Captain Vorpatril's alliance

“Um, right,” said Ivan, and let her cut the com.

It being the last weekend before the start of Winterfair proper, parking around ImpSec HQ was not as impossible as usual. Ivan only had to walk about a block before the bare little park, and the great gloomy building across from it, came into view.

The security headquarters had an imposing facade, utterly windowless, with the wide stairs leading up to the front doors deliberately designed to be higher than most people could comfortably step. The great bronze doors were, as far as Ivan knew, rarely opened‑everyone with business here went around to the human‑scale entrances on the sides or the back. The stone face of the building was severely plain, except for a stylized bas‑relief frieze of pained‑looking creatures that Miles had once dubbed pressed gargoyles which entirely circled the edifice.

At the time of the reign of Mad Yuri, the gargoyles had possessed some political/artistic/propagandistic metaphorical meaning, which had once been explained to Ivan, but that he had promptly forgotten. Ivan thought the poor things just looked constipated. The people of Vorbarr Sultana, over time, had named them all, and endowed them with varied personalities; there were running jokes about the conversations they had up there, frozen in their frieze, and some of them regularly appeared as editorial cartoon characters. And a short‑lived children’s animated show, Ivan dimly remembered from his youth.

The whole was surrounded in turn by a cobblestone courtyard and high stone walls topped with iron spikes not unlike the ones around Vorkosigan House, though already archaically outdated for actual defense even at the time they’d been built. All the real defenses were electronic and invisible. The wall was pierced fore and aft by two gates, the gate guards armed with energy weapons. Muskets would have seemed more in‑period.

The park was indeed sunny, if only because ImpSec had never permitted trees, kiosks, bathrooms, or bushes installed to impede the line of sight, or fire. Grass, a little brown after the first frosts but neatly groomed, held up well due to the small number of pedestrians who ventured to cut across it.

Five brightly‑dressed people were milling about on the turf‑Rish, Jet, Em, Pearl, and Star‑while Tej knelt at the side messing with a portable comconsole and some wireless speakers. Under Star’s direction, Tej stood up and shifted one of the speakers a few meters. Tej saw Ivan and waved, but didn’t come over to greet him. Star, with Jet consulting, also shifted around a couple of brightly‑colored sticks topped with sparkly pom‑poms; counting off strides, taking a line of sight, and sticking them back in the ground.

Simon, wrapped in an aged military greatcoat, was sitting on a bench at the grass’s verge benignly overlooking the show. Hatless‑Mamere would have had words‑with his thinning, graying hair making him look very much like some retired old man watching youngsters at play. Which Ivan supposed he was. Sort of. In some pig’s eye somewhere.

A uniformed ImpSec officer without a coat‑a major, Ivan saw as he approached‑was standing talking to Simon, looking back and forth from his former chief to the dance practice which was just getting rolling again. Bright music blared. Jewels were suddenly in motion, swaying, stomping, gesturing, rising and dipping. Jet, in a bravura moment, suddenly began a series of back‑flips that ran in a straight diagonal all across the park, and ended with him balanced first on one hand, and then on one foot.

“That’s impressive,” the major said to Simon, as Ivan came up. The fellow’s eyes shifted from Jet to check out Ivan, in civvies because this was his day off dammit; his face cleared. “Captain Vorpatril, is it? Ops?”

Ivan granted him a nod, in lieu of a salute. “Yes, sir.”

“So you would know what all this is in aid of…?”

“A rather high‑energy galactic dance troupe who have been cooped up on jumpships for too long, celebrating their reunion, is the tale I was told,” said Ivan easily. Did Simon smile, there, into his lack of a beard?

“I had never seriously watched dance,” Simon remarked to the major, “before my retirement. Lady Vorpatril has her own box at the Vorbarr Sultana Hall, you know. She has been kind enough to invite me to escort her there, many times since. It’s been a real artistic education. Of a style I’d never had time for, earlier in my life. Old dogs, new tricks, who knows where it could all end?”

“Hm. Well. If they’re with you, sir…” The major, with a restraint that practically seemed to break something‑perhaps his heart‑visibly kept himself from saluting his former chief, managing a mere curt farewell nod before turning away to dodge traffic across the street and slip back through the front gate.

Ivan slung himself down on the bench beside Simon, who had twisted a bit to watch the fellow retreat.

“That’s the fifth man who has come out so far to check this out,” Simon observed, turning back. “The ranks keep getting higher.”