Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen by Lois McMaster Bujold

always, and Jole had to remind himself now and then, as voices rose and the highlighted numbers were presented again in brighter colors , which side he was on.
    As they broke for a late lunch, he and Haines walked over to the officers’ mess together. Crossing the main quadrangle, Haines shaded his eyes and frowned at the distant mesa of plascrete pallets. “Have you managed to get any further with those Plas-Dan bastards?” he inquired.
    “The Vicereine has promised to sic some of her forensic accounting people on it. Depending on what she can come up with and how fast—I’m hoping for early next week—we should be able to devise something useful. In the long run, we need plascrete more than vengeance.”
    Haines grunted disconsolate concurrence. “Sucks some days, to have all these boys with guns and not be allowed to shoot anybody. It could be so cathartic .”
    Jole could only snort agreement.
    On the whole, Jole liked Fyodor Haines. The general had been assigned here only two years ago, and had so far proved the plodder type of officer, counting down the bare handful of years left to his twice-twenty—which meant, in the main, that everything got done on time and without unnecessary fuss. Vastly preferable for his actual peacetime duties than the thwarted-warrior type, which—an understandable antipathy to civilian contractors aside—Haines wasn’t.
    Haines’s domestic life was currently in some mysterious disarray; his wife of many years had stayed back on Barrayar when he’d been posted to Sergyar, ostensibly to care for aged and ailing parents, possibly due to having reached some abrupt breaking point about moving one more time to follow the drum. His two older sons were now in college, one on Barrayar, one on Komarr, which accounted for his current austere lifestyle and most of his pay, but his daughter had been shipped out to Sergyar a few months back to join her father. Jole was uncertain if this constituted a promissory note that his wife would soon follow, or if young Frederica Haines had been seconded as a marital spy. If the latter, her mother’s suspicions were unjust; if Haines’s stolid allegiance to his marriage oath didn’t keep him from attempting some adulterous liaison, his aversion to emotional uproar certainly would.
    As they cleared the cafeteria line and seized a small table by the windows, Haines said, “On another subject entirely, I have been commissioned as a scout.”
    “Oh?” Jole unfolded his paper napkin and contemplated his limp sandwich. But the regulation stew and the stiffly clotted pasta had been even less enticing, on this subtropical day.
    “Seems your officer corps is conspiring to throw you a surprise birthday party for your fiftieth. I could get behind the party idea, but I suggested you might not care so much for the surprise aspect.”
    “That’s pretty much correct,” Jole agreed. Although a part of him could not help being secretly touched, even if the conspirators’ main motivation was a transparent desire to get drunk and set off fireworks. It was like the inverse of a mutiny. “I’m actually not wild about either part. I was planning to ignore the day, myself. All those getting-older jokes.”
    “Been there, done that,” Haines, half-a-dozen years older than Jole, said without sympathy.
    Jole’s brow wrinkled. “It seems a few months early to be planning any such thing.”
    “Some of their notions seemed a touch grandiose. They wanted lead time.”
    “Bored, are they? I bet I could find them some more work.”
    Haines’s lips twitched. “The advantage of letting them set up something on base, besides the convenience, would be control. With Base Security in charge of the collateral damage, rather than the Kareenburg Municipal Guard.”
    “The advantage of letting them set up something fifty kilometers out in the desert would be that they couldn’t burn anything down.”
    “The catering would be less handy.”
    “Consider it a field