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Don’t let on you have a sense of humor, Lubachik, I think it’s an automatic disqualification.” Lubachik was in no danger of losing the posting if that were so, Miles reflected.
“Very good. But your most insidious chronic problem is in the area of . . . how shall I put this precisely . . . subordination. You argue too much.” “No, I don’t,” Miles began indignantly, then shut his mouth.
A recent infanticide in the Vorkosigans’ own district had cut even closer to the bone.
Somewhere in the chain of command there must be a conscious, sober and sane human being who was actually doing his job, or the place couldn’t even function on this level. Or maybe it was run by corporals, who knew? In that case, Miles supposed, his next task must be to find and take control of the most effective corporal available.
I have seen him wandering around Vorkosigan House at dawn in his underwear, yawning and prodding my sleepy mother into helping him find two matching socks.
Weather Officer, Camp Permafrost, was clearly a more responsible position than Miles had at first realized. The weather here could be deadly.
“So where are you headed, once you turn in your uniforms?” Miles asked him. “The equator.” “Ah? Where on the equator?” “Anywhere on the equator,” Ahn replied with fervor. Miles trusted he’d at least pick a spot with a suitable land mass under it.
As an unavoidable side effect of securing Komarr’s gates, Barrayar had been transformed from backwater cul-de-sac to a minor but significant galactic power, and was still wrestling with the consequences.
If there was any more to the story it existed only in Simon Illyan’s remarkable head, a secret file Miles was not about to attempt to access.
Offhand, Miles knew of no one Illyan feared except Miles’s mother. He’d once asked his father if this was guilt, about the soltoxin, but Count Vorkosigan had replied, No, it was only the lasting effect of vivid first impressions.
He was flanked by his aide, a tall blond lieutenant named Jole. Miles had met Jole on his last home leave. Now, there was a perfect officer, brave and brilliant—he’d served in space, been decorated for some courage and quick thinking during a horrendous on-board accident, been rotated through HQ while recovering from his injuries, and promptly been snabbled up as his military secretary by the prime minister, who had a sharp eye for hot new talent. Jaw-dropping gorgeous, to boot; he ought to be making recruiting vids. Miles sighed in hopeless jealousy every time he ran across him. Jole was even
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“You’ve been there?” Miles squinted. “And yet you let me get sent there?” “I commanded Lazkowski Base for five months, once, while waiting for my captaincy of the cruiser General Vorkraft. During the period my career was, so to speak, in political eclipse.”
“Yes, it’s a pathology. Obsessional delusion. It’s a big galaxy out there, Miles. There are other ways to serve, larger . . . constituencies.” “So why do you stay here?” he shot back. “Ah.” She smiled bleakly at the touché. “Some people’s needs are more compelling than guns.”
“Mostly in orbit. Pretend patrols, surrounded by Security shuttles. It got to be painful after a while, all the pretending. Pretending I was an officer, pretending I was doing a job instead of making everyone else’s job harder just by being there . . . you at least were permitted real risk.”
Do me a favor. Get married, settle down, and have six little Vorbarras real quick.”
“I suppose it would be improper,” Miles began hesitantly, “to ask you to try and get me out of here. It’s always seemed rather embarrassing to ask for Imperial favors. Like cheating, or something.” “What, are you asking one prisoner of ImpSec to rescue another?”
“Gregor.” Miles’s fingers tapped in frustration, against his knee. “You’re doing this to yourself. You have real power. Da fought through the whole regency to preserve it. Just be more assertive!”
“What is this larger game, that you all seem to know all about, and I, nothing?” “I don’t know anything,” chirped Mayhew. “I’m just going by Elena.” “Is this a chain of command, or a chain of credulity?”
Oh, God, he was going to have to write a report on all this when they got there. True confessions, in the approved ImpSec official style (dry as dust, judging from samples he’d read). Ungari, now, given the same tour, would have produced columns of concrete, objective data, all ready to be reanalyzed six different ways. What had Miles counted? Nothing, I was in a box.
Metzov turned to Gregor and said with perfect seriousness, “May I have your parole, sire—sir?” “What?” cried Cavilo. “Have you stripped a gear, Stanis?” “A parole,” Gregor noted gravely, “is a promise given between honorable enemies. Your honor I am willing to assume. But are you thus declaring yourself Our enemy?”
What are you doing here? That had to be the most-asked, least-answered question in the Hegen Hub, Miles decided.
“The key of strategy, little Vor,” she explained kindly, “is not to choose a path to victory, but to choose so that all paths lead to a victory. Ideally. Your death has one use; your success, another.
Miles waited, breathless. Oser’s jaw worked, chewing over this impassioned argument. “What’s your profit?” he asked at last. “Ah. I’m afraid I’m the dangerous variable in that calculation, Admiral. I’m not in it for profit.” Miles grinned. “So I don’t care what I wreck.”
Her tight-lipped stare at Miles was tense with suspicion, not of his motives, perhaps, but certainly of his methods. Now what foolishness? her eyes asked.
There. Obedient to Cavilo’s orders, Miles had made no attempt to contact Barrayar. But if Ungari couldn’t find him after this, it was time to fire the man.
“This man—you apparently don’t know—was cashiered from the Barrayaran Imperial Service for brutality.” Oser blinked. “From the Barrayaran Service? That must have taken some doing.”
Elena’s inspired mutinous gesture had given him the best break of the day. He had the momentum now. He wouldn’t stop till he was brought down bodily.
whom I love,
Bujold never gets her characterisation straight
“Come, love. Come to me.” Elena raised her brows sardonically at him. “Coming through. Your sweetheart is about to appear on Monitor Three.”
“I bluff not at all. Gregor is far more valuable alive to you than to me. You can do nothing, where you’re going, except through him. He’s your meal ticket. But has anyone mentioned to you yet that if Gregor dies, I could become the next emperor of Barrayar?” Well, arguably, but this was hardly time to go into the finer details of the six competing Barrayaran succession theories.
am I reading too much into all that innuendo, or did you in fact just connive to assassinate Gregor in one breath, offer to cuckold him in the next, accuse your father of homosexuality, suggest a patricidal plot against him, and league yourself with Cavilo—what are you going to do for an encore?”
Miles dropped his plasma rifle, tore off his helmet. “God almighty, I wasn’t expecting that. Gregor, you’re a genius.”
“Oh, at once,” shrugged Gregor. “She had the same hungry smile Vordrozda used to get. And a dozen lesser cannibals, since. I can smell a power-hungry flatterer at a thousand meters, now.” “I yield to my master in strategy.” Miles’s armored hand made a genuflecting motion. “Do you know you rescued yourself? She’d have taken you all the way home, even if I hadn’t come along.” “It was easy.” Gregor frowned. “All that was required was that I have no personal honor at all.”
“Active. Not passive. Real service.” “If—in your judgment—the best and most vital service you can give everyone else risking their lives here is as a minor field officer, I will of course support you to the best of my ability,” said Miles bleakly. “Ouch,” murmured Gregor. “You can turn a phrase like a knife, you know?” He paused. “Treaties, eh?”
You realize, Gregor, you did this? Sabotaged the Cetagandan invasion singlehandedly?” “Oh,” breathed Gregor, “it took both hands.”
“But you . . .”—her eyes were chips of blue ice, her voice low and venomous—“you will learn, little man. You’re riding high today, but time will bring you down. I’d say, just wait twenty years, but I doubt you’re going to live that long. Time will teach you how much nothing your loyalties will buy you. The day they finally grind you up and spit you out, I’m just sorry I won’t be there to watch, ’cause you’re gonna be hamburger.”
Why did you never bring her back? :(
“Those are such widely shared sentiments, Captain Ungari, that I’m afraid you might have to stand in line and wait your turn,” Gregor remarked, smiling slightly.
“Well, then, congratulations, sir; you have just rescued the Emperor,” snapped Miles. “Who, as your commander-in-chief, has a few orders for you, if you will permit him to get a word in edgewise.”
“Sergeant Overholt,” Miles added, “you will be the Emperor’s personal bodyguard and batman, until relieved.” Overholt looked anything but relieved at this abrupt field promotion. “Sir,” he whispered aside to Miles, “I haven’t had the advanced course!” He referred to Simon Illyan’s mandatory, personally conducted ImpSec course for the palace guard, that gave Gregor’s usual crew that hard-polished edge. “We all have a similar problem here, Sergeant, believe me,” Miles murmured back. “Do your best.”
Miles heard Tung chuckle under his breath, “Lunch with Admiral Vorkosigan, heh, heh . . .”
“Just fine,” breathed Count Vorkosigan back. “Mind you, there were moments when certain of my advisors wanted to have you shot. And there were moments when I agreed with ’em.”
Cordelia sends her love and her best hopes. If I saw you, I was to remind you, ah—I must get the phrase exact, it was one of her Betan cracks—‘Home is where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.’
“Well, when you came down to it, the Prince Serg’s fleet tac room had to have been among the most tightly defended few cubic meters anywhere in Vervain local space. It was, it was . . .” Miles watched with fascination as his father tried to spit out the words perfectly safe, and gagged on them instead. Light dawned. “It wasn’t your idea, was it? Gregor ordered himself aboard!”
Gregor faced you down? Oh, to have been a fly on the wall of that chamber.
Indeed :(
“I should warn you, Admiral Naismith is not very deferential.” Elena and Count Vorkosigan looked at each other, and both broke into laughter. Miles waited, wrapped in what dignity he could muster, till they subsided.
Replete with the first three courses, Miles sipped scalding coffee and plotted an assault on a second pastry, which cowered across the table linen under a thick camouflage of cream. Or would that overmatch his forces?
“You’re welcome.” Miles drank more coffee. “Do me a favor in return. Talk to someone.” “Who? Not Illyan. Not your father.” “How about my mother?”
“She could be the only person on Barrayar to automatically put Gregor the man before Gregor the emperor. All our ranks look like optical illusions to her, I think. And you know she can keep her own counsel.”
“All right. I will,” said Gregor. Miles waited. “My word,” Gregor added. Miles relaxed, immeasurably relieved. “Thank you.”
“Try it alone in bed at midnight, wondering when your genes are going to start generating monsters in your mind. Like Great Uncle Mad Yuri. Or Prince Serg.” His glance at Miles was secretly sharp.
