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Lieutenant Rivka Callens wasn’t sure just what made her start to suspect. She was bare weeks into this assignment and had only ever seen the two of them together in professional situations, after all. There was nothing she could have sworn to. Just a string of very small interactions: the occasional inappropriate touch, a passing glance held overly long, words said with incongruous tenderness. Yet taken together, they rang alarm bells for her. Or perhaps tripped across all too familiar grief.
Rivka reproached herself for letting her imagination – her paranoia – run away with her. The Admiral of Sergyar Fleet and the Viceroy of Sergyar could not possibly be having an affair. They were men of unimpeachable honor, heroes of the Imperium! So she brushed away the slanderous thoughts.
Until the morning when she spotted a man in brown and silver livery waiting in the lobby of Admiral Jole’s apartment building. Out of an abundance of enthusiasm for the start of her first topside rotation, Lieutenant Callens arrived ahead of schedule to drive the Admiral to the shuttle port. She’d even brought him coffee, though he was more of a morning person than Callens. She wondered about the Armsman’s presence momentarily but moved on to the bank of lifts with a shrug.
And then Viceroy Count Aral Vorkosigan emerged from one of the lift tubes. He passed her with only a bare nod of his head and a quiet: “Lieutenant.”
Even then she tried to rationalize it. There could be any number of reasons why the Viceroy was at the Admiral’s base apartment at 0700 hours, couldn’t there? She stood stock still by the call buttons, trying to think of some, dithering long enough that she was right on time, rather than early, to turn up at the door of said apartment.
“Good morning, Lieutenant,” Admiral Jole greeted her, taking the hesitantly offered go-cup. “This was quite thoughtful. Thank you.”
The Admiral chatted with her amiably as she took his duffle and they made their way out to the groundcar, which she’d left idling in the driveway in front of the building. He seemed far too relaxed for a man whose illicit lover had left his apartment mere minutes before his aide-de-camp was due. Maybe the Viceroy had called up to warn him of her early arrival, giving him plenty of time to pull himself together. Of course, if everything was above board here, neither of them had a reason to be anything but calm about her showing up before time.
God, she was spinning out!
They were on the shuttle for the military transfer station before she could drag her thoughts away from this peculiar obsession. Then the whirl of her duties finally drove all extraneous concerns out of her mind. It was the fastest, most thrilling eight weeks of her life, for all that her duties on the station were very little different from those on base. She was racking up hours in space, though, which would boost her standing for an eventual posting to one of the escort fleets. That had been the whole reason she’d accepted this position over something nominally more prestigious back at Ops in Vorbarr Sultana.
By the time they were landing back downside, Rivka had once again convinced herself she was entertaining foolish notions prompted by memories of her parents’ traumatic divorce. She needed to stop projecting her father’s sins on others.
Then Admiral Jole informed her she should drop him at the Viceregal Palace for an evening meeting. With the Viceroy.
“I can find my own way home, Lieutenant,” he avowed.
Somewhat reluctantly, she let him out at the front gates. He was waved through immediately by the mixed team of ImpSec agents and Vorkosigan Armsmen standing guard duty. Well, naturally, she told herself; he was the Head of Sergyar Fleet.
Get it together, Rivka. You’re not a teenager with daddy issues anymore.
Yet the dreadful idea that something was not quite proper between Admiral Jole and the Viceroy of Sergyar had returned in full force. And after that she couldn’t get it out of her head. She watched intently whenever she was in company of both men, noting everything that passed between them. There still weren’t any indications she could put her finger on; the clues were as subtle and subjective as before. But every time she saw them together, she grew more convinced that she was right.
Ultimately, she decided, it was no business of hers what powerful men like them got up to in their private lives. Their affair, if there was one, violated no laws or regulations that she could discover. More importantly, no one was asking her to do anything illegal.
Regardless, it was depressing to believe something so dishonorable of two men she admired. To think of her highly respected commanding officer as party to a taboo relationship, or the legendary Admiral Count Vorkosigan cheating on his equally famous Countess. The Vorkosigans’ marriage was held up in certain circles as something of a romantic fairytale. Young as she was, though, Rivka had long since seen the lie in such fantasies. Perfect love didn’t exist. It was no real shock to her that Great Men broke their marital oaths as readily as ordinary proles like her father.
Rivka never spoke of her conjecture to anyone, however. She could never be so faithless as to join in the speculation and gossip that surrounded her Admiral. Nor even drop a hint of her suspicion to the man himself. And she never, ever asked him directly if he was in love with a man who spoke with the Emperor’s Voice.
Because what in the hell would she do if he said yes?