Captain Vorpatril's Alliance (38 page)

“As your lady mother would say, that would not be correct. Which is no one’s fault”—
or business
flitted past, implied—“but our own. Although”—a brief, sideways hesitation, surely not
diffident?
—“I could likely do without all the mumbled
ums
.”

Um
, Ivan started to say, then thought better of it. He converted it to an “Oh.” Did Simon
care
about that?
Evidently
. Ivan’s mental review of all the awkward, smart-ass ways he’d introduced Simon these past four years was interrupted, thankfully, by Byerly sauntering over.

By gave Simon an apologetic nod. It was always a little fascinating to watch By’s habitual smarmy irony so thoroughly purged, not only from his expression, but from his body language, around the former ImpSec chief. Illyan plainly still unnerved By to the marrow of his bones, even though By had once worked for him—or was that,
because
he had once worked for him?

Ivan’s glance took inventory of Arquas and Jewels, gathered around the drinks trolley or gazing out the windows into the softening winter dusk. “I see you managed to get them all here. Mamere find a bus?”

“A luxurious sort of ground-barge, yes. We didn’t lose a single Arqua overboard,” Byerly said, with mock pride. “Not for lack of their trying. You have a
lot
of new in-laws Ivan.”

“Yeah, noticed that.” Ivan nabbed a drink, with a smile of intense gratitude to his mother’s servitor, a regular from that catering service Lady Alys called on for very-high-end governmental receptions, when she wasn’t using Imperial Residence staff. The woman smiled back in a motherly manner. Simon and Mamere were tag-teaming, Ivan saw out of the corner of his eye, Mamere escorting the Baronne and Lady ghem Estif to the wide windows to point out the highlights of Vorbarr Sultana, Simon doing the same for Shiv, both covertly watching the senior Arquas’ interactions with their very assorted children. Very adult children, but did any of the oldsters really see them that way…?

Tej was drawn into conversation with her brother Amiri, and his apparent jeeves-shadow Jet, or Onyx; did each of the full-blooded Arqua children rate his or her own Jewel, or what? This was a family dynamic that Ivan’s acquaintance with the Barrayaran historical precedent of acknowledged bastards did not quite seem to cover. He made the rounds of the rest of the clan, inquiring politely after their hotel, their naps, and their trip to his mother’s flat, all of which were reported as tolerable, then drifted over to join Simon and Shiv in time to hear Simon say, “So how
did
Prestene get the drop on you?”

Shiv heaved a sigh. “In part, it turned out to be an inside job. Some trusted subordinates—shouldn’t have been.”

“Unfortunate. But that can happen to the most supposedly-secure bastions.” Simon touched his forehead in a frustration-gesture Ivan hadn’t seen for a while. “That was how the bastard took down my chip.”

“Your eidetic memory chip that was removed upon your retirement? Was this not ordered by your Imperial masters? I don’t follow.”

“The other way around, I’m afraid. First the chip was bio-sabotaged, quite thoroughly—Ivan would doubtless remember that part better than I do”—a sharp glance under his lidded eyes Ivan’s way—“then the slagged remains surgically excised, happily before and not after the ugly side-effects killed me.
Not
the way I would have chosen to retire from the Imperial Service, for all my daydreams of doing just that, after forty years.”

“Ah. I
quite
see,” said Shiv, sounding entirely sincere.

The two men toasted each other ironically with their nearly-empty glasses, and drained them. The drinks-trolley elf appeared magically to refill them, then vanished into the mob again.

The marquetry doors on the end of the living room parted like the curtains on a play, revealing the stage, or at least the table, now pulled out to a spacious oblong and invitingly set. Mamere and her minions smoothly guided the guests to their places. Shiv seized the moment to murmur something in his daughter Pidge’s ear, before they were separated.

Ivan was unhappily parted from Tej, seated opposite her father who was placed at the foot of the table on Simon’s honored right. Alys, at the head, had Moira ghem Estif on her right, and Udine Arqua on her left—the usual protocols had plainly broken down in the face of the Arqua challenge, or things were being let to go a casual sort of family-style, or else Mamere had devised placements by some plan of her own, possibly with advice from ImpSec (retired). Ivan found himself plunked between his mother-in-law and his senior sister-in-law Star, with Byerly beyond her, separated from Rish by Emerald. Jet, Pearl, Amiri and Pidge filled the opposite side of the table between Lady ghem Estif and Tej. The table was too long to maintain a single conversation except in spurts; most likely the talk would fragment into two or three parts. By, in the middle, was placed to either hear everything or be utterly distracted, depending.

A hearty Winterfair-style soup appeared, appropriate to the season—Ivan recognized the recipe on the first heavenly sniff. His mother had apparently kidnapped Ma Kosti for the evening, and he trusted Miles wouldn’t find out. Rish, down the table, was assuring her fellow-Jewel Emerald that everything was going to be
just fine
, and the genetically sense-enhanced portion of the table, which was most of it, raised their spoons in bliss.

Lady Alys diplomatically began the conversation with the most neutral topic available, inquiring of Lady ghem Estif how she had enjoyed Earth, and drawing Ivan in with a few leading remarks about his career-polishing stint there as an assistant military attaché, a decade—no,
more
—ago. A glance under her lashes warned Ivan to leave out the Interesting Bits, hardly necessary; it would take more drinks than this before Ivan would want to expand on his lingering feelings for
those
. Anyway, Lady ghem Estif relieved him of the necessity by being willingly led, describing her past eight years of residence on humanity’s homeworld in unexceptionable terms. To Ivan’s surprise, it seemed she had not spent her time there in a cloistered retirement, either rich or straitened, but in some sort of genetics-related consulting business, “To keep my hand in,” as she explained. “My original training is sadly out-of-date, by Cetagandan standards; not so much by Earth’s. Though I have kept up.” She smiled complacently at her assorted grandchildren, ranged along the table.

Star, who in Ivan’s estimation had been drinking pretty heavily, unless she had some sort of gengineered Cetagandan liver, looked up and said, “How
did
you and the old general come to have the Baronne, anyway? Did your old Constellation order it? Must have—it’s said the haut keep their outcrosses tightly controlled.”

“That is incorrect, dear. Although by then my Constellation and I had long parted ways. It’s the haut-haut crosses that are meticulously planned. It is precisely the outcrosses which are loosened, so as to permit the possibility of genetic serendipity.”

Udine smiled rather grimly across the table at her mother. “Did you find me so serendipitous?”

“In the longer view—ultimately. I admit, at the time, my motivations were more short-term and emotional.”

Star’s brow furrowed. “Were you in love with Grandfather ghem Estif, back then?”
Moira ghem Estif waved away this romantic notion. “Rae ghem Estif was not a lovable man, as such. I did feel, strongly, that he—that all of us who chose to stop on Komarr rather than return to the Empire—had suffered our efforts to be betrayed by our respective superiors. It was Rae’s one loss to the Ninth Satrapy that I could make up.”

Jet, next to her, looked confused. “What loss was that?”

Udine sipped her wine, smiled affectionately across at her son-and/or-construct, and said, “What, you never heard that tale?” Jet, Ivan was reminded, was the last Arqua, even younger than Tej.

Conversation had died, all along the table, as those at the far end strained to hear. Tej leaned forward and peered around the line of her seatmates, alert for some new tidbit. Their
materfamilias
must not often bore them with accounts of her youth, Ivan decided.

“It’s a very Barrayaran story, all waste and aggravation and futility, which I must suppose makes it appropriate to tell here,” said Lady ghem Estif, with a glance down the table at her presumed host. Simon smiled distantly back, but his eyes had gone quite attentive. “The general’s son by one of his prior wives was lost in the Ninth Satrapy.”

“Blown up by Ivan Xav’s ancestors?” Rish inquired brightly from her end.

“We initially thought so, but our best later guess was that he was killed by what is so oxymoronically called friendly fire. Captain ghem Estif vanished while on a three-day leave. Normally this would have been put down to his being murdered by the guerillas or having deserted—desertions were a growing problem by then—but Rae insisted it could not be the second and there was no sign of the first. It was only much later—we had already reached Komarr, as I recall—that one of his son’s friends spoke privately with us, and we found out that the captain had taken a Barrayaran lover.”

She paused to sip soup; fourteen people refrained from interrupting, in unison.

She swallowed delicately and went on: “The captain had apparently penetrated enemy lines to the most dire and notorious nest of guerrillas on the planet in search of his young man. It is entirely unclear if he had found out the city was secretly slated to be destroyed by the ruling ghem-junta—of which General ghem Estif was not a part, so he could not have had the news that way—and was trying to get him out, or if it was just bad luck and bad timing. For all the ironic horror of his son’s immolation, Rae did seem to take some consolation in the assurance that it was not desertion.”

The four Barrayarans around the table were not, actually,
quieter
than the rest of the audience, Ivan thought—but maybe he was getting a worked demonstration of the difference between
attentive
and
choked
silence. The infamous nuclear destruction of the Vorkosigan’s District capital had been the act that had galvanized the war-torn and exhausted planet into its final push against the Occupation.

“My cousin Miles actually owns the site of Vorkosigan Vashnoi,” Ivan put in, affably. Pseudo-affably? Even he wasn’t sure. “It’s finally stopped glowing.”

“Has it,” said Lady ghem Estif, unruffled. “Well, salute the brave ghem-captain and his beloved for me, next time you fly over. I assume you do not land there.”

“No,” said Ivan. “Not even now.”

Lady Alys, with thirty years of diplomatic experience under her belt, looked as if she was discovering a whole new meaning for the term,
conversation pit
. But she made a valiant effort to recover. “Is that why you and the ghem-general took up Komarran citizenship?”

“I believe Rae’s motivations for that were more practical—he had been given access to a large block of planetary voting shares.”

Bribed
, did that translate as?

“I did not actually apply for Komarran citizenship myself, merely claiming umbrella residency as a spouse,” Lady ghem Estif went on. “Later, when I lived with Udine and Shiv, the question of governmental loyalties was, mm, locally moot. I have actually managed to remain a stateless person for the better part of a century, which, I can tell you, is not something the Nexus generally makes easy to do.”

“Indeed,” said Illyan from the other end of the table, staring at her in fascination, “not.”

The next course arrived and the conversation broke apart, the female-dominated end of the table going on to Cetagandan genetic techniques as applied to Jacksonian outcrosses, with a side-order of current Barrayaran techno-obstetrical fashions, the other end to military history and its financing. Ivan was maddened by not
quite
being able to hear the details when Simon and Shiv began to compare-and-contrast, or possibly one-up, anecdotes of brigandage and covert ops in the Jackson’s Whole system, presumably heavily edited on both sides.

Ivan decided to let someone else explain the provenance of the mouth-melting maple ambrosia served for dessert, but to his relief no one inquired; Lady Alys’s description of it as ‘a traditional Barrayaran confection’ seemed to cover it. The menu item was likely inevitable, given the cook; Ma Kosti was collecting royalties on the recipe, Ivan understood.

Dinner ended without disaster, despite Lady ghem Estif’s little wobble into ancient angst. With the seniors setting the pace, it was clear the evening was not going to run late or turn raucous. Ivan followed when Simon drew Shiv off to his study, an unusual postprandial honor; he normally only permitted the most select guests into this private space, such as Gregor or Miles or Uncle Aral when he was on-world. The honor was underscored when Simon rummaged in his credenza and emerged with a bottle of the even more select brandy, the one from the Vorkosigan’s District so rare that it didn’t even have a label, being distributed solely as a gift from the Count’s own hand.

And two glasses. Simon studied Ivan with his most annoying blandness, and murmured, “I expect Lady Tej will be wanting your support out there, eh, Ivan?”

They eyed each other; Ivan tried not to let his gaze fix on the bottle gently dangling from Simon’s hand. “I’m very concerned for Tej’s future, sir.”

“I am aware, Ivan. It’s one of the things in the forefront of my mind.”

Ivan couldn’t say, out loud in front of his putative father-in-law watching this play with keen interest,
Dammit,
I
need to be dealing with Shiv! Wait your turn!
Nor, as Simon chivvied him firmly to the door and evicted him,
Don’t forget!
Just how many things could Simon keep in the forefront of his mind these days without losing track? The very soundproof, not to mention projectile-, plasma-, and poison gas-proof, door slid closed in front of Ivan’s nose, exiling him to the hallway.

Byerly wandered up, looking faintly frazzled. “Have you seen where Arqua and Illyan disappeared to?”

Ivan jerked his thumb at the study. “Private conclave, evidently. Discussing Vorkosigan brandy, and I’m not sure what else.”