Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen (27 page)

Chapter Thirteen

Ghost ship
, was all Jole could think, strolling through the echoing, deserted corridors of the
Prince Serg
the next day. They glinted in the corners of his vision like fatigue hallucinations, those shades of anxious men. Some of them, he supposed, were dead for real by now; all were gone, scattered away from what had at the time seemed—been—their overwhelming purpose. From the pensive look on Miles’s face, Jole wondered if he was seeing similar specters.

So many crewmembers on the Vicereine’s expedition had wanted to see the
Serg
, the tour had been broken up into two groups. Hers, naturally, was led by the skeleton crew’s captain himself, and escorted by the chief engineer. Extra work for them all, but it did cast a validating few hours of importance across an otherwise boring routine voyage. And it never hurt to get the house cleaned up for guests.

Jole gazed around with almost as much curiosity as everyone else when they reached Engineering. He’d seldom been down here on his own long-ago months aboard. The kids were portioned out among the adults—Cordelia held Alex’s hand, Miles Helen’s, and Ekaterin Lizzie’s, to keep them from straying onto any unfortunate live controls. At a few points Cordelia looked as if she half wanted to pass off her charge to Jole and hold Miles’s hand instead, but he did manage to restrain himself and set a good example. His disturbingly expert lecture on the several ways one might go about hijacking the ship right from here was limited to a strictly verbal version, though he looked back wistfully over his shoulder as they left.

The bridge brought them to more-familiar old territory, from Jole’s point of view; and then the tactics room, doubly so. The old tactical computer had not been torn out or shut down with the weaponry, though its software had been sanitized of anything currently still classified. The hardware was too obsolete to recycle. It was plain that the skeleton crew, whiling away their voyage, had been using it to play war games, a skill-building leisure activity Jole could only approve. Here, at last, the visitors were allowed to push all the buttons their hearts desired. Miles led his children and Freddie into virtual battle with great enthusiasm.

Jole smiled and shook his head at an invitation to join the fray. “I’ve seen it in operation before,” he murmured, which, recalling where and when, daunted their hosts sufficiently not to press him. Cordelia also seemed to find the temptation resistible, sauntering up to companionably take his arm and watch.

“I’ve often wondered what it is the officers have left to do, when the tactical computer does so much,” Ekaterin, also observing, remarked after a time. “And so fast.”

“There are some classes of decisions it can’t make,” said Jole. “Mainly political ones. Also, rarely, an officer may know something it doesn’t. Even so, I only saw Aral override it a few times during the hot part of the Hegen Hub fight. Three instances out of four he was correctly guessing the psychology of the enemy’s next moves, when they were overriding
their
tac comps.”

And a hellish few hours the battle had been, but not nearly as hellish as the strained weeks leading up to it.

The official version was that young Emperor Gregor had secretly left the economics conference that he’d been attending with his Prime Minister on Komarr to go on an urgent personal diplomatic mission to the Hegen Hub, to try to pull its disparate polities together in the face of an imminent Cetagandan invasion of the planet Vervain. Since the Vervain system bordered the Hegen Hub, the expectation was that the Cetagandans would hopscotch the planet itself to seize the Hub and its vital multiple wormhole-nexus connections; and, if their momentum proved sufficient, perhaps move on to snap up the Pol system as well, which would have brought them right to the Barrayaran empire’s Komarran doorstep.

A hastily recruited double of Gregor had been sent back to Barrayar on the pretext of illness, to cover for the Emperor’s sudden absence. Another layer of supposed deception was that the Emperor had
disappeared
from Komarr, kidnapped or worse. This was supported by a frantic, if tightly closed-mouthed, ImpSec sweep of the domes and the system for the missing man. To this day, the confusion about which of the tales was true had been carefully maintained in the face of all commentary, well fogged. Every possible permutation had its variously fanatical supporters as the questions slowly segued from current events into history.

Jole and Cordelia were among the few who knew that the real answer was
all of the above
, and not necessarily in the order one would imagine. Evidently musing along similar lines, Cordelia pressed Jole’s arm and murmured, “I am
so thankful
that Aral had you with him, when I had to escort that poor boy we had playing emperor back to Barrayar. I had never seen Aral so mutely terrified as when we thought we’d lost Gregor, just when it had all seemed completed, Barrayar safely delivered to its future.”

“Not even during the Pretendership?”

“Not the same thing at all, no. And not just because he’d been twenty years younger then, I don’t think. This was a qualitatively different crisis, somehow. For a while there, he feared he might be looking down the throat of the third civil war on Barrayar in his lifetime, and it almost broke his heart. Finding himself facing Cetagandans instead was practically a
joy
, by contrast.”

That was almost too true to be funny. Fortunately, Aral’s usual stern and decisive facade had never cracked in public. Even Jole had only been treated to the occasional alarming flash of Aral’s doubts, like vivid filaments of lava seen through a surface one had thought safe stone. He’d done all he could to support the man, whether in his roles as aide, confidante, or lover, not that there’d been much time, energy, or attention left over for that last. Apparently, it had been enough, because they’d all won through alive somehow.

But when they’d received the confirmation that Gregor was at last coming aboard, Aral had smiled, snapped out the necessary orders, walked to his cabin, locked the door, sat down on his bunk with his face buried in his hands, and wept for the relief of it. Not for long; there’d been a wormhole to defend, coming right up. The maniacally cheerful edge with which the aging admiral had approached this task had been a big morale boost to the men, many of whom had never faced live fire before. That its source was far, far more complicated than a native enthusiasm for war was not something Jole had been able to explain to people, then or later. Except, perhaps, to Cordelia, who already understood. He covered the present Cordelia’s hand with his own, and pressed it in an unmoored gratitude.

The skeleton crew had offered a lunch of standard rations in the
Serg
’s mess as an authentic military experience, attempting to make a virtue of necessity; they were happily spared this charade by the Vicereine’s own chef, who provided for all. Scarfing it down, and discussing the vicissitudes of military chow generally, the engineer sighed to Jole, “I suppose at least the Admiral ate better, on board here.”

No, worse
. During the lead-up, Aral had barely been able to eat at all, with his old stress-related stomach issues resurfacing, and he hadn’t dared start drinking. Jole edited this to, “Only during the diplomatic phases. During the crunch times, he hardly paid attention to what was shoved in front of him.” And Jole had quietly added
badger him to eat
to his growing list of key-man-maintenance tasks.

Following lunch, at Cordelia’s suggestion, the kids were sent to the ship’s gym with some of the younger crewmembers for a modified introduction to onboard military fitness routines. After a brief, surreal peek into what had been Aral’s quarters and his adjoining own, now stripped bare, gray and hollow, Jole rejoined the senior Vorkosigans in the corridor for a last slow stroll around.

“It seems so wasteful of resources,” Cordelia sighed. “All this short-lived military buildup.”

“Till it’s suddenly needed, and then it’s everyone wailing, Why didn’t we
prepare
?” Jole countered amiably.

Miles nodded. “And then you’re up to your asses in ghem. Again.”

Ekaterin said thoughtfully, “I do sometimes wonder what the purpose of the ghem brotherhood really is, with all their militant cultural traditions. I mean, from the Cetagandan haut viewpoint. Lately, I’ve started to think their main function is camouflage.”

Cordelia’s eyebrows went up. “For what, do you figure?”

“Cetagandan haut bioweapons. And very long-range agendas.” She extended a hand, turned it over. “I really gathered the impression, on my own trip behind the scenes on Rho Ceta, that the haut could destroy us at any time. The only reason why not is that they haven’t
chosen
to.”

Miles said reluctantly, “I’m afraid that’s true. The haut ladies of the Star Crèche have some biological agents that can melt your
bones
. Literally.” He shuddered in memory. “The crew of a ship like this one could all be dead in an hour.”

“How do you defend against something like that?” said Ekaterin.

Jole wasn’t sure if that was a real or a rhetorical question. He answered it anyway. “Current plans call for fully automated and drone ships. I can’t give you operational details, but I promise you, a large number of people both in and out of the military are working on the issues.”

“We used to call the biowar intelligence and analysis section at ImpSec HQ the Nightmare Barn,” Miles reminisced. “In a large building full of pale, overcaffeinated men, they had a reputation as being the pastiest and the twitchiest.”

Ekaterin shrugged. “There are organisms that attack plastics and metals. I can’t imagine that the haut haven’t thought of hyping them up as well.”

“They still have to be delivered,” Jole pointed out. “This is—fortunately—a nontrivial problem.” But he suspected the gentle gardener knew more than she was saying.
As do we all, here.

“It’s a haunting image, though. Automated warships forever defending a world that has already died, with no one left alive to turn them off.” She stared away through the walls, in her mind’s eye seeing…what?

Cordelia, ever practical, broke the spell. “If you can find me a manufacturer of any machinery that will last forever, I want their address. Some of our stuff doesn’t last a
week
.”

Miles laughed blackly, and Ekaterin smiled a little. Cordelia had not, Jole noted, addressed the dead-world half of that scenario.

But then Miles bit his lip, his face scrunching down in some decision. Making it, he looked up. “There’s a thing coming along that Gregor’s been sitting on, which I should probably apprise you two of. Has to do with that goldmine of old Occupation data that was uncovered when they found that buried lab bunker. And why some of it hasn’t been declassified yet, despite the howls from the academic community. Duv Galeni’s been overseeing the work on it for ages, and even he agrees with Gregor. Though he’d love to publish—he’s actually written the book, which is sitting in his ImpSec secure files waiting for the go-ahead. He let me read the first draft.”

Jole had the utmost respect for Commodore Galeni, one of the more overworked men in Vorbarr Sultana, simultaneously holding down the ImpSec Komarran Affairs chief’s desk because of his background as a Komarran, and, because of his background as a trained historian, given oversight of the examination of an enormous cache of abandoned Cetagandan military and other data, left behind at the century-past pullout and not found until seven years ago. Jole wondered if his own high classification status would allow him to put himself forward as a peer reviewer for Galeni’s manuscript…

Miles was going on: “Anyway, he’s solved certain mysteries about the last days of the war and the pullout from the Occupation that we didn’t even know
were
mysteries, although, when the clues are laid out, you wonder how we missed them. I have some theories on that, too. The ghem only used lightweight chemical warfare on Barrayar, back then, and almost no biologicals, even when they were losing ground.”

The people they’d been used
on
might have a different opinion of that “light” classification, Jole reflected, but this was more-or-less true. “Because the haut wouldn’t let them use the good stuff, I’ve always understood. Which is part of how an apparently effete, apparently unmilitary genetic aristocracy keeps control of their own warrior class. Apparently.”

Miles’s grin flickered at the string of ironic
apparentlys
. He’d had more direct experience of the haut than even Jole had, and was quite alive to the depths those elegant, deceptive surfaces hid.

“A cabal in the ghem junta running the Occupation had an operational plan for stepping up the game, it turns out, after their nasty foray into nuclears backfired so thoroughly. Seems that wasn’t their last-ditch effort after all. The existence of the abandoned bunker itself was actually a fat clue, once you step back and squint—they wouldn’t have packed that much wealth and data into it if they hadn’t imagined they’d be coming back to collect it. Plus Galeni was also given some unique contemporaneous eyewitness testimony by Moira ghem Estif, though it was typically haut-oblique—even he took a while to decode her pointers.

“The
real
pullout plan called for the use of stolen haut bioweapons—some kind of virulent plague, as I understand it, rekeyed to Barrayaran genetics. Picture it. Pull all your people out, release this hell-brew, seal the wormholes behind you and let it work in tidy isolation. A planet-sized culture dish. Come back in a year or two to a neatly depopulated landscape freed of that pesky native crowd who kept irrationally refusing to be culturally uplifted, and move in. There would be galactic outcry, sure, but—too bad, so sad, too late.”

“How close to operational did this plan
get
?” asked Jole, chilled.

“They’d got as far as actually stealing the base material and trying to set up a crew of biochemists—with at least one suborned haut among them—for the modifications and replication. They were figuring on getting away with a
fait accompli
. But then their central Imperial—in other words, haut—government caught up with them. Remember all those famous executions when the junta returned to Eta Ceta? Everyone thought the ghem were being punished for
losing
, for losing the war, for losing face. Which made a handy dual duty for the exercise. But there was a second lesson for stroppy ghem embedded under the more public one.”