cordelia to the infirmary for me. Get her checked, get her—get her everything."
The colonel was no HQ desk pilot. He looked, in fact, as if he'd just flown in from some front line, wherever the "front" was in this war for loyalties. His fatigues were dirty and wrinkled and looked slept-in, their smoke-stink eclipsing Cordelia's mountain-reek. His face was lined with fatigue. But he looked only grim, not beaten. "The fighting in Marigrad has gone house-to-house, Admiral," he reported without preamble.
Vorkosigan grimaced. "Then I want to hopscotch it. Come with me to the tactics room—what is that on your arm, Colonel?"
A wide piece of white cloth and a narrower strip of brown circled the officer's black upper left sleeve. "ID, sir. We couldn't tell who we were shooting at, up close. Vordarian's people are wearing red and yellow, 's as close as they could come to maroon and gold, I guess. That's supposed to be brown and silver for Vorkosigan, of course."
"That's what I was afraid of." Vorkosigan looked extremely stern. "Take it off. Burn it. And pass the word down the line. You already have a uniform, Colonel, issued to you by the Emperor. That's who you're fighting for. Let the traitors alter their uniforms."
The colonel looked shocked at Vorkosigan's vehemence, but, after a beat, enlightened; he stripped the cloth hastily from his arm and stuffed it in his pocket. "Right, sir."
Aral let go of Cordelia's hand with a palpable effort. "I'll meet you in our quarters, love. Later."
Later in the week, at this rate. Cordelia shook her head helplessly, took in one last view of his stocky form as if her intensity could somehow digitize and store him for retrieval, and followed Droushnakovi into Tanery Base's underground warren. At least with Drou, Cordelia was able to overrule Vorkosigan's itinerary and insist on a bath first. Almost as good, she found half a dozen new outfits in her correct size, betraying Drou's palace-trained good taste, waiting for her in a closet in Aral's quarters.
* * *
The base doctor had no charts; Cordelia's medical records were of course all behind enemy lines in Vorbarr Sultana at present. He shook his head and keyed up a new form on his report panel. "I'm sorry, Lady Vorkosigan. We'll simply have to begin at the beginning. Please bear with me. Do I understand correctly you've had some sort of female trouble?"
No, most of my troubles have been with males. Cordelia bit her tongue. "I had a placental transfer, let me see, three plus," she had to count it up on her fingers, "about five weeks ago."
"Excuse me, a what?"
"I gave birth by surgical section. It did not go well."
"I see. Five weeks post-partum." He made a note. "And what is your present complaint?"
I don't like Barrayar, I want to go home, my father-in-law wants to murder my baby, half my friends are running for their lives, and I can't get ten minutes alone with my husband, whom you people are consuming before my
eyes, my feet hurt, my head hurts, my soul hurts . . . it was all too complicated. The poor man just wanted something to put in his blank, not an essay. "Fatigue," Cordelia managed at last.
"Ah." He brightened, and entered this factoid on his report panel. "Post-partum fatigue. This is normal." He looked up and regarded her earnestly. "Have you considered starting an exercise program, Lady Vorkosigan?"
Chapter Fourteen
"Who are Vordarian's men?" Cordelia asked Aral in frustration. "I've been running from them for weeks, but it's like I've only glimpsed them in a rearview mirror. Know your enemy and all that. Where does he get this endless supply of goons?"
"Oh, not endless." Aral smiled slightly, and took another bite of stew. They were—miracle!—alone at last, in his simple underground senior officer's apartment. Their supper had been brought in on a tray by a batman, and spread on a low table between them. Aral had then, to Cordelia's relief, ejected this hovering minion with a "Thank you, Corporal, that will be all."
Aral swallowed his bite and continued, "Who are they? For the most part, anyone who was caught with an officer up along his chain of command who elected Vordarian's side, and who hasn't worked up the nerve, or in some cases the wit, to either frag the officer or desert his unit and report in elsewhere. And obedience and unit cohesion is deeply inculcated in these men. 'When the going gets rough, stick to your unit' is literally drilled into them. So the unfortunate fact that their officer is leading them into treason makes clinging to their squad-brothers even more natural. Besides," he grinned bleakly, "it's only treason if Vordarian loses."
"And is Vordarian losing?"
"As long as I live, and keep Gregor alive, Vordarian cannot win." He nodded in conviction. "Vordarian is imputing crimes to me as fast as he can invent them. Most serious is the rumor he's floating that I've made away with Gregor and seek the Imperium for myself. I judge this a ploy to smoke out Gregor's hiding place. He knows that Gregor's not with me. Or he'd be tempted to lob a nuclear in here."
Cordelia's lips curled in aversion. "So does he want to capture Gregor, or kill him?"
"Kill only if he can't capture. I will, when the time is right, produce Gregor."
"Why not right now?"
He sat back with a tired sigh, and pushed away his tray with a few bites of stew and a ragged bread shred still left in his bowl. "Because I wish to see how many of Vordarian's forces I can woo back to my side before the denoument. Desert to me is not quite the right term . . . come over, maybe. I don't wish to inaugurate my second year of office with four thousand military executions. All below a certain rank can be given a blanket pardon on the grounds that they were oath-bound to follow their officers, but I want to save as many of the senior men as I can. Five district counts and Vordarian are doomed now, no hope for them. Damn him for starting this."
"What are Vordarian's troops doing? Is this a sitzkrieg?"
"Not quite. He's wasting a lot of his time and mine, trying to gain a couple of useless strong points, like the supply depot at Marigrad. We oblige and draw him in, or out. It keeps Vordarian's commanders occupied, and their minds off the real high ground, which are the space-based forces. If only I had Kanzian!"
"Have your intelligence people located him yet?" The admired Admiral Kanzian was one of the two men in the Barrayaran High Command whom Vorkosigan regarded as his superiors in strategy. Kanzian was an advanced space operations specialist; the space-based forces had great faith in him. "No horse manure stuck on his boots," was the way Kou had once expressed it, to Cordelia's amusement.
"No, but Vordarian doesn't have him either. He's vanished. Hope to God he wasn't caught in some stupid street cross-fire and is lying unidentified on a slab somewhere. What a waste that would be."
"Would going up help? To sway the space forces?"
"Why d'you think I'm troubling to hold Tanery Base? I've considered the pros and cons of moving my field HQ aboard ship. I think not yet; it could be misinterpreted as the first step in running away."
Running away. What a seductive thought. Far, far away from all this lunacy, till it was all reduced to the single dimension of a minor filler in some galactic news vid. But . . . run away from Aral? She studied him, as he sat back on the padded sofa, staring at but not seeing the remains of his supper. A weary middle-aged man in a green uniform, of no particular handsomeness (except perhaps for the sharp grey eyes); a hungry intellect at constant internal war with fear-driven aggression, each fueled by a lifetime crowded with bizarre experience, Barrayaran experience. You should have fallen in love with a happy man, if you wanted happiness. But no, you had to fall for the breathtaking beauty of pain. . . .
The two shall be made one flesh. How literal that ancient pious mouthing had turned out to be. One little scrap of flesh, prisoned in a uterine replicator behind enemy lines, bound them now like siamese twins. And if little Miles died, would that bond be slashed?
"What . . . what are we doing about Vordarian's hostages?"
He sighed. "That is the hard nut in the center. Stripped of everything else, as we are gradually doing, Vordarian still holds over twenty district counts and Kareen. And several hundred lesser folk."
"Such as Elena?"
"Yes. And the city of Vorbarr Sultana itself, for that matter. He could threaten to atomize the city, at the end, to get passage off-planet. I've toyed with the idea of dealing. Have him assassinated later. Can't just let him go free, it would be unjust to all those who've died already in loyalty to me. What burning could satisfy those betrayed souls? No.
"So we're planning various rescue-raid options, for the end. The moment when the shift in men and loyalties reaches critical mass, and Vordarian really starts to panic. Meanwhile we wait. In the end . . . I'll sacrifice hostages before I'll let Vordarian win." His unseeing stare was black, now.
"Even Kareen?" All the hostages? Even the tiniest?
"Even Kareen. She is Vor. She understands."
"The surest proof I am not Vor," said Cordelia glumly. "I don't understand any of this . . . stylized madness. I think you should all be in therapy, every last one of you."
He smiled slightly. "Do you think Beta Colony could be persuaded to send us a battalion of psychiatrists as humanitarian aid? The one you had that last argument with, perhaps?"
Cordelia snorted. Well, Barrayaran history did have a sort of weird dramatic beauty, in the abstract, at a distance. A passion play. It was close-up that the stupidity of it all became more palpable, dissolving like a mosaic into meaningless squares.
Cordelia hesitated, then asked, "Are we playing the hostage game?" She was not sure she wanted to hear the answer.
Vorkosigan shook his head. "No. That's been my toughest argument, all week, to look men in the eye who have wives and children up in the capital, and say No." He arranged his cutlery neatly on his tray, in its original pattern, and added in a meditative tone, "But they aren't looking widely enough. This is not, so far, a revolution, merely a palace coup. The population is inert, or rather, lying low, except for some informers. Vordarian is making his appeals to the elite conservatives, old Vor, and the military. The Count can't count. The new technoculture is producing plebe progressives as fast as our schools can crank them out. They are the majority of the future. I wish to give them some method besides colored armbands to distinguish the good guys from the bad guys. Moral suasion is a more powerful force than Vordarian suspects. What old Earth general said that the moral is to the physical as three to one? Oh, Napoleon, that was it. Too bad he didn't follow his own advice. I'd put it as five to one, for this particular war."
"But do your powers balance? What about the physical?"
Vorkosigan shrugged. "We each have access to enough weapons to lay Barrayar waste. Raw power is not really the issue. But my legitimacy is an enormous advantage, as long as weapons must be manned. Hence Vordarian's attempts to undercut that legitimacy with his accusations about my doing away with Gregor. I propose to catch him in his lie."
Cordelia shiv
ered. "You know, I don't think I would care to be on Vordarian's side."
"Oh, there are still a few ways he could win. My death is entailed in all of them. Without me as a focus, the only Regent annointed by the late Ezar, what's to choose? Vordarian's claim is then as good as anyone's. If he killed me, and got possession of Gregor, or vice versa, he could conceivably consolidate from there. Till the next coup, and train of revolts and vengeance-killings rebounding into the indefinite future . . ." His eyes narrowed, as he contemplated this dark vision. "That's my worst nightmare. That this war won't stop if we lose, till another Dorca Vorbarra the Just arises to put an end to another Bloody Century. God knows when. Frankly, I don't see a man of that calibre among my generation."
Check your mirror, thought Cordelia somberly.
* * *
"Ah, so that's why you wanted me to see the doctor first," Cordelia teased Aral that night. The doctor, once Cordelia had adjusted a few of his confused assumptions, had examined her meticulously, changed his prescription from exercise to rest, and cleared her to resume marital relations, with caution. Aral merely grinned, and made love to her as if she were spun glass. His own recovery from the soltoxin was nearly complete, she judged from this. He slept like a rock, only warmer, till the comconsole woke them at dawn. There must have been some military conspiracy at work, for it not to have lit up before then. Cordelia pictured some understaffer confiding to Kou, "Yeah, let's let the Old Man get laid, maybe he'll mellow out. . . ."
Still, the miserable fatigue-fog lifted faster this time. Within a day, with Droushnakovi for escort, Cordelia was up and exploring her new surroundings.
She ran across Bothari in the base gymnasium. Count Piotr had not yet returned, so once he'd debriefed to Aral Bothari had no duties either. "Got to keep in training," he told her shortly.
"You been sleeping?"