Shards of Honor (Vorkosigan Saga) (23 page)

He turned his face toward her. "Was I wrong, Cordelia, to give myself to this thing? If I had not gone, he would simply have had another. I've always tried to walk the path of honor. But what do you do when all choices are evil? Shameful action, shameful inaction, every path leading to a thicket of death."

"You're asking me to judge you?"

"Someone must."

"I'm sorry. I can love you. I can grieve for you, or with you. I can share your pain. But I cannot judge you."

"Ah." He turned on his stomach, and stared down at the camp. "I talk too much to you. If my brain would ever grant me release from reality, I believe I would be the babbling sort of madman."

"You don't talk to anyone else like that, do you?" she asked, alarmed.

"Good God, no. You are—you are—I don't know what you are. But I need it. Will you marry me?"

She sighed, and laid her head upon her knees, twisting a grass stem around her fingers. "I love you. You know that, I hope. But I can't take Barrayar. Barrayar eats its children."

"It isn't all these damnable politics. Some people get through their whole lives practically unconscious of them."

"Yes, but you're not one of them."

He sat up. "I don't know if I could get a visa for Beta Colony."

"Not this year, I suspect. Nor next. All Barrayarans are considered war criminals there at the moment. Politically speaking, we haven't had this much excitement in years. They're all a little drunk on it just now. And then there is Komarr."

"I see. I should have trouble getting a job as a judo instructor, then. And I could hardly write my memoirs, all things considered."

"Right now I should think you'd have trouble avoiding lynch mobs." She looked up at his bleak face. A mistake; it wrenched her heart. "I've—got to go home for a while, anyway. See my family, and think things through in peace and quiet. Maybe we can come up with some alternate solution. We can write, anyway."

"Yes, I suppose." He stood, and helped her up.

"Where will you be, after this?" she asked. "You have your rank back."

"Well, I'm going to finish up all this dirty work"—a wave of his arm indicated the prison camp, and by implication the whole Escobaran adventure—“and then I believe I too shall go home. And get drunk. I cannot serve him anymore. He's used me up on this. The death of his son, and the five thousand men who escorted him to hell, will always hang between us now. Vorhalas, Gottyan . . ."

"Don't forget the Escobarans. And a few Betans, too."

"I shall remember them." He walked beside her down the path. "Is there anything you need, in camp? I've tried to see that everything was provided generally, within the limits of our supplies, but I may have missed something."

"Camp seems to be all right, now. I don't need anything special. All we really need is to go home. No—come to think of it, I do want a favor."

"Name it," he said eagerly.

"Lieutenant Rosemont's grave. It was never marked. I may never get back here. While it's still possible to find the remains of our camp, could you have your people mark it? I have all his numbers and dates. I handled his personnel forms often enough, I still have them memorized."

"I'll see to it personally."

"Wait." He paused, and she held out a hand to him. His thick fingers engulfed her tapering ones; his skin was warm and dry, and scorched her. "Before we go pick up poor Lieutenant Illyan again . . ."

He took her in his arms, and they kissed, for the first time, for a long time.

"Oh," she muttered after. "Perhaps that was a mistake. It hurts so much when you stop."

"Well, let me . . ." His hand stroked her hair gently, then desperately wrapped itself in a shimmering coil; they kissed again.

"Uh, sir?" Lieutenant Illyan, coming up the path, cleared his throat noisily. "Had you forgotten the staff conference?"

Vorkosigan put her from him with a sigh. "No, Lieutenant. I haven't forgotten."

"May I congratulate you, sir?" He smiled.

"No, Lieutenant."

He unsmiled. "I—don't understand, sir."

"That's quite all right, Lieutenant."

They walked on, Cordelia with her hands in her pockets, Vorkosigan with his clasped behind his back.

*
     
*
     
*

Most of the Escobaran women had already gone up by shuttle to the ship that had arrived to transport them home, late next afternoon, when a spruce Barrayaran guard appeared at the door of their shelter requesting Captain Naismith.

"Admiral's compliments, ma'am, and he wishes to know if you'd care to check the data on the marker he had made for your officer. It's in his office."

"Yes, certainly."

"Cordelia, for God's sake," hissed Lieutenant Alfredi, "don't go in there alone."

"It's
all right,
" she murmured back impatiently. "Vorkosigan's all right."

"Oh? So what did he want yesterday?"

"I told you, to arrange for the marker."

"That didn't take two solid hours. Do you realize that's how long you were gone? I saw how he looked at you. And you—you came back looking like death warmed over."

Cordelia irritably waved away her concerned protests, and followed the extremely polite guard to the cache caverns. The planetside administrative offices of the Barrayaran force were set up in one of the side chambers. They had a carefully busy air that suggested the nearby presence of staff officers, and indeed when they entered Vorkosigan's office, his name and rank emblazoned over the smudge that had been his predecessor's, they found him within.

Illyan, a captain, and a commodore were grouped around a computer interface with him, evidently undergoing some kind of briefing. He broke off to greet her with a careful nod, which she acknowledged in kind.
I wonder if my eyes look as hungry as his. This minuet of manners we go through to conceal our private selves from the mob will be for nothing, if we don't hide our eyes better.

"It's on the clerk's desk, Cor—Captain Naismith," he said, directing her with a wave of his hand. "Go ahead and look it over." He returned his attention to his waiting officers.

It was a simple steel tablet, standard Barrayaran military issue, and the spelling, numbers, and dates were all in order. She fingered it briefly. It certainly looked like it ought to last. Vorkosigan finished his business and came to her side.

"Is it all right?"

"Fine." She gave him a smile. "Could you find the grave?"

"Yes, your camp's still visible from the air at low altitude, although another rainy season will obliterate it—"

The duty guard's voice floated in over a commotion at the door. "So
you
say. For all I know they could be bombs. You can't take that in there," followed by another voice replying, "He has to sign it personally. Those are
my
orders. You guys act like you won the damn war."

The second speaker, a man in the dark red uniform of an Escobaran medical technician, backed through the door followed by a float pallet on a control lead, looking like some bizarre balloon. It was loaded with large canisters, each about half a meter high, studded with control panels and access apertures. Cordelia recognized them at once, and stiffened, feeling sick. Vorkosigan looked blank.

The technician stared around. "I have a receipt for these that requires Admiral Vorkosigan's personal signature. Is he here?"

Vorkosigan stepped forward. "I'm Vorkosigan. What are these, um . . ."

"Medtech," Cordelia whispered in cue.

"Medtech?" Vorkosigan finished smoothly, although the exasperated glance he gave her suggested that was not the cue he'd wanted.

The medtech smiled sourly. "We're returning these to the senders."

Vorkosigan walked around the pallet. "Yes, but what
are
they?"

"All your bastards," said the medtech.

Cordelia, catching the genuine puzzlement in Vorkosigan's voice, added, "They're uterine replicators, um, Admiral. Self-contained, independently powered—they need servicing, though—"

"Every week," agreed the medtech, viciously cordial. He held up a data disk. "They sent you instructions with them."

Vorkosigan looked appalled. "What the hell am I supposed to do with them?"

"Thought you were going to make our women answer that question, did you?" replied the medtech, taut and sarcastic. "Personally, I'd suggest you hang them around their fathers' necks. The paternal gene complements are marked on each one, so you should have no trouble telling who they belong to. Sign here."

Vorkosigan took the receipt panel, and read it through twice. He walked around the pallet again, counting, looking deeply troubled. He came up beside Cordelia in his circuit, and murmured, "I didn't realize they could do things like that."

"They use them all the time at home."

"They must be fantastically complex."

"And expensive, too. I'm surprised—maybe they just didn't want to argue about taking them home with any of the mothers. A couple of them were pretty emotionally divided about abortions. This puts the blood guilt on you." Her words seemed to enter him like bullets, and she wished she'd phrased herself differently.

"They're all alive in there?"

"Sure. See all the green lights? Placentas and all. They float right in their amniotic sacs, just like home."

"Moving?"

"I suppose so."

He rubbed his face, staring hauntedly at the canisters. "Seventeen. God, Cordelia, what do I do with them? Surgeon, of course, but . . ." He turned to the fascinated clerk. "Get the chief surgeon down here, on the double." He turned back to Cordelia, keeping his voice down. "How long will those things keep working?"

"The whole nine months, if necessary."

"May I have my receipt, Admiral?" said the medtech loudly. "I have other duties waiting." He stared curiously at Cordelia in her orange pajamas.

Vorkosigan scribbled his name absently on the bottom of the receipt panel with a light pen, thumbprinted it, and handed it back, still slightly hypnotized by the pallet load of canisters. Cordelia, morbidly curious, walked around them too, inspecting the readouts. "The youngest one seems to be about seven weeks old. The oldest is over four months. Must have been right after the war started."

"But what do
I
do with them?" he muttered again. She had never seen him more at a loss.

"What do you usually do with soldier's by-blows? Surely the situation has come up before, not on this scale, maybe."

"We usually abort bastards. In this case, it seems to have already been done, in a sense. So much trouble—do they expect us to keep them alive? Floating fetuses—babies in cans . . ."

"I don't know." Cordelia sighed thoughtfully. "What a thoroughly rejected little group of humanity they are. Except—but for the grace of God and Sergeant Bothari, one of those canned kids might have been mine, and Vorrutyer's. Or mine and Bothari's, for that matter."

He looked quite ill at the thought. He lowered his voice almost to a whisper, and began again. "But what do I—what would
you
have me do with them?"

"You're asking me for orders?"

"I've never—Cordelia, please—what honorable . . ."

It must be quite a shock to suddenly find out you're pregnant, seventeen times over—at your age, too
, she thought. She squelched the black humor—he was so clearly out of his depth—and took pity on his real confusion. "Take care of them, I suppose. I have no idea what that will entail, but—you did sign for them."

He sighed. "Quite. Pledged my word, in a sense." He set the problem up in familiar terms, and found his balance therein. "My word as Vorkosigan, in fact. Right. Good. Objective defined, plan of attack proposed—we're in business."

The surgeon entered, and was taken aback at the sight of the float pallet. "What the hell—oh, I know what they are. I never thought I'd see one. . . ." He ran his fingers over one canister in a sort of technical lust. "Are they ours?"

"All ours, it seems," replied Vorkosigan. "The Escobarans sent them down."

The surgeon chuckled. "What an obscene gesture. One can see why, I suppose. But why not just flush them?"

"Some unmilitary notion about the value of human life, perhaps," said Cordelia hotly. "Some cultures have it."

The surgeon raised an eyebrow, but was quelled, as much by the total lack of amusement on his commander's face as by her words.

"There are the instructions." Vorkosigan handed him the disk.

"Oh, good. Can I empty one out and take it apart?"

"No, you may not," said Vorkosigan coldly. "I pledged my word—as Vorkosigan—that they would be cared for. All of them."

"How the devil did they maneuver you into that? Oh, well, I'll get one later, maybe. . . ." He returned to his examination of the glittering machinery.

"Have you the facilities here to handle any problems that may arise?" asked Vorkosigan.

"Hell, no. Imp Mil would be the only place. And they don't even have an obstetrics department. But I bet Research would love to get hold of these babies. . . ."