Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen Read Online Free PDF Page A

fond memory. It wasn’t a look she’d surprised on him for quite some time. It was no mystery why they’d both been getting through on zombie-pilot, these past three years; but she wondered when it had become a habit .
    “I’m glad you were over your, er, shyness by the time you came to us again on Sergyar.”
    “The extra years and the captaincy under my belt probably helped.”
    “Something had, certainly.” She bent her head, ambiguously but amiably. Silence fell between them, not unduly strained.
    He twisted the stem of his wineglass; looked up at her directly. “This isn’t going to be easy, is it. Or simple.”
    “It never has before; I have no idea why it should start now.”
    His laugh was low, but real.
    They lingered only a little longer, reverting to talking shop—Chaos Colony made sure that they never ran out of shop—and then rose together. He did not offer his arm, although he might have done so here unexceptionably enough, and she did not walk too close. He helped her into her groundcar, brought round to the front; as it pulled away she twisted and studied him through the canopy, striding off to his own vehicle. He did wheel and give her a bemused little wave as her car turned into the street. His hand, falling again, touched his breast pocket in passing.
    Cordelia was conscious of a twinge of frustration on Oliver’s behalf, mostly because he never seemed to muster it for himself. Dammit, if there was ever a man who deserved to be loved…But if he’d made any connections since Aral’s death, he hadn’t confided them to her, not that he was under any obligation to do so. Her attempts at Barrayaran-style matchmaking had been extremely hit-or-miss over her lifetime, or she’d be tempted to try to help him somehow. There were valid reasons, she recognized ruefully, why Aral might have avoided her aid back when wooing Oliver. But Oliver was…complicated. Which was why I broached this to him in the first place , she reminded herself.
    His tall, solitary figure was lost to her sight as her car rounded the next corner.

Chapter Two
    Jole arrived twenty minutes early for his appointment with Dr. Tan at the rep center, and then couldn’t make himself step inside. He walked up and down the side street, instead.
    Kareenburg actually had side streets now, some thirty-five or forty years, depending on how one counted it, after its founding. Barrayar’s first imprint on its new colony world had been a military base and shuttleport half-sheltered by a volcanic mountain that had blown out its side in some ancient cataclysm, standing sentinel with a string of sisters upon a wide plain. The pictures Jole had seen of earliest Kareenburg depicted a mud street lined with repurposed, and in some cases doubtless stolen, old military field shelters, as the base slowly upgraded from its first primitive incarnation. Like any up-sprung village serving a fortress on Old Earth or on Barrayar going back to the Time of Isolation, it had run heavily to such services as bars and brothels, but with the arrival of the first legitimate civilian colonists and a string of Imperial viceroys, government functions had slowly taken over the space, and the livelier aspects of the settlement had relocated. Historical redaction had cut in with amazing speed, and those grubby early days were well on their way to being rewritten mainly as a setting for romantic adventure stories.
    The hottest local political argument at the moment, and for the last ten years, was the transfer of the capital to some more selectively chosen region of the continent or one of the five others, resisted fiercely by those with major speculative investments in the present site. The Vicereine had dozens of scientific surveys on her side in favor of relocation, but Jole suspected she might be fighting one of her few losing battles with inertia and human nature. In the meanwhile, the racket of new construction extended and entrenched the proto-city in all