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 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
