Young Miles

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  "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 in startlement.

  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 like you need an infirmary."

  "I need a bed."

  "How about a bed in an infirmary?"

  Miles coughed, and blinked 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 like 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.

  * * *

  Miles thought his father might take him to the great and familiar Imperial Military Hospital complex, a few kilometers away across town, but they found an infirmary closer than that, three floors down in ImpSec HQ. The facility was small but complete, with a couple of examining rooms, private rooms, cells for treating prisoners and guarded witnesses, a surgery, and a closed door labelled, chillingly, Interrogation Chemistry Laboratory. Illyan must have called down in advance, for a corpsman was hovering in attendance waiting to receive them. A Security surgeon arrived shortly, a little out of breath. He straightened his uniform and saluted Count Vorkosigan punctiliously before turning to Miles.

  Miles fancied the surgeon was more used to making people nervous than being made nervous by them, and was awkward about the role reversal. Was it some aura of old violence, clinging to his father still after all these years? The power, the history? Some personal charisma, that made erstwhile forceful men flatten out like cowed dogs? Miles could sense that radiating heat perfectly clearly, and yet it didn't seem to affect him the same way.

  Acclimatization, perhaps. The former Lord Regent was the man who used to take a two-hour lunch every day, regardless of any crisis short of war, and disappear into his Residence. Only Miles knew the interior view of those hours, how the big man in the green uniform would bolt a sandwich in five minutes and then spend the next hour and a half down on the floor with his son who could not walk, playing, talking, reading aloud. Sometimes, when Miles was locked in hysterical resistance to some painful new physical therapy, daunting his mother and even Sergeant Bothari, his father had been the only one with the firmness to insist on those ten extra agonizing leg stretches, the polite submission to the hypospray, to another round of surgery, to the icy chemicals searing his veins. "You are Vor. You must not frighten your liege people with this show of uncontrol, Lord Miles." The pungent smell of this infirmary, the tense doctor, brought back a flood of memories. No wonder, Miles reflected, he had failed to be afraid enough of Metzov. When Count Vorkosigan left, the infirmary seemed altogether empty.

  There did not appear to be much going on in ImpSec HQ this week. The infirmary was numbingly quiet, except for a trickle of headquarters staff coming down to cadge headache or cold remedies or hangover-killers from the pliant corpsman. A couple of techs spent three hours rattling around the lab one evening on a rush job, and rushed off. The doctor arrested Miles's incipient pneumonia just before it turned into galloping pneumonia. Miles brooded, and waited for the six-day antibiotic therapy to run its course, and plotted details of a home leave in Vorbarr Sultana that must surely be forthcoming when the medics released him.

  "Why can't I go home?" Miles complained to his mother on her next visit. "Nobody's telling me anything. If I'm not under arrest, why can't I take home leave? If I am under arrest, why aren't the doors locked? I feel like I'm in limbo."

  Countess Cordelia Vorkosigan vented an unladylike snort. "You are in limbo, kiddo." Her flat Betan accent fell warmly on Miles's ears, despite her sardonic tone. She tossed her head—she wore her red-roan hair pinned back from her face and waving loose down her back today, gleaming against a rich autumn brown jacket picked out with silver embroidery, and the swinging skirts of a Vor-class woman. Grey-eyed, striking, her pale face seemed so alive with flickering thought one scarcely noticed she was not beautiful. For twenty-one years she'd passed as a Vor matron in the wake of her Great Man, yet still seemed as unimpressed by Barrayaran hierarchies as ever—though not, Miles thought, unmoved by Barrayaran wounds.

  So why do I never think of my ambition as ship command like my mother before me? Captain Cordelia Naismith, Betan Astronomical Survey, had been in the risky business of expanding the wormhole nexus jump by blind jump, for humanity, for pure knowledge, for Beta Colony's economic advancement, for—what had driven her? She'd commanded a sixty-person survey vessel, far from home and help—there were certain enviable aspects to her former career, to be sure. Chain-of-command, for example, would have been a legal fiction out in the farbeyond, the wishes of Betan HQ a matter for speculation and side bets.

  She moved now so wavelessly through Barrayaran society, only her most intimate observers realized how detached she was from it, fearing no one, not even the dread Illyan, controlled by no one, not even the Admiral himself. It was the casual fearlessness, Miles decided, that made his mother so unsettling. The Admiral's Captain. Following in her footsteps would be like firewalking.

  "What's going on out there?" Miles asked. "This place is almost as much fun as solitary confinement, y'know? Have they decided I'm a mutineer after all?"

  "I don't think so," said the Countess. "They're discharging the others—your Lieutenant Bonn and the rest—not precisely dishonorably, but without benefits or pensions or that Imperial Liegeman status that seems to mean so much to Barrayaran men—"

  "Think of it as a funny sort of Reservist," Miles advised. "What about Metzov and the grubs?"

  "He's being discharged the same way. He lost the most, I think."

  "They're just turning him loose?" Miles frowned.

  Countess Vorkosigan shrugged. "Because there were no deaths, Aral was persuaded he couldn't make a court-martial with any harsher punishment stick. They decided not to involve the trainees with any charges."

  "Hm. I'm glad, I think. And, ah . . . me?"

  "You remain officially listed as detained by Imperial Security. Indefinitely."

  "Limbo is supposed to be an indefinite sort of place." His hand picked at his sheet. His knuckles were still swollen. "How long?"

  "However long it takes to have its calculated psychological effect."

  "What, to drive me crazy? Another three days ought to do it."

  Her lip quirked. "Long enough to convince the Barrayaran militarists that you are being properly punished for your, uh, crime. As long as you are confined in this rather sinister building, they can be encouraged to imagine you undergoing—whatever they imagine goes on in here. If you're allowed to run around town partying, it will be much harder to maintain the illusion that you've been hung upside down on the basement wall."

  "It all seems so . . . unreal." He hunched back into his pillow. "I only wanted to serve."

  A brief smile flicked her wide mouth up, and vanished. "Ready to reconsider another line of work, love?"

  "Being Vor is more than just a job."

  "Yes, it's a pathology. Obsessional delusion. It's a big galaxy out there, Miles. There are other ways to serve, larger . . . constituencies."

  "So why do you stay here?" he shot back.

  "Ah." She smiled bleakly at the touché. "Some people's needs are more compelling than guns."

  "Speaking of Dad, is he coming back?"

  "Hm. No. I'm to tell you, he's going to distance himself for a time. So as not to give the appearance of endorsing your mutiny, while in fact shuffling you out from under the avalanche. He's decided to be publicly angry with you."

  "And is he?"

  "Of course not. Yet . . . he was beginning to have some long-range plans for you, in his socio-political reform schemes, based on your completing a solid military career . . . he saw ways of making even your congenital injuries serve Barrayar."

  "Yeah, I know."

  "Well, don't worry. He'll doubtless think of some way to use this, too."

  Miles sighed glumly. "I want something to do. I want my clothes back."

  His mother pursed her lips, and shook her head.

  * * *

  He tried calling Ivan that evening. "Where are you?" Ivan demanded suspiciously.

  "Stuck in limbo."

  "Well, I don't want any of it stuck to me," said Ivan roughly, and punched off-line.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The next morning Miles was moved to new quarters. His guide led him just one floor down, dashing Miles's hopes
of seeing the sky again. The officer keyed open a door to one of the secured apartments usually used by protected witnesses. And, Miles reflected, certain political nonpersons. Was it possible life in limbo was having a chameleon effect, rendering him translucent?

  "How long will I be staying here?" Miles asked the officer.

  "I don't know, Ensign," the man replied, and left him.

  His duffle, jammed with his clothes, and a hastily packed box sat in the middle of the apartment's floor. All his worldly goods from Kyril Island, smelling moldy, a cold breath of arctic damp. Miles poked through them—everything seemed to be there, including his weather library—and prowled his new quarters. It was a one-room efficiency, shabbily furnished in the style of twenty years back, with a few comfortable chairs, a bed, a simple kitchenette, empty cupboards and shelves and closets. No abandoned garments or objects or leftovers to hint at the identity of any previous occupant.

  There had to be bugs. Any shiny surface could conceal a vid pickup, and the ears were probably not even within the room. But were they switched on? Or, almost more of an insult, maybe Illyan wasn't even bothering to run them?

  There was a guard in the outer corridor, and remote monitors, but Miles did not appear to have neighbors at present. He discovered he could leave the corridor, and walk about the few non-top-secured areas of the building, but the guards at the outside doors, briefed as to who he was, turned him back politely but firmly. He pictured himself attempting escape by rappelling down from the roof—he'd probably get himself shot, and ruin some poor guard's career.

  A Security officer found him wandering aimlessly, conducted him back to his apartment, gave him a handful of chits for the building's cafeteria, and hinted strongly that it would be appreciated if he would stay in his quarters between meals. After he left Miles morbidly counted the chits, trying to guess the expected duration of his stay. There were an even hundred. Miles shuddered.

  He unpacked his box and bag, ran everything that would go through the sonic laundry to eliminate the last lingering odor of Camp Permafrost, hung up his uniforms, cleaned his boots, arranged his possessions neatly on a few shelves, showered, and changed to fresh undress greens.