Weatherman

Lois McMaster Bujold

A Miles Vorkosigan Novella

Author's Note

“Weatherman”, a Miles Vorkosigan novella, first saw print in the February 1990 issue of Analog Science Fiction Magazine.

It went on from that appearance, the following year, to garner a nomination for the Hugo Award in the novella category, but I withdrew it from the list of final nominees in favor of my novel The Vor Game (first printing September 1990 from Baen Books), from which it was an out-take. Prolific authors may in a fortunate year have different works up for award nominations in several categories; it seemed to me to be double-dipping, however, to have what was in large measure the same work up in two different categories. I was later glad for that coin-toss, because The Vor Game won my first Hugo Award for Best Novel, at ChiCon V, the 1991 Chicago World Science Fiction Convention.

The Vor Game was not a simple extension of the novella; the story of how Miles returned to the Dendarii Mercenaries, whom he’d left so precipitously at the end of The Warrior’s Apprentice, was conceived in one piece, and I only saw as the work progressed how the Kyril Island setting and its underlying themes made the opening section so neatly detachable as a stand-alone tale.  Happily, the Analog editor agreed.  The Vor Game, as well as the work to which it is a sequel, The Warrior’s Apprentice, are as of this writing still in print from Baen Books in the form of the omnibus volume Young Miles.  An e-edition of the omnibus is available from Webscriptions at www.baen.com

This e-edition has been newly edited by the author, to tidy up some minor grammatical issues.

Lois McMaster Bujold

March 2011

"Weatherman"

“Ship duty!” chortled the ensign four ahead of Miles in line. Glee lit his face as his eyes sped down his orders, the plastic flimsy rattling slightly in his hands. “I’m to be junior weaponry officer on the Imperial Cruiser Commodore Vorhalas. Reporting at once to Tanery Base Shuttleport for orbital transfer.” At a pointed prod he removed himself with an unmilitary skip from the way of the next man in line, still hissing delight under his breath.

“Ensign Plause.” The aging sergeant manning the desk managed to look bored and superior at the same time, holding the next packet up with deliberation between thumb and forefinger. How long had he been holding down this post at the Imperial Military Academy? Miles wondered. How many hundreds—thousands—of young officers had passed under his bland eye at this first supreme moment of their careers? Did they all start to look alike after a few years? The same fresh green uniforms. The same shiny blue plastic rectangles of shiny new-won rank armoring the high collars. The same hungry eyes, the go-to-hell graduates of the Imperial Services’ most elite school with visions of military destiny dancing in their heads. We don’t just march on the future, we charge it.

Plause stepped aside, touched his thumbprint to the lock-pad, and unzipped his envelope in turn.

“Well?” said Ivan Vorpatril, just ahead of Miles in line. “Don’t keep us in suspense.”

“Language school,” said Plause, still reading.

Plause spoke all four of Barrayar’s native languages perfectly already. “As student or instructor?” Miles inquired.

“Student.”

“Ah, ha. It’ll be galactic languages, then. Intelligence will be wanting you, after. You’re bound off-planet for sure,” said Miles.

“Not necessarily,” said Plause. “They could just sit me in a concrete box somewhere, programming translating computers till I go blind.” But hope gleamed in his eyes.

Miles charitably did not point out the major drawback of Intelligence, the fact that you ended up working for Chief of Imperial Security Simon Illyan, the man who remembered everything. But perhaps on Plause’s level he would not encounter the acerb Illyan.

“Ensign Lubachik.”

Lubachik was the secondmost painfully earnest man Miles had ever met; Miles was therefore unsurprised when Lubachik zipped open his envelope and choked, “ImpSec. The advanced course in Security and Counter-assassination.”

“Ah, palace guard school,” said Ivan with interest, kibbitzing over Lubachik’s shoulder.

“That’s quite an honor,” Miles observed. “Illyan usually pulls his students from the twenty-year men with rows of medals.”

“Maybe Emperor Gregor asked Illyan for someone nearer his own age,” suggested Ivan, “to brighten the landscape. Those prune-faced fossils Illyan usually surrounds him with would give me depressive fits. 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.

“Will I really meet the Emperor?” Lubachik asked. He turned nervous eyes on Miles and Ivan.

“You’ll probably get to watch him eat breakfast every day,” said Ivan. “Poor sod.” Did he mean Lubachik, or Gregor? Gregor, definitely.

“You Vorish types know him—what’s he like?”

Miles cut in before the glint in Ivan’s eye could materialize into some practical joke. “He’s very straightforward. You’ll get along fine.”

Lubachik moved off, looking faintly reassured, rereading his flimsy.

“Ensign Vorpatril,” intoned the sergeant. “Ensign Vorkosigan.”

Tall Ivan collected his packet and Miles his, and they moved out of the way with their two comrades.

Ivan unzipped his envelope. “Ha. Imperial HQ in Vorbarr Sultana for me. I am to be, I’ll have you know, aide-de-camp to Commodore Jollif, Operations.” He bowed and turned the flimsy over. “Starting tomorrow, in fact.”

“Ooh,” said the ensign who’d drawn ship duty, still bouncing slightly. “Ivan gets to be a secretary. Just watch out if General Lamitz asks you to sit on his lap, I hear he—”

Ivan flipped him an amiable rude gesture. “Envy, sheer envy. I’ll get to live like a civilian. Work seven to five, have my own apartment in town—no girls on that ship of yours up there, I might point out.” Ivan’s voice was even and cheerful, only his eyes failing to totally conceal his disappointment. Ivan had wanted ship duty, too. They all did.

Miles did. Ship duty. Eventually, command, like my father, his father, his, his . . . A wish, a prayer, a dream . . . He hesitated for self-discipline, for fear, for a last lingering moment of high hope. He thumbed the lock-pad and unzipped the envelope with deliberate precision. A single plastic flimsy, a handful of travel passes. . . . His deliberation lasted only for the brief moment it took him to absorb the short paragraph before his eyes. He stood frozen in disbelief, began reading again from the top.

“So what’s up, coz?” Ivan glanced down over Miles’s shoulder.

“Ivan,” said Miles in a choked voice, “have I got a touch of amnesia, or did we indeed never have a meteorology course on our sciences track?”

“Five-space math, yes. Xenobotany, yes.” Ivan absently scratched a remembered itch. “Geology and terrain evaluation, yes. Well, there was aviation weather, back in our first year.”

“Yes, but . . .”

“So what have they done to you this time?” asked Plause, clearly prepared to offer congratulations or sympathy as indicated.

“I’m assigned as Chief Meteorology Officer, Lazkowski Base. Where the hell is Lazkowski Base? I’ve never even heard of it!”

The sergeant at the desk looked up with a sudden evil grin. “I have, sir,” he offered. “It’s on a place called Kyril Island, up near the arctic circle. Winter training base for infantry. The grubs call it Camp Permafrost.”

“Infantry?” said Miles.

Ivan’s brows rose, and he frowned down at Miles. “Infantry? You? That doesn’t seem right.”

“No, it doesn’t,” said Miles faintly. Cold consciousness of his physical handicaps washed over him.

Years of arcane medical tortures had almost managed to correct the severe deformities from which Miles had nearly died at birth. Almost. Curled like a frog in infancy, he now stood almost straight. Chalk-stick bones, friable as talc, now were almost strong. Wizened as an infant homunculus, he now stood almost four-foot-nine. It had been a trade-off, toward the end, between the length of his bones and their strength, and his doctor still opined that the last six inches of height had been a mistake. Miles had finally broken his legs enough times to agree with him, but by then it was too late. But not a mutant, not . . . it scarcely mattered any more. If only they would let him place his strengths in the Emperor’s service, he would make them forget his weaknesses. The deal was understood.

There had to be a thousand jobs in the Service to which his strange appearance and hidden fragility would make not one whit of difference. Like aide-de-camp, or Intelligence translator. Or even a ship’s weaponry officer, monitoring his computers. It had been understood, surely it had been understood. But infantry? Someone was not playing fair. Or a mistake had been made. That wouldn’t be a first. He hesitated a long moment, his fist tightening on the flimsy, then headed toward the door.

“Where are you going?” asked Ivan.

“To see Major Cecil.”

Ivan exhaled through pursed lips. “Oh? Good luck.”

Did the desk sergeant hide a small smile, bending his head to sort through the next stack of packets? “Ensign Draut,” he called. The line moved up one more.

* * *

Major Cecil was leaning with one hip on his clerk’s desk, consulting about something on the vid, as Miles entered his office and saluted.

Major Cecil glanced up at Miles and then at his chrono. “Ah, less than ten minutes. I win the bet.” The major returned Miles’s salute as the clerk, smiling sourly, pulled a small wad of currency from his pocket, peeled off a one-mark note, and wordlessly handed it across to his superior. The major’s face was only amused on the surface; he nodded toward the door, and the clerk tore off the plastic flimsy his machine had just produced and exited the room.

Major Cecil was a man of about fifty, lean, even-tempered, watchful. Very watchful. Though he was not the titular head of Personnel, that administrative job belonging to a higher-ranking officer, Miles had spotted Cecil long ago as the final decision maker. Through Cecil’s hands passed at the last every assignment for every Academy graduate. Miles had always found him an accessible man, the teacher and scholar in him ascendant over the officer. His wit was dry and rare, his dedication to his duty intense. Miles had always trusted him. Till now.

“Sir,” he began. He held out his orders in a frustrated gesture. “What is this?”

Cecil’s eyes were still bright with his private amusement as he pocketed the mark-note. “Are you asking me to read them to you, Vorkosigan?”

“Sir, I question—” Miles stopped, bit his tongue, began again. “I have a few questions about my assignment.”

“Meteorology Officer, Lazkowski Base,” Major Cecil recited.

“It’s . . . not a mistake, then? I got the right packet?”

“If that’s what that says, you did.”

“Are . . . you aware the only meteorology course I had was aviation weather?”

“I am.” The major wasn’t giving away a thing.

Miles paused. Cecil’s sending his clerk out was a clear signal that this discussion was to be frank. “Is this some kind of punishment?” What have I ever done to you?

“Why, Ensign”—Cecil’s voice was smooth—“it’s a perfectly normal assignment. Were you expecting an extraordinary one? My job is to match personnel requests with available candidates. Every request must be filled by someone.”

“Any tech school grad could have filled this one.” With an effort, Miles kept the snarl out of his voice, uncurled his fingers. “Better. It doesn’t require an Academy cadet.”

“That’s right,” agreed the major.

“Why, then?” Miles burst out. His voice came out louder than he’d meant it to.

Cecil sighed, straightened. “Because I have noticed, Vorkosigan, watching you—and you know very well you were the most closely watched cadet ever to pass through these halls barring Emperor Gregor himself—”

Miles nodded shortly.

“That despite your demonstrated brilliance in some areas, you have also demonstrated some chronic weaknesses. And I’m not referring to your physical problems, which everybody but me thought were going to take you out before your first year was up—you’ve been surprisingly sensible about those—”

Miles shrugged. “Pain hurts, sir. I don’t court it.”

“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.

Cecil flashed a grin. “Quite. Plus your rather irritating habit of treating your superior officers as your, ah . . .” Cecil paused, apparently groping again for just the right word.

“Equals?” Miles hazarded.

“Cattle,” Cecil corrected judiciously. “To be driven to your will. You’re a manipulator par excellence, Vorkosigan. I’ve been studying you for three years now, and your group dynamics are fascinating. Whether you were in charge or not, somehow it was always your idea that ended up getting carried out.”

“Have I been . . . that disrespectful, sir?” Miles’s stomach felt cold.

“On the contrary. Given your background, the marvel is that you conceal that, ah, little arrogant streak so well. But Vorkosigan”—Cecil dropped at last into perfect seriousness—“the Imperial Academy is not the whole of the Imperial Service. You’ve made your comrades here appreciate you because here, brains are held at a premium. You were picked first for any strategic team for the same reason you were picked last for any purely physical contest—these young hotshots wanted to win. All the time. Whatever it took.”

“I can’t be ordinary and survive, sir!”

Cecil tilted his head. “I agree. And yet, sometime, you must also learn how to command ordinary men. And be commanded by them!

“This isn’t a punishment, Vorkosigan, and it isn’t my idea of a joke. Upon my choices may depend not only our fledgling officers’ lives, but also those of the innocents I inflict ’em on. If I seriously miscalculate, overmatch or mismatch a man with a job, I not only risk him, but also those around him. Now, in six months—plus unscheduled overruns— the Imperial Orbital Shipyard is going to finish commissioning the Prince Serg.”

Miles’s breath caught.

“You’ve got it.” Cecil nodded. “The newest, fastest, deadliest thing His Imperial Majesty has ever put into space. And with the longest range. It will go out, and stay out, for longer periods than anything we’ve ever had before. It follows that everyone on board will be in each other’s hair for longer unbroken periods than ever before. High Command is actually paying some attention to the psych profiles on this one. For a change.

“Listen, now.” Cecil leaned forward. So did Miles, reflexively. “If you can keep your nose clean for just six months on an isolated downside post—bluntly, if you prove you can handle Camp Permafrost, I’ll allow as how you can handle anything the Service might throw at you. And I’ll support your request for a transfer to the Prince. But if you screw up, there will be nothing I or anybody else can do for you. Sink or swim, Ensign.”

Fly, thought Miles. I want to fly. “Sir . . . just how much of a pit is this place?”

“I wouldn’t want to prejudice you, Ensign Vorkosigan,” said Cecil piously.

And I love you too, sir. “But . . . infantry? My physical limits . . . won’t prevent my serving if they’re taken into account, but I can’t pretend they’re not there. Or I might as well jump off a wall, destroy myself immediately, and save everybody time.” Dammit, why did they let me occupy some of Barrayar’s most expensive classroom space for three years if they meant to kill me outright? “I’d always assumed they were going to be taken into account.”

“Meteorology Officer is a technical specialty, Ensign,” the major reassured him. “Nobody’s going to try and drop a full field pack on you and smash you flat. I doubt there’s an officer in the Service who would choose to explain your dead body to the Admiral.” His voice cooled slightly. “Your saving grace. Mutant.”

Cecil was without prejudice, merely testing. Always testing. Miles ducked his head. “As I may be, for the mutants who come after me.”

“You’ve figured that out, have you?” Cecil’s eye was suddenly speculative, faintly approving.

“Years ago, sir.”

“Hm.” Cecil smiled slightly, pushed himself off the desk, came forward and extended his hand. “Good luck, then. Lord Vorkosigan.”

Miles shook it. “Thank you, sir.” He shuffled through the stack of travel passes, ordering them.

“What’s your first stop?” asked Cecil.

Testing again. Must be a bloody reflex. Miles answered unexpectedly, “The Academy archives.”

“Ah!”

“For a downloading of the Service meteorology manual. And supplementary material.”

“Very good. By the way, your predecessor in the post will be staying on a few weeks to complete your orientation.”

“I’m extremely glad to hear that, sir,” said Miles sincerely.

“We’re not trying to make it impossible, Ensign.”

Merely very difficult. “I’m glad to know that too. Sir.” Miles’s parting salute was almost subordinate.

* * *

Miles rode the last leg to Kyril Island in a big automated airfreight shuttle with a bored backup pilot and eighty tons of supplies. He spent most of the solitary journey frantically swotting up on weather. Since the flight schedule went rapidly awry due to hours-long delays at the last two loading stops, he found himself reassuringly further along in his studies than he’d expected by the time the air-shuttle rumbled to a halt at Lazkowski Base.

The cargo bay doors opened to let in watery light from a sun skulking along near the horizon. The high-summer breeze was about five degrees above freezing. The first soldiers Miles saw were a crew of black-coveralled men with loaders under the direction of a tired-looking corporal, who met the shuttle. No one appeared to be specially detailed to meet a new weather officer. Miles shrugged on his parka and approached them.

A couple of the black-clad men, watching him as he hopped down from the ramp, made remarks to each other in Barrayaran Greek, a minority dialect of Earth origin, thoroughly debased in the centuries of the Time of Isolation. Miles, weary from his journey and cued by the all-too-familiar expressions on their faces, made a snap decision to ignore whatever they had to say by simply pretending not to understand their language. Plause had told him often enough that his accent in Greek was execrable anyway.

“Look at that, will you? Is it a kid?”

“I knew they were sending us baby officers, but this is a new low.”

“Hey, that’s no kid. It’s a damn dwarf of some sort. The midwife sure missed her stroke on that one. Look at it, it’s a mutant!”

With an effort, Miles kept his eyes from turning toward the commentators. Increasingly confident of their privacy, their voices rose from whispers to ordinary tones.

“So what’s it doing in uniform, ha?”

“Maybe it’s our new mascot.”

The old genetic fears were so subtly ingrained, so pervasive even now, you could get beaten to death by people who didn’t even know quite why they hated you but simply were carried away in the excitement of a group feedback loop. Miles knew very well he had always been protected by his father’s rank, but ugly things could happen to less socially fortunate odd ones. There had been a ghastly incident in the Old Town section of Vorbarr Sultana just two years ago, a destitute crippled man found castrated with a broken wine bottle by a gang of drunks. It was considered Progress that it was a scandal, and not simply taken for granted. A recent infanticide in the Vorkosigans’ own district had cut even closer to the bone. Yes, rank, social or military, had its uses. Miles meant to acquire all he could before he was done.

Miles twitched his parka back so that his officer’s collar tabs showed clearly. “Hello, Corporal. I have orders to report in to a Lieutenant Ahn, the base Meteorology Officer. Where can I find him?”

Miles waited a beat for his proper salute. It was slow in coming; the corporal was still goggling down at him. It dawned on him at last that Miles might really be an officer.

Belatedly, he saluted. “Excuse me, uh, what did you say, sir?”

Miles returned the salute blandly and repeated himself in level tones.

“Uh, Lieutenant Ahn, right. He usually hides out—that is, he’s usually in his office. In the main administration building.” The corporal swung his arm around to point toward a two-story pre-fab sticking up beyond a rank of half-buried warehouses at the edge of the tarmac, maybe a kilometer off. “You can’t miss it, it’s the tallest building on the base.”

Also, Miles noted, well marked by the assortment of comm equipment sticking out of the roof. Very good.

Now, should he turn his pack over to these goons and pray that it would follow him to his eventual destination, whatever it was? Or interrupt their work and commandeer a loader for transport? He had a brief vision of himself stuck up on the prow of the thing like a sailing ship’s figurehead, being trundled toward his meeting with destiny along with half a ton of Underwear, Thermal, Long, 2 doz per unit crate, Style #6774932. He decided to shoulder his duffle and walk.

“Thank you, Corporal.” He marched off in the indicated direction, too conscious of his limp and the braces concealed beneath his trouser legs taking up their share of the extra weight. The distance turned out to be farther than it looked, but he was careful not to pause or falter till he’d turned out of sight beyond the first warehouse unit.

The base seemed nearly deserted. Of course. The bulk of its population was the infantry trainees who came and went in two batches per winter. Only the permanent crew was here now, and Miles bet most of them took their long leaves during this brief summer breathing space. Miles wheezed to a halt inside the admin building without having passed another man.

The Directory and Map Display, according to a hand-lettered sign taped across its vid plate, was down. Miles wandered up the first and only hallway to his right, searching for an occupied office, any occupied office. Most doors were closed, but not locked, lights out. An office labeled Gen. Accounting held a man in black fatigues with red lieutenant’s tabs on the collar, totally absorbed in his holovid, which was displaying long columns of data. He was swearing under his breath.

“Meteorology Office. Where?” Miles called in the door.

“Two.” The lieutenant pointed upward without turning around, crouched more tightly, and resumed swearing. Miles tiptoed away without disturbing him further.

He found it at last on the second floor, a closed door labeled in faded letters. He paused outside, set down his duffle, and folded his parka atop it. He checked himself over. Fourteen hours’ travel had rumpled his initial crispness. Still, he’d managed to keep his green undress uniform and half-boots free of food stains, mud, and other unbecoming accretions. He flattened his cap and positioned it precisely in his belt. He’d crossed half a planet, half a lifetime, to achieve this moment. Three years training to a fever pitch of readiness lay behind him. Yet the Academy years had always had a faint air of pretense, We-are-only-practicing; now, at last, he was face-to-face with the real thing, his first real commanding officer. First impressions could be vital, especially in his case. He took a breath and knocked.

A gravelly muffled voice came through the door, words unrecognizable. Invitation? Miles opened it and strode in.

He had a glimpse of computer interfaces and vid displays gleaming and glowing along one wall. He rocked back at the heat that hit his face. The air within was blood-temperature. Except for the vid displays, the room was dim. At a movement to his left, Miles turned and saluted. “Ensign Miles Vorkosigan, reporting for duty as ordered, sir,” he snapped out, looked up, and saw no one.

The movement had come from lower down. An unshaven man of about forty dressed only in his skivvies sat on the floor, his back against the comconsole desk. He smiled up at Miles, raised a bottle half-full of amber liquid, mumbled, “Salu’, boy. Love ya,” and fell slowly over.

Miles gazed down on him for a long, long, thoughtful moment.

The man began to snore.

* * *

After turning down the heat, shedding his tunic, and tossing a blanket over Lieutenant Ahn (for such he was), Miles took a contemplative half hour and thoroughly examined his new domain. There was no doubt, he was going to require instruction in the office’s operations. Besides the satellite real-time images, automated data seemed to be coming in from a dozen micro-climate survey rigs spotted around the island. If procedural manuals had ever existed, they weren’t around now, not even on the computers. After an honorable hesitation, bemusedly studying the snoring, twitching form on the floor, Miles also took the opportunity to go through Ahn’s desk and comconsole files.

Discovery of a few pertinent facts helped put the human spectacle before Miles into a more understandable perspective. Lieutenant Ahn, it seemed, was a twenty-year man within weeks of retirement. It had been a very, very long time since his last promotion. It had been an even longer time since his last transfer; he’d been Kyril Island’s only weather officer for the last fifteen years.

This poor sod has been stuck on this iceberg since I was six years old, Miles calculated, and shuddered inwardly. Hard to tell, at this late date, if Ahn’s drinking problem was cause or effect. Well, if he sobered up enough within the next day to show Miles how to go on, well and good. If he didn’t, Miles could think of half a dozen ways, ranging from the cruel to the unusual, to bring him around whether he wanted to be conscious or not. If Ahn could just be made to disgorge a technical orientation, he could return to his coma till they came to roll him onto outgoing transport, for all Miles cared.

Ahn’s fate decided, Miles donned his tunic, stowed his gear behind the desk, and went exploring. 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.

In the downstairs foyer a human form approached Miles, silhouetted at first against the light from the front doors. Jogging in precise double time, the shape resolved into a tall, hard-bodied man in sweat pants, T-shirt, and running shoes. He had clearly just come in off some condition-maintaining five-kilometer run, with maybe a few hundred push-ups thrown in for dessert. Iron-gray hair, iron-hard eyes; he might have been a particularly dyspeptic drill sergeant. He stopped short to stare down at Miles, his startled look compressing to a thin-lipped frown.

Miles stood with his legs slightly apart, threw back his head, and stared up with equal force. The man seemed totally oblivious to Miles’s collar tabs. Exasperated, Miles snapped, “Are all the keepers on vacation, or is anybody actually running this bloody zoo?”

The man’s eyes sparked, as if their iron had struck flint; they ignited a little warning light in Miles’s brain, one mouthy moment too late. Hi, there, sir! cried the hysterical commenter in the back of Miles’s mind, with a skip, bow, and flourish. I’m your newest exhibit! Miles suppressed the voice ruthlessly. There wasn’t a trace of humor in any line of that seamed countenance looming over him.

With a cold flare of his carved nostril, the Base Commander glared down at Miles and growled, “I run it, Ensign.”

* * *

Dense fog was rolling in off the distant, muttering sea by the time Miles finally found his way to his new quarters. The officers’ barracks and all around it were plunged into a gray, frost-scummed obscurity. Miles decided it was an omen.

Oh, God, it’s going to be a long winter.

* * *

Rather to Miles’s surprise, when he arrived at Ahn’s office next morning at an hour he guessed might represent beginning-of-shift, he found the lieutenant awake, sober, and in uniform. Not that the man looked precisely well; pasty-faced, breathing stertorously, he sat huddled, staring slit-eyed at a computer-colorized weather vid. The holo zoomed and shifted dizzyingly at signals from the remote controller he clutched in one damp and trembling palm.

“Good morning, sir.” Miles softened his voice out of mercy, and closed the door behind himself without slamming it.

“Ha?” Ahn looked up, and returned his salute automatically. “What the devil are you, ah . . . Ensign?”

“I’m your replacement, sir. Didn’t anyone tell you I was coming?”

“Oh, yes!” Ahn brightened right up. “Very good, come in.” Miles, already in, smiled briefly instead. “I meant to meet you on the shuttlepad,” Ahn went on. “You’re early. But you seem to have found your way all right.”

“I came in yesterday, sir.”

“Oh. You should have reported in.”

“I did, sir.”

“Oh.” Ahn squinted at Miles in worry. “You did?”

“You promised you’d give me a complete technical orientation to the office this morning, sir,” Miles added, seizing the opportunity.

“Oh.” Ahn blinked. “Good.” The worried look faded slightly. “Well, ah . . .” Ahn rubbed his face, looking around. He confined his reaction to Miles’s physical appearance to one covert glance, and, perhaps deciding they must have got the social duties of introduction out of the way yesterday, plunged at once into a description of the equipment lining the wall, in order from left to right.

Literally an introduction; all the computers had women’s names. Except for a tendency to talk about his machines as though they were human, Ahn seemed coherent enough as he detailed his job, only drifting into randomness, then hungover silence, when he accidentally strayed from the topic. Miles steered him gently back to weather with pertinent questions, and took notes. After a bewildered Brownian trip around the room Ahn rediscovered his office procedural disks at last, stuck to the undersides of their respective pieces of equipment. He made fresh coffee on a non-regulation brewer—named “Georgette”—parked discreetly in a corner cupboard, then took Miles up to the roof of the building to show him the data-collection center there.

Ahn went over the assorted meters, collectors, and samplers rather perfunctorily. His headache seemed to be growing worse with the morning’s exertions. He leaned heavily on the corrosion-proof railing surrounding the automated station and squinted out at the distant horizon. Miles followed him around dutifully as he appeared to meditate deeply for a few minutes on each of the cardinal compass points. Or maybe that introspective look just meant he was getting ready to throw up.

The morning was pale and clear, the sun up—the sun had been up since two hours after midnight, Miles reminded himself. They were just past the shortest nights of the year for this latitude. From this rare high vantage point, Miles gazed out with interest at Lazkowski Base and the flat landscape beyond.

Kyril Island was an egg-shaped lump about seventy kilometers wide and one-hundred-sixty kilometers long, and over five hundred kilometers from the next land of any description. Lumpy and brown described most of it, both base and island. The majority of the nearby buildings, including Miles’s officers’ barracks, were dug in, topped with native turf. Nobody had bothered with agricultural terraforming here. The island retained its original Barrayaran ecology, scarred by use and abuse. Long fat rolls of turf covered the barracks for the winter infantry trainees, now empty and silent. Muddy water-filled ruts fanned out to deserted marksmanship ranges, obstacle courses, and pocked live-ammo practice areas.

To the near south, the leaden sea heaved, muting the sun’s best efforts at sparkle. To the far north a gray line marked the border of the tundra at a chain of dead volcanic mountains.

Miles had taken his own officers’ short course in winter maneuvers in the Black Escarpment, mountain country deep in Barrayar’s second continent; plenty of snow, to be sure, and murderous terrain, but the air had been dry and crisp and stimulating. Even today, at high summer, the sea dampness seemed to creep up under his loose parka and gnaw his bones at every old break. Miles shrugged against it, without effect.

Ahn, still draped over the railing, glanced sideways at Miles at this movement. “So tell me, ah, Ensign, are you any relation to the Vorkosigan? I wondered, when I saw the name on the orders the other day.”

“My father,” said Miles shortly.

“Good God.” Ahn blinked and straightened, then sagged selfconsciously back onto his elbows as before. “Good God,” he repeated. He chewed his lip in fascination, dulled eyes briefly alight with honest curiosity. “What’s he really like?”

What an impossible question, Miles thought in exasperation. Admiral Count Aral Vorkosigan, the colossus of Barrayaran history in this half-century. Conqueror of Komarr, hero of the ghastly retreat from Escobar, for sixteen years Lord Regent of Barrayar during Emperor Gregor’s troubled minority; the Emperor’s trusted Prime Minister in the four years since. Destroyer of Vordarian’s Pretendership, engineer of the peculiar victory of the third Cetagandan war, unshaken tiger-rider of Barrayar’s murderous internecine politics for the past two decades. The Vorkosigan.

I have seen him laugh in pure delight, standing on the dock at Vorkosigan Surleau and yelling instructions over the water, the morning I first sailed, dumped, and righted the skimmer by myself. I have seen him weep till his nose ran, more dead drunk than you were yesterday, Ahn, the night we got the word Major Duvallier was executed for espionage. I have seen him rage, so brick-red we feared for his heart, when the reports came in fully detailing the stupidities that led to the last riots in Solstice. 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. He’s not like anything, Ahn. He’s the original.

“He cares about Barrayar,” Miles said aloud at last, as the silence grew awkward. “He’s . . . a hard act to follow.” And, oh yes, his only child is a deformed mutant. That, too.

“I should think so.” Ahn blew out his breath in sympathy, or maybe it was nausea.

Miles decided he could tolerate Ahn’s sympathy. There seemed no hint in it of the damned patronizing pity, nor, interestingly, of the more common repugnance. It’s because I’m his replacement here, Miles decided. I could have two heads and he’d still be overjoyed to meet me.

“That what you’re doing, following in the old man’s footsteps?” said Ahn equably. And more dubiously, looking around, “Here?”

“I’m Vor,” said Miles impatiently. “I serve. Or at any rate, I try to. Wherever I’m put. That was the deal.”

Ahn shrugged bafflement, whether at Miles or at the vagaries of the Service that had sent him to Kyril Island, Miles could not tell. “Well.” He pushed himself up off the rail with a grunt. “No wah-wah warnings today.”

“No what warnings?”

Ahn yawned, and tapped an array of figures—pulled out of thin air, as far as Miles could tell—into his report panel representing hour-by-hour predictions for today’s weather. “Wah-wah. Didn’t anybody tell you about the wah-wah?”

“No . . .”

“They should have, first thing. Bloody dangerous, the wah-wah.”

Miles began to wonder if Ahn was trying to diddle his head. Practical jokes could be a subtle enough form of victimization to penetrate even the defenses of rank, Miles had found. The honest hatred of a beating inflicted only physical pain.

Ahn leaned across the railing again to point. “You notice all those ropes, strung from door to door between buildings? That’s for when the wah-wah comes up. You hang onto ’em to keep from being blown away. If you lose your grip, don’t fling out your arms to try and stop yourself. I’ve seen more guys break their wrists that way. Go into a ball and roll.”

“What the hell’s a wah-wah? Sir.”

“Big wind. Sudden. I’ve seen it go from dead calm to a hundred-sixty kilometers, with a temperature drop from ten degrees cee above freezing to twenty below, in seven minutes. It can last from ten minutes to two days. They almost always blow up from the northwest, here, when conditions are right. The remote station on the coast gives us about a twenty-minute warning. We blow a siren. That means you must never let yourself get caught without your cold gear, or more than fifteen minutes away from a bunker. There’s bunkers all around the grubs’ practice fields out there.” Ahn waved his arm in that direction. He seemed quite serious, even earnest. “You hear that siren, you run like hell for cover. The size you are, if you ever got picked up and blown into the sea, they’d never find you again.”

“All right,” said Miles, silently resolving to check out these alleged facts in the base’s weather records at the first opportunity. He craned his neck for a look at Ahn’s report panel. “Where did you read off those numbers from, that you just entered on there?”

Ahn stared at his report panel in surprise. “Well—they’re the right figures.”

“I wasn’t questioning their accuracy,” said Miles patiently. “I want to know how you came up with them. So I can do it tomorrow, while you’re still here to correct me.”

Ahn waved his free hand in an abortive, frustrated gesture. “Well . . .”

“You’re not just making them up, are you?” said Miles in suspicion.

“No!” said Ahn. “I hadn’t thought about it, but . . . it’s the way the day smells, I guess.” He inhaled deeply, by way of demonstration.

Miles wrinkled his nose and sniffed experimentally. Cold, sea salt, shore slime, damp and mildew. Hot circuits in some of the blinking, twirling array of instruments beside him. The mean temperature, barometric pressure, and humidity of the present moment, let alone that of eighteen hours into the future, was not to be found in the olfactory information pressing on his nostrils. He jerked his thumb at the meteorological array. “Does this thing have any sort of a smell-o-meter to duplicate whatever it is you’re doing?”

Ahn looked genuinely nonplussed, as if his internal system, whatever it was, had been dislocated by his sudden self-consciousness of it. “Sorry, Ensign Vorkosigan. We have the standard computerized projections, of course, but to tell you the truth I haven’t used ’em in years. They’re not accurate enough.”

Miles stared at Ahn, and came to a horrid realization. Ahn wasn’t lying, joking, or making this up. It was the fifteen years’ experience, gone subliminal, that was carrying out these subtle functions. A backlog of experience Miles could not duplicate. Nor would I wish to, he admitted to himself.

Later in the day, while explaining with perfect truth that he was orienting himself to the systems, Miles covertly checked out all of Ahn’s startling assertions in the base meteorological archives. Ahn hadn’t been kidding about the wah-wah. Worse, he hadn’t been kidding about the computerized projections. The automated system produced local predictions of 86% accuracy, dropping to 73% at a week’s long-range forecast. Ahn and his magical nose ran an accuracy of 96%, dropping to 94% at a week’s range. When Ahn leaves, this island is going to experience an 11-to-21% drop in forecast accuracy. They’re going to notice.

Weather Officer, Camp Permafrost, was clearly a more responsible position than Miles had at first realized. The weather here could be deadly.

And this guy is going to leave me alone on this island with six thousand armed men, and tell me to go sniff for wah-wahs?

* * *

On the fifth day, when Miles had just about decided that his first impression had been too harsh, Ahn relapsed. Miles waited an hour for Arm and his nose to show up at the weather office to begin the day’s duties. At last he pulled the routine readings from the substandard computerized system, entered them anyway, and went hunting.

He ran Ahn down at last still in his bunk, in his quarters in the officers’ barracks, sodden and snoring, stinking of stale . . . fruit brandy? Miles shuddered. Shaking, prodding, and yelling in Ahn’s ear failed to rouse him. He only burrowed deeper into his bedclothes and noxious miasma, moaning. Miles regretfully set aside visions of violence, and prepared to carry on by himself. He’d be on his own soon enough anyway.

He limp-marched off to the motor pool. Yesterday Ahn had taken him on a scheduled maintenance patrol of the five remote-sensor weather stations nearest the base. The outlying six had been planned for today. Routine travel around Kyril Island was accomplished in an all-terrain vehicle called a scat-cat, which had turned out to be almost as much fun to drive as an antigrav sled. Scat-cats were ground-hugging iridescent teardrops that tore up the tundra, but were guaranteed not to blow away in the wah-wah winds. Base personnel, Miles had been given to understand, had grown extremely tired of picking lost antigrav sleds out of the frigid sea. Not to mention their late drivers.

The motor pool was another half-buried bunker like most of the rest of Lazkowski Base, only bigger. Miles rousted out the corporal, what’s his name, Olney, who’d signed Ahn and himself out the previous day. The tech who assisted him, driving the scat-cat up from the underground storage to the entrance, also looked faintly familiar. Tall, black fatigues, dark hair—that described eighty percent of the men on the base—it wasn’t until he spoke that his heavy accent cued Miles. He was one of the sotto voce commenters Miles had overheard on the shuttlepad. Miles schooled himself to not react.

Miles went over the vehicle’s supply checklist carefully before signing for it, as Ahn had taught him. All scat-cats were required to carry a complete cold-survival kit at all times. Corporal Olney watched with faint contempt as Miles fumbled around finding everything. All right, so I’m slow, Miles thought irritably. New and green. This is the only way I’m gonna get less new and green. Step by step. He controlled his self-consciousness with an effort. Previous painful experience had taught him it was a most dangerous frame of mind. Concentrate on the task, not the bloody audience. You’ve always had an audience. Probably always will.

Miles spread out the map flimsy across the scat-cat’s shell and pointed out his projected itinerary to the corporal. Such a briefing was also safety SOP, according to Ahn. Olney grunted acknowledgment with a finely tuned look of long-suffering boredom, palpable but just short of something Miles would be forced to notice.

The black-clad tech, Pattas, watching over Miles’s uneven shoulder, pursed his lips and spoke. “Oh, Ensign sir.” Again, the emphasis fell just short of irony. “You going up to Station Nine?”

“Yes?”

“You might want to be sure and park your scat-cat, uh, out of the wind, in that hollow just below the station.” A thick finger touched the map flimsy on an area marked in blue. “You’ll see it. That way your scat-cat’ll be sure of re-starting.”

“The power pack in these engines is rated for space,” said Miles. “How could it not re-start?”

Olney’s eye lit, then went suddenly very neutral. “Yes, but in case of a sudden wah-wah, you wouldn’t want it to blow away.”

I’d blow away before it would. “I thought these scat-cats were heavy enough not to.”

“Well, not away, but they have been known to blow over,” murmured Pattas.

“Oh. Well, thank you.”

Corporal Olney coughed. Pattas waved cheerfully as Miles drove out.

Miles’s chin jerked up in the old nervous tic. Taking a deep breath, he let his hackles settle as he turned the scat-cat away from the base and headed cross-country. He powered up to a more satisfying speed, lashing through the brown bracken-like growth. He had been what, a year and a half? two years? at the Imperial Academy proving and re-proving his competence to every bloody man he crossed every time he did anything. The third year had perhaps spoiled him; he was out of practice. Was it going to be like this every time he took up a new post? Probably, he reflected bitterly, and powered up a bit more. But he’d known that would be part of the game when he’d demanded to play.

The weather was almost warm today, the pale sun almost bright, and Miles almost cheerful by the time he reached Station Six, on the eastern shore of the island. It was a pleasure to be alone for a change, just him and his job. No audience. Time to take his time and get it right. He worked carefully, checking power packs, emptying samplers, looking for signs of corrosion, damage, or loose connections in the equipment. And if he dropped a tool, there was no one around to make comments about spastic mutants. With the fading tension, he made fewer fumbles, and the tic vanished. He finished, stretched, and inhaled the damp air benignly, reveling in the unaccustomed luxury of solitude. He even took a few minutes to walk along the shoreline, and notice the intricacies of the small sea life washed up there.

One of the samplers in Station Eight was damaged, a humidity-meter shattered. By the time he’d replaced it he realized his itinerary timetable had been overly optimistic. The sun was slanting down toward green twilight as he left Station Eight. By the time he reached Station Nine, in an area of mixed tundra and rocky outcrops near the northern shore, it was almost dark.

Station Ten, Miles reconfirmed by checking his map flimsy by pen-light, was up in the volcanic mountains among the glaciers. Best not try to go hunting it in the dark. He would wait out the brief four hours till dawn. He reported his change-of-plan via comlink to the base, one-hundred-sixty kilometers to the south. The man on duty did not sound terribly interested. Good.

With no watchers, Miles happily seized the opportunity to try out all that fascinating gear packed in the back of the scat-cat. Far better to practice now, when conditions were good, than in the middle of some later blizzard. The little two-man bubble shelter, when set up, seemed almost palatial for Miles’s short and lonely splendor. In winter it was meant to be insulated with packed snow. He positioned it downwind of the scat-cat, parked in the recommended low spot a few hundred meters from the weather station, which was perched on a rocky outcrop.

Miles reflected on the relative weight of the shelter versus the scat-cat. A vid that Ahn had shown him of a typical wah-wah remained vivid in his mind. The portable latrine traveling sideways in the air at a hundred kilometers an hour had been particularly impressive. Ahn hadn’t been able to tell him if there’d been anyone in it at the time the vid was shot. Miles took the added precaution of attaching the shelter to the scat-cat with a short chain. Satisfied, he crawled inside.

The equipment was first-rate. He hung a heat-tube from the roof, touched it on, and basked in its glow, sitting cross-legged. Rations were of the better grade. A pull tab heated a compartmentalized tray of stew with vegetables and rice. He mixed an acceptable fruit drink from the powder supplied. After eating and stowing the remains, he settled on a comfortable pad, shoved a book-disk into his viewer, and prepared to read away the short night.

He had been rather tense these last few weeks. These last few years. The book-disk, a Betan novel of manners which the Countess had recommended to him, had nothing whatsoever to do with Barrayar, military maneuvers, mutation, politics, or the weather. He didn’t even notice what time he dozed off.

* * *

He woke with a start, blinking in the thick darkness gilded only with the faint copper light from the heat-tube. He felt he had slept long, yet the transparent sectors of the bubble-shelter were pitchy black. An unreasoning panic clogged his throat. Dammit, it didn’t matter if he overslept, it wasn’t like he would be late for an exam, here. He glanced at the glowing readout on his wrist chrono.

It ought to be broad daylight.

The flexible walls of the shelter were pressing inward. Not one-third of the original volume remained, and the floor was wrinkled. Miles shoved one finger against the thin cold plastic. It yielded slowly, like soft butter, and retained the dented impression. What the hell . . . ?

His head was pounding, his throat constricted; the air was stuffy and wet. It felt just like . . . like oxygen depletion and CO_2 excess in a space emergency. Here? The vertigo of his disorientation seemed to tilt the floor.

The floor was tilted, he realized indignantly, pulled deeply downward on one side, pinching one of his legs. He convulsed from its grip. Fighting the CO_2-induced panic, he lay back, trying to breathe slower and think faster.

I’m underground. Sunk in some kind of quicksand. Quick-mud. Had those two bloody bastards at the motor pool set him up for this? He’d fallen for it, fallen right in it.

Slow-mud, maybe. The scat-cat hadn’t settled noticeably in the time it had taken him to set up this shelter. Or he would have twigged to the trap. Of course, it had been dark. But if he’d been settling for hours, asleep . . .

Relax, he told himself frantically. The tundra surface, the free air, might be a mere ten centimeters overhead. Or ten meters . . . relax! He felt about the shelter for something to use as a probe. There’d been a long, telescoping, knife-bitted tube for sampling glacier ice. Packed in the scat-cat. Along with the comlink. Now located, Miles gauged by the angle of the floor, about two-and-a-half meters down and to the west of his present location. It was the scat-cat that was dragging him down. The bubble-shelter alone might well have floated in the tundra-camouflaged mudpond. If he could detach the chain, might it rise? Not fast enough. His chest felt stuffed with cotton. He had to break through to air soon, or asphyxiate. Womb, tomb. Would his parents be there to watch, when he was found at last, when this grave was opened, scat-cat and shelter winched out of the bog by heavy hovercab . . . his body frozen rictus-mouthed in this hideous parody of an amniotic sac . . . relax.

He stood, shoving upward against the heavy roof. His feet sank in the pulpy floor, but he was able to jerk loose one of the bubble’s interior ribs, now bent in an overstrained curve. He almost passed out from the effort, in the thick air. He found the top edge of the shelter’s opening, and slid his finger down the burr-catch just a few centimeters. Just enough for the pole to pass through. He’d feared the black mud would pour in, drowning him at once, but it only crept in extrusive blobs, to fall with oozing plops. The comparison was obvious and repulsive. God, and I thought I’d been in deep shit before.

He shoved the rib upward. It resisted, slipping in his sweating palms. Not ten centimeters. Not twenty. A meter, a meter and a third, and he was running short on probe. He paused, took a new grip, shoved again. Was the resistance lessening? Had he broken through to the surface? He heaved it back and forth, but the sucking slime sealed it still.

Maybe, maybe a little less than his own height between the top of the shelter and breath. Breath, death. How long to claw through it? How fast did a hole in this stuff close? His vision was darkening, and it wasn’t because the light was going dim. He turned the heat tube off and stuck it in the front pocket of his jacket. The uncanny dark shook him with horror. Or perhaps it was the CO_2. Now or never.

On an impulse, he bent and loosened his boot-catches and belt buckle, then zipped open the burr by feel. He began to dig like a dog, heaving big globs of mud down into the little space left in the bubble. He squeezed through the opening, braced himself, took his last breath, and pressed upward.

His chest was pulsing, his vision a red blur, when his head broke the surface. Air! He spat black muck and bracken bits, and blinked, trying with little success to clear his eyes and nose. He fought one hand up, then the other, and tried to pull himself up horizontal, flat like a frog. The cold confounded him. He could feel the muck closing around his legs, numbing like a witch’s embrace. His toes pressed at full extension on the shelter’s roof. It sank and he rose a centimeter. The last of the leverage he could get by pushing. Now he must pull. His hands closed over bracken. It gave. More. More. He was making a little progress, the cold air raking his grateful throat. The witch’s grip tightened. He wriggled his legs, futilely, one last time. All right, now. Heave!

His legs slid out of his boots and pants, his hips sucked free, and he rolled away. He lay spread-eagled for maximum support on the treacherous surface, faceup to the gray swirling sky. His uniform jacket and long underwear were soaked with slime, and he’d lost one thermal sock, as well as both boots and his trousers.

It was sleeting.

* * *

They found him hours later, curled around the dimming heat-tube, crammed into an eviscerated equipment bay in the automated weather station. His eye sockets were hollow in his black-streaked face, his toes and ears white. His numb purple fingers jerked two wires across each other in a steady, hypnotic tattoo, the Service emergency code. To be read out in bursts of static in the barometric pressure meter in base’s weather room. If and when anybody bothered to look at the suddenly defective reading from this station, or noticed the pattern in the white noise.

His fingers kept twitching in this rhythm for minutes after they pulled him free of his little box. Ice cracked off the back of his uniform jacket as they tried to straighten his body. For a long time they could get no words from him at all, only a shivering hiss. Only his eyes burned.

* * *

Floating in the heat tank in the base infirmary, Miles considered crucifixion for the two saboteurs from the motor pool from several angles. Such as upside down. Dangling over the sea at low altitude from an antigrav sled. Better still, staked out faceup in a bog in a blizzard. . . . But by the time his body had warmed up, and the corpsman had pulled him out of the tank to dry, be reexamined, and eat a supervised meal, his head had cooled.

It hadn’t been an assassination attempt. And therefore, not a matter he was compelled to turn over to Simon Illyan, dread Chief of Imperial Security and Miles’s father’s left-hand man. The vision of the sinister officers from ImpSec coming to take those two jokers away, far away, was lovely, but impractical, like shooting mice with a maser cannon. Anyway, where could ImpSec possibly send them that was worse than here?

They’d meant his scat-cat to bog, to be sure, while he serviced the weather station, and for Miles to have the embarrassment of calling the base for heavy equipment to pull it out. Embarrassing, not lethal. They could not have—no one could have—foreseen Miles’s inspired safety-conscious precaution with the chain, which was in the final analysis what had almost killed him. At most it was a matter for Service Security, bad enough, or for normal discipline.

He dangled his toes over the side of his bed, one of a row in the empty infirmary, and pushed the last of his food around on his tray. The corpsman wandered in and glanced at the remains.

“You feeling all right now, sir?”

“Fine,” said Miles morosely.

“You, uh, didn’t finish your tray.”

“I often don’t. They always give me too much.”

“Yeah, I guess you are pretty, um . . .” The corpsman made a note on his report panel, leaned over to examine Miles’s ears, and bent to inspect his toes, rolling them between practiced fingers. “It doesn’t look like you’re going to lose any pieces, here. Lucky.”

“Do you treat a lot of frostbite?” Or am I the only idiot? Present evidence would suggest it.

“Oh, once the grubs arrive, this place’ll be crammed. Frostbite, pneumonia, broken bones, contusions, concussions . . . gets real lively, come winter. Wall-to-wall moro—unlucky trainees. And a few unlucky instructors, that they take down with ’em.” The corpsman stood, tapping a few more entries on his panel. “I’m afraid I have to mark you as recovered now, sir.”

“Afraid?” Miles raised his brows in inquiry.

The corpsman straightened, in the unconscious posture of a man transmitting official bad news. That old they-told-me-to-say-this-it’s-not-my-fault look. “You are ordered to report to the base commander’s office as soon as I release you, sir.”

Miles considered an immediate relapse. No. Better to get the messy parts over with. “Tell me, corpsman, has anyone else ever sunk a scat-cat?”

“Oh, sure. The grubs lose about five or six a season. Plus minor bog-downs. The engineers get real pissed about it. The commandant promised them next time he’d . . . ahem!” The corpsman lost his voice.

Wonderful, thought Miles. Just great. He could see it coming. It wasn’t as if he couldn’t see it coming.

* * *

Miles dashed back to his quarters for a quick change of clothing, guessing a hospital robe might be inappropriate for the coming interview. He immediately found he had a minor quandary. His black fatigues seemed too relaxed, his dress greens too formal for office wear anywhere outside Imperial HQ at Vorbarr Sultana. His undress greens’ trousers and half-boots were still at the bottom of the bog. He had only brought one of each uniform style with him; his spares, supposedly in transit, had not yet arrived.

He was hardly in a position to borrow from a neighbor. His uniforms were privately made to his own fit, at approximately four times the cost of Imperial issue. Part of that cost was for the effort of making them indistinguishable on the surface from the machine cut, while at the same time partially masking the oddities of his body through subtleties of hand-tailoring. He cursed under his breath and shucked on his dress greens, complete with mirror-polished boots to the knees. At least the boots obviated the need for leg braces.

General Stanis Metzov, read the sign on the door, Base Commander. Miles had been assiduously avoiding the base commander ever since their first unfortunate encounter. This had not been hard to do in Ahn’s company, despite the pared population of Kyril Island this month; Ahn avoided everybody. Miles now wished he’d tried harder to strike up conversations with brother officers in mess. Permitting himself to stay isolated, even to concentrate on his new tasks, had been a mistake. In five days of even the most random conversation, someone must surely have mentioned Kyril Island’s voracious killer mud.

A corporal manning the comconsole in an antechamber ushered Miles through to the inner office. He must now try to work himself back around to Metzov’s good side, assuming the general had one. Miles needed allies. General Metzov looked across his desk unsmiling as Miles saluted and stood waiting.

Today, the general was aggressively dressed in black fatigues. At Metzov’s altitude in the hierarchy, this stylistic choice usually indicated a deliberate identification with The Fighting Man. The only concession to his rank was their pressed neatness. His decorations were stripped down to a mere modest three, all high combat commendations. Pseudo-modest; pruned of the surrounding foliage, they leapt to the eye. Mentally, Miles applauded, even envied, the effect. Metzov looked his part, the combat commander, absolutely, unconsciously natural.

A fifty-fifty chance with the uniform, and I had to guess wrong, Miles fumed as Metzov’s eye traveled sarcastically down, and back up, the subdued glitter of his dress greens. All right, so Metzov’s eyebrows signaled, Miles now looked like some kind of Vorish headquarters twit. Not that such wasn’t another familiar type. Miles decided to decline the roasting and cut Metzov’s inspection short by forcing the opening. “Yes, sir?”

Metzov leaned back in his chair, lips twisting. “I see you found some pants, Ensign Vorkosigan. And, ah . . . riding boots, too. You know, there are no horses on this island.”

None at Imperial Headquarters, either, Miles thought irritably. I didn’t design the damned boots. His father had once suggested that his staff officers must need them for riding hobbyhorses, high horses, and nightmares. Unable to think of a useful reply to the general’s sally, Miles stood in dignified silence, chin lifted, parade rest. “Sir.”

Metzov leaned forward, clasping his hands, abandoning his heavy humor, eyes gone hard again. “You lost a valuable, fully equipped scat-cat as a result of leaving it parked in an area clearly marked as a Permafrost Inversion Zone. Don’t they teach map-reading at the Imperial Academy anymore, or is it to be all diplomacy in the New Service—how to drink tea with the ladies?”

Miles called up the map in his mind. He could see it clearly. “The blue areas were labelled P.I.Z. Those initials were not defined. Not in the key or anywhere.”

“Then I take it you also failed to read your manual.”

He’d been buried in manuals ever since he’d arrived. Weather office procedural, equipment tech-specs . . . “Which one, sir?”

“Lazkowski Base Regulations.”

Miles tried frantically to remember if he’d ever seen such a disk. “I . . . think Lieutenant Ahn may have given me a copy . . . night before last.” Ahn had in fact dumped an entire carton of disks out on Miles’s bed in officers’ quarters. He was doing some preliminary packing, he’d said, and was willing Miles his library. Miles had read two weather disks before going to sleep that night. Ahn, clearly, had returned to his own cubicle to do a little preliminary celebrating. The next morning Miles had taken the scat-cat out. . . .

“And you haven’t read it yet?”

“No, sir.”

“Why not?”

I was set up, Miles’s thought wailed. He could feel the highly interested presence of Metzov’s clerk, undismissed, standing witness by the door behind him. Making this a public, not a private, dressing-down. And if only he’d read the damned manual, would those two bastards from the motor pool even have been able to set him up? Will or nill, he was going to get down-checked for this one. “No excuse, sir.”

“Well, Ensign, in Chapter Three of Lazkowski Base Regulations you will find a complete description of all the permafrost zones, together with the rules for avoiding them. You might look into it, when you can spare a little leisure from . . . drinking tea.”

“Yes, sir.” Miles’s face was set like glass. The general had a right to skin him with a vibra-knife, if he chose—in private. The authority lent Miles by his uniform barely balanced the deformities that made him a target of Barrayar’s historically grounded, intense genetic prejudices. A public humiliation that sapped that authority before men he must also command came very close to an act of sabotage. Deliberate, or unconscious?

The general was only warming up. “The Service may still provide warehousing for excess Vor lordlings at Imperial Headquarters, but out here in the real world, where there’s fighting to be done, we have no use for drones. Now, I fought my way up through the ranks. I saw casualties in Vordarian’s Pretendership before you were born—”

I was a casualty in Vordarian’s Pretendership before I was born, thought Miles, his irritation growing wilder. The soltoxin gas that had almost killed his pregnant mother and made Miles what he was, had been a purely military poison.

“—and I fought the Komarr Revolt. You infants who’ve come up in the past decade and more have no concept of combat. These long periods of unbroken peace weaken the Service. If they go on much longer, when a crisis comes there’ll be no one left who’s had any real practice in a crunch.”

Miles’s eyes crossed slightly, from internal pressure. Then should His Imperial Majesty provide a war every five years, as a convenience for the advancement of his officers’ careers? His mind boggled slightly over the concept of real practice. Had Miles maybe acquired his first clue why this superb-looking officer had washed up on Kyril Island?

Metzov was still expanding, self-stimulated. “In a real combat situation, a soldier’s equipment is vital. It can be the difference between victory and defeat. A man who loses his equipment loses his effectiveness as a soldier. A man disarmed in a technological war might as well be a woman, useless! And you disarmed yourself!”

Miles wondered sourly if the general would then agree that a woman armed in a technological war might as well be a man . . . no, probably not. Not a Barrayaran of his generation.

Metzov’s voice descended again, dropping from military philosophy to the immediately practical. Miles was relieved. “The usual punishment for a man bogging a scat-cat is to dig it out himself. By hand. I understand that won’t be feasible, since the depth to which you sank yours is a new camp record. Nevertheless, you will report at fourteen-hundred hours to Lieutenant Bonn of Engineering, to assist him as he sees fit.”

Well, that was certainly fair. And would probably be educational, too. Miles prayed this interview was winding down. Dismissed, now? But the general fell silent, squinty-eyed and thoughtful.

“For the damage you did to the weather station,” Metzov began slowly, then sat up more decisively—his eyes, Miles could almost swear, lighting with a faint red glow, the corner of that seamed mouth twitching upward, “you will supervise basic-labor detail for one week. Four hours a day. That’s in addition to your other duties. Report to Sergeant Neuve, in Maintenance, at 0500 daily.”

A slight choked inhalation sounded from the corporal still standing behind Miles, which Miles could not interpret. Laughter? Horror?

But . . . unjust! And he would lose a significant fraction of the precious time remaining to decant technical expertise from Ahn. . . . “The damage I did to the weather station was not a stupid accident like the scat-cat, sir! It was necessary to my survival.”

General Metzov fixed him with a very cold eye. “Make that six hours a day, Ensign Vorkosigan.”

Miles spoke through his teeth, words jerked out as though by pliers. “Would you have preferred the interview you’d be having right now if I’d permitted myself to freeze, sir?”

Silence fell, very dead. Swelling, like a road-killed animal in the summer sun.

“You are dismissed, Ensign,” General Metzov hissed at last. His eyes were glittering slits.

Miles saluted, about-faced, and marched, as stiff as any ancient ramrod. Or board. Or corpse. His blood beat in his ears; his chin jerked upward. Past the corporal, who was standing at attention doing a fair imitation of a waxwork. Out the door, out the outer door. Alone at last in the Administration Building’s lower corridor.

Miles cursed himself silently, then out loud. He really had to try to cultivate a more normal attitude toward senior officers. It was his bloody upbringing that lay at the root of the problem, he was sure. Too many years of tripping over herds of generals, admirals, and senior staff at Vorkosigan House, at lunch, dinner, all hours. Too much time sitting quiet as a mouse, cultivating invisibility, permitted to listen to their extremely blunt argument and debate on a hundred topics. He saw them as they saw each other, maybe. When a normal ensign looked at his commander, he ought to see a godlike being, not a, a . . . future subordinate. New ensigns were supposed to be a subhuman species anyway.

And yet . . . What is it about this guy Metzov? He’d met others of the type before, of assorted political stripes. Many of them were cheerful and effective soldiers, as long as they stayed out of politics. As a party, the military conservatives had been eclipsed ever since the bloody fall of the cabal of officers responsible for the disastrous Escobar invasion, over two decades ago. But the danger of revolution from the far right, some would-be junta assembling to save the Emperor from his own government, remained quite real in Miles’s father’s mind, he knew.

So, was it some subtle political odor emanating from Metzov that had raised the hairs on the back of Miles’s neck? Surely not. A man of real political subtlety would seek to use Miles, not abuse him. Or are you just pissed because he stuck you on some humiliating garbage detail? A man didn’t have to be politically extreme to take a certain sadistic joy in sticking it to a representative of the Vor class. Could be Metzov had been diddled in the past himself by some arrogant Vor lord. Political, social, genetic . . . the possibilities were endless.

Miles shook the static from his head, and limped off to change to his black fatigues and locate Base Engineering. No help for it now; he was sunk deeper than his scat-cat. He’d simply have to avoid Metzov as much as possible for the next six months. Anything Ahn could do so well, Miles could surely do, too.

* * *

Lieutenant Bonn prepared to probe for the scat-cat. The engineering lieutenant was a slight man, maybe twenty-eight or thirty years old, with a craggy face surfaced with pocked sallow skin, reddened by the climate. Calculating brown eyes, competent-looking hands, and a sardonic air which, Miles sensed, might be permanent and not merely directed at himself. Bonn and Miles squished about atop the bog, while two engineering techs in black insulated coveralls sat perched on their heavy hovercab, safely parked on a nearby rocky outcrop. The sun was pale, the endless wind cold and damp.

“Try about there, sir,” Miles suggested, pointing, trying to estimate angles and distances in a place he had only seen at dusk. “I think you’ll have to go down at least two meters.”

Lieutenant Bonn gave him a joyless look, raised his long metal probe to the vertical, and shoved it into the bog. It jammed almost immediately. Miles frowned puzzlement. Surely the scat-cat couldn’t have floated upward. . . .

Bonn, looking unexcited, leaned his weight into the rod and twisted. It began to grind downward.

“What did you run into?” Miles asked.

“Ice,” Bonn grunted. “’Bout three centimeters thick right now. We’re standing on a layer of ice, underneath this surface crud, just like a frozen lake except it’s frozen mud.”

Miles stamped experimentally. Wet, but solid. Much as it had felt when he had camped on it.

Bonn, watching him, added, “The ice thickness varies with the weather. From a few centimeters to solid-to-the-bottom. Midwinter, you could park a freight shuttle on this bog. Come summer, it thins out. It can thaw from seeming-solid to liquid in a few hours, when the temperature is just right, and back again.”

“I . . . think I found that out.”

“Lean,” ordered Bonn laconically, and Miles wrapped his hands around the rod and helped shove. He could feel the scrunch as it scraped past the ice layer. And if the temperature had dropped a little more, the night he’d sunk himself, and the mud re-frozen, would he have been able to punch up through the icy seal? He shuddered inwardly, and zipped his parka half-up, over his black fatigues.

“Cold?” said Bonn.

“Thinking.”

“Good. Make it a habit.” Bonn touched a control, and the rod’s sonic probe beeped at a teeth-aching frequency. The readout displayed a bright teardrop shape a few meters over. “There it is.” Bonn eyed the numbers on the readout. “It’s really down in there, isn’t it? I’d let you dig it out with a teaspoon, Ensign, but I suppose winter would set in before you were done.” He sighed, and stared down at Miles as though picturing the scene.

Miles could picture it, too. “Yes, sir,” he said carefully.

They pulled the probe back out. Cold mud slicked the surface under their gloved hands. Bonn marked the spot and waved to his techs. “Here, boys!” They waved back, hopped down off the hovercab, and swung within. Bonn and Miles scrambled well out of the way, onto the rocks toward the weather station.

The hovercab whined into the air and positioned itself over the bog. Its heavy-duty space-rated tractor beam punched downward. Mud, plant matter, and ice geysered out in all directions with a roar. In a couple of minutes, the beam had created an oozing crater, with a glimmering pearl at the bottom. The crater’s sides began to slump inward at once, but the hovercab operator narrowed and reversed his beam, and the scat-cat rose, noisily sucking free from its matrix. The limp bubble shelter dangled repellently from its chain. The hovercab set its load down delicately in the rocky area, then landed beside it.

Bonn and Miles trooped over to view the sodden remains. “You weren’t in that bubble-shelter, were you, Ensign?” said Bonn, prodding it with his toe.

“Yes, sir, I was. Waiting for daylight. I . . . fell asleep.”

“But you got out before it sank.”

“Well, no. When I woke up, it was all the way under.”

Bonn’s crooked eyebrows rose. “How far?”

Miles’s flat hand found the level of his chin.

Bonn looked startled. “How’d you get out of the suction?”

“With difficulty. And adrenaline, I think. I slipped out of my boots and pants. Which reminds me, may I take a minute and look for my boots, sir?”

Bonn waved a hand, and Miles trudged back out onto the bog, circling the ring of muck spewed from the tractor beam, keeping a safe distance from the now water-filling crater. He found one mud-coated boot, but not the other. Should he save it, on the off-chance he might have one leg amputated someday? It would probably be the wrong leg. He sighed, and climbed back up to Bonn.

Bonn frowned down at the ruined boot dangling from Miles’s hand. “You could have been killed,” he said in a tone of realization.

“Three times over. Smothered in the bubble shelter, trapped in the bog, or frozen waiting for rescue.”

Bonn gave him a penetrating stare. “Really.” He walked away from the deflated shelter, idly, as if seeking a wider view. Miles followed. When they were out of earshot of the techs, Bonn stopped and scanned the bog. Conversationally, he remarked, “I heard—unofficially—that a certain motor-pool tech named Pattas was bragging to one of his mates that he’d set you up for this. And you were too stupid to even realize you’d been had. That bragging could have been . . . not too bright, if you’d been killed.”

“If I’d been killed, it wouldn’t have mattered if he’d bragged or not.” Miles shrugged. “What a Service investigation missed, I flat guarantee the Imperial Security investigation would have found.”

“You knew you’d been set up?” Bonn studied the horizon.

“Yes.”

“I’m surprised you didn’t call Imperial Security in, then.”

“Oh? Think about it, sir.”

Bonn’s gaze returned to Miles, as if taking inventory of his distasteful deformities. “You don’t add up for me, Vorkosigan. Why did they let you in the Service?”

“Why d’you think?”

“Vor privilege.”

“Got it in one.”

“Then why are you here? Vor privilege gets sent to HQ.”

“Vorbarr Sultana is lovely this time of year,” said Miles agreeably. And how was his cousin Ivan enjoying it right now? “But I want ship duty.”

“And you couldn’t arrange it?” said Bonn skeptically.

“I was told to earn it. That’s why I’m here. To prove I can handle the Service. Or . . . not. Calling in a wolf pack from ImpSec within a week of my arrival to turn the base and everyone on it inside out looking for assassination conspiracies—where, I judge, none exist—would not advance me toward my goal. No matter how entertaining it might be.” Messy charges, his word against their two words—even if Miles had pushed it to a formal investigation, with fast-penta to prove him right, the ruckus could hurt him far more in the long run than his two tormentors. No. No revenge was worth the Prince Serg.

“The motor pool is in Engineering’s chain of command. If Imperial Security fell on it, they’d also fall on me.” Bonn’s brown eyes glinted.

“You’re welcome to fall on anyone you please, sir. But if you have unofficial ways of receiving information, it follows you must have unofficial ways of sending it, too. And after all, you’ve only my word for what happened.” Miles hefted his useless single boot and heaved it back into the bog.

Thoughtfully, Bonn watched it arc and splash down in a pool of brown meltwater. “A Vor lord’s word?”

“Means nothing, in these degenerate days.” Miles bared his teeth in a smile of sorts. “Ask anyone.”

“Huh.” Bonn shook his head, and started back toward the hovercab.

* * *

Next morning, Miles reported to the maintenance shed for the second half of the scat-cat retrieval job, cleaning all the mud-caked equipment. The sun was bright today, and had been up for hours, but Miles’s body knew it was only 0500. An hour into his task he’d begun to warm up, feel better, and get into the rhythm of the thing.

At 0630, the deadpan Lieutenant Bonn arrived and delivered two helpers unto Miles.

“Why, Corporal Olney. Tech Pattas. We meet again.” Miles smiled with acid cheer. The pair exchanged an uneasy look. Miles kept his demeanor absolutely even.

He then kept everyone, starting with himself, moving briskly. The conversation seemed to automatically limit itself to brief, wary technicalities. By the time Miles had to knock off and go report to Lieutenant Ahn, the scat-cat and most of the gear had been restored to better condition than Miles had received it.

He wished his two helpers, now driven to near-twitchiness by uncertainty, an earnest good-day. Well, if they hadn’t figured it out by now, they were hopeless. Miles wondered bitterly why he seemed to have so much better luck establishing rapport with bright men like Bonn. Cecil had been right; if Miles couldn’t figure out how to command the dull as well, he’d never make it as a Service officer. Not at Camp Permafrost, anyway.

* * *

The following morning, the third of his official punishment seven, Miles presented himself to Sergeant Neuve. The sergeant in turn presented Miles with a scat-cat full of equipment, a disk of the related equipment manuals, and the schedule for drain and culvert maintenance for Lazkowski Base. Clearly, it was to be another learning experience. Miles wondered if General Metzov had selected this task personally. He rather thought so.

On the bright side, he had his two helpers back again. This particular civil engineering task had apparently never fallen on Olney or Pattas before either, so they had no edge of superior knowledge with which to trip Miles. They had to stop and read the manuals first, too. Miles swotted procedures and directed operations with a good cheer that edged toward manic as his helpers became glummer.

There was, after all, a certain fascination to the clever drain-cleaning devices. And excitement. Flushing pipes with high pressure could produce some surprising effects. There were chemical compounds that had some quite military properties, such as the ability to dissolve anything instantly, including human flesh. In the following three days Miles learned more about the infrastructure of Lazkowski Base than he’d ever imagined wanting to know. He’d even calculated the point where one well-placed charge could bring the entire system down, if he ever decided he wanted to destroy the place.

On the sixth day, Miles and his team were sent to clear a blocked culvert out by the grubs’ practice fields. It was easy to spot. A silver sheet of water lapped the raised roadway on one side; on the other only a feeble trickle emerged to creep away down the bottom of a deep ditch.

Miles took a long telescoping pole from the back of their scat-cat, and probed down into the water’s opaque surface. Nothing seemed to be blocking the flooded end of the culvert. Whatever it was must be jammed farther in. Joy. He handed the pole back to Pattas and wandered over to the other side of the road, staring down into the ditch. The culvert, he noted, was something over half a meter in diameter. “Give me a light,” he said to Olney.

He shucked his parka and tossed it into the scat-cat, and scrambled down into the ditch. He aimed his light into the aperture. The culvert evidently curved slightly; he couldn’t see a damned thing. He sighed, considering the relative width of Olney’s shoulders, Pattas’s, and his own.

Could there be anything further from ship duty than this? The closest he’d come to anything of the sort was spelunking in the Dendarii Mountains. Earth and water, versus fire and air. He seemed to be building up a helluva supply of yin; the balancing yang to come had better be stupendous.

He gripped the light tighter, dropped to hands and knees, and shinnied into the drain.

The icy water soaked the trouser knees of his black fatigues. The effect was numbing. Water leaked around the top of one of his gloves, feeling like a knife blade on his wrist.

Miles meditated briefly on Olney and Pattas. They had developed a cool, reasonably efficient working relationship over the last few days, based, Miles had no illusions, on a fear of God instilled in the two men by Miles’s good angel Lieutenant Bonn. How did Bonn accomplish that quiet authority, anyway? He had to figure that one out. Bonn was good at his job, for starters, but what else?

Miles scraped around the curve, shone his light on the clot, and recoiled, swearing. He paused a moment to regain control of his breath, examined the blockage more closely, and backed out.

He stood up in the bottom of the ditch, straightening his spine vertebra by creaking vertebra. Corporal Olney stuck his head over the road’s railing, above. “What’s in there, Ensign?”

Miles grinned up at him, still catching his breath. “Pair of boots.”

“That’s all?” said Olney.

“Their owner is still wearing ’em.”

* * *

Miles called the base surgeon on the scat-cat’s comlink, urgently requesting his presence with forensic kit, body bag, and medical transport. Miles and his crew then blocked the upper end of the drain with a plastic signboard forcibly borrowed from the empty practice field beyond. Now so thoroughly wet and cold that it made no difference, Miles crawled back into the culvert to attach a rope to the anonymous booted ankles. When he emerged, the surgeon and his corpsman had arrived.

The surgeon, a big, balding man, peered dubiously into the drainpipe. “What could you see in there, Ensign? What happened?”

“I can’t see anything from this end but legs, sir,” Miles reported. “He’s got himself wedged in there but good. Drain crud up above him, I’d guess. We’ll have to see what spills out with him.”

“What the hell was he doing in there?” The surgeon scratched his freckled scalp.

Miles spread his hands. “Seems a peculiar way to commit suicide. Slow and chancy, as far as drowning yourself goes.”

The surgeon raised his eyebrows in agreement. Miles and the surgeon had to lend their weight on the rope to Olney, Pattas, and the corpsman before the stiff form wedged in the culvert began to scrape free.

“He’s stuck,” observed the corpsman, grunting. The body jerked out at last with a gush of dirty water. Pattas and Olney stared from a distance; Miles glued himself to the surgeon’s shoulder. The corpse, dressed in sodden black fatigues, was waxy and blue. His collar tabs and the contents of his pockets identified him as a private from Supply. His body bore no obvious wounds, but for bruised shoulders and scraped hands.

The surgeon spoke clipped, negative preliminaries into his recorder. No broken bones, no nerve disruptor blisters. Preliminary hypothesis, death from drowning or hypothermia or both, within the last twelve hours. He flipped off his recorder and added over his shoulder, “I’ll be able to tell for sure when we get him laid out back at the infirmary.”

“Does this sort of thing happen often around here?” Miles inquired mildly.

The surgeon shot him a sour look. “I slab a few idiots every year. What d’you expect, when you put five thousand kids between the ages of eighteen and twenty together on an island and tell ’em to go play war? I admit, this one seems to have discovered a completely new method of slabbing himself. I guess you never see it all.”

“You think he did it to himself, then?” True, it would be real tricky to kill a man and then stuff him in there.

The surgeon wandered over to the culvert and squatted, staring into it. “So it would seem. Ah, would you take one more look in there, Ensign, just in case?”

“Very well, sir.” Miles hoped it was the last trip. He’d never have guessed drain cleaning would turn out to be so . . . thrilling. He slithered all the way under the road to the leaky board, checking every centimeter, but found only the dead man’s dropped hand light. So. The private had evidently entered the pipe on purpose. With intent. What intent? Why go culvert-crawling in the middle of the night in the middle of a heavy rainstorm? Miles skinned back out and turned the light over to the surgeon.

Miles helped the corpsman and surgeon bag and load the body, then had Olney and Pattas raise the blocking board and return it to its original location. Brown water gushed, roaring, from the bottom end of the culvert and roiled away down the ditch. The surgeon paused with Miles, leaning on the road railing and watching the water level drop in the little lake.

“Think there might be another one at the bottom?” Miles inquired morbidly.

“This guy was the only one listed as missing on the morning report,” the surgeon replied, “so probably not.” He didn’t look as if he was willing to bet on it, though.

The only thing that did turn up, as the water level fell, was the private’s soggy parka. He’d clearly tossed it over the railing before entering the culvert, from which it had fallen or blown into the water. The surgeon took it away with him.

“You’re pretty cool about that,” Pattas noted, as Miles turned away from the back of the medical transport and the surgeon and corpsman drove off.

Pattas was not that much older than Miles himself. “Haven’t you ever had to handle a corpse?”

“No. You?”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

Miles hesitated. Events of three years ago flickered through his memory. The brief months he’d been caught in desperate combat far from home, having accidently fallen in with a space mercenary force, was not a secret to be mentioned or even hinted at here. Regular Imperial troops despised mercenaries anyway, alive or dead. But the Tau Verde campaign had surely taught him the difference between practice and real, between war and war games, and that death had subtler vectors than direct touch. “Before,” said Miles dampingly. “Couple of times.”

Pattas shrugged, veering off. “Well,” he allowed grudgingly over his shoulder, “at least you’re not afraid to get your hands dirty. Sir.”

Miles’s brows crooked, bemused. No. That’s not what I’m afraid of.

Miles marked the drain “cleared” on his report panel, turned the scat-cat, their equipment, and a very subdued Olney and Pattas back in to Sergeant Neuve in Maintenance, and headed for the officers’ barracks. He’d never wanted a hot shower more in his entire life.

* * *

He was squelching down the corridor toward his quarters when another officer stuck his head out a door. “Ah, Ensign Vorkosigan?”

“Yes?”

“You got a vid call a while ago. I encoded the return for you.”

“Call?” Miles stopped. “Where from?”

“Vorbarr Sultana.”

Miles felt a chill in his belly. Some emergency at home? “Thanks.” He reversed direction, and beelined for the end of the corridor and the vidconsole booth that the officers on this level shared.

He slid damply into the seat and punched up the message. The number was not one he recognized. He entered it, and his charge code, and waited. It chimed several times, then the vidplate hissed to life. His cousin Ivan’s handsome face materialized over it, and grinned at him.

“Ah, Miles. There you are.”

“Ivan! Where the devil are you? What is this?”

“Oh, I’m at home. And that doesn’t mean my mother’s. I thought you might like to see my new flat.”

Miles had the vague, disoriented sensation that he’d somehow tapped a line into some parallel universe, or alternate astral plane. Vorbarr Sultana, yes. He’d lived in the capital himself, in a previous incarnation. Eons ago.

Ivan lifted his vid pick-up and aimed it around, dizzyingly. “It’s fully furnished. I took over the lease from an Ops captain who was being transferred to Komarr. A real bargain. I just got moved in yesterday. Can you see the balcony?”

Miles could see the balcony, drenched in late-afternoon sunlight the color of warm honey. The Vorbarr Sultana skyline rose like a fairy-tale city, swimming in the summer haze beyond. Scarlet flowers swarmed over the railing, so red in the level light they almost hurt his eyes. Miles felt like drooling into his shirt pocket, or bursting into tears. “Nice flowers,” he choked.

“Yeah, m’girlfriend brought ’em.”

“Girlfriend?” Ah yes, human beings had come in two sexes, once upon a time. One smelled much better than the other. Much. “Which one?”

“Tatya.”

“Have I met her?” Miles struggled to remember.

“Naw, she’s new.”

Ivan stopped waving the vid pick-up around and reappeared over the vid-plate. Miles’s exacerbated senses settled slightly. “So how’s the weather up there?” Ivan peered at him more closely. “Are you wet? What have you been doing?”

“Forensic . . . plumbing,” Miles offered after a pause.

“What?” Ivan’s brow wrinkled.

“Never mind.” Miles sneezed. “Look, I’m glad to see a familiar face and all that”—he was, actually, a painful, strange gladness—“but I’m in the middle of my duty day, here.”

“I got off-shift a couple of hours ago,” Ivan remarked. “I’m taking Tatya out for dinner in a bit. You just caught me. So just tell me quick, how’s life in the infantry?”

“Oh, great. Lazkowski Base is the real thing, y’know.” Miles did not define what real thing. “Not a . . . warehouse for excess Vor lordlings like Imperial Headquarters.”

“I do my job!” said Ivan, sounding slightly stung. “Actually, you’d like my job. We process information. It’s amazing, all the stuff Ops accesses in a day’s time. It’s like being on top of the world. It would be just your speed.”

“Funny. I’ve thought that Lazkowski Base would be just yours, Ivan. Suppose they could have got our orders reversed?”

Ivan tapped the side of his nose and sniggered. “I wouldn’t tell.” His humor sobered in a glint of real concern. “You, ah, take care of yourself up there, eh? You really don’t look so good.”

“I’ve had an unusual morning. If you’d sod off, I could go get a shower.”

“Oh, right. Well, take care.”

“Enjoy your dinner.”

“Right-oh. ’Bye.”

Voices from another universe. At that, Vorbarr Sultana was only a couple of hours away by sub-orbital flight. In theory. Miles was obscurely comforted, to be reminded that the whole planet hadn’t shrunk to the lead-gray horizons of Kyril Island, even if his part of it seemed to have.

* * *

Miles found it difficult to concentrate on the weather, the rest of that day. Fortunately his superior didn’t much notice. Since the scat-cat sinking Ahn had tended to maintain a guilty, nervous silence around Miles except when directly prodded for specific information. When his duty day ended Miles headed straight for the infirmary.

The surgeon was still working, or at least sitting, at his desk console when Miles poked his head around the door frame. “Good evening, sir.”

The surgeon glanced up. “Yes, Ensign? What is it?”

Miles took this as sufficient invitation despite the unencouraging tone of voice, and slipped within. “I was wondering what you’d found out about that fellow we pulled from the culvert this morning.”

The surgeon shrugged. “Not that much to find out. His ID checked. He died of drowning. All the physical and metabolic evidence—stress, hypothermia, the hematomas—are consistent with his being stuck in there for a bit less than half an hour before death. I’ve ruled it death by misadventure.”

“Yes, but why?”

“Why?” The surgeon’s eyebrows rose. “He slabbed himself; you’ll have to ask him, eh?”

“Don’t you want to find out?”

“To what purpose?”

“Well . . . to know, I guess. To be sure you’re right.”

The surgeon gave him a dry stare.

“I’m not questioning your medical findings, sir,” Miles added hastily. “But it was just so damned weird. Aren’t you curious?”

“Not anymore,” said the surgeon. “I’m satisfied it wasn’t suicide or foul play, so whatever the details, it comes down to death from stupidity in the end, doesn’t it?”

Miles wondered if that would have been the surgeon’s final epitaph on him, if he’d sunk himself with the scat-cat. “I suppose so, sir.”

Standing outside the infirmary afterward in the damp wind, Miles hesitated. The corpse, after all, was not Miles’s personal property. Not a case of finders-keepers. He’d turned the situation over to the proper authority. It was out of his hands now. And yet . . .

There were still several hours of daylight left. Miles was having trouble sleeping anyway, in these almost-endless days. He returned to his quarters, pulled on sweat pants and shirt and running shoes, and went jogging.

* * *

The road was lonely, out by the empty practice fields. The sun crawled crabwise toward the horizon. Miles broke from a jog back to a walk, then to a slower walk. His leg-braces chafed, beneath his pants. One of these days very soon he would take the time to get the brittle long bones in his legs replaced with synthetics. At that, elective surgery might be a quasi-legitimate way to lever himself off Kyril Island, if things grew too desperate before his six months were up. It seemed like cheating, though.

He looked around, trying to imagine his present surroundings in the dark and heavy rain. If he had been the private, slogging along this road about midnight, what would he have seen? What could possibly have attracted the man’s attention to the ditch? Why the hell had he come out here in the middle of the night in the first place? This road wasn’t on the way to anything but an obstacle course and a firing range.

There was the ditch . . . no, his ditch was the next one, a little farther on. Four culverts pierced the raised roadway along this half-kilometer straight stretch. Miles found the correct ditch and leaned on the railing, staring down at the now-sluggish trickle of drain water. There was nothing attractive about it now, that was certain. Why, why, why . . . ?

Miles sloped along up the high side of the road, examining the road surface, the railing, the sodden brown bracken beyond. He came to the curve and turned back, studying the opposite side. He arrived back at the first ditch, on the baseward end of the straight stretch, without discovering any view of charm or interest.

Miles perched on the railing and meditated. All right, time to try a little logic. What overwhelming emotion had led the private to wedge himself in the drain, despite the obvious danger? Rage? What had he been pursuing? Fear? What could have been pursuing him? Error? Miles knew all about error. What if the man had picked the wrong culvert . . . ?

Impulsively, Miles slithered down into the first ditch. Either the man had been methodically working his way through all the culverts—if so, had he been working from the base out, or from the practice fields back?—or else he had missed his intended target in the dark and rain and got into the wrong one. Miles would give them all a crawl-through if he had to, but he preferred to be right the first time. Even if there wasn’t anybody watching. This culvert was slightly wider in diameter than the second, lethal one. Miles pulled his hand light from his belt, ducked within, and began examining it centimeter by centimeter.

“Ah,” he breathed in satisfaction, midway beneath the road. There was his prize, stuck to the upper side of the culvert’s arc with sagging tape. A package, wrapped in waterproof plastic. How interesting. He slithered out and sat in the mouth of the culvert, careless of the damp but carefully out of view from the road above.

Placing the packet on his lap, he studied it with pleasurable anticipation, as if it had been a birthday present. Could it be drugs, contraband, classified documents, criminal cash? Personally, Miles hoped for classified documents, though it was hard to imagine anyone classifying anything on Kyril Island except maybe the efficiency reports. Drugs would be all right, but a spy ring would be just wonderful. He’d be a Security hero—his mind raced ahead, already plotting the next move in his covert investigation. Following the dead man’s trail through subtle clues to some ringleader, who knew how high up? The dramatic arrests, maybe a commendation from Simon Illyan himself. . . . The package was lumpy, but crackled slightly—plastic flimsies?

Heart hammering, he eased it open—and slumped in stunned disappointment. A pained breath, half-laugh, half-moan, puffed from his lips.

Pastries. A couple of dozen lisettes, a kind of miniature popover glazed and stuffed with candied fruit, made, traditionally, for the Midsummer Day celebration. Month-and-a-half-old stale pastries. What a cause to die for. . . .

Miles’s imagination, fueled by knowledge of barracks life, sketched in the rest readily enough. The private had received this package from some sweetheart/mother/sister, and sought to protect it from his ravenous mates, who would have wolfed it all down in seconds. Perhaps the man, starved for home, had been rationing them out to himself morsel by morsel in a lingering masochistic ritual, pleasure and pain mixed with each bite. Or maybe he’d just been saving them for some special occasion.

Then came the two days of unusual heavy rain, and the man had begun to fear for his secret treasure’s, ah, liquidity margin. He’d come out to rescue his cache, missed the first ditch in the dark, gone at the second in desperate determination as the waters rose, realized his mistake too late. . . .

Sad. A little sickening. But not useful. Miles sighed, and bundled the lisettes back up, and trotted off with the package under his arm, back to the base to turn it over to the surgeon.

The surgeon’s only comment, when Miles caught up with him and explained his findings, was “Yep. Death from stupidity, all right.” Absently, the man bit into a lisette and sniffed.

* * *

Miles’s time on maintenance detail ended the next day without his finding anything in the sewers of greater interest than the drowned man. It was probably just as well. The following day Ahn’s office corporal arrived back from his long leave. Miles discovered that the corporal, who’d been working the weather office for some two years, was a ready reservoir of the greater part of the information Miles had spent the last two weeks busting his brains to learn. He didn’t have Ahn’s nose, though.

Ahn actually left Camp Permafrost sober, walking up the transport’s ramp under his own power. Miles went to the shuttle pad to see him off, not certain if he was glad or sorry to see the weatherman go. Ahn looked happy, though, his lugubrious face almost illuminated.

“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.

Ahn hesitated on the ramp, looking down at Miles. “Watch out for Metzov,” he advised at last.

This warning seemed remarkably late, not to mention maddeningly vague. Miles gave Ahn an exasperated look, up from under his raised eyebrows. “I doubt I’ll be much featured on his social calendar.”

Ahn shifted uncomfortably. “That’s not what I meant.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well . . . I don’t know. I once saw . . .”

“What?”

Ahn shook his head. “Nothing. It was a long time ago. A lot of crazy things were happening, at the height of the Komarr revolt. But it’s better that you should stay out of his way.”

“I’ve had to deal with old martinets before.”

“Oh, he’s not exactly a martinet. But he’s got a streak of . . . he can be a funny kind of dangerous. Don’t ever really threaten him, huh?”

“Me, threaten Metzov?” Miles’s face screwed up in bafflement. Maybe Ahn wasn’t as sober as he smelled after all. “Come on, he can’t be that bad, or they’d never put him in charge of trainees.”

“He doesn’t command the grubs. They have their own hierarchy comes in with ’em—the instructors report to their own commander. Metzov’s just in charge of the base’s permanent physical plant. You’re a pushy little sod, Vorkosigan. Just don’t . . . ever push him to the edge, or you’ll be sorry. And that’s all I’m going to say.” Ahn shut his mouth determinedly, and headed up the ramp.

I’m already sorry, Miles thought of calling after him. Well, his punishment week was over now. Perhaps Metzov had meant the labor detail to humiliate Miles, but actually it had been quite interesting. Sinking his scat-cat, now, that had been humiliating. That he had done to himself. Miles waved one last time to Ahn as he disappeared into the transport shuttle, shrugged, and headed back across the tarmac toward the now-familiar admin building.

It took a full couple of minutes, after Miles’s corporal had left the weather office for lunch, for Miles to yield to the temptation to scratch the itch Ahn had planted in his mind, and punch up Metzov’s public record on the comconsole. The mere listing of the base commander’s dates, assignments, and promotions was not terribly informative, though a little knowledge of history filled in between the lines.

Metzov had entered the Service some thirty-five years ago. His most rapid promotions had occurred, not surprisingly, during the annexation of the planet Komarr about twenty-five years ago. The wormhole-rich Komarr system was Barrayar’s sole gate to the greater galactic wormhole route nexus. Komarr had proved its immense strategic importance to Barrayar earlier in the century, when its ruling oligarchy had accepted a bribe to let a Cetagandan invasion fleet pass through its wormholes and descend on Barrayar. Throwing the Cetagandans back out again had consumed a Barrayaran generation. Barrayar had turned its bloody lesson around in Miles’s father’s day. 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.

Metzov had somehow managed to end up on the correct side during Vordarian’s Pretendership, a purely Barrayaran attempt to wrest power from then-five-year-old Emperor Gregor and his Regent, two decades past—picking the wrong side in that civil affray would have been Miles’s first guess why such an apparently competent officer had ended up marking out his later years on ice on Kyril Island. But the dead halt to Metzov’s career seemed to come during the Komarr Revolt, some sixteen years ago now. No hint in this file as to why, but for a cross-reference to another file. An Imperial Security code, Miles recognized. Dead end there.

Or maybe not. Lips compressed thoughtfully, Miles punched through another code on his comconsole.

“Operations, Commodore Jollif’s office,” Ivan began formally as his face materialized over the comconsole vid plate, then, “Oh, hello, Miles. What’s up?”

“I’m doing a little research. Thought you might help me out.”

“I should have known you wouldn’t call me at HQ just to be sociable. So what d’you want?”

“Ah . . . do you have the office to yourself, just at present?”

“Yeah, the old man’s stuck in committee.”  Ivan’s eyes narrowed in suspicion. “Why do you ask?”

“I want you to pull a file for me. Ancient history, not current events,” Miles reassured him, and reeled off the code-string.

“Ah.” Ivan’s hand started to tap it out, then stopped. “Are you crazy? That’s an Imperial Security file. No can do!”

“Of course you can, you’re right there, aren’t you?”

Ivan shook his head smugly. “Not any more. The whole ImpSec file system’s been made super-secure. You can’t transfer data out of it except through a coded filter-cable, which you must physically attach. Which I would have to sign for. Which I would have to explain why I wanted it and produce authorization. You got an authorization for this? Ha. I thought not.”

Miles frowned frustration. “Surely you can call it up on the internal system.”

“On the internal system, yes. What I can’t do is connect the internal system to any external system for a data dump. So you’re out of luck.”

“You got an internal system comconsole in that office?”

“Sure.”

“So,” said Miles impatiently, “call up the file, turn your desk around, and let the two vids talk to each other. You can do that, can’t you?”

Ivan scratched his head. “Would that work?”

“Try it!” Miles drummed his fingers while Ivan dragged his desk around and fiddled with focus. The signal was degraded but readable. “There, I thought so. Scroll it up for me, would you?”

Fascinating, utterly fascinating. The file was a collection of secret reports from an ImpSec investigation into the mysterious death of a prisoner in Metzov’s charge, a Komarran rebel who had killed his guard and himself been killed while attempting to escape. When ImpSec had demanded the Komarran’s body for an autopsy, Metzov had turned over cremated ashes and an apology; if only he had been told a few hours earlier the body was wanted, etc. The investigating officer hinted at charges of illegal torture—perhaps in revenge for the death of the guard?—but was unable to amass enough evidence to obtain authorization to fast-penta the Barrayaran witnesses, including a certain Tech-ensign Ahn. The investigating officer had lodged a formal protest of his superior officer’s decision to close the case, and there it ended. Apparently. 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. And yet Metzov’s career had stopped, literally, cold.

“Miles,” Ivan interrupted for the fourth time, “I really don’t think we should be doing this. This is slit-your-throat-before-reading stuff, here.”

“If we shouldn’t do it, we shouldn’t be able to do it. You’d still have to have the cable for flash-downloading. No real spy would be dumb enough to sit there inside Imperial HQ by the hour and scroll stuff through by hand, waiting to be caught and shot.”

“That does it.” Ivan killed the Security file with a swat of his hand. The vid image wavered wildly as Ivan dragged his desk back around, followed by scrubbing noises as he frantically rubbed out the tracks in his carpet with his boot. “I didn’t do this, you hear?”

“I didn’t mean you. We’re not spies.” Miles subsided glumly. “Still . . . I suppose somebody ought to tell Illyan about the little hole they overlooked in his Security arrangements.”

“Not me!”

“Why not you? Put it in as a brilliant theoretical suggestion. Maybe you’ll earn a commendation. Don’t tell ’em we actually did it, of course. Or maybe we were just testing your theory, eh?”

“You,” said Ivan severely, “are career-poison. Never darken my vid-plate again. Except at home, of course.”

Miles grinned, and permitted his cousin to escape. He sat awhile in the office, watching the colorful weather holos flicker and change, and thinking about his base commander, and the kinds of accidents that could happen to defiant prisoners.

Well, it had all been very long ago. Metzov himself would probably be retiring in another five years, with his status as a double-twenty-years-man and a pension, to merge into the population of unpleasant old men. Not so much a problem to be solved as to be outlived, at least by Miles. His ultimate purpose at Lazkowski Base, Miles reminded himself, was to escape Lazkowski Base, silently as smoke. Metzov would be left behind in time.

In the next weeks Miles settled into a tolerable routine. For one thing, the grubs arrived. All five thousand of them. Miles’s status rose on their shoulders, to that of almost-human. Lazkowski Base suffered its first real snow of the season, as the days shortened, plus a mild wah-wah lasting half a day, both of which Miles managed to predict accurately in advance.

Even more happily, Miles was completely displaced as the most famous idiot on the island (an unwelcome notoriety earned by the scat-cat sinking) by a group of grubs who managed one night to set their barracks on fire while lighting fart-flares. Miles’s strategic suggestion at the officers’ fire-safety meeting next day that they tackle the problem with a logistical assault on the enemy’s fuel supply, i.e., eliminate red-bean stew from the menu, was shot down with one icy glower from General Metzov. Though in the hallway later, an earnest captain from Ordnance stopped Miles to thank him for trying.

So much for the glamour of the Imperial Service. Miles took to spending long hours alone in the weather office, studying chaos theory, his readouts, and the walls. Three months down, three to go. It was getting darker.

* * *

Miles was out of bed and half dressed before it penetrated his sleep-stunned brain that the galvanizing klaxon was not the wah-wah warning. He paused with a boot in his hand. Not fire or enemy attack, either. Not his department, then, whatever it was. The rhythmic blatting stopped. They were right, silence was golden.

He checked the glowing digital clock. It claimed midevening. He’d only been asleep about two hours, having fallen into bed exhausted after a long trip up-island in a snowstorm to repair wind damage to Weather Station Eleven. The comlink by his bed was not blinking its red call light to inform him of any surprise duties he must carry out. He could go back to bed.

Silence was baffling.

He pulled on the second boot and stuck his head out his door. A couple of other officers had done the same, and were speculating to each other on the cause of the alarm. Lieutenant Bonn emerged from his quarters and strode down the hall, jerking on his parka. His face looked strained, half-worry, half-annoyance.

Miles grabbed his own parka and galloped after him. “You need a hand, Lieutenant?”

Bonn glanced down at him, pursing his lips. “I might,” he allowed.

Miles fell in beside him, secretly pleased by Bonn’s implicit judgment that he might in fact be useful. “So what’s up?”

“Some sort of accident in a toxic stores bunker. If it’s the one I think, we could have a real problem.”

They exited the double-doored heat-retaining vestibule from the officers’ quarters into a night gone crystal cold. Fine snow squeaked under Miles’s boots and swept along the ground in a faint east wind. The brightest stars overhead held their own against the base’s lights. The two men slid into Bonn’s scat-cat, their breath smoking until the canopy-defrost cut in. Bonn headed west out of the base at high acceleration.

A few kilometers past the last practice fields, a row of turf-topped barrows hunched in the snow. A cluster of vehicles was parked at the end of one bunker—a couple of scat-cats, including the one belonging to the base fire marshal, and medical transport. Hand lights moved among them. Bonn slewed in and pulled up, popping his door. Miles followed him, crunching rapidly across the packed ice.

The surgeon was directing a pair of corpsmen, who were loading a foil-blanketed shape and a second coverall-clad soldier who shivered and coughed onto the med transport. “All of you, put everything you’re wearing into the destruct bin when you hit the door,” he called after them. “Blankets, bedding, splints, everything. Full decontamination showers for you all before you even start to worry about that broken leg of his. The painkiller will hold him through it, and if it doesn’t, ignore him and keep scrubbing. I’ll be right behind you.” The surgeon shuddered, turning away, whistling dismay through his teeth.

Bonn headed for the bunker door. “Don’t open that!” the surgeon and the fire marshal called together. “There’s nobody left inside,” the surgeon added. “All evacuated now.”

“What exactly happened?” Bonn scrubbed with a gloved hand at the frosted window set in the door, in an effort to see within.

“Couple of guys were moving stores, to make room for a new shipment coming in tomorrow,” the fire marshal, a lieutenant named Yaski, filled him in rapidly. “They dumped their loader over, one got pinned underneath with a broken leg.”

“That . . . took ingenuity,” said Bonn, obviously picturing the mechanics of the loader in his mind.

“They had to have been horsing around,” said the surgeon in impatience. “But that’s not the worst of it. They took several barrels of fetaine over with them. And at least two broke open. The stuff’s all over the place in there. We’ve sealed the bunker as best we could. Cleanup”—the surgeon exhaled—“is your problem. I’m gone.” He looked as if he wanted to crawl out of his own skin, as well as his clothes. He waved, making quickly for his scat-cat to follow his corpsmen and their patients through medical decontamination.

“Fetaine!” Miles exclaimed, startled. Bonn had retreated hastily from the door. Fetaine was a mutagenic poison invented as a terror weapon but never, so far as Miles knew, used in combat. “I thought that stuff was obsolete. Off the menu.” His academy course in Chemicals and Biologicals had barely mentioned it.

“It is obsolete,” said Bonn grimly. “They haven’t made any in twenty years. For all I know this is the last stockpile on Barrayar. Dammit, those storage barrels shouldn’t have broken open even if you’d dropped ’em out a shuttle.”

“Those storage barrels are at least twenty years old, then,” the marshal pointed out. “Corrosion?”

“In that case,” Bonn craned his neck, “what about the rest of them?”

“Exactly,” nodded Yaski.

“Isn’t fetaine destroyed by heat?” Miles asked nervously, checking to make sure they were standing around discussing this upwind of the bunker. “Chemically dissociated into harmless components, I heard.”

“Well, not exactly harmless,” said Lieutenant Yaski. “But at least they don’t unravel all the DNA in your balls.”

“Are there any explosives stored in there, Lieutenant Bonn?” Miles asked.

“No, only the fetaine.”

“If you tossed a couple of plasma mines through the door, would the fetaine all be chemically cracked before the roof melted in?”

“You wouldn’t want the roof to melt in. Or the floor. If that stuff ever got loose in the permafrost . . . But if you set the mines on slow heat release, and threw a few kilos of neutral plas-seal in with ’em, the bunker might be self-sealing.” Bonn’s lips moved in silent calculation. “. . . Yeah, that’d work. In fact, that could be the safest way to deal with that crap. Particularly if the rest of the barrels are starting to lose integrity, too.”

“Depending on which way the wind is blowing,” put in Lieutenant Yaski, looking back toward the base and then at Miles.

“We’re expecting a light east wind with dropping temperatures till about 0700 tomorrow morning,” Miles answered his look. “Then it’ll shift around to the north and blow harder. Potential wah-wah conditions starting around 1800 tomorrow night.”

“If we’re going to do it that way, we’d better do it tonight, then,” said Yaski.

“All right,” said Bonn decisively. “I’ll round up my crew, you round up yours. I’ll pull the plans for the bunker, calculate the charges’ release-rate, and meet you and the ordnance chief in Admin in an hour.”

Bonn posted the fire marshal’s sergeant as guard to keep everyone well away from the bunker. An unenviable duty, but not unbearable in present conditions, and the guard could retreat inside his scat-cat when the temperature dropped, toward midnight. Miles rode back with Bonn to the base administration building to double-check his promises about wind direction at the weather office.

Miles ran the latest data through the weather computers, that he might present Bonn with the most refined possible update on predicted wind vectors over the next 26.7-hour Barrayaran day. But before he had the printout in his hand, he saw Bonn and Yaski out the window, down below, hurrying away from the admin building into the dark. Perhaps they were meeting with the ordnance chief elsewhere? Miles considered chasing after them, but the new prediction was not significantly different from the older one. Did he really need to go watch them cauterize the poison dump? It could be interesting—educational—on the other hand, he had no real function there now. As his parents’ only child—as the father, perhaps, of some future Count Vorkosigan—it was arguable if he even had the right to expose himself to such a vile mutagenic hazard for mere curiosity. There seemed no immediate danger to the base, till the wind shifted, anyway. Or was cowardice masquerading as logic? Prudence was a virtue, he had heard.

Now thoroughly awake, and too rattled to even imagine recapturing sleep, he pottered around the weather office, catching up on all the routine files he had set aside that morning in favor of the repairs junket. An hour of steady plugging finished off everything that even remotely looked like work. When he found himself compulsively dusting equipment and shelves, he decided it was time to go back to bed, sleep or no sleep. But a shifting light from the window caught his eye, a scat-cat pulling up out front.

Ah, Bonn and Yaski, back. Already? That had been fast, or hadn’t they started yet? Miles tore off the plastic flimsy with the new wind readout and headed downstairs to the Base Engineering office at the end of the corridor.

Bonn’s office was dark. But light spilled into the corridor from the Base Commander’s office. Light, and angry voices rising and falling. Clutching the flimsy, Miles approached.

The door was open to the inner office. Metzov sat at his desk console, one clenched fist resting on the flickering colored surface. Bonn and Yaski stood tensely before him. Miles rattled the flimsy cautiously to announce his presence.

Yaski’s head swivelled around, and his gaze caught Miles. “Send Vorkosigan, he’s a mutant already, isn’t he?”

Miles gave a vaguely directed salute and said immediately, “Pardon me, sir, but no, I’m not. My last encounter with a military poison did teratogenic damage, not genetic. My future children should be as healthy as the next man’s. Ah, send me where, sir?”

Metzov glowered across at Miles, but did not pursue Yaski’s unsettling suggestion. Miles handed the flimsy wordlessly to Bonn, who glanced at it, grimaced, and stuffed it savagely into his trouser pocket.

“Of course I intended them to wear protective gear,” continued Metzov to Bonn in irritation. “I’m not mad.”

“I understood that, sir. But the men refuse to enter the bunker even with contamination gear,” Bonn reported in a flat, steady voice. “I can’t blame them. The standard precautions are inadequate for fetaine, in my estimation. The stuff has an incredibly high penetration value, for its molecular weight. Goes right through permeables.”

“You can’t blame them?” repeated Metzov in astonishment. “Lieutenant, you gave an order. Or you were supposed to.”

“I did, sir, but—”

“But—you let them sense your own indecision. Your weakness. Dammit, when you give an order you have to give it, not dance around it.”

“Why do we have to save this stuff?” said Yaski plaintively.

“We’ve been over that. It’s our charge,” Metzov grunted at him. “Our orders. You can’t ask a man to give an obedience you don’t give yourself.”

What, blind? “Surely Research still has the recipe,” Miles put in, feeling he was at last getting the alarming drift of this argument. “They can mix up more if they really want it. Fresh.”

“Shut up, Vorkosigan,” Bonn growled desperately out of the corner of his mouth, as General Metzov snapped, “Open your lip tonight with one more sample of your humor, Ensign, and I’ll put you on charges.”

Miles’s lips closed over his teeth in a tight glassy smile. Subordination. The Prince Serg, he reminded himself. Metzov could go drink the fetaine, for all Miles cared, and it would be no skin off his nose. His clean nose, remember?

“Have you never heard of the fine old battlefield practice of shooting the man who disobeys your order, Lieutenant?” Metzov went on to Bonn.

“I . . . don’t think I can make that threat, sir,” said Bonn stiffly.

And besides, thought Miles, we’re not on a battlefield. Are we?

“Techs!” said Metzov in a tone of disgust. “I didn’t say threaten, I said shoot. Make one example, the rest will fall in line.”

Miles decided he didn’t much care for Metzov’s brand of humor, either. Or was the general speaking literally?

“Sir, fetaine is a violent mutagen,” said Bonn doggedly. “I’m not at all sure the rest would fall into line, no matter what the threat. It’s a pretty unreasonable topic. I’m . . . a little unreasonable about it myself.”

“So I see.” Metzov stared at him coldly. His glare passed on to Yaski, who swallowed and stood straighter, his spine offering no concession. Miles tried to cultivate invisibility.

“If you’re going to go on pretending to be military officers, you techs need a lesson in how to extract obedience from your men,” Metzov decided. “Both of you go and assemble your crew in front of Admin in twenty minutes. We’re going to have a little old-fashioned discipline parade.”

“You’re not—seriously thinking of shooting anyone, are you?” said Lieutenant Yaski in alarm.

Metzov smiled sourly. “I doubt I’ll have to.” He regarded Miles. “What’s the outside temperature right now, Weather Officer?”

“Five degrees of frost, sir,” replied Miles, careful now to speak only when spoken to.

“And the wind?”

“Winds from the east at nine kilometers per hour, sir.”

“Very good.” Metzov’s eye gleamed wolfishly. “Dismissed, gentlemen. See if you can carry out your orders, this time.”

* * *

General Metzov stood, heavily gloved and parka-bundled, beside the empty metal bannerpole in front of Admin, and stared down the half-lit road. Looking for what? Miles wondered. It was pushing midnight now. Yaski and Bonn were lining up their tech crews in parade array, some fifteen thermal-coveralled and parka-clad men.

Miles shivered, and not just from the cold. Metzov’s seamed face looked angry. And tired. And old. And scary. He reminded Miles a bit of his grandfather on a bad day. Though Metzov was in fact younger than Miles’s father; Miles had been a child of his father’s middle age, some generational skew there. His grandfather, the old General Count Piotr himself, had sometimes seemed a refugee from another century. Now, the really old-fashioned discipline parades had involved lead-lined rubber hoses. How far back in Barrayaran history was Metzov’s mind rooted?

Metzov smiled, a gloss over rage, and turned his head at a movement down the road. In a horribly cordial voice he confided to Miles, “You know, Ensign, there was a secret behind that carefully cultivated interservice rivalry they had back on Old Earth. In the event of a mutiny you could always persuade the army to shoot the navy, or vice versa, when they could no longer discipline themselves. A hidden disadvantage to a combined Service like ours.”

“Mutiny!” said Miles, startled out of his resolve to speak only when spoken to. “I thought the issue was poison exposure.”

“It was. Unfortunately, due to Bonn’s mishandling, it’s now a matter of principle.” A muscle jumped in Metzov’s jaw. “It had to happen sometime, in the New Service. The Soft Service.”

Typical Old Service talk, that, old men bullshitting each other about how tough they’d had it in the old days. “Principle, sir, what principle? It’s waste disposal,” Miles choked.

“It’s a mass refusal to obey a direct order, Ensign. Mutiny by any barracks-lawyer’s definition. Fortunately, this sort of thing is easy to dislocate, if you move quickly, while it’s still small and confused.”

The motion down the road resolved itself into a platoon of grubs in their winter-white camouflage gear, marching under the direction of a Base sergeant. Miles recognized the sergeant as part of Metzov’s personal power-net, an old veteran who’d served under Metzov as far back as the Komarr Revolt, and who had moved on with his master.

The grubs, Miles saw, had been armed with lethal nerve disruptors, which were purely anti-personnel hand weapons. For all the time they spent learning about such things, the opportunity for even advanced trainees such as these to lay hands on fully powered deadly weapons was rare, and Miles could sense their nervous excitement from here.

The sergeant lined the grubs up in a cross-fire array around the stiff-standing techs, and barked an order. They presented their weapons, and aimed them, the silver bell-muzzles gleaming in the scattered light from the admin building. A twitchy ripple ran through Bonn’s men. Bonn’s face was ghastly white, his eyes glittering like jet.

“Strip,” Metzov ordered through set teeth.

Disbelief, confusion; only one or two of the techs grasped what was being demanded, and began to undress. The others, with many uncertain glances around, belatedly followed suit.

“When you are again ready to obey your orders,” Metzov continued in a parade-pitched voice that carried to every man, “you may dress and go to work. It’s up to you.” He stepped back, nodded to his sergeant, and took up a pose of parade rest. “That’ll cool ’em off,” he muttered to himself, barely loud enough for Miles to catch. Metzov looked as if he fully expected to be out there no more than five minutes; he might already be thinking of warm quarters and a hot drink.

Olney and Pattas were among the techs, Miles noted, along with most of the rest of the Greek-speaking cadre who had plagued Miles early on. Others Miles had seen around, or talked to during his private investigation into the background of the drowned man, or barely knew. Fifteen naked men starting to shiver violently as the dry snow whispered around their ankles. Fifteen bewildered faces beginning to look terrified. Eyes shifted toward the nerve disruptors trained on them. Give in, Miles urged silently. It’s not worth it. But more than one pair of eyes flickered to him, and squeezed shut in resolution.

Miles silently cursed the anonymous clever boffin who’d invented fetaine as a terror weapon, not for his chemistry, but for his insight into the Barraryaran psyche. Fetaine could surely never have been used, could never be used. Any faction trying to do so must rise up against itself and tear apart in moral convulsions.

Yaski, standing back from his men, looked thoroughly horrified. Bonn, his expression black and brittle as obsidian, began to strip off his gloves and parka.

No, no, no! Miles screamed inside his head. If you join them they’ll never back down. They’ll know they’re right. Bad mistake, bad . . . Bonn dropped the rest of his clothes in a pile, marched forward, joined the line, wheeled, and locked eyes with Metzov. Metzov’s eyes narrowed with new fury. “So,” he hissed, “you convict yourself. Freeze, then.”

How had things gone so bad, so fast? Now would be a good time to remember a duty in the weather office, and get the hell out of here. If only those shivering bastards would back down, Miles could get through this night without a ripple in his record. He had no duty, no function here. . . .

Metzov’s eye fell on Miles. “Vorkosigan, you can either take up a weapon and be useful, or consider yourself dismissed.”

He could leave. Could he leave? When he made no move, the sergeant walked over and thrust a nerve disruptor into Miles’s hand. Miles took it up, still struggling to think with brains gone suddenly porridge. He did retain the wit to make sure the safety was “on” before pointing the disruptor vaguely in the direction of the freezing men.

This isn’t going to be a mutiny. It’s going to be a massacre.

One of the armed grubs giggled nervously. What had they been told they were doing? What did they believe they were doing? Eighteen-, nineteen-year-olds—could they even recognize a criminal order? Or know what to do about it if they did?

Could Miles?

The situation was ambiguous, that was the problem. It didn’t quite fit. Miles knew about criminal orders, every academy man did. His father came down personally and gave a one-day seminar on the topic to the seniors at midyear. He’d made it a requirement to graduate, by Imperial fiat back when he’d been Regent. What exactly constituted a criminal order, when and how to disobey it. With vid evidence from various historical test cases and bad examples, including the politically disastrous Solstice Massacre, which had taken place under the admiral’s own command. Invariably one or more cadets had to leave the room to throw up during that part.

The other instructors hated Vorkosigan’s Day. Their classes were subtly disrupted for weeks afterward. One reason Admiral Vorkosigan didn’t wait till any later in the year; he almost always had to make a return trip a few weeks after, to talk some disturbed cadet out of dropping out at almost the finale of his schooling. Only the academy cadets got this live lecture, as far as Miles knew, though his father talked of canning it on holovid and making it a part of basic training Service-wide. Parts of the seminar had been a revelation even to Miles.

But this . . . If the techs had been civilians, Metzov would clearly be in the wrong. If this had been in wartime, while being harried by some enemy, Metzov might be within his rights, even duty. This was somewhere between. Soldiers disobeying, but passively. Not an enemy in sight. Not even a physical situation threatening, necessarily, lives on the base (except theirs), though when the wind shifted that could change. I’m not ready for this, not yet, not so soon. What was right?

My career . . . Claustrophobic panic rose in Miles’s chest, making him feel like a man with his head caught in a drain. The nerve disrupter wavered just slightly in his hand. Over the parabolic reflector he could see Bonn standing dumbly, too congealed now even to argue anymore. Ears were turning white out there, and fingers and feet. One man crumpled into a shuddering ball, but made no move to surrender. Was there any softening of doubt yet, in Metzov’s rigid neck?

For a lunatic moment Miles envisioned thumbing off the safety and shooting Metzov. And then what, shoot the grubs? He couldn’t possibly get them all before they got him.

I could be the only soldier here under thirty who’s ever killed an enemy before, in battle or out of it. The grubs might fire out of ignorance, or sheer curiosity. They didn’t know enough not to. What we do in the next half hour will replay in our heads for as long as we breathe.

He could try doing nothing. Only follow orders. How much trouble could he get into, only following orders? Every commander he’d ever had agreed, he needed to follow orders better. Think you’ll enjoy your ship duty, then, Ensign Vorkosigan, you and your pack of frozen ghosts? At least you’d never be lonely. . . .

Miles, still holding up the nerve disruptor, faded backward, out of the grubs’ line-of-sight, out of the corner of Metzov’s eye. Tears stung and blurred his vision. From the cold, no doubt.

He sat on the ground. Pulled off his gloves and boots. Let his parka fall, and his shirts. Trousers and thermal underwear atop the pile, and the nerve disruptor nested carefully on them. He stepped forward. His leg braces felt like icicles against his calves.

I hate passive resistance. I really, really hate it.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing, Ensign?” Metzov snarled as Miles limped past him.

“Breaking this up, sir,” Miles replied steadily. Even now some of the shivering techs flinched away from him, as if his deformities might be contagious. Pattas didn’t draw away, though. Nor Bonn.

“Bonn tried that bluff. He’s now regretting it. It won’t work for you either, Vorkosigan.” Metzov’s voice shook, too, though not from the cold.

You should have said “Ensign.” What’s in a name? Miles could see the ripple of dismay run through the grubs, that time. No, this hadn’t worked for Bonn. Miles might be the only man here for whom this sort of individual intervention could work. Depending on how far gone Mad Metzov was by now.

Miles spoke now for both Metzov’s benefit and the grubs’. “It’s possible—barely—that Service Security wouldn’t investigate the deaths of Lieutenant Bonn and his men, if you diddled the record, claimed some accident. I guarantee Imperial Security will investigate mine.”

Metzov grinned strangely. “Suppose no witnesses survive to complain?”

Metzov’s sergeant looked as rigid as his master. Miles thought of Ahn, drunken Ahn, silent Ahn. What had Aim seen, once long ago, when crazy things were happening on Komarr? What kind of surviving witness had he been? A guilty one, perhaps? “S-s-sorry, sir, but I see at least ten witnesses, behind those nerve disrupters.” Silver parabolas—they looked enormous, like serving dishes, from this new angle. The change in point of view was amazingly clarifying. No ambiguities now.

Miles continued, “Or do you propose to execute your firing squad and then shoot yourself? Imperial Security will fast-penta everyone in sight. You can’t silence me. Living or dead, through my mouth or yours—or theirs—I will testify.” Shivers racked Miles’s body. Astonishing, the effect of just that little bit of east wind, at this temperature. He fought to keep the shakes out of his voice, lest cold be mistaken for fear.

“Small consolation, if you—ah—permit yourself to freeze, I’d say, Ensign.” Metzov’s heavy sarcasm grated on Miles’s nerves. The man still thought he was winning. Insane.

Miles’s bare feet felt strangely warm now. His eyelashes were crunchy with ice. He was catching up fast to the others, in terms of freezing to death, no doubt because of his smaller mass. His body was turning a blotchy purple-blue.

The snow-blanketed base was so silent. He could almost hear the individual snow grains skitter across the sheet ice. He could hear the vibrating bones of each man around him, pick out the hollow frightened breathing of the grubs. Time stretched.

He could threaten Metzov, break up his complacency with dark hints about Komarr, the truth will out. . . . He could call on his father’s rank and position. He could . . . dammit, Metzov must realize he was overextended, no matter how mad he was. His discipline parade bluff hadn’t worked and now he was stuck with it, stonily defending his authority unto death. He can be a funny kind of dangerous, if you really threaten him. . . . It was hard, to see through the sadism to the underlying fear. But it had to be there, underneath. . . . Pushing wasn’t working. Metzov was practically petrified with resistance. What about pulling . . . ?

“But consider, sir,” Miles’s words stuttered out persuasively, “the advantages to yourself of stopping now. You now have clear evidence of a mutinous, er, conspiracy. You can arrest us all, throw us in the stockade. It’s a better revenge, ’cause you get it all and lose nothing. I lose my career, get a dishonorable discharge or maybe prison—do you think I wouldn’t rather die? Service Security punishes the rest of us for you. You get it all.”

Miles’s words had hooked him; Miles could see it, in the red glow fading from the narrowed eyes, in the slight bending of that stiff, stiff neck. Miles had only to let the line out, refrain from jerking on it and renewing Metzov’s fighting frenzy, wait. . . .

Metzov stepped nearer, bulking in the half-light, haloed by his freezing breath. His voice dropped, pitched to Miles’s ear alone. “A typical soft Vorkosigan answer. Your father was soft on Komarran scum. Cost us lives. A court-martial for the Admiral’s little boy—that might bring down that holier-than-thou buggerer, eh?”

Miles swallowed icy spit. Those who do not know their history, his thought careened, are doomed to keep stepping in it. Alas, so were those who did, it seemed. “Thermo the damned fetaine spill,” he whispered hoarsely, “and see.”

“You’re all under arrest,” Metzov bellowed out suddenly, his shoulders hunching. “Get dressed.”

The others looked stunned with relief, then. After a last uncertain glance at the nerve disrupters they dove for their clothes, donning them with frantic, cold-clumsy hands. But Miles had seen it complete in Metzov’s eyes sixty seconds earlier. It reminded him of that definition of his father’s. A weapon is a device for making your enemy change his mind. The mind was the first and final battleground; the stuff in between was just noise.

Lieutenant Yaski had taken the opportunity afforded by Miles’s attention-arresting nude arrival on center stage to quietly disappear into the admin building and make several frantic calls. As a result the trainees’ commander, the base surgeon, and Metzov’s second-in-command arrived, primed to persuade or perhaps sedate and confine Metzov. But by that time Miles, Bonn, and the techs were already dressed and being marched, stumbling, toward the stockade bunker under the Argus-eyes of the nerve disrupters.

“Am I s-supposed to th-thank you for this?” Bonn asked Miles through chattering teeth. Their hands and feet swung like paralyzed lumps; he leaned on Miles, Miles hung on him, hobbling down the road together.

“We got what we wanted, eh? He’s going to plasma the fetaine on-site before the wind shifts in the morning. Nobody dies. Nobody gets their nuts curdled. We win. I think.” Miles emitted a deathly cackle through numb lips.

“I never thought,” wheezed Bonn, “that I’d ever meet anybody crazier than Metzov.”

“I didn’t do anything you didn’t,” protested Miles. “Except I made it work. Sort of. It’ll all look different in the morning, anyway.”

“Yeah. Worse,” Bonn predicted glumly.

* * *

Miles jerked up out of an uneasy doze on his cell cot when the door hissed open. They were bringing Bonn back.

Miles rubbed his unshaven face. “What time is it out there, Lieutenant?”

“Dawn.” Bonn looked as pale, stubbled, and criminally low as Miles felt. He eased himself down on his cot with a pained grunt.

“What’s happening?”

“Service Security’s all over the place. They flew in a captain from the mainland, just arrived, who seems to be in charge. Metzov’s been filling his ear, I think. They’re just taking depositions, so far.”

“They get the fetaine taken care of?”

“Yep.” Bonn vented a grim snicker. “They just had me out to check it, and sign the job off. The bunker made a neat little oven, all right.”

“Ensign Vorkosigan, you’re wanted,” said the security guard who’d delivered Bonn. “Come with me now.”

Miles creaked to his feet and limped toward the cell door. “See you later, Lieutenant.”

“Right. If you spot anybody out there with breakfast, why don’t you use your political influence to send ’em my way, eh?”

Miles grinned bleakly. “I’ll try.”

Miles followed the guard up the stockade’s short corridor. Lazkowski Base’s stockade was not exactly what one would call a high-security facility, being scarcely more than a living quarters bunker with doors that only locked from the outside, and no windows. The weather usually made a better guard than any force screen—not to mention the five-hundred-kilometer-wide ice-water moat surrounding the island.

The Base security office was busy this morning. Two grim strangers stood waiting by the door, a lieutenant and a big sergeant with the Horus-eye insignia of Imperial Security on their sleek uniforms. Imperial Security, not Service Security. Miles’s very own Security, who had guarded his family all his father’s political life. Miles regarded them with possessive delight.

The Base security clerk looked harried, his desk console lit up and blinking. “Ensign Vorkosigan, sir, I need your palm print on this.”

“All right. What am I signing?”

“Just the travel orders, sir.”

“What? Ah . . .” Miles paused, holding up his plastic-mitted hands. “Which one?”

“The right, I guess would do, sir.”

With difficulty, Miles peeled off the right mitten with his awkward left. His hand glistened with the medical gel that was supposed to be healing the frostbite. His hand was swollen, red-blotched and mangled-looking, but the stuff must be working. All his fingers now wriggled. It took three tries, pressing down on the ID pad, before the computer recognized him.

“Now yours, sir,” the clerk nodded to the Imperial Security lieutenant. The ImpSec man laid his hand on the pad and the computer bleeped approval. He lifted it and glanced dubiously at the sticky sheen, looked around futilely for some towel, and wiped it surreptitiously on his trouser seam just behind his stunner holster. The clerk dabbed nervously at the pad with his uniform sleeve, then touched his intercom.

“Am I glad to see you fellows,” Miles told the ImpSec officer. “Wish you’d been here last night.”

The lieutenant did not smile in return. “I’m just a courier, Ensign. I’m not supposed to discuss your case.”

General Metzov ducked through the door from the inner office, a sheaf of plastic flimsies in one hand and a Service Security captain at his elbow, who nodded warily to his counterpart on the Imperial side.

The general was almost smiling. “Good morning, Ensign Vorkosigan.” His glance took in Imperial Security without dismay. Dammit, ImpSec should be making that near-murderer shake in his combat boots. “It seems there’s a wrinkle in this case even I hadn’t realized. When a Vor lord involves himself in a military mutiny, a charge of high treason follows automatically.”

“What?” Miles swallowed, to bring his voice back down. “Lieutenant, I’m not under arrest by Imperial Security, am I?”

The lieutenant produced a set of handcuffs and proceeded to attach Miles to the big sergeant. Overholt, read the name on the man’s badge, which Miles mentally redubbed Overkill. He had only to lift his arm to dangle Miles like a kitten.

“You are being detained, pending further investigation,” said the lieutenant formally.

“How long?”

“Indefinitely.”

The lieutenant headed for the door, the sergeant and perforce Miles following. “Where?” Miles asked frantically.

“Imperial Security Headquarters.”

Vorbarr Sultana! “I need to get my things—”

“Your quarters have already been cleared.”

“Will I be coming back here?”

“I don’t know, Ensign.”

Late dawn was streaking Camp Permafrost with gray and yellow when the scat-cat deposited them at the shuttlepad. The Imperial Security sub-orbital courier shuttle sat on the icy concrete like a bird of prey accidentally placed in a pigeon cote. Slick and black and deadly, it seemed to break the sound barrier just resting there. Its pilot was at the ready, engines primed for takeoff.

Miles shuffled awkwardly up the ramp after Sergeant Overkill, the handcuff jerking coldly on his wrist. Tiny ice crystals danced in the northeasterly wind. The temperature would be stabilizing this morning, he could tell by the particular dry bite of the relative humidity in his sinuses. Dear God, it was past time to get off this island.

Miles took one last sharp breath, then the shuttle door sealed behind them with a snaky hiss. Within was a thick, upholstered silence that even the howl of the engines scarcely penetrated.

At least it was warm.

* * *

Autumn in the city of Vorbarr Sultana was a beautiful time of year, and today was exemplary. The air was high and blue, the temperature cool and perfect, and even the tang of industrial haze smelled good. The autumn flowers were not yet frosted off, but the Earth-import trees had turned their colors. As he was hustled out of the Security lift van and into a back entrance to the big, blocky building that was Imperial Security Headquarters, Miles glimpsed one such tree. An Earth maple, with carnelian leaves and a silver-gray trunk, across the street. Then the door closed. Miles held that tree before his mind’s eye, trying to memorize it, just in case he never saw it again.

The Security lieutenant produced passes that sped Miles and Overholt through the door guards, then led them into a maze of corridors to a pair of lift tubes. They entered the up tube, not the down one. So, Miles was not being taken directly to the ultra-secure cell block beneath the building. He woke to what this meant, and wished wistfully for the down tube.

They were ushered into an office on an upper level, past a Security captain, then into an inner office. A man, slight, bland, civilian-clothed, with brown hair graying at the temples, sat at his very large comconsole desk, studying a vid. He glanced up at Miles’s escort. “Thank you, Lieutenant, Sergeant. You may go.”

Overholt detached Miles from his wrist as the lieutenant asked, “Uh, will you be safe, sir?”

“I expect so,” said the man dryly.

Yeah, but what about me? Miles wailed inwardly. The two soldiers exited, and left Miles alone, standing literally on the carpet. Unwashed, unshaven, still wearing the faintly reeking black fatigues he’d flung on—only last night? Face weather-raked, with his swollen hands and feet still encased in their plastic medical mittens—his toes now wriggled in their squishy matrix. No boots. He had dozed in a jerky intermittent exhaustion on the two-hour shuttle flight, without being noticeably refreshed. His throat was raw, his sinuses felt stuffed with packing fiber, and his chest hurt when he breathed.

Simon Illyan, Chief of Barrayaran Imperial Security, crossed his arms and looked Miles over slowly, from head to toe and back again. It gave Miles a skewed sense of déja vù.

Practically everyone on Barrayar feared this man’s name, though few knew his face. This effect was carefully cultivated by Illyan, building in part—but only in part—on the legacy of his formidable predecessor, the legendary Security Chief Negri. Illyan and his department, in turn, had provided security for Miles’s father for the twenty years of his political career, and had slipped up only once, during the night of the infamous soltoxin attack. 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. Miles had called Illyan “Uncle Simon” all his life until he’d entered the Service, “Sir” after that.

Looking at Illyan’s face now, Miles thought he finally grasped the distinction between exasperation, and utter exasperation.

Illyan finished his inspection, shook his head, and groaned, “Wonderful. Just wonderful.”

Miles cleared his throat. “Am I . . . really under arrest, sir?”

“That is what this interview will determine.” Illyan sighed, leaning back in his chair. “I have been up since two hours after midnight over this escapade. Rumors are flying all over the Service, as fast as the vid net can carry them. The facts appear to be mutating every forty minutes, like bacteria. I don’t suppose you could have picked some more public way to self-destruct? Attempted to assassinate the Emperor with your pocketknife during the Birthday Review, say, or raped a sheep in the Great Square during rush hour?” The sarcasm melted to genuine pain. “He had so much hope of you. How could you betray him so?”

No need to ask who “he” was. The Vorkosigan. “I . . . don’t think I did, sir. I don’t know.”

A light blinked on Illyan’s comconsole. He exhaled, with a sharp glance at Miles, and touched a control. The second door to his office, camouflaged in the wall to the right of his desk, slid open, and two men in dress greens ducked through.

Prime Minister Admiral Count Aral Vorkosigan wore the uniform as naturally as an animal wears its fur. He was a man of no more than middle height, stocky, gray-haired, heavy-jawed, scarred, almost a thug’s body and yet with the most penetrating gray eyes Miles had ever encountered. 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 worse than Ivan, who while darkly handsome had never been accused of brilliance.

“Thanks, Jole,” Count Vorkosigan murmured to his aide, as his eye found Miles. “I’ll see you back at the office.”

“Yes, sir.” So dismissed, Jole ducked back out, glancing back at Miles and his superior with worried eyes, and the door hissed closed again.

Illyan still had his hand pressed to a control on his desk. “Are you officially here?” he asked Count Vorkosigan.

“No.”

Illyan keyed something off—recording equipment, Miles realized. “Very well,” he said, editorial doubt injected into his tone.

Miles saluted his father. His father ignored the salute and embraced him gravely, wordlessly, sat in the room’s only other chair, crossed his arms and booted ankles, and said, “Continue, Simon.”

Illyan, who had been cut off in the middle of what had been shaping up, in Miles’s estimation, to be a really classic reaming, chewed his lip in frustration. “Rumors aside,” Illyan said to Miles, “what really happened last night out on that damned island?”

In the most neutral and succinct terms he could muster, Miles described the previous night’s events, starting with the fetaine spill and ending with his arrest/detainment/to-be-determined by Imperial Security. His father said nothing during the whole recitation, but he had a light-pen in his hand which he kept turning absently around and over, tap against his knee, around and over.

Silence fell when Miles finished. The light-pen was driving Miles to distraction. He wished his father would put the damned thing away, or drop it, or anything.

His father slipped the light-pen back into his breast pocket, thank God, leaned back, and steepled his fingers, frowning. “Let me get this straight. You say Metzov hopscotched the command chain and dragooned trainees for his firing squad?”

“Ten of them. I don’t know if they were volunteers or not; I wasn’t there for that part.”

“Trainees.” Count Vorkosigan’s face was dark. “Boys.”

“He was babbling something about it being like the army versus the navy, back on Old Earth.”

“Huh?” said Illyan.

“I don’t think Metzov was any too stable when he was exiled to Kyril Island after his troubles in the Komarr Revolt, and fifteen years of brooding about it didn’t improve his grip.” Miles hesitated. “Will . . . General Metzov be questioned about his actions at all, sir?”

“General Metzov, by your account,” said Admiral Vorkosigan, “dragged a platoon of eighteen-year-olds into what came within a hair of being a mass torture-murder.”

Miles nodded in memory. His body still twinged with assorted agonies.

“For that sin, there is no hole deep enough to hide him from my wrath. Metzov will be taken care of, all right.” Count Vorkosigan was terrifyingly grim.

“What about Miles and the mutineers?” asked Illyan.

“Necessarily, I fear we will have to treat that as a separate matter.”

“Or two separate matters,” said Illyan suggestively.

“Mm. So, Miles, tell me about the men on the other end of the weapons.”

“Techs, sir, mostly. A lot of greekies.”

Illyan winced. “Good God, had the man no political sense at all?”

“None that I ever saw. I thought it would be a problem.” Well, later he’d thought of it, lying awake on his cell cot after the med squad left. The other political ramifications had spun through his mind. Over half the slowly freezing techs had been of the Greek-speaking minority. The language separatists would have been rioting in the streets, had it become a massacre, sure to claim the general had ordered the greekies into the cleanup as racial sabotage. More deaths, chaos reverberating down the timeline like the consequences of the Solstice Massacre? “It . . . occurred to me, that if I died with them, at least it would be crystal clear that it hadn’t been some plot of your government or the Vor oligarchy. So that if I lived, I won, and if I died, I won too. Or at least served. Strategy, of sorts.”

Barrayar’s greatest strategist of this century rubbed his temples, as if they ached. “Well . . . of sorts, yes.”

“So”—Miles swallowed—“what happens now, sirs? Will I be charged with high treason?”

“For the second time in four years?” said Illyan. “Hell, no. I’m not going through that again. I will simply disappear you, until this blows over. Where to, I haven’t quite figured yet. Kyril Island is out.”

“Glad to hear it.” Miles’s eyes narrowed. “What about the others?”

“The trainees?” said Illyan.

“The techs. My . . . fellow mutineers.”

Illyan twitched at the term.

“It would be seriously unjust if I were to slither up some Vor-privileged line and leave them standing charges alone,” Miles added.

“The public scandal of your trial would damage your father’s Centrist coalition. Your moral scruples may be admirable, Miles, but I’m not sure I can afford them.”

Miles stared steadily at Prime Minister Count Vorkosigan. “Sir?”

Count Vorkosigan sucked thoughtfully on his lower lip. “Yes, I could have the charges against them quashed, by Imperial fiat. That would involve another price, though.” He leaned forward intently, eyes peeling Miles. “You could never serve again. Rumors will travel even without a trial. No commander would have you, after. None could trust you, trust you to be a real officer, not an artifact protected by special privilege. I can’t ask anyone to command you with his head cranked over his shoulder all the time.”

Miles exhaled, a long breath. “In a weird sense, they were my men. Do it. Kill the charges.”

“Will you resign your commission, then?” demanded Illyan. He looked sick.

Miles felt sick, nauseous and cold. “I will.” His voice was thin.

Illyan looked up suddenly from a blank brooding stare at his comconsole. “Miles, how did you know about General Metzov’s questionable actions during the Komarr Revolt? That case was Security-classified.”

“Ah . . . didn’t Ivan tell you about the little leak in the ImpSec files, sir?”

“What?”

Damn Ivan. “May I sit down, sir?” said Miles faintly. The room was wavering, his head thumping. Without waiting for permission, he sat cross-legged on the carpet, blinking. His father made a worried movement toward him, then restrained himself. “I’d been checking upon Metzov’s background because of something Lieutenant Ahn said. By the way, when you go after Metzov, I strongly suggest you fast-penta Ahn, first. He knows more than he’s told. You’ll find him somewhere on the equator, I expect.”

“My files, Miles.”

“Uh, yes, well, it turns out that if you face a secured console to an outgoing console, you can read off Security files from anywhere in the vid net. Of course, you have to have somebody inside HQ who can and will aim the consoles and call up the files for you. And you can’t flash-download. But I, uh, thought you should know, sir.”

“Perfect security,” said Count Vorkosigan in a choked voice. Chortling, Miles realized, startled.

Illyan looked like a man sucking on a lemon. “How did you,” Illyan began, stopped to glare at the Count, started again, “how did you figure this out?”

“It was obvious.”

“Airtight security, you said,” murmured Count Vorkosigan, unsuccessfully suppressing a wheezing laugh. “The most expensive yet devised. Proof against the cleverest viruses, the most sophisticated eavesdropping equipment. And two ensigns waft right through it?”

Goaded, Illyan snapped, “I didn’t promise it was idiot-proof!”

Count Vorkosigan wiped his eyes and sighed. “Ah, the human factor. We will correct the defect, Miles. Thank you.”

“You’re a bloody loose cannon, boy, firing in all directions,” Illyan growled to Miles, craning his neck to see over his desk to where Miles sat in a slumping heap. “This, on top of your earlier escapade with those damned mercenaries, on top of it all—house arrest isn’t enough. I won’t sleep through the night till I have you locked in a cell with your hands tied behind your back.”

Miles, who thought he might kill for a decent hour’s sleep right now, could only shrug. Maybe Illyan could be persuaded to let him go to that nice quiet cell soon.

Count Vorkosigan had fallen silent, a strange thoughtful glow starting in his eye. Illyan noticed the expression, too, and paused.

“Simon,” said Count Vorkosigan, “there’s no doubt ImpSec will have to go on watching Miles. For his sake, as well as mine.”

“And the Emperor’s,” put in Illyan dourly. “And Barrayar’s. And the innocent bystanders’.”

“But what better, more direct and efficient way for security to watch him than if he is assigned to Imperial Security?”

“What?” said Illyan and Miles together, in the same sharp horrified tone. “You’re not serious,” Illyan went on, as Miles added, “Security was never on my top-ten list of assignment choices.”

“Not choice. Aptitude. Major Cecil discussed it with me at one time, as I recall. But as Miles says, he didn’t put it on his list.”

He hadn’t put Arctic Weatherman on his list either, Miles recalled.

“You had it right the first time,” said Illyan. “No commander in the Service will want him now. Not excepting myself.”

“None that I could, in honor, lean on to take him. Excepting yourself. I have always”— Count Vorkosigan flashed a peculiar grin—“leaned on you, Simon.”

Illyan looked faintly stunned, as a top tactician beginning to see himself outmaneuvered.

“It works on several levels,” Count Vorkosigan went on in that same mild persuasive voice. “We can put it about that it’s an unofficial internal exile, demotion in disgrace. It will buy off my political enemies, who would otherwise try to stir profit from this mess. It will tone down the appearance of our condoning a mutiny, which no military service can afford.”

“True exile,” said Miles. “Even if unofficial and internal.”

“Oh, yes,” Count Vorkosigan agreed softly. “But, ah—not true disgrace.”

“Can he be trusted?” said Illyan doubtfully.

“Apparently.” The count’s smile was like the gleam off a knife blade. “Security can use his talents. Security more than any other department needs his talents.”

“To see the obvious?”

“And the less obvious. Many officers may be trusted with the Emperor’s life. Rather fewer with his honor.”

Illyan, reluctantly, made a vague acquiescent gesture. Count Vorkosigan, perhaps prudently, did not troll for greater enthusiasm from his Security chief at this time, but turned to Miles and said, “You look as though you need an infirmary.”

“I need a bed.”

“How about a bed in an infirmary?”

Miles coughed, blinking blearily. “Yeah, that’d do.”

“Come on, we’ll find one.”

He stood, and staggered out on his father’s arm, his feet squishing in their plastic bags.

“Other than that, how was Kyril Island, Ensign Vorkosigan?” inquired the count. “You didn’t vid home much, your mother noticed.”

“I was busy. Lessee. The climate was ferocious, the terrain was lethal, a third of the population including my immediate superior was dead drunk most of the time. The average IQ equalled the mean temperature in degrees cee, there wasn’t a woman for five hundred kilometers in any direction, and the base commander was a homicidal psychotic. Other than that, it was lovely.”

“Doesn’t sound as if it’s changed in the smallest detail in twenty-five years.”

“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.”

So to speak. “How’d you like it?”

“I can’t remember much. I was drunk most of the time. Everybody finds their own way of dealing with Camp Permafrost. I might say, you did rather better than I.”

“I find your subsequent survival . . . encouraging, sir.”

“I thought you might. That’s why I mentioned it. It’s not otherwise an experience I’d hold up as an example.”

Miles looked up at his father. “Did . . . I do the right thing, sir? Last night?”

“Yes,” said the count simply. “A right thing. Perhaps not the best of all possible right things. Three days from now you may think of a cleverer tactic, but you were the man on the ground at the time. I try not to second-guess my field commanders.”

Miles’s heart rose in his aching chest for the first time since he’d left Kyril Island.  He nodded, satisfied.

Lois McMaster Bujold

Photo by Carol Collins

http://www.dendarii.com

http://www.spectrumliteraryagency.com/bujold.htm

Lois McMaster Bujold was born in 1949, the daughter of an engineering professor at Ohio State University, from whom she picked up her early interest in science fiction.  She now lives in Minneapolis, and has two grown children.  She began writing with the aim of professional publication in 1982.  She wrote three novels in three years; in October of 1985, all three sold to Baen Books, launching her career. Bujold went on to write many other books for Baen, mostly featuring her popular character Miles Naismith Vorkosigan, his family, friends, and enemies.  Her books have been translated into twenty-one languages.  Her fantasy from Eos includes the award-winning Chalion series and the Sharing Knife series.

Books by Lois McMaster Bujold

Vorkosigan Series

Falling Free

Shards of Honor

Barrayar

The Warrior's Apprentice

"The Mountains of Mourning"

The Vor Game

Cetaganda

Ethan of Athos

"Labyrinth"

"The Borders of Infinity"

Brothers in Arms

Mirror Dance

Memory

Komarr

A Civil Campaign

“Winterfair Gifts”

Diplomatic Immunity

CryoBurn

The Spirit Ring

Chalion Series

The Curse of Chalion

Paladin of Souls

The Hallowed Hunt

The Wide Green World Series

The Sharing Knife, Vol. 1: Beguilement

The Sharing Knife, Vol. 2: Legacy

The Sharing Knife, Vol. 3: Passage

The Sharing Knife, Vol. 4: Horizon

Content

Weatherman
Lois McMaster Bujold

Author's Note

"Weatherman"

Lois McMaster Bujold