Lois Bujold - Barrayar

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?”

“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 I 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.