Free Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen by Lois McMaster Bujold Page B

And the base accounting department, who also didn’t check with the engineers, but only came out and counted the sacks to be sure they matched the invoice, was seized with a burst of unprecedented efficiency and paid the bill.”
    “A recoverable glitch, surely. The misdelivery address alone should put you on solid legal ground. Make them come and take it back, and recoup your credit. Aral would have.”
    “ Aral would have threatened to make them eat it—and made them believe him.” Jole paused in brief retrospective envy of a command style that had always seemed beyond his touch, or at least his acting abilities. Aral’s trick had been that it was no trick. “I already have. Well, not the eat-it part. They claim that such a move would bankrupt their business—leaving them unable to deliver next year. And no other vendor to replace them, not for those volumes. I sent one of my more forensically inclined procurement fellows to check out that assertion, and he claims that it’s true.”
    Cordelia’s brow wrinkled. “Those fellows—Plas-Dan, isn’t it?—you’d think they’d know better than to piss in the bucket they’re trying to drink from.”
    Jole grinned at Aral’s old plaint about politics. Not one of his public utterances, to Jole’s regret. “You would, yet here we are. And—civilian colonists. Belonging, therefore, to you—Your Excellency. A word in your private ear, as it were.” His thoughts veered a bit—her private ears nestled coyly in her wild hair, when he studied them from this distance. Different somehow from when she’d worn her hair long, weighted down by its own mass or aristocratically bound back and adorned with live flowers.
    Her face twisted up in expressive dismay. “Dammit, I knew you lied.…Do you want me to look into Plas-Dan, see if I can turn up some better handle on them?”
    “It’s worth a go. Without endangering next year’s supply of plascrete, if you please.”
    “Right-oh…” She scowled around at their fortress of moldering solitude. “Is this why you brought me out here, sort of a do-it-yourself cone-of-silence without the cone-of-silence alerting everyone that we were talking secrets? Not that it wasn’t a pleasant-enough walk.”
    The afternoon was warmer than the one of her garden party, the air even brighter, as the sun slanted gold. Did her feet hurt, after him making her march out to the far backside of the base? He glanced at her shoes, which seemed sensible enough. For about the eleventh time since then, he regretted not volunteering to rub her toes when they had been so invitingly bared to him, but he had still been off-balance from his trip to the rep center, and what would she have thought of so arrogant an offer, anyway? That had been Aral’s place.
    “Yes…no. Not only that,” he admitted. Not that at all . Was Plas-Dan merely convenient camouflage, the first he could grab off the shelf? Although setting Cordelia on them did seem the next logical step. “I had an unrelated personal addendum.”
    She leaned against the stack, crossed her arms under her breasts, and smiled at him. “You always have claim on my ear for those.”
    He took a breath. “After we talked the other day, I went ahead and ordered Tan to complete the fertilizations.”
    “Congratulations! You’re almost a father, then. I’m guessing you went with freezing the zygotes, till you work through your career decisions, though?”
    “Yes, in fact. Anyway, that’s what I told Tan when he called with the update this morning. It wasn’t that. It was…one of the four didn’t make it, Tan said. Normal attrition for this stage, he said.”
    She hesitated, then gave a conceding nod. “I’d started out with twenty eggs, brought from Barrayar. Half of them failed, for one subtle reason or another. Biology at that micro-level is trickier than most people realize. And more cruel.”
    And his added one more to that loss. Will you always be ahead of me, Cordelia? “Yes, Tan