Irresistible Forces

somehow more keenly excoriating than any bellowed dressing-down.

Roic checked his uniform again.

The long silvery groundcar pulled up and sighed to the pavement. The front canopy rose on the driver, the senior and dauntingly competent Armsman Pym. He released the rear canopy and hurried around the car to assist m'lord and his party. The senior armsman spared a glance through the narrow window as he strode by, his eye passing coolly over Roic and scanning the hall beyond to make sure it contained no unforeseen drama this time. These were Very Important Off-World Wedding Guests, Pym had impressed upon Roic. Which Roic might have been left to deduce by m'lord going personally to the shuttleport to greet their descent from orbit — but then, Pym had walked in on the bug butter disaster, too. Since that day, his directives to Roic had tended to be couched in words of one syllable, with no contingency left to chance.

A short figure in a well-tailored gray tunic and trousers hopped out of the car first: Lord Vorkosigan, gesturing expansively at the great stone mansion, talking nonstop over his shoulder, smiling in proud welcome. As the carved doors swung wide, admitting a blast of Vorbarr Sultana winter night air and a few glittering snow crystals, Roic stood to attention and mentally matched the other people exiting the ground-car with the security list he'd been given. A tall woman held a baby bundled in blankets; a lean, smiling fellow hovered by her side. They had to be the Bothari-Jeseks. Madame Elena Bothari-Jesek was the daughter of the late, legendary Armsman Bothari; her right of entree into Vorkosigan House, where she had grown up with m'lord, was absolute, Pym had made sure Roic understood. It scarcely needed the silver circles of a jump pilot's neural leads on midforehead and temples to identify the shorter middle-aged fellow as the Betan jump pilot, Arde Mayhew — should a jump pilot look so jump- lagged? Well, m'lord's mother, Countess Vorkosigan, was Betan, too; and the pilot's blinking, shivering stance was among the most physically unthreatening Roic had ever seen. Not so the final guest. Roic's eyes widened.

The hulking figure unfolded from the groundcar and stood up, and up. Pym, who was almost as tall as Roic, did not come quite up to its shoulder. It shook out the swirling folds of a gray-and-white greatcoat of military cut and threw back its head. The light from overhead caught the face and gleamed off… were those fangs hooked over the outslung lower jaw?

Sergeant Taura was the name that went with it, by process of elimination. One of m'lord's old military buddies, Pym had given Roic to understand, and — don't be fooled by the rank — of some particular importance (if rather mysterious, as was everything connected with Lord Miles Vorkosigan's late career in Imperial Security). Pym was former ImpSec himself. Roic was not, as he was reminded, oh, three times a day on average.

At Lord Vorkosigan's urging, the whole party poured into the entry hall, shaking off snow-spotted garments, talking, laughing. The greatcoat was swung from those high shoulders like a billowing sail, its owner turning neatly on one foot, folding the garment ready to hand over. Roic jerked back to avoid being clipped by a heavy, mahogany-colored braid of hair as it swept past, and rocked forward to find himself face to… nose to… staring directly into an entirely unexpected cleavage. It was framed by pink silk in a plunging vee. He glanced up. The outslung jaw was smooth and beardless. The curious pale amber eyes, irises circled with sleek black lines, looked back down at him with, he instantly feared, some amusement. Her fang-framed smile was deeply alarming.

Pym was efficiently organizing servants and luggage. Lord Vorkosigan's voice yanked Roic back to focus. 'Roic, did the count and countess get back in from their dinner engagement yet?'

'About twenty minutes ago, m'lord. They went upstairs to their suite to change.'

Lord Vorkosigan addressed the woman with the baby, who was attracting cooing maids. 'My parents would skin me if I didn't take you up to them instantly. Come on. Mother's pretty eager to meet her namesake. I predict Baby Cordelia will have Countess Cordelia wrapped around her pudgy little fingers in about, oh, three and a half seconds. At the outside.'

He turned and started up the curve of the great staircase, shepherding the Bothari-Jeseks and calling over his shoulder, 'Roic, show Arde and Taura to their assigned rooms, make sure they have everything they want. We'll meet back in the library when you all are freshened up or whatever. Drinks and snacks will be laid on there.'

So, it was a lady sergeant. Galactics had those; m'lord's mother had been a famous Betan officer in her day. But this one's a bloody giant mutant lady sergeant was a thought Roic suppressed more firmly. Such backcountry prejudices had no place in this household. Though, she was clearly bioengineered, had to be. He recovered himself enough to say, 'May I take your bag, um… Sergeant?'

'Oh, all right.' With a dubious look down at him, she handed him the satchel she'd had slung over one arm. The pink enamel on her fingernails did not quite camouflage their shape as claws, heavy and efficient as a leopard's. The bag's descending weight nearly jerked Roic's arm out of its socket. He managed a desperate smile and began lugging it two-handed up the staircase in m'lord's wake.

He deposited the tired-looking pilot first. Sergeant Taura's second-floor guest room was one of the renovated ones, with its own bath, around the corridor's corner from m'lord's own suite. She reached up and trailed a claw along the ceiling and smiled in evident approval of Vorkosigan House's three-meter headspace.

'So,' she said, turning to Roic, 'is a Winterfair wedding considered especially auspicious, in Barrayaran custom?'

'They're not so common as in summer. Mostly I think it's now because m'lord's fiancee is between semesters at university.'

Her thick brows rose in surprise. 'She's a student?'

'Yes, ma'am.' He had a notion one addressed female sergeants as ma'am. Pym would have known.

'I didn't realize she was such a young lady.'

'No, ma'am. Madame Vorsoisson's a widow — she has a little boy, Nikki — nine years old. Mad about jumpships. Do you happen't' know — does that pilot fellow like children?' Mayhew was bound to be a magnet for Nikki.

'Why… I don't know. I don't think Arde knows either. He hardly ever meets any in a free mercenary fleet.'

He would have to watch, then, to be sure little Nikki didn't set himself up for a painful rebuff. M'lord and m'lady-to-be might not be paying their usual attention to him, under the circumstances.

Sergeant Taura circled the room, gazing with what Roic hoped was approval at its comfortable appointments, and glanced out the window at the back garden, shrouded in winter white, the snow luminous in the security lighting. 'I suppose it makes sense that he'd have to wed one of his own Vor kind, in the end.' Her nose wrinkled. 'So, are the Vor a social class, a warrior caste, or what? I never could quite figure it out from Miles. The way he talks about them you'd half think they were a religion. Or at any rate, his religion.'

Roic blinked in bafflement. 'Well, no. And yes. All of that. The Vor are… well, Vor.'

'Now that Barrayar has modernized, isn't a hereditary aristocracy resented by the rest of your classes?'

'But they're our Vor.'

'Says the Barrayaran. Hmm. So, you can criticize them, but heaven help any outsider who dares to?'

'Yes,' he said, relieved that she seemed to have grasped it despite his stumbling tongue.

'A family matter. I see.' Her grin faded into a frown that was actually less alarming — not so much fang. Her fingers clenching the curtain inadvertently poked claws through the expensive fabric; wincing, she shook her hand free and tucked it behind her back. Her voice lowered. 'So she's Vor, well and good. But does she love him?'

Roic heard the odd emphasis in her voice but was unclear how to interpret it. 'I'm very sure of it, ma'am,' he avowed loyally. M'lady-to-be's frowns, her darkening mood, were surely just prewedding nerves piled atop examination stress on the substrate of her not-so-distant bereavement.

'Of course.' Her smile flicked back in a perfunctory sort of way. 'Have you served Lord Vorkosigan long, Armsman Roic?'

'Since last winter, ma'am, when a space fell vacant in the Vorkosigans' armsmen's score. I was sent up on recommendation from the Hassadar Municipal Guard,' he added a bit truculently, challenging her to sneer at his humble, nonmilitary origins. 'A count's twenty armsmen are always from his own district, y'see.'

She did not react; the Hassadar Municipal Guard evidently meant nothing to her.