The Vor Game

'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.'

'Not 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 labeled, 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 straighted 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 wait 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 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 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 ears, despite her sardonic tone. She tossed her head—she wore red-roan hair pinned back from her face and waving loose down the 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 motherbefore 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.